C.B. BERNARD CHASES ALASKA

via foxnews.com

Alaska and C.B. Bernard sing for the Last Frontier. And you.

When the wild calls your name, where do you go?

If you’re a writer like Cheryl Strayed you hit the Pacific Coast Trail and write a book called Wild.

Not the sort of wild you have in mind?

Most people understand wild as a place further away than a trail head on Mt. Hood, but it’s still a good place to start if you have a car and a tank of gas in Portland, Oregon.

So where would you go?

Alaska, that’s where. If you’ve been there or not, you haven’t been to C.B. Bernard’s Alaska.

This is a writer on the way to someplace other than where he was. The other place happened to be a few thousand miles away called Alaska.

You might call someone who makes the run from east coast to Alaska more than once a glutton for punishment. Or a writer looking for his story.

Go with the story idea if you have no plans on visiting the frozen north. Read Chasing Alaska for a warm up if you do plan a visit.

I met C.B. Bernard where I always meet writers, the monthly meeting of the Willamette Writers. The place is always full of writers listening to one of their own on stage.

This time was different.

If you’re a writer, think of yourself as a writer, or plan on writing something important, then you’re suspicious of everyone. Why? Because everyone else is probably a writer with a better story than you.

At least that’s what self-imploding writers tell themselves after their most current failure to settle in and write.

Seeing Bernard on stage killed that notion. There he was, a writer with a book, and not just any book but an Alaska book. Who writes about Alaska?

Adventure writers aim their pen north to show they’ve got something special, and if not special enough they’ve chosen a place with enough special to spook most residents of the lower forty eight.

Continental America is the lower 48 to Alaska not because everyone in Seward’s Folly is high. It’s more of a directional thing, like up and down.

C.B. Bernard looked like the most trusted man in Portland on the Old Church stage. Like a guide you’d want to follow into a wilderness designed to turn you into bear food, he used a supply of effortless charm to show his Alaska.

He didn’t talk about a man and his dog lost in the freezing forest where than man tires to build a fire.

He didn’t talk about a network of dog kidnappers working the west coast.

And he didn’t sing a verse of Johnny Horton’s hit, North To Alaska:

Big Sam left Seattle in the year of ’92,
With George Pratt, his partner, and brother, Billy, too.
They crossed the Yukon River and found the bonanza gold.
Below that old white mountain just a little south-east of Nome.

Sam crossed the majestic mountains to the valleys far below.
He talked to his team of huskies as he mushed on through the snow.
With the northern lights a-running wild in the land of the midnight sun,
Yes, Sam McCord was a mighty man in the year of nineteen-one.

In other words, C.B Bernard’s Alaska isn’t Jack London’s Alaska, if it ever was.

Instead he found an explorer and writer of his own when he moved to the great white north, someone Jack London would approve of, someone Jack London fans would admire.

Now you’ve got someone to lead the way, if you dare follow.