Arctic Daughter: A Lifetime of Wilderness | Biographical Documentary | Full Movie | Jean Aspen

[birds singing] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] Jean: I'm Jean Aspen and I've spent a third of my life in remote wilderness, which is where I am right now, in the Brooks Range of Alaska with my husband Tom Irons. [melodic instrumental music] My mother once said I must have been imprinted early on the arctic. Certainly it formed a basis for the rest of my life. [melodic instrumental music] When I returned as a young adult, it was incredibly familiar to me. My parents spe

nt 12 years traveling by dog sled, on foot, and canoe, adventuring. My mother wrote seven books, they filmed early documentaries, they were young people off on an adventure. By the time I was born, they were pretty well-known. My mother's books had been on the New York Time's best-seller's list and they were doing lecture tours throughout the United States with their two documentaries. I sometimes thought I was born as a photo prop for a documentary that my parents filmed, Jeanie of Alaska. It s

et a foundation for the rest of my life. My mother and father divorced when I was still quite young. I was three, my sister was 18 months old when my mother took us to her mother in Tucson, Arizona. We lived in obscurity and poverty, it was definitely a letdown for my mother who had been well known and who had lived an adventurous life. [melodic instrumental music] When I was 14, my mother put together an expedition. She got her publisher Little Brown and Company to front her $7,000 and we drove

to Canada and put into the Peace River in a canoe that she had specially ordered. It was 20-feet long and it was made of wood with canvas on the outside. It was quite heavy, I think over 200 pounds, and very stable. We set off during the biggest flood in 30 years. An amazing and audacious undertaking for a woman and her two children who had not ever seen anything like a big river before. [melodic instrumental music] It was my first real wild experience since my early childhood and it gave me an

opportunity to try myself in ways that I wouldn't have anticipated. It was not an easy journey. [melodic instrumental music] I was 22 when I started back into this country for an adventure of my own with my fiance Phil Beisel who had been my friend since I was 15. It was early June, the sun was going round and round and hardly setting, and we spent the day trying to put our outfit together. A few people came down from the small town to look at us and comment. By the time we got our canoe loaded

, it was night which in that part of the world in that time of year means that the sun was down below the horizon but still lighting the sky. We were young and we were off to sink or swim quite literally on the Yukon. In our hurry to get away from the town and find our own camp we forgot the map. We did have the later maps, once we got far enough up into the Brooks Range, we kept looking to see when we would get on a map and finally we found enough landmark to say this is where we are on the map

. The Yukon was enormous, all these loops and back sloughs, and islands and channels. It is a very big piece of water, and a 19-foot canoe doesn't ride very high, especially the way we had it loaded. We actually only had about two and a half inches of free board. As soon as we could find a place, we pulled off and camped, and we resorted our outfit and rebalanced it the next morning. Over the next few days we floated down the Yukon. When we were far from shore, it almost seemed like we were on a

lake. The muddy water was calm, you could hear this siss of the silt against the hull, and you could see boils that would come up or go down. [melodic instrumental music] It was wild and beautiful. It was about the second day out when we pulled ashore and set up our camp among the big trees down on the muddy Yukon. It's a land that you end up feeling kind of overwhelmed by the big trees, and the deadfall, and the timber. We set up the camp and Phil took off walking with the idea he was going to

go catch a rabbit with my mother's old .22 rifle. He got lost. A couple hours later when he found his way back and he said when he took his compass out, he wanted to ignore it because it was going a different direction than what he thought it would be, but ultimately used the compass and he did come back. We wanted to get up in the mountains, and we had this hope that we would find our little tributary and be able to head up into the mountains. Well the interesting thing was when looking at it

on a map, of course it looked very succinct you think well you're just going to go down here and then turn when you see a river coming in. The reality of the Yukon with all of the merging channels, and sloughs, and backwaters, it's hard to tell where you're at. We arrived in Fort Yukon a few days after setting off and walked through the town. It was kind of a neat place. It's a native village. They welcomed us, Fort Yukon welcomed us later when we came out of the bush too, people were kind to us

there. I spent an hour or so walking through town taking pictures of the children in particular, then we got back in our canoe and headed on downriver. When we left Fort Yukon headed downstream, we had no idea of knowing exactly how we were going to even find the river we were looking for. It enters the Yukon in a whole series of channels and sloughs that are difficult to find even if you know where you're at. And in our case, we had literally hundreds of islands that divided up the river. We d

