TRAVELING IN STYLE : So Big : Behind the Myths and Dreams and TV shows, America’s Ultimate Great Outdoors Is, Well, a Pretty Mythic Place

The Alaskan Dream appeared through a veil of mist and rainbows. Several thousand feet below our small plane, in a remote valley of the Brooks Range, a ranch was green with new-mown promise: log house and barn, fences and hay fields, grazing horses. My weather-crinkled host, a hunting guide and gold miner, had lived more than two decades here in the continent’s northernmost mountains, raising a family on moose and caribou. This at last was the myth made flesh, I thought--the ultimate self-sufficient life in nature.

My host was a mechanic and pilot who measured his experience not in hours of flying time but in the number of airplane engines he had worn out. His son was a pilot, too, and I flew with him one morning to a nearby valley to check on some campers they called “the Donner Party”--inexperienced prospectors who had set out several months earlier with nothing but a trailer full of Spam. We passed up his father’s rebuilt 1947 Champ--”Fred Flintstone used to herd dinosaurs with it,” he cracked--and took the Cessna instead. Banking over a mountainside, we found an ugly gouge of mud, an unusable “airstrip” that was all the prospectors had managed to accomplish that year. We airdropped them a frozen loaf of fresh-baked bread.

That evening, my host walked out to his own grassy airstrip and drove golf balls with a two-iron toward his gold mine. His golden retriever, trained for the task, scampered onto the gravel strip and returned the balls.

Nature may be the reason travelers come to Alaska, but its people give the state a loopy joy. The individual has always loomed large here, away from civilization’s clutter. Today, the shrinking world has brought cultural dissonance to the frontier, where traditions of broad-minded tolerance invite people to let loose their daydream versions of themselves. In that way, the popular TV show “Northern Exposure,” for all its muddled geography and exasperating misapprehensions, has got modern Alaska exactly right.

Alaskans didn’t think much of “Northern Exposure” at first, taking it rather too seriously. Imagine plucking tomatoes from your garden for Thanksgiving! I can’t even find my garden in November, under mounds of snow, and even in July we only manage to grow tomatoes indoors. Now, though, we realize that Cicely, the town in which the show is set, exists only in somebody’s dream--a dream where people might well be expected to gripe about televised echoes of themselves.

Still, we get frustrated because we can’t place Cicely on a map. Sleetmute, supposedly the next town over from Cicely, is an actual river village in the western mountains of Alaska, between Stony River and Red Devil. Cicely itself, though, looks like a town in the Panhandle--that part of the state known to Alaskans as Southeast (though it’s northwest of what most Americans call the Pacific Northwest). On the other hand, Cicely is connected to the outside world by a highway--apparently necessary to ensure a sustaining influx of kookiness for dramatic purposes--while in the real Southeast Alaska, all islands and inlets, there are hardly any highways. The isolation enforced by water and icy mountains is what helps maintain the eccentricity so treasured by connoisseurs of the region’s small towns.

Among the towns occasionally mentioned as the real-life inspiration for Cicely are Haines and Skagway, both in Southeast; Cordova, a rain-soaked fishing town in Prince William Sound, about 150 miles southeast of Anchorage, and Homer, on the Kenai Peninsula, southwest of Anchorage--where I live.

One of the big political fights in Alaska right now concerns a plan to build a highway to Cordova. Houses date from early in the century, freight still arrives on a barge from Seattle and people leave their car keys in the ignition when they run into the Alaska Commercial store. Residents are split down the middle on the highway question. Those who want a road cite all the usual red-blooded arguments about progress and commerce, but they are reallydriven by an underlying stir-craziness. A Cordova bar owner once told me how she and her friends drive out of town to where the road now stops and stare at the valley beyond. “We’re just like flies hitting a screen door,” she said. Opposing the road are old-timers who like their privacy, and refugees who came to Cordova on the run from progress and commerce. They argue for keeping a few towns unplugged from America--though they sometimes huff and puff to distinguish themselves from “effete” environmentalists who also oppose the road.

There’s already a highway into Homer. The end of the road looks out on the mountains and glaciers of Kachemak Bay, and though old-timers used to complain that you can’t eat scenery, the town has been doing rather well off summer tourists lately. The year-round residents are a motley over-the-rainbow mix--marine biologists who run fishing boats, right-wing missionaries, fugitive L.A. deejays and contra-dancing Cat-skinners. The local radio station plays John Coltrane, Cajun fiddle music and the Grateful Dead. One of the town’s official Hall of Fame citizens is a pony-tailed septuagenarian who first came to Alaska barefoot and in robes with a cult leader, later served on the City Council and now writes weekly epistles in the local paper to “citizens of our cosmic hamlet by the sea.”

I’ve been luckier than some of my friends, in that work hasn’t forced me to remain long in decidedly less cosmic Anchorage, where half the state’s 500,000 people live--”Los Anchorage,” as it’s occasionally called. Instead, my wife and I reside in the hills outside Homer, in a cabin we’ve built over the years, surrounded by fireweed in summer and four feet of snow in winter. When the drifts deepen, we park the car by the road and ski into the house carrying milk and romaine lettuce on our backs. Our 2-year-old daughter hunkers down in her sled on stormy nights, and sits up singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” when the stars are out.

We are beyond the reach of a television signal, but we have videotapes and electronic mail--and, as transplanted Easterners, we have a mail subscription to the Sunday New York Times. We sled this log of newsprint home from the post office each Wednesday, and then it waits unopened until the following Sunday, when we make a breakfast out of week-old stories and fresh pancakes--rather like the old fox-farmer from Lituya Bay east of here, who used to pick up a year’s worth of issues of the Juneau Empire on his annual trip to the territorial capital and then read one a day, exactly one year late, back alone with the foxes.

