Death Books

IN DETOURS: LIFE, DEATH, AND DIVORCE ON THE ROAD TO STURGIS, Richard, in his autobiography, concentrates mostly on the trek to the Dakotas, which serves as an allegory to life's journey from birth to death. This is a strong but quite different type of autobiography. Though some will say the author ignored his responsibilities to his family with this risky venture, many will agree this book is worth reading not only for the well-written morality tale, but also for encouraging individuals to sing "My Way".

Harriet Klausner

Sure would love to let loose and really take such a trip but until then, I'll take my daily dose of Detours to remind me to keep the perspective by getting lost.

PS... I'm off to Ebay to buy a bike!

Sheila Nickenson presents Alaska as a vast unforgiving terra incognita where death awaits the missing. Her essays on the lost--and sometimes found--of Alaska demonstrate emphatically it's not a place to be stranded in. For example, the immense interior glaciers offer no quarter. Even with today's sophisticated technology, the lost remain lost. Their bodies are not found; their fates are known to God. Most of the modern day missing are victims of plane crashes. (There are parts of our 49th state that are only accessible by airplane. Juneau, where the author resides, is one example.)

In earlier times, the late 1700s to the earlier part of the 20th century, the missing were members of expeditions and the Navy. Many of the dead sailors were "harvested" by the Cold Reaper in the flower of their youth.

Interspersed among the essays for the dead are meditations on: Sheila's life in Juneau, her publishing experience as a poet, her New England childhood, the "politics" of teaching Alaskan prisoners, the joys and insights of educating children about poetry, being a mother and wife, the flowers of Alaska--what flourishes and what perishes--and her personal ordeal about a missing friend

As someone who once lived in Alaska and liked good books, I could never understand why our state didn't produce more of them. Apart from Robert Service and a few essayists (Joe McGinnis, John McPhee), few talented writers have made Alaska their subject, and even fewer have handled it successfully. It is a melancholy commentary on Alaska that the most faithful representation of the state in the Lower 48 was the television show Northern Exposure.

Although the state has many dedicated writers, few have written material that was regarded as exceptional. Although many luminaries have visited, few were impressed with the home team. I found this particularly frustrating because other small, cold, places - Iceland or Denmark, for example - had developed rich and distinct literary traditions.

Doubly frustrating because the chance was there. You can't do regular literature in Alaska. Something about the place resists anything conventional. The problems an author might write about in say, Spokane, seem out of place or mis-scaled when set in Alaska. (This intractability extends far beyond literature - experienced mountain climbers from elsewhere are routinely killed in Alaska, talented pilots from the Lower 48 crash there, perfectly good ships sink off its shores.)

But this problem is also an opportunity, for the artist willing to go for broke. To succeed, she would have to invent new tools and take a radically different approach from the authors of the Lower 48. To misuse an analogy from Updike, the successful Alaskan author can't hope to hug the shore - she must build her own boat, and head straight out to the sea, with all the risks and rewards that entails.

Sheila Nickerson, a Juneau resident who was the state's poet laureate from 1977 to 1981, has taken up the challenge. The book is a history and a memoir. The history she reports is full of dangerous projects and unexplained disappearances. She dedicates long passages to great vanishings in the far north, from the! Franklin Expedition of the 19th century to congressmen Nick Begich and Hale Boggs in the early 1970s. But mostly Nickerson reports smaller vanishings: An old man gets off a ferry in Juneau and is never heard from again. A young man walks up a heavily-travelled trail and vanishes. A colleague disappears on a flight:

"Kent Roth, a fishery biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, has gone down with two brothers and two friends on a flight from Yakutat to Anchorage. It is an immense area, one that has swallowed people from the earliest times of its recorded history."

Throughout the book Nickerson intersperses her own story with this disappearance and the ensuing search. She also reports on the stacatto interruption of accidental death that is the hallmark of day-to-day life in Alaska:

"Flipping through search-and-rescue news releases at the Coast Guard headquarters at the federal building in Juneau, I quickly find a terrible sameness to the stories. The reports usualy continue from three to five days. If the case is large, or unusual, reports continue for a week or even two weeks. Then, for the most part, there is blankness."

