Alaska has always had an aura of mythology, and it’s easy to see why. Just plop a mountain like Denali into a state and you will have climbers dying on it. Have Jack London come into the North, almost die of scurvy, then retreat to sunny California to write hairy-chested and Darwinist tales of the…
All posts by Pete Kauffman
Jehovah’s Witnesses Don’t Go to Heaven
Or, How Not to Evangelize It’s been disappointing enough today, incurring debts from gracious people and otherwise being stuck a hundred miles north of nowhere. Never mind. So I’m sitting on the edge of a weathered deck, trying to pilfer some WIFI to tell my family that everything is fine, which is not a complete…
Epiphany of Fatherhood
“…parenthood is not an exact science, but a vexed privilege and a blessed trial, absolutely necessary and not altogether possible.” —Wendell Berry She cries. I cry, but not for the same reasons. “You want to hold her?” they ask. Do I want to hold my baby girl! I reach her away and it takes me five…
Nonsense
It’s a post-Covid waiting room with all the magazines gone, the television and radio playing simultaneously. I have an ear cocked to the radio and an eye to the television while passively consuming these media like a decent citizen. On the television: “Eggs are not a dairy product.” Is that why they call them chicken…
Big Words and Haters
The trouble with using a four-foot-long word is you risk sounding ostentatious. (See what I mean?) I’ve tried to argue that we should learn more and bigger words, but I’ve been trounced by smarter people and I surrender. But I must make one final jab at the editors and readers who have not humored me.…
Not All Who Wonder are Ignorant
Sketch: Saturday morning, 5:30, Kenai River flats, 32*F Sandhill cranes, long legged and musical, pitching into the mud with stilted legs outstretched. A flock of several hundred White-fronted geese, these with a watery cackle, circle once and come in. The sky is alive with birds: Lesser Canada Geese, Pintails and Mallards, a wigeon, some Northern…
Book Review: The Need to Be Whole by Wendell Berry
The Need to Be Whole is, by Wendell Berry’s own admission, a “pondering and ponderous book.” Approaching 500 pages, the ponderousness comes in part from Berry’s abhorrence of shadowy language that might allow some assumption to crawl under the back fence and set up shop. Any word with the suffix –ism calls for a page or two…
Sketch: Home
These were the men who raised me, brothers and coworkers, all of them better men than I. They taught me what they knew and many things they didn’t. They said, “Drive safe,” which was a banal thing to say. I checked the tire pressure on the car while they talked about their work for the…
The Distinctly Masculine Art of Journaling
Perhaps you are out there somewhere, but among my acquaintances, I can count on one hand the people who are simultaneously journal-keepers and male. Every now and then when The Wags stand around the barbecue pit on Father’s day, I like to imagine everybody sitting down with a tablet, pen, and cup of Earl Grey…
What a Wonderful World
According to the digital thermometer it is six below, Fahrenheit. The horizons are crystallized in a band of orange and contrasted with the deep blue of the sub-arctic sky. The sun is out of sight now, but while the land is in shadow, the clouds over the mountains refract the last rays of the sun…