Impossible Owls: Essays

by Brian Phillips

I called a pilot. “Do you have experience in winter-survival-type situations?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. “I survive them by staying indoors. It’s a technique that’s worked well for me so far.”

It had something to do with Alaska itself, its sheer hugeness and emptiness—731,449 people spread out over 570,640 square miles, a territory larger than Spain, France, and Germany combined holding slightly fewer people than the metro area of Dayton, Ohio. The density stats are a joke. The U.S. average is 87.4 inhabitants per square mile. The forty-fifth-most-dense state, New Mexico, thins that down to 17. Alaska has 1.28. And more than 40 percent of Alaskans live in one city! Factor out metropolitan Anchorage and you’re looking at about three-quarters of one person per square mile, in a land area ten times the size of Wisconsin.

This was the paradox of Jay Baldwin: One of the most infectiously happy human beings I’ve ever been around, his every waking moment was a kind of prolonged existential debrief. He was never not working on how to outwit the horrific eventualities he was forever expecting to befall him, and he was never not just extremely cheerful about this. Jay was a Vermont kid, raised in a small town, and there was a mordant New England pluck in the way he gazed into the abyss and said, “I see what you’re trying to do there, abyss.”

Who knew what would be there tomorrow? And it hit me that that was exactly the point of the Iditarod, why it was so important to Alaska. When everything can vanish, you make a sport out of not vanishing. You submit yourself to the forces that could erase you from the earth, and then you turn up at the end, not erased.

Officially, the purpose of the elaborate dohyo-iri is to chase away demons, and this is something you should register about sumo, a sport with TV contracts and millions in revenue and fan blogs and athletes in yogurt commercials—that it’s simultaneously a sport in which demon frightening can be something’s official purpose. But

For instance: the concept of mono no aware, which means something like “a pleasing sadness at the transience of beautiful things.”

When you have a regular cast whose interactions form the bulk of any plot, there’s always going to be a tendency to portray their relationships as overridingly important and to indulge the little bit of wish fulfillment that says they can satisfy all their emotional needs in one another.

The point is, The Next Generation depicts a strict military hierarchy acting with great moral clarity in the name of civilization, all anti-postmodern, “conservative” stuff—but the values they’re so conservatively clear about are things like peace and open-mindedness and concern for the perspectives of different cultures. “Liberal” values, in other words. You could say, roughly, that the Enterprise crew is conservative as a matter of method and liberal as a matter of objective. They sail through the universe with colonialist confidence sticking up for postcolonial principles. Starfleet has a Prime Directive … but it’s explicitly noninterventionist! This is so weird that it’s almost hard to notice; your mind slides over it. But it’s fascinating in numberless ways. Picard is both indisputably the most patriarchal Star Trek captain and indisputably the least likely to punch anyone in the face. No one is more individualist than the individuals of the Enterprise (“If there’s nothing wrong with me, maybe there’s something wrong with the universe”—Dr. Beverly Crusher, “Remember Me,” 1990), but their individualism has led them to reject most forms of private property (because it actually holds them back, they’re so boldly individualistic) and embrace ultracentralized health care. It’s nuts, but it’s also a vision of the American psyche that, if you can get into it, makes a lot of fine things suddenly seem possible, and makes some debilitating anxieties simply fall away.