Coming Out of Nowhere: Alaska Homestead Poems

By Linda Schandelmeier

“The earth near our place/ was cradle, / it rocked us— / became our skin. / House doors opened, / spilled us out, / we disappeared into trees— / they clothed us in delirious green. /. . . We knew the song / of this place, made it up, / sang it—”
 
Homestead life is often romanticized as a valiant, resilient family persisting in the clean isolation of pristine wilderness, living off the land and depending only on each other. But there can be a darker side to this existence.

Linda Schandelmeier was raised on a family homestead six miles south of the fledgling town of Anchorage, Alaska in the 1950s and ’60s. But hers is not a typical homestead story. In this book, part poetic memoir and part historical document, a young girl comes of age in a family fractured by divorce and abuse. Schandelmeier does not shy away from these details of her family history, but she also recognizes her childhood as one that was unique and nurturing, and many of her poems celebrate homestead life. Her words hint at her way of surviving and even transcending the remoteness by suggesting a deeper level of human experience beyond the daily grind of homestead life; a place in which the trees and mountains are almost members of the family. These are poems grounded in the wilds that shimmer with a mythic quality. Schandelmeier’s vivid descriptions of homesteading will draw in readers from all types of lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781602233614

Book preview

Image: An aerial photo taken in 1950 that shows the location of the homestead south of Anchorage. (Photo © Quantum Spatial)

Coming Out of Nowhere

ALASKA HOMESTEAD POEMS

Linda Schandelmeier

University of Alaska Press

Fairbanks

Text © 2018 Linda Schandelmeier

Published by

University of Alaska Press

P.O. Box 756240

Fairbanks, AK 99775-6240

Cover design by UA Press.

Interior design by Kristina Kachele.

Photographs in the book are from the Schandelmeier family collection, unless otherwise noted.

Cover image: Linda Schandelmeier stands in front of her family’s new 1959 Chevy station wagon purchased with some of the receipts from selling part of the homestead (1959).

Section One: Linda’s mother loads peat to sell to help make ends meet (ca. 1955).

Section Two: Linda’s sister (right) and Linda could find amusement even on a pile of logs (ca. 1951–52).

Section Three: Linda’s brother (right) and Linda snowshoe on the homestead. Common winter activities were ice skating, snowshoeing, and skiing (1959–60).

Section Four: Linda attended the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and earned a degree in biological sciences in 1971 (ca. 1968).

Names: Schandelmeier, Linda, 1949–author.

Title: Coming out of nowhere : Alaska homestead poems / by Linda Schandelmeier.

Other titles: Alaska homestead memoir : poems

Description: Fairbanks, AK : University of Alaska Press, 2018. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017059959 (print) | LCCN 2018002640 (ebook) | ISBN 9781602233614 (e-book) | ISBN 9781602233607 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Schandelmeier, Linda, 1949– | Poets, American—Biography. | Home—Alaska—Poetry. | Frontier and pioneer life—Alaska—Poetry. | Alaska—Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3619.C32575 (ebook) | LCC PS3619.C32575 A6 2018 (print) | DDC 811/.6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059959

For my parents, Nell and John Schandelmeier, and my sister and brother, Jeanette and John, who lived on the homestead, and for my husband, John Davies, whose steadfast love and support and insightful comments made this a better book.

CONTENTS

Preface

ONE

Country of Strangers

Driving by the Old Homestead

Mountains Like Ribs

The Homesteader’s Wife

Today Is All They Have

Baking Lessons

Momma Said

The Winter Meat

My Father Hilling Potatoes

TWO

Girl Made of Fog

Summer Untethered

Hum

Leda

Horse Called Charlie

Along the Print

Sleepwalking toward Myself

Stealing the Strawberries

No One Asks about the Bridge

In the Playhouse

Sleeping the Chickens

Childhood, Swallow

Ice’s Apprentice

December’s Tree

THREE

Survival Tactics

Painting the Stones

The Button Box

Above the