110
CIRQUE
Mike Burwell
Review of Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness by Bill Sherwonit
(2009, University of Alaska Press)
At the beginning of any journey, we find uncertainty and worry, and later, down the trail after we have shouldered our packs for the first few miles, we find a new rhythm; find ourselves at home in the new landscape, looking around, stretching out. Bill Sherwonit, in Changing Paths, swiftly grabs our sympathy as a narrator because we find that we too after the initial shakedown are walking and praising and reflecting with him in the wilderness landscape of the Brooks Range. From blisters to being rain soaked, from fears of river crossings to his lyrical descriptions of peaks and flowers and wolves, we are next to him and fall in step with his wilderness journey. Sherwonit sets out on a 50-mile solo trek from Anaktuvuk Pass to the Gates of the Arctic that becomes part reflection, part meditation, part history and natural history, and part self-initiation for him in his 50th year. Along the trail, his meditations take us back to his Connecticut childhood where he first tasted nature, to his college years when his geology training first brought him to the Brooks Range, and finally to the present as a nature writer who returns for a two-week wilderness trek that he hopes will offer an opportunity to more deeply unify his needs and beliefs about wild nature. Changing Paths is broken into three sections: Part One sets the context for the immediate trek which includes his early days as a geologist prospecting for minerals in the Brooks Range, his introduction to the writings of Bob Marshall and others, and his pivotal and life changing realization while prospecting for minerals along the Ambler River: “I tried to imagine the changes that could occur here: by my way of thinking, it was an ugly picture. And I realized, with a clarity that approached the Ambler’s streaming water, just how special this river and its valley had become to me. It was a remarkable place, even a holy place, whose purity was held and reflected by those sparkling, rushing
waters…Could I bear to know the Ambler had been harmed because of the work I had done….I felt a clash of values, more strongly than ever before.” This realization began his dissonance with geology and initiated his budding career as a journalist that would reach fruition later as writer and wilderness advocate. In Part Two, we get Sherwonit’s childhood reflections on place and belief. It also here that the trek moves deeper into the sanctum of wilderness. But the real soul of Changing Paths takes shape in in Part Three, especially in Chapter 15 “Gates of the Arctic” where Sherwonit lays out the whole history leading to Gates of the Arctic National Park. In Chapter 17 “In the Shadow of Doonerak,” we find some of the book’s most lyrical writing. On a trek to the flanks of Mount Doonerak, Sherwonit rhapsodizes: “…Desolate, yet sublime. The word, the idea that keeps coming to mind, is transcendent. I’ve been lifted into an extraordinary realm. It’s not only Doonerak that overwhelms me, but also its neighbor, Hanging Glacier Mountain, and the chasm, Bombardment Creek, that both separates and connects the two. A deep gash between looming, steep-sided rock walls three thousand or more feet high, this narrow gorge is unlike any I’ve seen. In its shadowed, bare-rock bottom are remnant snow fields, cascading whitewaters, landslide and avalanche debris, and, near its head, a stair-step waterfall fed by gleaming snowfields and corniced, knife-edged ridges…” In Chapter 18 “Wilderness Music” (excerpted on the following page), he hears a wolf howling and it triggers a reverie: ”…to be with howling wolves in the arctic wilds—well, there is no greater magic. Beneath the tarp and later in the tent, I imagine distant, intermittent