On Geography

In this world there are just mountains. No characters, and sometimes not even animals: all sentient life gone. The plants remain, caught up in the process of creation without product or end, bodies layered on top of each other in a flesh-ripe basket of hills. Think mountains lying down in bed together until they merge into one, sinking into the sheets of the earth. Think of their touch-eroded feet, smooth, wrapped up in each other’s hair.

To create this, we first unmake the world of humans. Keep only the green jagged lines of mountains, their cliffs hazed in salt and cinnamon bands of rock. Keep the unkempt vines, every natural shape that when faced with evening light will hemorrhage blue. A world of layers upon layers of green and blue and black and white mountains, their snowy crowns jeweled in ice-hued rainbows and pastel prisms. Give raw rocks dominion over the sun-bellied lizards that crawl across them, dominion over their fiery gemstone eyes, over spidery clutches of eggs lain in warm sand. Give trees dominion over birds. Their claw-shaped arms still reaching out, all the ravens, eagles, crows, owls and seabirds reduced to ornaments vanishing in the fog, no more glossy rings to grace gnarled wooden hands. A world of silent, infinite valleys. No consciousness, no chance at evolution into steel and smoke, just scraggly pine trees with their needles dying, yellow and browned.

This world now thrives, feasting on juniper sap and rich, black dirt, unhindered, ivy and clover swarming over the earth like a horde of bees, a lick and twist of manes and reed-like tongues. Flowering trees swell and stretch their backs against the sun, buds wet with pollen, shoots still intertwined and roses slick with thorns.

A world of silent, infinite valleys.

Circle Mountain

Spruce needles will always fall in spirals. The mountain range itself is in the shape of a helix, a long turning of dipping valleys forever intersecting ridgeline, thicket green in the summer, Midas gold with birch in the fall. There are no views or lookout points on Circle Mountain itself because it is so rich in trees and rivers. The two are linked, rooted together in a tangle of worm-like arteries crossing and re-crossing each other, coating the mountainside in a great, snaking net. Leaves, moss, and needles cover the sky, the slopes of the mountain looking out into other mountains beyond, swimming in whirlpools across the forest floor. Gold and green brush below the haze of choked trees.

If an outsider, some human form could be unfortunate enough to lose themselves on circle mountain through the maze of tree-lined corridors, water seeping up underfoot. They would never be able to leave. They would wander, until at last they come to a river—rushing moon white, a thick vein cutting through jade and gold.

This river is the main artery, the lifeline of how a person becomes a mountain. When the water touches skin, space conforms, liquid to caress the shape of the body. Struggle for a moment only, waist-deep, then disappear. Become an un-thing. A thing no-more and away.

Map of The World's Edge

There is a peak which is both the beginning and end of all things, white as glare, silk-thin, puddled over the edges of the world. At ground level, it might look flat, as the flesh of the moon from its surface, but it is in fact the tallest mountain in the universe: growing horizontally rather than vertically. The breadth of the mountain is so great that if you climbed it, even time and the movement of the sun would change. It exists cloth-like, in a perpetual state of cold at the edges of everything. It is permafrost. This is due to extreme elevation, and summarily, any living thing not native to the mountain that comes across it feels its steps grow heavy and slow. The laws of physics that govern here are the same as those at the edge of the world, and so the mountain itself is impassable. It looks like fog. It moans like ice. The end and extension of everything, quartz-like rivets of cloud pulled up in snowy garters where it touches the sea.

Tooth Range

Tooth Range, or Ghost Range, as some might call it, is a mountain range made up entirely of the memory of other mountain ranges. However, since in this place there are no people to remember these mountains, they are instead made up of the memories from animals and other mountains, therefore they are both short and flat, infinite, ivory-capped and sharp and thin as eyeteeth. Tooth range is the mountain range in the distance of any plane, a shape that might be seen over clouds in mirage, peaked and glimmering. To be there is to be dead. A thing too vast and simple to be known in its entirety. Like trying to understand the shape and sight of your own mouthful of teeth. Pieces might be known, might seem so innate that you cannot separate yourself from the thought of the mountain range, a kind of possession over it. You can only ever find in its roots an imagining of your home.

