By Annie Penfield

I pluck a clear-glass ice chunk from the glacial waters and bring it aboard to drop into my whiskey. A gesture of extraction or a communion: I am not sure. Earlier today, we motored around icebergs, maneuvering to get as close as possible to the terminus of the Sawyer Glacier. In the dingy, pelted by rain, wearing five layers of clothing, I watched the ice cleave, drop, dive, surface, bob, and drift. I would like to think my experience of this place, now at this age, is more assimilation than invasion. Currently, my husband and I, only us two, are aboard a 48’ sailboat in Alaska. Back in the lower 48 are our adult children, our jobs, our dogs and horses, our farm, and our aging parents. As a 54-year-old woman, I know I am not alone in a desire to shift life tides, to evolve my identity, to re-evaluate my ambitions, and to move towards what makes me feel more alive. A litany of life’s injuries redirects me to age into new pursuits. My mind resists and rebels but reveals an agility to absorb new influences. Aging amps urgency, but I seem to be moving at glacial speed. This is now my second trip to Alaska, and we have travelled north to explore the glacier. I swish the chunk of glacial ice in my glass and marvel at its clarity.

These excursions to Alaska feel like a whim, a departure from reality, but that sentiment would dismiss all the years my husband dreamt and planned this sailboat. I have hired a manager to run my business. I have retired my competition horse. Our children are all in college. Friends embark on chemotherapy—and divorce. Time moves fast and with consequence. Our climate is erupting along caste and class and climate and covid lines. The ground shifts and I want to move with it. I am ready to be in a place that answers only to winds and tides—and not the political variety. The sailing isn’t my dream, but my dream is that sailing might provide some answers.

Lulled by water on the hull, light through the small portholes, raindrops riddling the hatch, halyards clanking on the mainsail, I shift to the rhythm and sounds of the sea. We float within the sanctuary of Tracy Arm Entrance Cove, south of Juneau, along the Inland Passage.

I thought the immensity of this wild would soothe me and mollify the damage in the world. Here, I would begin to know how to right my course. There’s a story I seek to shift in being here. I thought it was my own, but now I understand the story is bigger than me, and it is also me.

On my first trip in May, I struggled to adjust to the climate and the space aboard Rapport. I didn’t expect the space to feel tight, but perhaps after leaving Vermont when spring was shouting—daffodils in bloom, horses back in work, pastures greening up, leaves unfurling—it was hard to rein in my energy. Displaced, I was not quite sure what to do with myself while Kent frittered with electronics, checked oil, stowed covers, and prepared to cast off from our slip in Ketchikan, and I sat below deck, drinking tea. We were on course to Punchbowl Sound, a fjord in southeast Alaska. We passed dozens of bald eagles along the shoreline as if this was the last best place on earth to seek refuge. On shore of Punchbowl Cove, a rock moved, and so revealed itself to be a brown bear eating grass. We kayaked close to shore to watch.

Without cell service and deep within the fjord, bears on the beach and mountains rising from the ocean, we have entered a wilderness. And without another boat or house in sight, we have left civilization. With the backdrop of three-thousand-foot cliff walls, Rapport looks so small. It’s hard to capture the immensity of the place. We are right-sized and powerless to the surrounding forces.

I came to a better understanding of this power and our powerlessness in the dark hours of the morning following our glacier visit. Waters calmed when we turned into our berth, but at two a.m. we awoke. Rapport strained on the anchor chain; the boat listed, and the wind battered us. When the wind hit fifty-eight mph, I pictured being dashed upon the stony shore.

Kent moved to the main cabin and took watch. I closed my eyes and remained in the stern berth and let a ticker tape of thoughts storm my brain. Was it too cold to swim? What happened when the anchor pulled free? Would we have enough power before hitting the rocks? Should I pack a bag? What would I put in the bag? Should I change out of my pajamas into full storm regalia? The bunk tilted. I listed dramatically to starboard. We swung violently sideways. I didn’t look out the portholes. I curled deeper under the down comforter. The rain hammered the deck above and I felt the swing of the boat. I was in the clutch of the ocean.

I didn’t want to see the rough seas, the trees bent to the wind, the white waves crashing on shore, the angle of the mast, the slant of the deck. “The anchor is holding,” Kent called from the main cabin. We had no cell reception. The satellite offered no radar reports or updated forecasts. The storm we thought we had missed was upon us and we had no idea how long it would last. The storm was a resounding reminder of how little I knew, and how out of place I am on a sailboat.

