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A memoir from the travel writer and editor who spent her childhood moving between her "Great Alaskan" father on the tundra in the summer and her more urbane mother in Baltimore during the school year, a lifestyle that led to an adult who both feared and idolized human connection.
Four plus stars for this wonderful book not because I grew up in Alaska (although I did) or because it was well written (although it was) but because it's wise, a coming-of-age saga nested like Russian dolls, each revealing another epiphany. Newman has a book of short stories coming out in April 22 (I believe) - Nobody Gets Out Alive - that seems to be on everyone's TBR. Here's hoping she gets the recognition that she deserves. ( )
When Leigh's parents’ divorce, she is torn between two worlds, Baltimore and Alaska. Summers are spent in the wilderness of Alaska, fishing and hiking. The school year is spent in Baltimore, where she struggles to fit in with her peers.
I was very interested in the book when the author was talking about her childhood and her wildly different experiences. The author jumped around a lot in time, which I found extremely distracting. Sadly, I grew bored when she began talking about her adult life. The book quickly devolved into a therapy exercise rather than a readable story. I think this book had a lot of potential, but fell short. ( )
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Dear, my compass/ still points north/ to wooden houses/ and blue eyes/ fairy-tales where/ flaxen-headed/ younger songs/ bring home the goose.../ -Elizabeth Bishop, Untitled
Dedica
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To my family
Incipit
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In the largest state in the Union, a state built on gold rushes and oil pipelines, ninety-pound king salmon and twenty-pound king crabs, a lot of things come prefaced by the phrase Great Alaskan. -Chapter 1, The Great Alaskan
Citazioni
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I sit in the mud by a broken patio chair. My job is to listen and worship and not, under any circumstances, be noticed. I can do this until the end of time.
I did not bring up all the times we’d driven in the snow at home. And she did not take her foot off the gas, zigzagging over the southern areas of the country—that vast anti-Alaska of waffle houses and sunshine, cattle ranches and swamplands.
On the weekends she read thick James Michener paperbacks while Dad and I fished, and then, on the weekdays, she picked me up from school and—over and over—more times than anybody thought was possible, drove our car into the ditch on the way back home, missing the driveway to our house, as if she did not know where we lived at all.
I usually found some kind of left-loose, open-minded dog wandering around to play with. But that’s the thing about Baltimore: Nothing wanders. Even the squirrels hustle by as if they have a piano lesson to get to.
Being alone in the dark feels so much lonelier once somebody’s already been curled up with you.
Winter is one of my favorite times in Alaska. It’s not what people from the Lower Forty-Eight expect. Twenty hours of daily darkness isn’t actually that dark. What soaks through the sky is a hushed, dense purple that glows from the light of the snow, even as the snow glows from the light of the moon. People speak more quietly during these slow, secret-feeling months. Errands are postponed in favor of naps. Whole days go by where you never change from pajamas into jeans and snowsuits.
Alaska is an easy word. I can make my lips say it. But there is the Alaska made of letters, the one that comes out of your mouth with rich, snappy a and k sounds. And then there is the one in my head now, the one that isn’t a place or even the-place-where-Dad-and-Abbie-live. Alaska is me—in scrapbook pictures, in daydreams, in family stories I can’t remember, in memories I mix up probably, but believe all the same.
I’m here because my dad loves Alaska and my mom doesn’t, because my dad loves Abbie and not my mom, because Abbie is a good-girl wife and my mom isn’t, because I am not a good-girl daughter (or not inside where it counts), because my mom loves me, because now my mom is the only one who loves me and maybe she was the only one who ever did … and because some of these thoughts are true and some aren’t, and some are and aren’t at the same time.
Kings are the salmon that made the state famous, the fish that embody exactly what their name implies. They are the great, the glorious, the royal inheritors of the kingdom of all fish, gleaming with a scaled, green-speckled brilliance, soaring up from the water with grace and authority that makes you hear trumpets and bugles in the rush of rapids.
“Your dad sure can fish.” Which is the most fawning compliment that any Alaskan fisherman can give another, fish praise being perhaps the only exception to the statewide love of overstatement.
The Alaska face was openly happy. It was not at all careless or blasé. And it was a lot harder, it took a lot more effort, because it used to belong to me. It used to be my real face.
I was acutely aware of one of life’s ugliest paradoxes: Getting a taste of what you long for is usually more painful than just going hungry.
Sometimes they inquire tentatively, but with great kindness, as to why I’m not finishing my food, which in Italy is social code for: Who didn’t love you? And by the way he was a fool.
“There are two reasons people come to Alaska,” Dad always used to say. “You’re either running to something or you’re running away.”
My landmark was the square-shaped Northwest terminal of Sea-Tac, where, for ten years, save for the occasionally rerouting through Chicago, I got off the flight from BWI and changed planes for ANC. Once there, I was as close to Alaska as was geographically possible from the Lower Forty-Eight. Only 2,280 more miles to go.
I hate stuffed animals dressed as people. Real animals need no trench coat. They’re human in their eyes and expressions, not their wardrobe choices. This is why people own dogs; dogs stare right at you and understand.
...after which she or he will stamp our foreheads: APPROVED. This is a stamp I have wanted for quite a while, in all kind of situations. It’s a ridiculous ambition, clearly, and I long ago found my way around it by confronting the fact that, when it comes down to knowing what you want to do: I don’t know what I want to do; I don’t have anybody to ask; the people I could ask, I won’t believe; and so to get over the hedgehog balling and stabbing and prickling me all over, I just do the nearest, fastest, most difficult thing and live with repercussions. A wedding, however, has some pretty serious repercussions.
Because there are people out there in this world who might not know how to do regular life so well, but in a crisis will leap over small country mountains and break land-speed barriers. Maybe because they grew up knowing only that.
This is what my mother can give me if I let her, love in the form of rescue.
Pain only seems scary while you’re waiting for it to happen. After it does, it’s just hurt and recovery.
“Okay,” he says, finally, and turns around. His face is serious. He knows what he’s agreeing to—us. “What took you so long?” “I was waiting for you to start paddling.” Then he smiles.
The choice, in fact, is deciding between the world of your making and the ever-distant, ever-glittering, open-all-night never-never land of the supposedly wiser, happier rest of the world.
Ultime parole
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Anchorage is the only place I know better from the air than from the found. -Chapter 15, A Tablecloth in the Wilderness
A memoir from the travel writer and editor who spent her childhood moving between her "Great Alaskan" father on the tundra in the summer and her more urbane mother in Baltimore during the school year, a lifestyle that led to an adult who both feared and idolized human connection.
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