June 29th PA Arts Sunday -- The Fine Art of Erin McKittrick

Part of our whole “ground truth trekking” idea is that we don’t want to just read about the issues and places we’re interested in. We want to tromp around in them. We make observations while we’re there, and take photographs of course… But it’s more than that. In a way that’s hard to explain, being literally surrounded by an issue, moving through it at a couple miles an hour, sounds and smells and intimate views, gives me something different. A visceral feel for a place, to add to the facts, maps, and diagrams. --- Erin McKittrick

I've written a few times here of my high opinion of Erin McKittrick's prose and photography. I've commented on the satisfaction I've gotten seeing her narrative gift grow as she and Bretwood Higman journeyed without any motorized assistance from Seattle to Unimak Pass.

When erin and hig neared Anchorage last January, I met them, and we planned an Anchorage presentation, to be held at UAA's Fine Arts Building recital hall. When I approached the visual arts department with a request that they sponsor the talk/slide show, I didn't feel I was stretching the point. And, after looking at the content on erin and hig's blog, Mariano Gonzales, chair of the art department, agreed that erin is a true artist.

Even with her masters degree in microbiology, erin is also a jewelry maker. "We make glass jewelry using solar energy, concentrating sunlight with a giant fresnel magnifying lens," she has written.

The image at left is of a turquoise "tropical waters" chime belly ring she made before she and hig started their epic trek.

By using the description "fine" art to wrap a term around what erin is accomplishing, I'm stretching the Aristotelian origin of the term. But the definition is constantly evolving, and some have argued for quite a while that creative writing, is also, in many senses, fine art.

The combination of so many elements into what erin's art has become during this recently concluded journey is unique. Each of the artistic disciplines put together by erin - photography, videography, descriptive essays, use of artful images and words to further a sociopolitical goal, inspiration that causes other art to be created by observers of erin and hig's acts, and the communicative art of blogging - has existed before. But the total package, especially when added to the astounding physical feat erin and hig accomplished, is entirely unprecedented.

Two recent men who wrote about experiences in the Alaska wild have been treated - at least by some - as artists too: wanderer Christopher McCandless, and videographer Timothy Treadwell. The American literary affectation with using nature as a backdrop about life's meaning goes back at least as far as Henry David Thoreau's Walden. The nature photography of Ansel Adams has long been regarded as some of the world's finest art. The Banff Mountain Film Festival often contains, along with its less serious offerings, films and photographs that are certainly fine art in a moving sense.

The high level of attention given to the cases of McCandless and Treadwell is, by and large, a fetish. I wasn't surprised to see so much attention given to these two. But I am surprised at the low level of attention given to McKittrick and Higman. I first heard about them from packrafter Steve Johnson back in early October. Steve is on the Colville River right now, with his wife Barb, and daughter Erin (another Erin), packrafting for three weeks. I started paying attention to their journey in November, and as I did that, I looked to see how long it would take for the uniqueness of this journey to catch on in the local, national and world media.

It never did. The finest article, of the few written about the couple's trip, was written by Anchorage Daily News outdoors editor, Craig Medred, back in early February. It certainly didn't address erin's art past Craig commenting on erin's "amazing photographs." And in the comments to Medred's articles, readers showed a bit more about why, perhaps, these two are fundamentally underestimated:

HAHAHA!
I rank these fools right up there with the Grizzly Man,Tim Treadwell-Dead and the guy who walked into the wilderness and died at an abandoned bus a week later. I can't wait when everybody is shocked when these two go missing, Idiots....

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I agree with interloper and its_a_nut
What are they doing for the enviroment besides putting more human waste out there and trying to make $$ selling books. What kind of kickback do they give you craig? or are they just more of your idiot heros like the others quoted?....

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These two fell right off the turnip truck I tell ya. And I'll bet they'll cost us our hard-earned tax dollars when the Coasties and the National Guard go out to rescue them.

Now you make sure and put the Iron Dog on the front page of both the Sports section AND the Outdoors section next Sunday! This is Alaska, Craig!....

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Whatever....yawn.
Not impressed. Somebody wake me up after they've circumnavigated a Public Housing complex in Chicago in the middle of summertime.....

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Now that erin and hig have concluded their journey - I hear they will be in Seldovia where hig grew up, for the 4th of July - I'm sure more attention will be brought to the physical aspects of their trip. erin has written recently that she has found more questions than answers on this journey. I'm sure, though, that she and hig will keep asking them, hoping for new answers to old problems, and reminding us of old answers to new dilemmas.

Here's one of my favorite essays, or at least part of it, by erin:

There’s a lot of wilderness. A lot of space for folks like us to wander. But it’s nowhere near infinite, and nowhere near indestructible. Talking to people who’ve seen these places decades before we got there - it’s amazing how quickly wilderness can be lost.

Environmental Lessons:

We left Seattle last June with the idea that in the course of walking 4000 miles we would learn something. That we might see what was really going on with some of the big environmental issues in this region, and could share that with the world. It was what we told everyone: potential sponsors, reporters, friends and family. Privately we wondered - was it really going to work? With such a broad scope, we couldn’t focus on a single issue, couldn’t give an easy answer, couldn’t make an easy sound bite. The sheer length of the trip forced us out of the usual wilderness-lover’s mantra of “save my favorite place” into thornier questions of balance, sustainability, and priorities.

After 2700 miles, have we learned anything?

Everyone’s fighting over the same few places:

Much of the area we’ve walked through, no one wants. Harsh terrain, harsh weather, rocks and ice… A lot of it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t matter if it’s protected or not. Most of the wildlife, the salmon, and the merchantable timber are concentrated in the same few places. A place like the Tongass may seem big on the map, but numbers of acres don’t mean much. Many of these crucial places have already been logged, and environmental groups and logging interests are fighting over the last few scraps.

Logging in Alaska doesn’t make sense. Fishing does:

Most of our journey so far has been through the temperate rainforest zone. And as we’ve thrashed through the brush beneath the trees, we’ve watched the forests change. Douglas firs disappeared first, followed by red cedars, then yellow cedars, until we were left with spruce and hemlock. We walked north, and ever thinner growth rings showed how the trees grow more slowly. Sparser. More spindly. The second and third growth “plantation forests” are nowhere to be seen in Alaska. Up here, logging is mining.

A one-time deal in the time frame of any company. It usually takes taxpayer subsidies to even be profitable. For small-scale local use, it can make sense. For large-scale commercial operations, we should take lumber from the places where trees grow faster (we don’t harvest oranges in Alaska either).

But as the big forests have become sparser, the wildlife has become more abundant. Particularly the salmon. Listening to a lecture by Dave Montgomery (author of King of Fish), I was struck by these numbers: Washington state only has 2% of its historic salmon runs left. BC has 36%. Averaged across the state, Alaska has 100%. As we traveled, we watched dams and salmon farms give way to free-flowing streams and commercial fishing boats, and listened to folks in the south wistfully reminisce about the fish that used to be. If it’s sustainably managed, the wild salmon fishery is an industry that depends on a healthy ecosystem to survive - working to keep it alive for hungry bears and wilderness-loving packrafters.

And so tasty!

images by erin