At nine a.m., the wind hovered around thirty mph, and Kent decided it was the moment to pull anchor, point the bow into the wind, and head south. The relief of a storm is knowing there will be another side of it, and there was a good chance we were already venturing out of it. Kent went out on deck, and I took the helm. The anchor released the muddy floor, and we headed into the wind. Having taken two Dramamine and sporting acupressure wrist bands, I focused on our course in order to ward off seasickness and to dispel my fear of rough seas. To find some control within my chaos. The bow rose high on a crest, and then fell into the trough—not unlike a roll of the canter stride. I bent my knees to stay loose and ride the ocean swells. I gripped the helm. Rain pounded on the canopy, mottled the screen. Our breath fogged the interior. Kent toweled the visor to improve our visibility. It helped. We pointed to the wind and motored on, bow rising and falling over fifteen-foot swells.

In a trough to our port side, I saw two small black birds. They bobbed within the trough, rising and falling with the ocean, disappearing and appearing in my view. Small heads craning but not looking any different than on quieter waters. The birds, sitting and powerless within such grand forces, rested on the ocean. Why would they choose to be on the heaving sea when they can fly to land, and ride this out on a branch of a tree? Why would they choose to remain on turbulent waves? Unless they don’t experience the seas as turbulent. Aligned with the power, they are right with the world.

Leaving my job and animals and adult children doesn’t feel quite natural. I am out of my element; I am not right with my world. I can feel the wind blow and change direction; I can see the tide rise and feel the current shift. But I don’t know what to do with this information. I grab my book and tell Kent I am going to sit on the uphill side. “Windward,” he says. I watch the bow rotate and pivot. “Look at how the bow rolls,” I say. “Yaw,” he replies. There is a language for everything, and I know none of it.

When I left Vermont, the legislature had just passed the bill apologizing for the Eugenics law. This place so big and wild also holds the tragedies of our white invasion on native lands. A year after the pandemic and social protests, I see this place differently than I might have a year ago when I would have been only focused on the land and not the people, like us, moving over it, and I think about others who have come before me.

When I first heard the story of Celia Hunter, a woman who set her course for Fairbanks and adventure, I marveled at her persistence and ability to thrive in the heart of Alaska. Celia, and her friend Ginny, signed on to fly for an Alaskan pilot looking to have planes delivered from Seattle. The thirty-hour trip took twenty-seven days, and they arrived in frozen Fairbanks on January 1st, 1947. Five years later, she settled in the Alaskan wilderness, and then set about to save that place, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, among other places. Her story is mythological but also close to home. My mother met Celia at a conference in Anchorage.

My mother first traveled to Anchorage to attend a conference in 1989 at the suggestion of a journalist friend. She had no agenda other than it aligned with her land conservation work in New England, and she had a starstruck feeling about Alaska after a sailing trip in Prince William Sound with friends in 1987. At her home in Massachusetts, she had been the chair of our town conservation commission, founded a now county-wide trail association, and worked fundraising for several New England land trusts. She was an expert in easements and zoning. She was 47 years old, and her youngest child (me) had gone off to college, and she had arrived at the conference on a bit of a whim. Now she tells me, “I was in a funk. I didn’t know what I was doing with myself.” Sounds familiar. The coming of (middle) age identity-creation story.

She wandered about the lobby like a displaced person—or perhaps as a person Celia Hunter recognized as looking exactly in the right place—like a person on a mission. And she recognized a kindred spirit. Celia asked her if she needed help. My mom says now, “These women were so genuine. They are there for the place to live a lifestyle they can’t live elsewhere. For me, it was a life-changing place and sharing with these famous women, and they don’t forget you.” They become friends and allies for conservation.

But she told Celia then, “I don’t know what I am doing here.”

“Stick with us,” said Celia, as she sat with Ginny Wood, her partner in Camp Denali. How lucky she was to have this powerhouse woman lay claim to her, and now, thirty-two years later, we stepped off the sailboat and met my mother in Anchorage, and we prepared to board a train on a journey to reach Celia Hunter’s Camp Denali.

Celia, Ginny Hill-Wood, and her husband Woody built Camp Denali with their own hands. They cleared land, skinned logs, and built tent platforms, a lodge, and a bear cache. They were notched into a ridge that faced Denali. From this camp, they would take paying guests hiking into the surrounding wilderness.

