SPECIAL FEATURE

They Were My People by John Luther Adams

Drawn from his upcoming memoir Silences So Deep: A Memoir of Music and Alaska, Pulitzer Prize and Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams writes about his music and deep friendship with Gordon Wright and John Haines. They were for him “larger-than-life figures” and “the embodiment of Alaska.”

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John Luther Adams has been called “one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker). A prolific composer inspired by the natural world, Adams’ body of work encompasses theater, chamber music, choral and orchestral works, and electronic sound installations.

Among Adams’ compositions, Inuksuit, his outdoor work for up to 99 percussionists, is performed regularly all over the world. In 2006, Adams created a permanent exhibition, “The Place Where You Go to Listen,” for the Museum of the North on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. This sublime sound and light environment “gives voice to the rhythms of daylight and darkness, the phases of the moon, the seismic vibrations of the earth, and the dance of the aurora borealis, in real time.”

Adams’ orchestral work Become Ocean received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music and a 2015 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Also in 2015, Adams received Columbia University’s William Schuman Award to “recognize the lifetime achievement of an American composer.”

Currently, John Luther Adams is composing Become Desert, a large-scale work for orchestra, and writing his third book, Silences So Deep: A Memoir of Music and Alaska, from which “They Were My People” is an excerpt. An essay titled “Leaving Alaska,” also drawn from the memoir, appeared in 2015 in The New Yorker.

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They Were My People BY John Luther Adams

”I was lucky to have known them when I did . . . they were my people . . . and I do not expect to see their kind again.”

– John Haines

I. Gordon Brooks Wright

We are in the middle of nowhere.

All the other musicians of the Arctic Chamber Orchestra have flown off to the next stop on our tour of villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. With only our backpacks, a duffle bag full of music stands and a pair of kettledrums, Gordon Wright and I are here, alone, waiting for the plane to return.

It is early April. The world around us is an endless expanse of white. After the long night of winter, the sun has come back to the North. The morning is resplendent. But the air is cold. So we stand on the south side of the little shack next to the airstrip, basking in the warm light. Everything is golden.

Gordon and I will share many such moments in the decades to come. Yet although I can’t yet imagine what a touchstone this golden light will become in the years ahead, even now I’m aware that this is a special moment of grace.

I am living a dream. I am twenty-eight years old. Here in Alaska I have found my own Walden – a rough cabin in the boreal forest. I’ve met the woman who will be my life companion, and together we are crusading to protect this place we so passionately love. I’ve composed my first piece for orchestra. I’m playing percussion and my best friend is conducting as we bring the music back out into the land that inspired it, sharing it with the people who have lived here longer than anyone can remember.

Out here amid the snow and sunlight, the world seems filled with possibilities as broad as the country around us. Standing here, I hold a vision of pristine landscapes protected from destructive human incursions, of new music rooted deeply in those landscapes, and a new culture in which we newcomers learn from our Native neighbors how to live in deep harmony with this place. This is a vision that I share with the tall, moose-like, bearded man standing by my side.

Gordon Wright was the friend of a lifetime. For some thirty years he and I shared our two great passions: music and nature. Gordon was my musical collaborator, my fellow environmentalist, my camping buddy and my next-door neighbor in the forest outside Fairbanks.

Although I love Alaska more than any other place on earth, I was never all that enamored of Fairbanks. Even so, I chose this homely boomtown near the Arctic Circle as my hometown for three principal reasons: The woman I had fallen in love with was there. The mountains I had fallen in love with were nearby. And Gordon Wright lived there.

During my first summer in Alaska, I traveled as far north as what is now Denali National Park. But I didn’t make it to Fairbanks until the summer of 1977, when I spent two months in the Brooks Range. Passing through town between my Arctic journeys, I had lunch with Gordon.

Gordon had come north in 1969, to teach at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and to serve as music director of the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra. Before long, he had created the Arctic Chamber Orchestra – a smaller ensemble designed to foster cultural exchange in village Alaska. And in 1971, amid the frenzy over construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, Gordon helped establish the Fairbanks Environmental Center.

Over that first meal together, Gordon endorsed my determination to live in Alaska and encouraged me to settle in Fairbanks. He told me all about his life in his cabin in the woods a few miles west of town. He said there could be good opportunities for a young composer to work with the Fairbanks Symphony and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra, and possibly with the music department at the University of Alaska. Although we environmentalists were decisively outnumbered on the northern line, Gordon told me that I would find a strong community of like-minded people who were working hard to make a difference in the future of the young state.

Over the next year, when I was back on the ranch in Idaho, Gordon and I exchanged letters. He told me more about life in Fairbanks and encouraged me to keep looking for a way to make my home there. By the summer of 1978, my first marriage had hit the rocks. I was trying to figure out what to do next when I received the letter that changed my life. Gordon told me that the Fairbanks Environmental Center was looking for a new executive director, and that he and Jim Kowalsky (another co‑founder of the group) thought I was the guy for the job. So I headed north.

Soon after I arrived in Fairbanks, Gordon informed me that I was going to play timpani with the Fairbanks Symphony and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra – an idea that didn’t especially appeal to me. I was working overtime as an environmental activist, and settling into a new relationship with Cindy. I had little interest in most orchestral music. So, for a couple of years, I resisted Gordon’s conscription campaign. But eventually, perhaps inevitably, I relented.

Gordon finally persuaded me with a sort of devil’s bargain: If I would play in his orchestras, he would play my music. There’s no doubt that I got the better end of this deal. But Gordon held up his end faithfully and with genuine conviction for the rest of his life.

Although I’d never played timpani, I was a percussionist of sorts and I knew how to read a score. Besides, if Gordon believed I could do it, then who was I to doubt? So I ordered some mallets by mail and began practicing. Since I didn’t have free access to the timpani at the university, I practiced at home in my cabin, where my “drums” were four pillows from the sofa.

My first concert with the Fairbanks Symphony included Credendum by William Schuman, which has a big flashy timpani solo. I practiced diligently on my pillow drums, and at the first rehearsal I nailed the part. Some of the musicians in the orchestra applauded. My fate was sealed, and for the next decade or so, I was Gordon’s timpanist.

Gordon was my best friend. Yet whenever he was on the podium and I was behind the drums, he always addressed me as “Timpani . . .” Calling me by the name of my instrument made it clear that the work at hand was not personal. This was not about us. It was about the music.

At one of my early rehearsals, I took my one and only unauthorized timpani solo. We were reading through Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony for the first time. At the beginning of the final movement, there’s a moment when the orchestra tattoos a unison rhythm, followed by silence. I spaced out and I fell behind by a couple of beats.

The orchestra played: Bum-bum BUM . . .

And the drums answered boldly: Boom-boom BOOM . . . !

Gordon stopped and looked at me.

“Timpani . . .” he said with mock empathy, “you’re allowed to do that . . .”

(He paused for dramatic effect before adding emphatically . . .)

“Once!”

Everyone burst out laughing. I tried to disappear beneath the drums. And I never played in a rest again.

In time I became a fairly good timpanist, probably better than I had been as a rock drummer. I relished the big timpani parts in Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler and Sibelius. I remember how proud I was when I managed to play the fiendishly difficult chromatic passage for timpani in the fourth movement of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra. The key was to remove my shoes and play the quick pedal changes in my sock feet.

Under Gordon’s direction, the Fairbanks Symphony played lots of music that by all rights should’ve been beyond the capabilities of a volunteer orchestra on the edge of nowhere. But, with classic Alaskan spirit, we didn’t care. We fearlessly tackled anything that appeared on our music stands. “The world’s scrappiest orchestra,” Gordon called us.

Over the course of the years Gordon led me on a never-ending quest for his ideal timpani sound. Riffing on the German word for the kettledrums (“pauken”), he called this elusive Holy Grail: Pauke (pronounced POWK!).

We were rehearsing the Bach B-minor Mass when Gordon implored:

“Timpani, I need more Pauke!”

I tried harder mallets. The Maestro wasn’t satisfied.

“More Pauke!”

I pulled out the hardest mallets I had. Still, Gordon wanted more, exhorting me:

“It should sound like socking a cow in the belly!”

So I turned my mallets over and used the wooden butts.

Gordon loved the sound! And I played the entire B-minor Mass with the wrong end of the sticks.

I never went to graduate school. Instead, I went to Alaska. Over the years I’ve come to feel that my time playing timpani in the Fairbanks Symphony was more valuable to me than any graduate school might’ve been. And perhaps only in Alaska would such an opportunity have been available to me.

Gordon called me “the second conductor,” and I took this seriously. Not only did I learn my timpani parts, I also studied the scores of the major pieces we played. I came to know a lot of great music that I’d previously avoided. And in the process, I learned a great deal about large-scale form and about orchestration, which has served me well in my own music.

As promised, Gordon performed a lot of my music over the years. He commissioned and conducted first performances of The Far Country of Sleep and The Light That Fills the World. He led performances of Forest Without Leaves on a tour of northern Europe and Scandinavia. And he gave me my very first commission. While still working full-time as an environmental crusader, I composed A Northern Suite for Gordon and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra.

In those days I wrote my manuscripts with calligraphy pens and ink on vellum paper, which I would send down to Los Angeles for printing. I had just received the freshly printed and bound scores of A Northern Suite in the mail, so Gordon and I walked over to the student center to have lunch and talk through the new piece.

As we sat down with our lunch trays, I realized I’d forgotten to get something to drink. So I went back for some orange juice. When I returned, I saw Gordon sitting with a puzzled scowl on his face.

“Uh-oh,” I thought. “He’s not happy with the score.”

Then I noticed that he hadn’t even turned to the first page of music. The focus of Gordon’s consternation was not the notes, but the inscription inside the title page – one of my favorite passages from a poem by John Haines:

There are silences so deep
you can hear
the journeys of the soul,
enormous footsteps downward
in a freezing earth.

“This doesn’t make any sense!” Gordon protested.

He read the words aloud and asked, indignantly: “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Simultaneously flummoxed and relieved, I replied:

“It’s poetry, Gordy! It doesn’t have to make sense . . . Just go with it. Just listen to the sound of the words.”

Apparently he did. In the years to come, Gordon became John Haines’ most devoted fan, amassing a collection of the complete Haines – seeking out every chapbook, every broadside, every limited edition of every poem and essay that the bard of Richardson ever published. And over the years, he also came to believe that sound rather than syntax was the key to making sense of my music.

For my 50th birthday, Cindy and I were in New York, where our friends Fred and Alexandra Peters threw a surprise party for me. And there was Gordon – jumping out from behind the couch with the other guests. Later that week, we heard a performance of my piece Red Arc/Blue Veil at Juilliard. Our friend and fellow Alaskan, Steve Williams, was with us. Just before the performance Steve leaned over and said (somewhat facetiously) to Gordon:

“I’m not always sure how to listen to John’s music. Do you have any words of wisdom?”

In his most expansive tone Gordon advised Steve:

“Just let it wash over you. Don’t try to make sense of it. Just go with the sound.”

During my early years in Fairbanks I lived in a series of cabins, first alone on Farmer’s Loop Road, and then with my girlfriend Cindy and her young son, Sage – on Grenac Road, the Old Steese Highway, and on a hillside in the Goldstream Valley. But Cindy and I were having difficulty adjusting to living together, and I moved out to a tiny place high up on Ester Dome.

One evening after orchestra rehearsal Gordon informed me, matter-of‑factly: “We’re going to be next-door neighbors. Tomorrow I’m going to take you to the cabin you’re going to buy.”

A few years earlier, Gordon’s marriage had come apart. He moved out of the family house in the suburbs and found a small cabin in the woods a few miles west of the University. The area was known as Findlay Forest, after Findlay Abbott, who had homesteaded 160 acres of spruce woods, then divided it up and given most of it away to his friends with the dream of creating a kind of Alaskan Ecotopia.

The Forest is almost entirely underlain with permafrost. So none of the cabins have running water, and there’s no year-round road. Everyone parks in a gravel lot near the road and hikes in to their places. Farthest back in the woods, a mile-and-a-half from the road, was the cabin of Dan and Helen Adams. Dan had built the cabin himself, hauling the materials in by sled and on his back. They were preparing for the arrival of their first baby, and had decided it was time to move out of the spruce bog and up onto the ridge somewhere. So they were selling “The Adams Place.”

Dan and Helen said they’d be happy to pass it along to another Adams for whatever the appraised value might be. That sounded fair to me. The appraisal came in at $42,500, for a rambling cabin and five acres of stunted forest. That was a lot of money to me. But it might have been substantially more if the appraiser hadn’t declared the property “Functionally Obsolete.” The report defined the term this way:

“Functional Obsolescence is the inability of a property to perform the function for which it is intended. The subject property is impaired by lack of convenient access, and therefore indicates functional obsolescence.”

As I read this, my heart swelled with backwoods pride. For years this declaration hung prominently on the wall by my desk.

Among the many benefits of life in Findlay Forest were the impromptu music lessons.

Early one Sunday Gordon dropped by my cabin. I’m not a morning person and Gordon was surprised to find me already sitting at my desk, looking very intent.

“What are you working on?” he asked.

“Oh. It’s a piece for flute choir,” I sighed. “It kept me up most of the night.”

“What seems to be the problem?”

Over a hot cup of coffee I showed Gordon the sequence of chords I had sketched out.

“I like the sound of these,” I complained. “I just can’t figure out what to do with them.”

Gordon took a sip and gazed slowly around the room. Finally his eyes settled on my refrigerator, which was covered with bright blue paisley wallpaper. After a long, pensive silence he said:

“Your chords are nice . . . But flutes like lots of notes and squiggles and curlicues . . .

“Just write your refrigerator!”

That’s exactly what I did.

I remember one afternoon sitting at the big desk in Gordon’s cabin (“Command Central,” as he called it), showing him a new piece I was working on. The tempo was slow, and the textures were sparse, with lots of long sustained tones and glacially deliberate glissandi.

Gordon mused for a while. “Hmmm . . . ,” he muttered. “Things take time in the Arctic!”

A few years later, we were at Command Central again, looking over the draft of a new score I was composing for the Fairbanks Symphony. Gordon said nothing at all about the notes. He zeroed right in on the orchestration.

“You might want to add a flute here, doubling the first violins. And have you thought about pizzicato ’cellos here?”

I had studied orchestration. I had practiced orchestration in my own music. I had even taught orchestration at the University of Alaska. But Gordon’s approach was organic – like a painter mixing colors, or a chef in the kitchen, adding a pinch of this or a dash of that, here and there. This was the moment when I truly “got” orchestration.

Soon after I settled into life in the Forest, Gordon and I established a regular ritual. Every Sunday evening, at his cabin, we shared sauna followed by dinner. By the time I arrived, around 6:30 PM, Gordon usually had the sauna hot. We’d sweat for an hour or so, then adjourn to the cabin to finish cooking and then to dine, sip Scotch and continue talking.

Our conversations were wide-ranging – the miracles of music, the mysteries of women, the conundrum of politics, the geography of Alaska, and the meaning of existence. Often, we’d read aloud to one another, sharing poems, humor or profundities we’d come across in our individual reading.

The conversation at sauna was different than our conversations on camping trips, travels with the orchestra or our day-to‑day work together. At sauna things were relaxed and wide open. Yet there was also a kind of formality to the proceedings. In that small ritual space our friendship deepened. Some of the most meaningful conversations Gordon and I shared were at sauna.

In time, Gordon and I invited other friends to join us on Sunday evening. Birch Pavelsky, the carpenter poet, and Dietrich Strohmaier, an insightful retired surveyor who came to Alaska in the 1940s, became regulars. Gordon dubbed us “The Ace Lake Sauna Society,” after the lake in the woods beyond my cabin.

Over the years the Ace Lake Sauna Society acquired other regulars: John Kristopeit, a neighbor in the Forest who was studying wildlife biology and working at the public radio station; Leif Thompson, the musician physician; and John Kooistra, the fisherman philosopher.

From time to time we’d host visiting dignitaries – guest soloists with the Fairbanks Symphony, the writer Barry Lopez and our very own poet, John Haines. John was well into his 80s when I finally persuaded him to join us at sauna. It was minus 40 degrees that night, and at one point on the walk in to Gordon’s cabin I was seriously concerned that we might lose John to hypothermia. I could just see the headlines in the News-Miner: “Local Composer Kills Poet Laureate in Pagan Ritual.” But the poet survived, and we all had another story to tell.

At each gathering, usually after sauna and before dinner, Gordon – our self-appointed and unanimously anointed benevolent despot – would convene an ersatz business meeting. During these sessions we discussed matters of grave import. Would we take a stand on the situation in Eastern Europe? When and where would we get our next load of firewood? Who would bring dessert to the next meeting? And who would bring the beer?

For several years we had regular beer tastings in the sauna. Each week one of the crew would be designated host, to present a flight of brews around a theme of his choosing. One week I might present Belgian ales. The next week, Leif might present West Coast micro-brews. After that John Kristopeit would treat us to lambics, or ales of the British Isles. But the most memorable evening by far was Gordon’s presentation of a “swill tasting.”

“Nothing in a bottle,” the host proclaimed. “Cans only.”

Our beer tastings were “blind,” with all beverages presented in brown paper bags. One by one, each bottle (or can) was passed around the sauna. Commentary was offered. And after a second round of tasting, we rated each numerically – from 0 to 10 – tallied up the scores, took the average and declared the winner.

Gordon presented some astonishing brews that evening – Schaefer, Schlitz, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Colt 45. Due to the unusual nature of this particular theme, the scoring system was inverted. The brew with the lowest score was proclaimed the winner. As I recall, it was Hamm’s. But the standout novelty of the night was Prinz Brau, produced by a brewery in Anchorage that had gone out of business several years before. The beer had not improved with age.

Sometime in the ’80s, a very fine brewery started up in Juneau. Alaskan Amber soon became the house beer at Gordon’s cabin. And although we tasted an ever-wider range of single malts over the years, Glenmorangie became Gordon’s house whisky.

Another highlight of our sauna gatherings was the readings. As with the beer tastings, we rotated the curatorship. We read John Haines. Occasionally one of us would present a poem our own. A recurring favorite of mine was to read the “Shouts and Murmurs” humor column from The New Yorker. But the literary patron saint of the Ace Lake Sauna Society was Ambrose Bierce.

We had an edition of The Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce that Gordon had picked up in a used bookstore. We called it “The Good Book,” and we read from it at almost every meeting. When we were short on time, we’d read a few brief selections from The Devil’s Dictionary or Fantastic Fables. Over the years, we worked our way through most of the Bierce canon, including the bizarre novella The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter. My very favorite was “Oil of Dog,” a short story from the collection titled The Parenticide Club. The first time Gordon read it aloud, I snorted and belly-laughed uncontrollably. And we returned to it time and again.

The Sauna Society also had a mascot. I had come to Alaska with my dog Rascal, an English Setter/German Shepherd mix. Rascal lived up to his name. He was unfriendly to almost anyone but me. He lived with Cindy, Sage and me in the cabin on the Old Steese Highway. And when our next-door neighbor’s chickens began disappearing, Rascal also disappeared. Although we were never sure exactly what happened to him, we have a pretty good idea. But Rascal had the last laugh. A few weeks after he disappeared, the neighbor’s dog gave birth to a whole litter of little Rascals. One of those puppies was Pogo.

Pogo was the dog of my lifetime. As sweet as his father had been cranky, he was my loyal companion for thirteen years. Always formally attired in his smooth black coat and gleaming white breast, he was a regular fixture at sauna, curling up contentedly on the rug while the boys carried on. Pogo loved everybody. And everybody loved Pogo. Gordon called Pogo his Zen master.

As Pogo got old and sickly, Gordon sensed that he wasn’t long for this world. So before leaving town, he came up to our house on Coyote Trail to say goodbye. He lay down on the floor and pressed his nose against Pogo’s nose, looked into his eyes and whispered softly to him. After Pogo died, we had a little ceremony for him in the sauna. Gordon told us that now our challenge was to find “the Pogo within.”

In 1989 Gordon retired from the Symphony and the University, and moved from Fairbanks to his new cabin in Rainbow Valley, south of Anchorage. He talked about selling the cabin in Findlay Forest for real, but I protested so vociferously that he kept the place. A couple of times each year, he would come up for a week or two and we would convene the old crew for sauna. And though the meetings now are fewer and farther between, the Ace Lake Sauna Society has continued into its fourth decade.

