“Big Wild Life”
By Jeff Lund; On Step Media, 2025; 220 pages; $20.
“The last thirty-three days of 2023 had at least a measurable amount of rain and brought Ketchikan’s annual total to 175 inches,” Jeff Lund writes in the opening essay of “Big Wild Life,” his latest book. “The thing is, 175.3 inches of rain isn’t a record,” he adds, going on to tell us just how high those numbers can get. For those of us in Fairbanks, digging out from an almost unfathomable snowfall on the heels of a near record-setting cold snap, it’s a reminder of the old adage, “It could be worse. It could be raining.”
Lund spent most of his childhood in the precipitation corner of Alaska, and after a decade-long escape after high school, came back because, he realized, the rest of the country can’t offer the lifestyle that Alaska does.
An avid outdoorsman and high school teacher, Lund writes calmly and with considerable self-awareness about two topics that have become highly controversial and sometimes condemned from two different ends of our polarized political climate. One is hunting and fishing, which have become taboo for many on the urban left living far from the natural world, never harvesting their own food. The other is education, which draws considerable fire from critics on the right who, Lund notes at one point, rarely if ever set foot in a classroom.
What Lund brings to these conversations is a human perspective from someone attempting to live humbly in both of these worlds, and he does so from the place he has made his home in. A place so physically removed from the rest of the country that it cannot be reached by road, yet, still a part of the modern world, thoroughly tied by the internet to all that lies beyond.
“This book is my view from Ketchikan, Alaska,” he writes. And while in this instance he’s discussing why he remains in a place so many people would describe as forlorn, the words apply to both major themes running through the book. He’s writing about the occupations he knows best.
I say occupations, plural, because in practice, Lund is an instructor by employment and a dweller on the land by instinct. In his writing, these two vocations merge seamlessly, naturally, while following the four seasons.
Thus the book opens in winter. And after griping about, and yet making peace with, the rain, he moves on to one big reason why Ketchikan offers something most other locales in Alaska cannot. Open running rivers in winter, and thus the chance to get out fly fishing, even if it means getting soaked in the process. After explaining how finding the right hole on the right creek requires knowledge learned on the ground, not online, he calls it refreshing that the world, or at least Alaska, still offer things you have to figure out for yourself.
A few pages later, however, he’s on to the logistics of ferrying or flying high school athletes from Ketchikan to games up and down the Panhandle. Though he’s since left the position, he coached girls basketball for a number of years and faced many delayed and diverted journeys just reaching and returning from conference matches against other similarly isolated communities. One of those trips took three days to get home from, as Ketchikan’s extreme weather led to aborted landings, and the team careened from Southeast Alaska to Seattle and back again.
Spring, as Lund tells us, brings warmer rain and a guessing game regarding which streams will be the most productive for a fisherman and his rod; Lund is often a catch and release guy until hauling in the next winter’s food becomes a serious endeavor. “By the time the green shoots of life have filled the gaps between branches and twigs, a rush has settled upon the Southeast Alaska steelheader,” he says.
Meanwhile there’s school, where he tries to teach his students not so much to have a plan for the future, as to have the skills to know when to change plans, and when to recognize in themselves abilities they did not know they had. “That variability and uncertainty is the scary part of freedom and independence, but it is what makes life worth living.”
Summer is break time, both for students and teachers, but Lund is not one to sit still. Salmon fishing, building a home with his wife Abby, preparing for their first child, and travels elsewhere in the state become prerogatives. Of the latter he notes, while comparing a visit to a developed campground in Denali National Park to the hard work of legendary outdoorsmen, “There is no one correct way to be outside or interact with Nature. Maybe the closest we want to get to brutal isolation is the dull edge of a campsite where a hammock can be ruined by rambunctious kids playing outside. There is nothing wrong with that.”
Fall brings hunting and back to school days, prompting a meditation on the errant lives of Chris McCandless and Timothy Treadwell, who both met their undoing in unforgiving Alaska realities, stories he shares with his students through assigned reading while pondering his own life choices. “What was my grizzly maze? What was my bus 142? Is there still one out there? If the bus and the maze embody the manifestation of a nemesis, the setting where the tragic flaw deals its fatal blow, and the unwillingness of the universe to reward all passionate pursuits, I want my students, and eventually my daughter, to steer clear.”
By shifting back and forth between daily concerns of home and work and trips into the wilds, Lund captures the natural rhythms of life in Ketchikan, where those excursions become a needed relief from the more mundane matters that everyone faces. “Big Wild Life” offers inspiration wherever one lives to get out on the land and into one’s community. Even if it endures 175 inches of rainfall. “Get out there,” he advises, “and make sure you stir those corners.“
[Launched out of McCarthy, Porphyry Press has published impressive titles with a collaborative approach]
[Book review: ‘Secret Alaska’ is a handy guide for the uninitiated explorer]
[Book review: ‘No Place Like Nome’ explores the outpost and its deep historical relevance]
