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Rhythm Of The Wild: A Life Inspired By Alaska’s Denali National Park

Author : Kim Heacox
Published : 2015-05-07

Editor's note: The following review was written by John C. Miles, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at Western Washington University. He is author of Guardians of the Parks: A History of the National Parks and Conservation Association (1995) and Wilderness in National Parks: Playground or Preserve (2009) among other books. He lives and writes about parks and wilderness in Taos, New Mexico.

Kim Heacox has a long history with Denali National Park, beginning in 1981 when he was a rookie interpretive ranger. Rhythm of the Wild is a memoir, describing how Denali National Park has influenced him over three decades during which he experienced the park as a ranger, as a visitor, and as a writer-in-residence. He opens with stories of his adventures in that rookie year, his excitement about exploring this new and amazing place and his trials and tribulations working with the National Park Service.

During that first season, for instance, he finds himself assigned to give a sled dog demonstration to new Secretary of the Interior James Watt, who asks how the mountain was named Mount McKinley. Heacox tells Watt the story of the prospector who bestowed the name of then presidential nominee William McKinley on the mountain which he saw on a prospecting expedition up the Susitna River.

“Thank you for that inspiring story, Tim,” Secretary Watt says. He loves the idea of brave men going upriver in little boats to discover new country, to open it up, tame it, and create opportunities for others. “Entrepreneurship and Manifest Destiny, that’s what America is about. That’s what makes us special. Lewis and Clark up the Missouri. Fremont and Carson up the Colorado. Washington up the Delaware.”

Heacox is not impressed with Watt or his version of history. Watt appears only briefly, but with humor Heacox  reveals his public land politics. The place that is Denali inspires him, yet here is the man in charge who blithely shows his ignorance and arrogance in a brief encounter with this young ranger. After his encounter with Watt he talks with his supervisor:

Sandy finds me. “You okay? She asks.

“I’m fine,” I lie.

“Take a deep breath, Kim. We’ve had fruitcake secretaries of the Interior before. Not many, but a few, and we’ve survived. We’ll survive again.”

I nod.

“What’s with the red socks?”

“A protest.”

“Against?”

“I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure it out.”

Heacox loves the park, and admires the Park Service, but can’t quite fit in, and at the time was puzzled by this. He observes later:

"Looking back, I see now that Denali did more than charm me that first summer; it saved me. The whole damn place beguiled me and believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. Call me crazy or blessed or crazy blessed. But I swear that again and again Denali has done this – made me buckle down and find inspiration and become the free man I am today.”

Heacox did not make a career of the Park Service, but has made a career of Alaska and of national parks in his writing, and his experiences of Denali have been a continuing inspiration for this career.

In this memoir Heacox shares anecdotes and stories of his life and especially his Denali experiences. As he tells his story, he weaves Denali history and natural history into his narrative in a light, engaging and often humorous way, as a national park interpreter would and should.

He returns to the park ten years after that first season, and in this second section of the book he describes growing up in Washington State, discovering Edward Abbey, and enjoying footloose travels, learning, growing and finding direction that leads him back to Alaska and Denali. He writes of Chris McCandless, another footloose young man who, like him, was drawn to the romance of Alaska and its wildness. McCandless, unprepared for what he found, starved to death. "That could have been me," Heacox reflects.

But it wasn’t, though Heacox had his share of misadventures, some of which he describes. Instead he found in Alaska, especially in Denali, teachers who not only helped him survive, but find his “inner porcupine” and thrive.

Ed Abbey was prickly like the cactus of the Southwest, and turned out to be one of the most important influences on Heacox the writer, conservationist, and social critic. Abbey didn’t write about Alaska, but he wrote about national parks and politics of place and as Heacox digested Abbey’s ideas and insights he developed a prickliness that emerges in this book.

Abbey wrote “The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.”