In his mid-sixties, Gordon faced significant challenges. As he faced his own mortality, he wrestled with regrets about the past and uncertainty about the future. We talked about this at length, when we were alone in the sauna, and on a series of float trips we made down the middle section of the Tanana River. But as he approached his 70th birthday, Gordon told me that he felt as though he had achieved “a vast new plateau.”

In spring 2003 Gordon and I were on our annual campout in the Alaska Range. I mentioned that I planned to surprise John Haines with a new song setting of a poem from Winter News, as a gift for the poet’s 80th birthday. Gordon allowed that this was a good idea. Then, with his inimitable gentle bluntness, he asked: “So . . . What are you gonna do for my 70th?”

In good fun he continued to kvetch that my recent orchestral music was too long and too difficult for the orchestras he usually conducted. Maybe, Gordon allowed, he’d just have to orchestrate my Haines setting, so he would have something of mine to perform. I probably groaned. And though I made no promises, I resolved then and there to take the matter into my own hands.

So in honor of Gordon’s matriculation as a septuagenarian, I finally did something I had talked about for many years. I revised A Northern Suite. It had always been a problematic opus for me. Yet there was something in this youthful effort that kept me from withdrawing the entire piece, as I had done with a number of my early works.

As I worked on the revisions I felt a renewed sense of gratitude to Gordon. He had asked for this piece, almost twenty-five years before, giving me my first opportunity to compose for orchestra and to actually hear the music performed. He conducted the ragtag Arctic Chamber Orchestra in the premiere performances on that mythic tour of western Alaska. A year or so later Gordon and the band recorded A Northern Suite for a small independent record label called Opus One. These were tectonic events in the life of an aspiring young composer.

I’d begun sketching the orchestral version of the Suite at Nome, during the winter of 1978–79. But a first draft for organ and two percussion (titled Northern Summer) dates back to the summer of 1975 and my first travels in Alaska. What an extraordinary summer that was: Admiralty Island, Glacier Bay, Denali and Katmai. In a very real way those experiences set the course for the next thirty years of my life and work. And then along came Gordon, who nurtured the growth of the composer and the music at that crucial early stage.

The process of revising A Northern Suite felt a little like renovating a period house. I had to resist the temptation to turn it into something completely new. But it was a joy to discover that seeds planted three decades before had finally come to fruition.

Gordon was traveling that winter, but I sent the score to reach him on his birthday, New Year’s Eve. In the cover letter, I wrote:

Although I took this on as a gift for you, it turns out that I’m the real recipient of the gift. So once again I find myself in your debt.

It’s hard to overstate the influence you’ve had on my life and work, brother man . . . And it’s impossible for me to put into words how I feel about you. Maybe music can come a little closer.

This final version of A Northern Suite premiered in Chicago, several years later. Gordon wasn’t around to conduct it. Yet as I heard the music for the first time, I had the palpable feeling that he was with me.

Gordon often said to me: “I haven’t always understood your music. But I’ve always believed in you.”

What more could a composer ask for?

In April 2006 my sound and light installation The Place Where You Go to Listen opened at the Museum of the North. The culmination of almost thirty years’ experience living in Alaska, The Place is a small room that resonates with the rhythms of the sun and the moon, perturbations of the earth’s magnetic field and seismic activity in Alaska, in real time. Inside The Place, there are no actual sounds of nature or familiar musical instruments. This is a self-contained world of its own.

I stood outside the room, greeting visitors and chatting as they entered and left The Place.

Gordon went in. Just few minutes later I saw him come out, and I thought to myself: “Uh-oh. He’s ‘been there, done that’ . . .”

But Gordon was just coming up for air. He walked right over and told me that he was overwhelmed by the implications of the piece. He proceeded to explain to me the deep connections, the endless possibilities within The Place Where You Go to Listen.

I was relieved, happy that Gordon liked it. More than that, I knew that he truly got the big picture of where The Place comes from, both musically and spiritually. Musically speaking, Gordon and I came from different planets. But we shared the same fundamental faith in the power of music and the sanctity of the planet Earth that come together in The Place Where You Go to Listen.

My last sauna with Gordon was in the fall of 2006. It was a Sunday night, with just the two of us. “Just like old times,” we said. As always, we talked about the past, about how rich, how blessed our lives have been. As always, we talked about the future, discussing the details of our various projects, and our respective itineraries, working out when and where we would see one another next.

Over the course of thirty years, Gordon and I shared many memorable camping trips. The last was in May 2006. This was our annual “spring camp.” But although the calendar said the season had changed, at 4000 feet in the Alaska Range it was still late winter.

Gordon, Cindy and I hiked in to our favorite campsite amid driving snow. We set up our tents, grabbed a quick dinner and ducked for cover.

Cindy was cold, so I snuggled up with her for a while in our tent. Then I bundled her into both our sleeping bags and went to check on Gordon. He didn’t look well. His face was pale. His lips were purple. And he was shivering.

I brought him a cup of hot tea, got him into some more warm clothing, and began massaging his feet. They were ice cold, and the veins in his calves had an ominous blue cast to them.

After a while, he began to warm up. I went back and crawled in with Cindy. But I was unnerved. Gordon had always been a pillar of strength to me. I’d never seen him like this, and I didn’t like it.

The wind howled throughout the brief, crepuscular night, but by morning, the weather broke. The sun came out, the birds came out, and so did we.

After breakfast, as Gordon and I strolled across the tundra, joking and chatting leisurely, his tone became more serious.

“I don’t know how much more time I have left, Johnny . . .”

I didn’t want to hear this, and I must’ve challenged his assertion so vigorously that he decided just to let it go.

We moved on to other subjects.

I’d been commissioned to compose a new work for the Anchorage Symphony. Gordon was my trusted musical advisor, and since he was a veteran orchestra conductor as well as a composer, I knew he’d have a good perspective on the possibilities for the new work.

As he so often did, Gordon hit me with a zinger.

“That hall is big,” he said. “Everything sounds small in there.”

I’d had the same experience with the concert hall in Anchorage, and voiced my agreement.

Gordon went on:

“There’s a good sound system in there, all around the house. You should use it. Do something with electronics.”

Once again, Gordon had hit the bull’s eye. I was off and running.

The next morning, before I was up, Cindy and Gordon sat as they always did, sipping coffee and watching the country.

Gordon tried again.

“Johnny doesn’t want to hear this, but I don’t know how much time I have left . . .”

Without missing a beat, Cindy replied:

“You got enough time for another cup of coffee?”

“Yeah. I think so . . .”

Not much more was said. But the Big Guy had made his point.

At the end of our campout, Cindy and I decided to go for a little stroll among the necklace of ponds on the other side of the road before heading back to Fairbanks. Gordon had to leave for Sitka the following morning, so he decided to go ahead and hit the road south toward Anchorage.

As we stood and watched him drive away and disappear over the hill, I turned to Cindy and said:

“I hope this wasn’t the last time.”

* * *

By the early 2000s, Gordon had taken to shutting down his cabin in the Chugach Mountains above Turnagain Arm to spend his winters at the guest cabin of friends at Timber Cove on the northern California coast. But in 2007 he made a midwinter trip home to Alaska, to hear the premiere of Dark Waves with the Anchorage Symphony.

The week before, I fly down to Anchorage for the first rehearsal. My flight is fifteen minutes early. As usual, so is Gordon. Since I have no checked bags, I figure I’ve got time to visit the men’s room, and then grab a cup of tea for the road. I emerge from the terminal, still a few minutes ahead of myself. And there is Gordon, standing outside his little Toyota Tercel wagon, pretending to look impatiently at his pocket watch.

Damn, it’s good to see him! It’s been almost six months since our last time together in Fairbanks. We embrace, give each other the requisite raft of shit and pick up right where we left off. We’re both looking forward to enjoying another memorable time together.

Downtown, we have dinner with the group of donors who commissioned Dark Waves. Afterwards, Gordon and I walk over to the Hotel Captain Cook and head up to the restaurant on the top floor, which has the best selection of single malt Scotch in Anchorage. He kids me about my high-falootin’ tastes, then defers to me to make the selection. I order a 15‑year Glenfarclas and a 1991 Glenrothes. The waiter puts the former in front of Gordon and the latter at my place.

As always our conversation is wide-ranging and non-stop. As we banter and prattle on, I nose my Scotch, admiring its legs and its color. Eventually I get around to tasting it. After savoring the finish for a few minutes, I think about proposing that we switch glasses. To my shock and dismay, I see that Gordon’s glass is empty!

In the time it’s taken me to muster one wee sip, Gordon has summarily dispatched his full dram. I kid him about his bottom-feeder ways. But I have no doubt that he enjoyed this fine whisky every bit as much as he enjoys the rotgut from Costco that he sometimes brings on our camping trips.

Since he began spending his winters at Timber Cove, Gordon has told me on several occasions about a piece he intends to compose, inspired by that place. Whenever he speaks about this music that he hears in his mind’s ear, he waxes poetic, describing a vast nocturnal sea of sound – dark, surging, beautiful and foreboding.

My response is always the same: “Gordy, that sounds great! You should write that piece!”

Tonight I present Gordon with his copy of the freshly printed score of Dark Waves. He takes a sip of my Scotch, falls silent, and begins studying it.

After a few minutes, he looks up, smiles at me and says:

“Well. I guess don’t have to write my Timber Cove piece . . . You’ve already written it for me!”

No friend can give a more generous blessing than Gordon.

* * *

The next evening I hear the first reading of Dark Waves. The session is in a small, unflattering-sounding rehearsal room. The musicians aren’t yet certain what to make of their parts, which are filled with long sustained tones and quavering tremolos, devoid of melodies or easily recognizable musical landmarks. It’s clear that the piece will be a new experience for the orchestra. Even so, from the first tentative sounds I can hear that it’s going to work. After all those months alone in the studio, this is a terrific relief. I catch a midnight flight back to Fairbanks, looking forward to the following week.

In the current draft of the score, the strings play continuously from beginning to end. Even though the piece is only twelve minutes long, this is likely to induce fatigue for the musicians. So I spend the weekend cutting “breathing holes” in the string parts. In addition to giving the musicians a little welcome rest, this should add a subtle variation to the overall texture.

On Wednesday afternoon I board my flight back to Anchorage, excited about hearing the new piece and enjoying several days in the company of my dear friend.

We arrive right on time. I haven’t heard from Gordon in several days. I know he’s had lots going on. And amid the flurry of revisions and last-minute preparations, I’ve been distracted. But Gordon is as reliable as a Swiss train. So I’m confident that he’ll be standing there by his car waiting for me, just like last week. When I walk out of the terminal and don’t see him, my heart sinks a little.