A Mountain Overgrown

The most dangerous mountain is one so big it has begun to grow in reverse: an inverted peak like a spike leading from the outwards world down. Picture a hole, the weight of the thing, the emptiness stretching through your spine until it engulfs and inhabits you like a parasite. This kind of mountain is a solid thing of absence. Think loneliness in the land. Some places have a way of clotting, of burrowing into the blood and submerging. Freezing in a knifepoint, piercing down to your core. Loneliness is this variety of mountain. An ivory needle within, long, bone-hooked tooth worming inward.

If left alone long enough with this mountain, a person will be swallowed up, wrapped in the overgrowth. They will become like a tree drinking water. A stone so choked in vines it is no longer recognizable as a stone.

Sister Peaks

To reach a ridgeline in any system, first the sister peaks must be crossed. This may seem counter-intuitive at first, as one might assume the peaks themselves, being sisters, lead one up to the other and onto the ridgeline, but as with all things at the center of a root-system, there must be protections in place to keep secret things secret, the deep things deep, stored away. The sister peaks are a part of this system. They will always be two peaks or more. They support each other, a family of earth and rock. They are together, and so all things are together within them. These mountains are always shining, even when drenched in fog. This is because they have each other.

The Unreachable Peak

Only at night can you see the unreachable peak: an upside-down mountain. You can only ever see its ridge, the line where it plunges through the underside of the world. A thing of stars wreathed in Northern Lights, all hooked cliffs and glaciers. It is a thing of the sky. Where all the places you thought you wanted to be have gone. The slopes of this mountain are so sheer and treacherous that to step on them would already be considered an act of falling. The world at their base is unreachable. A realm of the sky an endless space, forever reaching up to send you tumbling into space.

Blue Mountains

Time itself is a mountain range here. The mountains on either side of the valley that ranges through time have a color. If you’re wondering what this kind of blue looks like, imagine a postcard tucked into the frame of a mirror. All mountains, except when covered in snow, look blue from a distance. Blue is the last color to appear in written history, first showing up in texts about 4,500 years ago. They think this may be because humans used to perceive color differently. As babies, humans are born with a perception of both light and darkness, but blue is the last color a human recognizes, at around five months old—much later than other colors—around the same time babies develop conscious awareness.

Picture your place in time as a mountain both in front of you and the one behind. One the past, the other the future. Even if you stand on the same exact spot on the earth as someone who is dead, or a place you have been before, you will never see or touch each other. You are together but apart. A vast valley in the earth between these two people. But the other person or version of yourself is there, waiting. If only you had a way to climb to scale these blue mountains. If only there were a way to make this map more than just a key. If only there were a way to find your way back to who you used to be.

On The Inefficacy of Maps

There is a map of a place I used to live in which the point looks like a fish bone, the thin curving tapered rib of an arctic char. I keep trying to find ways to write about it but am never happy with them. I tell myself all meanings and the landscapes they imbue are subjective anyway, so the best description of any place is to say nothing at all. That the most respectful depiction of my time living in the Arctic and in Alaska would be silence. I say this because it often seems to me that the negative spaces are where the simplest, most unique and poignant of our experiences exist, and these are frustratingly untranslatable. You can’t describe the experience or meaning of a place, so in the end all you can do is try to layer images to get closer.

It’s like an orange. You can build the idea of the fruit to someone, describe the peel enough that someone might read your work and say “oh, that’s an orange,” but the actual fruit itself, the experience of an orange isn’t something you can truly get at. Meaning and place work the same way. Imagine trying to describe an orange to someone who has never seen or eaten one. Even if you do it well, when they eat an orange later, it’s going to be a surprise. They’re going to say “this isn’t what I expected” and that might be good or bad, but no matter what, it’s going to be different. And, of course, one of the pretty obvious differences between oranges and places is that you can’t actually hurt anyone by incorrectly describing an orange. Do that to a place, a community, and it becomes part of a larger narrative about that place. Do that to a community with marginalized voices like rural, indigenous Alaska, and that can be dangerous.

