Genes De Large

An Alaskan Diary and Memoir

This book was written in diary form to chronicle events during our annual stay at Chandalar Lake in the Brooks Range. Myself and two friends built a cabin on the lake shore in 1991. My wife and I spend one month there during the short arctic autumn each year. Its our piece of tranquility played out in a cabin by a lake on the tundra. The following is a sample diary entry. September 13 Low cloud cover, calm all day, thirty-eight degrees in the a.m. It was fifty-six degrees in the p.m. The snow has stayed back maintaining a hold only on the tops of the highest mountains. It waits patiently for its ultimate advance. In the meantime we have the arctic version of an Indian Summer and we love it. The birch, alder, and berry bushes have given up their blazing colorful dance of autumn and let their costumes fall, willing to wait for the rhythms of spring. At the end of each diary entry there is a poem that corresponds to activities of the day or a historic quotation pertaining to the Chandalar area, Brooks Range, or Interior Alaska.. There are also short memoir pieces chronicling events from all over Alaska from territorial days to the present. Memoir -- The Season Preparing for the hunting season had been a concern of mine for a couple of weeks. No one in the village sold hunting licenses and it appeared that if you wanted one you had to send to Kodiak. This was not a popular idea. If one person had a license Fish and Game might want everyone to buy one. I could understand that you had a right to hunt without a license if no one sold them, but how did you find out when the season started and ended? I had been seeing an old Aleut man with a shotgun coming home along the road at dusk every now and then. The kids at school told me it was old Custa. I stopped him on the road along the beach. "Custa," I said, "When does the hunting season open?" He laid down the Emperor Goose he was carrying, leaned on his rusty old shotgun and went into deep thought. The silence was punctuated by the boom and hiss of waves pounding and receding through the pebbles on the beach. "Well," he finally said. "I try to get out about daylight and get home about dark." He picked up his goose, placed his shotgun under his arm and shuffled on down the road. I lived in the Aleutian Islands for a number of years and never asked another soul about hunting seasons.