Enshrining the trees

A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage along the Yukon River, by Dan O'Neill (Counterpoint, 272 pp., $24.95)

IN Dan O'Neill's previous book, The Last Giant of Beringia: The Mystery of the Bering Land Bridge, he wrote of the plants and animals that during the last Ice Age migrated eastward across the land bridge, and of the people--apparently the first Americans--who followed the animals from Asia into Alaska and a new continent, and whose "discovery and colonization of half the earth is one of the great accomplishments in human history."

Today, however, he tells us in A Land Gone Lonesome, the historical process is running in the other direction. Owing to the complex and often contradictory federal laws and regulations enforced by the National Park Service and other agencies, the depopulation of rural subsistence-living Alaska is well under way.

It was in part to capture a fast disappearing way of life that O'Neill set out in his square-backed canoe to travel the Yukon River, from Dawson City in Canada's Yukon Territory to Circle City in Alaska. At one point in his trip, he listens to the sound of an outboard motor on the river. As it passes his camp, he thinks:

   I am in his past. But he remains in my
   present because I can hear him still.... In
   another moment I cannot distinguish the
   pulse of the [outboard] from the general
   thrum of the living world. The whine disintegrates
   into the air, though for a
   moment I can reassemble it more or less
   in my memory. It is a shadow of a perception,
   and it begins at once to fade like
   a photograph left in the sun. Unless one
   makes a record.

That is precisely what O'Neill sets out to do, and his record is a rich one. The Yukon has served as a highway for a steady stream of travelers, hunters, trappers, and people staking out areas for building cabins and fish camps. There were men on the run, outlaws, tenderfeet, seekers after solitude and total self-sufficiency, men following gold and minerals, and men like O'Neill, both participant and observer.

At the end of each day, O'Neill pulls his canoe in to make camp at one of the sites along the river--a ruined cabin, an abandoned fish camp, a ghost town, a side river, each locale with its own story and cast of characters--and reconstructs their human and natural histories, frequently drawing on anecdotes and the recollections of river people who have passed them down. "Stories," says O'Neill, "are the original record of human history in this place."

There are good stories here, well told--a gunfight, a vividly reconstructed grizzly attack, a newcomer freezing to death, and a wonderful variation on the old disappearing-cremation-ashes story, this one involving an Alaskan legend named Dick Cook, the bane of federal land-use enforcers and the personification of everything people either love or detest about men who live on the land and insist loudly on their absolute right to do so. (Cook managed to drown--twice.) And there are stories of good men and good women who were tested and emerged better people.

O'Neill does all this in clear, crisp, and evocative prose, with the reader able to see, hear, and sometimes even smell the characters. As in his earlier books, O'Neill also demonstrates a rare gift for describing in quick and imaginative prose natural phenomena and scientific or mechanical processes--the properties of glaciers and how they move; the operations of a dredge; and the many different ways there are to die when plunged suddenly into icy water.

At most stops, after he has set up camp, finished his meal (heavy on moose sausage), and cleaned his mess gear, he sits for a while, sometimes with what he calls "dessert's dessert: a ration of ardent spirits," looks out over the country and the colors, and shows us what he sees as he paints with words:

   As the sun goes down, the sky first
   ambers, then concentrates into an intense,
   blazing orange. Below, the river plays
   out, shining like a satin ribbon unreeling.
   It absolutely glows. It is as if it has
   absorbed light all day and now begins to
   fluoresce. [The blue is] like the blue of
   the noon sky but mixed with mercury and
   electrified. A color intrinsically agreeable
   to the human heart, and the more exquisite
   for being the chromatic opposite of the
   neon-orange. Sometimes when my concentration
   wanders, the scene slips into
   two dimensions. A composition blocked
   into thirds. Across the middle, a black
   band--the hills--without depth or texture.
   A jagged black crack between the
   two luminous regions, sky and water. An
   allegory of night: the dark between the
   day that's done and the day that's coming.

The land will retain its great beauty. But whether human beings will continue to have a place in it is an open question. Not long ago, it was still possible to stake out a homestead in Alaska. But no longer. Today, because of the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, the certainty of future oil discoveries, and great mineral wealth, over against the almost religious fervor with which environmentalists oppose any Alaskan development whatsoever, land-use issues tend to dominate Alaskan politics. But one thing seems to unite all factions: opposition to those people who would have once been called pioneers, frontiersmen, and homesteaders, but are now called squatters, or worse.