Only Kayak by Kim Heacox
I live in the sunlight of friends and the shadows of glaciers.So begins The Only Kayak, Kim Heacox's coming-of-middle-age memoir written in the tradition of Edward Abbey, John McPhee, and Henry David Thoreau, with a voice at times tender, irate, funny, and deeply humane. In it, he asks, what does it mean to fall in love with a place that cannot stay the same? When do you hold on? When do you let go? Born in Idaho's Bitterroot Mountains and raised in Spokane, Washington, Heacox moves to Alaska as a young park ranger and discovers a land and sea newly reborn from beneath a retreating glacier. People are reborn here too, he writes. This place is that powerful. In Glacier Bay you don't inherit, you create. You practice resurrection because the land and sea show you that anything is possible. Moose swim across fiords. Bears traverse glaciers. Flowers emerge from granite boulders. Inlets fill with glacial silt. Shorelines shift and nautical charts become obsolete as the land--the actual crust of the Earth--rebounds after the immense weight of glacial ice (of just a few hundred years ago) has been lifted. In this tale of friendship, risk, and hope, we find a story of coming home and learning to live gracefully among the deep blue glaciers of Alaska, a place Kim calls the Africa of America. His words offer us a chance to look into our own selves and ask how we might live with greater deliberation, purpose, and thankfulness for the wild places we still have.
[A] tender chronicle of a miracle in process, with glints of its rarity thrown by the handful from these pages--Kirkus ReviewsWriter and photographer Heacox delivers a genuine, deeply moving account of the past twenty-five years he has spent living in Glacier Bay, Alaska.--Publishers Weekly'Make access easy, and a place dies,' is his motto, and therein lies the paradox that Heacox tries to resolve in this book. . . . As he wrestles with such conundrums, Heacox creates a nicely balanced environmental portrait of Alaska's ice-cut coast.--Booklist
Kim Heacox is the award-winning author of several nonfiction books and the novel Caribou Crossing. His feature articles have appeared in Audubon, Travel & Leisure, Wilderness, Islands, Orion, and National Geographic Traveler. His editorials, written for the Los Angeles Times, have appeared in many major newspapers across the United States. When not playing the guitar, doing simple carpentry, or writing another novel, he's sea kayaking with Melanie, his wife of nearly twenty years, or watching a winter wren on the woodpile. Learn more at www.kimheacox.com.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781592288946 |
| ISBN 10 | 1592288944 |
| Title | Only Kayak |
| Author | Kim Heacox |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Rowman & Littlefield |
| Year published | 2006-06-01 |
| Number of pages | 272 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |