Disappearance: A Map: A Meditation on Death and Loss in the High Latitudes [Paperback]

Sheila Nickerson (Author)

Book Description

Series: Harvest Book | Publication Date: April 1, 1997

Weaving together personal experience and wilderness lore, this poetic journey through Alaska and Alaskan history is “a potent map of love and loss and how we find our way back home through the landscape of the heart” (Terry Tempest Williams).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The loss of a colleague whose Cessna 340A disappeared between Yakutat and Juneau (an area known as Alaska's Bermuda Triangle) prompted the author to examine other disappearances in that vast state. A former editor of Alaska's Wildlife, poet Nickerson reaches back to early frontier Alaska, to the Russians, American missionaries, Sir John Franklin and subsequent polar expeditions, including those of Captain Bob Bartlett and Vilhjalmur Stefansson. She also meditates on another kind of loss?the disappearance of the shamans, language and culture of the natives and of the land's natural resources. Nickerson follows recent disappearances of hikers, climbers, tourists and adventurers (in 1991, the Coast Guard launched 1192 rescues, with 45 reported fatalities). These gripping stories of death and loss are deftly interwoven with reflections on the author's life in Alaska. Beautifully written, Disappearances gives us a sense of place not found in ordinary maps. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Moved by the disappearance of a colleague, Nickerson (In the Compass of Unrest, Trout Creek, 1988), combines her own life story with brief accounts of other missing people within her home state of Alaska. The author draws her information from history books, personal anecdotes, records of missing persons, and her own diary entries. This broad spectrum of material brings both an eclectic and individual approach. One of the most striking features of the book is the author's flowing and descriptive prose as she covers such topics as exploration, indigenous people, and the unsettling reality surrounding missing persons. As much informative as it is a personal reflection of the author's life, this thought-provoking work encourages reflection in our own lives and our fragile place in the environment. For public libraries.
Jo-Anne Mary Benson, Osgoode, Ont.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (April 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156004984
• ISBN-13: 978-0156004985
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,903,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Remarkable Memoir and History, July 5, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Disappearance: A Map: A Meditation on Death and Loss in the High Latitudes (Paperback)

Notes on Disappearances: A Map

As someone who once lived in Alaska and liked good books, I could never understand why our state didn't produce more of them. Apart from Robert Service and a few essayists (Joe McGinnis, John McPhee), few talented writers have made Alaska their subject, and even fewer have handled it successfully. It is a melancholy commentary on Alaska that the most faithful representation of the state in the Lower 48 was the television show Northern Exposure.

Although the state has many dedicated writers, few have written material that was regarded as exceptional. Although many luminaries have visited, few were impressed with the home team. I found this particularly frustrating because other small, cold, places - Iceland or Denmark, for example - had developed rich and distinct literary traditions.

Doubly frustrating because the chance was there. You can't do regular literature in Alaska. Something about the place resists anything conventional. The problems an author might write about in say, Spokane, seem out of place or mis-scaled when set in Alaska. (This intractability extends far beyond literature - experienced mountain climbers from elsewhere are routinely killed in Alaska, talented pilots from the Lower 48 crash there, perfectly good ships sink off its shores.)

But this problem is also an opportunity, for the artist willing to go for broke. To succeed, she would have to invent new tools and take a radically different approach from the authors of the Lower 48. To misuse an analogy from Updike, the successful Alaskan author can't hope to hug the shore - she must build her own boat, and head straight out to the sea, with all the risks and rewards that entails.

Sheila Nickerson, a Juneau resident who was the state's poet laureate from 1977 to 1981, has taken up the challenge. The book is a history and a memoir. The history she reports is full of dangerous projects and unexplained disappearances. She dedicates long passages to great vanishings in the far north, from the! Franklin Expedition of the 19th century to congressmen Nick Begich and Hale Boggs in the early 1970s. But mostly Nickerson reports smaller vanishings: An old man gets off a ferry in Juneau and is never heard from again. A young man walks up a heavily-travelled trail and vanishes. A colleague disappears on a flight:

"Kent Roth, a fishery biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, has gone down with two brothers and two friends on a flight from Yakutat to Anchorage. It is an immense area, one that has swallowed people from the earliest times of its recorded history."

Throughout the book Nickerson intersperses her own story with this disappearance and the ensuing search. She also reports on the stacatto interruption of accidental death that is the hallmark of day-to-day life in Alaska:

"Flipping through search-and-rescue news releases at the Coast Guard headquarters at the federal building in Juneau, I quickly find a terrible sameness to the stories. The reports usualy continue from three to five days. If the case is large, or unusual, reports continue for a week or even two weeks. Then, for the most part, there is blankness."

Observing that the Alaskan Shamen were wiped out by protestant missionaries, she rushes to fill the void with any spiritual tool that can find purchase - the tarot, feng shui, dreamwork, bird messengers, ghost stories from her childhood. She is impatient with the stern, inscrutable Protestant God (perhaps her distant and angry father, who ultimately disinherited her, has something to do with this). Ironically, this is one place where that stern patriarch seems plausible. Such a God is a mere curiosity in a literary, affluent place like New York, Paris, or Peking. But He fits well where nature kills suddenly, unexpectedly, and arbitrarily. Nickerson never goes there - if that's the deal, she doesn't want it.

