For This Gen-Z Author, Alaska Held the Secrets to a Life Well-Lived

When Ben Weissenbach first landed in Anchorage in the summer of 2018, he considered himself pretty much invincible. Nothing could touch him; there was no situation he couldn’t charm, reason, or muscle his way out of. Looking back now, Weissenbach calls that feeling “pure hubris,” the kind of confidence that shows up in your swagger when you’re a 20-something kid from Los Angeles for whom everything just seems to go right. That was before Alaska got ahold of him—and turned his worldview upside-down.

This odyssey is the subject of Weissenbach’s new book: North to the Future: An Offline Journey Through the Changing Wilds of Alaska. It’s a spirited adventure tale complete with hair-raising bear encounters, weeks-long expeditions alongside grizzled ecologists, and late nights spent weighing the fate of the world around a guttering fire. But it’s also a profoundly thoughtful look at the way we all live our day-to-day lives—and what our tech-saturated world could leave us missing.

The Allure of Alaska

When Weissenbach first planned his trip to Alaska in 2018, he never intended to get a book deal out of it. Mostly, he was just looking for an excuse to travel.

Like many young people, Weissenbach had been drawn to the far north by the romance of classic adventure tales—stories by the likes of Jack London, John Krakauer, and John McPhee. And though he’d only ever spent a handful of days in a tent, he managed to convince his school, Princeton University, to send him to Alaska for a research project on climate change. It was a trip for which he was entirely unprepared.

“In a lot of ways I had grown up experiencing the world through a screen. I think that’s true of a lot of kids my age,” Weissenbach told Outside. “I was part of the first generation to go through adolescence with front-facing cameras and social media. What was going on online often felt as real—if not more real—than whatever social interactions we were having in person.” He grew up with the sense that the “real world” was always somewhere else, a glossy, glowing image just out of reach. Weissenbach hopped on that plane to Alaska in part hoping to find it.

Unplugging—Big Time

What he discovered was a land that’s at once as raw and wild as it’s ever been—and more impacted by human activity than any other corner of the planet. Despite its remoteness, Alaska faces some of the worst effects of climate change on earth. The experience opened Weissenbach’s eyes to both the harsh reality of a warming world and the inexorable joy that comes from unplugging, slowing down, and paying attention to the rhythms of the earth.

“I realized I had let technology invade my life so entirely that I didn’t know how to experience the world without it,” he says. During his first days off-grid, he felt out of place and disoriented. But as the weeks ticked by, he sank into a deeper presence—and discovered he was able to pay attention and see the world in ways he never imagined possible.

“It’s really hard to understand how different your mind can be when you’re off your phone and away from the internet for eleven weeks at a time,” Weissenbach says. “Most of us haven’t experienced that since we were toddlers. I was amazed at how different the texture of my mind was.”

The experience changed the way Weissenbach sees our planet, and the way he sees his own habits. Of course, none of that wisdom was easily won. 

The sky was dark as a cave when I landed in Fairbanks on January 1, 2019. Kenji was waiting at baggage claim, his bald pate gleaming in the brightly lit terminal. Outside, the air was surprisingly mild for winter in interior Alaska—which was, from all I had read and heard, not so much a season as a passage: a seven-month descent into metal-snapping, stone-shattering cold. But the temperature was now only a few degrees Fahrenheit below freezing, said Kenji, down from a few degrees above earlier that day.

As we drove out of the airport parking lot, I asked Kenji about a bizarre project he had mentioned the previous summer. It was an offhand attempt to make conversation, and I was not remotely prepared for his reply. The project involved a team of Japanese astronomers who were trying to transport the most powerful infrared telescope in the world to the top of Chile’s eighteen-thousand-foot Cerro Chajnantor, where the thin, clear air would allow them to investigate dark energy and the origins of the galaxy. The astronomers had recruited Kenji’s permafrost expertise to design a road on which to drive the massive telescope to the mountain’s icy summit, and Kenji had agreed, but the project was not going well.

“Actually, I need to talk to you about that,” he said, shifting in his seat. Recently another person working on the road had died, bringing the total death toll to seven. The astronomers needed more guidance, and Kenji had agreed. “I going back there next week,” he added. For the eleven days he would be gone, he explained, he needed me to take care of his reindeer herd, horse, dog, and property. I would have five days with him beforehand to learn everything I needed to know.

“Okay?”

Okay? I thought, my blood draining. Does okay mean something else in Japanese?

“Do you have medical insurance?” he continued. “In case something happens. Maybe I take picture of it.”

We passed a car that had skidded off the road into a snowy ditch. About two hundred yards later we passed another.

“Typical problem,” said Kenji, explaining that the roads were icing over as the temperature began to drop. I was barely listening. Outside, fog shrouded the polar night, and the darkness beyond the road yawned without depth or focus. Leaving sun-drenched LA that afternoon, I had understood only dimly that my next eighteen days would pass in near-total darkness; now it dawned on me that my last glimpse of true daylight had passed during my layover several hours earlier, as I’d stared out absentmindedly over the Seattle-Tacoma tarmac.

Near the front of Kenji’s homestead, about half a mile from the main cabin and teepee I had visited the summer before, was an older cabin that Kenji no longer used. As we rumbled up his old driveway, Kenji told me that it had a woodstove, and I was welcome to stay there. I swallowed uncomfortably.

“Actually I’ve never used a woodstove,” I said. “And to be honest I don’t have a ton of experience building fires.” By that I meant none. We didn’t start fires in Southern California—we tried to put them out.

“Okay,” he replied gently. “You stay with me in main cabin. I teach you before I go.”

