THE CULT OF PROENNEKE
On every continent, the people of the world are leaving rural villages and country settings to settle in megacities, teeming metropolises the likes of Sao Paulo, Jakarta, Nairobi, Mexico City, Mumbai, Beijing, Cairo, Lima, to name a very few. Humans are moths to candles, unable to resist the brilliant neon lights and promise of urban Earth.
For some, though, city life holds no currency. Cities may be where the money is and where popular culture reigns supreme, but cities leave yawning crevasses in the human spirit. For those inside a canned urban existence, fair numbers hanker for a can opener.
What else would explain the Cult of Proenneke? Summon up YouTube and search for “Alone In The Wilderness.” It’s a Bob Swerer Productions product, all of nine minutes and a few seconds in length. The little documentary has been viewed nearly nine million times.
In the film there is but one character, the late Richard Proenneke. This diesel engine mechanic strode into the forest at Twin Lakes, Alaska at the age of 51 and did not come out until he was in his 80s. He lived alone for 30 years.
But it is how he lived alone that has Cult of Proenneke followers in awe. For the man ventured into the cold North with a cache of hand tools, a rifle and fishing tip-ups, a modest store of dry goods, and the knowledge and a skill set well hewn to turn a log into anything and everything needed to fashion a life in the wild. The only bit of modern technology he took with him was a small motion picture film camera on a tripod so he could record his daily comings and goings.
The opening frames of the short documentary inspire reverence among cult followers. For a few minutes, viewers watch Proenneke build a log cabin from the ground to the roof peak and fabricate a chimney to carry away wood smoke from a small cast iron stove. In the film frames there is not one power tool to be seen. Proenneke wields hand saws, axes, chisels, knives, draw shaves, and a wooden mallet of his own making. By the first snowfall in September, the cabin is tight, waterproof, and warm. It’s fully outfitted with rustic furniture and utensils, every bowl, plate, cup and saucer fashioned from native wood.
Why are this film and the life it portrays so magnetic? Why does it draw people in by the millions?
I like to think it has to do with the fact that each of us is not very far removed from the days when we all had to forge a life from our local natural environment. In reality, most of us are only four or five generations in time away from living on the land. At the turn of the 20th century, half of the United States population and almost everyone else alive around the globe got up with the dawn to do farm chores.
Step back yet another four generations, and most people around the world heated with wood, cooked with wood, walked or rode a horse, mule, or camelid for transportation, and hauled water by hand. Then, there was no indoor plumbing whatsoever. The bathroom was a latrine. The shower was a Sunday galvanized basin or hollowed log half full of water heated on a wood burning stove or next to a fireplace or even an open fire. The lump of soap to wash with was probably a mixture of wood-ash lye and rendered pork fat.
Wind back the clock another four generations and life for many on the American frontier consisted of long days felling trees with an ax and bucking them up for firewood, planting corn fields and gardens in drained beaver bogs or horse-plowed fields, cooking on fireplace coals, and the like.
Today, virtually no one can imagine the labor, the sheer toil our forebears shouldered in order to craft a nation out of the continent’s forests and plains. But some hunger for something altogether real, something hard and physical, something raw and challenging, something to test our mettle when the greatest challenge many of us face is commuter traffic and deadening office hours.
And then Richard Proenneke appears on a screen. The few minutes of film are hypnotic. Suddenly there is someone in our sights who turns our mass-culture myths upside down. What is success, if all one does is pay someone wage money for a house to live in, a car payment, and a cart full of groceries? What is a life if it is lived seven hours a day in front of a television and an iPhone screen consuming images and dialog fashioned by media mogul corporations in New York or Los Angeles?
Here on Youtube is a fellow human who stepped out of the cash and dash economy, the globalized, homogenized uni-culture and seems content, at ease, and happy to live simply and in complete harmony with his very wild and remote surroundings.
Not one in a thousand would take the first step on the journey that Mr. Proenneke took away from our mass-culture addiction. But the yearning to break away no doubt quickens the hearts of millions who sit through that short documentary film.
Although the site of Proenneke’s cabin at Lake Clark National Park is located in remote southwest Alaska, hundreds make the pilgrimage each year during the brief summer, flying in via float plane. There the 200 square-foot log cabin rests within a gigantic landscape overwhelmed with continental silence. In this setting, people come to pay homage to Proenneke, and to mourn the loss of human existence lived well on nature’s terms.
