North to Alaska: Moose of Darkness

All photos by Hart and Jayne Williams © 2010, except as noted *.

There she was, Myth America.

Because, finally, the selling of Sarah Palin (and before that, Wyoming Cowboy Dick Cheney, Texas Cowboy George W. Bush and before that, Ronald Reagan in his Death Valley Daze) is based on American Mythology. About the mystery and majesty of places that you’ve never been, but have been hearing tall tales about for your whole life, if you were born in the USA, or even if you weren’t.

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Myth Alaska (and before that, the “cowboy” mythology) is based on the indispensable notion of the self-made man, the rugged pioneer, the indomitable mountain man, The Noble Savage.

Mile Zero of the original Iditarod route at Seward, Alaska

And when I say “indispensable” I refer specifically to Rousseau’s coinage of the Noble Savage, the “natural” man, born outside of human society, free in nature, and from that philosophical metaphor, the entire notion of “the Social Contract” derives. When John Locke elaborates on it, you might recognize his language, because Thomas Jefferson virtually plagiarizes it in the Declaration of Independence, in his justification that:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security….

Which is Locke and Rousseau in a nutshell.

They sold Andrew Jackson as “Old Hickory,”  and William Henry Harrison — who my ggg-grandfather James Williams was evidently a personal friend of — as “Tippecanoe” for his exploits in the wilderness of the Northwest Territory (with “Northwest” meaning what we now call Illinois, Indiana and Ohio), and they sold Abe Lincoln as “Honest Abe” BORN IN A LOG CABIN.

Rousseau’s Noble Savage illuminates and drives our national mythology, the engine that inspires it from the Declaration of Independence to John Galt.

Except that the noble savage is bullshit. We are inherently social animals. Even the brave trapper relies on the industrial technology, the manufacturing, the massive distribution across an ocean and a continent for his knife, his rifle, his steel traps. You leave plains indians alone with massive herds of game (and before the coming of the horse, another gift of civilization) and the society never rises above subsistence hunter/gatherer. The brave trapper relies on his technology to sell beaver pelts for hats and coats among the fashionable in the Eastern cities.

You leave a man alone in the wilderness, say, raised by wolves, and beyond a certain age they can’t even be taught to SPEAK, let alone read and write.

The mountain man still relies on the technology of language,  of written accounting (the first writing, in the cuneiform tablets). It is understandable that Jefferson and Rousseau didn’t understand human civilization and society well enough to come to these conclusions. They were the finest flowering of their era. But they didn’t have lasers. And they didn’t have the scientific studies of feral children. They did not have satellite images of the country they explored. Indeed, Jefferson as president, many years later, commissioned Lewis and Clarke to go and find out what this continent we’d landed on two hundred years earlier was all about!

There is no “Noble Savage.”

But it is a potent American myth. The myth I’ve been working on ever since I, as a one and two and three and four-year old in Cheyenne, and then after that in Laramie have tried to resolve: bombarded with western TV shows like “Cheyenne” and “Laramie” IN Cheyenne and Laramie.

Of course, my grandfather died as a cowboy in Miller, Nebraska in 1931, so that gives me a little perspective. The ‘cowboy’ is a result of railroad technology, rounding up and driving the herds to the railheads in places like Abilene, Ellsworth, Dodge City, Deadwood. We ignore the reason for those noble savages: the ability to ship beef on the hoof to the slaughterhouses of Chicago, and thence East so that you can have a “New York Strip Steak.” I doubt the steak was raised in New York, but on virtually every menu in America, you can order one, as a forgotten rhetorical relic of the age of the Railroads.

Noble Savages don’t have railroads.

The reality and the mythology of my American West were at odds with one another as I grew up, and yet, as I noted in the first installment (“North to Alaska, or, Back From AK,” 17 June 2010), when we told the children of our parents’ visiting friends the reality, they stared blankly at us, and were simply sure that we were hiding the horses in our garages and our Indians in the park, just waiting for our visitors to leave so that we Westerners could get back to the serious business of playing John Wayne.

And, to this very day, dressing up in cowboy drag is a favorite pastime of everyone from barflys to busmen, businessmen and presidential candidates.

Remember, Theodore Roosevelt played cowboy so strenuously that he actually sort of became one. Roosevelt embodies the fundamental contradiction between the civilized man and the noble savage, in many ways. His assassinated predecessor was honored by naming a peak in Alaska after him, a peak we’d see on our odyssey: Mount McKinley (Denali), the highest peak in North America, our Mount Everest.

And playing cowboy is still very much in evidence, even in Alaska.

The truth about the West, as Wallace Stegner most notably noted, is not a truth about brave individualists, but, rather, a history of huge companies pushing weak state legislatures around to accommodate some of the most amazing grabs and thefts in the Long and Variegated History of Human Greed.

In many ways, Stegner’s writing prefigured the thinking of so-called new historians like Patricia Nelson Limerick, a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who see the region in quite different terms from the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s vision of the land of unlimited opportunity.

”Mr. Stegner was willing to take tragedy into the picture,” said Professor Limerick, who knew him. ”The view of Western history as a simple, linear story, in which Americans go west as leaders — he refused that happy marketing route. He looked at failure. He showed how toxic dreams could be.” (New York Times, “Puncturing the Myth of the West.” September 8, 1997)

Take Mount Whitney, in California, the highest point in California, which I visited in May.

