Glendon Brunk’s Epiphany

• Main Author: Dunaway, Finis
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Carolina Press 2021
• Subjects: Arctic; north slope; Alaska
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469661100.003.0006

At almost the same moment Lenny Kohm had his epiphany, Glendon Brunk also had a life-changing experience on the North Slope of Alaska. Brunk grew up in a Mennonite family in the Midwest and moved to Alaska after becoming a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. He then lived out what he described as a frontier fantasy: homesteading, building a cabin, and becoming a world champion dog musher. For a while, he was employed as a laborer on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and also conducted scientific research projects funded by the oil industry. Kohm and Brunk—a Jewish jazz drummer and a Mennonite mountain man—came from very different backgrounds, yet their paths converged in Sonoma in the fall of 1987. This chapter emphasizes what led Brunk to become an Arctic activist and contrasts his quest for frontier masculinity and emphasis on the traditional wilderness ideal with Kohm’s focus on Indigenous rights.