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A Place Beyond: Finding Home in Arctic Alaska
This powerful book blends the rhythms of daily arctic life with high adventure. ""Jans's writing is a pleasure, "" said the ""Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.""
189 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1996
7 people are currently reading
115 people want to read
About the author
Nick Jans
17 books83 followersNick Jans is an award-winning writer, photographer, and author of numerous books, including The Grizzly Maze. He is a contributing editor to Alaska Magazine and has written for Rolling Stone, Backpacker, and the Christian Science Monitor.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
May 3, 2015
Posted at Shelf Inflicted
Nick Jans, teacher and writer, looking to flee “a future that looked all too certain”, drove five-thousand miles to Alaska.
In these simply written, brief, and pleasurable essays, Jans vividly describes the mundane aspects of his life in Arctic Alaska, as well as the wild and unpredictable. He writes of repairing a snowmobile, camping among wolves, his students’ love for basketball, the treacherous mosquito season, the breaking up of the Kobuk River, and hunting with the Inupiat Eskimos. He writes movingly of a friend’s death and burial, and a Christmas Eve celebration.
I have some fascination with Alaska and was thrilled to win this through the “First Reads” program on Goodreads.
If you are at all interested in Alaska, Inupiat life and culture, wilderness, and changing seasons, then I recommend this thoughtful and introspective collection of essays.
Nick Jans, teacher and writer, looking to flee “a future that looked all too certain”, drove five-thousand miles to Alaska.
In these simply written, brief, and pleasurable essays, Jans vividly describes the mundane aspects of his life in Arctic Alaska, as well as the wild and unpredictable. He writes of repairing a snowmobile, camping among wolves, his students’ love for basketball, the treacherous mosquito season, the breaking up of the Kobuk River, and hunting with the Inupiat Eskimos. He writes movingly of a friend’s death and burial, and a Christmas Eve celebration.
I have some fascination with Alaska and was thrilled to win this through the “First Reads” program on Goodreads.
If you are at all interested in Alaska, Inupiat life and culture, wilderness, and changing seasons, then I recommend this thoughtful and introspective collection of essays.
August 16, 2022
I liked the passages that described the author’s experiences in Alaska, but so much of the book was just him parading indigenous people around to gain a story. Parts of the book were downright racist (like when he insisted, multiple times, that the loss of language in indigenous communities was due to kids being more interested in “television, friends, and school” and simply … losing interest? forgetting? their language and culture and not the incredibly damaging colonization that ransacked communities within living memory.) He also said some really damaging and gaslight-y things about early colonization itself, like how people “flocked” to missionaries and no one was disappointed to be punished for speaking their traditional languages bc it was clear English was superior. What?! I assumed it was published in the 1970s/80s based on the ingrained and flippant (ignorant??) racism but NOPE. 2003 😑
November 27, 2013
I used to fantasize about getting away from modernity and moving to Alaska. Unfortunately, I get cold when the thermometer drops under 70ºF. I might still consider moving to a more southern region of Alaska – somewhere that still qualifies as "wilderness," but where I can feel my toes for more than six weeks a year – but A Place Beyond has proved to me that arctic Alaska just isn't my cup of tea (since, y'know, I like my tea thawed). But a visit, I can handle. I'll do like Jans does with the wolves and go, to co-opt his phrase, "traveling with my eyes". Only my eyes will be looking at books and maybe movies/documentaries, not wolves. Darn.
Beyond proving that I'm no Alaskan, native or otherwise, A Place Beyond talks about life in the Arctic Circle in such a way that you realize how similar it is to life anywhere else, while still getting glances at the exotic bits. People there wear t-shirts and play basketball and think their grandparents are boring old people who keep talking about "the good ol' days". They also hunt regularly for dinner, think -10ºF is a warm spring day, snowmobile to the store, and fly to church. As much as I like the idea of being surrounded by trees, if the point is to get away from engine noise, the Alaskan arctic is definitely not the way to go. But I don't mind reading about it.
Beyond proving that I'm no Alaskan, native or otherwise, A Place Beyond talks about life in the Arctic Circle in such a way that you realize how similar it is to life anywhere else, while still getting glances at the exotic bits. People there wear t-shirts and play basketball and think their grandparents are boring old people who keep talking about "the good ol' days". They also hunt regularly for dinner, think -10ºF is a warm spring day, snowmobile to the store, and fly to church. As much as I like the idea of being surrounded by trees, if the point is to get away from engine noise, the Alaskan arctic is definitely not the way to go. But I don't mind reading about it.
