God Gun & Big Water

A story told from the perspective of a sixty-seven-year-old man facing the physical challenge of a six-week, 800 mile, expedition into the wilderness, and with the craftsmanship of a Journalist with 30 years of writing experience. It is an engaging story that flows smoothly with the variety of the River.

This is a story of total immersion into Nature. It’s woven with the themes of the Spiritual experience, the constant vigilance for self-defense and interaction with the surprising and unpredictable forces of the River.

It shows the side of Nature that is unavailable for most. In two words, it was ‘clean’ and ‘quiet.’ For example, most people have never heard a whole movement from a bird’s repertoire, uninterrupted by other sounds. It is a common concert in the wilderness.

When dancing with Nature, She takes you to your edge, between life and death, and waltzes you gracefully along it, while consuming your total consciousness with Her beauty and Her strength. But you have to go to Her, where She lives unblemished by man, to get this kind of dance. The Yukon River is such a place.

The third longest river in North America, at about 2,000 miles, it is in the same league as the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. It drains the vast northwestern wilderness from the Continental Divide in British Columbia, across the Yukon Territory and into Alaska. It enters on the eastern border, and traverses 1,100 miles across the great state to the Bering Sea on Alaska’a far west coast.

The Mighty Yukon is unrestrained by man, and is controlled only by natural flood plains and canyons. There are no navigational improvements like levies, dredging of channels, locks or dams. Sandbars come and go. Sometimes suddenly.

It is without pollutants from man. There are no major agriculture operations or industry on its banks or in its watershed. The people who live along its shore are mostly Natives or fur trappers.

Think Mississippi River before the Steamboat Era. The only mark of man along its Alaskan shores are the fishing villages of the indigenous people, the homesteads of the Bush dwellers who live along the River, and a bridge.

Upstream, in Canada, the water is clear. In Alaska, it is cloudy with silt run-off. Still a remarkably clean river, that smells piney and flowery all along its banks. There is no carrion. That which dies gets eaten before it rots. In paddling over 800 miles on one of the largest freshwater fisheries in the world, I saw one dead fish.

Nature is in balance, and She makes you want to use your nose more.

Borealis Books presents

Excerpt from the First Chapter