Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska BY Seth Kantner (Milkweed Editions, 2009) From the Publisher: “Beginning with his parents’ migration to the wilderness of Arctic Alaska and extending to contemporary struggles between subsistence living and sport hunting, Shopping for Porcupine provides an… account of life in the far north. A grown man’s appreciation for his young daughter’s unfettered understanding of language; enlightened meditations on the permanence, severity, and grandeur of nature; and finally, elegiac warnings and stirring calls to action — taken together, these essays provide a revealing portrait of the author of the bestselling novel Ordinary Wolves, and of the land he so deeply loves.”

If there’s one lesson aspiring authors are taught in Memoir: 101, it’s that one of the most fundamental responsibilities of the nonfiction writer is to unlock the door to the reader’s life. In other words, it is possible to conjure up empathy and compassion from the reader if the author can convince them that his/her story is also the story of the reader, even if it is not. The job of a memoirist, a good memoirist, is to take a literary snapshot of a particular time or significant experience from their life, package and present it in a way that makes the writer’s true story an analogy to the reader’s, which then reveals a universal truth about humanity, and if possible, about the whole world. (To wit: make the specifics general.) The task of inspiring empathy ain’t easy. Aside from the elementary obstacles, such as bad writing or lack of talent, the writer faces many challenges and distractions, like fear or ego, and temptations like political agendas or revenge, not to mention the writer’s marathon of finding a publisher once the book is written. But when a storyteller succeeds, the former aspiring writer (now “published author”) is transformed into an amalgamation of titles: therapist, entertainer, goodwill ambassador, guide, and looking glass, because their work has reached a tender, vulnerable spot in the reader’s heart, and a profound connection has been made. The author’s story becomes a parable of my story, of your story, of everyone’s story. I felt that the Alaskan-born, -bred and -based author knew exactly who I was, unerringly how I was feeling, and precisely what I felt about life in general, even though our life stories were polar opposites. I am a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. I live with my husband and two dogs on a 4th floor walk-up apartment. Each morning, my husband gets into a crowded subway car full of silent strangers avoiding eye contact and he rides into Manhattan, where he has a job building buildings. I stay at home with the dogs and write. In our neighborhood, we can buy mangoes at a bodega down the street at any time of the year. If we want heat in the winter, we send a piece of paper with a number on it to strangers in another city and they turn on our radiator. During my days and nights, I am rarely more than ten feet away from another human, even if it is a piece of drywall that conceals us from one another, and still I often find myself a bit lonely and isolated. I live in a city with over 2.5 million residents (and fewer trees), almost 5,000 miles from Alaska, yet when I read the Seth Kanter’s memoir Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska, I felt that the Alaskan-born, -bred and -based author knew exactly who I was, unerringly how I was feeling, and precisely what I felt about life in general, even though our life stories were polar opposites. Even though I was raised in Michigan, have never slept in a sod igloo on the Arctic Tundra wrapped in caribou hides after swimming in an ice floe while hunting for wounded waterfowl, even though my parents weren’t back-to-the-land free spirits from Ohio who moved to the remote Alaskan tundra to live a “semi-Eskimo” existence. Even though my mother is a Polish immigrant who met my father in Chicago, married, then raised three children in Michigan and I wasn’t birthed in an igloo in 1965 like Kanter was, and even though I never dreamed of becoming a great hunter in the Eskimo tradition like Kanter did, I felt after reading his memoir, I could reasonably say, “I am this Seth Kanter, and Seth Kanter is me.” I am this person, and this person is me. Even if I was reading this person’s story about their life in Kotzebue, Alaska while sprawled across my couch in Brooklyn, New York.

In the opening scene of the memoir, Kanter finds himself at the decaying sod igloo of a neighbor, reflecting on innocent times before hunting for survival gave way to recreational hunting. “Although I’m not an elder,” he writes, “sometimes it’s tough watching all these young people and newcomers rush past with their fast and fancy equipment, with little room on board for knowledge and respect for those by-hand times that have recently passed.” It is a theme we are familiar with: unstoppable advance of globalization and the loss of nature, not to mention purity. With Sarah Palin and the Gravina Island Bridge (aka “The Bridge To Nowhere”) having recently put Alaska in the political spotlight, Shopping for Porcupine relates to this theme without getting too preachy; Kanter gives a testimonial that his side of the situation is one we can empathize with, not fight, even if we have never shared his unique upbringing and way of life.