Camp Denali was an accumulation of Celia’s experiences, each moment leading to the next, to tip into creating the Camp, and then to protect the creation by taking a lead in conservation. Her evolution began with her pilot’s license at age twenty-one at her home in Washington state. She then transported war planes when she served in the Women’s Air Force Service. There she met Ginny, and together they worked to get to Alaska, and finally succeeded in transporting planes to Fairbanks in winter. When they landed in Fairbanks and extracted their frozen selves, they did not want to leave. They scrambled to find work as bush pilots, often delivering visitors to a hunting lodge in Kotzebue. Then a year traveling around the hut system in Europe revealed the possibilities for a different visitor experience in Alaska. Taking advantage of the Homestead Act, they staked a claim with a view of the mountain. Launched in 1952, Camp Denali was the intersection and evolution of all those experiences and pioneered the industry of eco-tourism.

Celia realized it was possible to endanger a wilderness even a large and wild as Alaska. She worked with Olaus and Mardy Murie to establish the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to protect the grounds for the Porcupine Caribou herd. This work further exposed Alaska to outside opinion on open space and governance. In response to inside resistance to outside pressures, Celia helped found the Alaska Conservation Society for Alaskan residents only. She wrote columns for the Fairbanks newspaper and opposed dams and drilling and lobbied for the Alaska Lands Act. She had flown to Alaska in 1947 for adventure, and Alaska claimed her. She wanted to continue to fly over vast open lands, to share the enjoyment of the place, and that evolved into a stewardship that garnered support to create a movement and a structure to keep space open and wild. She had the foresight to know that Alaska could not maintain open space without policy and people. And she had the guts to fight for that land: “You’re going to have to bite the bullet and really decide what kind of world you want to live in,” she wrote.

Over the course of the summer, I travel to Alaska for two-week stints, and then return home to my business and my animals. Trips like interludes, providing space like a deep breath, like breaching, to ask questions to challenge my daily routine: Am I effecting a change in my life? How do I transform within the life I am living?

One means to shift the story of my life would be to move onto this sailboat: to adapt, learn the language, and stay aboard. To do this would require me to discharge my life in Vermont of a business, and horses, and what of the dogs? Such a change seems not an evolution of my life but an escape. Transformation is organic, debated, trial and error—built on small movements to a lasting change. This sailboat marks a pivot from my landed life—perhaps the lever of transformation. Like the glacier carving the earth, we transform slowly. New direction may strike in a moment, like an epiphany, but transformation evolves from gathered pieces of understanding, and experiences that meld, and tip into the larger realization, until my landscape is reshaped by the force.

Now run by a third generation, Camp Denali exists as a private in-holding within the now six-million acres of Denali National Park. In June, in the company of my mother, in the company of our three children, Kent and I take a bus and travel the only road through the park, a single lane dirt road, to mile eighty-nine of the ninety-mile park road. At a small sign beside the road, we turn nearly ninety degrees into a twisty, dog-legged lane along rows of cabins, climbing higher to the small log lodge. All day we travelled under a blue sky in the company of Denali, shoulders above the other mountains in the Alaska Range.

Now, instead of canvas tents, we stay in log cabins with outhouses. From our cabin window, we stare at the massive Denali, a pastel chimera on the horizon. My mother, now 81, has been anxious about the long train, longer bus ride, and the eventual outhouses. But she is motivated by a single regret: that she never accepted Celia’s invitation to visit her at her Camp. She and Celia often met in Moose, Wyoming, home of Mardy Murie, or in Anchorage. Celia died in 2001. My mother’s last trip to Alaska was twenty years ago for her life celebration. While we hike, my mother sits in the lodge. The staff come to her for stories of Celia. She needlepoints and stares at the great mountain before her, the same view Celia and Ginny took in seventy years ago.

We hike every day, in all weather. The low rumble of the Muldrow glacier, experiencing a phase of rapid advancement, surges into the river basin. Caribou cool in the snow patches while the sun blazes above us. A moose submerges his entire head into a kettle pond, emerging with water streaming off antlers. A wolf print in the sand of the riverbank sparks our excitement as we wade through streams engorged with ice melt.

I expected jagged peaks and lush plains to support the oversized wildlife, but instead we have rolling mountains and hundreds of variations of lichen. The spongy tundra is kind to my achy joints. The terrain undulates underfoot. It has forgiveness. We hike above the tree line, yet don’t lose breath. The latitude is high, but not the altitude. I feel superhuman to be scrambling across scree, parting the willow canopy, fording streams, clambering a rock face on all fours, and following social trails laid down by caribou, grizzly, and moose—as if we are all members of the same community and on the same path. Breathing easily and keeping up with my kids, and then taking the ebullient stride across the tundra back to our bus, I feel as timeless as the landscape—no arthritis slowing me down, no lack of breath hampering me. Below us, the floodplain stretches wide and sandy and within its rock are fossilized dinosaur prints we learn about from a Fairbanks paleontologist during an evening talk at the Camp. As if the Triassic era was just yesterday. As if we walk in the footprints of those who walked only moments before us: the wolf, the bear, the moose, the theropod three-toed dinosaur.

