Kantner critic misses the point of his commentary

Jessica Pezak's op-ed (Jan. 30) responding to Seth Kantner's characterization of New York (Jan. 28) was well-written and certainly made valid points. However, she clearly doesn't know Seth Kantner, nor his world; and her New York-is-so-much-more-than-a-cliche spiel misses the central point of Seth's piece.

I met Seth in 1980 in the remote Inupiaq village of Ambler in 1980. He was 14 years old, and I was 24, working as manager of the local trading post. Seth and his brother had just traveled 30 wilderness miles from the sod-and-log homestead where both of them were born to what was for them the big city — a village 300-plus miles off the road grid, where they'd come to sell fox skins. Seth wasn't faking it or falling back on facile cliché when he described his recent New York experience; he was merely reporting what he saw and felt, totally understandable within the context of his life. If Ms. Pezak and Seth were to have been swapped at birth, I bet she'd feel the same way.

Like Ms. Pezak, I was raised in another world from Seth's — my father was a career diplomat, and I attended college back East, some of it at Rutgers, in the shadow of New York City. After I moved to Maine, and still found its wild country far less wild than what I sought, I came to the Arctic to find home … and did. Heck, after my first six months in the upper Kobuk country, Fairbanks felt like Mars. Still does, after a few weeks in the Bush.

I find Seth's perspective and reporting accurate, honest and totally valid. His main point isn't that New York is a weird universe where everyone's out of touch with what he considers important; it's that we're teetering on the edge of losing one of the last great unroaded wilderness landscapes in this rapidly shrinking, Starbucks-and-McDonalds-riddled, Facebook-and Instragram-infused world — one where the Catskill Mountains pass for wilderness.

Nick Jans is an Alaska writer and photographer who lived for 20 years in the western Arctic. He now divides his time between a home on the Kobuk River and a homestead near Haines and winters on the Suwannee River in north Florida.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser.