For thirty years, Dick Proenneke lived alone within the Alaskan wilderness. He lived in a cabin he constructed along with his personal arms. He had no operating water and no electrical energy. No cellphone to name for assist. No neighbors to test on him. He procured most of his meals from the land and the animals that strode on it. Proenneke hunted, he hiked, he turned an professional wilderness photographer, and, most of all, he wrote. He did all of this on the backend of his life, from about ages 50 to 80.
A sort of retirement besides: This interval was clearly the person’s zenith. The full flowering of a dude who was born to look at the world and write about it, to insert himself in nature and change into a part of it, to visualise a method of being and really understand it.
As he wrote in one of many over 100 kilos of notebooks he stuffed whereas dwelling in his cabin about that first yr there:
“What was I capable of that I didn’t know yet? What about my limits? Could I truly enjoy my own company for an entire year? Was I equal to everything this wild land could throw at me? I had seen its moods in late spring, summer, and early fall, but what about winter? Would I love the isolation then, with its bone-stabbing cold, its brooding ghostly silence, its forced confinement? At age fifty-one I intended to find out.”
He did. And what he discovered was he would thrive.
Proenneke was not born with a coonskin cap on his head, or an axe in his hand. He was born in 1916 in small-town Iowa and grew up there, leaving to affix the Navy after the assault on Pearl Harbor. The son of a carpenter, he too had abilities with the hammer, so the Navy put him to work rebuilding their destroyed base. After a time he was stationed briefly in San Francisco awaiting his subsequent project. While there he caught rheumatoid fever and was deeply sickened. While he recuperated at a Naval hospital the warfare ended and he was discharged.
The sickness made Proenneke really feel weak and powerless, two issues he wasn’t accustomed to and which motivated him to be as robust and self-reliant as potential. He additionally knew he didn’t need to spend any extra time inside than he completely needed to.
As it has for thus many wanderers within the Northern Hemisphere, the north referred to as to him. Wild, rugged, and empty. Maybe I’ll elevate cattle, he thought, whereas touring to Oregon. Instead, he enrolled in a diesel mechanics course in Portland, figuring he’d all the time be set for a job and may make sufficient cash to stop working altogether far sooner than most.
He additionally stored shifting north, ultimately getting work on an Alaskan Navy base. A freak eye harm on the job practically value him his imaginative and prescient; this was his second medically issued get up name. I’ll be damned if the very last thing I see is a grease-splattered bulldozer I’m engaged on, he thought. He determined then it was time to seek out an escape hatch.
Proenneke discovered ii on the shores of Twin Lakes, Alaska, now a part of Lake Clark National Park and Preserve. In 1968, he moved there full-time. He first stayed in an present cabin owned by a Navy buddy. But he shortly set about constructing his personal. He designed a 12′ x 6′ constructing of saddle-notched spruce logs he lower and peeled by hand. The roof was spruce limbs lined with sod and moss. He constructed a fireplace and chimney with stones he collected from the lakeshore. Gravel flooring got here from a close-by stream. The construction was nicely thought out, and designed to final. You can go to it immediately ought to you end up wandering Lake Clark NP.
The shores of Twin Lakes. Photo: NPS/Okay. Lewandowski
If you do, you’d see what drew Proenneke to that place. What gave him life. What stored him there, for the subsequent 30 years, save the occasional journey in his Piper Cub again to Iowa to see household. Proenneke left his cabin in 1999, and spent the previous couple of years of his life dwelling with a brother in California. He handed away in 2003.
While in Alaska he was free to let his physique and thoughts wander and self-sufficient sufficient for it to be an journey each single day, however not of the existential life-threatening sort. Clear-eyed and expert, he merely noticed a stupendous place to reside and thought: that is the place. I’ll make my stand right here.
“I looked around at the wind-blasted peaks and the swirls of mist moving past them,” he wrote. “It was hard to take my eyes away. I had been up on some of them, and I would be up there again. There was something different to see each time, and something different from each one. All those streamlets to explore and all those tracks to follow through the glare of the high basins and over the saddles. Where did they lead? What was beyond? What stories were written in the snow?”
I questioned if at that second there was anybody on the planet as free and blissful.”
Probably not, Dick. Probably not.
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For extra, take a look at One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey by Sam Keith.