I’d expected the grandeur—the sheer cliffs, the river braided by floods,
the grizzly-bear tracks across the beaches where we pitched camp. But
I’d been unprepared for the quietly dramatic beauty of autumn in
Alaska’s Brooks Range. Though it was still officially late summer, the
snowline was already dropping on the peaks, and the chill air was
turning the green tundra into a carpet of reds and yellows by the hour.
I’m a good child of New England, forever enchanted by the neons that a
maple-birch-beech hillside can produce. This was subtler—not muted,
exactly, but drawn from a different palette. The dwarf dogwood and the
aspen shrubs produced vast blocks of tawny and canvas and beet and dried
blood against the misty sky; in places, it looked like a van Gogh wheat
field times a thousand, with spindly spruce filling in for Mediterranean
cypress.

Bob Marshall, the founder of the Wilderness Society, was the first white
person to fully explore this northern fork of the Koyukuk River, ranging
its summits and creeks in the nineteen-thirties. What attracted him,
above all, was the region’s remoteness; his journals are filled with
hymns to the distance from the rest of society. “The nearest human
beings were a hundred and twenty-five miles away, and the civilization
of which they constituted the very fringe—a civilization remote from
nature, artificial, dominated by the exploitation of man by man—seemed
unreal, unbelievable,” Marshall wrote. Thanks in large measure to his
ideas about wild places, the area remains essentially untouched. Gates
of the Arctic is the country’s second-largest national park, 8.4 million
acres without roads or ranger stations or trails—or, maybe more
important now, cell-phone signals or wireless connections.

This trip marked the first time since Donald Trump took office that I’ve
been totally out of touch, and it made me understand in a gut way
precisely how deep he’s managed to get in my mind. It’s not that I
didn’t think about him in the Arctic—I did, and usefully, in the moments
not devoted to navigation or breaking camp or watching grayling rise in
the Koyukuk’s clear tributaries. But I didn’t react to him; he wasn’t
there to break into my thoughts, or my Twitter timeline, at every turn.
Trump’s doubletalk is, by design or by accident, perfectly suited to
keep one from thinking. The steady production of nonsense is his
defining feature, and now a scarily large portion of my brain seems to
have reshaped itself to anticipate, absorb, react to the craziness. My
internal clock seems to register those early-morning and late-evening
hours when he’s likeliest to start ranting.

An underappreciated virtue of former Presidents is that you could forget
about them for days at a time. They differed in their abilities and
their ideologies, but they reliably receded into the backdrop of one’s
life and thoughts. They could go to the site of a natural disaster and
say anodyne words that were just part of the normal, sad order of things.
There was no danger they’d show up at an evacuation shelter and tell people to “have a good time” or boast about the size of the
crowd they’d drawn. It’s not that Trump is a disturbing, disruptive
President; it’s that he’s a disturbing, disruptive person who’s managed
to become President, and now we’re living in his chaotic reality.

It may be that Trump’s continuous stream of insults and oddities—say, going off on South Korea when North Korea detonates a bomb—is not clinical but tactical, a high-level version of the distracting patter perfected by the three-card
monte guys who used to work their swindles on the street corners around
midtown Manhattan. In any event, its effect, at least on me, has been to
make it harder to focus on the biggest and scariest threats that his
Presidency represents, the rips he’s trying to tear in the physical
fabric of our planet and the social fabric of our nation. In general,
we’ve reacted well at the most obvious moments—the surge of people to airports when the Muslim ban was announced, the wicked anger when Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord and gutted DACA, most of all the collective disgust at his announcement that “fine people” were out protecting Charlottesville’s Confederate icons. But the President’s chatter makes even those defining moments start to
fade into the general noise. As hard as it is to remember, there were
problems in our country before Trump came to power, (problems severe enough that they helped set the stage for his improbable election). It has been difficult to muster the intellectual or organizational energy for anything but playing defense.
Which is a problem, because it’s crucial to figure out how to make Trump
react, instead of the other way around.

And it’s why time in Alaska’s deepest wild felt like such a gift. It
wasn’t that you could escape the world’s problems; no place on the
planet is warming faster, and every glance at the yard-thick layer of
permafrost exposed by the rushing river was a reminder. But, since Trump
was not actually there in person, and since Twitter didn’t exist, he
couldn’t blitzkrieg your brain. Those who fought for our great
wilderness parks understood that time alone in nature is useful.
They may not have realized that, one day, millions of us would need such
places to escape, for a moment, from a specific guy. It’s probably not
necessary to get quite so far back into the woods; any place without
Internet will do. But a hideout seems essential, a mental staging ground
to prepare the raids that will, at last, deliver us from Trump and get
us some peace and quiet.