Grim collection of stories shows the underbelly of the Alaska dream

Cabin, Clearing, Forest

By Zach Falcon; University of Alaska Press; 2015; 150 pages; $16.95

"Where are you supposed to go when the last (expletive) frontier is ruined for you? Where else?

What am I supposed to do, Silas?"

These words of desperation, spoken by a young man named Wade as he and his childhood friend Silas drunkenly stagger through Juneau the night before Wade is set to leave their hometown, capture the feeling evoked in most of the stories found in "Cabin, Clearing, Forest," a collection of work by Zach Falcon.

This is the first book by Falcon, who was born and raised in Alaska, and whose impressive resume includes a degree from the University of Michigan Law School, work as an attorney for the state of Alaska, and serving as an associate director of the Writing Resource Center at the University of Iowa College of Law. He's now an assistant professor of conservation law and environmental policy at Unity College in Maine.

The story in question, titled "a beginner's guide to leaving your hometown," follows two young men in their early 20s who have spent their lives in a town with no roads out. The Juneau that Falcon describes comes across as a place one might be wise to leave:

"There was little forethought given to the town's founding, threatened equally as it is by avalanche and tsunami, plagued by grim weather and endless damp, but it was where Joe Juneau had struck gold in 1880, and white people had lived there ever since, whether it was a good idea or not."

Hemmed in

To say this is not an uplifting book would be correct. It is, however, quite good. Whether Falcon's experience of Alaska is as dark as the stories he tells I cannot say, but he chronicles brief periods in the lives of people who have found in Alaska not boundless opportunities but instead a landing spot from which escape is nearly impossible.

Juneau is the setting for many, though not all, of these stories (several take place on Kodiak). The characters found here are part of families slowly falling apart or they're fleeing families already dissolved. They are near the ends of their tethers, with their lines pulling them backward. Their surroundings could be beautiful if not for the rain that seems to constantly fall. Plus, their communities hem them in and prevent them from finding the freedom they seek.

In "blue ticket" a homeless man has come north from Seattle hoping to make a new start in Juneau, but instead falling into the only life he knows. He takes in a younger man who has fled his fundamentalist Christian upbringing, walking all the way from Skagway with no real idea what he might find or where he might go. Homeless in that water-locked town, they encounter the same hazards that would befall them in Seattle: confinement to a squatters camp, violence on the street, and police who won't take their side when they're preyed upon.

The stories set in Juneau are Falcon's strongest. Perhaps this is because the city should offer more hope than an isolated fishing village, yet the claustrophobia feels all the more oppressive there.  

In "knots pull against themselves" the entire story, other than its coda, involves something as simple as two brothers driving to the airport. Yet it's filled with tension. Marty, the younger brother, is bound for college and the escape he's dreamed of since high school. He's late for his flight because his brother Jake, a habitual petty criminal, is in no hurry to get him there. Over the course of a handful of pages Falcon relates Marty's increasing desperation to make his plane while exploring the brothers' complicated relationship with each other and their differing but equally dysfunctional relationships with their mother.  

No escape from Kodiak

In "bridge to nowhere," an alcoholic, out-of-work Juneau lawyer spontaneously takes up the property dispute case of a developmentally disabled neighbor, a job for which he will receive no pay but which may bring him salvation while he, too, looks for escape — but only if he can stay sober long enough to negotiate a resolution.

The stories set on Kodiak often lack even the hope of escape. People get washed ashore with no place left to go, all but sucked into the ground beneath them.  Falcon's descriptive powers are particularly impressive here:

"The cabin sat on a rise in the woods, well back from the bluffs of the bay. The pulling ocean sounded faintly through the shadowed forest of spruce trees. The cabin was built with round logs, chinked with tar. It hadn't been maintained against the wet climate of southwest Alaska.

Black moss grew freely on the rotting logs; ditch grass sprouted on the shingles. A thick-billed raven hunched darkly on the roof ridge. It swiveled its attention to the men as they entered the clearing and then spread its wings from its chest and flew off, croaking."

The unifying theme of these stories is an overwhelming sense of the mundane. Set against a landscape that can be postcard perfect and the popular American vision of Alaska as a place of boundless opportunity, we find people walled in by their lives and the limits of their towns, unable to move freely and probably unwilling to do so. For a young physician's assistant from New York City and new to Kodiak, the revelation of where he has placed himself summarizes the mood of the entire book:

"Alaska was not what he anticipated. It was not the simple frontier he imagined from the Saturday westerns. Instead of wilderness and moral clarity, he found himself in a shabby plywood-built fishing town as complicated in its workings as anywhere else."

It's not the Alaska that most of us encounter, but it is true for some. Falcon has given voice to those who never quite make it in the Last Frontier. Hopefully we'll hear more from him.

David A. James is a Fairbanks-based freelance writer and critic.