Only late in the book does she hint that she sees the awful possibility that there is no order, spiritual or otherwise, to it all:

"! ;There is a framed original chart from the Cook expedition to Alaska in 1778 - Cook's last before he turned south to Hawaii and death at the hand of native Hawaiians. The chart, in pencil, was executed either by Cook or by Master William Bligh... It is a working chart of Unalaska Island, out in the Aleutians, made during the summer as Cook and his men headed north to Icy Cape, at the edge of the Frozen Sea. There, just off the coast of the island, in a faint but elegant hand, this notation:

'All this 30' west of the truth' "

But even when her spiritual guides fail her (perhaps I should write 'especially'), the book marches powerfully on, because it is not driven by a spiritual force, but by Nickerson's relentless intellectual engagement. She becomes discouraged, but she never gives up. When one line of attack breaks down, she shifts to another.

It would be unfair to try to say this book has succeeded or failed. As with most Alaskan enterprises, success is a relative thing. A successful Alaskan expedition is one in which no one gets killed. Nickerson is generous with partial credit to explorers who got home with at least some of their shipmates. She has succeeded well on those terms - she's built her boat, gone to sea, and come back.

She succeeds in other ways as well. The whole book is pitched at a high level, far higher than Alaskans expect of local writers. Nickerson's full of talent - she writes in a clear direct voice, and, her protests notwithstanding, she has a pretty good idea of what she's trying to accomplish. This is the kind of a book that might be viewed someday as a cornerstone of Alaskan literature, one of the moments when Alaskans started writing things the rest of the world wanted to read.

Only Nickerson knows if the literary achievement was accompanied by a spiritual one. Alaska is particularly unkind to those who come seeking spiritual development. The sea and wilderness seem to have a special fondness for killing sojourners and utopians. It is a place where what does no! t destroy you tries to cripple you so it can get you next time. As McGinnis discovered, there are a lot of damaged people in those bars and cabins. In this game, holding your own is a big victory.

I think Nickerson held her own.

Sheila Nickerson, Disappearances: A Map, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is as much a meditation on love as it is on loss., March 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Disappearance: A Map: A Meditation on Death and Loss in the High Latitudes (Hardcover)

This book opens with the disappearance of one of Nickerson's colleagues in a Cessna 340A flying out of Yakutat on a foggy May evening. Nickerson writes with a splendid compassion of the way the love of family, friends and community assures that a lost man will never be a lost soul; she describes not only the enormous risks undertaken to search for survivors, but the courage of people who continue to love and have faith long after tragedy has shattered their lives. Nickerson, a poet, novelist, editor and teacher, is also a wife and mother whose family - mountain climbers and sailors - are themselves explorers, and she writes of necessity with empathy no mere spectator could achieve. It is not hard to imagine Nickerson, seeing tragedy unfold so close by, make a decision to bring the stories of those who have disappeared before readers' eyes - to remember those who have gone, but also, as a testament to the families who remain. She integrates stories of her personal life with historical sagas and also, deftly, brings into focus the horizons of Juneau's own magnificent but dangerous horizons. Reading "Disappearance: A Map" is like holding a collection of maps with ever more detailed views. You can step back, and see Alaska from the distance of headlines and stark topography, or you can move in closer and see lives as they emerge from these stories. I would urge you to read further into Nickerson's work. Her novel, "In Rooms of Falling Rain" evokes the troubling landscape of a community in Colorado struggling with storm and confusion. Like "Disappearance" it is immensely suspenseful, far more so than most books which fall specifically into the genre of mystery writing. When a writer of Nickerson's discipline and intelligence creates fiction the pages of the story turn swiftly. But do not fail to read her poetry, either. "On Why the Quilt-Maker Became a Dragon", with gorgeous illustrations by Judy Cooper; "Feast of the Animals", graced with exquisite wood engravings by Dale DeArmond; "To the Waters and the Wild", "Song of the Pinewife" and the sumptuous "In a Spring Garden" are written with the clear eye of the great poet: passionate, elegant, direct, wise. The more I read of Nickerson the more I want to read. Sheila Nickerson was the poet Laureate of Alaska from 1977 to 1981, and her books should be given pride of place on the shelf. She has not hidden in the sanctuary of the university: instead, she has brought her reverence for the word into prisons and children's schoolrooms and the pages of the journals she has edited. The literature and art of Alaska are among its most enduring treasures and these books will bring honor to your home.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Disappearance Discovered, May 27, 2000

By 

Michael J. Muller "Adirondack Reader" (Queensbury, New York USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Disappearance: A Map: A Meditation on Death and Loss in the High Latitudes (Paperback)

I found this book quite by accident in an old stack of magazines and newspaper clippings about Alaska. Thumbing through it, I became intrigued by the style of writing, the choice of subject and the author's method of interspersing personal memoir with historical and literary fact. For those who have read the writings of and by the Arctic explorers and the Alaskan sourdoughs, this is a book for you. Very introspective and yet not too personal. Really tends to get you thinking about those who have been lost and never found. I'm glad I found this book and would encourage you to discover it also.