January 26, 2025
I can't tell you that my heart left my body and came back filled with light, or that I forgot, for a time, where the land ended and I began, even if it's true. Words, like map and compass, tell one story but fail at another.
Annie Dillard, when writing and rewriting the introduction to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, got less and less verbose with time, slimming and narrowing and simplifying what she wanted to say, and the author intended that here inspired by Inupiaq wisdom, and I believe he was successful at being succinct while overall telling a good story. This book shines a light on living in the far North in the past 30 years. A friend of mine lived in Kotzebue, not too far from him, and back in the letter writing ages, would send letters detailing life there, so it was familiar in a way.
It is a snapshot of time, from a perspective that rarely veers into lyrical or spiritual, and when it does, it turns the light on for all of us. That is the problem with winnowing down a story, you lose some of its spirit. He writes several times about being “almost there,” “just around the bend,” searching for something and rarely finding it. I find my heart leaving my body and being filled with light nearly every time I go outside my door into nature, the sky, the trees, the snow, the sunrise or sunset, so my one criticism is that he perpetuates a myth that those feelings come only a few times in a lifetime. It is available to us at all times, but we have to look, we have to open, we have to think outside the narrative.
The water keeps getting thinner, the chances bigger. Finally the whole world funnels down to a series of split-second moves, as visceral as some big, high-stakes video game. At the same time, there's the aesthetic thrill of body, boat, and river moving together, raw power and grace joined in delicate balance, like horse and rider. The insistent roar of machinery fades, ceases to matter somehow. With gravel blurring by inches below my feet, fish scattering like birds, the mountains rising close on both sides, I'm often overwhelmed by the notion that gravity and time have fallen away. Just one more bend, I tell myself. Ahead, the country stretches into forever. I'm almost there.
Ruthie Sampson, the bilingual coordinator for the region's schools, notes, "The grammatical structure of Inupiaq is 180 degrees from English, further removed than Chinese." Technically speaking, Inupiaq relies on a postbase construction: you start out with nouns and verbs, and add on series of descriptors (the rough equivalent of adjectives and adverbs) after the base word-thus, postbase. The descriptors aren't independent but directly linked to the base to form single word-phrases that are often longer than the entire English alphabet. The exact sequence of postbases is determined by rules so subtle they puzzle trained linguists. Also, certain concepts just don't translate-the linguistic equivalent of not being able to get there from here. For example, "big," a simple adjective in English, is a descriptive verb in Inupiaq. You can translate the word, but not the idea of what "big" really is. The languages reflect radically different ways of looking at the world, especially when it comes to time and space. Village English phrases like "sometimes always" and even "sometimes always never" might be partially rooted in translation errors made long ago, but I think they also reflect the failure of standard English to express Inupiaq concepts.
June opens sun-drenched, the clouds gone at last, and a few pans of ice have broken free in front of the fish racks. People look toward the river and nod. "Any time now," the elders say. There's an ice jam a mile below town, another at the hairpin bend just above us-blue and white slabs of ice three to five feet thick crushed into twisted piles higher out of reach. And behind the jam there are two hundred miles of ice waiting upstream, creaking and shifting as the Kobuk rises.
Several times a day I walk down the hill, drawn by the simple miracle of moving water; after seven months of stiff white silence, the river's swirling rush, two hundred yards of open current in front of town, is mesmerizing. Two days ago was too early, but now I remember what's coming: the explosion of green, clouds of mosquitoes, the splash of grayling, the glitter of stones in water so pure it seems like air. The winter has lasted eight months-months of darkness and sixty below zero, days of storms and nights drifting with ice fog. Now, as we watch, one door swings shut, another opens. Arctic summer is here.
Back in camp, my pocket thermometer reads nine above zero, and the night wind falls down the valley. The temperature has dropped twenty degrees since afternoon, and may drop another twenty, though the sky is suffused with a pale glow. The snow lies chest-deep in the willows, but this season, which the Inupiat call springtime, is defined by light. The days grow longer by seven, then ten minutes, the pace intoxicating after the numb darkness of winter. By mid-April the sun hardly sets. You can feel spring gathering itself, waiting to explode green and warm, alive with the cackle of geese, the whistle of snipe, and everywhere the crash of meltwater rushing for the sea.
