The Only Kayak
“Wilderness areas are places to explore deeply yet lightly; to exercise freedom but also restraint, to manage but also leave alone, to bring us face-to-face with a dilemma in our democracy. How do we convince people to save something they may never see, touch, or hear? A starving man can’t eat his illusions, let alone his principles.”
“I live in the sunlight of friends and the shadows of glaciers.” So begins Kim Heacox’s weave of memoir, history, and conservation treatise on living in Glacier Bay, Alaska, a place where the myth of the “Last Frontier” still feels alive. His love for Glacier Bay, Alaska, was first ignited when he worked there as a park ranger in the late 1970’s, and developed as he built a life there over the next 25-odd years. He becomes determined to conserve such wilderness, and wrestles with the paradoxes of loving a place that is rapidly disappearing, and sharing that love when recreating there seems to make Glacier Bay more vulnerable to overdevelopment. With humor and thoughtfulness Heacox captures the spectrum of relationships we have to nature and with each other.