University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 1995 Yearning wild: Confessions of a recovering alpha male R. Glendon Brunk The University of Montana Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Brunk, R. Glendon, "Yearning wild: Confessions of a recovering alpha male" (1995). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 5717. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/5717 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Maureen and Mike MANSFIELD LIBRARY TheMontana University of Permission is granted by the author to reproduce this material in its entirety, provided that this material is used for scholarly puiposes and is properly cited in published works and reports. ** Please check “Yes" or “No " and provide signature** Yes, I grant permission No, I do not grant permission Author’s Signature Date; VWIS Any copying for commercial purposes or financial gain may be undeitak' only with hie. author’s explicit consent. Yearning Wild: Confessions of a Recovering Alpha Male by R. Glendon Brunk B.S. The University of Alaska, 1974 presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science The University of Montana 1995 A 11 Chairperson Efean, Graduate School &. m s UMI Number: EP41184 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI EP41184 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQ uest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Brunk, R. Glendon , M.S. , April 1995 Environmental Studies Yearning Wild: Confessions of a Recovering Alpha Male Chairperson: Ronald Erickson The writing that follows is a memoir of my years growing up in the Midwest, and my first twelve years in Alaska, - 1968 through 1980 - the same period that a massive petroleum field was discovered and developed in Alaska's Arctic. Of any other period in Alaskan history, these were the years of the greatest social and environmental decline, a trend still underway today. Those first years in Alaska were also ones of great change in my own life. The complication and subsequent decline of a place that I loved from the start, in so many ways paralleled the complication and decline of my own life. What follows is more than memory, then. It's an attempt to look more closely at causes, at the underlying roots of decline, both personal and otherwise. It's an attempt to look through the lens of my own life at the attitudes and perceptions that I carried that led to the loss of things loved. At the same time it is an attempt to look broader, to look at the attitudes and perceptions that dominated Alaska those years, attitudes that still persist. What follows is a record of my own process, a process of coming to see that my own attitudes and perceptions, my cultural conditionings, were much the same of most other men. I also began to see the rage, the frustration, the desire and emptiness that fills so many men's lives. I began to see how these feelings are projected outward, onto women and children, onto other species, onto the earth. In examining my own maleness it was impossible not to see the broader scope, in particular the scope of maleness in Alaska's decline. Like it or not, frontier is essentially a male phenomena. Frontier, in some odd way, is about war, about conquering something we perceive needs conquering. Frontier is about economic opportunity, about amassing wealth. Frontiers, indeed most of men's activities in this modem, industrial world, are about controlling, dominating, accumulating, utilizing, stripping, extracting, dividing, managing, too often about plundering. This is a work in progress, a record of my own coming to understand maleness and how that maleness reflects on the world. It is an attempt to open to the changes men need to make in themselves, an attempt to define the first steps men need to take in healing men, and ultimately what men, in co­ operation with women, need to do to re-imagine the world, to create a sustainable and workable world, where women and men and all species live together as equals. C o n ten ts Foreward - The Intention of Remembering Chapter 1 - Gone Dogs 1 Chapter 2 - Growing Up Mennonite 21 Chapter 3 - Pacifist Wars 46 Chapter 4 - Gone Alaska 81 Chapter 5 - A River Place 115 Chapter 6 - Desire 146 The wilderness falling into disrespect, deteriorating and being destroyed, is a reflection of our own fate. - Robert Hinshaw "Testament to the Wilderness" Forew ard The Intention of Remembering My earliest memories are ones of yearning for the wild, for a place and way of life that had nothing to do with the life I was bom to. I don't know where it came from, this desire. There was nothing about it founded in direct experience, nothing relative. It seemed to come from some unconscious place, from some other life that I'd lived in another time. All through my childhood and adolescence the desire for wild pushed at me. It was just there, in all my thinking and feeling, festering like a sore under the surface of a life lived painfully in the bland and predictable environs of northern Indiana. I was twenty-three years old when I left for Alaska, determined to make a life there. It seems now, in some way, all my stories turn to those first years 1 spent in Alaska, especially the years I spent on the river. Those were the free, innocent times when I believed that I had come to a life that suited me completely, when we lived on the edge of the wild, and I thought I existed only to drive dogs. They were not always easy or sensible years, but of the fifty years I’ve lived, if I could choose, those are the ones I’d choose to live over. At least I would choose them if I could know then what I know now. There would be some things I’d do differently. For starters I’d pay more attention to the balance of things. And I’d know how greed and the ways of men can turn I II something beautiful into something else entirely. I’d choose, too, to expect less of people around me, to be more forgiving. I’d choose to love better, to give a whole lot more to those who need giving to. Perhaps it was the time: the late sixties and the seventies. We were children of the sixties, alive with the idea of a limitless future. It was the age we lived in, a time of dreams and revolution. And for some of us the dreams were ones of returning to wilderness, of finding something so wild and untouched that it could pass for two hundred years ago. What did any of us know? We thought we knew enough: all you needed to live well was to be young and to have radical notions. All of us were determined to live differently than we’d seen our parents live. Most of us who came to Alaska were bent upon carving out something different for ourselves, something with more substance than what we’d been given by the dented America of Richard Nixon, the assassination of JFK and Martin Luther King, the wasted images of Viet Nam and Hollywood. We were all trying so hard to go back to something we’d heard about, to another time, to connect with old values. But something went wrong; what we came for wasn’t supposed to die in front of us. In the late sixties oil was discovered up in the Arctic. The North Slope they called it. It was a time of big change in Alaska. Little did any of us actually understand what was underway. We watched the oil people move in. We witnessed the big companies take over Alaska, and a lot of us took their jobs and the big money they offered. We were all too lost in our own stories to really understand the bigger one taking place around us, to see the end of one good thing and the beginning of another that was not so good at all. Truthfully, though, what was I personally capable of seeing? Those were the years I lived mostly for the promise of that first deep snow, for the Ill slow pulse of darkness that brought the cold time, for the season when nothing interfered with driving dogs. Nothing. If only someone had told me that those times were bound to be lost, that the harder I pursued the dream the quicker it would be gone. If only I could have seen the trap of my own self-absorption. But what does any young man see of his life when he’s so lost in the making of it? What do any of us see? It was the Last Frontier.