The Great Alone

Leni reached into a box and pulled out the mason jar full of ashes. For a lovely moment the world blurred and Mama came to her, smiled her bright smile and gave her a hip bump and said, Dance, baby girl.

When Leni looked again, the boats were splashes of color against the blue-green world.

She opened the jar, poured the contents slowly into the water. “I love you, Mama,” Leni said, feeling loss settle deep, as much a part of her now as love. They’d been more than best friends; they’d been allies. Mama had called Leni the great love of her life and Leni thought maybe that was always true for parents and their children. She remembered something Mama had said to her once. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. She’d been talking about Matthew and sadness, but it was equally true for mothers and their children.

This love she felt for her mother and her son and Matthew and the people around her was a durable thing, as vast as this landscape, as immutable as the sea. Stronger than time itself.

She leaned over and dropped some bright pink fireweed on a gently rolling wave and watched it float toward the shore. She knew that from now on, she would feel her mother’s touch in the breeze, hear her voice on the sound of the rising tide. Sometimes, berry-picking or making bread, or even the smell of coffee would make her cry. For the rest of her life, she would look up into the vast Alaskan sky and say, “Hey, Mama,” and remember.

“I will always love you,” she whispered to the wind. “Always.”

MY ALASKA

July 4, 2009

by Lenora Allbright Walker

If you had told me when I was a kid that someday a newspaper would come to me to talk about Alaska on the fiftieth anniversary of its statehood, I would have laughed. Who would have thought my photographs would mean so much to so many? Or that I would take a picture of the Valdez oil spill that would change my life and make it onto the cover of a magazine?

Really, my husband is the one you should speak to. He’s overcome every challenge this state has to offer and is still standing. He’s like one of those trees that grow on a sheer granite cliff. In the wind and snow and icy cold, they should fall, but they don’t. Stubbornly, they remain. Thrive.

I am just an ordinary Alaskan wife and mother who prides herself primarily on the children she has raised and the life she has managed, somehow, to wrest from this harsh landscape. But like all women’s stories, mine has more to it than sometimes appears on the surface.

My husband’s family is practically Alaskan royalty. His grandparents carved a life out of the remote wilderness with a hatchet and a dream. The quintessential American pioneers, they homesteaded hundreds of acres and started a town and settled in. My children, MJ, Kenai, and Cora, are the fourth generation to grow up on that land.

My family was different. We came to Alaska in the seventies. It was a turbulent time, full of protests and marches and bombings and kidnappings. Young women were being abducted from college campuses. The Vietnam War had divided the country.

We came to Alaska to run away from that world. Like so many cheechakos before and since, we planned poorly. We didn’t have enough food or supplies or money. We had almost no skills. We moved into a cabin in a remote part of the Kenai Peninsula and learned fast that we didn’t know enough. Even our car—a VW bus—was a poor choice.

Someone said to me once that Alaska didn’t create character; it revealed it.

The sad truth is that the darkness in Alaska revealed the darkness in my father.

He was a Vietnam veteran, a POW. We didn’t know then what all that meant. Now, we know. In our enlightened world, we know how to help men like my father. We understand the ways in which war can break the strongest mind. Then, there was no help. Nor was there much help for a woman who was his victim.

Alaska—the darkness and the cold and the isolation—got inside of my father in a terrible way, turned him into one of the many wild animals who populate the state.

But we didn’t know that in the beginning; how could we? We dreamed, like so many others, and planned our course and duct-taped our Alaska or Bust banner on our bus and headed north, unprepared.

This state, this place, is like no other. It is beauty and horror; savior and destroyer. Here, where survival is a choice that must be made over and over, in the wildest place in America, on the edge of civilization, where water in all its forms can kill you, you learn who you are. Not who you dream of being, not who you imagined you were, not who you were raised to be. All of that will be torn away in the months of icy darkness, when frost on the windows blurs your view and the world gets very small and you stumble into the truth of your existence. You learn what you will do to survive.

That lesson, that revelation, as my mother once told me about love, is Alaska’s great and terrible gift. Those who come for beauty alone, or for some imaginary life, or those who seek safety, will fail.

In the vast expanse of this unpredictable wilderness, you will either become your best self and flourish, or you will run away, screaming, from the dark and the cold and the hardship. There is no middle ground, no safe place; not here, in the Great Alone.

For we few, the sturdy, the strong, the dreamers, Alaska is home, always and forever, the song you hear when the world is still and quiet. You either belong here, wild and untamed yourself, or you don’t.

I belong.