#ourland

When we started the “Our Land” journey in January, I mentioned that I drew inspiration from the words of John Steinbeck: his notion, in the travelogue Travels with Charley, to “rediscover this monster land.”

Four months later, as we wrap up the first phase of our project, I’m turning for inspiration to another John: the naturalist, explorer and author John Muir. 

In the late 1800s, Muir took three trips to southeast Alaska, where producer Elissa Nadworny and I just spent a revelatory two weeks gathering stories. Muir traveled along the Inside Passage by steamer ship and canoe, marveling at the glaciers he watched calving into fjords, the huge girth of Sitka spruce trees, the endless, quivering light display of the aurora borealis. The scenery of coastal Alaska, Muir wrote, was “hopelessly beyond description.” But he managed, beautifully:

In these coast landscapes there is such indefinite, on-leading expansiveness,     such a multitude of features without apparent redundance, their lines           graduating delicately into one another in endless succession, while the whole is so fine, so tender, so ethereal, that all pen-work seems hopelessly unavailing. Tracing shining ways through fiord and sound, past forests and waterfalls, islands and mountains and far azure headlands, it seems as if surely we must at length reach the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed. 

The guiding principle behind the “Our Land” series has been to explore how place shapes identity: how where we live shapes who we are, and how ties to the land determine our sense of self. These ideas are front and center in our most recent Alaska reporting. Among our stories, we’ll hear a father-daughter commercial fishing duo talk about making a living, and a life, on the water. We’ll hear from Alaska Natives about celebrating and revitalizing their ancient cultures, rooted in the land. And we’ll visit a tiny village – with just a post office to its name -- where living independently, off the grid, defines the people who make it their home.

Throughout our travels, I’ve been reminded time and again of people’s intense pride in where they’re from. We heard this expressed clearly by the sons of Yemeni immigrants in Hamtramck, Michigan. By a cattle broker along the Arizona-Mexico border. By Chinese-American families in the Mississippi Delta.

And it’s no small thing that on every step of our road trip, we’ve been welcomed into people’s homes and invited to share the bounty at their dinner table. We’ve gratefully shared in a community potlatch in Klukwan, Alaska, a Chinese feast in Clarksdale, Mississippi, an Uzbek dinner in Kansas City, Missouri, and many more.

(Sheila Spores holding a platter of grilled wild Alaska king and coho salmon at the home of our dinner host, Peter Rice, in Ketchikan)

Outside my office at NPR, I’ve hung a laminated map of the U.S., and I’ve marked our travel routes to date with a black Sharpie. It’s satisfying to look at the ground we’ve covered, but it’s also a constant reminder that there’s so much more territory to explore. The road beckons.

--Melissa Block

(Photos: Melissa Block/NPR)