First Wilderness, Revised Edition

Sam Keith

Description

The story behind the best-selling book One Man’s Wilderness and how author Sam Keith and Dick Proenneke met and forged an everlasting friendship.

“Sam, you know right well you don’t want to leave this country. Don’t give up on it. Me and you got to figure something out.”

After serving as a US Marine during World War II and attending college on the GI Bill, Sam Keith decided to seek adventure in Alaska as a laborer on the Adak Navy base. There he befriended Dick Proenneke, whose shared love of the outdoors, hard work, and self-reliance quickly bonded an alliance between the two. Together they explored the wilds of South Central Alaska while working on the Navy base, hunting and fishing with friends and breathing in the great outdoors. Keith was ready to leave after three years of finding almost everything he sought—not realizing then how his fate was intrinsically tied to his friend’s and how it would lead to writing the best-selling book One Man’s Wilderness.

Sam Keith passed away in 2003. But in 2013, his son-in-law and children’s book author/illustrator Brian Lies discovered in an archive box in their garage a book manuscript, originally written in 1974 after the publication of One Man’s Wilderness. First Wilderness is the story of Keith's own experiences, at times harrowing, funny, and fascinating. Along with the original manuscript are photos and excerpts from his journals, letters, and notebooks, woven in to create a compelling and poignant memoir of search and discovery. Foreword by Nick Jans, one of Alaska's foremost authors and photographers, and Afterword by Keith’s daughter Laurel Lies.