I can't tell you that my heart left my body and came back filled with light, or that I forgot, for a time, where the land ended and I began, even if it's true. Words, like map and compass, tell one story but fail at another, just as when I sorted through the fifty slides I took of that mountain and ended up throwing most out. The ones I kept were fine-sharp focus, good composition, proper exposure-but the thing I'd tried to hold had slipped away. I've been back to the Ipnelivik since, and it's still good country, some of the best I've seen. The mountains remain, bathed in light, and bears roam through silent canyons where the rocks almost meet overhead. But the place I seek is somewhere else, now-just over the next ridge, or the one beyond. I ride out, hoping.
Annie Dillard, when writing and rewriting the introduction to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, got less and less verbose with time, slimming and narrowing and simplifying what she wanted to say, and the author intended that here inspired by Inupiaq wisdom, and I believe he was successful at being succinct while overall telling a good story. This book shines a light on living in the far North in the past 30 years. A friend of mine lived in Kotzebue, not too far from him, and back in the letter writing ages, would send letters detailing life there, so it was familiar in a way.
It is a snapshot of time, from a perspective that rarely veers into lyrical or spiritual, and when it does, it turns the light on for all of us. That is the problem with winnowing down a story, you lose some of its spirit. He writes several times about being “almost there,” “just around the bend,” searching for something and rarely finding it. I find my heart leaving my body and being filled with light nearly every time I go outside my door into nature, the sky, the trees, the snow, the sunrise or sunset, so my one criticism is that he perpetuates a myth that those feelings come only a few times in a lifetime. It is available to us at all times, but we have to look, we have to open, we have to think outside the narrative.
The water keeps getting thinner, the chances bigger. Finally the whole world funnels down to a series of split-second moves, as visceral as some big, high-stakes video game. At the same time, there's the aesthetic thrill of body, boat, and river moving together, raw power and grace joined in delicate balance, like horse and rider. The insistent roar of machinery fades, ceases to matter somehow. With gravel blurring by inches below my feet, fish scattering like birds, the mountains rising close on both sides, I'm often overwhelmed by the notion that gravity and time have fallen away. Just one more bend, I tell myself. Ahead, the country stretches into forever. I'm almost there.
Ruthie Sampson, the bilingual coordinator for the region's schools, notes, "The grammatical structure of Inupiaq is 180 degrees from English, further removed than Chinese." Technically speaking, Inupiaq relies on a postbase construction: you start out with nouns and verbs, and add on series of descriptors (the rough equivalent of adjectives and adverbs) after the base word-thus, postbase. The descriptors aren't independent but directly linked to the base to form single word-phrases that are often longer than the entire English alphabet. The exact sequence of postbases is determined by rules so subtle they puzzle trained linguists. Also, certain concepts just don't translate-the linguistic equivalent of not being able to get there from here. For example, "big," a simple adjective in English, is a descriptive verb in Inupiaq. You can translate the word, but not the idea of what "big" really is. The languages reflect radically different ways of looking at the world, especially when it comes to time and space. Village English phrases like "sometimes always" and even "sometimes always never" might be partially rooted in translation errors made long ago, but I think they also reflect the failure of standard English to express Inupiaq concepts.
June opens sun-drenched, the clouds gone at last, and a few pans of ice have broken free in front of the fish racks. People look toward the river and nod. "Any time now," the elders say. There's an ice jam a mile below town, another at the hairpin bend just above us-blue and white slabs of ice three to five feet thick crushed into twisted piles higher out of reach. And behind the jam there are two hundred miles of ice waiting upstream, creaking and shifting as the Kobuk rises.
Several times a day I walk down the hill, drawn by the simple miracle of moving water; after seven months of stiff white silence, the river's swirling rush, two hundred yards of open current in front of town, is mesmerizing. Two days ago was too early, but now I remember what's coming: the explosion of green, clouds of mosquitoes, the splash of grayling, the glitter of stones in water so pure it seems like air. The winter has lasted eight months-months of darkness and sixty below zero, days of storms and nights drifting with ice fog. Now, as we watch, one door swings shut, another opens. Arctic summer is here.
Back in camp, my pocket thermometer reads nine above zero, and the night wind falls down the valley. The temperature has dropped twenty degrees since afternoon, and may drop another twenty, though the sky is suffused with a pale glow. The snow lies chest-deep in the willows, but this season, which the Inupiat call springtime, is defined by light. The days grow longer by seven, then ten minutes, the pace intoxicating after the numb darkness of winter. By mid-April the sun hardly sets. You can feel spring gathering itself, waiting to explode green and warm, alive with the cackle of geese, the whistle of snipe, and everywhere the crash of meltwater rushing for the sea.
