Who's Driving Read online

  In order to save bears from future Treadwells, we should probably start putting warning labels on a slew of appealing nature films: “Caution: This is all about us—not about animals” and add the disclaimer: “No animals were interviewed or even studied in order to produce this film.”

  HUNTING FOR WHAT

  The fastest way to make a fool of yourself is to talk about culture and hunting with people who live, or whose parents and grandparents have lived, in a hunting culture. I am not going to tell you how I know this—just that I am going to continue to try to talk about culture and hunting.

  It is incredibly difficult for any group of Alaskans to crawl out of their own memories and self-interest far enough to get a bead on the immensely important and immensely vague concepts of “subsistence” and “preserving culture.”

  I read Craig Medred’s “Nelchina Caribou Ruling a Cultural Travesty” in the Anchorage Daily News this morning, and it seemed a mix of perfect sense and perfect lunacy. I had to take a walk to restore my head to its preferred state of emptiness.

  Walking, I noticed that the swallows had returned to Cappuccino. I noticed that the fireweed had suddenly bloomed to the top. I noticed that the pair of Trumpeter swans on the lake still had one remaining cygnet, floating like a small grey dory tied to the bright white schooner shapes of its parents.

  I scanned Slide Mountain with near-sighted gaze, and felt the twinge of love and excitement I always feel in this season when the stars are coming back at night, the berries are getting ripe and animals will soon be on the move.

  I don’t know much about the natural history around here compared to the old people who used to live in the neighborhood: Ahtna elders Morrie and Joe Secondchief or the other trappers, Native and white, who lived and worked here over many decades. Through long love and acquaintance with these forests, they noted the rise and fall of rodents, birds, and mammals in every season.

  Hunting knowledge, that aspect of culture so important to many Alaskans, requires acquaintance with the country and a need for the food it offers. Importantly, it requires that we learn from other people who know more than we do.

  It’s part of a very long political discussion around Alaska, the very simplistic version being whether there should be some kind of rural preference for hunting instead of most hunts being open to all Alaskans. You can guess where Native groups and rural residents usually stand on this. It has gone back and forth, mostly because no one can define a rural resident who deserves preference or a city resident who is actually rural by birth or inclination. It is especially difficult because of some untidiness between Federal law and Alaska’s constitution.

  Medred, a knowledgeable commentator on Alaska’s outdoors, did not like this recent court battle being tipped toward local preference. In a way, he’s just more optimistic than I am, because he thinks that non-hunters, “particularly young urban Alaskans,” can be inducted into hunter-gatherer culture and thus “foster a greater understanding of and appreciation for wild lands, no matter your age, race or ethnicity.”

  That sounds nice and I hope it will happen, but I want the induction ceremony to involve some old guys and gals who love this place. Vivid in my mind, still, are the two young caribou bulls lying bloated beside the Glenn Highway a mile from our house a month ago, shot from a passing vehicle during the night.

  Did those people think they were hunting?

  Whatever hunting “is,” I don’t think anyone learns it without tapping into a community of hunting practice and hunting morality. I think you learn it by hunting with people who learned it from people they went hunting with.

  It seems to me that community was what Superior Court Judge Eric Smith was trying to preserve as he ruled that prior history with the Nelchina game populations and land, family connections, and dependence on the resource would have to be counted as factors in the determination of who gets caribou permits.

  I believe that the Native organizations who brought suit against the income-only criteria for subsistence permits would say preserving this particular aspect of culture was about more than shareholders and excluding other people.

  We should all ask ourselves: Beyond the opportunity to eat wild meat, what else is it that we are trying to preserve?

  Beyond what laws can dictate, how do we learn the reciprocity of the natural world without the chance—and necessity—of participating in it?

  Beyond the opportunity that the law gives us to run around the country with guns and trucks, who can teach us a little respect?

  Painful as this dialog about who gets to hunt caribou and moose may be, and the impossibility of solving it, we need to keep on talking.

  GRUMPY ABOUT HORROR MOVIES

  I like America’s complicated October holiday—Halloween. I like the story where the corpse wakes up at his own funeral. I like the little kid slumber party joke that ends with the nose booger: “I’ve Gotcha and Now I’m Gonna Eat Ya!” I like handing out candy in my Value Village-assembled witch costume, and I like grimacing pumpkins shining real candlelight out of their eyes on our dark front porch when the trick-or-treaters come to call.

  One year in McGrath the Kuskokwim Valley Rescue Squad, its ranks recently swelled with teenagers, employed a modest amount of fake blood and moulage makeup, plus a few Resusi-Annies’ torsos and arms and legs, to make the best haunted house anybody in town could remember.

  If that makes you wince, call it team-building.

  Healing and horror? That’s Frankenstein. Healing and horror and humor? That’s Young Frankenstein.

  Halloween is a hall of mirrors that reflects all the images it has taken in—from Poe, Hawthorne, Hitchcock, and from a zillion bad movie Draculas.

  I like Halloween but dislike the not-funny horror movies, many of which are released during this season.

  To generalize, young kids love Halloween and older kids love horror movies, which caused a big disagreement between me and the teenaged peers of my daughter.

