Green Alaska: Dreams front the Far Coast (review)

Reviews Full-Length Reviews Green Alaska: Dreams from the Far Coast by Nancy Lord Counterpoint Press, 1999 192 pages, cloth, $22.00, iUustrated History used to be rewritten regularly in the former Soviet Union—an insidious and soul-deadening practice that we can only suppose hastened the coUapse of that regime. In exploring the relationship between the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition and present-day Alaska, Nancy Lord (re)imagines and (re)invigorates the way history shapes the present and in so doing attempts to resurrect the past rather than bury the present. "Here is a man, the BiU Gates ofa century ago . . . Edward H. Harriman, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, [who] can afford to do absolutely anything he wants on the vacation his doctor insists he must take." So why not outfit a 250-foot-long steamship with aU the amenities, invite a bunch offriends, coUeagues, and some ofthe foremost naturaUsts ofthe day—John Muir and WiUiam H. DaU among them—and cruise the stiU-remote coast ofAlaska? Why not, indeed? Among the passengers is John Burroughs, popular nature writer, friend of Walt Whitman. In Green Alaska he is shown in the reluctant role as official historian ofHarriman's Alaska expedition. Now, in commemoration of the 100-year anniversary ofthis expedition, Lord, in a much less lofty boat, foUows Burroughs s shoreUne. He is her focal point, her entry into the colonial , casuaUy rapacious, turn-of-the-century world. Not that Burroughs is out to exploit. It's more that he is, as we might say today, conflicted. He is a nature writer who prefers his nature a bit tame. As Henry James put it, Burroughs is "a sort of reduced, but also more humor201 202Fourth Genre ous, more avaüable, and more sociable Thoreau." Throughout the expedition —as Lord imagines it—Burroughs is drawn again and again to the "tiniest " and "tenderest," rather than the majestic and breathtaking. Burroughs's own home in the Hudson River VaUey meets his finely balanced needs: nature not too tame, but surely not too wüd. "His natural world is a civiUzed and homey place," according to Lord. In fact Burroughs, it might be said, plays it safe, in that he is neither visionary nor muckraker. When the expedition stops at Prince WiUiam Sound, Burroughs doesn't think to record the scene ofa cannery exploiting both the natural and the human. "Our man has left the disagreeable cannery and poUuted waterfront behind and is off to his sweet-smeUing woods, following the song of a hermit thrush," Lord chastises. Lord, too, is conflicted—but about Burroughs.Yes, she wishes more from him as naturalist and chronicler. Yet, for her journey, she brings along her copy of The Writings ofJohn Burroughs, volume 13, "In Green Alaska," because this particular volume has been in her famüy for four generations— passed from Lord's great-grandmother, to grandmother, to mother, to her. Burroughs is now part ofher own famüy's history. "But I like him, too," Lord writes, "because he knows how to look carefuUy at things and to choose his words with equal care ..." Lord, also a careful observer of our natural world, foUows his path, his journey, then, in more ways than one. Yet unlike Burroughs, Nancy Lord, both in Green Alaska and in her memoir, Fishcamp: Life on an Alaskan Shore, is both practical visionary and poetic muckraker. In her vision she recalls that, as a chüd, she believes there's a movie camera behind her eyes that projects everything she sees (clouds, the way ants walk) onto a screen, aUowing everyone to see what she sees. Now an adult in green Alaska, she writes, "I am there again, in that place of aU beauty. The camera behind my eyes is roUing . . . What I see . . . —from oceans to hüls, to untracked sky—is as new as the start ofUfe on earth. . . . If [aU the people] saw . . . they would know that life is filled with both many smaU bUsses and stark raving extravaganzas." Shifting from visionary to muckraker, from romantic to practical, Lord explores the present oü and gas industry plaguing Alaska. "[E]very year the industry dumps miUions...