On the East Coast, in Philadelphia, it is a casual comment, and off-hand mention of my home that starts the questions. It is this mention of my home state that transforms me, in the eyes of fellow classmates, from the average fellow student to something exotic and fascinating. There was one occasion, during my class on writing poetry, when I was asked about the imagery of a poem I was sharing. My response was something like, "There are beaches in Juneau that don’t have sand, but instead have these jagged boulders that will slice open your foot if you slip the wrong way." The mention of Juneau, Alaska, dooms me to a barrage of questions that I’m usually only too eager to answer, but another, darker part of me remembers the almost two decades I spent growing up in the Last Frontier, and the mix of emotions I gained after leaving it.
But whenever I describe the land of my birth, I feel glaring inadequacy. I felt it during my poetry class. I’ve learned that for most people in the "Lower 48," especially people on the East Coast, Alaska might as well be Mars or some other alien planet. I feel inadequate in describing it because Alaska is so familiar to me, but so strange to everyone else. Alaska is—or was—my home, my life, my blood. It exudes such an other-worldliness that many people forget or just don’t know that it is still a part of the United States. Life in the Last Frontier is so different and so unknown compared to the rest of the States that to leave Alaska was to enter into true isolation, where innocent but ignorant questions are asked, and a true understanding is never reached. I keep trying to describe home, hoping someone will understand such a place as I do.
As much as I love Alaska, it is the stage for much loneliness and presents its own form of isolation. I was born and raised in the capital of Alaska, Juneau, where no roads lead in or out of the city. Boat or plane is still the only way to reach the city of 30,000-40,000 people. While I was growing up, it was considered a day trip—something to do during a lazy day in the brief summer—to drive about 45 miles to the end of the road. We drove out there for lack of something better to do, and to see the "sights" along the road: lonely and uninviting houses, big and small, nestled amongst old conifers, and the dumpy trailer at the gravel turnaround at road’s end. There were also summer nights when my sister would gather her friends and together we’d all go to one of Juneau’s cold beaches. We would start a bonfire and talk and roast marshmallows long into the night, and with how lonely a place Juneau was, it was guaranteed we’d be the only group of people at the beach that late, at Auke Rec.
One occasion of this midnight bonfire sticks in my mind. At the time I was a typical awkward teen, except for the fact that I’d been born and raised in Alaska. And not only was I an awkward teen, but I also suffered from a moderate case of depression that was only going to get worse. Such as I was, I sequestered myself from my sister’s group, outside of the light of the bonfire, that one cool midnight. With the chatter of friends only a murmur, I heard the snapping of the fire, the lapping of the ocean waves, and I saw the moonlight spilling a white halo on the surface of the water. Sitting apart, on the chill bed of pebbles weathered to smoothness by countless tides, isolation felt complete. The sounds of the whispering world entered my body, but filled none of the empty spaces. Instead, I ended up feeling emptier than when I came. This I felt that night despite the peaceful solitude. At the time, cities like Philadelphia and Dallas and New York City had no place in my mind. As far as I was concerned, they were foreign worlds, different dimensions existing outside of Alaska and outside of my life.
"This picture was taken by my mother from the top of the Mount Roberts Tramway on Mt. Roberts. Across the Gastineau Channel lies Douglas Island with the town of Douglas, while the other side of the bridge connects to downtown Juneau. Further down the channel, the larger portion of Juneau, the Mendenhall Valley, is visible, and beyond that, on the horizon, is the Chilkat Mountain Range."
I grew up in solitude, with the emerald boughs of alders and cottonwoods, the depth of the dark green spruces and hemlocks, the wholesome salty scent of the sea at Auke Bay Harbor, and the frigid, misty jade tinted waters of the Mendenhall River that traverse what used to be my backyard. I grew up in this secluded land of natural beauty, away from cities, and the problems of the rest of the world. I grew up sectioning a herring and spearing the gooiest piece to my lure, hoping for the father of all dolly varden (which I eventually caught—a huge specimen weighing four pounds and reaching 23 inches in length). That beast of a fish, on a sunny day at Auke Bay, vacated the shadows of the floating dock to grab my lure, which dangled just under water’s green surface. The stricken fish jumped and whirled and rolled the nylon line round and round its head while I desperately manned my fishing pole with shaking, excited hands. I begged for a net from any passing fisherman until someone from the Bayliner next to me brought one. Fishermen gathered as I dragged that monster fish (in dolly varden terms) onto the dock, where it thrashed and spat the lure from its mouth. Tangled in the line that was the only thing keeping it on the dock, the fish was in my grasp before it could slip back into the water. And, sweating profusely and grinning like an asylum patient, I dumped the fish in my little bucket.
