Nathan Vonnahme

Regent College

24 September, 1999

          I began the boat course somewhat exhausted and, surprisingly to me, a little depressed and homesick. My first journal entry was entirely about leaving Alaska:

17 Aug 1999

          How can I write about this place when I'm still yearning for the one I just left? Less than a week ago Betsy and I took a crazy last-minute trip camping in the White Mountains north of Fairbanks. We drove out too late . . .
          Anyway, we got out to the campground at 59 mile Steese, praying all the way that the Pacer wouldn't break down like the time we tried the same trip earlier this summer. The last ten miles were extra tense because the pavement ended, and we had thought we were going to 49 mile by mistake. Betsy was grumpy but thankfully patient with me.
          We camped at a great walk-in spot close to the pretty, rushing river. Angel [the dog we took care of all summer] loved it all and was as excited to be rummaging through the "new" bushes as we would be if we were taken on a trip to a different continent. Ahh, if only we were as easily happy as dogs are.
          So anyway, we awoke late to find our tent surrounded by blueberries! We hadn't noticed them before because it was getting dark as we set up camp. We ate a wonderful breakfast of oatmeal with blueberries and highbush cranberries, then loaded the car and drove two miles back to the U.S. Creek trailhead on the other side of the road at mile 57. The gravel road there went in several miles before crossing a mostly dry creek and forking--the sign said "Ophir Creek Campground 12; Mt. Prindle Campground 4." We drove to the closer campground and surveyed it. We got out to take a hike but because of time had to shorten it to a walk with elaborate planning for a future trip. We discussed many ways of crossing the stream on one side of the campground to get up to the tundra on the other side and climb the bluff to get a nice view of the next valley.
          The best part of it all was on the way back, where we made one last stop at a rocky pullout, and walked out onto a spectacular outcropping of rock. We could see down into dozens of green valleys, and the small, rolling White Mountains behind them, and in the distance the Brooks Range, in purple. And from where we stood, we could see hundreds of miles with no mark of man--no roads, buildings, cars or people. We stood there and breathed the fresh air deeply over and over, embracing the land with our hearts and eyes and noses, and jabbered on and on about how much we were going to miss Alaska and how we should come back lots more to this place next summer, etc., etc....

          While I was in college in Oregon my friends told me that I was always depressed for about a week after returning from Alaska, and I had always attributed it to missing my true love, Betsy. Since we've been married I have felt homesickness for Alaska more and more as a distinct feeling. It was still surprising, though, and paralyzed me for the first few days of the trip.

Wednesday, 18 Aug 1999

          I feel too confused to think or pray coherently about anything... I can at least give the details of where we've been so far on this trip:
          We left Galiano Island late on Monday night--around 6:30. We landed at the north end of Wallace Island and camped there for the night. We had the fanciest tent sites I've ever seen--wooden boxes filled with a flat layer of gravel. We took off around 10:30ish Tuesday morning--the Kingfisher returned to the Wilkinsons' for some things we forgot, and the Niña, which Betsy and I were in, rowed around the west side of Wallace, and met up with the Kingfisher off its southern point. We then continued on to James Bay on the north end of Prevost Island. We've camped there now, in an abandoned orchard. Our tent is right under an apple tree. Mmm... I can't wait until my cold sores are healed and I can enjoy apples from the trees at our new house!
          The book Cliff reviewed (This Place on Earth) sounds really good. I wonder how Fairbanks could be preserved from sprawl. There need to be more parks there before greater density seems appealing.
          It's really hard for me to figure out how I should relate to all this--part of me thinks that REI-style high tech ecotourism is good, part of me is crowded and turned off by the magenta and cobalt clad legions with trekking poles and wants to just see--and be--the sourdough out hunting in wool pants and flannel shirt. And part of me wants to be a responsible city dweller while another just wants to live in the woods. And then I think of how much all of this is the privilege of the rich. I hope that someday we can do something that helps people care for the land more instead of just using it. Especially public land--I think if people felt more ownership of it they'd keep it cleaner and stuff. Bob Ekblad's work with farmers in Honduras sounds magically wonderful to me...

