I'm writing a long piece about Seth Kantner and his book Ordinary Wolves right now for the January issue of Bookslut. (I'm thinking it's better to be ahead of all my deadlines as Christmas looms closer and the 4 year old becomes much more excited...) One of the things Seth and I talked about in Seattle a couple of weeks ago was how books on Alaska never seem to be really about how it is up there - just how people want it to be or expect it to be. There are obviously a few exceptions to this (and Nick Jans is one author worth reading), but mostly books about AK are written by authors who have an agenda. The best example of this is Jon Krakauer and Into the Wild. It's certainly a well written book and I had no problem reading it when it was assigned in one of my grad classes, but I was sorely disappointed by what Krakauer had to say. It's the story of a long drawn-out suicide that Krakauer poses as an intense soul search. Because of the way he wrote this book, because of how he presented this story and infused it with his own opinions and hopes and dreams about his subject, people still make treks (pilgrimages maybe?) out to the abandoned school bus where Chris McCandless died of starvation and leave long messages about how much they admire him for never letting go of his dream.
It amazes me everytime I think about it.
McCandless starved in an abandoned school bus that every hunter and his third cousin has used as a stopping point at one time or another. (My husband's uncle could take you there in an afternoon.) The road is not far, there is a trolly in place to use for crossing the river and the path is relatively clear. Basically, he found a wild place close to civilization and killed himself.
Some kind of dreamer.
It's just hard to find books that capture not just the wilderness aspect of the state, not just the whole "saw the Aurora and saw Jesus cause it was so pretty" part, but everything else. Most people don't know that AK has some of the highest rape and suicide rates in the country. Alcoholism is rampant, violent crime is not uncommon (in Town or the bush) and some of the most dangerous jobs in the world are handled there like another day at the office (logging, fishing, flying - we make the top five every time). It's a gorgeous place and yet it has areas that rival third world countries in appearance. It's just crazy contradictions from one end to the other but never where the tourists (or the journalists) take a look. When Seth wrote Ordinary Wolves he was taking a lot of chances that there would be an audience willing to read what it is really like up there. The fact that he just won a Whiting Award suggests that he was right about telling the world of his Alaska. But I don't think nearly enough people know about this book, or what it is like to write the truth about the state.
Part of what prompted me to think about all of this was a letter I received from an editor today about my book. She was very kind - incredibly kind - but suggested that the best thing I could do was change it to nonfiction. She thought changing the names of the pilots would be enough to protect their identities, and would also still allow me freedom to write about commercial flying up there as it really is. And she offered to reconsider it if I made this change. (Lord, how tempting!) Of course she doesn't know how tiny aviation is in AK or how easily everyone would know who I was referring to (changed names or not) or how quickly all of my friends and former coworkers would distance themselves from me and call me a liar (some of these guys are with the airlines now, so having the world know about all the regulations they busted is not such a good thing). But the hardest thing of all would be to compress everything I know into truths for each individual. Part of the freedom of fiction is you can combine stories and have one character experience all of them - make it nonfiction and it has to be researched, it has to be separated - hell, it has to be true.
That's just not a burden I can carry along with everything else in this book.
But, here's the crazy part - it is all true. One of the things Seth and I talked about was that in order to tell a true story in AK you have to make it fiction. That doesn't apply to every story in the state obviously, but when you become that intimately involved with the characters and the setting - when you are dead on about how people act and react and behave (and not a lot of this is very good), then you can only lay it on the line if you make it fiction. That allows you to make it a blanket statement - to say that someone named Scott flew in shit weather and claimed it was good and someone named Ray crash landed off the coast of Nome after running out of fuel (just barely making it to the sea ice). That's how you say that one little girl is raped and no one does anything, one man kills himself and he won't be the last, and dogs are starved or microwaved more because of boredom then anything else. That's how you tell the bad stories, by letting them be fiction. That way at least, everyone can believe.
They can think it is true but it won't scare them - it won't make them angry.
Otherwise, right now, if I told you that a friend of mine flew one day out of Fairbanks and it was 55 below and he landed in a village called Chalkyitsik and it was 62 below then you would call me a liar. You wouldn't believe it was straight temperature, for one, and you wouldn't believe that a turbine engine aircraft could handle that cold. (Hell, you wouldn't believe a single-engine piston could handle 40 below.) But it did - of course it did. We flew in 40 and 50 and 60 below. We flew in wind chills colder than 100 below. It was crazy everyday, every single day at the Company, but we just kept flying stupid shit airplanes in stupid shit weather for stupid shit Bosses. It was my job to keep the planes in the air and the freight out the door. It was my job to tell everyone to go, and I did it. I said whatever I had to say to make them fly.
I lied all the time.
That's authentic Alaska - and it's not the pretty picture that everyone seems to have. But Seth has written an amazingly honest book about life in the bush and people are reading it. And for today, that is a pretty awesome thing.
My book will find a home out there somewhere, I'm sure of it. I told the truth and eventually, the truth is always heard.