idn't know when a side channel might trap us or divert us miles from the main river. We spotted a small side channel ahead of us on the right. We were undecided whether we would take it or not. Phil saw some geese he wanted to take pictures of, and by the time he had gotten the camera out, we were sucked into this little slough, and it turned out to be the right way. It was a windy day and a group of geese that determined our course. And we found ourselves entering a small river that we could ac

tually see was a river because it had a slightly different color, it was clearer, it had the milky kind of look of having come down from glaciers, and it just made me happy to see it. We had our little outboard motor and when the wind died in the evening, we started up the river. And in those two days we would travel mostly at night because of the wind. We started up this little river, the small bends being very friendly for us, but it gradually became swifter. [melodic instrumental music] One e

vening we were camped on a sandbar feeling very discouraged when Jesse and Albert Williams came downriver in their Jon boat looking for us. They offered us a ride back to the village and we were just very grateful. They flipped our canoe over on their boat and put all our stuff aboard, and within half an hour we were at the village. We spent two or three days in the village, and at that point I told Phil we have to see if we can't get somebody who will take us further up this river, we'll never

make it into the mountains by Wintertime. We didn't have any money. What we had to offer was gasoline to go hunting upstream. We found a young man who was willing to take us up as far as where the rivers split. Beyond that he said he could not go because there were too many rocks and the water was too rapid. We had also added another problem to our load, for in the village we had picked up a puppy. It seemed like a good idea at the time, we called her "Nachetso" which means little girl in the Gw

ich'in dialect of Athabaskan. Once we took her on, she was our responsibility, and that weighed heavily upon us. And that was the last people we would see for almost a year. And after that we began more and more to pull the canoe with a rope. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] We found that day by day the river got swifter and harder to navigate for us. We could now see the mountains ahead of us which made our hearts feel light. We knew we were leaving the Yukon and the mu

d flats behind. [melodic instrumental music] The real tragedy in life is not failing, but in not setting out in the first place, and not being willing to commit to one's dreams. It's very easy to lose your window waiting for perfection. [melodic instrumental music] We depended on finding food, neither one of us having shot anything larger than a rabbit. We had a measured amount of foot, and I had calculated it as well as I could, thinking in terms of carbohydrates and fat, proteins. We had 50 po

unds of flour, 25 pounds of sugar, maybe 30 pounds of beans. Realistically we had food for only a month or two. We had hoped to be able to catch fish. We had a small fishing net, my mother had said that you could always depend on your nets and your snares, when you can't see things, you can catch them and she was right. However, this is a very lean country and we weren't very good at it. We shot very few rabbits, there weren't many rabbits. We shot a few tree squirrels. We caught a few fish, but

not enough to live on. Gradually as we ascended the river we ate up our food supply. We were exhausted, it didn't take long pulling that canoe upriver day after day and living on watered down oatmeal. When I was a child, my mother fed me the great classics, she read to us, stories that spoke to all ages, to that mytho poetic journey of who we are, and who we can become. Out of that reading I found ideas that became deeply entrenched in my thoughts. It seems ironic and poetically correct that Ph

il and I started out on the Yukon river without a map. It was the young person's journey, it was the opportunity to try ourselves against the greater world, to lay out our own destiny. [melodic instrumental music] As we entered the mountains proper, the river took on a very different kind of character with large boulders, and rapids, and it became more and more difficult pulling our canoe upstream. By August we were running low on food and we realized that we were going to have to start hunting

before we had intended. [melodic instrumental music] It had been raining pretty heavily and we had slept in, in the morning and then got up in the afternoon, late afternoon when the sky cleared and taken the .22 and the .30-06 and walked upriver to just kind of take a look and see what was up there. As we walked along we spotted a moose on the other side of the river. And the moose turned and came down to the river and Phil shot it. The moose moved back into the bushes, we swam the river and the

re was the moose. So we had meat, but it was still Summer and of course you can't keep meat in the Summer, which means we had to dry that whole moose. That's an enormous job to do even if you have a table, and place to hang it and so on, we had none of those things. All we had was determination, and ingenuity, and youth. We camped there for 10 days and Phil put up a meat rack. [melodic instrumental music] About three days into drying the moose, the clouds rolled in, the wind picked up, and there

was a storm. We were so exhausted that we just lost heart and went to bed and slept for about 24 hours while the rain fell and the wind blew our jerky off the racks and made a mess. But then the clouds moved back and we climbed out, shooed the flies away, hung up the jerky again, and started the fires and got it dried out, and we ended up saving that whole moose. Life isn't easy but it is a miraculous adventure when you have the courage to follow your heart. We need to re-imagine how we are wit

h the planet. It is time for us to mature as a species and begin to look at how we can rejoin the community of life. [melodic instrumental music] It was our intention to find a place to build a cabin, we had actually thought about a certain area that looked good on the map. We thought that's where we're going to go, but we began to realize that it didn't make any difference whether we were here or some place else, there weren't any people. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music

