40 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
PERSONAL HISTORY
WANDERLUST
How a summer tracking musk oxen in Alaska led to a lifetime on the road.
BY JONLEEANDERSON
L
ast year, I took more than a hun-
dred flights, travelling to twenty-
three countries on four conti-
nents. From my home, in an old town
on the English coast, I went east to Swit-
zerland and Greece, and south to Mex-
ico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Bolivia, and
Chile. There were trips into the Ken-
yan bush, across Siberia, and to remote
settlements in the Brazilian Amazon. I
wasn’t home for more than a few weeks
at a time—my habit since I started work-
ing as a foreign correspondent, almost
forty years ago.
During the quarantine, I’ve spent five
long months at home. My office here
is festooned with mementos of report-
ing trips: a rug from one of Saddam’s
palaces, a gilded leather box that be-
longed to Muammar Qaddafi, a piece
of a Bosnian tombstone. On a wall are
two nudes, painted in oil by one of Che
Guevara’s guerrillas; on another is a silk
heraldic flag used at the coronation of
King Faisal I.
In one of my early jobs, a bureau
chief at Time encouraged me to be a
“fire-eater”—to go where other report-
ers wouldn’t. I didn’t need any encour-
agement to get myself in trouble. Among
the artifacts in my office are a pile of
journals, which I began keeping in my
early teens. One of them contains the
record of a formative trip that I took in
1978, when I was twenty-one. That sum-
mer, I travelled to Alaska to make my
fortune from musk-ox wool.
I hadn’t planned on it, exactly. I was
staying at my aunt Doris and uncle
Warren’s house in Woodside, a village
tucked into live oaks and redwoods,
about an hour south of San Francisco.
For two months, Doris had been teach-
ing me how to cook. I wasn’t hoping
to become a chef; she had assured me
that if I acquired some basic kitchen
skills I might be hired to join a U.S.
Geological Survey expedition to the
Alaskan wilderness.
Warren, my mother’s older brother,
was a geologist who had worked for
years in remote places: Alaska, the Mo-
jave Desert, Liberia. He was now posted
at the U.S.G.S. office in Menlo Park,
but he spent summers mapping the Alas-
kan backcountry with a team of geolo-
gists. Like Warren, most of them were
hardy, deeply tanned men of few words.
I met a colleague of his at a U.S.G.S.
picnic one weekend: a young woman
with prosthetic arms, to replace the ones
she’d lost when a bear mauled her. War-
ren noted laconically that she was lucky
to be alive.
Warren had grown up, with my
mother, on a ranch in the San Gabriel
Mountains, roaming the countryside
and hunting in the woods. My mother
told me that he had kept bobcats as pets,
and at twelve survived a winter alone in
a cabin in the High Sierras, tending
traplines for food. During the Second
World War, he had spent two years on
a desert island in the South Pacific, man-
ning a radio outpost for the Navy. Fam-
ily photographs show him stark naked
in a lagoon, hunting fish with a spear.
As a child, I dreamed of having a life
like Warren’s, and my parents did their
best to mollify me. My mother, who
wrote children’s books, plied me and my
siblings with stories about the wild
world. On my bookshelf, Thor Heyer-
dahl’s “Kon-Tiki” sat not far from “Birds
of the Gambia.” My father was an offi-
cial in the U.S. Foreign Service, and we
moved often, from Korea to Colombia
to Taiwan. My family arranged wilder-
ness excursions, and patiently accom-
modated a succession of feral pets: an
alligator, an owl, a parrot, two mon-
gooses, a civet cat, a pangolin.
For my eighth-grade year, my par-
ents sent me to Liberia to live with War-
ren and Doris. The highlight of my time
there was a three-week trip around East
Africa, hosted by family friends—for-
eign-service types who were meant to
keep an eye on me. Instead, I went off
the grid for nearly two months. I hunted
elephants in Uganda, climbed Kiliman-
jaro, camped alone in the Serengeti, and
travelled to the ancient Ethiopian city
of Harar. I had never been happier. My
family worried, but when I finally reap-
peared they forgave me, mostly out of
relief that I hadn’t died.
My teen-age years were largely defined
by outward momentum. I worked as a
machetero in Honduras, learning Span-
ish but also nearly losing a leg to blood
poisoning; I spent six months living on
a wharf in Las Palmas, Spain. I went to
college for a year, then dropped out to
take a job with the Oceanics, a New
York-based alternative school that op-
erated out of a tall ship at sea. For seven
months, I guided scientists and students
through the rain forests, deserts, and
mountains of South America.
Afterward, I was uncertain about re-
turning to college; most of all, I wanted
to journey deeper into the Amazon. But
Aunt Doris suggested Alaska, and it
seemed as good a destination as any.
Uncle Warren had gone there with a
buddy after the war, and built a log cabin
in a place called Girdwood. I’d grown
up hearing my cousins’ stories about
their Alaskan adventures, and had read
and reread “White Fang” and “The Call
of the Wild.” And so I went to Wood-
side to train in Doris’s kitchen.
After a month of baking bread and
cooking omelettes, I was deemed ready.
But, when I applied to the U.S.G.S. to
work as a summer cook, a local got the
job instead. Resolved to get to Alaska,
I made a list of other employment pos-
sibilities: “Kodiak Fish Canneries, la-
borer; Alaska Fish & Game, fish counter;
Alaska Forestry Service, firefighter.”
Leaving nothing to chance, I’d also writ-
ten to the National Geographic Insti-
tute, asking for funding to search the
Honduran jungle for the ancient lost
city of Ciudad Blanca. I wrote in my
