Four Quarters of Light

by Brian Keenan

  FOUR QUARTERS

  OF LIGHT

  A Journey through Alaska

  Brian Keenan

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  Published 2004 by Doubleday

  a division of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Brian Keenan 2004

  Map by Neil Gower

  The right of Brian Keenan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0385 603061

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also by Brian Keenan

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Map

  1 Instructions and Preparations

  2 First Footfalls in Fairbanks

  3 Dog Mushing

  4 Maiden Voyage

  5 Ghosts in the Confessional

  6 Road to the High One

  7 Close Encounters of a Bear Kind

  8 The Long and Winding Road

  9 The Road to McCarthy

  10 Paradise Lost

  11 A Moose Moment

  12 Churchers, Birchers and Searchers

  13 The Haul Road

  14 Into the Arctic

  15 Going Native

  16 Athabascan Anglicans

  17 Patrick and the Caribou

  18 Close to the Caribou

  19 Council of the Raven

  20 More Mammoths and Musicians

  21 Arctic Inua

  22 No Place Like Nome

  23 Soul Bears

  24 The Final Quarter

  Text Acknowledgements

  For Audrey, Jack and Cal, crew of the RV Pequod.

  For Debra, who guides me still.

  And for Lena, who is alone now.

  Also by Brian Keenan

  An Evil Cradling

  Between Extremes (with John McCarthy)

  Turlough (novel)

  Brian Keenan is a writer and poet. An Evil Cradling, the story of his four years’ captivity in Beirut, is recognized as a non-fiction classic. He is also the author of a travel book, Between Extremes, with John McCarthy, and a novel, Turlough.

  ‘There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise.’

  Jack London

  ‘How great are the advantages of solitude! How sublime is the silence of Nature’s ever-active energies! There is something in the very nature of wilderness, which charms the ear and soothes the spirit of man. There is religion in it.’

  Estwick Evans, 1818

  Acknowledgements

  • Noeleen Gernon, who typed this manuscript while setting out on a new life journey herself.

  • Pat Walsh in Fairbanks, Alaska, who worked out the logistics of my trip and introduced me to many people, a special friend to Audrey and the boys. Pat Walsh can be contacted for travel arrangements in Alaska at akplaces@alaska.net

  • Debra Chesnut, my guide into the Arctic and into myself.

  • Mike Davis, ‘the old man of the sea’, who finally discovered what life is about and, like the salmon, came back! Congratulations.

  • Eileen Monaghan and family, who anchored us in Anchorage.

  • Clare and Tom Connolly and Noreen and Tom (the fireman), who entertained us in Anchorage.

  • The Gwich’in people of Arctic Village.

  • Lena and Charlie Mendenhall.

  • Mike Murphy and family, Mike McCarthy and Laura, Mary Shields, John Reese, Jane Haig and John Luther Adams – Alaskans all, and all of whom enriched my journey.

  • My editors, Bill Scott-Kerr and Heather Barrett, who waited until the whale came home.

  • And finally my wife Audrey and my sons Jack and Cal, the other anchors in my life, who never let me get lost.

  Instructions and Preparations

  From where I sit at my study window in Co. Dublin, I can see the rolling swell of the Wicklow hills. On stormy nights, if I walk to the end of the short terrace of which my house is the last but two, I can hear the sea’s turbulence. As I look at the quaintly named Sugar Loaf mountain, I think that such a hill would not register in the landscape of the far Alaskan Northland. In a panorama that has one’s head turning in a hypnotic 360-degree movement, in a mountainscape of fantastic dimensions such as you would only imagine in the illustrations of a mythic saga, such a pathetic headland would not even merit a nod.

  Horizons are neither fixed nor finished in the Northland. Any horizon that presents itself to you only marks the limit of your vision; far beyond what you see, you know there is more. Another rugged mountain range, another somewhere, probably nameless and likely uninhabited. Only migratory birds, in their hundreds of thousands, know this landscape intimately. We poor land-bound, sight-blighted creatures can only grasp at things with our imagination and stumble over words such as permafrost, tundra and boreal forest, hot springs and pack ice, aurora borealis and midnight sun. They are all phenomena particular to the far north, but to me they are more than that: they are magic words, like a fistful of polished bone thrown from some shaman’s hand. In them you might discover more of yourself than you know. Perhaps that’s why I went to the final frontier – for the magic, before my own bones were too feeble for the task.

