WE'VE COME A LONG WAY

I've spent the past couple of weeks, aside from hiking and camping, in the Alaska Room at the Loussac Library, poring through old books about Alaska - specifically, dozens of books in the public domain, published before 1923.

The books run quite the gamut. Everyone who'd visited the territory in those days had stories to tell. It's easy to imagine eager readers dreaming of Klondike gold and adventure, turning page after page to find out what this place was all about.

The same topics drew almost every author's pen: burial customs of the native peoples, totem poles, the trials of the trail. Wild predictions are made: reindeer will haul cargo over mountain passes; the territory will become an agricultural mecca. Perceptions of Alaskan natives are mostly steeped in prejudice and misunderstanding.

Much of the prose is flowery and overwrought. Readers today can be thankful styles have changed. Some is funny: "Log cabins stuffed with moss should be wonderful in the tropics. I'm about frozen," wrote Rockwell Kent. Some is brutally honest: "We had no time for amusement," wrote William Standley. "Our routine was to work a great deal, sleep a little and eat when we had the stuff."

Not much of it is great literature, but all of it illuminates our past.

MEMOIR MAKING

I had a wonderful dinner last night in Girdwood, at Alaska's famous Double Musky restaurant. Stunning scenery, savory food, great company - a new friend and one I'd known years ago. In the way things happen here, my new friend knew my old friend, and she re-connected us.

My "old" friend, who's very young at heart, came to Alaska in 1954. She and her husband homesteaded Stony River from 1960-1970, building not just a home for their family of seven but also a town so folks didn't have to send their kids to Wrangell to school. Gail Sheehy wrote about her in Passages. Now she's prepping to tell her own story by taking an online class in memoir writing with 12 people from across the country.

"Hands down, your stories are the best in the class," I said.

She laughed. "My classmates seem to think so," she admitted. In contrast memoirists who hype their tales, crossing the fuzzy line between creative nonfiction and fiction, my friend says she's having to tone some stories down a notch or two. "Otherwise no one would believe them," she explained.

I pressed for an example and had a good laugh over Uncle Tony, a careening fuel drum, and a red bathrobe - not all in the same tale. I won't give up the details - they're hers to tell. But this will be one to read. I can pretty much guarantee it.

POLAR POLKA

Suspend disbelief and enjoy Cherie Stihler's new reverse counting book, Polar Polka (Sasquatch,2008). Fanciful arctic animals join a polar bear polka band as pieces of iceberg break away and polar bears rally to save the day. Vibrant art by Erik Brooks brings the story to life, incorporating lots of active details that encourage kids to study every page.

If you think polar bears are getting lots of attention this reading season, you're right. And unfortunately reverse counting of these great white beasts is what scientists are actually doing. Just yesterday we learned that of fifty-plus animals tagged and studied this spring, only one was a yearling, which means the cub survival rate may be plummeting.

At the end of her book, Stihler offers a list of easy ways kids can help fight global warming. Big people, too, might want to heed the warning and jump on the iceberg, so to speak, before it's too late.

WINSTON OF CHURCHILL

Polar bears are big news these days. Are they threatened? Endangered? Alaska's Governor Sarah Palin is calling for a spendy conference to showcase scientific evidence that they're doing more or less fine despite the threat of global warming. Politics and science collide.

In Jane Davies Okimoto's new picture book Winston of Churchill, illustrated by Jeremiah Trammell (Sasquatch Books, 2008), polar bear activist Winston isn't concerned about what list he ends up on. He just wants his ice. Like his World War II namesake, cigar-chomping Winston rallies his comrades, organizing a polar bear protest to draw attention to his warming world. Along the way, he realizes that he must make a change or two of his own.

Trammell's delightful illustrations bring the polar protesters to life, and Okimoto wraps a simple explanation of global warming into the story. Okimoto's not Alaskan, and neither is Winston - the acclaimed polar bear town of Churchill is in northern Manitoba. But this book gives a nice introduction to a serious issue that affects us all.

UNLEARNING TO FLY

A friend loaned me her copy of Jennifer Brice's memoir Unlearning to Fly, published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press. My friend couldn't get past the Preface, for reasons I'll explain. I pushed on through, and I'm glad I did.

There's no shortage of Alaskan memoirs. It's hard to find an Alaskan who doesn't consider her life unique and memoir-worthy, and there's a fair abundance of those who have the tenacity to write their stories and get them published, come hell or highwater, which is not so tough these days, thanks to print-on-demand and vanity presses abounding.