I felt, in those moments of Alaskan ecstasy, like I’d found the cure for cancer. After that victory, I spent long minutes admiring the slick, supple body of the silver fish, feeling both elation in the catch, and sadness that the fish was dying. I watched as, like so many fish before—dollies, trout, and herring—my fish gasped, languished, and finally gave up its life. And every time, I’ve felt that miserable combination of satisfaction and grief that something had to suffer and die by my hands. But Alaska is a place of life and death, predator and prey, coldness and warmth, plenty and emptiness, and survival.
Born and raised Alaskans are intimately familiar with such cycles. We grow up understanding them. A lot of tourists, adding their two bits to Juneau’s healthy tourist industry, might see a black bear at a distance and wonder at its terrible power and beauty, but at the same time fail to understand the relationship between these bears and the people living on their land. There was a story in the Juneau Empire about a woman who, walking along a lonely gravel road, was attacked by a black bear. Though black bears are not usually aggressive, as the height of humans tends to deter them, they sometimes display a mean streak. She would have been killed if she had not feigned death, even as fangs and claws bore down on her. These days, whenever she goes walking, she carries a revolver at her hip and is licensed to use it in her defense.
More vicious, and dangerous, than black bears are the grizzly bears, which stand eight feet tall when standing on their hind legs. Some people, even in the "Lower 48," will have heard of the Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 years studying and filming these bears at close range. Anyone who watches his footage and sees pictures related to the occasion for his death might feel a cold, frightened shudder run up his or her spine. He was finally rewarded for his stupidity when he and his girlfriend were killed and eaten by a grizzly that invaded their tent. His footage, and his gruesome death, are a reminder that while Alaska is beautiful and majestic, it is not a playground or a tourist trap. It is wrong to idealize the Last Frontier, just as it was wrong for Treadwell to treat the grizzlies he studied like people. In the film about Timothy Treadwell entitled "Grizzly Man," director Werner Herzog states, "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder." And in Treadwell’s case, such a comment fits.
To hunt and be hunted is a sort of credo for Alaska. If you want to hunt such animals as bear or deer, you take a day trip in a boat or ferry to Tenakee Springs. Tenakee is a small town of 300 residents, cut off in the same way as Juneau, but infinitely smaller, with only one main road made of dirt. My dad and I took our 29’ Bayliner to a branch of land near Tenakee, boarded a truck that was waiting for us in a gravel lot, and started off down the deserted, narrow dirt road with our cousins. We scanned the clearings and clear cuts of the mountain side in search of deer, and while we shot none that day, our cousins bagged one and brought that back to my cousin’s shack in Tenakee.
My cousin’s buck was skinned, beheaded, and placed in a cotton gauze sack that was hung in the entryway. The bloodied head and skin were placed in a cardboard box just under the hanging flesh. In the dim light the scene was creepy, but at the same time, I could almost taste the juicy tang of the buck’s back-strap meat. When you see a buck, at one moment standing placidly on a mountain ridge, the next fleeing in an explosion of blood and fur at the sound of a gunshot, you’re reminded of the violence that characterizes survival in lonely Alaska.
Fishing in Alaska can be just as frightening and mysterious as the landscape itself. When people think about sea monsters, they generally think about myths like the Loch Ness. But slightly more pedestrian "sea monsters" can still be frightening. When my and dad went out fishing one day, something massive took their line. When my mom went to check the pole, she found the rubber snubber (a length of rubber designed to give the fishing line flexibility) was hideously stretched, the other end leading into the murky depths. All she saw was a bright flash of white, as if a halibut had turned its white side toward the surface. Problem was, the flash was much too large to be an average halibut, and when the line finally went slack, my mother found a whole, untouched, but very dead king salmon on the other end.
Now, there is an old photograph in The Hot Bite—a small, burger-and-shake food shack by the Auke Bay docks—of a gargantuan, 800-pound monster halibut that got tangled in a commercial fisherman’s net. A halibut is an ugly fish that looks like a flounder, with both eyes on one side of its body. Typically, halibut caught by sport fishermen range from the ping pong paddles (about 10-20 pounds), the chickens (about 25-30 pounds) to the average halibut of about 50 pounds. Occasionally, sport fishermen will catch a large specimen of about 100-200 pounds. These are about as tall as a short man. The monstrous 800-pounder was twice as tall as a full grown man and could have easily swallowed a child—maybe even a person of average size. My mother thinks it was just such a giant beast, lurking on the ocean floor, that had swallowed the king salmon that had originally taken their line. She told me she would not want to be in the water knowing such a thing was hiding below her. I wouldn’t either.
