It is a delightful truth that in Alaska, at any moment, one might have their ordinary activity interrupted by a magnificent but deadly beast. Moose dart across our yard quite frequently. The spring is full of bear sightings. There is a porcupine that wanders out of the woods on occasion.
I encountered this bear safely at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center.
Our neighborhood porcupine.
Sometimes, as I walk to my car I think, “I could be trampled by a moose right now.” These thoughts do not keep me from going to my car or from enjoying a coffee on the front porch while my son frolics in the yard with his dog. We stay alert and move inside if see an animal. When we hike, we make noise and stick to the trails. On Mother’s Day, I was gifted with a bear gun to provide further protection for my frequent hikes. I took time to learn how to safely shoot and carry my new tool of defense. I am aware that the there are real threats lurking in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness. I have a great instinctual desire to protect my son, but I do not want him to be afraid of the world or to miss out on the adventures waiting beyond our doorstep.
Our neighborhood moose photographed from the safety of my deck.
The Alaskan wilderness presents grandiose examples of natures power and magnificence. One cannot look at the mountains or into the depths of the forest without being reminded of one’s frailty or mortality. The landscape draws a person out of their self and demands response. For this reason, Alaska continuously inspires writers and draws forth adventurers. Each choosing to respond in their own way. Reminders of mortality provoke differing expressions in different individuals. Or perhaps it is more true to say, it provokes differing responses in each individual at different times. It acts as a call to withdrawal; a call to fight; a call to protect; a call to indulge; a call to amend; a call to evasion; a call to discernment; a call to pray. In one of his poems St. John Paul II said “death is contradiction.” How will this contradiction move me today?
“Fear Which Is at the Beginning
Oh, how you are bound, place of my passage,
with the place of my birth.
God’s design rests on the face of passerby,
its depth following the course of ordinary days.
Sliding into death I unveil the awaiting, my eyes
fixed on one place, one resurrection.
Yet I close the lid of my body, and the certainty
of its decay I entrust to the earth.
You rise above it slowly, and level Your design
with the surface of each day,
and with the shadows of passersby in afternoon streets,
in the streets of our town at dusk.
You God, you alone
can retrieve our bodies from earth.
This is the last word of faith going
to meet the necessity of passing,
the word that answers the record
not contradictory to being (death is a contradiction),
the word most held in suspicion, uttered
despite everyday deaths,
despite this planet’s history, which became
our place of passage, the place of death,
generation after generation
Allow the mystery to work in me,
teach me to act within my body
suffused with weakness like a herald prophesying death,
like a cock crowing-
Allow the mystery to work in me, teach me to act in my soul
which intercepts my body-
the soul still has its fear for maturity, for acts-
shadows the human spirit carries forever-
and the depth in which it was submerged;
finally of the divine, that fear
which is not against hope.
”
Works Cited
John Paul II, “Fear Which Is at the Beginning".” The Place Within. Translated by Jerzy Peterkiewicz,
Random House, 1979, pp. 149-60.