50 States of Literatue: A Trip to Wild Alaska

Nancy Lord’s short stories, collected in The Man Who Swam With Beavers, despite spanning years, locations, and all sorts of protagonists (both human and animal), are connected by their basis in Eskimo folktales and their evocation, both figurative and literal, of the Alaskan wilderness. At the heart of the conservation debate, and with a population divided between Native Americans, recent locals, and businessmen, Alaska is a state at war with its elements—and this unique quality is what Lord’s stories capture best. “Recall of the Wild” demonstrates the futility of attempting to domesticate or obliterate nature, while “What Was Washing” recounts the way in which oil companies send anthropologists “to study who and what was in the place before they went ahead and changed it.” But Alaska is also largely uncharted and untamed, bitter and beautiful. In Lord’s stories the rich wildlife and fierce landscapes serve often to inspire, sometimes to horrify, and always to enmesh the protagonists in its powerful ebb. A retired city man is drawn into the life of a nearby dam in “The Man Who Swam With Beavers,” while “Afterlife” portrays a poacher haunted by his kills. In “The Man Who Went Through Everything,” Lord perhaps best captures why Alaska is so alluring—at once intimate and unattainable. Noah, an antique dealer, is perpetually adrift—and his only escape from life is in his one-man canoe. “He could feel the plastic rippling his back,” Lord writes. “He felt as though there were barely any barrier between the river and himself. He was of it, in it, maybe even it.” The water that flows through and around this land is at once beautiful and dangerous, freeing and overwhelming, much like the state itself.