That’s why I say I sometimes feel like the most respectful depiction of a place, particularly one like Alaska, might be silence. If you’re quiet, you experience something, you’re in the present-tense of it. You don’t describe because you’re too into the beheld. You don’t dilute it or box it in.

Here on a map, a two-dimensional blue and white thing is the fin-shaped hook of Utqiaġvik and the fish’s rib of Point Barrow: a claw reaching north into the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. A landmark that both forms a tiny part of my self and yet exists apart from me. A place where I spent four years of my life full-time, and four years in and out. It’s flat on a map, lifeless compared to the topography maps of mountains I read for backcountry hiking in Southeast Alaska now. These days I live 1000 miles south of Utqiaġvik in Alaska’s capital, Juneau. But Utqiaġvik is still there, even in these hard, isolated times. It goes on happily without me as it has for hundreds to thousands of years, there in what is now the most northern point in the United States. I have eight years of combined history in and out of Utqiaġvik, and if my brain were a camera, I might be able to pull this shot of the map back, until even more moth-eaten lakes of the tundra appeared in the south. I would try to trace my journey there and away: The hundreds of miles of tundra on and on down to the Brooks Range and eventually Fairbanks, until finally that mangled-hand shape of Alaska sticking out from Yukon and B.C Canada with the handle of Southeast Alaska and Juneau reaching down the side.

The size and distance alone is impressive. Humbling to think about, even just in the context of Alaska’s size as a state. Everyone I talk to about Utqiaġvik seems to have ideas about what the place meant and still means to me, when I myself don’t. A Northern Irish man I was seeing for a short while claimed it was the source of all my “madness,” whatever that means, and added that everyone he ever met who’d been to the Arctic “is fucked up.” So certain was he of his opinion of the place based on some pre-established mythos that—having never in fact been there himself and having known me two weeks—he decided it was the root of all my problems. He’s far from the first to speculate on the experience or wonder what “drove” me here. Frankly, I wasn’t really driven at all. The simple logistics are that at twenty-one I applied to AmeriCorps alphabetically by the states I wouldn’t mind living in, and Alabama was too hot.

My sense of Alaska now is a strange and unreal map, a place of very real people and spaces mixed with imaginary dreams mapped onto one landscape. At its worst, the mythos of Alaska is a racist, frontier, white male wet dream and/or ecofascist fantasy. At its best, it’s a sentimental attempt to describe the indescribable, a world of landscapes deeply inaccurate and accurate all its own. This second vein is the sin I fall into when I’m not careful. In my cartography, I create a fictitious world of mountains that is devoid of people. You can’t get a much clearer correlation with Eco-fascism or Alaska as uninhabited land than that.

Before I came to Alaska, my goal was to go to a place where I could be concerned with only my own needs. To do that without hurting anyone in my life, it seemed as if I had to go a place that was physically far away from other humans. So far that I did not have to think about anyone—and I mean anyone’s—needs in relation to mine. I wanted to be alone. Aggressively and unapologetically so. Let’s add that I am, at times, not very good with people—isolationist and rigid yet in an occasionally lonely and needy way. It’s not a great combination. I saw Alaska as an empty space in which to safely exist that way without being a problem. To not bother others with my existence or be bothered by them. Which is, of course, impossible. This place has never been empty. There have been indigenous people living here for thousands of years. And when I say people, I mean to say, roughly one fifth of the entire population of Alaska is indigenous. 16% identified in the US census as solely Alaska Native by race, and that does not represent the overall indigenous population, which is often both Native Alaskan and one or more other races. Alaska Native people make up the vast majority of indigenous people living in the United States. So much of the Alaskan population is Native that it is common practice in some areas for Native languages to be taught immersively in schools. Alaska Native cultural presences are everywhere.

