Last chance in Alaska for characters in UAF professor’s collection

Where We Land

Daryl Farmer; Brighthorse Books; 204 pages; 2016; $14.95

Judging by the books that have come my way in recent weeks, it would seem that stories about people who wash up in Alaska with no place else to go are in vogue. Brendan Jones' excellent novel, "The Alaskan Laundry," and Zach Falcon's short story collection, "Cabin, Clearing, Forest," both explore the lives of people who flee north when all else fails. In the two closing tales of his own new collection, "Where We Land," Fairbanks author Daryl Farmer joins the trend.

[Zach Falcon's "Cabin, Clearing, Forest"]

[Brendan Jones' "The Alaskan Laundry"]

"In the Long Shadow of Morning," the first of the pair, a man is reunited with the daughter he abandoned when she was a young child. She visits him during her senior year of high school. Alternating between past and present, and from father's viewpoint to daughter's, we learn that the dad had long ago left his wife and child in Portland, Oregon, and that it has been many years since he last saw them. A recovering alcoholic, he spends his winters care-taking a remote lodge, and it is here that his daughter comes by her own volition, seeking to decide if she loves him or hates him.

The question of what love is runs through many of Farmer's pieces, including the title story, which closes the book. Mitchell Jensen is an ex-third-string NFL quarterback who has fled his failings and his family and found a niche in Homer with a fishing boat, a Samoan crewman, and the woman he loves who will never love him back. Recalling the journey that brought him north, he offers a story familiar to many Alaskans:

"It was the drive around Turnagain Arm that started it, I think. It was sunny, those mountains rising over Cook Inlet. Dall sheep on the roadside. I drove, stopping once to hike through brush so thick I had to part it with my arms as I moved over the trail. Later, past Ninilchik, I pulled over and looked across the water at two triangular-shaped peaks, which, I learned later, are still-active volcanoes. I felt calm for the first time in as long as I could remember. By the time I saw the sign in Homer that said 'The End of the Road,' I'd already decided I was staying."

Colorado stories, too

It's a settling thought that comes near the end of a collection of stories where being unsettled is an overriding theme, as is a sense of being trapped by place and circumstance. The book gathers stories that have been published in various magazines and journals over the past decade. Only four are set in Alaska. Several others take place in Colorado, where Farmer — an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the director of its creative writing program — grew up.

One of those Colorado stories opens the book and draws readers in immediately. Though titled "Yukon," it takes place in a small town where the state prison is a big employer and the future for residents is bleak. It's the mid-1990s and a young boy on the cusp of his teen years, who has never known his father, struggles with other troubled adolescents, smokes pot for the first time and watches his town make headline news for a crime involving one of the kids he's known his whole life.

If the small town of that story feels confining, Denver comes across as no better. In "Let Your Breathing Return to Normal," the narrator is a 30ish office worker dead-ended in his job and living with a woman who is drifting away from him. It's a tragicomic tale of a life coming slowly undone in a stifling environment, and it offers this deadpan description of a Presbyterian church that the protagonist briefly attended:

"I found the people as a rule the most laid back, the least pretentious. They didn't play with snakes, for example, or drink strychnine. They didn't volunteer you for Saturday night bake sales. There was no confession or penance. They went light on the fire and brimstone. All in all, they treated low-level sin as a part of the human condition rather than a failing of the human spirit, and on God's great tests, they seemed pretty well content with low C's. It all felt like a rare world I might fit into."

Hardly an advertisement for the serious spiritual seeker, but a perfect fit for the deadened urban landscape evoked in the story.

Farmer recently received the 2016 Alaska Literary Award for creative nonfiction from the Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation, and the above passage demonstrates his abilities.

Survival story

Perhaps it's a personal preference owing to my many years here, but I found the Alaska-based stories the best in the book. "On the Old Denali Road" has the most literary tension. A college professor driving home from Fairbanks to Anchorage in winter decides to head partway down the Denali Highway to take some photographs. Caught in a snowstorm he rolls his vehicle and has to walk out after dark in subzero temperatures with a broken arm. It's the sort of survival story Alaskans know well, where one poor decision leads to dire consequences.

"Skinning Wolverines," on the other hand, takes place in an Athabascan village, again in winter, where the teachers find themselves answering to a new principal who is clearly insane. It's a story of Bush madness and Bush justice, and it's the darkest and best of these tales, containing perhaps the finest Alaska line I've read all year: "Up here, you measure winter not by temperature, but by light."

Light is in short supply in this book but it isn't all darkness. Some of the characters do settle for what they have, and that's when the light appears, much like the January sun in Alaska. Weak and far away, but it's there.

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