Sujets

• Essays
• Sciences et techniques
• Richard Proenneke
• Nature
• Alaska

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 11 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781513261836
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First Wilderness
My Quest in the Territory of Alaska
BY SAM KEITH
Author of One Man s Wilderness
REVISED EDITION with Color Images
Text and photographs 2014 by Sam Keith, Brian Lies, and Laurel Keith Lies
First Printing of Revised Edition 2018
This edition:
ISBN 9781513261652 (paperback)
ISBN 9781513261829 (hardbound)
ISBN 9781513261836 (e-book)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier edition as follows:
Keith, Sam.
First wilderness : my quest in the territory of Alaska / by Sam Keith.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-941821-09-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-941821-19-0 (e-book)
ISBN 978-1-941821-34-3 (hardbound)
1. Keith, Sam. 2. Keith, Sam-Travel-Alaska. 3. Wilderness areas-Alaska. 4. Outdoor life-Alaska. 5. Frontier and pioneer life-Alaska. 6. Pioneers-Alaska-Biography. 7. Adventure and adventurers-Alaska-Biography. 8. Proenneke, Richard-Friends and associates. 9. Kodiak Island (Alaska)-Description and travel. 10. Kenai Peninsula (Alaska)-Description and travel. I. Title.
F909.K28A3 2014
979.8-dc23
2014017710
Edited by Tricia Brown
Maps by Ani Rucki
Alaska Northwest Books
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To my sister, Anna, and my wife, Jane. I think of you and I think of home.
The Land of Beyond
Have ever you heard of the Land of Beyond,
That dreams at the gates of the day?
Alluring it lies at the skirts of the skies,
And ever so far away;
Alluring it calls; O ye the yoke galls,
And yet of the trail overfond,
With saddle and pack, by paddle and track,
Let s go to the Land of Beyond!
Have ever you stood where the silences brood,
And vast the horizons begin,
At the dawn of the day to behold far away
The goal you would strive for a win?
Yet ah! In the night when you gain to the height,
With the vast pool of heaven star-spawned,
Afar and agleam, like a valley of dream,
Still mocks you a Land of Beyond.
-From Rhymes of a Rolling Stone by Robert W. Service
Contents
FOREWORD
An Unmet Friend BY NICK JANS
MAPS
INTRODUCTION
Buried Treasure BY BRIAN LIES
PREFACE
Longings
CHAPTER 1
Out of the Nest
CHAPTER 2
The Jumping-Off Place
CHAPTER 3
The Transplanting
CHAPTER 4
Taking Hold
CHAPTER 5
Local Color
CHAPTER 6
Winter Smorgasbord
CHAPTER 7
Days of the Bear
CHAPTER 8
Into the Backcountry
CHAPTER 9
Kenai Moose Hunt
CHAPTER 10
Comings and Goings
CHAPTER 11
Boomerang Alaskan
CHAPTER 12
The Bay of the Winds
CHAPTER 13
Enforcement Patrolman
CHAPTER 14
Driving Out
EPILOGUE
A Nest of My Own
AFTERWORD
On His Shoulders BY LAUREL KEITH LIES
EXCERPT
One Man s Wilderness
FOREWORD
An Unmet Friend
BY NICK JANS
I never met Sam Keith, but wish I had. His Alaska sojourn ended in 1955, the year I was born, and he arguably had more in common with my father (a fellow child of the Great Depression and a Marine combat veteran of World War II) than I. Yet Sam and I traveled parallel trails, decades apart. We were both young English majors fresh out of back-East colleges, yearning for something more, a wider horizon on which to stretch our dreams. That hope, and our shared, abiding love of the natural world, led us across the continent and northward thousands of miles to Alaska. Neither of us had a fallback plan; half-broke and boxed in, we just went, led by the eternal optimism and inexhaustible energy of youth. And The Great Land proved everything we hoped for, and more. Its sprawling, careless beauty became woven into our being, inseparably twined with the stories of our lives.
Alaska being the almost unimaginably vast state that it is, Sam and I ended up many hundreds of miles apart. But as I read First Wilderness , I can imagine myself alongside Sam on Kodiak Island, pulling long, hard hours working in the company of rough men; catching his first salmon; tagging along with his soon-to-be lifelong friend, Dick Proenneke, on a bear hunt; camping at the mouth of a remote stream as a neophyte fish warden; navigating a stretch of wild Kenai Peninsula rapids in an outboard skiff. The words ring true and vivid. Keith s writing bursts with exuberance. At its best, it exhibits a crafted, visual style verging on brilliance:
During the next few days, Bruce showed me a flock of sandhill cranes settling in a moose meadow. Some of them almost somersaulted as they landed . They had an ethereal presence as they rose, wheeling above us like vapors clouding, spreading, thinning, and coming together again. They made a whooping, purring racket that descended upon us .
More often, the writing tends toward sturdy, workmanlike cadences, suited perfectly to the story at hand. Always, the prose is engaging and fast-paced, almost breathless; we sense the raw excitement of young Sam scribbling late at night in his journal or penning letters home, searching for the words to describe a land so wide and deep, and to capture the essence of the people he meets along the way.
Though the narrative revolves around a series of on-the-move adventures set against the backdrop of Alaska s territorial days, the more profound journey is inward. Above all, First Wilderness is, as the subtitle states, the story of a quest: a young man searching for a direction and purpose in life. Alaska, no matter how alluring, ultimately proves waypoint rather than destination for Sam Keith. We can feel the pull his beloved father, Merle, and sister, Anna, exert, drawing him back to that other world. Throughout the tale, too, the beauty of Alaska competes with Keith s yearning for feminine companionship. Equally as beguiling as snowcapped peaks are a head-turning beauty on a Seattle bus and a redhead on the Coast Guard base where Keith serves as a civilian construction worker. These connecting threads lend thematic undercurrents that pulse through the book.
Given the distinctly autobiographical perspective, what Sam Keith chose to omit from First Wilderness offers telling insight. There s not a word about Sam s experiences as a bomber crewman just a few years earlier; no mention of his being shot down over the trackless ocean and surviving. He seemed to have consciously resisted mining the dichotomy between the destructive power of war and the restorative properties of nature, la Hemingway, though it offered an obvious and natural theme to explore. Why indeed would a born storyteller avoid so much as a reference to what must have been the most harrowing and dramatic experiences of his life? According to his daughter, Laurel, I think he simply saw the war as something he had endured and survived. It was in his past and he always wanted to focus on the future. And truly, that forward-focused optimism brims throughout First Wilderness . Alaska provided a new beginning for Sam Keith, in every sense of the word. He went on from there to find the purpose he yearned for, as an educator, through someone he met in Alaska; and later on, he met Jane, the love of his life, at a home movie showing of his adventures.
Through understated foreshadowing, Keith sustains narrative tension, preparing us for his eventual farewell to Alaska. Close attention to the text hints he clearly sensed his trail diverging from that of Dick Proenneke, whose classic story of solitary wilderness living and self-sufficiency Sam would later carve in One Man s Wilderness . He seemed to realize that his own destiny lay in the company of others, rather than alone. Throughout the rest of his life, though, Proenneke s experiences served as a reminder of the trail not followed. Sam and Dick s long-distance friendship, constantly renewed through hundreds of letters, would keep Alaska welded to his soul. Dick Proenneke was truly both avatar and doppelganger for Sam; no surprise that the two friends passed from this world just weeks apart.
Sam Keith lives on, through his family and those whose lives he touched; and no less so in his enduring contribution to Alaska literature. First Wilderness , this posthumous offering, cements that legacy.
Sam with a landlocked salmon, Aroostook County, Maine, 1942 .
INTRODUCTION
Buried Treasure
BY BRIAN LIES
T his is a book that almost didn t happen.
Sam Keith, the author of the award-winning book One Man s Wilderness , passed away in 2003. Four years later, his widow, Jane, moved from their retirement home in Anderson, South Carolina, back to Massachusetts, where Sam and Jane had lived for many years. Jane s new apartment didn t have much storage space, so during the move, a dozen archive boxes of Sam s-filled with letters, journals, unpublished manuscripts, photographs, and slides-went instead to a garage our garage.
You see, I m married to his beloved daughter, Laurel.
Laurel and her father were kindred spirits. For years after his death, the boxes sat untouched on steel shelves at the back of our garage. Opening them was just too painful.
The boxes collected dust until the winter of 2013,