Book review: Author Michael Engelhard follows the beating heart of Alaska in new collection of essays

“What the River Knows: Essays from the Heart of Alaska”

By Michael Engelhard; Hancock House Publishers Ltd, 2024; 324 pages; $24.95.

Writing about the art of the essay in the postscript to his recent collection of such writings, the prolific author Michael Engelhard tells us, “Their source isn’t always obvious; their destination, a sea of rest and tranquility or mingling with other currents, sometimes surprises even myself.”

This thought perfectly encapsulates “What the River Knows,” one of a trio of recently published works by Engelhard, and one that showcases the art of the essay in its finest form. An anthropologist by training, an outdoors guide by profession, and a writer by nature and compulsion, Engelhard has wandered across the varied landscapes of Alaska for decades, taking in the animals and cultures that have dwelt upon them for millennia and noting their evolutions as the ground beneath their feet has shifted throughout history — most quickly during our time of human-driven cultural and environmental upheaval — while pondering what this means and where this is heading for a place he loves so deeply.

“What the River Knows” is a culmination of over three decades of writings that have sprung from Engelhard’s journeys into Alaska, sometimes on his own, and more frequently with others, traveling alternately as guide, friend, spouse, or in one case, spurned potential boyfriend. Both his successes and failures are acknowledged as he weaves atop rivers and ice and lands, over mountains and lakes and sand dunes, and back and forth through the years, finding insights and discoveries along the way. It’s writing that prompts the reader to think, and come to love through his words if nothing else, this place to which Engelhard has devoted his life.

The book begins in mostly well-trodden parts of the state, sometimes leaving the trails behind for more difficult throughways, noting the treasures found just beyond our backdoors and pondering their fates as global heating (he meticulously refuses to use the more placid and broadly employed term “global warming”) closes in on these worlds that have emerged from millions of years of far more gradual shifts in climate and resident populations, first animal, and then human. These trails ultimately lead him to his beloved Arctic, a place where the familiar is quickly vanishing, and which occupies the final third of these pages. At the heart of each essay lies an expedition, whether for a single day, or several, or weeks or longer still, excursions that allow his mind to wander.

In the opening pieces, he stays close to home, although that home has moved about from Cordova to Fairbanks to Nome.

Near Cordova, he goes ice skating on Sheridan Lake, a favored pastime for local residents, albeit one available for only a brief window of opportunity. Here he considers the history of a sport imported into America along with the Europeans who colonized the continent, “pioneers” who arrived thousands of years after the original inhabitants, and who later brought both skates and bicycles to Alaska when they began streaming into the recently purchased territory late in the 19th century.

In Fairbanks he follows his long-ago predecessors into winter biking, pedaling through the city before fat tires and warming temperatures made it the wildly popular means of transportation it is today.

In Nome, a town carved into the land by a brief Gold Rush, he ruminates on the interplay of man and earth while picking blueberries, the bounty of this northern corner of the planet. It’s a place where muskoxen, which he lightheartedly dubs “beefy haystacks,” were once hunted to extinction, were then reintroduced, and now wander the nearby tundra and sometimes through the city itself. He describes his one-time home, a small outpost of civilization amidst faraway wilds, as being “as real as Alaska gets.”

Elsewhere, Engelhard marches to other locations, accessible by road or reachable only by sea or plane.

At the peak of the pandemic, he visits Castner Glacier, located in the Alaska Range near the Richardson Highway, and considers what the now rapid retreat of these massive sheets of ice means for the earth, as well as what their melting has uncovered about the past of this planet and its residents.

Leading a class of Outward Bound students deep into Resurrection Bay, he and his charges are confronted by the reality of bears and their hidden presence at all times in a land still teeming with wildlife.

And on the Koyukuk River, he is accompanied by a French woman who responded to his profile in Alaska Men magazine, only to lose her interest after a momentary error mars their previously serene experience, the sort of mistake easily committed in a moment’s absentmindedness.

[Vera Starbard named new Alaska writer laureate]

Ultimately Engelhard lands in the Arctic, the part of Alaska he perhaps knows best. Here he paddles and walks and stumbles his way through the state’s most difficult terrain, where predators ranging from mosquitoes to bears threaten his every step. Mosquitoes, he cautions, “remind us that we are still part of the food chain, and not necessarily at the top.” It’s a lesson driven home more viscerally when he’s charged by a bear near the Hulahula River. “I am not a religious person,” he writes, “yet in situations like these, pledges are made, bargains struck, conversions affected. Souls alchemize in the crucible of fear.”

His own mortality becomes abundantly clear to him when he attempts a winter journey into the Brooks Range at the age of 60, and finally has to abort his efforts and go home.

Home, however, remains the land itself. In lines about a mountain goat marooned by a rising tide on an outcrop on the Inside Passage, he watches the animal find its escape, and offers words that fully capture the Engelhard we meet in this wonderful book:

“I would trade with this bearded recluse in an instant. I’d travel unburdened by gear. I’d grow hairy and hunchbacked and rank, sniffing out mates and competitors. I’d become agile enough to dodge grizzlies and wolves, fearless enough to bed down on vertiginous ledges, and smart enough to avoid our kind.”

[Book review: Twenty years later, Ned Rozell takes another pipeline walk]

[Book review: Every mile through this wild landscape is filled with more than a walking adventure]

[Book review: Photo collection reveals the majesty and peril of sea ice]