When I awoke the next morning around nine a.m., the sky was no brighter than it had been at a quarter past three, when we’d gone to bed. My head throbbed from the liquor, but Kenji was already up, silently tending to matters around the cabin with martial economy. If he was at all hungover, he didn’t show it.
Kenji walks with his heavy arms bowed out at his sides like a prizefighter—which in fact he once was. In a 2012 biography called Finding Mars, the Fairbanks science writer Ned Rozell recounted how an eighteen-year-old Kenji was scouted by the renowned Japanese boxing trainer Shoei Uehara, who’d coached several world titlists. “I thought
he could be a world champion,” Uehara told Rozell. But while Kenji trained as Uehara’s protégé for a little over a year, he was less interested in fighting than in disciplining his body and mind. “I think adventure was his dream,” Uehara’s wife once told Rozell. “He didn’t derail from it.”
Rozell’s book described a man with an almost preternatural sense of direction. The son of an office secretary and a lifelong employee of Bridgestone Tires, Kenji grew up in the suburbs of Tokyo, the most populous metropolitan area in the world; Rozell visited his childhood home and found “no trace of wildness” beyond the manicured ginkgo trees lining the streets and the papillon dogs his parents doted upon. But when Kenji was five or six, his parents took him clam digging, and he slipped off to explore the shore alone. They eventually found him in the care of a bemused park attendant, who told them Kenji’s surprising interpretation of events: “My parents got lost.”
When he was nine, Kenji began sneaking out on bicycle, each time charting a new thirty-, forty-, fifty-mile route. In junior high he made a fifty-mile solo pilgrimage through the countryside on foot, sleeping in garages and train sheds. At the same age he learned how to build a fire, a skill he practiced every weekend, rain or shine. He studied astronomy, self-testing his knowledge by craning his head to a random point in the sky, allowing himself a one-second glimpse, and then naming the star he’d seen based on its color, the time, and surrounding constellations. These skills gave him confidence that he could always take care of himself, and always find his way.
“You have to believe yourself,” Kenji had said the night before as we drank, pulling a sextant from the shelf and showing me how to use it. He lamented that people no longer saw the need to orient for themselves, since they carried phones that told them where they were. (I took a drink.) If you didn’t trust your internal compass, then you were liable to become “lost.”
I didn’t need my English degree to understand that being lost, in Kenji’s terms, meant more than geographic disorientation. He saw every device as a double-edged sword. To the same degree that technologies disburden us of practical concerns, the philosopher Albert Borgmann argued, they also dissolve our concrete ties to the world. Even as they free us up to live a “life of the mind,” they numb us to our physical surroundings. And in place of the focused, objective urgency one channels when building a fire against the cold, members of a technologically advanced society often suffer a more general anxiety, an ironic corollary of the fact that almost nothing we do on a daily basis is directly essential.
“Technology…I don’t say bad, but changing everything last twenty years,” said Kenji the night before, as he handed me the sextant. “I am last generation that knows how to use this. I feel obligated to share, or we lose everything.”
When John McPhee visited Alaska in 1976, he found a land of self-sufficient generalists—bush-dwelling men and women “of maximum practical application.” These were holdouts of a bygone era, seeking independence from the rising tide of modern technology. But such people have become rare today, even in the hinterlands of the last frontier, and Kenji was one of only a few people I’d met who were still trying. He couldn’t stand taking anything on faith. He insisted upon seeing the world with his own two eyes. Life inside “the vast machine” seemed to him like no life at all.
And as he spoke, I realized that we were talking about my life, and I had only a faint notion of the alternative.
Ben Weissenbach’s first book, North to the Future: An Off-Grid Adventure Through Alaska’s Changing Climate, is now available for pre-order.
