“An arctic pirate looks at sixty.”
That’s how Nick Jans describes his newest book, a moving collection of essays called “The Giant’s Hand: A Life in Arctic Alaska.” That description encapsulates some of the book’s main themes: adventure, friendship, home and the passage of time.
In “The Giant’s Hand,” Minnie Aliitchak Gray, the Ambler woman who would come to be Jans’ “Eskimo mom,” heals him of a mysterious ailment she diagnoses as a twisted intestine, using nothing but her hands and her knowledge. Jans wanders the Arctic in his first long adventure, and innumerable more. He builds a house. And years later, he begins a long process of goodbyes — to friends, to youth, to life as a full-time Arctic resident — and he undergoes the reckoning that comes that.
“I didn’t come to Alaska to become a writer. I came to Alaska to live, and I came to the bush to live. I started writing as a way to explain things to myself, things that I didn’t understand. If photography became my journal, writing became my therapy,” Jans said. “In the Arctic, (complexities) are stripped down to their essences. That just makes them all the more dynamic and powerful.”
Each essay in “The Giant’s Hand” appeared in Alaska Magazine over the last 25 years. Jans has been writing for the magazine since 1990.
“I love the essay form. It’s absolutely my wheelhouse,” he said. “Personal essay combines the intensity of poetry, the shape of short fiction and the undeniable advantage of being true.”
[Read one of the essays — Caribou Time — here]
In “Going Alone,” Jans delves into the way one becomes a part of the world when away from the “commotion” people make together.
“I remember almost everything,” he wrote of one trip. “I was alone, in the fullest sense of the word… Yet my life over that brief time, rather than empty, was filled with a complete sense of where I was, where I was going, what I was doing, and why — rich enough, it seems from this distance, to justify my time on earth… what’s not often recognized is the huge difference between heading out (into the wilderness) with others and going alone. The experiences are so different that you can scarcely equate them.”
The book pays homage to Jans’ friends, Arctic family, and traveling companions. Of Minnie Gray, to whom Jans dedicates the book, he writes “I still remember meeting Minnie, soon after I arrived. She walked into the store, saw a stranger behind the counter, and introduced herself — a rare thing in a place where everyone knew each other, and expected that you did, too… My world became a little less lonely.”
Jans self-published this book, and though it’s a lot of work, he’s enjoying the creative control self-publishing gives him, he said. Though it’s a collection of stories, not a single long-form narrative, “It does have a beginning, middle, end and very careful, sometimes subtle thematic connections,” he said. “It’s all a combination of setting out into the world, finding a home, getting lessons from the land and the people you meet, and coming to grips with inevitable change and mortality, including your own.”
That reckoning with mortality and with aging gives “The Giant’s Hand” a sometimes melancholic feel. In a way, it’s a love letter to the community of Ambler, the Arctic, the wild, and the people Jans came to know and love after moving there at 24.
“I’m certainly not just writing about the Arctic. I’m writing about life,” he said. “As Clint Eastwood says, ‘We all have it coming.’ If you live your life well, you love things. Loving has losing built into it. If you let your loss or your own oncoming demise ruin everything for you, then you’re missing the point.”
[Author Nick Jans discusses writing, life in Alaska]
This summer, Jans has been making presentations on cruise ships.
“It’s an incredible opportunity to advocate for wild Alaska, and wolves in particular,” he said. He tries to get the audience “engaged in the whole idea that if Alaska is going stay wild in the largest sense of the word, a lot of it’s going to be up to them…. The only reason places stay wild is because people willed it so.”
Jans’ next book is a collaboration with Juneau photographer Mark Kelley on the Mendenhall Glacier; he said he’ll likely publish a collection of animal essays in 2018. And the novel he’s been working on for years, “a classic tragedy in the Greek or Shakespearian sense, but in a remote Inupiaq Eskimo village in the 1980s,” is ongoing. The novel will likely be his “farewell album,” he said.
“It’s very gritty, very visual, and very, very fast-paced, he said. “Three characters are driven by their essential nature to their own destruction or the destruction of what they love most. It’s about the nature of interracial justice, and from whence it comes.”
He’s also working on the final phases of the Romeo exhibit at the Mendenhall Glacier; it should be finished this fall, he said.
“The Giant’s Hand” and Jans’ other books are available on his website, nickjans.com.
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Clarence Wood, Nick Jans’ friend and mentor, in a 20 below zero ground blizzard in the Brooks Range.
Minnie Gray, Nick Jans’ Eskimo mom, works on a subsistence gillnet in her Ambler home. “The Giant’s Hand” is dedicated to her.
The Inupiaq Eskimo village of Ambler, Nick Jans’ home for 20 years.
A bull moose is framed by a rainbow, Kobuk Valley National Park.
Author and Haines resident Nick Jans.
Seth Kantner, fellow arctic writer, photographer and longtime traveling companion, struggles with a stuck snowmobile on the way to the Arrigetch Peaks.
Clarence Wood and Raymond Brown on a subsistence caribou hunt, Kobuk River.
Arctic travelers in the Brooks Range.
NIck Jans lines up the Ambler River in 1979 on his first Alaska adventure – 700 miles through the Brooks Range.
