Alaska News

Reading the North: New books by Smelcer, Misko

As All My Fathers Were

By James A. Misko (Northwest Ventures Press, $18.95)

The blurb: Forty-year Alaska resident James Misko has written a story about Richard and Seth Barrett, who are devoted to running the family ranch on Nebraska's Platte River. It is their intent to keep doing so the rest of their lives. However, the terms of their mother's will require them to travel by horse and canoe along the Platte River, to understand why their maternal grandfather homesteaded the ranch three generations earlier. From the grave, she commands them to observe industrial farming's harm to the land, air and water. A 90-year-old bachelor farmer with a game plan of his own butts in and threatens to disrupt and delay the will's mandatory expedition. Using a gullible hometown sheriff and a corrupt local politician, a conniving neighbor, seeking to seize the property, thwarts their struggle to keep their ranch and meet the will's terms. The Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep, becomes its own character in this turbulent novel and lives up to its legend as being too thick to drink and too thin to plow.

Excerpt: "Judas Priest, Filoh. You can't go blowing people's stuff up. Especially if it belongs to Dixon. He'll have you drawn and quartered and God help you if he buries you on his land. He's got about 7,000 acres and we wouldn't find you until hell freezes over."...

"Didn't work right," Filoh said.

"That's good that it didn't. You got spare money you don't mind paying Dixon for replacing his irrigation equipment? One of those 10 tower pivots will cost about $80,000 dollars. You got $80,000 dollars you want to throw around, you might hire a lobbyist and talk to the legislature. That's the only way you're gonna get things changed around here. We're all farming the way we learned in school. We're using pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides all over the place. Cass County Agri-spray hits us about every month during the season. Richard says we'd have lost most of the crop to corn borers if we hadn't sprayed last year."

"I never used all that stuff, and I never lost a full crop." Filoh sipped the coffee. "Some short ones, that's true, but always had enough."

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"But Filoh — what you need to see is that modern farming and ranching isn't built on enough. It's built on having some of the good stuff in life. A few luxuries, you know? This is the industrial age and farming has come along with it. Bigger farms. No backbreaking work; air-conditioned cabs with computers, stereo, and TV. It's a far cry from when you were farming in the '60s."

He could hear Filoh sucking the coffee from the saucer. He didn't want to turn around and see it. Actually, he didn't want to see Filoh anymore. The old man had haunted him since his youth. Always intense, severe, full of thoughts and ideas that he was pursuing. He was not an adult for kids to be around.

Filoh ran the back of his sleeve across his mouth. ... "What you and Richard are doing is killing the land. And the air and the water. And mark my words, it's gonna take you down with it."

Edge of Nowhere

By John Smelcer (Leapfrog Press, $9.99)

The blurb: Seth is a reluctant teenage deckhand on his father's commercial fishing boat when he and his dog are washed overboard one rough night in Prince William Sound. By good fortune, they are swept to one of the hundreds of small islands ... They struggle to survive off land and sea as they slowly work their way homeward, from island to island, facing starvation, rain, cold, sunstroke, bears, tankers, and hardest of all, isolation. As summer passes and autumn arrives, Seth's father endures his own emotional journey and never gives up searching for his son, who everyone presumes dead. The months of solitude allow Seth to finally understand his father's love, accept his Alaska Native heritage and come to terms with his grief over his mother's death. Smelcer is the author of some 40 books, and splits his time between Talkeetna and Kirksville, Missouri.

Excerpt: Seth decided to take a swim in a cove, where a little piece of the sea was briefly captured by the land. He stripped off his clothes and stepped into the cold water. It felt good to be cold. But he couldn't help remembering how his feet and arms had grown numb in the cold sea when he and Tucker had struggled to stay afloat during the storm.

He swam out a couple of hundred feet from shore, turned over on his back, and floated lazily, looking up at the sky, as blue and deep as the sky in a child's crayon drawing.

A strange noise disturbed the peacefulness around him. It sounded like air suddenly released under pressure, the way a bus sounds when the doors open. Then he heard it again and again. Seth rolled over, treading water, turning to look for the source of the noise. Several killer whales were behind him, closing in. He could see the tall, black fins slicing the taut surface.

One fin looked to be four feet high, maybe more. Seth panicked.

He spun around and tried to out-swim them to shore, an impossible feat. Almost nothing in the sea swims faster than a killer whale. He was so terrified that his form was sloppy and he slashed wildly more than swam. In a moment, the whales were upon him, coming so close he could have touched one. Seth stopped flailing as the four whales encircled him. He could see their black and white patterns, their black eyes sizing him up, their sharp ivory teeth.

Seth knew that killer whales hunt in packs like wolves.

In fact, they are called sea wolves. Marine biologists have seen them hunt giant whales, taking vicious bites, trying to kill the larger whales by riding on their backs, using their weight to drown them. Whales have sometimes been found washed ashore, whole portions of them missing, seagulls pecking at the wounds.

As Seth waited for the inevitable, he suddenly recalled a story his grandmother had told him. It was the story of the first killer whale. In the story, a man named Natsalane carved a whale from a red cedar log. ... He pushed the carved shape into the sea, where it transformed into a killer whale with its mouth of sharp, white teeth. The man told his creation to kill his enemies in their distant canoe, who had tried to kill him. He watched from shore as the killer whale raced toward their canoe, capsized it, and killed the men aboard, ripping them to pieces, turning the sea red. He could hear their screams. When it had finished its task, the whale returned to its master, awaiting further commands. Terrified of the awesome ferocity of his creation, the man told it to never again kill people. And, so the story goes, killer whales have never attacked people since.

Seth didn't know if it was true. It was just a story.

Nonetheless, he spoke to the whales, his voice breaking from fear. "You won't eat me, will you?" he said. "Please don't eat me." He kept pleading with them, hoping they would realize he wasn't a seal or sea lion.

This time, when they came close, he reached out and let his hand pass along the length of their lithe bodies, feeling the smoothness of their skin.

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He could feel their sleek forms, their sheer power. They were beautiful, a force of nature.

They were nature.

After a while, the whales turned and swam back out to sea. Seth paddled to shore, sat naked on the gravel beach, warming under the sun, drinking the wild air, and watching until their fins were too far away to see. He held his arms across his chest, afraid he was going to cry with relief. Instead, he heard himself laughing, at first quietly, to himself, then louder and louder until his joyful voice thundered across the bay.

No one will believe me, he thought.

And he was probably right.

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