Blog Entry #3: Landscape and Personal Change

First of all, sorry this post is not very good!  I really struggled with what to write this week and put it off as long as possible.  Here I am though, with 2 1/2 hours left to post for the week, and I need to put something.

One of the guiding questions this week was, "Why is landscape such a prominent feature in Alaska writing?"  This is a very interesting question to me and I wondered about it a great deal as I read.  It's true that much written about Alaska deals with the landscape and environment, much more than writing set in other locations.  I think the reason for this is that Alaska has more wilderness than many places, and Alaska is well known around the world for this.  Only three states have a smaller population than Alaska, yet our state is by far the largest one in the country.  As a result, it's pretty difficult to live in Alaska (or spend a significant amount of time here), without having some exposure to the wild landscape.  Additionally, Alaska's landscape is probably the thing that draws people here the most.  Miners and fur seal hunters came here to take something from the environment, and tourists come here to see whales, bears, and pan for gold.  It is inevitable then that much of the writing about Alaska features the landscape prominently.

Something else that I thought about a lot during the readings was how Alaska's environment shapes people, even when the people are trying to change the environment.  An excellent example of this is the story Change by Charles J. Keim, which is one of the readings I have enjoyed most from our book.  The excerpt is about an elderly man named Arne who has lived in a small cabin in Alaska for the past 60 years.  He loves Alaska and is very unhappy when a family decides to homestead near his cabin.  The husband chops down trees, levels the ground, and plans to bring groups of tourists around to go fishing so he can earn extra money.  Arne considers the area where they homestead to belong to him, even though he does not legally own it, and he is very angry at the actions of the family.  When he sees that they draw clean, clear water from the creek to use, he diverts another creek so it pours muddy, silty water into their nice creek.  A power struggle of sorts ensues when Arne and the husband go back and forth, diverting the silty creek so it alternately contaminates and does not contaminate the clear creek.  During one of his diversion attempts, Arne slips and gets his feet stuck in the mud in the bottom of the creek.  He nearly drowns, but the very pregnant wife of the family saves him after putting her life in danger, which causes her to go into labor.  After this event, Arne forgives the family and takes the wife to his cabin to help her deliver her baby since her husband is away.

I think this story is a prime example of the environment changing people.  For over half a century, Arne has worked with the land and strives to protect it.  When the neighbors do things to the land that he disapproves with, he alters the environment by messing with the flow of the creek in an attempt to get them to leave.  The creek then almost drowns him, but he is saved by one of the neighbors.  This event changes his attitude towards the neighbors and their activities.  I am very curious about how he and the neighbors get along after that!

Gold Creek, located in Washington.  I looked for a picture of an Alaskan creek and this is in Washington, but I chose it anyway because it looks more like the creek I imagine from the story!  Photo from Wikipedia.

Blog Entry #2: The Work of John Haines

          John Haines was a well known poet and what I like to call a transplanted Alaskan, meaning he was born elsewhere (Virginia in his case), but moved to Alaska and embraced the Alaskan way of life.  Much of his poetry was about Alaska, but he also covered a great deal of other subjects, such as "Fourth of July at Santa Ynez" which is set in California, and "In the House of Wax" which is about historical figures.  For the purposes of this blog post however, I will focus on "The Tundra," which is a poem he contributed to the book we are using for our class.  Regardless of where his poems are set or the subject matter, one thing remains consistent: Haines used a great deal of visual imagery in his writing.  Two writings in particular from our main book this week stood out to me as being similarly laden with visual imagery, particularly that of light, dark, and colors.

          The first piece I will examine is "The Tundra."  As with his other poems, Haines used fantastic imagery in this one and did a wonderful job of helping the reader imagine the autumnal tundra that he described.  He wrote about darkness as well as light, color, and mirrors.  Haines started out by mentioning the autumn sun, and those two words are enough to evoke images of gold, orange, red, and dark yellow.  Later in the poem, he confirmed that the tundra is full of blood.  Whether he meant literally full of blood from the hunting of animals or if he meant the ground looked red because of the changing season and time of day is unknown, but the visual is powerful regardless.  With his line, "Frozen gut-piles shine with a dull, rosy light," the reader is able to visualize the mound of animal innards in an uncharacteristically beautiful way since we don't typically think of intestines and the like as being rosy or luminous.  The rosy light and the description of people laughing around campfires conveyed the approach of evening, and this is confirmed when, "the heavy tundra slowly rolls over and sinks in the darkness," and night fell.

This photograph, taken by Paul F. Gill and titled "Fall Color Alaska Tundra"

seems like it was almost taken to accompany Haines' poem, or else as if the poem was 

based on the photo because they go together so well!  You can see the tundra full of blood, which is beautiful in this case.  Photo is from Paul F. Gill's website.