] [melodic instrumental music] The immature human position is that of a child taking thoughtlessly, thinking of the mother earth as being the all-forgiving, and all-abundant, and all-giving being that she has been for us. But at some point, if we don't bring something back to the table, the table will be empty. [melodic instrumental music] So we were going to build our log cabin from dead standing trees. We needed to have a place that was fairly level. We hoped to have a place that would be faci

ng South so that we would get the most sun in the middle of Wintertime. We weren't real clear how cold it was going to get, or how much light we would have, it was all new for us but we knew being above the Artic Circle, that the sun would go away and we would have profound cold. We had planned as carefully as we could for a year alone. We had Plexiglas windows and hinges, but we had very little of anything including even clothing. We didn't even have Winter boots. [melodic instrumental music] I

'd always been a little on the chubby side, but as the Summer wore on, I got quite lean and bones were sticking out, and Phil who had never been chubby got very lean indeed. One of the things about living in austerity is the appreciation of what you do have. I think there's a kind of poverty, a modern poverty of spirit, of having too much. I know that when Phil and I lived with almost nothing, everything we did have became very precious to us. Because there were just the two of us, we were very

precious to one another. We took care of each other, we were kind and gentle, and accommodating in many, many ways doing little things for one another that meant everything. [melodic instrumental music] One night we camped at a place that we saw there was an old trail marked on the map that went over to what looked like a couple of dotted cabins up in a canyon. We had this thought that perhaps there might be things that we could use there. [melodic instrumental music] When we arrived at the area

, it was really a magnificent gift to us. The man who had lived there, we found his name on the inside of his cache was Chris Olsen. He probably lived there in the 1930's. And his cabins were falling down, like they do, they tend to rot out with a sod roof. He had a little cache that was still standing, that was tight after all those years, and he had meticulously kept his tools. There was an amazing gift for us. The next couple of days we worked our way up and around the bend, and past where th

e creek came in, and I began to feel really desperate. I wanted to find a place for a home. Phil insisted that we find a place that was high enough and stable enough to build a cabin, and we did. The site itself was not level, we ended up digging down to try to level it out enough, but it had enough trees, that were dead standing trees around it and across the river and on the islands. It had a beautiful view of these five islands and a long, deep stretch of water that was unusual. So when we fo

und our home, I was very happy and contented. I felt like yes we're going to make it, this is going to be okay. We could still get in the canoe and go downstream and make it out before freeze-up, but now we were settled in, we were going to do this thing. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] It's interesting how our lives weave in and out with people we've never met, and the gifts that we get from them, and the gifts that we leave others without

realizing the larger picture that we play into. Chris Olsen had been dead longer than I had been alive and yet his life impacted mine in ways that he could never have anticipated. I was very grateful for that gift and every time we visited his place and removed a floor board or an old battered tea kettle, I stopped a minute and I thanked him for that gift. The real question is not how to live forever, or to live securely, but how to live joyfully, how to make your life matter. Oftentimes there's

no agreement or resources available for what you're called to do in life, nevertheless if you pursue it with an open heart, you will find avenues open unexpectedly and serendipitously. That has been my experience throughout my life. An accident occurred when Phil was felling trees that was to cost us time. "Nachet" broke her leg, finally we did create a splint that allowed her leg to heal and it healed well. It was always a little crooked, but she lived a long life. It was already pretty late i

n the year and there's a very brief window for hunting moose, between the time that you can keep the meat and the time that the animals start to rut and they run all their fat off. So we needed to get those moose in during about a 10 or 15-day period. We calculated that we were going to need to take the four moose that we were legally allowed. The interesting thing is that when just before the rut, the moose become quite active, they begin moving around. And within that 10-day period of time, we

actually did see and kill four enormous bull moose. It was a staggering amount of work to cut up, and bring home, and hang up that quantity of meat. By the time that 10 days was over we were exhausted but we had the food now to see us through the Winter, we knew we weren't going to starve to death. And now it was cold, and the snow began to fall, and our boots froze hard at night. Hardship itself is not only a great teacher, it is fundamental to establishing a sense of unity and courage I think

