For Ben Weissenbach, Alaska felt like the wildest place on Earth.
Growing up in Los Angeles, he daydreamed about trading his smartphone for a backpack and hiking boots. As a teenager, he told his parents he would drive up the coast through Washington state to Alaska and then walk into the wilderness. But it wasn’t until college that Mr. Weissenbach found journalism to be a more legitimate path to answer the questions that gripped his imagination.
Before he left for Alaska for the first time, at age 20, he had spent no more than a handful of nights in a tent. By the time he wrote “North to the Future: An Offline Adventure Through the Changing Wilds of Alaska,” he had learned to survive in the wilderness from some of the state’s most experienced outdoorspeople and leading environmental scientists.
Why We Wrote This
Alaska persists in the imagination as one of the last untamed places on Earth. But for one Gen Z writer, that romantic ideal was replaced by awe, respect, and concern for one of the fastest-warming corners of the planet.
In an interview with the Monitor, Mr. Weissenbach shared his thoughts on how technology has penetrated our most private moments and public lives. He explains how the Arctic is poised to change – because of the warming planet – and the ways in which Alaska changed him. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What do you think are the benefits and pitfalls of going cold into something in your 20s?
I think the benefit, journalistically, was that I threw myself into some situations that led to a really steep learning curve and some extraordinary experiences, and into a narrative about what makes this particular moment in history interesting and strange. Alaska was some place that I had just read about and dreamed about for a while. I was totally unprepared, for example, spending months at a time in the wilderness with someone like Roman Dial, who’s one of the most skilled outdoorspeople in the world. I also think what makes the book fun and relatable is that I went in at zero both in competence and in knowledge level.
Why did you feel that a first-person nonfiction narrative was the best approach?
The first draft of the book was much more detached, and I didn’t have much of a voice, but soon I realized that part of what was interesting was the “attentional education” I was receiving from these scientists. As a kid who grew up in Los Angeles, I experienced much of the world through a screen. As I traveled through the landscape with these scientists, it seemed at the beginning as though we were moving through two separate worlds. I was completely oblivious. I was not used to paying attention to things that weren’t competing for my attention. And so that experience of learning how to read a wild landscape and how to reconsider my generation’s technological inheritance seemed like an essential theme. I tried to draw in my experience to the extent it is representative of a broad swath of my generation.
What is it about Alaska, rather than another part of the Arctic, that really appealed to you?
The authors I was reading as a kid ranged from Jack London to Jon Krakauer and, eventually, John McPhee. In the works of these writers, the frontier had never really closed; it had just moved north. They described a place that was wild, and of a scale that seemed impossible to comprehend without actually going there. So, I wanted to see if a place like that really still existed.
How did you get these experts to take you along on their trips?
When I arrived in Alaska, I backpacked around the state asking people, “If you could talk to one person, who would it be?” And a lot of the names I was given were environmental scientists, which sounds strange until you realize that Alaska is perhaps the fastest-warming corner of our planet, and it’s really sparsely populated. There’s very little infrastructure. So, there’s a very small cadre of scientists with both the academic skill set and the wilderness chops to figure out what’s actually going on. So, that seemed like the biggest story when I landed in Alaska. If I wanted to understand contemporary Alaska, these were the people to follow.
What was your relationship with technology, and how did you feel as you were disconnecting?
I was just blown away by how different my mind was for months away from the internet. I didn’t know how to experience the world without those mediating devices. I didn’t know how to experience it in a more direct, present way. I didn’t know how good that could feel. The book is by no means an indictment of these tools. Many of them we really need to understand our surroundings and communicate about them. Yet there are kinds of attention that don’t find a place in our contemporary media environment. I was discovering, by spending time in the wilderness, just what I was leaving behind and what is really worth fighting for.
How did you feel about making your mother worry?
When I first began doing these trips, I didn’t believe that anything bad could ever happen to me. Call it hubris. I sort of believed that I could get out of any situation and in the course of these travels, I was slowly learning to consider the consequences of my actions.
I especially began to think more about how getting hurt might affect my mother because Roman Dial, an extraordinary biologist with whom I spent several months, had the devastating experience of losing his son, who was in his 20s and went out and did a wild wilderness adventure and never reappeared. I heard from Roman the pain of that experience, which he also recounted in heart-wrenching detail in [his book] “The Adventurer’s Son.” So I became a much more careful person.
The Arctic is having a moment. Is that a good thing, or not so good thing, and why?
I think it’s inevitable. The Arctic has a place in the public imagination as one of the last great, wild regions, and rightfully so. It’s full of cultures and ecosystems that inspire awe, yet it’s also the region most radically impacted by our lifestyles and, especially, by climate change. It’s warming roughly three times faster than the rest of the planet, which is causing mountainsides to collapse, and soils to sag, ice sheets to melt, forests to burn, and entire ecosystems to reshuffle. The way these ecosystems respond is one of the great mysteries of our time.
What message do you hope readers will take away from the book?
I hope they enjoy it, that they find it fun and funny and entertaining. I also hope it speaks to concerns they might have about their own relationship to technology and what the devices that have flooded our world are doing to our attention, particularly our relationship to the nonhuman world. I’d be thrilled if it provides a nudge to people to think critically about their relationship to those technologies.
