The Ghosts Are Laughing

Ron Hyde was a boy during the Cold War, hungry for something bigger than what he could see from his window. One day on a school bus he wrote a list of everything he thought he'd need when the bomb came. He didn't know he was actually drawing a map.

After his parents' divorce, Ron spent many of his formative years among the streetlights, smokestacks, and sirens of Flint, Michigan. He also followed his father to the Alaskan Bush-more specifically, to a Yup'ik village called Goodnews Bay on the Bering Sea coast. The community there gave him the name Agyaq, the Yup'ik word for "star." He was not Yup'ik. But he lived Yup'ik in his soul.

He was fifteen when he committed to his first Alaskan winter alone, far beyond any village, in a landscape where a mistake meant no one would ever find him. Flint taught Ron to watch for whatever could kill him. The Bush taught him that the wilderness doesn't care who you are. Only whether you respect its terms.

Ron learned to survive, but what he needed was something to survive for. He wanted to belong, and to understand what the elders knew. This is a book about consequences, and about the people who shape us. For Ron, some of them died and refused to leave.

"What they taught me living, they keep teaching me now. I still hear them laughing."

-Ron Hyde