Chills and Thrills

On an Alaskan wilderness adventure, Sarah Manguso and her son learn the elements of survival.

- Sarah Manguso

THE FAR NORTH is a good place to be alone with one's thoughts. Ever since my divorce, my young son and I have been living on an invisible, internal frontier of our own, and Alaska's desolate Interior seemed like the right place to get used to feeling more alone in the world, while at the same time more completely integrated into it. So despite my usual uneasiness when I'm more than a few miles from civilization, the two of us traveled to central Alaska in January, when daytime temperatures remain below zero and daylight lasts less than five hours, to encounter the dimness and silence of the subarctic winter.

Our hosts, the wife-and-husband team of Jenna and David Jonas, have lived sustainably since 2012 far off the grid on a bluff above the Tanana River, about 60 miles west of Fairbanks. David is the younger brother of one of my oldest friends, and when we were all in our teens, he built a cabin on his parents' wooded land in Vermont without power tools and lived there for two years. Now he and Jenna are experienced wilderness guides, and their home-based business, Alaska Homestead Adventures, offers private, bespoke, all-inclusive winter vacations.