Read Me: Looking for Alaska by Peter Jenkins

For writing this book, Jenkins is almost my hero. He managed to turn his occupation into moving to Alaska and having as many adventures as possible in one year, then writing about it. Sign me up! But the book wasn’t really about moving to Alaska as much as it was about Peter Jenkins moving to Alaska. The popularity of his previous books, especially A Walk Across America (1979), enabled him to sell this book idea to his editor. (Side note to Tricia: Well, it looks like a smidgeon of fame isn’t all bad after all...) Granted, he does a good job of letting his interviewees do the speaking and inserting his own humble narrative voice only to give color and perspective. Still, I wouldn’t mind crossing the Lower 48 by foot if I got to write a successful book about it afterward, and then move to Alaska.

I say that Jenkins is almost my hero because the book that I would write after a year in the (original) frozen tundra would be radically different than Looking for Alaska. People fascinate Jenkins. He travels in order to collect relationships, to experience different ways people live, to learn how people cope with and thrive in so many situations. What he likes to remember about a place is that slower-than-necessary drive down that empty road, listening to a local granny recall a lifetime of stories. The very middle of nowhere, an extended snow machine ride off the vehicularly harsh Haul Road, is represented by a surprisingly civilized house and its quiet inhabitants. The far north, near Barrow, means Native whaling expeditions whose leaders read the ice as if it was a Shakespeare sonnet. Jenkins’ Alaska is less the stereotype unpeopled wilderness than a space dotted with villages, in a glass-half-full kind of way. Parts of his book go almost too far, becoming laundry lists of the admittedly interesting characters he meets, as if to prove that people do in fact live there: mountain-man backwoods bachelors dressed perpetually in flannel; strong, gun-toting women; knowledgeable children on whose chores rest the livelihood of their families.

All good reading... although an Alaskan tradition is for Outsiders to move there in order to avoid people, not to seek them out, which is the camp I would join. People like Jenkins can go anywhere on Earth and find interesting people just waiting for someone to ask them to tell their life stories. And when people like Jenkins do so, I’m quite willing to read the resulting books, because I’m unlikely myself to walk into some arctic fishing village and pretend to be interested in the details of someone’s broken marriage (even if it is a broken Alaskan marriage). Instead of experiencing people, I would visit Alaska to experience the land: midnight sun and noontime darkness, unimaginable cold, northern lights, suicidally obedient sled dogs, neighborhood herds of musk oxen, omnipresent bears, tundra, taiga, mountains, a thousand versions of ice, and hiking through as much of it as possible.

(But then, who would read a book whose theme is “isn’t that a pretty mountain?” No one wants to read a book devoid of people. That would be either a natural history textbook or a nature walk pamphlet. Some authors get around it through personification: talking pigs, haughty housecats, dragons that behave like flamboyantly-dressed circus fire-eaters. And why not? We can’t possibly know how a pig really thinks, so authors must necessarily imagine and project people-thoughts into the piggy heads. I barely know what my own self is thinking half the time. As we await scientific consensus regarding the inner lives of African grey parrots and apes using sign language, I’m stuck writing the book All the Neat Scenes Rachel Saw on her Summer Vacation until I learn to dull my distaste of small talk long enough to hone interviewing skills.)

Still, I give Looking for Alaska a thumbs up for accomplishing one of the goals of any book, allowing me as the reader to have vicarious experiences I would not otherwise have—with the added bonus that the interesting parts about bears and kayaking and the Iditarod and near-death experiences aboard various bush planes are all distilled from the dreary small talk and dead-end leads Jenkins had to wade through.

Surprisingly, the book dealt not only with Jenkins’ dealings with his new Alaskan neighbors, it also talked about his relationships with his own family. His wife lived with him in Seward between his frequent road trips. Various other family members made long visits or traveled with him. His college-age daughter, Rebekah, made regular appearances. Jenkins brims with pride for her as he watches her find her place in the world as a writer, just like Dad. He even gives her space in his book to write about her own Alaskan experiences (in prose as pleadingly flowery as the Teleflora delivery truck on Valentine’s Day morning, which is to be expected for a wannabe writer not far out of high school). He also brims with parental advice—not suggestions on helping your kid avoid teen angst or quieting an infant at 3 a.m., but rather advice on coping with your children’s successful coming of age. Jenkins notes Rebekah’s newfound self-confidence, developed during a recent NOLS outing and exercised during various Alaskan exploits. He is proud that she is growing up and becoming independent, but it is inevitably a bittersweet pride for giving up his “little girl” and relinquishing his role as protector. He struggles to tame his parental shielding instinct in order to send Rebekah to a tiny village above the Arctic Circle to live with two guys he knows only from emails and a handful of telephone calls. She can take care of herself now, even alone in the arctic with strange, lonely men.

While reading, I felt a bout of anti-homesickness coming on. Reading reminded me of what it feels like to move far away for a year, that excitement for constant newness and daily opportunities to explore. Everyday tasks become adventures. Planning a trip to the grocery store elicits eager anticipation. If you include navigating public transportation systems, the possibilities for epic expeditions become infinite. By the end, you can say with conviction that you have accomplished something that year. You’ve learned. You’ve been faced with daily challenges, many of them quite bizarre, and survived.

Sure, there’s lots to recommend staying put and becoming deeply familiar with one place, developing a history with a place. And there’s something to be said for the ability to work on long-term relationships instead of continually answering where you’re from and what brings you here. (Wouldn’t it be more efficient to print out that introductory speech on business cards to give out?) There are vast differences between talking to someone who’s known you since birth versus chatting with the insta-friend in the next hostel bunk.

But I’m greedy, I have to see every inch of the planet before I can decide where the ideal spot to settle down is. Or maybe that’s being thorough. All I know is that my brain feels good, as if it got a subcutaneous massage, when its exploration cortex gets exercise.

I had to wonder whether Alaska deserves the top spot on my Ideal Future Home list. I think I’d have to go find out for myself. Anyway, I’m now itching to go somewhere. And writing a best-seller about it wouldn’t be half bad, either.