Erica Watson was one of the earliest contributors to Edible Alaska. Ten years ago, her essay called “Caffeine and Community Behind the Counter,” based around her working experience as a barista at Tonglen Lake Lodge, appeared on our website. Fast-forward to last winter, when it reappeared, revamped and renamed, as part of her debut book, Ghosts of Distant Trees, published by Porphyry Press. Full disclosure: I’m the founding publisher of that company as well as co-publisher here at Edible, where we are pleased to present this short essay, “Not Just the Wolves,” to you for a full-circle return.
In Ghosts of Distant Trees, Erica Watson traces the layered ecologies of Denali National Park, Alaska—its vast, shifting landscape, seasonal labor rhythms, and the subtle politics of inhabitation. Through lyric and narrative essays, she explores how built environments like Denali’s single road shape encounters with land, gender, weather, and community. Turning from iconic vistas to gravel, orange peels, and garden beds, Watson asks what it might be like “to get to know a place without immediately thinking of what threatens it.” Haunted by fire and thaw, these essays resist elegy, offering instead a complex meditation on belonging, vulnerability, and the fragile intimacies that persist in a warming world. Erica’s writing is attuned to detail, disruption, and the ethics of attention.
Longtime readers of Edible Alaska will recall another of Erica’s essays from Issue No. 2 (“Complete, Eaten, and Over: Summer Distractions”) as well as her profile of chef Maura Brenin from Storyknife Writers Retreat in Homer, where Erica worked extensively as a fellow on her book manuscript in 2022 (“Nourishing Women’s Stories,” Issue No. 27).
Buy Ghosts of Distant Trees from Solstice Books or The Great Alaskan Bowl Co. in Fairbanks, Fireside Books in Palmer, Title Wave Books in Anchorage, directly from the author or the press, or wherever else books are sold. —Jeremy Pataky
In the weeks on either side of the summer solstice, the sun barely sets and by 6 a.m. looks well on its way to noon. I worked three summers in a small lodge bakery, biking up the hill between four and six in the morning, and in those midsummer mornings the shift felt almost reasonable. But by the end of August, foggy twilight settles into the six o’clock hour, and by September, each day is six minutes shorter than the last, and soon the whole operation shuts down and I forgot that hours like four or six in the morning even exist. Alaska summer: it passes while you’re busy doing other things.
On days I was the second to arrive, scones and muffins had already cooled under the oven. I arranged them in labeled baskets, made myself an espresso, counted out the register, and caught up with my coworker over NPR’s Morning Edition or Pandora’s classic rock station. I ate a misshapen cookie crumbled into steel-cut oats, checked the storage room for signs that squirrels had snuck in overnight. On days I arrived first, I chose the soundtrack; if I wanted news, it meant streaming a radio station from an earlier time zone until the rest of Alaska woke up.
Of course there was always some variable to the morning: a moose blocking the driveway, derisively eyeing my bike before stepping slowly out of the way, or the realization as I pulled off my rubber XtraTuf boots in the closet that I’d grabbed mismatched kitchen shoes in my rush out of the house, or jet-lagged lodge guests who forgot to order an early breakfast before their Denali bus tour and anxiously awaited coffee, directions, and a weather report before I’d processed the fact that I was awake.
Lodge guests filtered in for breakfast throughout the morning. I drew lopsided ferns in their lattes, bagged their lunches, and offered unexpectedly exuberant explanations of crepuscular mammals’ latitudinal adaptations; we’d all worked as guides or naturalists before cycling into the service industry, and as grateful as I was that it was no longer up to me to get anyone safely from point A to B, show them an animal, and keep their feet warm and dry, there are some cues I couldn’t resist taking even out of context. I found it easier, for a time, to deal not in information but in caffeine and calories: buttery scones and kale and bacon quiches, foamed milk and extra shots. I liked the straightforward work.
The tourists brought the money, but the neighbors kept it real.
They wandered into the bakery in twos and threes, stood too long at the counter, and still somehow forgot to pay: the National Park Service retirees, whose friendships have long transcended the jobs they once had, the pants-less toddlers whose moms snuck chocolate chunk cookies into their own bags, for later. We all undercharged Ron when he rattled up the hill in his 1926 blue-and-yellow Ford and helped himself to coffee refills when we were too busy or distracted to get it for him.
On one of the many mornings the phones were down, Linda burst in at 7:01 to ask what time it was. She thought it was two hours later and here she was, fully dressed, and all for nothing. I offered her coffee, given her situation as clothed and out of the house, knowing she only drank decaf, and only with company. She shook her head and went back home, either to take her clothes off or reset her clocks or I don’t know what. She lived here before phones, before power lines, before artisanal bacon-date scones or Italian-style macchiatos, and now, like all of us, she resorted to swiping helplessly at a screen in a moment of uncertainty, rushing to the closest business for assurance that there were still other people out there.
Brad, the neighbor who supplied my first seeds when I started gardening, took great interest in my struggling pea crop. He never dropped by to look at the stunted plants in person but walked his two golden retrievers past my house and up the hill to the café almost daily to nurse a single cup of coffee and a scone, speculating about what went wrong with this year’s combination of heat, nitrogen, and microbes. “Go look,” I urged. But he said, “Nah, I just wanted to come up here and talk about it,” and slid his empty mug across the counter.
Jane shared tidbits of wolf management gossip, that cornerstone of Alaska politics, and told me who admitted unexpected sentiments about predator control or aerial hunting behind closed doors or on remote trails but would never tell anyone without a legislative majority, and we all know how unlikely that is, don’t we. I’d leave cookies too long in the oven when Jane came in and forget to refill the creamer.
I’d forget this wasn’t my house, and neighbors’ kids weren’t my kids when I reached across the counter to wipe boogers from their noses and then plate a cookie with the same hand, and then we’d all remember that this is food service and there are rules, but this is also a small community and a cool climate and little noses need a lot of help. I’d wash my hands too much one day and too little the next. When the cell signal came back, I hid in the back of the kitchen, sending emails I’d promised not to send to the wolf advocates, water overflowing in the prep sink. I was inefficient. Three summers in and yet half the time my latte art looked vaguely like genitals. I ate dropped cookies off the floor. We’d watch who came in together, and when Jane came in we’d tell her, too, about the unexpected coffee dates. She’d been around long enough to know it’s not just the wolves that keep people around Denali. It’s the gossip.
