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Caption: ALASKA IN FEBRUARY Ice, Taiga &
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Caption: ALASKA IN FEBRUARY is an immersion in white, a glacial veil cut with basalt mountain peaks and ink strokes of black spruce on barren taiga. To be awake here in 30 below is to suspect you're one step from leaving this world for the next. I've come here from Outside (as they call the Lower 48) to visit an old forester, to see what he's doing up here, beyond the world but still in it.
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Caption: He picks me up in Anchorage. We drive 4.5 hours east, to Gakona. The land is white. And pink.
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Caption: Chopping wood. Chopping and chopping. Keep chopping. The stove is always burning.
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Caption: We snowshoe from his cabin to the edge of the Copper River, the western boundary of Wrangell-St. Elias. In summer, the forester tells me, he will come to the River daily, if he feels like it, and catch dinner -- coho, sockeye or Chinook. A coyote trots upstream on the ice. When he's fifty yards out, the forester calls a series of yelps. The coyote turns his nose to us, trying catch a scent, trying to decide if the call is one of his own or a trickster. He trots on.
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Caption: We pass this lonesome bar owned by Russians. We surprise the owner as we walk through the door. He jumps, spilling two Teacup Yorkies from his lap to the floor. "Eat or drink?," he asks. "Drink," we say. He turns on the lights and pours whiskey. The wood stove hums in the corner.
Caption: The forester promises we'll find real mukluks. Posty's in Chistochina carries moccs and mukluks made by village elders. I select a pair made from tanned moose hide. I'll wear them til they fall off.
And every time I glance down at my feet, I'll think of the forester way up there, stacking firewood and following moose tracks through snow--in the world but not of it.
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Caption: www.sarah-grigg.com