          One of the writings that reminded me of John Haines' work was an excerpt from James Vance Marshall's novel, A River Ran Out of Eden.  The excerpt described the autumn night a young boy passed in a sod hut as a storm raged outside.  Like with Haines' poems, much of this story dealt with light, dark, and colors.  The boy sought refuge as the sky darkened, and found the inside of the hut to be pitch black before he quickly noticed the glowing red eyes of an animal that had taken shelter in the same place.  After his fear of the animal subsided somewhat, he found a candle, which cast light around the small room and revealed the animal to be a golden seal, "her fur like a field of sun-drenched corn."  Later in the story, he described her fur as "fine-spun gold."  Gold seems to capture people's imaginations and the reader can't help but wonder at the beauty of the seal.  The story continued in alternating light and darkness as the candles burned out and were replaced until eventually no more candles remained and all is dark.  In the end, it was the color of her fur that possibly saved her as the boy vowed to stop his father from killing her for her highly prized golden pelt.

Unfortunately, I could not find a photo of a golden seal to share, but this one does

look rather golden and her fur is so shiny it looks as if it is glowing!  Photo is from

the Alaska Department of Fish and Game website and depicts a harbor seal.

          The other writing that especially reminded me of Haines was an excerpt from the book One Man's Wilderness by Richard Proenneke and Sam Keith.  The excerpt was a journal that described the progress Proenneke made as he built a log cabin by himself in the Alaskan wilderness.  It did not lack at all for visual imagery or detailed descriptions.  Like Haines' work, right from the beginning it frequently mentioned light and color and the first paragraph ended with, "the peaks, awash in the warm yellow light, contrasted sharply with their slopes still in shadow."  He went into much detail as he described animals and the environment around him, such as a cock ptarmigan with "his neck and head shining a copper color in the sun" and his summer plumage "beginning to erase the white of winter."  Later on, he wrote that, "The spruce boughs are glistening with rain-drops.  The land had a bath last night."  All in all, I found the writing style charming and feel that I can imagine perfectly what his cabin and the surrounding area looked like.

Blog Entry #1: Landscape in Alaskan Literature

The concept of landscape in Alaskan literature is an interesting one.  As I did the readings for this week and last week out of the book The Last New Land: Stories of Alaska Past and Present, I kept the idea of landscape in my head and jotted down notes on each piece.  As I read, I noticed some trends among the various types of writing in regards to landscape.  Naturally, these trends are not true for each and every example, but in general they seem accurate.  For the purposes of this blog post, I will focus on fiction and oral stories.

The first genre I will discuss is fiction.  As I read through the book, it became immediately apparent to me that the fictional stories are chock full of descriptions of landscape.  A good example of this is the excerpt from Rex Beach's novel The Spoilers, which begins on page 70.  Entire paragraphs in this story are devoted to describing the surroundings and it seems that no detail is spared a mention.  For example, most of page 74 is taken up with the author's description of how the city of Nome appears.  I believe that great care is taken in presenting the landscape in fictional stories like this because they are written for outsiders.  The authors are telling stories to people who have probably never been to Alaska or at least are not particularly familiar with the landscape or time, so detailed descriptions are necessary to anchor the time and place in the reader's mind.

Photo of Nome, Alaska during the time described in Beach's novel.  Photo from this website, and originally from page 18-19 of a book called This Fabulous Century: 1900-1910.

In contrast to the great amount of effort expended in descriptions of landscapes in fictional stories is how landscape is presented in oral stories.  Now, oral stories can be very, very long and one story can take days to tell.  The oral stories presented in this book are all pretty short, but as I think back on oral stories I heard and read about in a previous Literature class, they seem to be very representative of Alaska Native oral stories as a whole and details do not seem to have been sacrificed for the sake of brevity.  That being said, landscape is not a concept that is focused on all that much in the oral stories in this book.  Certainly setting and surroundings are mentioned, but nowhere near to the same degree as in the fictional story I mentioned earlier.  For example, in the Tlingit Legend How Mosquitoes Came to Be on page 11 (which happens to be my favorite Alaska Native story), landscape is barely mentioned at all.  The storyteller mentions that the main character lies down on the ground, but does not specify where he lies down or give any details of the surroundings.  After he is taken back to the giant's home, the only detail that is mentioned is the fireplace.  Why is this?  Why doesn't landscape take as central a role in these stories?  After thinking about it for a bit, I came to the conclusion that it is because the oral stories were created by Native Alaskans for people of their own cultural group.  The stories were made in the same setting that they were told.  Everyone within the intended audience would be intimately familiar with the landscape around them since nature took such a gigantic role in their lives, therefore the listeners would not need much explanation of the surrounding landscape to understand the story.

This leads to the question of whether or not humans separate themselves from nature when they classify it as a resource.  In my opinion, it definitely can.  The first thing that comes to mind is people destroying the environment in the process of mining.  However,it is not always the case that people separate themselves from nature when they regard it as a resource.  An example of how this is the excerpt from James A. Michener's book Alaska, which begins on page 13.  The story is about a group of ancient people traveling over the Bering Land Bridge to Alaska.  To their alarm, there is very little food to be found as they make their journey and they desperately need to find something to eat so they don't all die.  Finally, the men are able to kill a mammoth after hunting it for several days, thereby guaranteeing they have food for the time being.  In this case, they are definitely using nature as a resource, but one can hardly say they are separated from nature since the entire course of their lives and whether they survive or not is dictated by nature