In an unobtrusive, conversational tone, writer and outdoor photographer Kantner recollects the people, places and events that influenced his present outlook, situation and his activism.

In an unobtrusive, conversational tone, writer and outdoor photographer Kantner recollects the people, places and events that influenced his present outlook, situation and his activism. Now in his forties, he writes of how his family ended up in Alaksa, starting with his wandering and slightly stubborn father Howard, a man who scaled Mount McKinley in the early 1960s, and who learned the ancient ways of the indigenous I-upiaq people, which he incorporated into the upbringing of Seth and his brother Kole. As a youth, he and his family subsisted on fish, moose, porcupine and caribou. They drank melted snow and wrapped themselves in hides to stay warm in a place where “frostbite was a way of life.” Kanter narrates more recent adventures with his spouse Stacey on the Alaskan tundra, which soon include their daughter China. All are hearty challenges of day-to-day survival, even if they are as seemingly simple as taking China to kindergarten in 30-degrees-below-zero weather. There are moments when Kanter blatantly advocates for the preservation of the Alaskan tundra, and despite the lack of modesty of stance, his strong opinions are not jarring — he’s earned his right.

In this follow-up to his acclaimed novel, Ordinary Wolves (2004), Kanter writes in a way that does not emphasize the drama (though the material he has to work with is extremely rich and rare). Rather, he calls it as he sees and feels it. When your narrator is a man raised and reared in the Alaskan wilderness, the prose reveals an honesty, purity, and rawness — qualities that are in all of us, somewhere beneath the layers of stress, anxiety and greed we encounter in our daily grind. With a sensitive and youthful voice, as well as his own luscious photographic illustrations, Kanter writes of his life growing up, and living still, in the Arctic. With a sensitive and youthful voice, as well as his own luscious photographic illustrations, Kanter writes of his life growing up, and living still, in the Arctic. He reflects on the struggles of the American Dream (“as in the Old West, it is what we’ve lost that marks who we are much more than these things we’ve gained”), and meditates on global warming and human encroachment onto the wilderness (snowmobiles, the demise of working dogs, apartments and refrigerators). While exploring the choices of seclusion and uncertainty, Kanter documents the wisdom of the disappearing Inuit culture his father revered — a man who left Ohio for Alaska to study, then eventually married and raised a family. He locates the Inuit place in modern life, at times crescendoing (and at times a bit too loudly) his feelings of their desire for modern-day comforts, presenting a bit of irony to his father’s quest (and even his own) to live off the land. The Inuit want comfort, not struggle.

Overall, Kanter writes with honesty and youthful curiosity, and maintains a refusal to romanticize his heritage. He does not censor his thoughts about native hunters and the deterioration of their culture and values, but he does question them without censure, which allows the readers to draw their own conclusions about life in northwest Alaska. Kanter has written his memoir in the present tense, a stylistic choice that makes the narration come across as more lively and fresh. However, such a stylistic choice also has a tendency to pull readers out of the scene and make them question the writer, rather than the narrator (i.e. how can he have these insights if the situation he is reflecting on is happening at that very moment?) Of course, Kanter’s storytelling is not without flaws, but after reaching the halfway mark of the book, the narrator has gained the reader’s trust and far acceded the qualifications that he needs to be considered the master of his domain — the Arctic, and the art of storytelling.

What universal truths do frozen human eyeballs and frostbite, elk heart and moose marrow offer a reader? Maybe it is that man is on a constant quest for meat. Or that humans just want to be warm and comfortable, or that we just want to be loved. Maybe it is that we are doomed unless we take a break from modern technology, or that we have already sealed our fate when Eve and Adam ate that apple. Perhaps the answer lies in the question the reader is asking. I have been told that there is nothing new under the sun, only new ways to tell a story, and that is what I was looking for when doving into Kanter’s Alaska. When I reemerged, not only was I pleased by Kanter’s life story, I was also enlightened by the way he revealed it to me. I believe this was the same way life reveals itself to Kanter: in its most natural form, the wilderness. And in the only way it can: honestly, simply and purely.