Mariner - Fall 2007 - (Page 10)

Otter Lake, Anchorage The breathtaking beauty and isolation of the Far North have long inspired writers. And for the armchair adventurer, a trip through literature is the perfect appetizer for a personal journey to the Great Land. Here are just a few writings to whet your appetite and lure you north. The Classics. No review of Northern literature would be complete without mentioning Jack London and Robert Service. London’s most well-known novels, Call of the Wild and White Fang, both take place in the Yukon—a place he became personally familiar with trudging up Chilkoot Pass to Lake Bennett during the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897. One of his best short stories—To Build a Fire—is also set here, and you won’t find a more bone-chilling description of the hazards of a Yukon winter. Robert Service chose poetry as his literary canvas, and ballads like The Spell of the Yukon and The Cremation of Sam McGee earned the Scottish banker from the Yukon Territory titles such as the Bard of the Yukon and the Canadian Kipling. On the nonfiction front, John Muir’s Travels in Alaska offers some remarkable descriptions of Southeast Alaska in the late 1800s—the perfect prelude to a cruise up the Inside Passage to Glacier Bay. (Visitors to Glacier Bay may also want to pick up a copy of The Only Kayak: A Journey into the Heart of Alaska by Kim Heacox, a Glacier Bay park ranger whose breathtaking prose is destined to make it a future classic.) the viewpoint of newcomers struggling to adapt to this alien land. For instance Tisha: The Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaskan Wilderness by Robert Specht tells the true story of Anne Hobbs, a prim 19-year-old schoolteacher who in 197 accepted a teaching job in the town of Chicken, Alaska, not far from the Yukon’s Dawson City. Gary Paulson is best known for his award-winning children’s literature, but in his autobiographical Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod, Glacier Bay From the Outside In. In the North, a cheechako is a tenderfoot, and there’s a plethora of literature from 10 Holland America Line

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Mariner - Fall 2007

Cover Table of Contents Street of Dreams Ancient Assets Island Cuisine Life in Old Gatún Tales of the North Coming to Life in Antarctica A Thousand Miles from Nowhere Maritimes 2007/2008 Best Cruise Values Behind the Scenes Mariner Values Mariner at a Glance

Mariner - Fall 2007

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