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Alaska is never quite what you expect. The wild landscapes that inspired Jack London tales and the reveries of Barry Lopez are still there, of course, and still invigorate the traveler. But the old myths may need updating.

These are some of those myths:

Ends of the Earth. This is the image (perpetual whiteout, Baffin Island in December) that usually occurs spontaneously to people who have never thought about Alaska before when they suddenly have reason to think about it--the Coast Guardsman in San Diego, say, who has just been told that he’s been assigned to Kodiak.

Big Pay Streak. Linked subliminally to the first, this notion of Alaska as the land of big bucks is apparently based on the belief that people here are so few and feckless that jobs go begging. (A corollary myth is Alaska as a hunting ground for unattached females seeking mates; I know several women who came holding such a notion but are now wearing T-shirts that read “Alaska, where the odds are good but the goods are odd.”) Dreams of the Big Pay Streak run through Alaska’s history, from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline back to the Klondike Gold Rush and even farther back to the first Europeans to see the place--the Russian fur hunters shipped east by the czar.

Place of Exile. Linked, in turn, to Big Pay Streak. Alaska as Siberia. Who would live there, if they weren’t forced at gunpoint, or enticed with high wages? This harsh attitude may soften with time (see the endless sentimental stories of the “the-true-gold-is-in-the-sunsets-not-the-creeks” genre), but it’s an attitude that still juts out of many newcomers--some of them still-unwitting victims of classified ads in college papers promising improbable riches to be won while throwing up on fishing boats in the Bering Sea.

Nation’s Treasure House. The mission to unlock the frontier’s resources for the glory of God and the Manifest Destiny of the nation may be sneered at on university campuses in the Lower 48, but it’s still a driving force in Alaska, where the frontier is being tamed by petroleum geologists rather than sodbusters. When the Smithsonian in Washington opened a controversial exhibit last year portraying America’s westward expansion as a pageant of exploitation, self-delusion and genocide, it was no coincidence that the most vocal attack on the show in Congress came from Ted Stevens, Alaska’s veteran Republican senator. Other western legislators may have considered the show to be a slap at their forebears; for Stevens it was an assault on the voters who put him in office.

Song of the North. Alaska as “Nature” documentary, America’s Last Wilderness, a rare surviving bit of the planet where caribou roam and killer whales still leap from sparkling seas. It’s all true, of course--but where does this myth leave the people who live here? Brokenhearted, watching things change, and implicated too. Every Alaskan sooner or later bumps up against it. Even my own small cabin has altered nature, forcing the neighborhood black bears to make a small detour around it.

Lost Innocence. Song of the North collided with Nation’s Treasure House when the Exxon Valdez hit the rocks in 1989. I don’t think this myth will retain its hold on the national imagination for long, though. America’s need for Song of the North is too strong. We need a wild and pure counterbalance to the rest of the continent--a mythic destination in which to set our dreams of escape or of a second chance (or at least of an unspoiled vacation).

Indeed, the latest Alaskan myth depicts the state as terrain for playing out optimistic fantasies--but this time with destructive consequences. This one might be called Innocence Not-Quite-Found.

The story involves a young man who hitchhiked to Alaska last summer and set out into the woods in search of some stripped-away version of himself. Armed with a .22 rifle and a book of Indian plant lore, he settled into a derelict bus 28 miles from the nearest highway to live off the land. When some hunters found his body a few months later, there was a flurry of local speculation about how he’d managed to starve to death in summer. A terse journal he’d kept offered few clues.

Once he had been identified in the press as a “slightly imbalanced” quester from a well-off family down south, local interest faded. Trouble is always lurking in Alaska. Old Eskimos who get trapped in blizzards when their snow machines break down but show up in their villages three days later merit only a brief mention in the papers. Cheechakos (as tenderfoots are widely known in Alaska) get in fixes all the time, and either they muddle through and learn or they go back where they came from. They have to be especially dumb, or willful, and very unlucky, besides, to slip so far out of touch they can’t get back.

But then national magazines picked up the young man’s tale. The New Yorker, Outside and People all ran stories. Alaskans were less surprised by the young man’s death than by his media afterlife. Visiting reporters played up the pilgrim’s search for innocence and purity--”Another victim of Thoreau,” one muttered, returning from the scene of the crime, where he’d found a coverless copy of “Walden.” They played it as a mystery, and in the end the killer turned out to be the Alaska Dream.

Indeed, there was probably more to the story than Alaskans were eager to consider. There were probably ways in which the pilgrim’s demise symbolized our own disappointments, the death of our own ambitions.

Here in Alaska, though, we just say he didn’t have the right stuff and press ahead, alert for those moments that reassure us that we’re in the right place after all. Like the afternoon last summer when we put out our subsistence net (the highest legal take of fish in Alaska is from subsistence fisheries, reserved for the many of us who live partially off our catch) and I counted splashes along the corkline as silver salmon were snared, while my wife hiked off in search of blueberries. We pulled in the winter’s salmon, and had blueberries for pancakes in January besides, all on one of those sunny afternoons when Alaska just seems to give and give as if the planet had no reason at all to resent our taking.

Or the other night, skiing home in a thick fog (the week had been unusually warm), when we stopped at the cabin door and heard the excited baying of a wolf pack maybe a half-mile away. The fog had drifted away later when I went out to empty a chamber pot. The northern lights were out, so bright I could follow the path to the outhouse by their green rays. The mournful hoot of a Great Horned Owl haunted the woods. I stopped and looked up, and listened in the silence for the oldest song of all.