Yet, if you’re not from Alaska, it might shock you to learn that. Because that is relatively absent from the overarching narrative and mythos of wild, empty Alaska, because for that mythos to work in this environment, we’d have to acknowledge what it really means to think of Alaska as the last frontier. The last time Americans started talking about frontiers, they meant the great push west two hundred years ago. Now, the nostalgia for the wild west that sprung up in the 1960s and the brutal colonial history that actually went with it have not exactly aged well. But clearly, there is still a desire and market for those narrative roots and those are tied into how we idealize Alaska. White people used to think everything west of the Mississippi as empty too, and you had better believe it was at some personal narrative gain.

I am a part of this. I was twenty-one, and that is a part of how I conceived my push north when I moved from Juneau to the Arctic. Of course, that’s not how I thought I thought about it. I thought about reaching into the unknown.

A lot of Alaska is still a personal unknown. I haven’t even been in Alaska over ten years yet and I can see how that idea shaped me. Three and a half of my years here are not even in the state full-time. I wasn’t born in Alaska, and though I consider myself somewhat Alaskan at this point because I call this place my “home,” I am clearly a transplant. Alaska is often perceived as a state of transplants, although this too is a lie. Most of my experience living in Alaska is with indigenous Alaska in a rural indigenous community. To the world outside Alaska, the Arctic is that unknown. A place of science and emptiness. There seems barely more than a nod to the people and families up here and Iñupiaq culture. No one lives in igloos, nor ever did they permanently. Everyone I knew while I lived in Utqiaġvik had ramen and streaming Netflix. That information seems to disappoint people so much though whenever I tell them. I get it: it’s less “interesting” than the existing narrative. People don’t want reality, they want taxidermy. They want a static narrative of caricature and stories.

As an Alaska transplant, I have spent a lot of time talking to non-Alaskans about Alaska as a physical space. Conversation after conversation though keeps bringing me back to the same conclusion: people don’t actually want to know about Alaska. They want a story. And they latch onto and accept only the details that fit with narrative. I had a friend while I lived in Utqiaġvik who was hired by a writer in Seattle to illustrate children’s books about the Arctic. Utqiaġvik is a whaling community, and there was a scene with a whale being harvested on the beach, so my friend illustrated the whale with baleen coming out of its mouth, the way bowheads are during that situation. The writer had a lot of issues with this because it “looked weird” and “was confusing.” It was “too much to try and explain,” so she requested it be cut from the drawing. She also didn’t like that my friend had drawn the father in the story as balding and claimed that she had done a lot of research on the topic and found that Native men didn’t go bald. Now. There’s a lot to unpack there, but the level to which this woman disputed my friend’s lived experience of a community she actively walked around in and saw both whales and balding people illustrates a kind of unwillingness I’ve even seen in my own friends and family to change their views of established images of Alaska. In the end, my friend stayed on as the illustrator, but the conflict about the images led to her almost being taken off the project without full pay.

Eight years ago, when I was twenty-five and had been in Utqiaġvik about two years, I wore mukluks I bought online. I thought I had figured out things a bit and bought them because they were cheap and lighter than heavy winter boots. But these boots were a bad time. They had beads on them and all sorts of things, and I thought it was okay because I thought I needed the convenience and because my then-wife—an Iñupiaq trans woman—thought they were cute. But that’s not how that works. My rationale was it’s very encouraged in Utqiaġvik for everyone to buy and wear traditional jewelry and clothing made by your friends, it seemed much more of a deal not to, a way of keeping yourself apart and saying you were too good for it. But these were not those sorts of local items. They were not Iñupiaq culture specific and I did not know the people who made them. They were mass produced.

It wasn’t until another Native woman called me out in the post office calling the boots ugly that I realized what I’d been doing. And in the moment, I defended them. Some of that was surprise and confusion, because it wasn’t really clear to me what she meant since she just kept telling me they were ugly, but I’m not an idiot and by the end of the conversation I had figured it out. I just didn’t want to accept it. Because that meant I had done a bad thing, she had a right to be mad, and I had hurt her. That’s how privilege and ignorance work. I owe that woman a debt really, though in the moment I told her that I was going to wear them anyway because they were warm. I threw them away later that night, but still. That happened. I don’t want to do something like that again, to pretend I have rights to stories and experiences that are not mine.