I call his cabin. No answer. I call the Anchorage Symphony office. They haven’t heard from him. I call home. Cindy is out. After 45 minutes waiting, pacing, hoping, I finally grab a cab downtown. On the way, I call Gordon’s cabin again and leave another message. I have just enough time to check into my room and walk over to the concert hall for sound check and rehearsal. The session goes well, but I’m distracted, and my sense of dread grows. The moment the orchestra is finished with my piece, I’m out the door and back on the phone.

Gordon is planning to stay tonight with our friend the violinist Paul Rosenthal, so I call there. No one is home and I leave a breathless message for Paul.

Next I call my friend Mike Dunham, the arts editor at the Anchorage Daily News. I haven’t had dinner yet, so Mike and I arrange to meet at the brewpub across the street from the concert hall. There, I call Bob and Dorothy Childers, who live near Gordon out in Rainbow Valley. Dorothy tells me they’ll go right down and check on him.

I walk over to the pub. Mike is already there. We order a little food and wait. In a few minutes, my phone rings. It’s Bob.

In a whisper, he tells me: “John . . . Gordon has passed away.”

My eyes fill with tears. I tell Bob:

“I’ll be out as soon as I can get there.”

As I put the phone away, Mike looks at me and says:

“You look like a guy who needs a ride.”

We make the familiar drive south out of Anchorage, past Potter Marsh and up Turnagain Arm. The night is clear and moonless. Icebergs loom in the dark, churning in the turbulent waters. We reach the turnoff and make the slow, steep, winding drive up the mountainside. We stop and pull in next to Gordon’s familiar Toyota wagon, tucked into its usual spot. We get out and walk slowly up the hill, through the tunnel of alders to his cabin. Through the large bay windows we see the light of one small lamp burning inside.

Gordon had built the deck of his cabin around a beautiful birch tree that he couldn’t bring himself to cut down. We find him lying there, curled up against that tree.

Inside the cabin are Bob and Dorothy, two other neighbors and a state trooper. The trooper goes about his business quietly and respectfully. When he’s finished, he officially “releases” the body to us.

For years, Gordon had kept his own coffin by the door of his cabins, first when we were next-door neighbors in the woods outside Fairbanks, and now here in Rainbow. It was always good for a laugh when you’d take your boots off or put them on, sitting on Gordon’s coffin. The plain pine box was tailor-built by our friend the carpenter poet Birch Pavelsky, and it made its debut appearance in 1980 at the Halloween concert of the Fairbanks Symphony.

. . . The lights went down, and a hush fell over the audience. Someone lit a candle or two. From the back of the hall four shadowy figures emerged, carrying an extra-long coffin. With deliberate solemnity the procession moved down the aisle, set the coffin on the edge of the stage and departed.

Ever so slowly, the lid of the coffin opened. A hand appeared on the top of the lid, and a towering caped figure emerged. Turning to face the audience, the 6’7” apparition lowered his arm and opened his terrible maw to reveal – iridescent yellow vampire teeth!

Leaping to the podium he hurled a downbeat and launched the orchestra into Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. . . .

Ever since that night, all those years ago, Gordon has told me that it was in this coffin that he wanted to be transported for the last time. I turn to the present company and remind them of our friend’s wishes. And now, thanks to his flair for the dramatic, I will have the dubious distinction of being a pallbearer for my best friend – twice!

Gordon was a mountain of a man. And we have our work cut out for us, getting the man down the mountain. We lift him into the box, but he doesn’t seem to fit very well. His body is frozen. Gently, tentatively, we begin to move his arms and hands, his legs and feet, easing him into the coffin. At first this seems a little grotesque. But I recall massaging Gordon’s feet when we were out on the tundra last spring. And as we work we begin to find comfort in tenderly touching our friend for the last time.

We realize there’s no way we’re going to carry him down that steep, snowy trail in the dark. So we place the coffin on top of Gordon’s big akhio freighter sled and tie it down. We slide it across the deck. And somehow we manage to lift Gordon’s 200‑plus pounds down the steep, snow-covered stairway with no railing. At the bottom, we catch our breath before beginning the trip down the hill.

Gordon was very particular. He hated it when people would punch through the snow onto the margins of his carefully manicured trail. So, all the way down the trail, when anyone falls off to the side, I mock-scold them on Gordon’s behalf.

“Hey! Watch where you’re going . . . Stay on the trail!”

We’re certainly an unconventional wake. Hanging onto the coffin and the sled, some of us are hunched over, attempting to walk. Others are crouched and sliding downhill on our feet. It’s not at all clear whether we’re driving the sled or the sled is driving us.

Amid our intermittent tears, the giggling begins. As we continue on down the trail, we begin to see how sad and funny, how solemn and ridiculous our procession is.

“Gordon’s last sled ride!” somebody quips.

And full-blown laughter breaks out.

The trail becomes steeper, and the coffin gathers momentum. One by one, pallbearers fall by the wayside. As it accelerates toward the road and the ravine below, only Bob and I are left – the two skinniest guys, hanging on for dear life.

As we plunge down the icy slope I have a fleeting vision of the three of us – Bob, me, and Gordon in the coffin – sailing across the road and over the precipice. Yet somehow we manage to hang on and dig in and grind to a stop in the middle of the gravel road, just before the edge.

Only in Alaska!

We load Gordon into the back of a neighbor’s pickup truck and begin a slow motorcade back down to the highway. As he wished, Gordon will be cremated in this plain pine box. As we wait for the van from the mortuary to arrive, the trooper walks over and says to us quietly:

“I didn’t know this man. But the respect, the humor and the love you folks have shown toward him tonight tell me everything I need to know about who he was.”

What a lovely benediction.

Tonight is one of the saddest nights of my life. Strangely, it’s also one of the most beautiful. Even amid the grief, I’m deeply grateful that I am here for my beloved friend’s last ride.

Back in Anchorage at 3:30 in the morning, Mike and I stop at a seedy bar and raise a glass of whisky in honor of Gordon. Back at the Captain Cook at 5:30 AM, I fall into bed and sleep fitfully.

The premiere of Dark Waves seems to go well. But it passes in a blur, part of the waking dream of the past few days. Cindy has flown down from Fairbanks, and this afternoon we drive back out to Gordon’s cabin for a potluck in his memory. It feels good to be in his place again, amid his friends and neighbors, telling stories and laughing.

As we leave the gathering, I linger and kneel beside the beautiful birch where my best friend lay down for the last time. All the way down the trail, I weep freely. We return to Fairbanks on an early evening flight. To the west, beyond the Alaska Range, the sky glows a deep, burnt orange – like dying embers.

During the years we were next-door neighbors, each Tuesday evening after orchestra rehearsal Gordon and I would drive back to the forest and walk home together. When we’d reach the fork in the trail Gordon would veer left off to his cabin and I’d continue on to mine.

One deep winter night when the temperature was in the 40s below zero, as I dipped into the low spot where the tamaracks grow I heard a great horned owl calling:

“Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo . . . Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo . . .”

I stopped. I answered.

“Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo . . . Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoooooo . . . . . .”

The call came again, and I knew it was Gordon.

From that night on this was our signal, our way of staying connected, reassuring one another through the cold and the darkness: “I’m here. And even though you can’t see me, I’m still there with you.”

Whenever we walked home together, Gordon and I would call back and forth. When I’d hear Gordon’s last hoot, I’d know he’d arrived at his cabin. Then, a minute or two later, I’d step onto the deck at my place.

Each Sunday evening on my way to sauna, when I reached the final turn on the trail to his cabin I’d stop and hoot. If Gordon were outside splitting wood or walking between the house and the sauna, he’d hoot back in greeting.

At the end of the evening Gordon would always stand on the deck and send me on my way. About the time I’d reach that turn in the trail, I’d hear him calling:

“Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo . . . Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoooooo . . . . . .”

I’d stop, turn around, cup my hands to my mouth and call back.

The years went by and Gordon and I called back and forth countless times – in the forest at home, on camping trips in the wilderness, on busy city streets. Our hooting was a way of voicing our affection for one another. It was also a way of acknowledging our connections with the owls in the forest and with all our relatives in the larger-than-human world.

I always imagined that Gordon and I would continue calling to one another until we were both old men. Then, suddenly, he was gone.

Gordon was meticulous about his schedule. We always kept one another informed of our itineraries, and after he moved away we took care to plan our time together far in advance. Months ahead we’d reserved a date when Gordon would be in Fairbanks for a performance by our friend the violinist Paul Rosenthal. The three of us were going to have sauna.

In the weeks since Gordon’s passing, I’ve been determined to keep this appointment. Paul agrees this is the right thing to do. So following his concert, we walk the familiar trail out to Gordon’s cabin.

We split wood and light the fire. We toast our friend, share memories and catch up on one another’s lives. Then we head out to the sauna for a good, hot sweat.

In Gordon’s stead I perform the duties of keeping the fire stoked, ladling snow and water onto the hot stones. But in his honor we leave Gordon’s customary saunameister seat open.

Paul and I are in and out of the sauna several times. When he’s had enough, Paul retreats to the cabin. And I crawl back in for one final blast.

Ladling on the last of the water, breathing in the intense steam, I speak a few quiet words to Gordon. Thanking him for his faith and his friendship, I whisper my gratitude for all that we’ve shared in this small but powerful ritual space.

Then I tidy things up, crouch under the low doorway and step outside.

The full moon is rising above the snow-covered spruce trees. As I stand bathing in the amber light and the deep stillness of the forest, a call rings out:

“Hoo-hoo, Hoo-hooo. Hoo-hoo, Hoo-hoo . . . .”

My heart rises. And I answer:

“Hoo-hoo, Hoo-hooo. Hoo-hoo, Hoo-hooooo . . . .”

The owl calls back.

As my tears flow, I’m filled with deep sadness at the absence of my friend, and an equally deep joy in this palpable reminder of his presence.

A month later, I keep another appointment with Gordon.

Gordon, my wife Cindy and I had planned to meet in Phoenix for a concert of my music. Afterwards, we’d head off for a camping trip in the redrock country of Utah.

The first night out Cindy and I pitch our tent in a magical spot on deep red-purple sand, above the confluence of three lovely canyons.

The colors of the sunset mirror those of the land. The moon rises. I want to feel the breath of the desert night. So I stand on a rock outcrop, watching, listening.