  Take into account the fact that these young people have already made me watch Dumb and Dumber and Super Bad, just so they could laugh while I squirmed.

  Ever a glutton for punishment, I let them show me a youtube trailer of a movie about people being driven crazy by a vision/dream of a white owl. The preview suggested that the movie was based on fact. At my request, my google-nimble daughter quickly navigated to a review of the film that said its only factual basis is that the star of the movie was indeed a real actor.

  I was feeling sorry for the vilified snowy owl, in its actual identity one of the most beautiful creatures on earth, and said so.

  The point then made by the younger people, which I will simplify and thus misrepresent because I want to and because this is my column, is that it is extremely fun to be scared by a movie and whatever gets the job done is okay.

  This I can believe from the generation that buys black underwear with little pink skulls and sticks pins through their tongues.

  Imaginary monsters are fair game, although I’m sure the orcs in the Lord of the Rings books are more like the ones in my imagination than the slimy ones in the movie version.

  But don’t real animals suffer enough from our relentless fictionalized re-inventions of them throughout the culture? Even in good movies?

  It is the dilemma of art in a free society—everybody gets to play with the toys. I understand that and accept the distortions, except for this nasty, gooey, screamey genre.

  Consider owls, wolves, dark deserted highways and abandoned cabins. That’s not a scary movie. That’s just a drive home from Glennallen at 10 pm in October. We are more rural than Amityville. We are weirder than Area 71.

  C’mere, kid, let’s go outside. In November, the lake groans as it freezes—small, puzzled sounding groans at first and great deep monster-in-a-cave sounding groans a few days later as it makes ice 5 and 6 and 12 inches below the surface. You don’t notice the sounds much in the day time, but out on the porch at midnight, in your slippers and with all the lights o
ff, this will give you an actual thrill.

  What seems plain wrong to me is that somewhere, someday soon, after watching that dumb movie which has no other plot or purpose than to make people scream, some kid who has never had the chance to even get close to wild nature is going to look at a photo of a snowy owl and say, “those things give me the creeps.”

  TROPHIES

  I am going to wait until my partner in life is not in the house then I’ll drag the eight foot step ladder inside and up the stairs. I’ll use a big rubber band to attach a shiny red Christmas bulb to the nose of the elk trophy. I will haul the ladder back outside, making it as hard as possible to undo this guerilla act of seasonal cheer.

  My husband Jim says he doesn’t like the bulb on the nose of the elk or the Santa hat that I also place on its head as a jaunty seasonal touch. The at-least 10 years of Rudolph-elk makes it traditional, doesn’t it? But decorating the elk head still makes my husband Jim uncomfortable—because he says we are violating the dignity of the great animal.

  Every year, I think about this and acknowledge the truth in it and then I decorate the elk head anyway.

  The Deadheads are mostly not my fault. I married into them, and in one way of looking at the universe, they are the reason my house will never achieve feng shui.

  There are the Africans: Grant’s Gazelle, Reedbuck, Kudu, Impala. I look at their graceful forms every morning and never stop being amazed that they are so far from home. They are more than thirty years dead, brought back from Africa to North America when Jim was a very young man. They were stored by various long-suffering relatives until he had a house and me.

  I talk to them occasionally, as the middle of my life and these remnants of their beauty have coincided for such a long time. Their heads and necks can only suggest their once-fleet forms. Their foreign provenance makes them a good audience for complaints about this occasionally odd life I am living. Outsider to outsider, you know.

  There are some cassette tapes somewhere, too, of the nightly-told stories by men of three continents and several major faiths, joined by their knowledge of animals and the hunt. As the magnetic dots have fallen from these tapes the voices have faded; now only the mute stuffed foreigners remain to kindle my husband’s memories of African campfires.

  On another wall, I am partially responsible for the great elk from Montana; how could we not commemorate a September day that is part of the origin story of our marriage? Jim can recount every breathless moment of that hunt. He heard the bull snap branches as it came out of the canyon called Devil’s Gap. Jim ran down the mountain to a clearing where he knew the animal would appear.

  What I remember most about that elk hunt is the next day, when the bones in my knees met each other for the first time in my then quarter century or so of life. The intervening cartilages were squished flat as we packed meat through two miles of shale slides and dog-hair lodgepole pine thickets.

  We built the walls of this room very high, in part for the elk head, and also for the others—head mounts, horns, and skulls. The antlers from my first deer are up there—crudely nailed to a plaque by myself when I was 14. I only knew that I wanted to keep them forever. The first Alaska moose and caribou antlers are there, too, not giant animals by most standards, but kept in view so that we can remember the golden or wet days we hunted for them, met and killed them and brought them home. After these, there were so many animals and so many hunts to remember that there wasn’t any room left on the walls.

  Priscilla Feral would have to be carried off for a triple-bypass if she ever visited our house.

  Jim’s grandma called them “the deadheads”—the entire class of antlered trophies—striking a note of humor and perhaps disdain for something that never quite gets clean no matter how much you vacuum it.