. [melodic instrumental music] Winter was coming down pretty fast on us and the river was freezing up. There was still water running out from underneath the rapids down below, but essentially our exit was closed. There was no way to get out until next Spring. Fortunately we had the food, but we did not have the shelter so we began to work as fast as we could to get that cabin up and it was a wretched time. There were days that were sunny, but the nights would get down to 15 below zero and the ni

ghts were getting longer very rapidly. We would wake in the morning and our boots would be completely frozen, like iron, couldn't get your feet into them at all. And we would warm them up against our stomachs, we helped each other, we were compassionate, and kind, and good to one another. We loved each other a great deal and we were all we had. We hobbled about, our feet had already been damaged by cold water and they never really got warm. It took probably most of a month to get up the cabin. T

he walls went very slowly. We had to cut each thing with an axe, and as the long walls rose, they become more and more difficult to lift into place and twist the auger down through the frozen logs. I remember the feeling of walking into this enclosure which was now head high and looked like a great log corral covered with snow and ice, and thinking that my life depended on getting this thing up, and I just couldn't visualize it. I couldn't see myself warm, and dry, and comfortable in this. We we

re eating an enormous amount and still losing weight. We were living out in inadequate clothing and the wind sometimes down to 20 below zero at night. We had stacks of frozen moose meat and we just continued to eat boiled meat and fat pretty much all day long. [melodic instrumental music] The days were getting shorter and we would take oftentimes and have to stop and have a foot warming and hand warming session, laying in the tent and hugging each other and trying to warm up, just standing aroun

d a fire was not enough. The day we finally got the roof on was a remarkable day for us. The gables were the hardest part because there was nothing to balance on, but once they were up, we rolled up the ridge pole and the two purlins and began laying the poles for the roof. There was a mindset, a narrowing of focus when we were so desperate of can we get out of the tent, can we push through this one more day? For months we had just talked about what the cabin would look like, and how we would re

joice on that special day when we could finally stop working and be safe. [melodic instrumental music] When we got into the cabin, we were only a month shy of complete darkness, 40 below zero, the kind of thing that becomes very serious in the Arctic. We still had a lot to do. I was busy grubbing around in the snow, trying to find moss to chink the cabin with because the log walls were like a log corral but the wind would blow right through. We also had some little strips of plastic that we tack

ed over the windows, and over the door hole until Phil could make windows and a door. We needed to put a floor in, we needed to build a bed, get up off the moss and off the floor. We needed a lot of fire wood, day by day the snow fell and deepened, and every day we would go out for a short period of time and bring home enough wood to burn that day and enough for another day. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] We were at a point where we could watch Winter coming on with a

sense of anticipation, and joy, and excitement rather than dread. As soon as we had the roof on, we moved our small pile of belongings up from the riverbank to be able to have them where we could look at them and feel wealthy. We got out our few books and pretty quickly Phil made a little bookshelf to put our books on. We had a five-gallon can full of books which was a huge storehouse for us, and we had brought along wicks to make tallow candles which most of the light we had that Winter was tal

low candles. I remember we had Thanksgiving and we prepared for Thanksgiving for a long time in advance because we were enormously grateful to be alive. [melodic instrumental music] I took a picture and what I see now when I look at that picture is how the ice cream that we had made with blueberries and powdered milk is kind of pushed to the front of the bowl so that it looks more abundant than it actually is. We laid everything out on the half-finished bed and got into our best clothes. For us,

everything was remarkable. We were enormously grateful to just be alive. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] Once our survival was assured and we had a sense of being able to relax our guard, we did become playful and adventuresome again. As the darkness came on, we would get out every single day, not only to get wood which was of course necessary, but also sometimes to just explore. The sun goes down the third week in November and doesn't come

up again until the middle of January. That period of time is not completely dark, there's the Aurora Borealis of course which is a remarkable experience that lights up the night sky, and the stars, incredible stars. [melodic instrumental music] There's a level of silence and expanse of space that is hard to describe. [melodic instrumental music] I particularly remember one morning when I followed a bunch of caribou up into the mountains above tree line. It was about 10 or 15 below zero and I im

agined what it would be like to be a caribou walking up. Their stride was just about the same as my stride, and I could step in the steps where they had walked. And as I followed them up one hill and down the other, high above tree line into the mountains I thought about what it would be like to live without having to carry anything with me. To be at home in my own skin on this planet without the burden of house, or backpack, or tools. I guess I have come about as close as I can to that. We didn