I can't tell you that my heart left my body and came back filled with light, or that I forgot, for a time, where the land ended and I began, even if it's true. Words, like map and compass, tell one story but fail at another, just as when I sorted through the fifty slides I took of that mountain and ended up throwing most out. The ones I kept were fine-sharp focus, good composition, proper exposure-but the thing I'd tried to hold had slipped away. I've been back to the Ipnelivik since, and it's still good country, some of the best I've seen. The mountains remain, bathed in light, and bears roam through silent canyons where the rocks almost meet overhead. But the place I seek is somewhere else, now-just over the next ridge, or the one beyond. I ride out, hoping.
November 20, 2013
God I love these stories. Makes me so lonesome for Chicken I could cry. Maybe I need to go on a roadtrip. The city gets a bit crowded some days.
July 8, 2018
This book was written about a village in my school district. It was really interesting to read another outsider's perspective of this place. There are some things he talks about that I haven't experienced, but have heard of, and there are a lot of things he talks about that I have seen or experienced for myself. I should buy a copy and annotate it with my own memories... It's sad, though, because some things he talks about, like the loss of culture, have gotten worse since he wrote this book.
March 27, 2018
Finished this yesterday, 2/7/18. Goodreads is not allowing me to enter dates other than "finished today".
October 12, 2019
This book contains some of the most beautifully written essays I have ever read.
December 18, 2020
An absolutely AMAZING book!
November 6, 2021
My review of this book can be found on my YouTube Vlog at:
https://youtu.be/SS4lHCl6vY4
Enjoy!
https://youtu.be/SS4lHCl6vY4
Enjoy!
August 6, 2009
I read this through the "First Reads" program on Goodreads. This is an enlightening book of short stories written from the perspective of the author who actually lives in Alaska in a rural area of the tundra. Each of the stories has a different introspective message which is vetted through the eyes of someone living in this small village in Alaska.
Something I appreciated more in this book than in others which were more historical that I have read is just how COLD it is up there and how difficult it must be for people to live there. The author really shows through Western-ized eyes how inspiring and amazing these communities are--it's almost like stepping back in time the way they live--except that they have snowmobiles and motorized boats. :)
I really enjoyed this book even though I usually don't like short stories. It can be read in many different "sit-down" periods as each story really stands alone.
Something I appreciated more in this book than in others which were more historical that I have read is just how COLD it is up there and how difficult it must be for people to live there. The author really shows through Western-ized eyes how inspiring and amazing these communities are--it's almost like stepping back in time the way they live--except that they have snowmobiles and motorized boats. :)
I really enjoyed this book even though I usually don't like short stories. It can be read in many different "sit-down" periods as each story really stands alone.
February 8, 2017
A great little book about one man's life in the sparsely populate upper-western part of Alaska. If you have an interest in life in Alaska, this is a great read.
October 4, 2009
Nick Jans provides small yet satisfyingly raw images of his life in Alaska. He brings the reader into his world filled with survival, snowmobile parts, Inupiat neighboors, and local culture. Jans' chapters unveil the Alaskan wilderness as a harsh yet manageable place that draws people into herself. I am breathless as I read this powerful personal saga of life in a wonderland of harsh realities.
August 6, 2009
A very nice series of essays about life in a remote Alaskan village. The author does a good job of describing the wildlife and landscape, and, particularly, how depressing it can be during the dark winter months. Would have liked to learn a little more about the people living there, both native-born and newcomers.
August 8, 2009
Deceptively simple.
Jans, neither native nor fully outsider, layers snapshots of daily life in the arctic from a truly unique perspective and, in 28 short essays, offers an unexpectedly vivid portrait of a people and a lifestyle that are disappearing into the mainstream.
Jans, neither native nor fully outsider, layers snapshots of daily life in the arctic from a truly unique perspective and, in 28 short essays, offers an unexpectedly vivid portrait of a people and a lifestyle that are disappearing into the mainstream.
August 29, 2013
Non-fiction. Great writer. Lives in Ambler, Alaska. Cold up there!
November 16, 2014
You get a good idea of how it feels to live in arctic Alaska. I think an avid outdoorsman would enjoy this book the most.
May 9, 2015
Brought the Brooks Range and Ambler, Alaska alive.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews