Sustainability visionary, brown bear whisperer, solo expedition paddler and Zen master of Lemesurier Island—where he’s lived alone for nearly two decades—Bob Christensen, 47, is a good candidate for the most interesting man in Southeast Alaska. Twenty-five years ago, Christensen built a traditional baidarka from modern materials and paddled it, alone, from Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island to Bellingham, Washington. The trip marked the first time he’d ever sat in a kayak. These days, Christensen can be found commuting by small boat to ports all over Southeast Alaska, helping develop more sustainable communities.
Who influenced your path to Southeast Alaska?
When I was 19, at my first year of college, I took a marine ecology course. There were jobs available in Alaska right after the [Exxon Valdez] oil spill, surveys on the beach of Prince William Sound. I met a guy named Steve Lewis—he’s a SEACC (Southeast Alaska Conservation Council) board member and a biologist. He was on the boat, basically a grunt worker, trying to make some money to finish his master’s on wolf and deer interactions out on Coronation Island. After our contract was done in Prince William Sound, he asked if I wanted to go to Southeast Alaska and participate in a cave exploration project. He took me there, to a special place on Prince of Wales Island at El Capitan Pass. It was a lot like what I grew up with as a kid in the Puget Sound, except it was wild.
What made you decide to live alone on an uninhabited island?
I did a whole bunch of kayak trips for five years in a row throughout Southeast Alaska where I went from one inholding to another. I was in awe in front of the Willoughby Cabin on Lemesurier Island jigging for a halibut. I ended up hooking a really big halibut right in front of the place. I broke my pole and started wrapping the line around my arm. The fish was dragging the boat around in the kelp forest. The people inside the cabin came out in their double Klepper and help land the fish. I ended up camping down the beach a little ways and we spent three days eating that fish. I visited them the next year and they offered me the job of caretaking. It was an ideal short-term solution to the challenge that was facing me as far as finding an inholding to develop into a sustainable community. My first season was the first time in my life I ever experienced solo time like that, which led to a lot of self-reflection and spiritual contemplation. This happened on those kayak trips too, because I almost 100 percent paddled solo and would be out two to three months each summer. When I planted myself on this island in the wintertime it was amplified tenfold. I started really focusing on how that kind of experience—that deep isolation, lots of time for reflection, limited distraction, juxtaposition to the sort of rat race—that somehow that was providing me with some kind of useful contribution to this collective effort of designing a sustainable community.
When did you get over your fear of bears?
When I was done with the caving expedition I paddled back to Bellingham, Washington. I had no experience in bear country and was pretty terrified. I can remember stupid things like after a couple of days of banging my pots and pans together in terror, finally figuring out the noise I was hearing in the shrubs was a winter wren. What that led me to do was really focus on trying to figure out where not to camp, which started teaching me how to read bear sign. That whole fear thing turned into a personal study figuring out how to read patterns of use you could see on the land by bears. I’ve had many experiences that could have gone bad but didn’t. One summer I was doing a project studying bear human interactions on Lake Eva. This bear basically walked right up to us on the trail and we had a wind blowing away from her. It was obvious she really wanted to smell us. She came up so we could have touched her face. We stayed there still and the bear went around us on the trail, got behind us and took a big sniff. She didn’t react at all. It was clear that she almost nodded her head like, “Oh, yeah that’s who I thought you were.” I’ve had a few experiences like that. I had a good one over on Chichagof where I had a migraine headache and was lying down and a bear came up and sniffed my face.
Where do you find your inspiration?
My first inspiration comes from the beauty of nature, not just the asthetic, like the color and shapes, but how eloquent the ecology, the interaction of life is. It also largely comes from the people I’m working with, who begin to see this community sustainability work in a way that sees human beings as a worthy species to exist. There’s a lot of angst in our culture right now about humanity. Whatever the nasty stuff is that we focus on in the news, it hurts our spirits. In general, people are super hungry for a story that gives them hope and frees them from the self loathing that is cultivated by our media culture. When I talk to people, I see them light up as they talk about their vision for sustainability; whether it’s jobs they can have in their community for their children, or grandchildren.
Why Focus on Community Sustainability?
The Sustainable Southeast Partnership is the culmination of my life’s work since I started becoming interested in human-nature interactions and the sustainability of community. When I first moved to Southeast Alaska that’s what I wanted to do. The vision was, my friends in college were sending me off to find a piece of property to buy and send a note back saying, “OK, let’s build it.” Of course that never happened.
I basically held that vision of wanting to work on community sustainability in Southeast Alaska the whole time I did a bunch of other jobs. I studied nature by hiring on to a variety of wildlife projects.
Right about the time I did the Community Forest Project (CFP) in Hoonah, philanthropy was funding SEACC, the Wilderness Society and all these other entities trying to get a big wilderness bill passed. It wasn’t working. Investors wanted to do something different that basically addressed human well-being alongside conservation. The only thing that was going on like that was the CFP in Hoonah. We expanded on the CFP and started assembling a much more comprehensive vision which included food security, economic development, energy conservation and renewable sustainability as core elements. Now, there’s 14 of us working on it. It’s like finally getting my big break.
This article appears in the Early Summer 2016 issue of Adventure Kayak. Read more great stories, get the full issue here.
