In The Way It Was, Max Sauerbrey attempts to help his grandfather, elderly Alaskan adventurer Chuck Wirschem, finish a film he started 50 years earlier.
Back in the 1970s, Wirschem was kayaking, hiking, fishing, hunting, and skiing in the Alaskan wilderness — an adventure Renaissance man. While he was out there, he carried a 16mm film camera to record his experiences to turn into a movie. Somehow or other, the movie didn’t happen, and the film ended up in a box. Eventually, Wirschem handed the box over to his grandson, Max Sauerbrey.
The film introduces itself with Wirschem showing us around The Fox Farm, a collection of comfortably aged buildings in rural Alaska. Max, fresh out of film school, interviews his grandfather on the deck of one of the old shacks.
Beside an Alaskan lakeside is a complex of sheds and boathouses known as the Fox Farm. Photo: Screenshot
The urge to document
“I don’t know what I was thinking back then,” Wirschem admits, reviewing some of the footage with Sauerbrey. He had no design for his film, merely the urge to document. A lot of the footage focuses on Wirschem’s two children, whose outdoor adventures in Alaska are obsessively posed and catalogued by their father.
Wirschem’s two kids spent a lot of time outdoors in Alaska, going on adventures and serving as their father’s ‘actors.’ Photo: Screenshot
Weaving together old and new footage, the film documents Wirschem’s kayaking trip down the Kanektok River, his skiing and climbing adventures with a friend on Ruth Glacier, and his annual sheep hunting excursion.
The footage shows the bold, adventurous life of its creator. It’s also a glimpse into a landscape that has changed, and is changing, with terrifying rapidity. Wirschem doesn’t dwell on it, but the thought slips through, like when he admits that big, impressive rams aren’t around anymore. His footage captures “the way it was” in Alaska.
A friend bothers a heap of walruses in Chuck Wirschem’s old footage. Photo: Screenshot
The film ends on the same porch. Wirschem admits that he’s going to miss The Fox Farm once he sells his share. Why is he selling then, Sauerbrey asks? He’s getting older, Wirschem says frankly. The beloved Fox Farm, and with it all of Wirschem’s wild and adventurous life, are “the way it was.”
“Sometimes the memories of the way it was is better than trying to keep them going 50 years later.”
