Читать книгу First Wilderness, Revised Edition - Sam Keith - Страница 10

PREFACE

Longings

At a party in Massachusetts one winter evening in the early 1970s, several of us men drifted away from our wives and gathered in front of a snapping blaze in the fireplace. We sipped our drinks and stared into flames that turned our conversation from current events to our primitive longings. We strayed easily from talk of the trans-Alaska pipeline….

“I was all set to go, in ’48,” one said. “Right down to the military jeep and two spares. But we never got the show on the road. My roommate up and decided he wanted to go on for a master’s, and I met Nancy.”

Another man leaned in. “I was another casualty. I had it all figured out. I was going to be a wilderness trapper way back of beyond somewhere. The Porcupine. The Pelly. The Athabasca. I dreamed about marten and lynx and wolverines and sourdough biscuits. Read all the books. Still have ’em somewhere. I settled for my father’s meat business. In it ever since.”

“You won’t believe this. Right after I got out of the service, all I could think about was Ketchikan. Commercial fishing—that was the life for me. I had a name all picked out for that forty-footer I was going to own: The Northern Lady. Somehow, it just don’t sound the same plastered on a canoe.”

I had heard the same sad tunes before. On and on stretched the tombstones with their eroded epitaphs of what was going to be, yet never came to pass.

We all have our Alaska, in one form or another. It’s a place we never got to see, a goal we never reached, a dream that stayed that way.

I was one of the lucky ones. I mined some of those dreams we talked about as boys, before responsibility descended with its straitjacket. I saw things I dreamed of seeing. I did things that I dreamed of doing. I prospected my Alaska, and discovered new placers in myself. That big, awesome land brought out the pieces, like flashes of gold in black sand.