Every time I step out the door I’m thinking about what I need to do to stay alive. It’s not a dominating thought, it’s a comfortably familiar awareness that has been with me ever since my parents moved my family to a remote part of Alaska when I was six years old. Our first home in this new, raw world, was a floathouse. In this case, it was a regular wood-frame house that had been winched aboard a raft made up of massive logs, formerly ancient trees. It was of the “shotgun” type with one room seguing into the next in a straight line from front door to back door.…