The wind here sings with voices I’ve never heard before. Sand and slick rock, cliff rose, juniper and prickly pear. This is new music to my ears.

Suddenly, a familiar voice booms out: The great horned owl!

As always, I cup my hands and answer.

The owl calls back.

Throughout the night I hear him calling. And I sleep with the comforting feeling that our friend is here in the desert with us.

Following a memorable week in the canyons, we’re now back in Phoenix. In the morning, we’ll fly home to Alaska. Just before turning in I walk out onto the little terrace of our hotel room, to make a phone call.

In the mixed darkness and milky city light, I notice a large bird circling above the trees. At first it seems to be a gull, like the ones that often drift into Fairbanks. But there’s something different about this bird. The profile isn’t quite right. And when it calls out with an intense nasal screech, I know it’s not a gull.

Suddenly the bird flies toward me and I’m looking straight into its face . . . the ghostly, heart-shaped face of a barn owl!

First the owl at Gordon’s sauna in the boreal forest; then the owl in the desert; and now here in the middle of the sprawling concrete flats of Phoenix, I am face-to‑face with another owl, calling in the night.

Maybe these are disconnected events. Maybe they have no specific meaning, at least no meaning that relates personally to me or to my own small life. Maybe they have meaning far beyond the reach of my understanding.

But how can I receive these three encounters as anything less than visitations and benedictions?

Now whenever I hear an owl calling I will hear Gordon’s voice reminding me: “I’m here. And even though you can’t see me, I’m still there with you.”

Even as my heart fills with longing for what I have lost, it overflows with gratitude for what I still have.

The calling of the owls reminds me that this world is filled with magic.

And some things do not die.

Months before Gordon died, I had a visitation – a premonition perhaps.

After a long summer evening working in the studio, I walked up to the house around midnight. Cindy was already asleep, but I was hungry. So I tiptoed in, grabbed some fresh oysters from the refrigerator, and stepped outside to enjoy a delicacy in the sub-Arctic twilight.

The oysters had been flown in from near Sitka, hundreds of miles to the south. I shucked a plateful, dribbled a little lemon juice, and started slurping. They were wonderfully fresh and meaty, tasting like the sea. As I savored the second oyster, I pondered how blessed we are, how rich and patient the Earth is. I looked up. There on the branch just above me, not ten feet away, sat a boreal owl.

I didn’t know how long he might have been there, watching me. A little embarrassed, I bowed my head and lowered my eyes. Slowly, cautiously, I looked up again. The owl was still looking at me, silent and implacable. Deep in the woods, a Swainson’s thrush was singing. The owl turned and looked over his shoulder. Then he looked back at me with his intent dark eyes. I looked down.

I thought about slipping back inside to leave the owl alone, but I didn’t want to frighten him away. So, moving as slowly as possible, I ate another oyster. Each time I looked up, the owl was still there, looking back at me. Now and then he would look over his shoulder – first to one side, then to the other. Then he would look at me again, and I would lower my eyes. This went on for quite some time. I ate another oyster, then another, and another, finally finishing my meal.

The owl and I sat there for a long time, looking at one another in the dusty light. The thrush kept on singing. The wind kept on rustling the leaves.

I looked down again for an instant. And when I looked up, the owl was gone.

Credo by John Luther Adams

in memory of Gordon Wright

I believe in the mystery of being,
in the wholeness of life,
and the spirit in all things.

I believe in the tundra,
in the forests, in the rivers,
and the nameless mountains
stretching to the sea.

I believe in the music
of the rising wind, the rushing water,
and the bell tones of the hermit thrush
ringing in the twilight.

I believe we are relatives
of the moose, and the swans,
of the birch, the cranberry, and the wild rose.

I believe that our destiny
is to know our place, to live in peace,
and to listen to the earth.

Gordon Wright and John Luther Adams (1999)
Photo by Dennis Keeley © 1999

---

Mountains Without End by John Luther Adams

from A Northern Suite (1979/2004)
music by John Luther Adams

Originally composed in 1979–80
for Gordon Wright and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra.
Revised in 2004 to honor Gordon Wright on his 70th birthday.

This work is dedicated to my dear friend Gordon Wright,
with gratitude, admiration and affection.

There are silences so deep
you can hear
the journeys of the soul,
enormous footsteps downward
in a freezing earth.

– John Haines

A Northern Suite ©Taiga Press 2004
Printed with permission.

II. John Meade Haines

In the 1970s I was a regular reader of the weekly newspaper The Alaska Advocate. Published by a small band of young firebrands (including my friend and future Anchorage Daily News editor, Howard Weaver), The Advocate offered an essential alternative to the industrial development propaganda that appeared in the grim pages of The Anchorage Times and The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. The Advocate also provided encouraging evidence that there was intelligent life in Alaska, people who thought about things beyond the next big pipeline or mining boom.

Working on a frayed shoestring budget, The Advocate made valiant efforts to investigate and expose the bad public policies, corruption and collusion between government and business that were so rampant in Alaska. Beyond the feature stories, I enjoyed the sardonic humor of Satch Carlson and the insightful musical musings in “Contrapunctus” – the regular column by Gordon Wright, the conductor of the Fairbanks Symphony.

It was in The Advocate, sometime in 1977, that I came across a review of Cicada  – a new book of poems by John Haines. I hadn’t read Haines before, but I was so taken by the excerpts in the review that I immediately tracked down a copy of the book. That slim volume changed my life.

At the time I was living in Idaho, on a ranch on the Nez Perce Indian Reservation. I remember walking the hills reading aloud, reveling in the deep resonances of Haines’ words and the images they evoked. I soon acquired two of his earlier books, The Stone Harp and Winter News. The latter especially haunted me, with its visions of the North as a place to rediscover our ancient roots in the earth and imagine new possibilities for the human spirit.

All that summer, on my travels throughout the Arctic Wildlife Range and the Gates of the Arctic, I carried Winter News in my backpack. I read those poems over and over again, until I came to feel that they belonged to me. Two years later, I read them out loud to my new love, Cindy, on our first camping trip together in the Alaska Range, not far from the Haines homestead.

John Haines had left the homestead in 1969, so during my first years in Alaska, he was a specter, an oracle speaking truth about place and imagination, challenging and inspiring me to a deeper sense of possibility in my own life’s work. One of my favorite poems in Winter News was “Listening in October.” The final stanza was especially evocative for me.

There are silences so deep
you can hear
the journeys of the soul,
enormous footsteps
downward in a freezing earth.

I longed to hear more of those silences, to experience some of those journeys, and somehow to evoke them in music.

At the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, where I worked, we printed these words in a fundraising mailer. The response to that appeal was strong. But the real prize came one morning in the spring of 1980 when John Haines himself walked through the door of our office in the rickety little house at 218 Driveway.

After a decade wandering in the wilderness of the Outside world – living in California and Montana, and traveling here and there – Alaska’s poet had come home. So began a friendship that lasted some thirty-two years.

At that first meeting, John gave us a lovely little essay titled “Ice,” which we published in our newsletter The Northern Line. John and I sat for a long while in the backyard, getting acquainted, talking about music and writing, and resolving to get together again, soon.

For a short while, John stayed at the cabin of our friend Henry Cole, out at Nine-Mile Chena Hot Springs Road. But he had returned to Alaska with the dream of resuming his previous life at the homestead at Mile 68 Richardson Highway. And before long he had managed to rent the place from the woman to whom he had sold it a decade before.

For John Haines, the Richardson Homestead was the center of the universe. The life that he lived there in the birch forest on a hillside above the Tanana River, facing the peaks of the central Alaska Range, gave him experiences that very few people in our contemporary world will ever know. Out of that life, grew his singular poetic voice.

Over the years I made many trips to the homestead. Sometimes I would pitch my tent in the woods or on a gravel bar down on the Tanana River. But most often I would sleep in John’s writing studio, up the hill from the main cabin. In the midnight dusk of summer I would stand on the deck, listening to the sublime music of the hermit thrush. In autumn, the cackling of geese would roll up the hillside from the river down below.

As we walked through the woods or sipped whisky in the cabin, John would tell me about his early days – building the cabin, hunting moose and fishing for salmon on the Tanana, about Fred Campbell, Billy Melvin and the other larger-than-life characters who lived around Richardson back then. He told me the story of sledding an old trapper’s cabin down from the backcountry, and then reassembling it log by log, where it still stands, just behind his own cabin.

John and I hiked all over the countryside, up nearby Gasoline Creek, down along the river, up the long, steep trail he had cut to the top of Buckeye Dome. We would sit at the top of the hill above the house, on what we called “the Truth Bench,” surveying the magnificent sweep of the Tanana basin and the breathtaking white peaks of Deborah, Hess, Hayes and Moffitt.

Although he was now a renter, John still felt as though he owned the place, which in a very real way, he did. With or without the consent of the new owner, he began making repairs and improvements. Our friend Birch Pavelsky, the carpenter poet, built the new writing studio for John, shored up the foundation of the cabin, and built a new smokehouse in which John cured delicious alder-smoked salmon. John was an accomplished gardener. He reclaimed his old potato patch, and restored the large greenhouse he had built so many years before. In the summertime, whenever I returned to Fairbanks I left with a cornucopia of freshly harvested squash, tomatoes, onions and even melon.

In the winter of 1980-81, after John had settled back into life at the homestead, I received in the mail an envelope of drafts for a new cycle of poems. In the accompanying note, John asked whether I might find something musical in them.

My response was immediate and enthusiastic: “Yes!”

Not long after that we met at my cabin one evening to discuss our nascent collaboration. John brought with him a bottle of the Hungarian red wine egri bikaver – “Bull’s Blood.” Although we made quick work of its contents, I kept that bottle as a kind of talisman. Even now, holding it in my hand, I can almost touch the excitement I felt on that evening in the forest, so long ago.

The work that took shape over that bottle of wine was Forest Without Leaves – a cantata for choir, vocal soloists and chamber orchestra. The eighteen poems of John’s cycle address the inextricable ties between human beings and the natural world, from prehistory to post-apocalypse.

Once we had an outline, I took the idea to my pal Gordon Wright, who readily agreed to premiere the piece with the Arctic Chamber Orchestra. Soon, thanks to the active support of the poet Gary Holthaus, who was then serving as the executive director of the Alaska Humanities Forum, we found funding for the project.

