The Library at the End of the World

Just like my mother and Reba I’ve chosen to live my life as a nomad, although my travels take me far outside my ancestor’s traditional land. I’ve yet to find a way to balance work and travel so when I get weary of the road and run out of money I head back to Alaska. Before I leave I always make sure to stop by my mother’s old property and think about the fun times we had in the woods. As I leave Alaska this time I don’t know if I will ever come back. The many extreme changes I’ve seen in the last few years have me worried that the land will never be the same again. As a child I would look out of my window at the mountains above Anchorage, I studied the lines of light and shadow, the contrasts of rock and snow meeting the white clouds and blue sky. I tried so hard to capture this beauty with pencil and paper but all my efforts only produced simple lines and shading that required a lot of imagination. When I look at those mountains today I no longer see the snow that used to cap the...

Have you ever went hiking and stumbled across a forgotten cabin, and as your curiosity pushes you to explore you can’t help but wonder about the lives of the people who lived there? This is the story of one of those forgotten places.                 About 9 miles outside of a tiny little Alaskan border town called Tok, tucked away in the woods down a long dirt road off an even longer stretch of highway sits the cabin of Reba Dewilde, an amazing woman who cut her own path through the harsh Alaskan wilderness and one of the last of a generation of Native Americans raised in the old ways. What’s impressive about this particular cabin is the fact that it’s not the only one she built, she had built 3 cabins in her lifetime, all while raising her five sons and daughter as a single mother. Feeding six kids off of the land in and of its self is an impressive task, but to single handedly build 3 cabins while...