There’s a kind of paradox to be had between the reasons I came up here, the facts that deconstructed the mythos and exposed its dangers to me, and my own lived experiences. In my experience of Alaska, out in mountains and in communities alike, there has still been a lot of isolation: but that isn’t about uninhabited place or being outside of people. It comes from me. Once, in Utqiaġvik during the winter darkness my now ex-wife and I had a conversation in which she described to me how at its worst living in a place “like this” can feel like being at the bottom of a well. You think you can see little pieces of blue and cloud and start to get bitter, thinking the place is somehow keeping you from them. But then, you realize that the well is not the Arctic: it’s you. There’s nothing left to distract you from yourself. That was revelatory for me.

At twenty-one, I was not okay with who I was: someone who enjoys being alone. I thought wanting to be alone and still experiencing loneliness meant there was something wrong with me. I thought that I had to be away from other people in order for it to be okay to be who I am. I thought I had to go without people so it could be okay for me to be that way. But that’s not only impossible, it’s unnecessary. The sense of landscape here still gives me space in that way to safely feel and face that part of myself. This place is just so far beyond me. The history, the life, the mountains, the tundra: everything that makes Alaska what it is is so bigger and beyond me as a person. Nothing is about me here, nor should it be. That realization is isolating, yes: it is hard to know how much a place affects you while you in no way affect it. But this is also a safe place to be a person who sometimes wants the space to be alone. People understand and accept that here. I have since realized that that aloneness does not have to be a problem or a part of place, it can be a part of me. That’s okay.

I’ve been all around the mountains here in Juneau and from my window in my house where I live now, I can see across the waterway of Gastineau Channel to an uninhabited part of Douglas Island. Douglas Island blocks my view of Admiralty Island: a place devoid of people but for the village of Angoon, an island whose name in Tlingit translates as Fortress of Bears. I only have cell phone service in one corner of my house: the window seat looking over my impossibly steep driveway that the postal service has deemed too much of a hazard to drive up. I have a wood stove, but I also have gas and baseboard heating. My pipes are crap, because they’re jerry-rigged by the regular human back in the sixties who built this house and ran a line from the stream out back. A thousand feet from my house, the road literally ends and a trail runs nine miles into backcountry until you hit Taku inlet, which is only accessible by boat or air and has very little sign of humans: just trees, rivers, bears, and the very active Taku glacier. Juneau itself is only accessible by air and sea.

But I live by a town. I have a roommate. I call friends and family on my phone. Wilderness around me is not a place where I am or where I can really go. It is a thing that would eventually kill me because I do not know how to use all of its resources. Humans, even remote ones, still rely on society. People long before me used to travel out to Taku inlet the way I do now when I go out to be alone in the mountains. The place I go to be alone in “wilderness” has never been mine alone or empty. Tlingit and Haida culture is still very much alive and this particular route has been around a long time. The trail is rough—choked with devil’s club and cow parsnip—enough to keep most hikers off, but there are still one or two if the weather is good, and kayakers make their way out. Local boat people also sometimes pull up on beaches along the way. I can generally head out for a few days though, and not see anyone. I have logged literally months alone in my tent.

My own dream mountainscape I tried to make is cobbled from moments in places like that. The way the land around me feels to me. For all my hatred and terror of the limitations of communication, I owe the people I know a try at creating something about these places we have been. These places are not mine, but I want to write about them in a way that other Alaskans can see and recognize some part of themselves in. We live here together. We live here.

Sometimes I feel like I’m writing just for me, trying to listen to some part of me that can’t talk and wishes it weren’t a person, so it didn’t have to. As if I could vanish into mountains. Maybe I am the Alaskan hermit stereotype somehow, a twisted, boring, non-romantic version, though, even then, I think that would make me a fake. I’m sitting in my office clothes and lipstick right after work trying to write an essay. Trying at age thirty-three just to make enough money to pay my rent like a normal person so I can afford the time and a hot shower to come home to, after I spend three miserable days out in the rain at the point, on purpose, most weekends, for no communicable reason. In the mountains. Just to be more alone.