Sam Keith - First Wilderness, Revised Edition: My Quest in the Territory of Alaska

First Wilderness

My Quest in the Territory of Alaska

BY SAM KEITH

Author of One Mans 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, SamTravelAlaska. 3. Wilderness areasAlaska. 4. Outdoor lifeAlaska. 5. Frontier and pioneer lifeAlaska. 6. PioneersAlaskaBiography. 7. Adventure and adventurersAlaskaBiography. 8. Proenneke, RichardFriends and associates. 9. Kodiak Island (Alaska)Description and travel. 10. Kenai Peninsula (Alaska)Description and travel. I. Title.

F909.K28A3 2014

979.8dc23

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,

Lets 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

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. Keiths 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 Alaskas 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 Keiths 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. Theres not a word about Sams 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