We Never Met

By Tom Poland

 

I wish we had.

I traded letters with a writer who lived alone in the remote reaches of Alaska, the Land of the Midnight Sun. Poet laureate of Alaska, his letters and a slender volume of essays described a beautifully harsh landscape. Solitude is yours whether you want it or not and each day is briefer and darker until, finally, darkness swallows you.

His nearest neighbor lived 60 miles distant. He had a wife but she bolted. The cold. This man’s companion through the long Alaskan winter was a crackling fire. His forays into the snowy wilderness meant encounters with grizzly bears and one day he had no choice but to shoot one in the chest. The bear clambered up a hill near his cabin. For a long time, he feared this wounded bear would attack him.

The Alaskan writer was John Haines. His wintry wilderness story began in 1947 when he and a friend drove to Alaska where he bought a 160-acre homestead, 80 miles southeast of Fairbanks. His goal was to paint the Alaskan winters. He salvaged wood from an old bridge and built a 12-by-16-foot cabin. When his paint froze, he turned to writing.

Haines lived in extreme winters in that land of cold rivers, salmon, volcanoes, and glaciers. He tracked animals for food with frostbite always a subtle threat. One night a man knocked on his door. Frost covered his hair. He couldn’t lift his head or unclasp his arms.

“His feet and lower legs were like dead things, nearly hard and white as marble.” Haines massaged warm coal oil into the man’s legs, saving them. “He may have lost a couple of toes, but he walked on those feet and legs till the day he died.”

Ice ruled supreme, making everything beautiful, everything deadly. Haines described how a nearby river would freeze as winter laid its hand upon the land. “Free of its summer load of silt, the river was incredibly blue and big rafts of ice crowd each other. Where it gathers speed in the rapids above, the sound of all this ice and water is loud, rough, and vaguely menacing. As the cold gradually deepens and the sunlight departs in the days to come, the floating ice will become harder and thicker, and the sound of its movement in the water will change to a harsher, grinding and crushing … The ice sings, groans, howls and whistles like a living thing.”

The freezing river cut off an avenue to civilization. No way out in a dark, cold land; no one can save you should something dire transpire.

He wrote prose as a poet should.

“There are shadows over the land. They come out of the ground, from the dust and the tumbled bones of the earth. Tree shadows that haunt the woodlands of childhood, holding fear in their branches. Stone shadows on the desert, cloud shadows on the sea and over the summer hills, bringing water. Shapes of shadow in pools and wells, vague forms in sandlight.”

—From Stories We Listened To, the Bench Press.

The trail grew cold. His letters ceased.

John Meade Haines died in 2011.

 

Photos in public domain.

 

Georgia native Tom Poland writes a weekly column about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and culture and speaks frequently to groups in the South. Governor Henry McMaster conferred the Order of the Palmetto upon Tom, South Carolina’s highest civilian honor, stating, “His work is exceptional to the state.” Poland’s work appears in books, magazines, journals, and newspapers throughout the South.

Visit Tom’s website at www.tompoland.net

Email him at tompol@earthlink.net