When I caught up with Jeff, he was sitting under an old oak tree. Spanish moss dripped above us. The sun was low and the day was quiet. He had a book in his hand. It was an old science fiction novel from the library, something with tattered pages and a cracked spine. He squinted at me through the mess of gray hair that hung in front of his eyes. His face was hard to read, like most faces that had seen the years, but there was a smile there. A friendly smile. The kind that comes from living hard and doing what you had to do to get by. He didn’t ask much of life. Just to be left alone, it seemed.
He was from Florida, he told me, though he didn’t talk much about it. He’d been to Alaska once. Spent three years there, he said. He spoke of it as a man speaks of something he had to do. Not something he loved, but something that made sense in the moment. He had lived out there in the wild, far from anything. Three years hunting, trapping, fishing. Salmon. Salmon in the rivers, salmon in the nets. He made his own nets, salted his own meat. He said that when there was too much salmon, he would take the extras to the Inuit Elders, 35 miles by boat. Flat-bottomed skiff. You had to know the waters, the currents, the paths of the fish. And the bears. He had a story about the bears, of course. Everybody has a story about bears when they’ve been in the wild long enough it seems.
He told me about the traps. About setting them in the cold mornings, waiting for the animals to come. About how you could tell the marks of the mink and the lynx in the snow. The run-ins with bears had been few, but enough, his chuckle was thick. He had survived them. The life he made was in the quiet of the land. He never said much about the city. The noise. The people. That was not for him. He was a man who lived on his own terms, and Alaska had been where he found peace.
Jeff had worked as a correctional officer for a time. That had been in Florida. He said the job didn’t bother him. It had been a job. But the men he watched—those men locked up—they needed space. Like he did. He needed the open sky, the cold air. When you work with people in a cage, it makes you want to leave more than anything, he said. He needed to be free. But the men in the prisons, they needed freedom too. In a way, they were the same.
He had never married. Said it was because of his itchy feet. He had never stayed in one place too long. That was why. Always moving, always leaving. It was like he had been born to wander. His friends were all settled now, “exactly where they landed” after high school. They had families. Houses. But Jeff never saw the point. They were all in one place. He was not. He lived out of his truck now, always with a map in the glove compartment, always with the road ahead. He didn’t have much, but what he had was enough.
“I’m leaving again soon,” he said, after a while. “Going out to Idaho to pan for gold. Got a claim there. My friend’s got it all set up. I just pay $40 a year to use the place. You dredge up the gravel, sift through it, find a little gold. It’s nothing much, but it’s the way things go. You live off the land. Find what you can. That’s how it is.”
He told me more. About the small generator he used to run the dredge. How it wasn’t much, but it kept him busy. And the $40? He said it wasn’t a bad price to live a simple life. Not bad at all. It was just a way of being. A way of moving, like he had always moved.
He looked older than he was, though I couldn’t tell exactly how old he was. Sixties? Seventies? Hard to say. His face was old, the kind of face that had weathered a lot. Like a ship’s captain, one of those men who had been out on the water too long to care about how the world looked. He had big, strong hands, rough from the years of hard work. He had the look of someone who knew how to survive. His body was solid, built for life on the move.
He told me about the animals he had known in Alaska. The mink, the lynx. The beavers he had eaten, too. Said there had been a time when he had lived off nothing but beaver meat. He told me about the bears. How when you netted salmon, you had to watch the easiest paths. That’s where the bears would be, coming down from the hills, moving through the water, reaching out with their paws. If you didn’t watch the path, they’d take the fish right out of your hands. But Jeff had survived it all. He’d learned how to move.
Once, he said, he tried to settle down. There had been a woman. A Native American woman, an Inuit from Alaska. He had tried to make a life with her. But she didn’t want that. She wanted to go to the city. Shop. Be like the others. She didn’t want to live like her ancestors had, like Jeff wanted to live. So that was the end of that. They parted ways.
The world was full of people who wanted the things they couldn’t have, Jeff said. People who didn’t understand the land, or what it took to live off it. It wasn’t for everyone. Not for her. Not for most people. But Jeff had lived it. He had done the work. He had been a man of the wild for years, and nothing could change that.
Now, here he was, sitting under the oak tree, talking to me. An author and part-time park ranger who would probably never know the land like Jeff had. There were stories Jeff had never told. I could see it in his eyes. Stories of the wild. Stories of what it meant to live outside the rules. I thought maybe I’d hear them all one day. Or maybe not. It didn’t matter.
He looked at me, and for a moment, he smiled again, that easy smile that came from a life lived well. He didn’t own a television. I found that funny. People today were always staring at screens. Always plugged in. Jeff was different. He wasn’t a part of that world. He had a different rhythm, one that didn’t need to keep up with the rest of the world.
And when I asked him about the television, he just looked at me, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “I don’t need it.” There was something in his voice, in the way he said it, that made me think he had lived without it for a long time. Maybe he had never needed it. It was a joke, but there was truth in it. Maybe Jeff was the last of a kind, a man who had found peace in the spaces where others couldn’t live. And maybe, just maybe, the world was better for it.
On the road, I carried Jeff’s smile.
Come along then. Let’s see where we end up.