't know how cold it was going to get, or how dark, so there was this sense a little bit of anticipation and perhaps anxiety. What would it take for us to really survive the Winter? We were young and we were strong, but at any time either one of us could have been seriously injured. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] The Solstice was a very important milestone for us. It was more important than Christmas, I think that was true for all the early peoples. In our case it meant

it wasn't going to get any darker. The first sun coming over the mountain, just peeping above the Southern horizon for two minutes was a cause for great celebration for us. We hadn't seen the sun in a couple of months, and that was a remarkable assurance that life was going to return. The sun returned as rapidly as it had left, and in many ways it seemed more so. At first it was just a few minutes, and then about 15 minutes a day of daylight are gained during March and April. We had stayed clos

e to home when it was really cold and dark, but with the return of Spring, our adventurous spirit came back to life and we went out. Putting in snow shoe trails up and down the valley, climbing high above tree line, and thinking about new adventures. Phil and I were no longer the naive young people who had started off on this adventure. Through the initiation of our time there, we had gained confidence and skills, we were now ready to start off on new adventures, and our hearts were open and ful

l of hope. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] Phil called me, said the ice is going and I ran outside and we looked, and we had this whole deep mile of ice that was frozen in pretty hard and moved just a little. And then we had this igloo we had built down on it, and the whole thing kind of shifted just a little bit, and then it stopped, nothing happened. We stood there and then it began to move, very slowly like a train taking off of a station, and then building up speed

faster and faster with a roar and grind as it hit the reef. Break-up came clearing the way for a new adventure. We had dried the moose meat, so we loaded that and our few belongings into the canoe and started out downstream on the Spring flood erasing in a couple of weeks all the miles that had taken us the previous Summer. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] When we got to Fort Yukon we

only had 17 cents to our name. Phil took a job at the power plant to make some money for us to go South. A kindly native family, Jim and Charlotte Peters, took us in. Jim and Charlotte stood up for us at our wedding. I was 23, Phil was 24. [melodic instrumental music] [fire crackling] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] It was early the next Spring when Phil and I drove the Alcan in his truck loaded with supplies, and with our pregnant dog. We flew our supplies to Fort Yuko

n and chartered a small plane to take us into our cabin and land on the river ice. We were determined that we would have more food this time. Not having a canoe however was going to be a problem but one we didn't think would bother us. We planned on swimming the river when we needed to. We were strong, we didn't know how we would get out, but Phil had brought along some canvas with the idea of perhaps making a canoe out of willow. In any case, we were going to be out for about 20 months, and we

would worry about that later. [melodic instrumental music] We were full of new plans, new hopes, new directions to go. I wanted to plant a garden that year. The snow was still deep when "Nachet" had two female puppies, we called them Winkey and Robin. They were very different in temperament, Winkey the lighter one was wild and nervous as a wolf, Robin was very pragmatic and solid, nothing flapped her. This was to be our dog team and our family over the next years. [melodic instrumental music] [m

elodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] That first Summer we stayed close to home. As the pups became able to travel, we would go out upstream cutting dead standing trees to build rafts to bring home. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] That Summer Phil started work on a canoe. He used little sticks of green willow and steamed them in a piece of stove pipe over the outside fire. Then he bent them around logs to create a keel of canoe and also ribs and gunnel

. It was about 15-feet long and fairly beamy. Over this he stretched his thin canvas, however it was too thin, and the canoe sank so we put it up on a rack and left it to figure out another year. [melodic instrumental music] By Autumn the pups were big enough to carry light packs, to get them used to the idea that a trip out was fun, but it also meant work. [melodic instrumental music] Again, we had to hunt for our moose meat and that was a big part of our early Autumn, but once we had our meat

in, we took a long trip over across a couple of mountain ranges with the pups. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] Of course fairly soon Winter closed down with the darkness and cold that kept us close. Because we had been able to acquire more fire wood because we had more supplies this year, because we had a warm cabin, we looked at the whole process very differently than we had the year before. [melodic instrumental music] With the return of t