Observing that the Alaskan Shamen were wiped out by protestant missionaries, she rushes to fill the void with any spiritual tool that can find purchase - the tarot, feng shui, dreamwork, bird messengers, ghost stories from her childhood. She is impatient with the stern, inscrutable Protestant God (perhaps her distant and angry father, who ultimately disinherited her, has something to do with this). Ironically, this is one place where that stern patriarch seems plausible. Such a God is a mere curiosity in a literary, affluent place like New York, Paris, or Peking. But He fits well where nature kills suddenly, unexpectedly, and arbitrarily. Nickerson never goes there - if that's the deal, she doesn't want it.

Only late in the book does she hint that she sees the awful possibility that there is no order, spiritual or otherwise, to it all:

"! ;There is a framed original chart from the Cook expedition to Alaska in 1778 - Cook's last before he turned south to Hawaii and death at the hand of native Hawaiians. The chart, in pencil, was executed either by Cook or by Master William Bligh... It is a working chart of Unalaska Island, out in the Aleutians, made during the summer as Cook and his men headed north to Icy Cape, at the edge of the Frozen Sea. There, just off the coast of the island, in a faint but elegant hand, this notation:

'All this 30' west of the truth' "

But even when her spiritual guides fail her (perhaps I should write 'especially'), the book marches powerfully on, because it is not driven by a spiritual force, but by Nickerson's relentless intellectual engagement. She becomes discouraged, but she never gives up. When one line of attack breaks down, she shifts to another.

It would be unfair to try to say this book has succeeded or failed. As with most Alaskan enterprises, success is a relative thing. A successful Alaskan expedition is one in which no one gets killed. Nickerson is generous with partial credit to explorers who got home with at least some of their shipmates. She has succeeded well on those terms - she's built her boat, gone to sea, and come back.

She succeeds in other ways as well. The whole book is pitched at a high level, far higher than Alaskans expect of local writers. Nickerson's full of talent - she writes in a clear direct voice, and, her protests notwithstanding, she has a pretty good idea of what she's trying to accomplish. This is the kind of a book that might be viewed someday as a cornerstone of Alaskan literature, one of the moments when Alaskans started writing things the rest of the world wanted to read.

Only Nickerson knows if the literary achievement was accompanied by a spiritual one. Alaska is particularly unkind to those who come seeking spiritual development. The sea and wilderness seem to have a special fondness for killing sojourners and utopians. It is a place where what does no! t destroy you tries to cripple you so it can get you next time. As McGinnis discovered, there are a lot of damaged people in those bars and cabins. In this game, holding your own is a big victory.

I think Nickerson held her own.

Sheila Nickerson, Disappearances: A Map, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996.

There are many books on the market dealing with the after death experience, both realistic and fanciful in their undertaking but not until recently had I come across any dealing with the subject matter of death from the point of view at this side of life.

I found as I read the book that a great many of the stories had a recurring theme of unawareness from those involved and the tying up of loose ends by those getting ready to leave.

The book has a nice steady pick me up, put me down, pace to it. As I read it, I felt a sense of peace and empathy manifest itself inside me for the people between its pages.

I can write without hesitation that the book is well worth reading because it concerns people writing about people and inside its pages there may be something to be discovered which someday could be of concern to the reader.

Full marks to the author C. M. Meide and the people of the book

Drawing from many years of training and research at prominent institutions, he reminds us that the human brain is an ever-changing flexible organ the function of which constitutes the amazing plastic mind. The brain, previously considered a relatively static and non-renewable assembly of nerve cells, is described as a very dynamic structure whose growth factors convert experience into intercellular connections which mediate learning, memory and emotion. He suggests that new discoveries mark only the beginning of understanding, not only with respect to possible cellular transplantation but also with respect to replication of existing cells to replace dying cells of the diseased brain.

The chapter on memory is very good, and the research on grafting cells onto affected brain areas in animals looks promising.

When my mother speaks now, it's mostly word salad, but she can answer simple questions with a yes or no - although I'm not sure if she's telling me what she really wants. You guess sometimes. Often she'll be seem to be speaking to someone who isn't there and sometimes her attention will spill over to include me, and for that I'm grateful. I live in hope.