THE VISTA ALASKA LETTERS

A former Volunteers In Service To America initiate recounts his time in Alaska in this vicariously captivating, if underdeveloped, epistolary memoir.

In 1969, naturalist Wilson (Kodiak Island, 2014) fulfilled his lifelong wish to go to Alaska. Through his letters home, the author charts the year he spent with his wife, Suzie, in the Yupik village of Little Russian Mission. Although it takes a bit for the memoir to gain momentum, Wilson becomes a more observant and forthcoming correspondent as time passes. He often captures the primitive beauty of his surroundings, and although he seems to be a kindred spirit with Henry David Thoreau (“I sometimes think that when people traded the sounds of loons and the flocks of passing ducks and geese for well insulated and secure homes and jobs, that they may have given up the sounds and solitude for things of lesser worth”), he doesn’t romanticize the hardships; instead, he writes of how he spent grueling weeks living without his own cabin. “Most of the villages up here have no wells, water is obtained from the same rivers the honey buckets are emptied into,” he reports. “There is no electricity.” As he deals with life in these remote surroundings, where people can go months between hot showers (a luxury available in a village 13 miles away), the Vietnam War casts a long shadow; the author’s own draft status becomes a subplot. Wilson chides himself for his “minimalist writing”; for example, one letter contains a fleeting, benign mention of a hunting trip, and in a present-day note to readers, he reveals that the trip almost cost him his life. Readers may hope that Wilson someday revisits his Alaska experience, using his letters as a guide to render a more fully developed memoir, bringing readers closer to the people he met and addressing the tensions in his marriage (at one point, he refers to his wife as an “insignificant spouse”) and estrangement from his parents. Such a memoir might better convey the work he did, and the challenges he faced.

A resonant, if sketchy, wilderness sojourn for seasoned or aspiring social-action volunteers.