Heacox is invited by the Nature Conservancy to write a book on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge but learns it will be funded by oil money. He refuses this lucrative offer, suspecting that despite assurances that he would be able to write what he wants, a pro-development message would somehow be inserted into the book.  He is strongly against any development of the refuge.

Sure enough, when the book appears it is “so big it could have been a coffee table itself. All those warm images of a cold place. Among them: a striking photography of caribou standing next to the oil pipeline in a modern northern tableau; a drilling facility in radiant winter light; waterfowl nesting near wellheads; a fox on a road; Arctic Alaska as one big compatibility story: oil and tundra, industry and wilderness.”

While he doesn’t make the claim in so many words, he knows Abbey would approve his decision to forgo the money he might have made by writing this book. Instead, he has written books like this one in which he is a critic of community, government, and culture, revealing his own inner prickly porcupine.

Rhythm of the Wild is very readable and entertaining, Heacox’s writing style light and engaging, but he is deeply concerned about issues facing wilderness, Denali, and national parks generally. There are, of course, free market fundamentalists like James Watt who think all natural resource values should be determined by market forces. This drives development, especially oil in Alaska, which threatens wildlife, salmon, and wildness. Late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens “spoke with conviction about a bright economic future despite all the new national parks foisted upon us by ‘extreme environmentalists’ [in the 1980 Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act]. Not once did I hear him say anything about ‘extreme capitalists,’ ‘extreme businessmen,’ or ‘extreme developers.’”

There is global climate change, and the oil, gas, and coal development that fuels it. “The Denali road corridor is bookended by extraction industries: Kantishna gold to the west, Usibelli coals to the east . . . each lucrative in its own way, and destructive.” Ideology drives a host of issues, in Heacox’s opinion:

Many issues boil down to ideology: the State of Alaska versus the US National Park Service, and mind-set of seeing animals as “game” versus animals as “wildlife’; of regarding the park as “locked up” (from economic opportunity and the manipulative hand of man) versus it being just fine the way it is – exquisite, in fact – a holy place. . . . And so we have gardening versus guardianship; “ego” versus “eco.” We have humans atop a pyramid filled with all living things below as they talk of ‘harvest” and “sustained yields,” versus humans in a sphere with everything else, open to new ideas and ways of seeing and being, eager to learn and repair as one species among the many. To arrive at such an enlightened place has been a difficult evolution for the National Park Service, but an evolution nonetheless, while the State of Alaska remains calcified in a dogmatic past.

Despite all of these problems with our treatment of nature in Alaska and elsewhere, Heacox has not lost hope. Denali inspires and encourages him and he writes, “A national park this big and wild helps me to acknowledge that in the midst of this little global experiment called civilization, we still have the wisdom to restrain ourselves, to preserve things as we inherited them, to leave the apple unpicked.”

Toward the end of the book he describes a week spent in Denali with a group of high school students on a National Geographic Student Expedition. He shares stories with them, of park history, wilderness, and wildlife. They explore many question: “What does it mean to be a critical thinker? To challenge your own assumptions before you challenge others? To stand atop a mountain and find God in nature, time in a flower, perfection in a caribou, poetry in a river?” On the last evening he tells the students that “conservatives today, their fists closed tightly around their money . . .despite all scientific evidence say human-caused climate change is a fiction.” So what to do?

Let us knock the wheels off their clown car. Let us write and speak with brave self-reflection and go forth, inspired by all, intimidated by none, grateful for every day to accept seemingly insurmountable problems as golden opportunities. “Your job,” I tell the kids, “is to joyously confront the crises before you.”

He delivers a sermon to the “kids,” but not to us readers. While he doesn’t shy from criticism and bad news, Heacox comes across in Rhythm of the Wild primarily as someone who loves the wild, the wilderness, most especially Denali National Park. He shares his love and concern for this and other wild places with humor and deep knowledge of their promise and peril. In this moment when we celebrate the centennial of the National Park Service, and face unprecedented threats to public lands and wildlands, this is a most timely read.        

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