Such are stories in and around Juneau and other settlements in Southeast Alaska. But what most of the more than ten thousand tourists disembarking the cruise ships in Juneau during summer—tourist season—avoid is the depressing weather that often plagues the city. To live in Juneau is to expect almost 100 inches of rain a year in the temperate rainforests it inhabits. The constant, misting rain is responsible for the gloomy frowns and absence of smiles on the faces of the residents. Every day I expected high, bright overcast, or low-slung clouds and banks of steam rising from the warm trees of the Tongass National Forest. I expected the brief week or two of sun that comprised a Southeast Alaskan summer. Constant sadness and emptiness hung in the air, oppressing the troubled city of Juneau.
Besides the issue of moving the state’s capital, and the rejection of the road project that would have connected Juneau to the rest of the world, Juneau possesses a dying economy in its sunless isolation. I saw businesses move in and leave a few months later. Around the city there are smatterings of empty, boarded up buildings where businesses have failed. The Mendenhall Mall resembles a toothless mouth with its empty spaces for rent. The more popular, single-story Nugget Mall is heading down the same road, due to overly expensive rent. With almost nowhere else to go, people flock to the only large stores in town, Fred Meyer and Costco, for their Sunday shopping. During those gray days of September through February, the streets are almost empty of pedestrians, of people who are too tired to do anything but stay home.
In the summer, however, Juneau’s downtown streets are flooded with tourists who are none the wiser to the lives of the residents. So poor is the economy and so hard are Alaskans pushing to move the capital, that someday I might no longer have a hometown. All that’s keeping the city alive is the work that state jobs in the capital provide, and the supplemental income the tourists provide. In coming years, my home might be gone, killed by a lack of concern for its survival. I am left wondering what it will feel like to lose my home, not to war or natural disaster, but to the seemingly deliberate murder of economy by the public. It is estimated that by the year 2012, the capital star will no longer be associated with Juneau, if the city is even still on the map.
Even though I was witness to death, loneliness, the stifling depression of rain, ignorant friends, and total isolation, I still care for my home. I still care about the forays I made on the dangerous rocky beaches and the times I slipped and gashed my legs. I still care about the times I waded into the water of the Mendenhall Glacier in search of the flawless, crystalline ice. The summer days I traipsed along the Mendenhall’s dry riverbed, I found little fish and water bugs in my favorite pond. My cat once joined me to roll on the patches of sand and to explore the bushes with me. All the while, the reduced waters of the river roared beside me. On those rare sunny days, the melting snow on Thunder Mountain would glisten white and shadowy blue. Rain or sunshine, Juneau was my home. But in leaving Alaska, I have since experienced another species of loneliness, one that manifests itself in the innocent questions and fascinated curiosity of classmates, and from the alien surroundings of Philadelphia.
In the city, you hear stories of robberies and shootings and arrests. Gone are the ancient evergreens, the real mountains, and the soft drizzle of the rainforest. Here, I can’t walk and talk simultaneously without gasping for air like a landed fish. On the streets and in the malls, I’m met with frowns that are not due to depression, but are merely rude. And while the residents of Juneau are often subdued and keep to themselves, people here are outwardly mean. It is not typical to meet someone who is friendly, so that while in Juneau I was one quiet person among many, in Philadelphia I have to struggle to be polite to people who are not polite to me; the only people who are friendly are my colleagues and instructors at Drexel University, and the occasional traveler stopping to ask me for directions.
Forget about asking me to tell you stories about Philadelphia that match the quality of the ones from Alaska. Actually, I don’t have any to tell. In this city, my lips are dead, my face is tired from the strain of remaining polite or neutral, the air is sometimes harsh on my unaccustomed lungs, and the natural land around the city feels trodden and used up. I feel rejected by this city, cut off from the life that bustles inside it. Most people only become really friendly with me when they learn that I am an Alaskan. During the year that I’ve lived in this city, I’ve felt more anguish and sadness than what I felt in the last ten years in Juneau combined.
What it comes down to is that, so far, I am left to face yet another species of loneliness.
Charlotte Lenox is majoring in English at Drexel, and is a transfer student from the University of Alaska Southeast. She was born and raised in Juneau, Alaska.