I picked this up from the friends of the library book sale nook in 2016 judging by the books this was stored with. I made a goal to read and release the books in the tote this came out of this year. So, this book is being registered to read and release.

From the Back Cover
“I live in the sunlight of friends and the shadows of glaciers.”

So begins The Only Kayak, Kim Heacox's coming-of-middle-age memoir written in the tradition of Edward Abbey, John McPhee, and Henry David Thoreau, with a voice at times tender, irate, funny, and deeply humane. In it, he asks, what does it mean to fall in love with a place that cannot stay the same? When do you hold on? When do you let go?
Born in Idaho's Bitterroot Mountains and raised in Spokane, Washington, Heacox moves to Alaska as a young park ranger and discovers a land and sea newly reborn from beneath a retreating glacier. “People are reborn here too,” he writes. “This place is that powerful. In Glacier Bay you don't inherit, you create. You practice resurrection because the land and sea show you that anything is possible. Moose swim across fiords. Bears traverse glaciers. Flowers emerge from granite boulders. Inlets fill with glacial silt. Shorelines shift and nautical charts become obsolete as the land―the actual crust of the Earth―rebounds after the immense weight of glacial ice (of just a few hundred years ago) has been lifted.”
In this tale of friendship, risk, and hope, we find a story of coming home and learning to live gracefully among the deep blue glaciers of Alaska, a place Kim calls “the Africa of America.” His words offer us a chance to look into our own selves and ask how we might live with greater deliberation, purpose, and thankfulness for the wild places we still have.

This is an amazing memior about falling in love with life in Alaska as well as a touching tribute to photographer Michio Hoshino whom the author met as a young summer ranger in Glacier Bay and his own close personal friendship with Hoshino.

The book ranges from the late 1970's through the mid 1990's and looks at the Alakan national parks, the struggle of conservationists to keep Alaska from being exploited, and the friendships that Kim Heacox found through his life as a ranger and author/photographer in his adopted home in Alaska.

I found the book a wonderful tribute to the Japanese photographer Michio Hoshido as his figure wanders into and through Heacox's book.

left in the little free library