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“The Alaska Traveler”
A monthly column for Alaska Magazine
Click here for a direct link to online archives of "The Alaska Traveler" column.
“The Restless Season,” about watching the gray whale migration
An excerpt from The Anchorage Press
Coasting along the shoreline on our way back to Seward, Captain Tim spotted a black bear nosing along a bluff. When it heard us, it casually powered itself uphill into a stand of trees, not fleeing, not even looking at us, but not sticking around. We didn't stick around either, because we weren't there to witness the whole of a wild animal's life. But for just a few moments, my attention was completely fixed by that bear. That, and the cool air, the hidden impulses of spring, the sense of a long season of light and sustenance ahead — that was enough to enlarge the bear's existence, and my own.
The late Paul Shepard probably thought more about the relationships between humans and animals than anyone else. In his book The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, he writes about how people learned to become who we are by watching animals, “participating in their world by eating and being eaten by them, suffering them as parasites, wearing their feathers and skins, making tools of their bones and antlers, and communicating their significance by dancing, sculpting, performing, imaging, narrating, and thinking about them.”
Accounts about impending environmental disasters also serve to warn “against the deafened self, against emptiness,” says Shepard. Perhaps one way we repudiate such emptiness is to become a creature of peregrination ourselves. This is, after all, the restless season, when hummingbirds and terns and whales and caribou and godwits and geese — a bestiary of motion — are shrinking the globe with their wings and hooves and flukes. That was us, once, crossing the land bridge, paddling down the coast, setting off across the plains and ranges to search for what we needed.
If we're looking to backfill emptiness, then we must also accept that sometimes our gaze is harsh and even damaging. But our intentions are good, I think, in intercepting the odyssey of the gray whales. We want to understand more about them and their 10,000-mile pilgrimage. We want to cheerlead a little: Go, Eschrichtius robustus! Way to graduate off that endangered species list! Way to reproduce! Way to avoid being eaten by killer whales — and by us!
This is one of the few hopeful acts a person can enjoy when it comes to the natural world. The north Atlantic population of gray whales is extinct, and the population that lives on the western rim of the Pacific remains depleted. We want to share a rare success story, the comeback of the eastern north Pacific gray whales in our time. It means we can change. Read more...
“Strangers in the Night,” an article about the Alaska Zoo after hours
An excerpt from The Anchorage Press
Any true connection between animal and person is, of course, impossible to force or measure. Zoo-goers usually linger but a moment or two before each exhibit, especially if the animal is not doing anything more interesting than dozing or pacing. Often the animals seem to look beyond the hopeful human faces, to resist any kind of reciprocal recognition as they turn away to hidden corners. They are private ciphers who live publicly. But sometimes, at night, that changes.
A midnight zoo is a different country, a geography contoured by smells: the comforting barnyard odor of manure and feed, the sharper whiff of wolverines and wild cats, the peppery aura of spruce trees and wildflowers. During the day, people pass constantly without causing any stir, but a single human moving in the near dark is a break in the routine.
Two young lynx ghost through their pen, intrigued by unfamiliar motion outside the fence, evaporating if they sense the scrutiny of eyes. The male black bear startles from his rest and approaches to sniff the air and eye the shadowy figure before returning to curl up beside the female. The youngest coyote pounces from the long grass and then bolts away.
One Amur tiger dozes, while the other is an orange slash in the gloaming, the force of its stare almost physically piercing. The porcupines annoy each other in some kind of fracas, squealing and grunting as they climb fences and trees, butt against each other, and nip legs. When the polar bear lofts her great white head from her paws to gaze through the glass, the distance between her dark-eyed regard and the open air seems uncrossable.
Some of the animals have disappeared into the farther regions of sleep and darkness. The northern goshawk is as still as a church statue. The ravens tuck their heads against their wings. The deer and the turkey vanish in the understory. The male brown bear snoozes on the hill, a place grown familiar after 13 years; the female sprawls against the den door with legs splayed against the wall.
The yak baby sleeps its first sleep out of the womb. Its mother stands over it. A feral cat slips across the path. The forest stirs with skitterings and rustlings from all the small, free creatures invisible in their hidden provinces. And for just a few hours, the orphans and exiles, the endangered, the rescued, the wounded, the recovered, the abandoned and found, those confined to captivity and those born to it — they all exist stripped of names, free of stories, momentarily at peace under the same open sky. Read more...
