Once his training was finished, he was sent to San Pedro to crew a Battleship for a few months and later sent to Norfolk, Virginia.
Haines was a part of the Marshall Island invasion, the bombardment of Kwajalein, the battle of Truk, and assaults on Marinas, Saipan and Tinian, and The Philippines.
From 1950 to 1952 he studied at Hans Hofmann's School of Fine Arts in New York before moving to Alaska where he homesteaded from 1954 to 1969.
[5] Haines moved to San Diego in 1969, and lived in the lower 48 states for several years before returning to Alaska.
Haines published nine collections of poetry and numerous works of nonfiction, including his acclaimed Alaskan book The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness.
[2] Some of Haines’s poetry suggests readers look past the trivial aspects of the physical world and imagine a dreamlike journey.
He dissolves temporal boundaries of the natural world, without losing his awareness of the importance of understanding contemporary history, associates Dreamtime with elemental activities such as hunting and traveling over the land, showing the continuity of such experience, and its vitality and importance in affirming longstanding human habits of relating to the natural world.
In “Rain Country,” he evokes experiences of thirty years before defined by intimacy with the natural world.
The “In the Forest Without Leave,” Haines juxtaposes surreal imagines devastated by future catastrophe to others that suggest the restoration of a simpler and satisfying way of being in the world regulated by natural rhythms.