          Our home town of Fairbanks is characteristically modern west-coast U.S., and our wide roads and intersections coupled with meager traffic have earned Fairbanks the recognition of "a place of many superfluous superhighways" in at least one guidebook. But the small city is growing unchecked, and the older downtown area is becoming more and more decrepit while the "nice" new houses are being built further and further out of town. I imagine that if we settle in Fairbanks we will live outside of town too, though in some ways I think that living responsibly in one of the older, decrepit areas would be better. It's very confusing to me. A couple of Wendell Berry's items about the sustainability of cities in his "27 propositions..." concern me even more when I think about Fairbanks:

The only sustainable city--and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal--is a city in balance with its countryside: a city, that is, that would live off the net ecological income of its supporting region, paying as it goes all its ecological and human debts.
Some cities can never be sustainable at their present levels of population because they do not have a countryside around them or near them from which they can be sustained. New York City cannot be made sustainable, nor can Phoenix. Some cities in Kentucky or the Midwest, on the other hand, might reasonably hope to become sustainable.

According to this criteria, there is no way that Fairbanks can become sustainable at all. The climate of the area is simply not capable of supporting enough farms to grow enough food for even a small town. Probably a bigger portion than usual, worldwide, of the food eaten in Fairbanks comes from subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering, but the amount of wild food available is far too small to support the community. In fact, the whole economy of Alaska is almost completely dependent on revenue from the oil fields in the north, and though the state government is doing everything it can to diversify the economy, at this point the state is completely unsustainable, as we have to export our abundant natural resources (oil, gold, coal, timber, seafood) in order to import food and other human necessities. I frankly don't see how, barring the complete breakdown of global transportation and commerce, that Fairbanks will ever be sustainable.

Saturday, 21 August 1999

          Time flies... Wednesday we remained at James Bay. Betsy and I were a bit less grumpy and unsocial; we laughed more. It was really fun watching and playing with garter snakes.
          Thursday was a long, hard day. We rowed from James Bay to the restaurant (Stillwater Hotel?) where we ate lunch. Using the bathroom, I was surprised to realize I hadn't seen a real mirror for days. The rowing was a lot of hard work all day but everyone was laughing and joking so it seemed a lot more fun. We had a scare, though, when the boats were almost stranded on rocks where we stopped for a quick meal. (Oh--it wasn't until we got ice cream cones on Mayne Island that I felt truly civilized again.)
          Journals have always confused me because I can't figure out who I'm writing to. It's like babbling out loud to yourself...
          Night rowing on Thursday night was my favorite part yet. Loren reading Tolkien aloud to us--shooting stars--peeing off the side and watching the clouds of erupting phosphorescence--Tracy saying, "I'm not a hero, I'm just bossy!"--a salute for the bagpiper...
          Yesterday we slept in and had class in the afternoon and evening. My watch had lunch duty and I prepared to present my book in the evening so I didn't write in here.
          I still feel all muddled and confused by all our changes and like there's too much to think about coherently. I'm overstimulated by community and work and my mind just bounces around the few moments I'm not busy with something or other. It will be nice, Betsy and I keep telling ourselves, when we're all settled in our new house.
          Today I'm out, settling in to solitude, as we're all doing. It took Betsy and me too long to find a good spot--our initial choice of the top of the big, first mountain (we camped yesterday at Taylor point on Saturna Island, in the orchard) was disappointed by several houses and a fellow solitude seeker. After a long and frustrating hike we found an even better spot near the summit of the second, farther mountain. I'm up there now, cradled in a grassy palm of the mountain, looking out over the San Juan Islands, with the Olympic Peninsula's mountains on my right and Mount Baker on my left, though I can't see it now, either because of clouds or my current elevation a few hundred feet above the water. The eagles are soaring over my head, and the ants are crawling all over me and up my sleeves and pants. I really hope they go away when night falls. The sun has been shining brilliantly all afternoon--yet another glorious day sent from God!
          Okay; let's try some coherent thinking now.
          Wilderness:
          It sure is nice to be able to escape human habitation and development as much as possible for short periods of time. I think, then, that wild places should be preserved, if only for aesthetic and recreational reasons. Of course, there's the sticky problem, much evidenced in this trip, that beautiful wild places are soon popular and overrun with (rich) recreators. Maybe then a distinction should be made between wild and deserted places. Often the deserted places are desolate or impenetrable and not very fun to be in.
          Here's another problem: wilderness is in most places (maybe except Alaska) a hobby of the rich. But make it too public (like some parks around Vancouver; I'm thinking a lot of Lighthouse) and it gets shabby and run down by unrespectful park users. Maybe it's not just poor people who litter and abuse parks, but non-outdoor lovers, immature and self-centered people of any income level.
          It's a fundamental respect and care for the place that's important.
          Today as Mary Ruth sent us off she told us we're not guests in God's house but sons and daughters of the king. I can imagine exploring all the rooms of his great house and marveling at all the wonders and provisions he's made for us--but woe to the one who leaves a room he's used in worse shape than he found it! Even a beloved son or daughter who does such a thing will be disciplined.