  In a town close to where Jim was raised there is a bar named “The Buckhorn.” There is a bar named “The Buckhorn” in nearly every town in northern Wisconsin. In this one, the walls are populated by a century’s worth of paper mache-filled head mounts, faces contorted by time and smoke into hideous grimaces and grins. These ranks of deadheads were likely gifted to the drinking establishment after they were banished from houses by generations of strong Midwestern women. By the time I was introduced to these head mounts, they looked less like ungulates and more like the drunks and storytellers they’d shared company with for all the disembodied decades.

  I have affection for the deadheads and antlers adorning my house, but feel deep discomfort with the idea that a trophy proves something about the hunter. Anyone who lives long enough at the edge of wild country meets thoughtless people eager to “get” a trophy, and those people cause a lot of grief for the people who love both hunting and wild creatures and appreciate the food they provide.

  Thoughtless hunters have become the whipping boys of Walt Disney but all hunters have felt the lash. The video parables of Bambi and Gaston have helped drive our children away from the art of hunting and away from the respect they should feel for ethical hunters. Very few citizens know that much wildlife habitat and research depends—by federal law since 1937 as well as long custom—on funds raised by hunting.

  In a group of one hundred of the students entering my daughter’s Oregon college last fall, playing a “get to know each other” game, she learned that only one other student had ever been hunting in his life.

  “Hunters” in the news are not helping the misconceptions, such as the recently and momentarily famous pair from Washington State who took copious numbers of grizzly bears, caribou, moose, and Dall sheep without tags or licenses. Wildlife troopers retrieved evidence for their convictions from a taxidermy shop preparing one of the—yes—trophies.

  What does a trophy mean when you cheat?

  Perhaps trophies—hopefully created by the nostalgic or proud hunter—should never, ever, be allowed to change hands, especially for money.

  Under this theoretical regulation I just thought up but now fervently support, the owner of a trophy would be required to display all trophies prominently in his or her living room.

  Furthermore, in the thousands of divorce proceedings which would likely follow the passage of such a regulation, the trophy would remain for life in the possession of the person who originally hunted and killed the animal. Under this rule—which I am liking better and better as I talk about it—nobody could have a trophy of anything if they didn’t kill it themselves.

  Choosing to create and own a trophy from an animal we had killed would consequently be a weighty commitment that would puzzle our children and lead to brief periods (between video games and text messages) of intellectual questioning.

  And graceful, once-wild things with eyes would stare at us—to mean whatever they mean to each person in the house for as long as the hunter lived. And to be vacuumed—for a lifetime.

  I’m rethinking the elk costume—maybe just the Santa hat this year.

  BEING TAUGHT

  WHAT A SCHOOL MEANS

  When I drive past the Nelchina Lottie Sparks School, closed now for several years, I get a really strong desire to sew turkey costumes and make paper mache ornaments. I used to have a toddler who sat on my lap at plays and potlucks and couldn’t wait until she could start kindergarten with her friends. After she started school, Jim and I skied with her and her classmates, made brownies and sold raffle tickets with the other parents, watched goofy and/or wonderful holiday plays at the school with grandparents and friends.

  With other members of our community, we fought for this school. In the 1980s we fought for its very existence, and then for equity in the resources allocated to schools around the district. In the mid-nineties we very nearly became a charter school. Those difficult meetings and reams of paper—in the end, all those things accomplished was to convince the school district we really, really liked our children.

  Lottie Sparks was never more than a couple of modular trailer structures with bad furnaces and no foundations—but the community corporation bought playground equipment and c
omputers. Volunteers showed up whenever the teacher needed help. Our last teacher, Mary Rose Donalson, gave the kids a dynamite jump start in reading and math. She added “Change Your Mind!” and “KaPICHE?” to our family’s vocabulary forever.

  An ever narrowing funding formula for rural schools and a local trend for homeschooling, including our own family’s migratory work that necessitated homeschooling, dropped the school population and closed Lottie Sparks.

  Now the kids who aren’t homeschooled travel opposite directions, either to Glacier View or Glennallen. Though still in this community, former classmates lose touch with each other as they are immersed in the society and activities of their different schools nearly 100 miles apart.

  My neighbors will argue with me about what this means. But to me, it means we went back to being people living along the highway, held together nominally by the coffee pot at Grizzly Towing, by a couple of widely scattered lodges and the small community organization which dedicates itself mostly to the proper disposal of our garbage. Many are held together by the fellowship at Mendeltna Chapel that long preceded the school.

  Our big kids benefit from the good classes, the variety of sports and academics and opportunities in their larger schools. Witness what Alaska village parents are going through right now, weighing local schools against boarding schools (again) hundreds of miles away. Even when those distant schools are kind and effective, shipping your kids off to give them better opportunities means the students leave family and culture behind.

  Compared to that, forty miles of highway is nothing. Glennallen and its schools offer a wider community of friends and activities, and we are grateful for those things for our daughter.

  But for me, there is no center like the school that gathered all the Nelchina and Mendeltna neighbors. Lottie Sparks, in its proximity, touched the lives of people who otherwise wouldn’t be associated with a school at all. They came down to watch a play, to eat spaghetti, to teach the kids an art project or to ski or play hockey with them. It was not just the kids who benefited from this. To know kids up close is to be reminded that we have a future.