I gave my truck keys to my dad one time and told him to take my mom into Canada to see Chilkat Pass.
They came back early. “I don’t know why you sent us up there. There’s nothing there,” dad reported.
In a manner of speaking, he was right. For 100 miles on the only road out of here, there’s nothing. No homes. No stores. Not even a gas station. There’s an indigenous settlement at Klukshu and a few homesteads off the road, but you don’t see those driving through. All you see is mountains, streams, tundra, trees and sky.
In this part of the world, we specialize in nothing.
Nothing for 40 miles south until Excursion Inlet, nothing for 13 miles north until Skagway, nothing for 70 miles west until the vast, empty Pacific Ocean. Our tiny human hive is surrounded by nothing. By square mile, the Haines Borough is less densely populated than the State of Alaska, an already empty place.
I was working on a pipeline construction project in the Mojave Desert in 1991 when an uncle and aunt arrived in nearby Las Vegas for a business convention. On a day off, I drove them out to my off-road job site, a few miles from pavement or anything else manmade that you could see.
After only a few minutes, my aunt, who’d spent her entire life in the Boston-Washington urban corridor, became fearful and wanted to leave. “There’s nobody out here,” she said, as though that meant peril.
For some, a horizon empty of people brings fear but the great writer Wallace Stegner called the American West “the landscape of hope,” a place full of potential, perhaps as the pioneers – escaping suffering in the Old World – saw it.
John Haines, arguably Alaska’s premier poet-philosopher, wrote that “the land gets into everything.”
Let’s assume that our remarkable neighborhood of open land has an effect on us, as our surroundings always do. Stepping into a towering cathedral, we feel uplifted. Driving through a slum, we feel fear, bewilderment, even loss. Except for the most intellectual, we’re visual creatures.
But open land is neither a slum nor a wonder. It’s a view of the world without us.
We accept that the long darkness of winter in this place turns us inward, makes us hibernetic or depressed or both. But what is the effect of looking out at unpopulated land all day, every day, for years?
Conservationists are prone to see empty land as an abundance of nature, a sight worth celebrating or revering. Developers look at the same landscape and dream of riches of minerals below or real estate above.
But how does a continual view of wilderness affect a schoolteacher or a truck driver or a nurse at our clinic? Does it bring them hope or fear or nothing?
We marvel at our mountain-ocean scenery. We glorify it in tourist brochures and in postcards we send to relatives. Some people even go so far as to describe our surroundings as “healing” although most of us also know too many people who died in its unforgiving clutches.
Does our environment change us? If it does, is the change for the better or for the worse? Is it why we stay in this place or why we leave?
Perhaps some master’s-level college student should study this and report back to us.
It might provide some useful information and help us understand ourselves more than we do now.