On natural selection in the Alaska bush - posted at 08:10

Before I get started, I'd just like to exclaim that the fireweed is blooming! Hooray!

When I was in high school I read Into the Wild, a story by Jon Krakauer which has gained quite a bit more attention and recognition since it was made into a movie of the same name. I read the book on the tails of another Krakauer book, Into Thin Air, and frankly remember being pretty underwhelmed by the Christopher McCandless story because the story of an Everest tragedy was so much more compelling and used such powerful imagery. This is not totally surprising because Into the WIld is something of a biography, whereas Into Thin Air accounts the author's personal experiences. How could a huge personal ordeal so traumatic that the (ostensibly normally sober) author had to get high after getting off that mountain (something that obviously really stuck with my sheltered sixteen year old brain) compare with a story that was merely researched, observed from a distance? But I digress.

So when the movie came into theaters last year I didn't rush to see it. Now that I live in Alaska, I looked at the story as another cautionary tale of how, yes, Alaska can kill you. These cautionary tales are good. There are a lot of ways in that something that would be pretty trivial elsewhere - like forgetting your hat when you're only going to make a quick run from your heated garage to get a gallon of milk, or, say, making absolutely sure that you're not walking in between a mama and baby moose on the way to your car through a darkened parking lot - can cost you your life up here. It's good to remember things like this and to not be unprepared. And surely, if you were to sum up the many mistakes that Chrisopher McCandless made in one word, you would come up with "unprepared." There are a lot of people who view him as a tragic figure (except Alaskans, of course, who take a different tack on it, of course), but I can't say I was every really one of them.

Last week I was doing a shift of vampire hours so I decided to rent the movie to help pass the night. And I'd like to say that my perspective has changed a little in the ten years since I read the book. Now that I'm out of high school and am a denizen of this so-called real world, y'know, I can relate to McCandless' point of view and his thoughts of our modern society. I've had many of the same thoughts myself. What I can't agree with is the extreme to which he took those thoughts. I'd like to stress that for the loved ones who may have felt their blood pressure rise when they read that - I promise that I will not just up and leave and go move into a bus in the middle of interior Alaska and die. That said, I understand the need to feel like you're living life the way it is actually supposed to be lived - not working a meaningless job so that you can accumulate more material goods (I swear that I am actually a happy person even though I don't own an iPod). I think I've made it pretty clear in my infrequent postings here that I am dissatisfied with the way of work in modern society and I think everyone would just be happier if we were working with our hands in jobs that actually produced something concrete. I think that Mr. McCandless would give a "hear, hear" to that but would probably take it to an even greater extreme - he might even object if I owned a sheep and made my yarn from the beast and dyed it with plants from my garden, because all of that requires the acquisition of some material goods. I'm not opposed to owning material goods, I'm opposed to our society's gross "need" for stuff.

But here's the thing that got me about him, a slight hypocrisy in his philosophy: while he was living as a supertramp he was perfectly happy to live off or live with those who had the material goods that he rejected. He worked for farmers who owned outrageously expensive farm equipment or lived with hippies in RVs. He was still spun into the core of the fabric of the society that he so vigorously rejected. Even when he was living in the Alaska bush, he was living in a something that was an expensive material possession. He wasn't truly living off the land - he had industrially-produced shelter and (possibly) an industrially-produced means of generating heat. Even the gun he was using was another piece of metal. If this guy was trying to repudiate everything about our society, he should have been using things he had made with his own hands, living on the land, not on a bus. Does anyone else find it odd that he would take an expensive piece of steel wrought in a foundry with him into the wild, but not a $4 compass?

The inability to see such inconsistencies undoubtedly cost him his life. If he had been less rigid and more thoughtful, more critical, he would have seen that it made no sense in his philosophy to take a gun but not a compass or a map with him on his lone Alaska adventure. He would have understood that in being truly free, it made no sense to live in a bus, and he would have been more able and more willing to be nomadic and live where food was.

He was so blinded by his passion that logic totally escaped him and he could only see in black and white. As I said, while I sympathize with Christopher McCandless' ideas I can't reconcile his extremes, because ultimately they got him killed. In the end, he was not so extraordinary or so brave - he's just another example of natural selection in the Alaska bush.

They call me Dr. Wool - posted at 10:59

My favorite new stress reliever:

Yarn.

I know I'm not the first knitter to proclaim the stress-relieving properties of the craft from the mountaintops, but when I'm stressed I crave simplicity, and really, it doesn't get any more simple than just holding a really wonderful hank of yarn.

For example, I'm working night shifts this week and it's been really tough on me. I can't for the life of me stay asleep until my alarm goes off. To top it off, my shift technically ends at 9am, but I have to give a brief at 9 and that's been going like an hour every day. So this morning at the end of my busy, stressful 13-hour shift I went to the post office and picked up the package waiting for me - seven skeins of the second-most luxurious yarn I've ever touched (I regrettably have yet to add qiviut - the hairs from the undercoat of the Arctic muskox - to my stash). I ripped the package open and on my drive home, I just held a hank of the yarn - in my hand, against my face, (almost) anywhere with a high concentration of nerve endings, and I felt the pronounced edge that had steadily been gnawing at me all night just melt away.

A more extreme instance occurred a couple of weeks ago when my parents were in town. I got home from work in a vile mood. I was so pissed off that I was getting even more pissed off at myself because I hated being so pissed off. Vicious cycle. I was so sick of myself after about fifteen minutes that I declared "That's it! I'm going to a yarn store!" So I went, just wandered around and touched all the wonderfully sheepy and other woolly goodness for a while, and came back home a happy and well-adjusted Staceyfish.

What can I say? I'm a tactile person and there's something so simple, so down-to-earth about a great skein of yarn. It's like it's my own private shrink (a shrink that should start paying rent because of the amount of space in my house that it is rapidly taking over, but a shrink nonetheless!). I can almost hear the yarn corner in my house calling me over and declaring "They call me Dr. Wool!" *

My new arrival and my favorite (semi) affordable yarn - Blue Sky Alpacas Royal

* I know Cory is laughing at me right now, but I can't think that without breaking into song. Which song? They Might Be Giants' Dr. Worm, of course!