  But an old man’s romance is not enough for an answer; in any case, romance belongs to the rocking chair and recollection. We go places for our own reasons, even if we only half understand them. On the closing page of Between Extremes, an account of my travels in Patagonia and Chile co-authored with John McCarthy, I wrote, ‘I sensed that the only important journey I would make henceforth would be journeys out of time and into mind. There was another landscape to be discovered and negotiated. The landscape of the heart, the emotions, and the imagination had to be opened up and new route maps plotted . . . We talked late into the night arguing whether or not we, too, have journeys mapped on our central nervous systems. It seemed the only way to acco
unt for our insane restlessness.’

  So how could I now account for my own restlessness and my insistence on travelling to Alaska? It seemed to stand in contradiction to my deeply felt resolve at the conclusion of my South American travels. If I had determined that the only journeys I would make should be into the imagination and the landscape of the heart, then why was I thinking again of the Alaskan wilderness? For it was more than an old man’s romantic folly, if not best forgotten then consigned to wishful thinking. The idea of an undiscovered country set in an elemental landscape fascinated me. It appealed to my anarchistic notions of boundless freedom. Sure it was romantic, but it was also real. Alaska was not a figment of my imagination. It existed in time and in place, and in my mind as somewhere that might test my self-assurance. One thing was for sure: it was clearly written on the map of my central nervous system.

  It’s a long way from Avoniel Road, where I went to school, to Alaska, where I dreamed of going, and the distance is in more than miles and physical geography. After all, what correspondence could there be between Belfast in the north of Ireland and Barrow in the far north of the Arctic Circle? But Avoniel primary school in east Belfast gouges itself up out of my memory as an original point of departure. It was 1959, and I was approaching my tenth birthday. I was a ‘good child’, as my mother described me, quiet and untroublesome.

  The school was a big, two-storey barracks of a building, solid and imposing, set among the maze of back streets it served. A great lawn of two junior-sized football pitches stretched out in front of it. To the right and screened from the entrance was a concrete netball pitch, and beside that the boys’ and girls’ outside toilets. Whatever advantage the 1947 Education Act had provided for the children of the area it did not accommodate indoor plumbing. But then this was the catchment area of the aircraft factory and the shipyard, and me and my mates were all cannon fodder for the engineering industry. The football pitches were the largest green space in the area but they were forbidden to any of us after school hours. I was not of an athletic disposition anyway, and though I occasionally scaled the railings during the summer holidays it was more because the place was forbidden than out of any desire to kick a football.

  I compensated for my lack of sporting skills by finding a refuge in books. I excelled at reading and had finished all the ‘readers’ we were required to make our way through long before my peers. If I was always the last kid picked to play, I was equally the first to complete any reading tasks, and I had more gold stars than anyone in my class. My special reward for being so far in advance of the rest of my classmates happened the day my teacher called me aside and suggested I might like to choose a book from the library. The library in Avoniel was an old Welsh dresser with locked doors stationed at the end of the first-floor corridor. It was also where the classrooms for the kids about to go to the ‘Big’ school were located, and the library was exclusively for their use. The upper shelves were full with about three dozen books. I remember being quite frightened as my teacher walked me out of the class, admonishing the rest of the kids to be quiet and get on with their work until we returned. Whatever alienation I had felt from the rest of my mates, it was now compounded by this ‘honour’. I was nine at the time and should not have been using the library for another year or two.

  Standing on the rickety chair scanning the book spines in front of me, I felt like a sacrifice; these books were teeth in the great God monster that was going to devour me.

  ‘You pick one, sir,’ I said, immobilized and wanting to be away from this looming altar of words.

  The teacher laid his hand on my shoulder and in a voice that conveyed neither sympathy nor enthusiasm pronounced, ‘No, young man, you’re going to read it, so you choose it.’

  I had never felt so alone in my life. Again I scanned the books before me. Their titles were just a jumble of words that meant little to me and only added to my confusion. Then my eyes alighted on one book; the four words comprising its title were easy for my young mind to read. The conjunction of the words were intriguing and the stark image on the dust cover of a large dog howling into a richly coloured sky impressed itself upon me. I picked it out, climbed down from the chair and handed the book in silence to the teacher.

  He took it from me and announced the title to the empty corridor: ‘The Call of the Wild.’ He smiled thinly and continued, ‘So, you like dogs, do you?’

  I answered him automatically, the words spilling from me. ‘Yes, sir. My dog at home is called Rex!’

  His smile hung there for another moment, then he said, ‘It may be a little difficult for you, Keenan, but it is a great adventure story. Try it, and we’ll see how it goes.’ I held out my hand to take the book. ‘I’ll bring the chair and you bring your dog!’ he added, handing me the book.