Another thought about wilderness, that I've had for a while: There is a definite difference between the ideal of wilderness and the reality of it. In real wilderness there are mosquitoes and thorns, paths only tall enough for rabbits to walk comfortably on, and branches whacking you in the face. A couple of friends of ours living near Fairbanks are being paid by the National Forest Service to tend the trees on their land: thin them out until they're 6-8 feet apart, cut off all branches you can reach, and get rid of dead trees, brush piles, and fallen logs. The result is a beautiful forest that you can walk in, that is resistant to forest fires, and that grows big, straight trees. I don't think that it is an accident that Genesis says humankind was created to tend a garden--we are more at home in a garden than in wilderness, and our romantic ideals of wilderness actually tend to envision a tended wilderness. Wendell Berry incisively observes,

          Pure nature, anyhow, is not good for humans to live in, and humans do not want to live in it--or not for very long. Any exposure to the elements that lasts more than a few hours will remind us of the desirability of the basic human amenities: clothing, shelter, cooked food, the company of kinfolk and friends--perhaps even of hot baths and music and books.

Sunday, 22 August 1999

Technology:
          The observation [from The Ecology of Commerce] that technological change is like a change in the ecosystem is a good one.
          I can't really see how our current technopoly can be remedied. I guess on an individual level scientists and inventors and engineers can have better ethics, but it seems like somebody will always be willing to use more technology if it's more efficient.

          The discussions and especially the readings about technology were my favorite part of the course's academic material. I'm still utterly confused about what a proper attitude toward wilderness should be (REI-ite, Durning, or goldpanner?), but I found a couple of useful concepts that help me relate to technology. First is Jacques Ellul's insight that technology pervades everything in the modern west:

The choice is less and less a subjective one among several means which are potentially applicable. It is really a question of finding the best means in the absolute sense, on the basis of numerical calculation.
          It is, then, the specialist who chooses the means; he is able to carry out the calculations that demonstrate the superiority of the means chosen over all others. Thus a science of means comes into being--a science of techniques, progressively elaborated.
          This science extends to greatly diverse areas; it ranges from the act of shaving to the act of organizing the landing in Normandy, or to cremating thousands of deportees. Today no human activity escapes this technical imperative. There is a technique of organization . . . just as there is a technique of friendship and a technique of swimming. . . .
          In fact, nothing at all escapes technique today. There is no field where technique is not dominant--this is easy to say and is scarcely surprising. We are so habituated to machines that there seems to be nothing left to discover.

          Wendell Berry's essay about not buying a computer was less helpful than I thought it would be (I was very disappointed to see that his wife types everything, and it then must evidently be re-typed by his publisher: it would be a more noble choice if he typed it himself). Mary Ruth's comment was more useful: "Some people say that dishwashers ruin community. I'd rather get my community in other ways." Martin Heidegger summarizes the predicament the best, though, and offers a solution:

For all of us, the arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology are to a greater or lesser extent indispensable. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances. But suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that we fall into bondage to them.
          Still we can act otherwise. We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them any time. We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right o dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature.
          But will not saying both yes and no this way to technical devices make our relation to technology ambivalent and insecure? On the contrary! Our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed. We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is, let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher. I would call this comportment toward technology which expresses "yes" and at the same time "no," by an old world, releasement toward things.

