Seward - Reverential peaks

Editors' note: We asked 14 of Alaska's best writers spread across the state — from Tenakee Springs to Dutch Harbor to Utqiagvik — to grapple with a question we all face in our lives: Why do I live where I live? This piece is part of that collection.

SEWARD — It's the people, like a handful of pebbles scattered beneath the massive grandeur of its mountains.

On a Saturday morning in early November, I study the sun rising over the Resurrection Peninsula. The evening before, the mountains at the edge of a wine-dark sea flaunt the crisp outline of their snow-capped peaks against a charcoal sky. Sturdy and rugged and indifferent — they make us feel small. Not insignificant, but reverent.

As I enter Resurrection Bay Coffee House, a 100-year-old former Methodist/Lutheran church building where I do most of my writing, a voice stops me. It's one of my old students, whom I haven't seen in years (I taught two generations of kids at Seward High School). We talk. Reminisce. He's returned to Seward to live. He misses the mountains. Their stability and enduring strength consume the trivial, ingest the petty, devour the frivolous.

Inside the coffee house, a young man sits at my table as I write. We talk. A recent local high school graduate on break from an Iowa college, he misses Seward. The mountains beckoned him, too. Their humbling bulk broadens the mind, strengthens the character. They embody a land of shadow and defeat — a place to confront and embrace the paradoxes and ambiguities of life and death.

"Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are," wrote philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. "Are," or at least strive to be.

Scattered like a precarious afterthought beneath the grandeur of the reverential peaks, we strive to be worthy of the panorama.

Writer and historian Doug Capra lives in Seward and is the author of "The Spaces Between: Stories from the Kenai Mountains to the Kenai Fjords."