Coda Sherry Simpson
WAYFINDING
Our family moved eleven
times before I turned seven. I attended three >rst grades: in Utah,
in Colorado, in Virginia. I remember the
July day we arrived in Juneau, Alaska,
the way the barnacle must regard its >nal
and lasting attachment, with relief and a
niggling worry: Is this the place?
The following summer we lived in
Mount McKinley National Park, as it then
was known. My father, a civil engineer, was
in charge of a project to pave the >rst >fteen
miles of the park road as far as the Savage
River. For three months, we lived at park
headquarters, wedged into a trailer so small
that the four kids shared two bunks embedded in the hallways, like beds in a Pullman
sleeper. My strongest memories feature me
as a half-feral child roaming from adventure
to adventure, discoveries all around.
This, then, was the child becoming herself. I pounded dull cubes of fool’s gold
free from granite rocks. Dug green bones
of snowshoe hares from beneath a du= of
dry spruce needles. Felt the blast of my
heart when I woke from daydreaming to
see an impassive moose standing before
me. Heard the drum of my feet against
the damp trail as I ran away. Tasted the
sour burst of blueberries picked warm and
dusty. Scu=ed through the silvered ruins
of some long-dead prospector’s cabin.
This is how I discovered my home.
This was my >rst act of way>nding.
Sometimes, though, we lose our way,
without ever realizing it. The summer in
Mount McKinley ended, and we moved
back to Juneau, to the Mendenhall Valley,
hedged by a glacier at one end and tidal ?ats
at the other. On this suburban frontier
I grew up climbing trees in a rainforest and
riding motorcycles on back roads scraped
from glacial till. I camped with friends on
uninhabited beaches and stood in line for
Star Wars, >shed with my dad o= Shelter
Island and played third-string basketball in
high school, ate (reluctantly) ocean-bright
salmon two or three times a week and Kraft
macaroni and cheese when we were lucky.
I never became the sort of Alaskan who
?ies planes, kills wild animals, >shes open
seas, climbs mountains, or treks through
the backcountry as if it were no more troublesome than driving to the local 7-Eleven
for a newspaper. Life felt interesting enough
in a place where the separation between
nature and home seemed no more substantial than the faint rattle of a beaded curtain
between doorways. Black bears strolled
through backyards. Humpback whales
coursed silently like intergalactic freighters
beneath my father’s boat. The Mendenhall
Glacier was a grand blue slab of scenery for
thousands of thrilled tourists and a playground where everyday hooligans like me
spent afternoons leaping o= moraines and
plinking rocks at castaway icebergs.
There were moments that scraped away
this unmindfulness. After a night of baby-sitting, for instance, I watched the four a.m.
dawn pinking the clouds behind Thunder
Mountain, and some foreknowledge of
a larger world both frightening and exhilarating pierced me. On a day in November,
huddled in dead grasses on the Mendenhall wetlands, I watched Canada geese so
intently through binoculars that the tide
rose unnoticed and stranded me, and it was
not so much the bitter cold but some
recognition of life’s blind passage that made
me cry as I waded through chest-deep water
toward solid ground.
Of course I could never have used the
words home or wilderness then with any
awareness of their complex meanings, nor
did I know the phrase mysterium tremen-dum, a German theologian’s term for
awe-fullness, numinous dread, an apprehension
of the Other. Somehow I did know that the
only way to experience that searing intensity was to push beyond the known world,
past a life eased by familiarity. Years fell
behind me, miles passed beneath my feet,
before I recognized that such moments—
and how painfully few they are—help us
recognize axis mundi, the center of the
world, which is not a place but a way of
being. Like wilderness. Like home. a