  For more than forty years I have had that dog with me, and the call of the wild echoes in me still. The story of Buck has, it seems, permeated the whole of my growing up, and here I am in my fifties still enraptured with it, the author and the landscape that gave it birth. The Call of the Wild is a parable about surviving and overcoming against all odds. It is about struggle and fulfilment, and it is ultimately about becoming what is in one to become. The call of Alaska’s wilderness became a siren song; to resist it was to smother a vital instinct in myself. Maybe mortality and old age were knocking on my door and maybe I was not ready to let them in. There was another place I needed to go first. The last sentence of The Call of the Wild still speaks profoundly to me about the mystery and magic of that place, and about the torment of the author who wrote so eloquently about it: ‘When the long winter night comes and the wolves follow their meat in the lower valleys he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moon light on glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a bellow as he sings the song to the younger world, which is the song of the pack.’

  Still, I don’t know if it was my solitary childhood immersion in Jack London’s barbaric Northland that created my yearning. Isolated and barren landscapes draw me to themselves, different places for different reasons, but the one constancy is the lure of emptiness and wilderness. I suppose I feel comfortable there, untroubled. I can imagine a recreated life, and I confess a part of me is a loner. Loneliness, isolation and empty spaces are, I suppose, the preconditions of the dreamer, and I am a dreamer, unreconstructed and uncompromising. I pursue the landscape of the imagination and seek to find in the world about me some correspondence between the external and inner worlds, or perhaps a trigger for their coming together.

  All journeys for me have this dual nature. But Alaska is no dreamland. It is raw, wild, primordial and uncompromising. Forsaking the holy grail of the imagination and emotion for a Klondike chronicle might be more demanding of the traveller than I could conceive. But only when you really contemplate it do you begin to slowly comprehend that Alaska is as complex as it is large.

  For a start, it comprises several time zones and climatic regions. There are a minuscule number of roads for a region larger than England, France, Germany, Italy, Holland and Ireland put together. Negotiating such a vast expanse would be a nightmare of logistics, and as I intended to take my family with me I was multiplying my problems fourfold. But there was no way I could leave them behind. Maybe I was afraid the emptiness might engulf me, but my intoxication with the call of the wild was spilling over into my family life. I wanted to take my sons to see the place that had embedded itself in me when I was a child.

  One belief I hold as an absolute truth is that the mind forgets nothing. I might forget things, but my mind forgets nothing. My sons were younger than I was when I was first smitten with Alaska. They might not enjoy months of living like the Swiss Family Robinson in the wilderness. I might not myself. Perhaps the illusion would evaporate there. Perhaps I had made too big an investment from my childhood in this imagined land. But that would be for me to resolve. Even if in the years to come my sons forgot their stay in Alaska, they would still have it store
d in their memory bank to revisit over time, as I had done on many occasions. I only wanted to reveal to them the place that had continued to inspire me. I wanted Alaska to be more than their old man’s ramblings. It could become for them whatever they chose. They only needed the seeds planted in them by exposure to the place, just as they had been implanted in me by exposure to Jack London’s calling wilderness.

  But there was another curious incident that swept the winds of Alaska right into my home and made my visit an imperative. I had visited Fairbanks in central Alaska several years earlier as a guest lecturer. My stay was brief and confined to the environs of Fairbanks and its university, but it was enough to seal my longheld fascination with the place. While there I spoke with a group of students and some members of the public who attended my lecture as non-registered students about the use of the ‘instinct’ in the creative process. I happened to mention that I had a notion to write a book about a blind musician, and as I knew nothing about music and was not blind I hoped my instinctual facilities were in good order.

  I soon forgot the incident, but was brought sharply back to it while in the process of writing the book. I had spent years researching my subject and was tortuously trying to put the fiction together: I was finding it hard going trying to imagine the life of an eighteenth-century blind harpist, Turlough Carolan. Several months into the task I was about to give up and forget the project, though it remained very close to my heart. I was locked in one of those imaginative and intellectual culs-de-sac and was beginning to question the validity of what I was writing about. The whole thing seemed pointless.

  At the very time I was contemplating this, I received a letter with a Fairbanks postmark. The letter was brief with no return address, the handwriting tiny but neat. It looked and felt feminine to me but I could not make out the signature. It informed me that its author was aware I had intended writing a book about Turlough Carolan, who was a ‘Dreamwalker’. The word threw me totally. I had not come across it before and never in reference to my subject. Mainly due to frustration with the lack of empathetic engagement with my subject, I dismissed the letter as having been written by some demented old spinster in the Alaskan outback who filled her days by writing strange letters to complete strangers.