I was thrilled to be working with my favorite poet, and more than a little intimidated. John was twice my age – a mature artist with a singular voice. Not yet thirty, I was still coming into my own as a composer. Yet John treated me as a full creative partner. His generosity set me at ease and allowed me to work more freely and confidently.

Out of respect for John and his work, I resolved to be as faithful as possible to the natural melodic and rhythmic flow, the inherent music of the words. Invoking Monteverdi, Mussorgsky and Harry Partch as models, I wrote:

“Any composer who sets out to add tones to a text of integrity faces a formidable challenge. As language, the words are complete in and of themselves. Yet when they are spoken, their inherent music seems to cry out for the added resonance of singing voices and instruments. The composer’s challenge, then, is to enhance that inherent music without impairing the imagery or meanings of the words. This demands a serious obligation of fidelity to words not only as sound, but as language.

“The common conventions of ‘setting words to music’ – forcing them into rigid meters, formulaic harmonies, architectural forms and essentially instrumental melodies – are simply inappropriate. Instead, the composer must search for the music within the words . . . the natural flow of their rhythms and the curves of their melodies – should be the seeds from which everything grows. Their integrity as language should always be respected, the sound and sense always preserved.”

In spite of these convictions, if I couldn’t find the music in a particular poem, I felt comfortable telling John. His response was always the same: “Well, let’s just leave that one out.” In one instance, I wanted to keep the poem but leave out a middle stanza. That was fine with John, too. And if a specific phrase or word didn’t work for me, John was perfectly willing to consider another.

As I was working with one of the loveliest poems in Forest Without Leaves, I kept stumbling over one particular line. I asked John whether he might consider an alternative to the word “clod.”

“I just can’t make it sing,” I said. “Would you consider changing it to ‘cloud’ ?”

This was no trivial request. In essence I was asking the poet to move heaven and earth. To my surprise, he agreed instantly, and the line became:

And sometimes through the air,
this dust is like a willow
tethered to a cloud.

The work flowed easily, back and forth, between us. During my days at the Environmental Center, I hadn’t composed as much as I’d wanted. Working on Forest Without Leaves, I began to feel like a composer again.

I composed much of the music in my cabin, at my old Fender Rhodes electric piano. Things evolved slowly and painstakingly, as I worked syllable by syllable, to hear and augment the natural prosody of John’s poems. But there were occasional moments of grace.

Late one evening I was leaving my shift at the radio station. Walking the hallways of the Fine Arts building I passed by the stage door of the concert hall. It was closed, but not locked. I stepped inside, turned up the lights and walked onto the stage. There stood the beautiful 9‑foot Steinway. It, too, was unlocked. I sat down and lifted the keyboard cover.

My right thumb touched middle C. The sound and the feel of the instrument were rich and supple, so unlike the heavy metallic clunk and ping of my electric instrument at home. I began to trace a simple arpeggio, expanding up and down . . .

C
C-E
C-E-G-E
C-E-G-C-G-E
C-E-G-B-C-B-G-E-C

I stopped and pulled my sketchbook, a pencil and one of John’s poems out of my pack.

How the sun came to the forest
How the rain spoke
and the green branch flowered . . .

The melody began to flow from the words and an hour later I had completed How the Sun Came to the Forest – for sopranos, altos, alto flute, English horn, harp and strings.

The poem is one of the most lyrical in all of John’s work. And if there’s a “hit single” in Forest Without Leaves, this is it. When he first heard the piece, my friend Birch Pavelsky said: “This should be the state song for the new Alaska.”

Birch was one of the twenty-four similarly generous-spirited friends who gave voice to Forest Without Leaves. There was no standing choral ensemble in Fairbanks that was up for the job, so I recruited a select group of volunteers. The long-suffering singers indulged me as I tried out new musical ideas and improved my conducting technique at their expense, all the while demanding obsessive accuracy of rhythm and clarity of diction. I was determined that every syllable of every one of John’s words would be heard and understood by our audience.

We rehearsed once a week for more than a year. It’s hard to imagine any ensemble anywhere working so hard for an aspiring young composer. Looking back now, I can see what a rare gift this was. Although it was difficult for me to let go, in the final week before the premiere, I handed the reins over to Byron McGilvray, an experienced choral conductor from San Francisco.

Forest Without Leaves generated a lot of local interest. There were big feature stories in the Anchorage and Fairbanks newspapers, as well as radio and print interviews. The unabashedly eco-centric perspective of John’s poems did not reflect the views of many of our neighbors. Even so, on November 11, 1984, the Davis Concert Hall at the University of Alaska Fairbanks was full.

Before the performance, the distinguished writer Barry Lopez addressed the audience, speaking for a few minutes about the larger themes of Forest Without Leaves. I had never met Barry. But I’d admired his work since the early ’70s, when I first encountered it in the pages of Audubon magazine. His book Desert Notes had been in my backpack (alongside John’s Winter News) during my first summer traveling in the Arctic. And his Arctic Dreams, which appeared two years later, is on the short list of books that changed my life. Since then Barry and I have worked together on several projects. By now, he is one of my oldest and closest friends.

In 1984 Alaska was filthy rich from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and the State Legislature was hell-bent on building new roads, ports, dams, pipelines and refineries all over the state. The Soviet Union had not yet fallen. Ronald Reagan had just been reelected for his second term as president, and a full-blown expansion of the military was underway. A big new infantry unit and the “Star Wars” missile system were to be based in Alaska.

There was not yet widespread recognition of global warming. Nuclear winter seemed a more likely end for human civilization, and Forest Without Leaves considers that apocalyptic scenario. Yet even amid the prospect of doom, the piece concludes on a note of faith and hope.

A birch leaf held fast
in limestone ten million years
still quietly burns,
though claimed by the darkness.
Let earth be this windfall
swept to a handful of seeds –
one tree, one leaf, gives us plenty of light.

Those last two words were highlighted by two high bell tones – A-flat rising to G – ringing out brightly over the full choir and orchestra.

The response of the audience was overwhelming. As John and I joined the musicians on stage to receive the ovation, someone presented us with bouquets. But these were not bouquets of flowers. They were bundles of naked birch branches tied together, from each of which hung a single birch leaf dipped in gold, with the final line of the piece inscribed on it.

A week or so after the concert in Fairbanks, we gave two more performances of Forest in a single day at a church in Anchorage. During a recreational ride on a dogsled in Fairbanks, Byron McGilvray sustained a leg injury that required him to return to San Francisco for surgery. So I conducted. After three years of composing and a year of rehearsing the piece, I knew the score well. The choir and orchestra rose to the occasion and I simply rode their waves.

A few weeks later, still walking with a cane, Byron returned to Fairbanks to lead the recording sessions in the Davis Concert Hall. The following year an LP of Forest Without Leaves appeared on Owl Recordings (now Starkland). Later that year (1985) the Arctic Chamber Orchestra toured the piece in Switzerland, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Gordon Wright conducted, and I played percussion.

Forest Without Leaves was a major milestone in my life. Working closely with John Haines encouraged me to think deeply about what it means to be an artist in the Far North, giving me the temerity to entertain artistic aspirations to match the landscapes of Alaska. What I didn’t and perhaps couldn’t fully appreciate at the time was just how much our collaboration meant to John. For the rest of his life he would speak often and wistfully of those days:

“I’ll always remember that big banner hanging above the Cushman Street Bridge, in letters three feet high . . .

Forest Without Leaves
poems by John Haines
music by John Adams.”

The poems of Forest Without Leaves are the work of a mature poet. In my view, they mark the beginning of a prolific “late period” for John. Following his earlier “nature poems,” he had now begun to engage more fully with the sweep of human history and culture.

The music of Forest Without Leaves is the work of a still-young composer. After all these years the central elements of the score, especially the melodic lines, seem to stand up. But in the intervening three decades I’ve learned a lot about harmony, texture and orchestration that would make the piece stronger and more complete. For years now I’ve wanted to revise, perform and record it again. Although the right opportunity hasn’t yet presented itself, I hope that one day it may. I only wish that John Haines could have heard Forest Without Leaves again.

Twenty years later, to celebrate John’s 80th birthday, Cindy and I hosted a big party at our house in the hills of Goldstream Valley. On a brilliant Interior Alaska summer afternoon a large group of friends gathered to feast and toast our friend the poet. In honor of the occasion I’d composed a song setting of John’s “Poem of the Forgotten,” a poignant remembrance of his first autumn at the homestead.

Since we didn’t have a piano at the house and there was no obvious candidate in Fairbanks to sing the song, I’d arranged to have it recorded in the Lower 48. We all gathered in the living room that afternoon to listen to the recording. By request, we listened to it twice. Everyone seemed to enjoy the moment. And although it wasn’t clear that the guest of honor had actually been able to hear much of the song, he seemed to appreciate the thought.

A few years later I set another Haines poem as a gift. This time the occasion was the 30th wedding anniversary of our close friends Fred and Alexandra Peters. John Haines is not known as a poet of love songs. But one afternoon many years before, while awaiting the arrival of his new love, Jo Going, in the course of a few brief stanzas John managed to travel from the trackless wastes of interstellar space to the intimate touch of a lover’s hand. “Little Cosmic Dust Poem” remains one my favorite poems in any genre.

From time to time over the years John and I would talk about doing another big piece together. The perennial threat of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the increasingly dramatic effects of climate change in the North, were very much in our minds. I kept raising the idea of some sort of Requiem for the Arctic. Finally, John presented me with a single poem on that theme. Although I had hoped for something much grander, on the scale of Forest Without Leaves, I gratefully accepted it and went to work. The result was a six-minute duo for solo ’cello and spoken voice – John’s voice, of course. We donated a recording of the piece to the Alaska Coalition and the Alaska Wilderness League as a kind of “audio broadside.” I’m not sure it made much of an impact. Still, it was a joy to work with John again.

Even though he’s no longer with us in the flesh, I hope that my work with John Haines is not yet finished. In addition to revising Forest Without Leaves, I still want to compose a song cycle on selected poems from Winter News. I’ve already chosen the poems, and I want to hear them sung.

The poetry of John Haines is poetry for the ear, and for the voice. Longer-lined and densely packed as they are with mythical and historical images, even the later poems are poems to be heard. We can read and study a poem by Haines. We can memorize and analyze it with our eyes. But, ultimately, this poetry must be recited, intoned, chanted, or sung with the full voice.

