I often think of Rusty's way with words..."a williwaw on the Tanana".....[Tanana is an interior Ak river pronounced 'tan-ah-gnaw'] makes me chuckle a bit.....especially since we just experienced a williwaw last week.
Rusty was a war correspondent in the WWII Aleutian Campaign and he is frequently quoted in Jim Rearden's recent book [a good read] on those battles.
very true--the man really understood how to arrange words. while not exactly word for word, he might write something like:
i watched the clouds comb themselves to tatters on the high sierra... or;
this drama began on a wild rose september morning in alaska's ice ribbed knik river valley... or;
after they killed the blue wolf, as they headed to the kill, he wrote something like; the wind howled a lonely wilderness requiem... or;
by the time we finished skinning the animal, venus hung like a lantern on a peak in the evening sky...
i had read that he was a war correspondent during ww2, and also at some point worked as a smoke jumper as well.
no matter what a person's take on his writing is, for me it was real simple;
i liked hunting and shooting from the time i was about 5 years old, and as i grew and began to read, his stories re-enforced those desires, and whetted my appetite between outings--as a teenager and not yet able to drive, i passed hundreds of hours in the field, walking the hills, ledges, and rimrocks, looking for any suitable game to hunt--for me that was paradise, and the more difficult the weather was, the more i enjoyed it. (that carried over into my construction work--to this day i have always loved working outside in below zero weather--my work colleagues don't understand it, nor do they feel the same way--but to me its just another way to "feel" the beauty of lonely winter hunting walks...)
jim rearden--now that's a name i haven't heard in awhile. it recall several articles by him for outdoor life i believe, about around the mid 70's, and a typically focused on alaska...
