Enshrining the trees.(A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage along the Yukon River)(Book review)

A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage along the Yukon River, by Dan O'Neill (Counterpoint, 272 pp., $24.95)

IN Dan O'Neill's previous book, The Last Giant of Beringia: The Mystery of the Bering Land Bridge, he wrote of the plants and animals that during the last Ice Age migrated eastward across the land bridge, and of the people--apparently the first Americans--who followed the animals from Asia into Alaska and a new continent, and whose "discovery and colonization of half the earth is one of the great accomplishments in human history."

Today, however, he tells us in A Land Gone Lonesome, the historical process is running in the other direction. Owing to the complex and often contradictory federal laws and regulations enforced by the National Park Service and other agencies, the depopulation of rural subsistence-living Alaska is well under way.

It was in part to capture a fast disappearing way of life that O'Neill set out in his square-backed canoe to travel the Yukon River, from Dawson City in Canada's Yukon Territory to Circle City in Alaska. At one point in his trip, he listens to the sound of an outboard motor on the river. As it passes his camp, he thinks:

 
   I am in his past. But he remains in my 
   present because I can hear him still.... In 
   another moment I cannot distinguish the 
   pulse of the [outboard] from the general 
   thrum of the living world. The whine disintegrates 
   into the air, though for a 
   moment I can reassemble it more or less 
   in my memory. It is a shadow of a perception, 
   and it begins at once to fade like 
   a photograph left in the sun. Unless one 
   makes a record. 

That is precisely what O'Neill sets out to do, and his record is a rich one. The Yukon has served as a highway for a steady stream of travelers, hunters, trappers, and people staking out areas for building cabins and fish camps. There were men on the run, outlaws, tenderfeet, seekers after solitude and total self-sufficiency, men following gold and minerals, and men like O'Neill, both participant and observer.

At the end of each day, O'Neill pulls his canoe in to make camp at one of the sites along the river--a ruined cabin, an abandoned fish camp, a ghost town, a side river, each locale with its own story and cast of characters--and reconstructs their human and natural histories, frequently drawing on anecdotes and the recollections of river people who have passed them down. "Stories," says O'Neill, "are the original record of human history in this place."