In Alaska my life has been pared down to its most basic elements. When I am tired, I sleep. When I am hungry, I eat. When I want a song, I sing it. I’ve brought with me just a few books. Stories by Faulkner. Harlan Ellison. Chekhov. A few literary magazines. A book of prints by Thomas Wood given to me by an old friend during my journey up. An anthology of modern essays. When I read from these I can find warmth in blankets or in the bath. There is exploration and exertion either in my mind or in a more elemental form — on my feet. I go on a walk every day and in fact have not driven anywhere in weeks. Many writers share an affection for walking, something documented nearly as well as the affection for drink.
Phillip Lopate called the literary walk a “a technique to deal with, act out, dramatize, defend, or deplore one’s solitude,” but he was talking about urban walking, and so many of the walks I take here in Alaska are considerably more solitary than Lopate’s strolls through, of all places, New York City. Still, all of these walks are within fifty miles of the state’s population center, and I cannot escape the idea that mankind is like a gas, and that we will eventually expand to occupy every inch of this planet, even as we invent new technologies to compensate for the influence we already exert.
I consider then the projections of rising seas, something hard to ignore here where glaciers are measurably receding, and in the memory of living observers. Even as I button my coat, that inexorable trickle continues into the ocean, and people calculate and argue about how many feet it will rise in our lifetimes; in the lifetimes of the next generation. Yet the amount of land taken back by surging seas will account for just a fraction of one percent of the surface of the earth. We are indeed jealous of our coasts.
Issac Asimov once suggested we might one day pump the oceans off of the earth and let them form a few small moons which we could tap when needed. We would regulate the atmosphere with vast machines, and chase giddily into the sea beds, anxious to explore them first-hand and then parcel them off. But Issac knew that such efforts would also make us more vulnerable. As survival becomes more complex, as it takes more and more individual steps and pieces to meet our needs, it becomes accordingly more precarious. So I value this new simplicity and I am proud of my imposed spareness.
Seen this way, perhaps the best equipped traveler is not the one with supplies and itinerary, but the one with keen eyes for danger and a nose that can find a pot of soup over a distant fire.
That’s a line for the ages.