A Voice in the Wilderness
It is June 2. My arms full of children, I crouch in a ten-seater Cessna Caravan and ready myself and six others for the flight across Kodiak Island, Alaska. Every summer since 1978, I have left my winter island home for our fish camp, where my family and I commercial fish for salmon. We will fly sixty miles over wilderness, mountains, glaciers, and fjords to a mile-long island with a population of eight-our family alone. This place has no roads, cars, or electricity, except what we generate ourselves, and days will often pass there before I see a human being other than my children. Our only contact with the outside world is a quirky, on-again, off-again radio-phone.
When I am not fishing or tending children, I make my way down to ashed that sits on pilings over the Gulf of Alaska waters that beat timeand tide against the foundations of my dwelling. I am surrounded bymountain and ocean wilderness that sucks the breath out of all whofirst see it. Out my window, I can see bald eagles and peregrinefalcons stirring the winds; sea lions, otters, and whales cruise by intheir own currents; volcanoes steam on the horizon.
It is here that I write-poetry, essays, nonfiction. I could not havechosen a geography or two occupations-fishing and writing-morefreighted with the folklore of self-sufficiency, rugged individualism, andfierce independence.
These clichés happen to be real life for us. We built our own house anddug our own well; we fish by hand. Like a latter-day Adam and Eve,we dress and keep our own island world. For a writer, the romanticimages are equally accurate-the author in pensive solitude, breathingin rarified inspiration from the lap of undefiled creation, the numbingdin of popular culture thousands of miles away.
But I would give it all up in an iambic heartbeat. I know exactly what Iam missing. As an undergraduate at a Christian college, I joined withfaculty, students, and friends in the pursuit of integrating faith, art,and knowledge. How do we make every thought, every artisticexpression captive to the Lordship of Christ? How do we redeem alanguage so fractured and bent it no longer references a recognizableworld? We harnessed ourselves together in asking questions likethese, and in our attempts at answering them. We spoke the samelanguage. We were many, yet we were one.
Since then, in my teaching career, I have created numerous writingworkshops and learned that community is far more than peoplegathering in the same room to share and perfect their work. Therewere carnivorous groups, out for the hunt and spill of blood. Happysocial groups, united in dodging the hard work of truth. Complainerswho plotted subversion. Cheerleaders who thrilled to every trite,tripping phrase. The alchemy to produce writing groups where ironsharpens iron is elusive, at best.
This brings some comfort to me as I sit, writing, during the months ofmy fish camp exile. I worry that solitude will lapse into solipsism, andwish for fellowship around words, literature, poetry, faith. A few selectjournals and magazines assuage this ache and remind me I am notalone. But thankfully it is not enough. My need sends me further, tothe final source of all community-the Word itself. It is here that thehardest work begins.
In the shed that serves as my prayer closet and writing studio, I openthe Scriptures and enter a swirl of mysteries I cannot parse: Word andworld, logos uttering forth cosmos, the aspirating spirit rattling thetongue of holy writ in my ear. This other world, these words, undo me.In their company, I am lost, I am found, I am freed from thesuffocating bounds of self. As I work at writing memoir and nonfiction,holding up the tattered pieces of my life in a search for language toshape and redeem them, I invite the gaze of another-the Word-creatorhimself. This is the ultimate writing workshop.
Sometimes I am quiet, simply listening. Other times, I am Jacob, who,having ushered the rest of his family to a safe distance, then stolidlyapproaches the theophany, sweaty hands on his wrists, not letting gountil the words he needs are spoken, the blessing given. This duel is asingular enterprise. No one can stand in for me. And though theprevailing metaphor for the church-the human body-is thequintessential image of community (many parts, one body), St. Pauladmonishes us as well to "work out our own salvation with fear andtrembling." Whether we live in the heart of Manhattan or on an islandin Alaska , this is the hard work done on our knees, alone. This is thehard work of writing, nothing less than a fearful working out of ourdaily salvation.
I write about the virtues of working in isolation because I must. In afew weeks, I will pack up house and children and make the flight outto our distant island. I will always long for community in this place,and in my winter island home as well, and will read journals and joinconferences and workshops whenever possible, but I am reconciled tothe boundaries set around me. I am learning not to fear isolation andneed. Indeed, as a writer, I am fed by the tensions that define my life.Perhaps these are the same tensions that define the lives of believerseverywhere-who stand every day with their two feet in oppositionalworlds.
On the day that all longing is filled, will my pen fall silent? Or, perhaps,finally, in the company of redeemed fellow writers and artists, I willfind my best and truest voice, a choral voice.