Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now

Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now

by C. B. Bernard
Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now

Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now

by C. B. Bernard

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Overview

Alaska looms as a mythical, savage place, part nature preserve, part theme park, too vast to understand fully. Which is why C. B. Bernard lashed his canoe to his truck and traded the comforts of the Lower 48 for a remote island and a career as a reporter. He soon learned that a distant relation had made the same trek northwest a century earlier. Captain Joe Bernard spent decades in Alaska, amassing the largest single collection of Native artifacts ever gathered, giving his name to landmarks and even a now-extinct species of wolf. C. B. chased the legacy of this explorer and hunter up the family tree, tracking his correspondence, locating artifacts donated to museums, and finding his journals at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Using these journals as guides, he threw himself into the state once known as Seward’s Folly, boating to remote islands, hiking distant forests, hunting and fishing the pristine environment, forming a landscape view of the place that had lured him and “Uncle Joe,” both men anchored beneath the Northern Lights in freezing, far-flung waters, separated only by time. Here, in crisp, crystalline prose, is his moving portrait of the Last Frontier, then and now.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780762794287
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date: 05/07/2013
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 288
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

C. B. Bernard has worked as a newspaper editor, magazine and public radio journalist, senior copywriter at an advertising agency, and marketing and communications specialist. He has been a lecturer at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Writers Conference, a featured writer at the Boston Fiction Festival, and a featured speaker at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Spring Speakers Series. The Alaska Press Club awarded his series on the oyster farms of Kachemak Bay, and Newsweek columnist Eleanor Clift judged his column about life in Alaska as best in the state. The author of a travel guide to New England bike trails, he has also written extensively for Alaskan Southeaster, Alaska Business Monthly, Pacific Fishing, and Professional Mariner magazine. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Table of Contents

Part I Sucker Holes

1 Change 2

2 Departures 11

3 Trails 16

4 Prospects 24

5 Cathedral of Stillness 30

6 Northern Lights 40

7 Cities at Sea 54

8 Sustenance 65

9 New Beginnings 74

Part II Liquid Sunshine

10 Better Than This 82

11 Epsom Salts and Seasick Bears 91

12 Signs 101

13 Homecoming 110

14 Dashed Hopes 114

15 Shelter 120

16 Trout Fishermen and Metrosexuals 130

17 Too Far 140

Part III End of the Road

18 Winnebago's Army 144

19 Family Reunion 152

20 Theme Park 157

21 Occupational Hazards 165

22 The Mistake by the Lake 177

Part IV Crossing the Bar

23 Flesh and Blood 184

24 Tragedy Strikes 191

25 A Fleeting Condition 197

26 Fish Oil and Snake Oil 204

27 Black Friday 213

28 Captain Bernard 219

29 Convergence 229

30 The Unfriendly Arctic 240

31 Voices in the Wilderness 248

32 Holding the Past 259

Epilogue: Forty-Ninth State of Mind 268

Notes 276

Acknowledgments 279

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