Book: North of Hope by Shannon Huffman Polson

A Daughter's Arctic Journey

In June of 2005, Shannon Huffman was in Portland, Oregon, visiting her brother when she got a call from the North Slope Borough in Alaska (Alaska does not have provinces or states; they have boroughs). The call was from a law enforcement officer telling her that "… a bear came into their campsite last night…."

"Their campsite" was that of her Dad and his wife Kathy who were kayaking the Hulahula River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, moving north and downriver to the Beaufort Sea. The bear killed both of them.

The book is Shannon's tribute to their lives, her journey to find peace and resolution and an adventure in its own right. She rafts the Hulahula the next summer with one of her brothers and a friend. She has to "finish their trip…I have to see the place Dad and Kathy loved so much."

It is a lyrical, moving, compelling tale.

Also in the first year following the tragedy, Shannon auditions for and is accepted into the chorale company of the Seattle Symphony for a special performance of Mozart's Requiem which will be performed with Itzhak Perlman. There are short chapters of the rehearsals and the final performance alternating with river stories.

"...the flyer I received and the audition that followed, lined up as though orchestrated from another place, by a bigger hand, in the careful way that even when you do not feel him, God moves gently in you life."

She writes in lovely prose about the barren beautiful topography of north Alaska…and the silvered, musical river with its sandbars and braided channels and cold rocks and rapids. They find the last campsite and Shannon fashions a small driftwood cross anchored in a cairn of river rocks.

So this is a story of love, of acceptance, of family, of remembrance and also a plea to protect the "wild coastal plain of the ANWR" as it continues to be threatened by the greed of an oil industry that is pushing to develop another 2000 acres of the coastal plain "requiring roads and helipads and other destructive infrastructure on tundra perfectly suited for the cruelty of an Arctic winter, and utterly unable to withstand human development."

Her web site is: www.aborderlife.com