Koviashuvik: Making a Home in the Brooks Range

by Sam Wright

On a slope above a mountain lake in Alaska’s Brooks Range, Sam and Billie Wright built a twelve-by-twelve-foot log cabin with hand tools and named it Koviashuvik—an Eskimo word meaning "living in the present moment with quiet joy and happiness." Sam’s account of the twenty years they spent there is both a tale of wilderness survival and an inspiring meditation on the natural world and humanity’s relationship to it.

223 pages, Paperback

First published March 25, 1989

Reviews

[Roomie Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing style of this book is a little hard to get used to, but overall it is a very introspective story about protecting the wild and things that are real.

[Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I read years ago, just after college, and wanted to return to again. It does not engage me now quite like it did then, but it's a nice slice of wilderness life, and reminds me how I wanted to accomplish something like he and Billie did for many years, live alone in quiet and solitude. Why didn't I?

The author is a little predictably condescending toward anyone who doesn't live alone in the Arctic. He has a right to be, and as a young man, I was right there with him, seeing the typical American as some sort of mindless sheep. I've either gradually become one myself, or taken on a kinder, gentler, more understanding attitude toward my fellow people.

He was a great voice for the preservation of wilderness, and for that I have great appreciation and admiration. I have no urge to put the book away, so it still holds sway. I wish I had been in his place, for five years, let's say.

[Camille Cusumano · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Alaska - have made a half dozen trips there, including to the Brooks Range in summer and to Talkeetna in winter. Koviashuvik was one of the books that spurred me on to find a way to live in Alaska for a while. But then came tango . . . otra historia. And says, Sam Wright in his book,“ . . . nearly everyone who lives in Alaska, except some native people, are not really at home in Alaska because they are going to live somewhere else some day.”
So instead I wrote a novel that takes place the Great Land, not yet published. Sam Wright and Alaska inspired this contemplation:
The herd society of the beast sets patterns on the land, filigrees it as do the streams and water channels from the melting ice, in circular patters that we don’t pay attention to. We in our linear time mode—a herd society setting patterns with flumes of burned fuel in the jet stream, ribbons of macadam on the ground. Do the season really come and go or are they always there and our bodies are what move in circle through them. We put ourselves fixed in the center of all our stories and we become rigid, unable to bend and move when we must. This is why we die properly unto the earth. This is dis-ease and decay of the worst sort, being stuck. There are parallel universes in our own lives all the time. One day we wake up and the sun ray hits the window different. The birdsong is sweeter, we forget to finish our coffee, we meet a neighbor who’s always been there. We discover a whole new set of dreams and longings within and without.