The University of Nebraska Press is far from a vanity press. They did well to publish Brice's book. In it, she speaks with grace and beauty of family, of risk-taking, of searching for one's place in the world. Flying is both a reality and a metaphor in the book, one that's happily not overdone.

I was privileged to work with Jennifer's mother, Carol, one of many Alaskan women with a remarkable mix of grit, fortitude, and refinement who did it all and then just a little bit more. So I may have lacked some objectivity in the early parts of the book - I loved learning more about Carol's background and how she raised her family.

Unlearning to Fly is about what it means to leave and come home again. It's about the forces of place that follow no matter where you go. It's about facing life dead on, about battling crosswinds, about forgiving and unforgiveness.

In my favorite chapter, "Loving Lloyd," Brice writes with brutal honesty about her adopted brother, a victim of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Among multiple problems, Lloyd, known to his adoptive family as Ben, gashes his wrists. "A few years ago," Brice writes, "someone in my family - I won't say who - said she wished he'd go ahead and cut a little deeper, like he really meant it. Someday he probably will."

Like life, Brice's chapters loop around one another, and time does double takes. Pesky concrete-sequentialism gives way to poignant meaning. In "The Metaphysics of Being Stuck," Brice asks how people really die in plane crashes. "Their hearts explode," explains a fellow pilot. That's not unlike what happens with Lloyd.

Which returns me to the problem with the preface. Alaskan are sticklers for details, especially when it comes to the place they hold dear. As a pilot, Brice knows that little things matter, that the whole is in all ways the sum of the parts. But she opens her book in April 1964, with an account of the great Alaskan Earthquake, also known as the Good Friday Earthquake - all well and good, except that the earthquake happened in March. This kind of faux pas makes Alaskans renounce books in their entirity. Usually their books by non-Alaskans who just can't get it right. I've done it myself - put done an acclaimed book by a renowned children's authors because it talked about a Native hunter selling ptarmigan to the meat department of a grocery store to earn some extra cash.

But Brice's book is too good to set aside. Forgive the error, even though it's posted front and center. Pilot error is the cause of most crashes. But as any good pilot will tell you, a few errors slip past the best of them.

KINDLE RAVES

My friend just got a Kindle. Like lots of people, she had to wait. The electronic reader from Amazon sold out in 5 1/2 hours.

Some caveats: I'm not a techie. I love my independent bookstore. I love my library. I'm not one to chase after the latest gadgets. I'm not an industry analyst. I love holding a book in my hands.

But everything I hear about the Kindle has been over-the-top. There's no back-lit screen. You can do all sorts of annotation. It uses the same technology as advanced wireless phones. Sixty seconds after you order a book, you're reading it. It's light and easy for travel. It stores 200 books. You can adjust the print size, a plus for readers with vision issues.

A great device for folks who live in the Bush with no access to bookstores. Anyone know if the downloading works in those areas?

Here's what gets me really jazzed about Kindle. The publishing industry is broken. Warehousing and return issues in the unweildy hands of megacorporations mean that only blockbusters see the light of day, and out-of-print times are measured in months instead of years. But with devices like Kindle, books don't need to be warehoused or returned. They'll never go out of print.

A revolution? I think so. And one that's long overdue. The paradigm is shifting, and readers will benefit.

BEAR SCARES

Like most everyone in Alaska this time of year, I'm thinking of spring. The other seasons saddle on in as a matter of course. Not spring. No matter where you live, it's much anticipated and prone to disappoint. Last week we were sure it had arrived in Southcentral Alaska. On Friday we got 20 inches of snow. It didn't spoil our trip to Chickaloon, which was all that mattered in my little world.

Before the snow, signs of spring were all around. Defiant greening grass skirting the edges of receding banks of snow. Water rushing through culverts. Flocks of geese and cranes making their way north. And bears.

The season's first bear attach was in Kenai. The victim will live, scarred and wiser. He'd seen a sow and cubs rooting around in his yard. His compost pile, filled with not-so-composty stuff like spaghetti, was a lazy toss from his front door. He went out jogging, and the sow charged. He ran. Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.

If you need a reminder of how dangerous Alaska's bears can be, read Larry's Kaniut's Alaska Bear Tales. If you like that, try his More Alaska Bear Tales. Or one of the Timothy Treadwell books, which I'll talk about in another post. But don't blame me if they keep you up nights. You may come away slightly scared, but sensible - a great tradeoff, any time of year.