For years, Judith B. Aftergut searched for her path. It was Glacier Bay and the stories of many who have lived there that helped her find it.
Now, 40 years after she arrived in Gustavus for the first time, she’s published her first book: “Everything They Wanted: Muz and Joe, Reid Inlet, and Glacier Bay.” The book intersperses place-based art and photographs from Gustavus artists and friends with short, thoughtful chapters on Aftergut’s own story, her research on homesteaders Muz and Joe Ibach, and the history of Glacier Bay as a landscape. Among other things, it’s a story of how Aftergut found her own voice and discovered for herself how to be a woman in the world — she stopped writing at age 13, she wrote, “thinking I had no permission to speak.”
“I grew up thinking I couldn’t speak in my own community,” Aftergut said in an interview. “I didn’t think I had a perspective of my own. Going to Glacier Bay, that’s where I started to wake up…. So in a way, this book was both gratitude for all of that, and this whole series is an attempt to give something back.”
Aftergut first arrived in Gustavus in 1974, at the age of 30. Though she’s never lived there year-round — her longest residency there features a rather funny (and uncomfortable-sounding) story about scabies — she returned regularly over the summer, she said.
“I think when people are confronted with that place — or any place that’s amazing to them — you want to do something, even though it’s inadequate,” Aftergut said. “A writer wants to write; a photographer wants to take photographs; a geologist wants to study the rocks.”
“Everything They Wanted” weaves together interviews with homesteaders, fishermen, park employees, and others with Aftergut’s own experiences.
The Ibachs, a homesteading couple who died before she arrived there, took on a particular significance to her.
“I looked to the thread of their lives as a way to nourish my soul and to ground it in reality,” she wrote.
The book explores the idea of having everything one wants. The title comes from something Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve maintenance supervisor Ken Youmans told her — that Joe Ibach “had everything he wanted.”
“I found this hard to believe,” Aftergut wrote. “I had never heard a statement like that from or about anyone in my life.”
WRITING
The act of writing the book was a path and a discovery in itself, Aftergut said. After she began researching, she felt a sense of responsibility to those she’d interviewed — fishermen, researchers, everyone.
“Doing an interview meant that I was promising they’d be in a book… publishing after all this time was to honor that promise.”
Over the course of those decades, the book developed in sometimes surprising ways.
Once, she was in line to buy cheese in Washington and happened to hear that someone who worked at the store had worked with the Ibachs. That man’s brother turned out to have been very close to them.
“That’s the kind of thing that shows me that I’m on the right path even if I don’t know that I am,” she said. “That is a lifelong learning process to me, to allow things to arise in their own timing, and to allow myself to be open enough and patient enough and awake enough to notice. Glacier Bay is all about that. It doesn’t work by, live by, clock time. It’s a different kind of time. You follow what the weather and the tide is doing — it’s not a matter of having an appointment. And that is such a wonderful way to live.”
Aftergut, who first arrived in Gustavus at age 30, is now 73.
Over the decades she researched and wrote, “it became one humongous manuscript,” she said. It was in recent years that she began to break it up into its current form.
“This book was written in short pieces, and the next ones will be too,” she said. “People are free to read the whole thing in whatever order they want.”
She plans a total of five books, each around 100 pages. The working title of the next book, which she said will likely be out in a year, is “See it for Yourself.”
A portion of the proceeds go to the Inian Islands Institute, started by Zach Brown of Gustavus. For more about the institute, see http://www.capitalcityweekly.com/stories/010814/new_1188772219.shtml and http://juneauempire.com/outdoors/2014-09-26/trip-north.
“Everything They Wanted” is available at Fireweed Gallery, Coffee and Tea House in Gustavus, Hearthside Books in Juneau, and on Aftergut’s website, www.judithaftergut.com, as well as Amazon.com.
CONTRIBUTORS
Gustavus’ artistic and scientific community — and historical archives — contributed lots to the book. It features watercolors by Carole Baker and photography from Fritz Koschmann, Robert E. Howe (courtesy of Fred Howe), Dave Bohn, Gustavus Historical Archives and Antiquities, the U.S. Geological Survey, Bruce Black and Lynn Kinsman (courtesy of Dave Bohn), Jim Mackovjak, Sean Neilson, the explorer Bradford Washburn, and Aftergut’s good friend Kate Boesser.
Writer, photographer and friend Dave Bohn was a big inspiration; he owns Goose Cove Press, out of Berkeley, which printed the book. He’s also the author of “Glacier Bay: The Land and the Silence,” which Aftergut began reading soon after her arrival, and a quote from which serves as the epigraph for the book. It was he that first encouraged her to write.
The Gustavus writers group was also instrumental, Aftergut said, mentioning Abigail Calkin, Fran Kelso, and Kate Boesser; Gustavus writer Kim Heacox isn’t in the group but was also helpful, she said. When she’s not in Gustavus, she calls into the group’s weekly meetings by phone.
• Contact Capital City Weekly editor Mary Catharine Martin at maryc.martin@capweek.com.
By 1985, the Ibachs’ cabin, once described as a welcoming place, was falling down.