Mount Whitney from Whitney Portal Road, Lone Pine, California

Congress was subsidizing the building of the transcontinental railroad, a bill signed into law by Abraham Lincoln, and part of the Republican platform that Lincoln ran on. For every mile of flat terrain, the railroads were paid a set fee by Congress. For every mile of mountainous terrain, they were paid a MUCH HIGHER fee by Congress. The robber barons of the Southern Pacific Railroad (whose names are still slapped on monuments, buildings and parks throughout California: Collis Huntington Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker & Leland Stanford) paid off the (thick-headed, as history has shown*) state geologist of California, a fellow named Josiah Dwight Whitney to declare the entire Sacramento Valley (whose farms form a rich checkerboard as you’re flying into San Francisco from points East) to be mountainous terrain. The robber barons cleaned up.

[* JD Whitney served as California State Geologist from 1860 to 1874, and it's odd that the highest peak in the lower 48 -- or "outside," as they say in Alaska -- would be named after the boss in 1864 -- a mere four years into his tenure. Normal protocol would dictate some famous politician or hero, which ought to give you a clue as to the origins of the name "Mount Whitney." In 1874 he went to Harvard, where he headed its geology department, and was famously wrong about just about everything, dismissing John Muir's contention that the Yosemite Valley was formed by glaciers contemptuously, calling Muir  an “ignoramus” and a “mere sheepherder.” The Whitney Glacier, on Mount Whitney was the first confirmed glacier in the lower 48 states, refuting Whitney's contention that there were NO glaciers here. And please note that the Wikipedia article linked is a sad hash of history, evidently run through a food processor or paper shredder before having been posted.]

In gratitude, they got the California state legislature (which they pretty much owned) to declare the highest peak in California to be “Mount Whitney” in 1864. And each of them got their own peak too, with Stanford getting TWO Mount Stanfords:

Later, when the USGS mapped the Pioneer Basin region in 1907-09, its chief geographer, R. B. Marshall, named the four peaks of the divide in memory of the “Big Four” magnates of the Central Pacific Railroad: Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington, and Leland Stanford. So now there are, after all, two Mount Stanfords in the state.”

- Erwin Gudde, California Place Names

That’s the towering achievement of western history. Billy the Kid and Custer are just side show freaks. (There is a sanitized version of this story that’s STILL scandalous, by the by).

But the myth of the noble savage still is deeply ingrained into our consciousness, and unless we understand it, we cannot deconstruct it, nor can we escape its narrative death grip.

So, let’s begin this journey to Wasilla the day before, when we drove 126 miles down to Seward to start at Iditarod Mile Zero.

North and South are easy there. There’s even a stone monument with an old dog sled, an official sign and a NSEW vane on top:

Seward, looking almost due South

Vane and sled

And the trip back to Anchorage (almost due North) is magnificent, with the late afternoon (OK, we started back about 8 PM) sun just dipping behind the western mountains that guard Seward.

Downtown Seward, looking North

Downtown Seward looking East

And it is magnificent.

Back to Anchorage from Seward

And then we get back to our Anchorage hotel, a 126 mile voyage from the reality of the Iditarod Trail in 1900 to the unreality of the sporting event in 2010:

Downtown Anchorage

Our hotel

And then, we got back,  and were sitting in the hotel bar, watching the sunset at 10:30 at “night” on the busiest floatplane lake in the world, and half-watching the SportsCenter wrapup of the Lakers Celtics NBA Championship Game 5 (Celtics 92, Lakers 86) when a commercial came on for Cal Worthington Ford.

Cal Worthington and His Statue, Spot *

Cal Worthington?

And, for an irrational minute I wondered whether they were picking up KCOP-13 in Los Angeles, who broadcast all Lakers away games, going back to when Santa Fe, New Mexico cable carried it, and I got to see most of the Lakers’ legendary 33-0 run, still the longest winning streak in professional sports history. With Cal Worthington commercials.

And Cal Worthington sponsored virtually every show ON KCOP (And KTTV, and KTLA and on and on. And on and on and onandon.) Cal, in his cowboy hat, who’d “stand on my head” or “eat a bug” to make you a DEAL;  ”Cal Worthington and his dog “spot” which was everything from an ostrich to a baby elephant, or whatever. A legend in Southern California media, and maybe the all time champ in the car dealer business … what the HELL was Cal Worthington doing on ANCHORAGE television?

Uh, turns out there’s a Cal Worthington Ford in Anchorage.

But is Cal Worthington a cowboy? Really? (No, but he is an authentic WWII hero. B-17 pilot, etc.)

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But selling himself as a cowboy, as a noble savage, selling cars in Alaska. Some things never change, I guess.

Tomorrow we go to Wasilla and Willow. Tomorrow we see how the myth of Sarah Palin’s home town stacks up against the reality of Sarah Palin.

Courage.

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NOTE: This is part IV of a series of VIII.

The other installments are:

• I. North to Alaska, or, Back From AK, 17 JUNE 2010
• II. Back From AK 2: Moosylvania is Saved, 19 JUNE 2010
• III. North to Alaska: Into the Belly of the Moose, 24 JUNE 2010
• IV. North to Alaska: Moose of Darkness 26 JUNE 2010
• V. Moosterious Interlude, or, Strangers In The Right, 29 JUNE 2010
• VI. North to Alaska, 2010- A Moose Odyssey 2 July 2010
• VII. North to Alaska: How Moose Was My Valley 4 July 2010
• VIII. North to Alaska: The Moosterious Stranger 7 July 2010
• (appendix) Mudflats Flaps Back? Tries To Declare Moosetrial 10 July 2010