he sun that Spring, we were out much of the time playing, traveling. [melodic instrumental music] As break-up again freed the country, we set off to explore as far as we could go with our now mature dogs, they could carry a third of their weight. [melodic instrumental music] We traveled for days and weeks around our area seeing new places, exploring, and finding traces of the people who had lived in this country back in the 30's. In one abandoned mine cabin we found some canvas that was heavy. I

t was an oily dark material and we took that back to our home and Phil tacked it over our little canoe, and he used his hoarded quart of orange paint to paint it so that it would be waterproof. And we named our canoe poppy, it was the way we intended to get out of the country. It was almost freeze-up and there were flurries of snow on the river when we loaded our remaining dried meat and small amount of food, our few possessions, and our three dogs in this small craft and headed downriver. It to

ok us about 10 days to get down to the village where we gave the canoe away. Phil and I were to return to our cabin one last time with the intention of climbing to the Arctic Continental Divide with our dogs. We set off and took several weeks on a circuitous route up into the mountains. [melodic instrumental music] The final ascent to the Divide we did in a straight 22 hours of walking, there was no place to build a camp. [melodic instrumental music] We found enough dead standing trees to build

a rather skimpy raft, and we launched it into the current with the hope of getting home within two or three days. The river entered a gorge, well when it went into the gorge, we pretty much lost control of the raft. The whole current would pile down into the walls, underneath ledges, and in one of those turns we came very close to drowning. It very much humbled me, and shook my confidence, and made me realize again how much I've always been a guest of this land. It is the grace and bounty of thi

s wilderness that has kept me alive for many years. I never forget that part. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] The nature of life is change. I think the Buddhists have it right, it is our attachment to trying to keep things as they are, our grasping and avoiding that brings the suffering. It's a hard lesson to learn. Through evolution or cataclysm, life takes away everything we think we are and gives us the opportunity to recreate ourselves. [melodic instrumental music]

I found myself restless, wanting to leave not because I didn't love the land, it was something within me that once I had gained the skills and accomplished what I needed to accomplish at that part of my life, it was time for me to move on. We chose to go back to Arizona. I returned to the University to finish my degree in biology and apply for medical school. Phil got his certificate as an airplane mechanic and went to work at the Tucson Airport where he met and fell in love with someone else. S

o abruptly my life changed. My life seemed over in many ways, all of the pieces I thought I had put in place for the future were not there. Phil was gone, I didn't get into medical school, and for a number of years I drifted around in that mystery of not knowing and feeling like my life was over. I've since learned that life is a creation, not a discovery, and that we get to make it up. When you stop looking ahead and choosing, you end up in an eddy, going round and round with a lot of flotsam t

hat you might not have chosen. It was ultimately through a declaration that I made to my cousin that I chose a different life. It was simply choosing a direction and saying I'm going here. I told him I would become an artist. And that I would give up my job and be an artist on November 1st, 1981. November 17th opened a whole new chapter of my life when I met a remarkable man who shared an awful lot of my vision of exploration, and communication, willingness to stick through and explore deeper is

sues. Tom Irons became my life partner. Tom was also an artist and a superb craftsman in glass. He had left aerospace to create his own life out on the desert, building his home in the Tucson mountains on five beautiful nature acres. [melodic instrumental music] He was an adventurous and willing companion, someone who could step outside the cultural norms to create his own experience. We were drawn together by our love for one another, but also by our enthusiasm for choosing life as we went alon

g and believing in dreams. [melodic instrumental music] Tom and I were married, and for 20 years we were partners designing and building art glass. We created beautiful pieces of stained, leaded, beveled, and etched glass throughout the Tucson area and the whole Southwest. [melodic instrumental music] Tom and I were married in 1983. Two and a half years later our son Lucas Foster Irons was born. He became the center of our life. It was a joyful time and a challenging one also, for we lived with

much beauty, enthusiasm, and creativity but very little money. [melodic instrumental music] It seemed to me that my wild adventuring days were over. Now I had a husband, a young son, a business, and a home. It was another journey into adulthood for me. I set aside that wilderness part of me, but it kept coming back in dreams. When Luke was 16 months old, our family was invited to spend the Summer on a lake in the Brooks Range. During that time, Tom also fell in love with the wilderness. It was t