Whenever I read Haines, the voice I hear is always his voice – that distinctive, muscular baritone he knew how to use to such great effect. As a young man John had heard recordings of William Butler Yeats reciting his poems, and he emulated that rhythmic precision and prophetic tone in his own recitations.

For me, the voice of John Haines is the voice of Alaska. He was Alaska’s first great man of letters. Yet he was far more than a regionalist. By any measure John Haines was a great writer. His singular and prophetic voice will continue to resonate with readers throughout the world, for a long time to come.

* * *

John was a very serious guy. To those who saw only this side, he could be downright intimidating. But he also had a very healthy sense of humor.

In the late ’80s John taught for a couple of years at George Washington University. This was the time when Pat Buchanan and Jesse Helms had declared their “culture wars,” but social and political conservatives had not yet succeeded in severely curtailing public funding for the arts in the United States. The National Endowment for the Arts still made grants directly to individual artists, and working artists were regularly invited to the table to sit alongside the arts administrators on NEA grant-making panels. I sat on several of those panels.

Whenever I was in Washington, John and I would get together. We visited galleries and museums, and (in those days when they still existed) we browsed through the local bookstores. John loved to take me to his favorite restaurants – an Indian place in Georgetown, Italian and Ethiopian places in Adams Morgan, and his favorite British-style pub near DuPont Circle.

One afternoon, walking from John’s apartment to a nearby Indonesian restaurant, we passed a fellow walking a small lapdog on a leash. I harrumphed.

“Well, well. Isn’t that a cute little stew dog? Not much more than a soup bone.”

John snorted out loud, and then began riffing poetically about “stew dogs, pie pugs and mulligan mutts.”

When I returned home to Alaska, a postcard was waiting for me. On the front of the card was a jowl-faced bulldog wearing reading glasses and a visor cap, cigarette dangling from his mouth, apparently hammering away at the typewriter in front of him.

The card was addressed to “John Stewdog Adams.” And the message, scrawled in John’s inimitable hand, read:

“Noted mystery writer, Mutt Mulligan, hard at work on his latest potboiler.”

Not long after that, I received in the mail a poem entitled “Das Kapital March.” It began:

When you’re down and out in Washington
And camping on the streets,
Sooner or later you’re bound to think
Of where to get your eats.

The kitchen doors are closing
In the home you left behind
And stew dogs, pie pugs and mulligan mutts
Are all that you can find.

And so it continued, in a similar vein.

I came up with a little tune for John’s doggerel, and shared it with him. But, thinking better of both our artistic reputations, I never brought the piece to performance.

The dog jokes continued for the rest of John’s life. He would call my phone and leave a message composed entirely of growling and barking sounds. We exchanged doggie postcards and note cards by the score – the more ridiculous or obscene, the better. Mutt Mulligan and Stewdog endured to the end, even as other comic personae appeared.

I can’t remember what precipitated it, but at some point John began calling me “Adam,” and referring to himself as “Eve” or, better yet, “Evie.” I still have the recording from my message machine in which he sang out discordantly:

O, Adam, he trusted his Eeeeeve . . . .
That his heart she would never de-ceeeeve . . .
But he found her awake
In bed with a snake,
With a holler you wouldn’t be-leeve!

John’s phone messages were the stuff of lore around our house. I loved coming into work at the studio to discover the latest installment of buffoonery from the bard. One time, in his most high-sounding Yeatsian voice, he left me this little parody of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree:”

I will arise and go now, and go to take a pee
And a wee puddle I will make there, just you wait and see . . .

Some years later, on my return to Fairbanks from a trip to San Francisco, John and I got together at his place for dinner. As a gift, I had brought an independent bottling of a single-malt whisky that I thought he would enjoy. After our meal, as we sat sipping and chatting, I asked:

“So. How do you like it?”

“It’s all right . . . But it’s more your taste than mine.”

Later, as I was leaving, John went to hand me the bottle of whisky.

“No, John,” I said. “That’s for you!”

“Well, OK . . . ,” he grumbled. “I guess you can drink it when you come back.”

A few days later as I came into the studio and checked the answering machine, I heard this brief message from my drinking buddy:

“Uh, Adam . . . You got any more of that whisky?”

I howled. And years later I still chuckle every time I hear him in my mind’s ear.

As he got older John became an inveterate writer of limericks. Some of these were political in nature, and many of them were decidedly off-color. He published one or two in The Ester Republic – the local paper of the hippie Mecca on the western outskirts of Fairbanks. And he kept threatening to publish a volume of what he referred to as his “light verse.”

“Sure. Go ahead. Ruin your literary reputation!” I would say.

John would mutter something in reply. I don’t doubt that he was quite serious about publishing a book. But, much to my relief, he never did.

John never had much money. At the homestead he lived a subsistence life, with very little cash. And throughout his life, he rarely received a regular paycheck. So he was, to put it gently, frugal. Among his friends, it was a standing joke: Would Haines ever pick up the check at dinner? And yet on occasion he could be surprisingly generous.

Before he decided to dedicate himself to writing, John had been an aspiring sculptor. He studied at the Hans Hoffman School, and he sustained a lifelong interest in visual art. On one of my trips to Washington, we visited The Phillips Collection together. There, we enjoyed a major exhibition of paintings by the abstract expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart. However, the highlight of the day was the half-hour we spent sitting quietly in the Rothko Room.

I was already passionate about Rothko. I had seen his works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and even at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. But that afternoon I was moved as I hadn’t been before.

The room at the Phillips is quite small. The lighting is low. There are only four paintings, hung low, as Rothko intended. There’s a feeling of confrontation. You want to stand back, but you can’t – you’ll hit the wall. So you’re left with a choice. You can leave the room. Or you can submit to the paintings. John and I chose the latter. The museum was quiet that afternoon, and we had the Rothko Room largely to ourselves. We sat there in silence for the better part of an hour.

Before we left the museum we stopped into the bookstore. John looked through the catalog of the Pousette-Dart exhibition. I picked up a large-format book on Rothko. It was a deluxe edition, filled with lavish color reproductions printed on the finest paper. I lingered for a long time, agonizing over whether or not to buy it. But the $100 price tag was beyond my means at the time, so I put it back on the shelf and we left.

A week or so after I returned to Alaska, the Rothko book arrived in the mail, accompanied by a lovely note from John. I was stunned. I hadn’t said anything about the book to John. But he must’ve seen me admiring it and decided that I needed to have it. What’s more, I knew that John couldn’t afford this expensive book any more than I could. It remains one of the most thoughtful and cherished gifts I’ve ever received.

From time to time, a group of friends including the philosopher fisherman John Kooistra, Birch, John Haines and I would get together for dinner, drink and a little reading aloud. Each of us would contribute something to the meal. I often made a big salad, and maybe some pasta. Kooistra would donate a special bottle or two from his well-curated wine cellar. Birch usually brought dessert. Once in a while, John Haines would bring his specialty – moussaka.

John was a good cook. And his moussaka was mouth-watering. Together with a good salad and a fine red wine, it was a one-way ticket to gustatory nirvana. John prepared the dish the right way, cutting no corners, cooking each of the three layers separately, before baking. In the finished casserole, the eggplant was toothsome, the custard light and moist, the lamb and the spices perfectly balanced.

As we lavished praise on the chef, John never missed an opportunity to remind us:

“I’m glad you like it. You know, it’s an awful lot of work . . .”

This became a running gag. In innumerable life situations we found it amusing to quote John on this matter. Then one day Cindy decided to prepare moussaka for dinner. Knowing that she had a high standard to live up to, she did everything the right way. The result was profoundly delicious. However, as she served it up, she felt compelled to concede:

“You were right, John. It is an awful lot of work!”

In his last years, due to a heart condition, John’s driver’s license was revoked. Fairbanks is not a walking town, and the mass transit leaves a great deal to be desired. So it fell to John’s friends to provide him with transportation. John Kooistra and Birch did a lot of chauffeuring. So did Cindy.

We had only one car, and at the time I was struggling with advancing cataracts, so I wasn’t driving. But each Saturday after she finished her morning work at her office, Cindy cheerfully shuttled John to the grocery store and then to the public swimming pool for his weekly workout. This went on for several months.

One weekday afternoon, John called the studio.

“Uh, Adam. Is Cindy at her office today?”

“Yes. She’s there. Why?”

“Well, I couldn’t reach her. But would you ask her to stop by on her way home?”

I did so. And that evening Cindy came through the door beaming, and bearing a casserole dish full of moussaka, made for us by the master himself. We savored every bite.

* * *

For John Haines writing was not a matter of literary achievement. It was an artistic imperative. John’s work was his best gift to the world. But at times it came at great cost to him and to those around him.

By nature, John was introspective and solitary. As a strong artist, he created a world of his own imagining, a world he inhabited, largely alone. At times there were discontinuities between John’s world and the world that the rest of us inhabit. Living in isolation all those years on the homestead may also have deprived John of a larger sense of community, and contributed to what could sometimes be perceived as social awkwardness or insensitivity.

In his final years, John was profoundly hard of hearing. He was also fiercely proud. And what some people may have interpreted as aloof, brusque or even rude behavior may well have been a result of John not hearing clearly, and being too proud to admit it.

There were many women in John’s life. He was legally married five times, and for all practical purposes he had six different wives. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the two longest relationships of John’s life were while he was living at the homestead – first in the 1960s, and then in the ’80s. Both women were named Jo. John was a die-hard romantic and away from the homestead, he had many romances. But he just couldn’t seem to sustain a domestic partnership.

John’s relationships with academia were similarly wide-ranging. Over the years he taught at many colleges and universities, including Sheldon Jackson College, Austin Peay University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Montana. The most satisfying of his forays into the academy were at George Washington University and the University of Ohio in Athens. At both institutions he enjoyed two-year visiting positions, with cadres of admiring students. Not surprisingly, these were also productive times for his writing.

John’s experience with the University of Alaska was not so felicitous. Although he was admired and celebrated far beyond Alaska, the state’s primary institution of higher education never seemed to find much room for the poet. For a couple of years the Fairbanks campus had a chancellor, Patrick J. O’Rourke, who recognized John’s stature and did his best to make a place for him. O’Rourke was the force behind the Honorary Doctorate that the University awarded to John. He also hosted meetings of a group of us who were working to purchase and preserve the Haines homestead.

