Coming back to the country

Coming back to the country

While applying to attend John McPhee's writing seminar at Princeton University in the fall of 2017, Ben Weissenbach wrote his 86-year-old instructor "I want to follow in your footsteps, literally."

In completing his first book, "North to the Future: An Offline Adventure Through the Changing Wilds of Alaska," Weissenbach penned a compelling portrayal of wild places that are similar but not identical to the ones McPhee explored in his classic 1977 book "Coming into the Country."

In North to the Future, Weissenbach, of Los Angeles, tagged along with three prominent Alaska scientists in the northern part of the state.

After fearlessly introducing himself to adventurer/scientists Roman Dial, Kenji Yoshikawa and Matt Nolan Weissenbach cut his own imperfect path across Alaska, frost-nipping his fingers and straining his Achilles along the way.

Weissenbach adopts two themes in his work: One is examining how America's Arctic is changing as it heats up about three times faster than the rest of the planet.

And, as "part of the first generation to go through adolescence with front-facing cameras," Weissenbach also confronts his own challenges in being able to pay attention to the natural world.

Weissenbach devotes much of the book to two separate trekking trips across the Brooks Range with Dial, famed Alaska adventurer and now a professor emeritus at Alaska Pacific University.

Dial, whom Weissenbach met at a party for another Anchorage outdoorsman, was on a mission to document the farthest north white spruce trees now popping up on Alaska's arctic tundra.

An Alaska newbie sharing a tent with one of its grand swamis has rich literary potential. Weissenbach documented a time he failed to zip up the pyramid tent in the way Dial had instructed.

'"I saw that," [Dial] barked from across camp," Weissenbach wrote in the book.

"It was a mistake," I yelled back, voice fragile with rage and insecurity. "People make them!"

"Yeah," Roman replied. "People also shoot up schools."

With consistent narrative tension that includes a few bear stories (even McPhee included a few of those), Weissenbach documents the zenith of Dial's long career as his team ground-truths the northern march of the boreal forest, its seedlings nourished by enhanced warmth and moisture.

Carrying a 50-pound pack that included a packraft, Weissenbach stretched his abilities during two of Dial's expeditions on both east and west ends of the Brooks Range. He continued hiking and floating even longer than Dial himself, who flew out from one segment when the pain from hip arthritis became too intense. As in other sections of the book, Weissenbach's science observations pass muster:

"White spruce are specialists of scraping together enough sustenance in summer to survive the desiccating cold of winter."

McPhee is a master of written descriptions of humans. His student - who dedicated the book to McPhee - paid attention. I found myself nodding with the words he chose for Fairbanks artist Klara Maisch ("willowy") and pilot Dirk Nickisch: A "spritely, bearded man."

Weissenbach described the Wulik River as "gin-clear." McPhee used the same phrase in Coming into the Country when writing of the Brooks Range's Salmon River (into which he had just plunged after falling out of a kayak).

Regarding that same Wild and Scenic River and how it has changed, Weissenbach wrote of McPhee himself sending Weissenbach a package that contained an article coauthored by Dial.

In the paper, Dial and his colleagues describe the Salmon River turning a toxic orange due to recent permafrost thaw, which enabled the water to react with minerals that had been locked up for perhaps thousands of years.

"'This came as a blow to the solar plexus,' McPhee scrawled across the printout." Weissenbach wrote in his book.

For a more complete picture of the changing north, Weissenbach also sought out permafrost scientist Kenji Yoshikawa.

Yoshikawa has drilled holes in the earth from Siberia to Alaska to Hawaii to Chile into which he has lowered strings of thermistors to measure ground temperature. Ground that has remained frozen through the heat of two summers (or perhaps thousands of them) is permafrost. Yoshikawa has personally created a worldwide network of baseline measurements.

Weissenbach experienced a crash course in cold-weather living when he tended to Yoshikawa's reindeer in the dead of winter on Yoshikawa's quiet acreage just outside of Fairbanks.

Weissenbach kept all of Yoshikawa's animals and himself alive for 11 days at 40 below zero. He also came to peace with Yoshikawa's guarded opinion that "humans don't know much," and scientists did not have enough "bullet-proof permafrost data from the past to make strong claims about the future.

"Kenji was not trying to forecast climate change," Weissenbach wrote. "He was trying to archive pure facts."

Weissenbach also flew in a single-engine plane with Matt Nolan, an independent researcher who studies McCall Glacier high in the Brooks Range.

Scientists have documented McCall Glacier since the late 1950s, but Nolan has returned there more than anyone else, landing on its surface with his plane on skis or wheels. He refined a digital photographic system to measure its surface with precision. He has also taken comparison photos of the glacier then and now that made their way to the Obama White House.

Bad weather prevented Weissenbach from stepping out of Nolan's plane to the ice of McCall Glacier, but Weissenbach documents his time at Kavik Camp, run by reality TV star Sue Aiken. And a pithy conversation he had with Nolan four years after his failed attempts to get there.

Nolan realized that long-shrinking McCall Glacier seemed to be counterintuitively getting colder and slowing down its downhill motion. That might be the result of the glacier's modern lack of an "accumulation zone" - new snow up high that drives movement and serves as a heating mechanism.

"The implications were potentially profound," Weissenbach wrote. "Might the melting of Greenland eventually slow, too?"

How does one finish such a book, a profile of this rapidly changing place and those who help quantify that change?

At the end of Weissenbach's second hike and many weeks on the muskeg with Dial, the ecologist asked him if he was more or less optimistic about the future. Weissenbach reports that he responded to Dial with "hackneyed garbage."

But, given a writer's time to think, he phrased this answer:

"If we were a species of wiser, stronger, more capacious beings - ones who felt this planetary shock we are causing with the same vividness that one feels a charging bear - then we would find ways to price carbon. We would eat less meat. We would throw our weight behind transitioning to solar and wind and nuclear energy . . . We would preserve unbroken tracts of land like the Brooks Range, which gives ecosystems room to shift and adapt, and we would build more green spaces in urban areas, so that our children grow up sensitive to the wonders of the more-than-human world."

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell [email protected] is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.