he opening of a new dream for us. [melodic instrumental music] When Luke was four, my sister Annie joined us in canoeing down the river that I had built a cabin on in my youth. We spent the Summer seeing land and exploring this wilderness, and I got the chance to see Tom falling more and more in love with the Arctic. There was one golden evening when we were camped that Tom and I walked up on a bench above the river and it was like coming home. [melodic instrumental music] We talked of maybe com

ing back here and building a cabin of our own, it was the first time we really opened that conversation that as a family the three of us could live here for a year. The next two years Tom and I spent pulling together an outfit. Gathering supplies, making things to go North, living on the edge of a dream. We mortgaged our home, we sold everything that was not necessary to make this gallant leap. [melodic instrumental music] [laughs] Tom: I got this boy. Oh boy. Jean: Oh boy, skis. Tom: Woo. Jean:

Look at these, some little boots. Those look like they would just about fit him too. Tom: Wow, isn't that something? Jean: One of the things Tom and I wanted was a third adult for the social aspects, for safety, I think a lot for Lucas too. And it was so serendipitous, as much of my life has been, that just a month or two before we were to head North, Laurie Schacht, the daughter of a friend, decided to throw in her lot with us and it turned out to be a perfect match. [melodic instrumental musi

c] Another thing we did kind of at the last minute was decide we were going to record this experience. We borrowed money to buy two Hi-8 camcorders which were the state of the art at that time. And it wasn't until 20 years later that Tom and I actually were able to create a documentary out of that experience, and that's our documentary "Arctic Son: Fulfilling The Dream." Even the journey of getting here was a remarkable adventure. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] We had

hinged all of these dreams on pieces that might or might not come true. [melodic instrumental music] Once we arrived in the country, we all relaxed. It was a lot of work to build a cabin, but it was fun, it was joyful, we were enthusiastic. It was almost as if we could let our breath out again. Tom: To the right, to the right. Jean: We did not see planes, we didn't have satellite phone or any way of communicating with the outside world except for one mail flight that we had planned for November

to let our families know that we were okay. Laurie had the option of leaving then and she did choose to go back to her other world at that point, and it was just Tom, and Luke, and I for the remaining of that year. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] Luke was a very different child, the following Summer when we were exploring our valley and setting off for a 600-mile canoe trip downriver to the bridge that now spanned the Yukon river. We all had been transformed by this exp

erience. Throughout the years, Kernwood as we called our cabin, drew our family back repeatedly. It was our sanctuary, it was our place of remembering our greater life on the planet. Sometimes it was just the three of us, and sometimes we had a special friend join us. [melodic instrumental music] Laurie returned with us for another year when Luke was 13 and 14. He entered puberty in the wilderness and it was interesting to see the way he set about his own rituals of initiation. By the time we ca

noed down the river the following year, he really was a young man; capable, competent, and wise; an observant presence that was well beyond his 14 years. [melodic instrumental music] Each moment of life is an irreplaceable jewel. If we could carry death on our left shoulder the way Carlos Castaneda suggests and treat every moment as the treasure it is, we would never waste our lives being angry, or petty. We would treat each encounter with a person or a place as the last one. Life continues to c

hange, and with that change we evolve into something new. It doesn't make what was before wrong but it is gone forever. My four-year-old Luke and my six-year-old Luke turned into the 14-year-old young man. It's a good thing, but it is a one-way trip. I think living here has for me been an opportunity to see this cyclic nature of the seasons and yet every season is different. Certainly, I am different with each season. [melodic instrumental music] At the end of my long life what I have discovered

is there are no ordinary days. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] Once Lucas had set off on his own life's journey becoming a nurse, Tom and I moved to Alaska. Eventually we found a place in a small Alaskan town to settle. But we returned to the cabin yearly and spent a considerable amount of our time in Kernwood. You want to have a egg too, Tom? Tom: No thanks. Thank you, babe. Jean: You're welcome. We continued to build at Kernwood not because we needed things, but beca

use we are artists and each of our structures became a miniature work of art. [melodic instrumental music] The world was rapidly changing and its attention was drawn at last to this last great remnant of wildness, the Brooks Range. Each Autumn now, the sky was filled with hunters, people coming for a brief time to take the moose, or caribou, or sheep. We didn't hunt much anymore because we didn't wish to be taking more than we needed from the country. This is delicate, fragile, and sparse countr