This sort of "releasement" is akin to the Biblical command to be "in the world but not of it" and is the proper attitude for us to have, lest technology becomes an idol for us and we are ruled by the work of our hands instead of ruling it. Erazim Kohak brought out the issue even more clearly for me:

The heavens may still declare the glory of God, but we look up not at the heavens but at neon reflected on smog; we walk not on the good earth but on asphalt. Our estrangement from nature is no longer conceptual only: it has acquired an experiential grounding. Figuratively, we are all in the position of the child who has never seen, never mind milked, a cow, and whose lived experience constantly provides an experiential confirmation for the assumption that milk comes from a supermarket cooler. In such a context, the attempt at a phenomenological bracketing, no matter how theoretically sound, will inevitably prove practically futile. The Sachen selbst, the very stuff, of our daily experience will reintroduce the very constructs we have bracketed. Though milk may still come from cows, our lived experience reaches only as far as the dairy case. Though we bracket the construct of "nature" as a mechanical system and of the human as the sole source of all meaning, our urban experience will lead us right back to it.

This, then, is part of the reason that exposure to creation is so important to our sanity. Kohak goes on to see through some of the anti-technological sentiment that naturally arises when we see the way technology interferes with our lives and with the earth's:

It is not simply that few of us would wish to entrust our bodies to the medical treatment of, say, mid-seventeenth-century medicine or our safety to an army equipped with muzzle-loaders--though no one who ever had to submit to on-the-spot medical treatment or watch Soviet tanks rolling into his country could possibly wish either. High technology is indeed irrevocably a part of our life. We could surrender it only at a high cost not simply in luxuries, but in genuinely human values like health and freedom. . . . Quite concretely, the purpose of electric light is to help humans see. When it comes to blind them to the world around them, it becomes counterproductive. The task thus is not to abolish technology but to see through it to the human meaning which justifies it and directs its use.

Since the completion of the boat course I have found myself using technology much more consciously, and thinking about where each tool comes from and what it would be like to live without it. Moving in to our house in the last few weeks, we bought a lot of furniture, but I also built a bookcase and, with Betsy's help, a bed frame (I have plans and materials for some more furniture, though I have run out of time now that school is in full session). Using the few tools I had made me much more conscious of both the possibilities and the superfluity of technology--I could make the bookcase with only an axe, perhaps, and a drawknife or plane and some nails, but having the right kind of saw helps immeasurably, and makes many things possible that would be impossible otherwise. All the same, I now have a great sense of satisfaction with our home-made furniture, and it makes me appreciate the rest of our furniture more. Kohak, again, perceptively sees the truth behind this:

          Heating with one's own wood may be no more "authentic" than central heating, but it offers a far clearer metaphor. . . . There is nothing anonymous about the glow of the stove: its heat can be experienced primordially as a gift of the forest and of a person's labor. Cleaning the chimneys and trimming the wicks, filling the lamps and kindling a light in the darkness, those are no less evidently a person's acts, a person making light. In such a context, the place of the human in the cosmos stands out in unobscured clarity: the love which gives meaning to labor and the labor which makes love actual.
          That love and that labor are no less present in an automatically lit and heated urban apartment. Here, no less than in a forest clearing, light and warmth of a winter's night are not automatic. They, too, are the gifts of love and labor. Their sense, however, does not stand out: too many intermediate links intervene. An urban parent my tell his child with equal justification that he goes to work to give her warmth and light, but when that work is not splitting wood or trimming a wick, the claim, however justified, will remain abstract and theoretical, lacking all experiential force.

For similar reasons I have been baking bread once a week, and in the last few weeks we've made home-made pasta, ice cream, pies, soup stock, and so on. None of these things are very efficient in terms of money or especially time, but they do give us a perspective of quality and help us to value the things that technology makes easier. Like Wendell Berry, I have a hard time figuring out where to draw the line with using technology, and his observation that it will need to be drawn where it is difficult to draw is a convicting one. But there is a balance--I should certainly never properly fulfill my vocation as a student if I were not surrounded by technology that makes leisure possible. My duty is to give glory to God for the bounty of his creation, mediated to me in many ways by the fearfully made hand of man.