284 PART THREE
Simplicity, here, embraces mystery. You can see that happen in his own black-
and-white photos for News from the Glacier. Half are detailed close-ups: a deep-
grained section of dead tree trunk, a rotting log beside a flower sprig, oak leaves
just settled on a pool. The others show far-reaching terrain: a glacier across a
lake, a road rolling across plains below huge sky, and near his homestead, the
Tanana River up toward the Alaska Range.
Before all this, as a naval officer’s son, Haines was shifted around the country.
“I never had a home.” After seeing combat during World War II, and a year on
the GI Bill in art school, he chose to root himself, homesteading southeast of Fair-
banks in daunting wilderness and weather, absorbing old-timers’ lore of the land:
“they’d begin telling stories, and I’m just sitting there listening to them.”
Haines went back to painting and sculpture but returned to the north, clear-
ing forest, building cabins, making his own stove and boats, planting gardens,
chopping wood, cutting trails, moving by snowshoe and dogsled, hunting, trap-
ping, weaving nets for salmon fishing, often alone and sometimes with his wife.
Home and wilderness the same, he forged a life little different from generations
ago, close to an “American grain” his much-admired William Carlos Williams
once imagined. His wife, like Dorothy Wordsworth, kept a journal. Winter
1961, November 29: “John skinned two more marten... Dark at 2 P.M....
John wrote tonight.” December 22: “up to -44° for a little while... John got
two sleds of wood.”
Now does this make someone a stronger poet? Not necessarily, any more than
Thoreau choosing to live alone at Walden Pond or climb Katahdin could have
written as he did without rare literary and spiritual wherewithal. Haines:
I came to this place,
a young man green and lonely.
Well quit of the world,
I framed a house of moss and timber,
called it a home...
I made my bed under the shadow
of leaves, and awoke
in the first snow of autumn,
filled with silence.That spareness of word and rhythm make his low-keyed phrase “filled with
silence” even more mind-bending.
By the time Haines published his first collection, Winter News, at forty-two,
he ’d read and written much poetry, all the while keeping his foothold on a
“hillside overlooking the Tanana River” in central Alaska. “To one who lives
in the snow and watches it day by day, it is a book to be read.” Or put largely,