y. There were guides and hunters that envied our cabins and we could no longer leave Kernwood unattended in the Fall. And we made it our business to be here every Fall regardless of our other plans. Technology also allowed us to keep in touch with Lucas via satellite phone as he grew and matured into himself, and our family remained close even at a distance. We found the longer we watched and the more we were present with the land, the deeper it opened its secrets to us. The little lives of the

community that lives up on this bench is quite complex and long-lived, even strangely enough the insects that come year after year at the same places. The same birds returning and knowing us. The community of life here is very deep and inter-related and complex in ways that I had not imagined before. It became our joy to simply sit near our fire in the morning and watch it unfold around us. [melodic instrumental music] Each species carries its gift to the whole of life. The squirrels carry the c

ones, and the mushrooms, they're inoculating new forests. The bears eat the berries, and the mushrooms, carrying the spores and the seeds for miles. Every organism has a part to play in this amazing community. Humans also belong to this gracious earth. When we remember this, we bring our unique gifts to the greater community of life; our love, our playfulness, and our gratitude. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] Life is not just about growth and expansion, but also about

pruning and returning to the land. In 2012 Tom and I lost our beloved son. Those who have not experienced losing a child cannot know the depth of pain it entails. We didn't see any way out. It looked like it was forever. We were stripped to the bone with nothing. I saw it as a great white sea that we were paddling across that went on forever. Tom: Luke was six years old when we came in to build this cabin. He was nine when we returned for the first time. He was 13 when we returned for a full 14-

month cycle of living here. And he learned so much about himself. He learned about the caribou, the moose and the bear, he learned about the Winter. What it's like to spend a Winter in the Arctic, what it's like to spend over a year in a little two-room cabin with his parents. Over those times here at the cabin we grew together as a family, and Luke grew into young adulthood, and then on to be a fine young man. Lucas: I sometimes like to sit up here. Just when you're up here and just to look out

the window and see God. And look out the window. Jean: Our culture doesn't give us any tools to deal with these great initiations in life, these moments of human cataclysm. We have no tools in our modern world. For Tom and I, returning to Kernwood, the sanctuary and solace of this remarkable land was the way we healed and regained our wholeness. Here for three months, four months, we were able to set aside any thought of how people would see us, any need to respond, and to dive deeply into our

grief, creating rituals, ceremonies that meant something only to us that unearth that deeper despair and processed it, and allowed us to be reborn into a new life. [stream running lightly] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] Throughout our lives here at Kernwood, we've never forgotten that we were guests of this gracious land. Living simply and with deliberation is not hardship, but a joy

and a communion. It is beyond price. That's one of the things I want to share, that each of us has the ability to let go of what we think we need in life. And we will be enriched by it, not impoverished. [melodic instrumental music] It is my deepest hope that in sharing our life here we will inspire others, not necessarily to go build a cabin in the wilderness, but to live consciously in their own lives. To find things of beauty and value to invest in. To pay attention to the smile of a child,

and the blooming of a flower, to the sound of flowing water, to the gifts of everyday life. It is in recognizing our unity, and our wholeness, our oneness with all living beings that we will step out of the insanity that is driving us to extinction. Tom and I have long considered what to do with our whimsical cabins. Tom's 70 now and I'm not far behind. All things change and we are changing. The responsible thing we've decided is to give the land back to itself. We are in the process over the ne

xt two years of taking down everything we've built and removing all traces of our life here. Re-wilding the land, replanting our footprint, and removing anything that is not native to the area. Tom: Luke always kept a warm loving spot in his heart for Kernwood and I believe that he would agree with us that it's time to re-wild this area. To give the energy that this cabin has collected and held from us back to the land. Jean: Change is the nature of life, but we would not have our whimsical fant

asy here turned into the sad and trashy affair that old cabins become. So we began this year 2016 to take down what we have created, removing every nail, removing every log of our storehouse, returning the logs to the river or splitting them for firewood to be used next year. There's no way of guaranteeing that this land will remain untouched. All I can do is my best. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] Who will I be

without this great solitude? That is a question I keep turning around in my head. It has been the foundation of my life. I have to trust that in setting out on a new journey, new things will open to me. There is a sweet poignancy about this Autumn, knowing that this is the last time that we will be enjoying our cabin, next Summer we will be taking it down. And as we wrap up a quarter century of living on this remarkable bench, it is with a sense of sadness as well as Thanksgiving that we releas

e it and let it go. [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music] [melodic instrumental music]