Flimsy metal baskets
What does it mean for people to live in wilderness?
Sitting in the flimsy metal basket, suspended above the middle of the raging Kennecott River, I thought, “This is a little bit insane.” It felt a bit like the time I’d jumped out of a plane: yes, I trusted in my parachute, but part of me questioned why I had put myself in a position that required such trust.
I had driven 60 miles down a bone-rattling dirt road, with potholes the size of metropolitan areas. I had paid too much for the right to roll out my sleeping bag on a not-at-all-flat rock slab helpfully labeled “campsite.” After a night’s “sleep,” I was pulling myself across the river in a homemade basket suspended from a cable.
It was May of 1997, and I was exploring Alaska. I was the most annoying kind of tourist: the one who’s poking around for a few days after a wedding. I hadn’t come because I had a burning desire to experience “Alaska” (much less “the real Alaska”). I enjoyed mountains and wildlife, but I could see plenty of that stuff outside my own door in Montana. Indeed, before the wedding in Anchorage I had visited bookstores and ethnic restaurants, because it’s a big city, 120 times larger than my hometown. Yet having made the trip, not knowing when I might return, I figured I might as well see something worthwhile. I decided to visit Wrangell–St. Elias National Park.
It’s America’s largest national park, the size of six Yellowstones, filled with wildlife, glaciers, and peaks. Most of it is utterly inaccessible. But one road—this one I’d just taken—provided difficult access to a near–ghost town. Once I pulled myself across the river, I’d be able to walk six miles up the side of a glacier to a vast abandoned copper mine.
In the moment, however, looking down at the torrent of water, I had some doubt. I could see the nearby abutments of a washed-out bridge—was I sure the cable would hold better? I could see the bolts holding this contraption together—shouldn’t it have one of those inspection stickers like you see in even the most obscure elevators? I knew from maps that the river flowed hundreds of bridgeless miles downstream to the sea—would my body ever be recovered? And as I paused midriver to catch my breath, there was not another person anywhere in sight. But I figured I was already halfway across, so I might as well keep tugging.
It turned into one of the most memorably fulfilling days of my life. The ruins were fascinating, the few people I encountered were quite friendly, I was in good enough shape to truly enjoy the walk, and the scenic backdrop was absolutely spectacular. But more than that, the whole set-up presented a beguiling platform for pondering questions of nature, risk, community, and humanity.
I could feel, in this ridiculously remote spot, the joys of living remotely. I could feel, through the momentarily terrifying but ultimately unremarkable act of hoisting myself across the river, the joys of living by your self-reliant wits. I could feel, through the crashing waters and towering peaks, the power of nature. I could feel the glorious, foolish, indescribably tiny countervailing force of any individual person.
If every day was this sunny and pleasant, I thought, I would love to live here. I’d put up with the hardships, the remoteness, the never-trendiness, the tiny population, the lack of romantic options, the absence of bookstores and ethnic restaurants, the dearth of what many people call culture. Because this place exuded its own culture. It felt like home.
I knew, of course, that every day was not so sunny and pleasant. It was a subarctic environment with a January daily mean temperature below zero. It was at 61 degrees latitude, where winter days may have just four or five hours of light. It was a place where roads are rough and bridges wash out because of the awful power of storms and floods and generally bad weather.
Still, once you imagine a place as home—even briefly and illogically—you always want to go back.
These memories arose for me this month as I read Tom Kizzia’s extraordinary book Cold Mountain Path: The ghost town decades of McCarthy-Kennecott, Alaska. Kizzia is the bestselling author of Pilgrim’s Wilderness, a true-crime account of a charismatic nutcase who was attracted to this region. In a foreword to Cold Mountain Path, he notes that he had done a bunch of historical research that didn’t fit in to the previous book, and so decided to add to it and publish a local history.
Such humility sells himself short. If this is local history, it is an absolute pinnacle of the genre. The story of a near–ghost town around an abandoned mine in a stunning natural setting is the tale of much of the American West. The people who try to live here are playing out the values and mythologies of the American character. Their strengths and foibles are all of ours. Kizzia knows this, and subtly positions his characters to stand in for greater quests.
Granted, you’ve never heard of most of these people. (Singer John Denver does make an appearance, while filming a bad 1970s nature documentary. But his story is among the book’s least entertaining.) They’re individuals who ran away from society, tried to live in the middle of nowhere, and often kept failing. They failed their partners, their neighbors, their community, their natural conditions. Some failed and left. Others kept failing and kept staying. Many died unpleasantly.
Yet reading Kizzia’s book, they felt to me like heroes. In a place that had once called to me as a sort of home, they felt to me like familiar heroes. They tackled life, and nature, on independent terms. They lived in the wilderness—even if they were squatting in an abandoned miner’s cabin, salvaging antiques left behind by retreating copper barons.
“Live in the wilderness” is a frequent advertising siren these days. It seems to apply to cabins with indoor plumbing, heat, electricity, well-appointed furnishings, and silk sheets. It seems to apply, in other words, to the view more than the conditions. And it seems to rejoice in a legal paradox: official federal wilderness areas are defined by the very fact that nobody does or can live there.
Cold Mountain Path shows wilderness living to be about conditions: cold, lonely, uncomfortable, self-reliant, bracing, generous, wondrous. As old-timers say, “You can’t eat the scenery”—and the characters in this book suggest that the saying doesn’t have to embody scorn for nature-loving newcomers. Instead it can stand for the way you eventually stop gaping at the scenery and take pride in how you made dinner.
Such ways of living in the wilderness don’t scale—and most of Kizzia’s heroes know and mourn this as well. They fight over whether or how to improve the road. They reject offers to build a new bridge. Many of them despise the early representatives of the National Park Service. They know newcomers are a lifeblood, and they know newcomers mean change. Progress. An erosion of the very wilderness conditions they find special.
A few years after I visited, a footbridge was constructed across the river. Then a vehicle bridge, too, although it has a prohibitive toll. Visitation has steadily increased. Today cabin-building is the ghost town’s most lucrative occupation.
I bet it’s still a neat place. I want to believe that the type of people who are attracted to it are the type of people I would like. But the most surprising thing to me about Cold Mountain Path was the way the book had a narrative arc, a beginning and an end to its natural story. The story started when the copper mine closed and there seemed no logical reason for the community to exist. It ended—with surprising violence, heartbreaking inevitability, and beautiful strands of hope—a year or three before I showed up.
As I read Cold Mountain Path, I thought about how I would recommend it to friends. Toward the beginning of the book, I was thinking: “If you’ve ever heard of McCarthy, Alaska, you should read this. And if you’ve never heard of McCarthy… I’m sorry. You’re too late.” But as I got deeper into the book, as I gained intimacy with its characters, and as I simultaneously realized my distance from them, I realized that we are all too late.
When we search for a magical natural moment, when we try to live in the wilderness, we will always be too late. That’s in part because those moments are so hard to recognize when you’re amid them, and in part because they are by definition fleeting. There’s something I love about wilderness that gets degraded just by me showing up.
I thought again about the flimsy metal baskets. As I looked down amid my crossing, I wasn’t just afraid of the raging river. I was afraid of myself, of how my existence might degrade the world. Then, in a pale imitation of my heroes, I chose to keep tugging at the tramline.
Discussion:
Thanks to Thomas Pease, a Natural Stories subscriber, for sending me the book. Someday Thomas will develop a website with links to his own great writing, and I’ll post that address here.
If you want to buy the book, support an independent local bookstore! Alternatively, to support me, you can use this link to Bookshop.org.
I loved McCarthy. I think I will love the book (thanks for day lighting it!). And I love this piece.