What we see in Denali is the same as what Celia saw. And not the same. The permafrost is melting. The glacier surged—as it did last in 1957, under the watchful eyes of the original camp owners. I listen. I listen for the sound of surge. I listen for the wolves in the evening. I listen to the guides and learn what is the favored lichen of the caribou, where there will soon be berries ripening, and what flowers will bloom. Life in the details. It’s not just the scale of the vast valley, and the uninhabited wilderness, and the overly large mammals, that put me in perspective, but my total lack of knowledge. I know little. Be quiet, learn your place in the world. I hear their reverence for this place, and while I marvel at the vastness of mammal and mountain, I hear about the minute. And how the detail of landscape is what nourishes the largesse: the lichen to caribou, the algae to the moose, as with the plankton to a whale. And I hear how these people worship this place through their specific knowledge of it.

I welcome my middle-of-the-night trips to the outhouse into the solstice alpenglow. I don’t stumble in darkness. I love to enter the cooled air and inspect the light. A woolen wrap about my shoulders to shield me from mosquitos. Every night I emerge at a different hour but always to a lightened landscape. Unmoored by the constant light, by the looming mountain, I stare from my open outhouse door at Denali, from the Koyukon meaning “the Great One.”

For Celia, her desire to share the wonders of this place with others became yoked to her ferocity to protect the wilds. As Mardy Murie wrote in Two in the Far North, “life up here gets hold of you so you can’t fit in anywhere else.” And too, my mother came for a place and returned year after year for the people who fought for the place, who rose to the challenge to keep open the spaces you love. And my mom expanded her network over the years, taking her to Arctic Village and Kachemak Bay, Homer and the Kodiak Islands. The people, genuine and placing the land above themselves, inspired her.

We perpetuate harm in small and large ways, and the small actions add up: a cord less wood in the woodstove, a day less of driving, my own containers at the market. Small actions that express the mantra of my mother of moderation. Am I doing the very best by the place I love? Increase renewable energy sources at home. Spread more manure. Compost food scraps. Let more trees rot into the soil. Eat locally. Eat less meat. Drink milk because it’s from my neighbor’s farm. I shift my role at work from management and budgets to education and advisory. My former duties cleave and fall to others; I witness their energy and ideas enter our workplace. I create space in my days to allow new opportunities. I put my name forward to be on the board of the newly-created Ashley Community Forest. The community forest, near my home, offers possibilities for a larger trail network, wildlife habitat, school programs on ecology, a site to tell all the histories upon the land, a forest management program to provide heating assistance to local families, and a forest plan to model stewardship. I am operating within the same parameters of horse chores, work travel, dog walks, pick up CSA food, ride my horse. Changes are small, incremental, and feel like not enough, and too slow—glacially slow. My efforts are like lichen, the minute upon which larger forces are propelled.

I would prefer not to experience a catastrophic event to precipitate change, but how do you measure catastrophe? Perhaps it’s here, and we’ve adapted to the damage, and we are so inured to our surroundings that this is now normal and acceptable—and measurable, like the retreating glacier. The Sawyer Glacier, a piece of which I held in my hand, breathed, surged, sounded, and shed. The size of it looked immense. Yet according to our map, Rapport should have been sitting on an ice mass, not floating in a fifty-eight of water. NOAA last surveyed the Tracy Arm in 1974, and then updated the maps in 2018, which revealed that the Sawyer Glacier had regressed .75 miles during that time. According to our chart, the glacier has retreated an additional .35 miles in the past three years. My rough calculation tells me that the glacier receded an average of 90’ a year in the 44 years between surveys. In the past three years, it has receded 616’ a year. Experience of this retreat amps my urgency and search for climate action to make a difference.

Reach for abundance, don’t retreat. Save money and resources. Moderation: determine a carbon footprint and live within it. Create carbon offsets within my life and not a tree elsewhere. Support efforts within my state to create regenerative economies and make land available to all, not just a few. Move towards a vision. Through my daughter, I have come to know the work of a new generation of Vermonters creating afro-indigenous retreat centers and educational programs. The mission is to provide a space for black and brown peoples within our state, to feed them through their CSA, build a network upon stolen lands, to raise food and folk medicine gardens, and tell the stories of their heritage through their crops and medicines. A safe place for individuals to escape repeated harms. I am uncomfortable to sit with the knowledge I am that predator of which they speak. I sit with that knowledge. Community farms are a small vision to move us towards inclusion and food security and homes. I am appointed to the two-town, five-member committee to oversee the Ashley Community Forest to develop a common vision for the forest, through public conversation, and transition the forest from an idea into shared space with programs and to work across town lines to model conservation based on land and not boundaries. Like the Ashley Forest, I am feeling not fully realized, but I have many new opportunities developing. Glacial increments, but I look around to see a changed landscape.