My thoughts lurched to the Jack London short story “To Build a Fire,” in which a man travels alone through the Yukon wilderness, near Alaska’s eastern border, in winter. After he breaks through a frozen creek, his feet begin to freeze, and he finds his fingers too numb to build a fire. London wrote two versions of the story, neither of which I now found particularly reassuring. In the first, published in 1902, the man eventually succeeds in building a fire but suffers frostbite that leaves him bedridden for a month. In the more famous version, published in 1908, the man has no such luck. “He realized that it was no longer a mere problem of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet…The fear made him lose control of himself.” Soon thereafter, the man falls into a slumber from which he never wakes.

A sickening anger rose from my stomach, directed as much at myself as at Kenji. In our first meeting, I had mentioned to him that I had climbed the north side of Denali, a grueling and remote route. Eager to gain his confidence, I had not mentioned how reliant I’d been upon the expedition’s leaders, without whom I would have turned back or died. Now I felt sure that he had imputed to me skills I didn’t actually possess.

We passed an old tractor, a stack of about fifty felled white spruce trees that Kenji pulls from in May to cut firewood, and a woodstove-equipped tent he had set up next to the driveway, in case the cabin burned down. Then we came to a gate, and Kenji stressed the importance of always closing it behind us: If a moose wandered in, it would be “almost impossible to get back out.”

After another six hundred feet, we arrived at the main cabin, a twenty-by-twenty-foot box with a gable roof. Kenji had initially considered building his home underground to maximize heat efficiency and avoid property tax inspection by satellite, but decided it would be too expensive. Instead, he’d hired a contractor to build a house that was simple enough to complete during a brief window in spring when the days were long enough and before the ground turned soggy. The only parts of the stock design Kenji modified were the front windows: These he wanted to be very large to accommodate his view.

But the view now was darkness, and I had little interest in seeing it. What I wanted—what we both needed—was a drink. Kenji parked the car, and we trudged through snow to the cabin, the warm wind on our faces. Once inside, Kenji removed his flannel, revealing a T-shirt that said simplify. From my bag I extracted a gift for Kenji, a half-gallon of Grey Goose. Kenji brought this to his liquor cabinet and returned with a fifth of Shackleton whiskey. Then, on the first night of the New Year, miles north of the coldest city in the US—which was, for the moment, at least, rather warm—we drank, and drank, and talked deep into the night.

When I awoke the next morning around nine a.m., the sky was no brighter than it had been at a quarter past three, when we’d gone to bed. My head throbbed from the liquor, but Kenji was already up, silently tending to matters around the cabin with martial economy. If he was at all hungover, he didn’t show it.

Kenji walks with his heavy arms bowed out at his sides like a prizefighter—which in fact he once was. In a 2012 biography called Finding Mars, the Fairbanks science writer Ned Rozell recounted how an eighteen-year-old Kenji was scouted by the renowned Japanese boxing trainer Shoei Uehara, who’d coached several world titlists. “I thought

he could be a world champion,” Uehara told Rozell. But while Kenji trained as Uehara’s protégé for a little over a year, he was less interested in fighting than in disciplining his body and mind. “I think adventure was his dream,” Uehara’s wife once told Rozell. “He didn’t derail from it.”

Rozell’s book described a man with an almost preternatural sense of direction. The son of an office secretary and a lifelong employee of Bridgestone Tires, Kenji grew up in the suburbs of Tokyo, the most populous metropolitan area in the world; Rozell visited his childhood home and found “no trace of wildness” beyond the manicured ginkgo trees lining the streets and the papillon dogs his parents doted upon. But when Kenji was five or six, his parents took him clam digging, and he slipped off to explore the shore alone. They eventually found him in the care of a bemused park attendant, who told them Kenji’s surprising interpretation of events: “My parents got lost.”

When he was nine, Kenji began sneaking out on bicycle, each time charting a new thirty-, forty-, fifty-mile route. In junior high he made a fifty-mile solo pilgrimage through the countryside on foot, sleeping in garages and train sheds. At the same age he learned how to build a fire, a skill he practiced every weekend, rain or shine. He studied astronomy, self-testing his knowledge by craning his head to a random point in the sky, allowing himself a one-second glimpse, and then naming the star he’d seen based on its color, the time, and surrounding constellations. These skills gave him confidence that he could always take care of himself, and always find his way.

“You have to believe yourself,” Kenji had said the night before as we drank, pulling a sextant from the shelf and showing me how to use it. He lamented that people no longer saw the need to orient for themselves, since they carried phones that told them where they were. (I took a drink.) If you didn’t trust your internal compass, then you were liable to become “lost.”

I didn’t need my English degree to understand that being lost, in Kenji’s terms, meant more than geographic disorientation. He saw every device as a double-edged sword. To the same degree that technologies disburden us of practical concerns, the philosopher Albert Borgmann argued, they also dissolve our concrete ties to the world. Even as they free us up to live a “life of the mind,” they numb us to our physical surroundings. And in place of the focused, objective urgency one channels when building a fire against the cold, members of a technologically advanced society often suffer a more general anxiety, an ironic corollary of the fact that almost nothing we do on a daily basis is directly essential.

“Technology…I don’t say bad, but changing everything last twenty years,” said Kenji the night before, as he handed me the sextant. “I am last generation that knows how to use this. I feel obligated to share, or we lose everything.”

When John McPhee visited Alaska in 1976, he found a land of self-sufficient generalists—bush-dwelling men and women “of maximum practical application.” These were holdouts of a bygone era, seeking independence from the rising tide of modern technology. But such people have become rare today, even in the hinterlands of the last frontier, and Kenji was one of only a few people I’d met who were still trying. He couldn’t stand taking anything on faith. He insisted upon seeing the world with his own two eyes. Life inside “the vast machine” seemed to him like no life at all.

And as he spoke, I realized that we were talking about my life, and I had only a faint notion of the alternative.