Toward the end of John’s life a generous-spirited faculty member, Roy Bird, secured a modest adjunct situation for John in the Honors program. The pay was substandard, but the position allowed him to live in University housing for awhile, and gave him a small office space. Most importantly, it afforded John the opportunity to work with young people again, and to enjoy some small measure of respect at home. Yet it remains an enduring embarrassment and shame that the University of Alaska did not make a place of honor on its faculty for Alaska’s great man of letters.

The biggest regret of John’s life was leaving the homestead in 1969. In retrospect, the leaving was probably inevitable. The more difficult proposition was trying to get back home again. In his later life John was filled with a deep longing to return to his earlier life at the homestead. But if the homestead was John’s Garden of Eden, perhaps that Eden never really existed except in John’s imagination and his writings. It certainly hadn’t been an easy life, and perhaps what John really longed for was the sense of magic and discovery of those early days. Maybe he was trying to get back to that earlier life with the hope of finding another Winter News.

Sometime in the ’80s John gave a lecture at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. (Tellingly enough, this did not take place in the English Department, but at the Geophysical Institute.) The title of John’s talk was “What Are Poets For?” He later expanded it into an essay, in which he addresses the imperative for poets and artists to engage with the full range of human experience, including the major social issues of our times.

In the discussion that followed, a professor of psychology voiced her disapproval of poets getting involved in politics, asking John:

“Why don’t you write more poems like Winter News?”

Although he must have been nonplussed, John calmly reasserted his belief that poets and other artists have an obligation to engage with the complexities of current events. The questioner wouldn’t let it go, invoking Ezra Pound as a cautionary tale of what can happen when poets venture into politics; she all but asked John: “Why don’t you just leave the politics to the politicians?”

I was outraged. And ever since that day I’ve taken on a personal crusade on behalf of the later poems.

The writings of John Haines trace a lifelong journey of discovery – from his blood and bone experiences as a homesteader, to his deep reflections on art and history, to those last expansive musings on the nature of the cosmos and the meaning of existence. In the body of John’s work, and in English language poetry as a whole, there’s nothing else quite like Winter News. There’s also nothing like Poem Without Meaning, Meditation on a Skull Carved in Crystal or Night.

In its beauty and simplicity, with its short verses and vivid images of the natural world, Winter News is easy to love. It addresses us directly, in terms we can understand. The later poems are not so immediately ingratiating. They require more work to fathom. But if we’re willing to do that work, reading them slowly and repeatedly, sounding them out loud, gradually these poems reward us in surprising ways, as we discover vast new horizons, deeper and deeper layers of meanings.

When John returned to Alaska in 1980, he seemed determined to recover the life he had left behind at the homestead. Yet even when he first arrived in 1947, the old ways of living off the country were coming to an end. By the time he came back home, all the old-timers he had known were gone. The new Trans-Alaska Pipeline was just over the ridge to the north. Alaska was booming. The Richardson Highway, which had once been a narrow road farther down the hillside, now brought a growing stream of cars and trucks roaring past the cabin.

Although he was still strong John was no longer young, and the rigors of subsistence fishing, hunting and trapping were now beyond his reach. A life that demanded such a direct hand in death had never been easy for a person of John’s reflective temperament. (As he wrote in one of his early poems: ”I am haunted by the deaths of animals.”) And by this point he must have lost altogether whatever stomach he once had for the blood-and-guts realities of life in the woods. Besides, he had other work to do.

For several years, John and his new companion, the artist Jo Going, shared life at the homestead. During this period, he wrote some of his greatest poems and completed his luminous memoir The Stars, The Snow, The Fire. After Jo left the homestead, John stayed on for a while. But financial necessity and perhaps loneliness required him to leave. Eventually, John married again. He and his last wife, Joy, lived briefly at the homestead. But before long, they moved into Fairbanks, then to Anchorage and, finally, down to Helena, Montana.

There had been many comings and goings throughout the decades. But when a group of friends met at the homestead to help John move out, we all knew this was the last time. John was despondent that day. He talked about suicide. And we knew that he had guns. So we kept a close eye on him.

One by one, as cars and trucks were filled with John’s possessions, they departed for Fairbanks. Finally, only John and I were left. I did my best to console him.

“This is your one true home, John. It will always be. And it will live on in your books. But in another sense, your work is now your home.”

I knew that my words were grossly inadequate to ease the pain that my friend was feeling.

We walked to the gate, where the sign reads:

Richardson Homestead
Established 1947

I offered to close the gate. John wanted to do it himself.

It was time to go. But John wanted a few minutes alone. Although I was afraid he might do something drastic if I left him alone, I felt I had no real choice: I had to honor John’s request.

I got in my car, and drove off.

At the top of the hill, out of sight of the homestead, I stopped. I waited there for what seemed like a very long time, my heart filling with dread.

Just as I was about to turn around and drive back, John appeared, putting slowly up the hill in his little Toyota.

In his memoirs of the homestead, John Haines evokes a mythical time and place. Reading those pages, we travel through a dreamtime, in a forest inhabited by the spirits of wild animals, filled with the miracles and terrors of life in a cold and distant country. In his poems, Haines amplifies and expands these mythic dimensions, to transcend time and place. Reading or reciting a poem by Haines, we find ourselves standing alone at the center of existence, immersed in the wonder and mystery of the world, here and now, wherever we may be.

John was old enough to be my father. (Actually, he was five years older than my father.) Yet I never looked to John as a father figure. And he never showed the slightest inclination to assume that role. The fact that John was so much older than me was immaterial to both of us. We were simply fellow artists and the best of friends.

John was not my mentor. He never tried to teach me anything. (Perhaps he realized that my contrarian nature made that a hopeless proposition.) Even so, in John I recognized a powerful role model – a major artist who refused to compromise his art for professional gain, and who had consciously chosen to root his life and work in the North.

In me, perhaps John saw some reincarnation of his younger self. Whatever the reason, from the very beginning of our friendship John treated me with respect as his equal – a fellow artist and younger peer. I wasn’t worthy of this. Yet when an artist of the stature of John Haines believes in you, you have no choice but to try and live up to that faith. And I will strive to do so for the rest of my life.

* * *

For most of the time that I knew him, John Haines was fit and active, appearing younger than he actually was. As he moved into his eighties, he began to show his age. His hearing became worse. He shrank physically, and began to look frail. His intellect, however, was undiminished. He still read voraciously. He still had the same silly sense of humor. And he could still recite poems – his own and those of others – from memory.

During a visit to the emergency room, John surprised a pretty young nurse when, in his boldest reciting voice, he began intoning the 15th-century Spanish poet Jorge Manrique:

Este mundo es el camino para el otro . . .

At 86 and in failing health, John was still John. Yet it was clear that his time was approaching.

John often joined Cindy and me for dinner or brunch at our house on Coyote Trail (which he liked to call “Corroded Tail”). Our last meal together was in October 2010. Cindy and I were about to leave to spend the fall in Mexico, and the winter at Harvard.

John could no longer drive, so our son, Sage, brought him out and shuttled him back home. The four of us enjoyed the feast that Cindy prepared. Afterwards, we sat in the living room as the light on the snow dissolved into cobalt blue. As we had done so often before, we sipped a little single-malt whisky, and John recited a few poems for us.

As darkness continued to descend, we said goodbye. I told John that Cindy and I would be back in the spring. But he and I both knew this was probably the last time we would see one another – and we said so. As we embraced, I told John that I loved him. And he told me the same.

As the car pulled out of the drive, I waved. I walked back into the house and collapsed, weeping on Cindy’s shoulder. Yet despite the sense of impending loss there was nothing unresolved between John and me, and nothing more to be said. Our goodbye was as sweet and as simple as our friendship had always been.

John passed away in March 2011. Obituaries and tributes appeared in magazines and newspapers around the world. There was a big memorial event in Fairbanks, and smaller gatherings at the homestead, and here and there. Later that summer, after things had died down, Birch, our good friend John Kooistra and I returned to Mile 68 Richardson Highway for a final quiet observance.

We brought John’s memorial plaque from the Veterans Administration, which we left on his table by the bay windows facing the Alaska Range. We shared a few stories, recited some of his verses and raised a dram of rare whisky to our friend. We climbed the hillside and sat on the “Truth Bench.”

Then we descended to the river.

---

Saying Goodbye on the Tanana by John Luther Adams

for John Haines

We carried your ashes down from your house
to the island in the river.

There, on that frigid night so long ago,
the owl called
and you, a young man, green and lonely,
were listening.

Quietly, we spoke a few of your words,
strong and smooth as the stones underfoot.

We laid you onto the dark, heavy waters
that rush down from the glaciers,
and watched the long plumes drift toward Asia.

I turned to hear your voice in the wind,
intoning a poem in a language I could not understand.

I lifted my palms to see the dust of your bones
glowing, luminous, in the whorls of my fingers.

John Haines and John Luther Adams (1984)
Photo by Charles Backus © 1984

---

“How the Sun Came to the Forest” by John Luther Adams

from Forest Without Leaves (1984)
music by John Luther Adams
poems by John Haines

How the sun came to the forest,

How the rain spoke
and the green branch flowered:

How the moss burned
and the wasp took flight;
how the sun in a halo of smoke
put an end to summer.

How the wind blew
and the leaves fell.

Death made a space in the forest,
where snow would come,

and silence, and night.

– John Haines

Forest Without Leaves ©Taiga Press 1984
Printed with permission.

III. I Do Not Expect to See Their Kind Again

John Haines and Gordon Wright were larger-than-life figures. They lived without compromise, far beyond the boundaries of convention. For me, they were the embodiment of Alaska.

When Gordon passed away, I began to sense that the time for me to leave Alaska was drawing near. When John passed away, I knew the time had come.

John and Gordon were very different men. But both were essential role models for me. Intensely focused and fiercely dedicated to his life’s work, John could be prickly and aloof. Expansive in his interests and enterprises, Gordon was affable and charming.

From John, I learned how to live without compromise as an artist. From Gordon, I learned how to live more fully as a man. I am still learning from both of them. And I expect this learning to continue as long as I live.

Almost every day, as I ponder a problem or an opportunity, I find myself wondering: “What would Gordon think about this?” Or, in my mind’s ear, I hear John’s rich baritone voice intoning a phrase from one of his poems, right when I need it.

Through their love and friendship, their lives, their work and their spirits, Gordon Wright and John Haines continue to challenge, comfort and inspire me.

They were my people. And I do not expect to see their kind again.

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