In late September, I am back aboard Rapport and moving south down the Stephens Passage to Wrangell, where we plan to haul her for the winter. The rain pelts the dodger, and I think about all I have seen over the summer. Traveling among whales, watching grizzly mamas and their cubs, escorted by dolphins surfing our wake, the ocean brimming with sea lions and kelp: the wild world feels right. It’s easy to dismiss the disruptions to the climate, the retreating glaciers, to deny the shifting maps and the carbon we belch. Salmon seems plentiful when purchased on the docks from one of the many, many fishing boats tied up around us in Petersburg. Here the skies are not clouded by the haze of western fires. The seas look abundant with marine life, and also with storms. A glacial pace used to mean excessively slow, but now the glacier moves with a rapidity, at a pace like I feel my own desire to make change—at a gallop.

Sometimes being extracted from a familiar landscape and residing in a new place allows us to find a piece of ourselves. We must be willing to move out of our place and our comfort zone, to delve into the stories of our lives but also craft our days to hold the shape of the stories of others and hear the harm we have done. I seek out conversations to expand my boundaries. These new places, small farms and glacier visits, Denali and Wrangell, Vermont to Rapport, sharpen my sensitivities and alter the parameters of my daily life. I stretch my reality through place. The devotion to listen to the place and the stories upon it is the way to shift my story.

In Wrangell, we prepare the boat for a winter on the hard. Hauled and held aloft by scaffolds, she is a boat out of water. Between duties, we bike five miles south of town to walk to Rainbow Falls. Stepping on boardwalks, thick pine planks encased in wire, steps as wide as a whale’s vertebrae, we climb the spine of the ridge above Institute Creek. The Wrangell Institute was not some environmental research center as I had decided in my brain when I saw the point on the map, but a boarding school opened in 1932 by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to educate natives: to beat them for speaking their own language. To teach older children to beat younger children. It was decades of every abuse until closed in 1975.

Next day, I walk the rocky shore of Petroglyph beach. The sign says there are at least 40 noted petroglyphs on rocks, worn faint by hundreds of years of tides. I wander the rocks blind. Is it my white eyes that cannot see the history, that don’t know how to read the symbols? I stumble from rock to rock, unseeing and feeling ridiculous. I cannot leave until I see at least one, I tell myself. I look to bigger rocks that strike me as better canvas and a spiral indent emerges, and then more appear: salmon eyes, the shape of a fish, more spirals. Stories abound on rock faces. I thought I would feel the power of this place, so indelibly marked as special, but why should it speak to me when I have never listened before, never in 3,500 years.

The ghost-cries of brutalized children that rise around Institute Creek, my ears hear. The symbols of fish carved on rocks that my eyes see. The briny taste of kelp prepared in our galley. Drinking in the glacial melt in my glass as I sit in the cockpit surveying the murky twilight. I recall the feel of the tundra around my arm and the cool frost deep within its tangle. The chill of the ocean in which I submerge a hand while kayaking. I have mingled breath with the spouting whales passing our sailboat and laughed with porpoises popping through the bow wake. Awe fires my endorphins and lifts me to feel the earth-abundance.

I return home in time for foliage. I walk the trails with my dogs. Listen to the crunch of leaves underfoot, look to the bare and tangled branches overhead. Feel the circulation of the woods. My dogs nose the scents from the rotting leaves and chase a squirrel, but it rings the tree and rises from the danger. I drink in the falling colors. Oranges and yellows drift on the eddies of unseen forces, flutter to the ground and land audibly. Breathe deep. Listen. Watch the sun diving through the trees and the hills undulating into the distance. Stars hide in the liminal twilight. Awe softens my breath, weakens my knees in reverence. And only within the reverence, am I as buoyant as the tundra, as resilient as the kelp, powerful as the glacier, am I humble enough to soften my knees, to listen, and to bend to earth in forgiveness. And in forgiveness, we truly change the story of our lives.

Annie Penfield holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is working on a memoir based on her essay “The Half-Life.” Twice named notable by Best American Essays her work has appeared in several wonderful journals (www.anniepenfield.com). She lives in Vermont, spends time in Alaska, and works to reconcile it all through her writing.