Please don’t die.

In the Lower 48, you carry around a sense that the human environment has been molded by people who went before — this battle on this hill and so on. There’s a texture that you, too, are part of, even when it’s bloody or frightening, a texture within which your life can assume some kind of meaning. And that, as Bernard’s theory of tax policy and generations of writers have discovered, can be its own nightmare, but in remote Alaska, the nightmare is: It’s not there.

Out in the Great Alone.