Frontier, Defined.

Frontiers are having a hard time lately.

Well, not the frontiers themselves; they don’t have hard times, or easy times. They just are.

But the word “Frontier,” the notion of a “Frontier,” strikes people nowadays as odd. Outdated. Somehow it has gotten itself loaded with baggage in these fraught times.

Fraught times for frontiersmen, er, frontierspersons, um, frontiers-beings?

A few days ago I spotted an article in a magazine sitting around here, titled “Why the Myth of the Frontier Will Not Die.” And I have to say, that morning, I looked out the window and thought, “Why ‘Myth’?” Then I started thinking about the word and all its modern-day baggage and fraught-ness. Who, in 2023, by way of introduction or small talk, would say “Oh me? I live out on the frontier.” Who would? Well, maybe I would say it, just to get a rise out of you: “My wife and I live out on the frontier.”

Because we do. A frontier being an edge, a boundary, a border between lands known and lands unknown, places settled and places wild, surroundings familiar and surroundings frightening. No exaggeration here, because I guarantee that if you climb up the hills and keep going north and north-east from where I stand this afternoon, you are heading into unknown, wild, and sometimes frightening country. Yep, right now, in 2023, tail end of November. Darned cold and dark up that way too, as bonus attributes.

Oh yes, there were men and women who knew vast swathes of that country intimately — like the backs of their hands, as the saying goes. For them there was no frontier up in those hills and hundreds of miles onto the barrens north and east from here. But you know what? Those people are all gone. And almost every one of them is dead. Despite what you may hear on the radio or read in the papers, nobody knows that country now, not like those old-timers did. I wonder if anyone ever will again. I doubt it.

Might there be some way to define this hackneyed old word “frontier?” Here is a little anecdote, something that led me to a cumbersome and kind of playful definition. I intend to use it from time to time, to ascertain in short order whether I am actually out on the frontier, or not.

Consider this. The other night the dogs were making a ruckus. We have two dozen working dogs plus a handful of walking hospice cases, so when they all start barking and howling and ki-yiing at once, you notice. Those dogs can generate some decibels, believe me. The noise woke us out of a sound sleep. It was many hours ’til daylight, maybe three in the morning. I stepped out onto the second-floor catwalk, elegantly clad in my Frontiersman Series nightwear: old Walmart shoe-pac boots and baggy boxer shorts. I flicked on the jack-light beam and swept it around. Most of the dogs were standing on top of their snow-covered flat-roofed duplex wooden houses. Most of them were looking north, and everybody was revved up about whatever was up that way. I swept the powerful white beam around: west toward the sawmill; up onto the path and ridge toward Blue Fox Cove; north past the woodshed and the outhouse and the skid-steer track.

Snow, scrub, rock. The usual. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing moving or lurking.

The dogs might not have seen anything either. Often they don’t. They live in another dimension that we don’t have, because our sense of smell is useless. I have read that the human olfactory processors are about the size of a postage stamp, while a dog’s are the size of a football field.

I knew there had to be something out there, and quite close by, to get thirty huskies so riled up at three in the morning in the cold and dark.

Wolf?

Bear?

Moose?

Muskox?

Those were the first four choices, in that order. “Bear” is on the list because in fact we have seen bears this late in the autumn, every once in a decade or so. Farther down my mental list were “wolverine” and “fox.” The dogs seemed more excited than “fox.” Way more excited than “rabbit.”

The thing is, there is one big mammal, a very common one nowadays in a lot of places (but not nearly as common right across the planet as a lot of people seem to think), one species of “charismatic mega-fauna” (as the biologists like to say) that never for a moment crossed my mind until I was thinking about it all, many hours later, and talking with Kristen over breakfast.

The one thing I knew it absolutely could not be — not in November, not with the lake still open, and not with it being 2023, and with every neighbor we’ve ever had now gone, and on and on — the one thing it was most assuredly not, no way, was a person. A fellow human. If the beam of that jack-light had played across the figure of a human being out there in the night, well, you probably would have been able to knock me over with a feather. I think I might have fainted, really. Up on the deck that might have been downright dangerous.

And maybe, right there, is a convoluted but also distilled definition of “frontier.” A quick test to see whether you’re on one. I will use it again.

Oh and by the way, tracks in the snow the next day showed that there is a smallish wolf around, and although we still have not seen it, it’s still coming in close to the dogyard at night. Likely a lone animal, likely young, and by now it must be in serious trouble, calorie-wise. One year we had one juvenile wolf that started sharing a straw-filled doghouse with one of our older huskies. Maybe that would lead to another tangential take on where you are in relation to a frontier.

Here’s a poem I have always loved, by the late John Haines. It’s from 1967. I love that he just goes right ahead and uses the word “frontier.” I paste the poem here without asking for permissions, because I knew John just a tiny bit. We wrote back and forth a long time ago, after I first came to the Hoarfrost River. I last saw him in Fairbanks in 2004. About forty years ago today I took him for a little airplane ride above Lake Superior at Chequamegon Bay, in my 1946 Cessna 140, and we had a good time. He smiled. When John smiled, you knew he was pretty tickled. He died in 2011.

The Sweater of Vladimir Ussachevsky

BY JOHN HAINES

Facing the wind of the avenues

one spring evening in New York,

I wore under my thin jacket

a sweater given me by the wife

of a genial Manchurian.

The warmth in that sweater changed

the indifferent city block by block.

The buildings were mountains

that fled as I approached them.

The traffic became sheep and cattle

milling in muddy pastures.

I could feel around me the large

movements of men and horses.

It was spring in Siberia or Mongolia,

wherever I happened to be.

Rough but honest voices called to me

out of that solitude:

they told me we are all tired

of this coiling weight,

the oppression of a long winter;

that it was time to renew our life,

burn the expired contracts,

elect new governments.

The old Imperial sun has set,

and I must write a poem to the Emperor.

I shall speak it like the man

I should be, an inhabitant of the frontier,

clad in sweat-darkened wool,

my face stained by wind and smoke.

Surely the Emperor and his court

will want to know what a fine

and generous revolution begins tomorrow

in one of his remote provinces…