What I'm Waiting For Item Type Thesis Authors Simpson, Sheryl Ann Download date 01/10/2021 05:39:21 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/11122/8521 INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. H ie qualityof this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, prim bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. 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WHAT I'M WAITING FOR A THESIS Presented to the Faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS By Sheryl A. Simpson, B.A. Fairbanks, Alaska December 1995 © Sheryl A. Simpson Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 1376794 Copyright 1996 by Simpson, Sheryl Ann All rights reserved. UMI Microform 1376794 Copyright 1995, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. WHAT I’M WAITING FOR By Sheryl Ann Simpson RECOMMENDED: Advisory Committee Chair y . f j j Dep^tment Head APPROVED: a. il-e# Dean, College of Liberal Arts ''Dean of the Graduate School Date Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. A bstract What I'm Waiting For is a collection of essays that explores the boundaries between people and wilderness in Alaska. Most of the essays use childhood experience and journeys into the country to examine the relationship of history, myth, imagination, and language to landscape and wildlife. The style shifts among literary journalism, personal essay, and memoir as the narrator tries to locate her own place within these relationships. The viewpoint moves from an outsider's perspective represented by the narrator as a reporter, to an insider's stance as someone who grew up in the state. The writing attempts to overcome northern stereotypes and to present deeper meanings offered by Alaska's wilderness. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. iv Table of Contents Abstract * iii Acknowledgments V Epigraphs vi At Auke Bay 1 The Book of Being Lost 5 Where Bears Walk 20 The Way Winter Comes 36 Circumnavigation 51 The Middle Ground 67 Killing Wolves 79 Looking for Otters 110 What We Remember 117 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. V Acknowledgments Many people have provided encouragement and advice, but I would particularly like to thank Frank Soos and Jennifer Brice for their hard work and generous criticism. Their intelligence and eloquence of craft have made me a better writer. One could ask for no better teacher or example than Frank. Many thanks also to Eric Heyne, Peggy Shumaker, and John Morgan for their help and support. Above all, my loving gratitude to my friend and husband, Scott Kiefer, who offered an uncritical eye when I wanted it, chocolate when I needed it, and solace when I couldn't ask for it. Some of these pieces have appeared elsewhere in different form. “Where Bears Walk” has been published in various forms in the anthologies American Nature Writing 1994 and Another Wilderness, Summit magazine, and We Alaskans magazine of the Anchorage Daily News. “Killing Wolves” appeared first in We Alaskans. ‘The Way Winter Comes” was published first in Alaska magazine. A shorter version of “Looking for Otters” appeared in Sierra magazine as the winner of its 1995 Nature Writing Contest. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In some truly improved natural setting—one well removed from the reach, the sights, and maybe especially the sounds of our wonted culture— surrounded by the immemorial phenomenal world, whether trees, ocean, or the waves of prairie grasses, a change may overtake us, precisely to the extent that we are willing to remain where we are and resist what will be a gathering temptation to return to more certain comforts. It will not quite be fear, but it will be next to this: a kind of existential humility bom of a sense of all the life that surrounds and includes us and that will go on without us. And this is the ground of myth—fear or humility and submission to the still unfathomed mystery of Life. Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography That which is far off and exceeding deep, who can find it out? Ecclesiastes 7:24 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 At Auke Bay The shoreline of Auke Beach forms a parenthesis that both gestures to open sea and embraces the cove. I find my own way along this arc, clambering over driftwood the tide may carry away tomorrow or never, stumbling across algae-slick rocks turtled into the mud. It's easiest to follow the high tide line as it unfurls a banner of pink and indigo mussels, seaweed salad, tangerine-colored fragments of molted crab shells. Eventually this tangled ribbon will lead to Point Louisa. Sometimes as I walk I'm tempted to read the constellations of tidal debris like a horoscope. What signifies a halibut head with eyes carved out by scavengers? A Nike tennis shoe prunish as a foot too long in water? A miniature Crown Royal bottle bearing an unintelligible message scribbled on a coiled fragment of paper? Once I came upon six deer skeletons with heads missing, shreds of meat still clinging to fresh white bone. The legs angled against the sand as if these deer had outraced waves to gain the refuge of land. The next day, the skeletons were gone. I have walked this shore many times since I was a child, and I nearly always head this direction, out of the shelter of spruce trees and toward the point. The footing grows easier in the deepest curve of shore, where an unnaturally even layer of pebbles crunches and rolls underfoot. Waves worry the beach in the sea's endless accounting of shell and stone. Legend says Tlingit Indian slaves cleared this stretch of all rocks larger than a child's fist so the Auk people could beach their canoes safely. For four hundred years, maybe more, the Auks lived in clan houses overlooking the cove. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 Then, in 1880, an Auk led white prospectors to mountainous basins that held gold. He earned a hundred Hudson's Bay Company blankets for starting the gold rush that settled Juneau.. Within a few decades, the Auks had abandoned their village to live in frame homes on the edge of town, twelve miles to the south, an exchange they surely regretted later. Today the U.S. Forest Service claims this beach, as it does most of Southeast Alaska. The agency named the cove Auke Village Recreational Area and sprinkled it with outhouses, shelters, and fire pits. Only a meadow of cow parsley and wild rye marks the place where the Auks lived, where the Big Dipper clan houses and totem poles brooded above the bay. Beyond the meadow, past the shelter of big trees, the beach narrows into a natural bridge between mainland and Point Louisa. Few people know the body of a Tlingit shaman was once laid away near here. The Tlingits cremated all of their dead except shamans and slaves. The slaves they tossed into the sea or forest; the shamans they sheltered in gravehouses built on a bluff or a point, always facing the ocean. I've looked, but nothing remains of the shaman's gravehouse. My family often came to the point when I was a child. Sometimes we fished for salmon and Dolly Varden from the jagged rocks, casting our lines awkwardly as our rubber boots slipped on brown rockweed. Acorn barnacles colonizing the stone shattered beneath our feet. At night, we probed tidal pools with flashlights, spying on purple and green sea urchins prickling their way across the basins, tiny starfish living in slow motion, hermit crabs approaching the world always sideways, wearing shells borrowed from periwinkles. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 Inside the point's gathering of trees, footpaths seam the moss and duff where fishermen and wanderers tramp toward the water.