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store and restaurant, the road gained elevation as it headed through acres of dead but still-standing spruce. Over the previous decade, an infestation of spruce bark beetles, an insect the size of a piece of long grain rice, had killed an area of spruce forest outside of town as large as Connecticut. These beetles crawled under the bark of trees and laid eggs. Hungry larvae emerged and sucked the sap of the tree until the canopy went brown and the tree died. Spruce that had stood dead for three or four years weren’t much good for building. There was a push to tidy things up, to get private companies to log the dead trees even on public land in places that would require new roads. “Salvage logging,” it was called, and it grew more popular as wildfires raged through the grayed woods. But dead spruce slowly rotting into the ground provided the best nursery for young ones. And when the trees were clear-cut, grass typically choked out everything else.

The beetles had been killing spruce in the region in cycles for hundreds of years. But by the late 1980s, the climate here was warming measurably. The winters got milder and the summers warmer, causing a historic population explosion among the beetles. In less than ten years the forests were leveled. “We were shell-shocked,” an old-timer told me. As the woods fell, houses that had been closely hugged by spruce now stood naked, bare to the road and to neighbors. Some homes enjoyed a bay and glacier view for the first time, but these new views raised property taxes. A couple who had homesteaded this forested land forty years earlier couldn’t get used to the expansive vista and moved into town.

Twenty-three miles out of town to the east, the pavement ended at the school bus turnaround, a geographical point familiar to everyone in town. The school bus was a civilizing factor; if you lived beyond the turnaround, you were really off the map. There, a line of mailboxes sat next to a bullet-pocked sign that warned “ROAD NARROWS.” A brown sign tacked up temporarily beneath it by the state’s Fish and Game department explained moose hunting regulations. It was the season for moose and ducks. This was fall.

A few miles past the turnaround, the dirt road ended at a small clearing where an old sedan missing a wheel was propped on a wood block, and a rusted horse trailer lay on its side in the grass. At the edge of the clearing, a cemetery opened behind a gate topped by a Russian Orthodox cross with three bars—the third low and slanted down to the right. Beyond the clearing, a steep dirt track switchbacked down to the beach. Near where this road met the beach was a village of Old Believers that was represented by a single black dot on the map. I had never heard of Old Believers before moving to Alaska, but I learned of them quickly after seeing entrance and exit marked in both English and Russian on the doors of the main supermarket. Old Believers, a sect of Russian Orthodox, had broken off from the church in the mid-seventeenth century after the patriarch at the time mandated changes in church books and rituals to correct what he considered inaccuracies and inconsistencies. It has been estimated that tens of thousands of Old Believers burned themselves in protest. Others fled their villages and pledged to fervently uphold a traditional religious life. In small communities, they moved to undeveloped areas of Russia or left to roam the globe in search of places—China, Australia, Brazil—where they could live and raise children away from the influences of modern life.

Mainstream Russian Orthodoxy had come to Alaska when the Russians first arrived and raised churches topped by the characteristic triple-barred crosses on the banks of muddy rivers and on patches of wind-swept tundra. You can find these churches in poor Native villages all over the state; their cheap chandeliered and fake-gilded interiors are the most opulent things around. But Old Believer communities, where Russian was spoken even in public schools, came later: They migrated from Oregon in the mid-1960s and formed about half a