Dirt Work

by Christine Byl

  I wasn’t offering to strip my shirt to save my crew, but if charged, I knew I would wield pepper spray with more confidence, and if that didn’t work, could curl into a ball and take my chances easier than I could fire an efficient shot under duress. No part of me wants to die in a bear attack, a martyr to wilderness. A co-worker in Montana had been badly mauled by a grizzly and his scars and stories would have knocked the romance out of Alexander Supertramp and Timmy Treadwell at once. Still. If it came down to it, I’d rather exit this world made humble, not fumbling with a violence I don’t fully comprehend. Maybe if I were a marksman, I’d feel differently. An old coot in a bar mocks me; he’d bring a pistol to a high school graduation. “Wait till yer charged, honey,” he drawls. I guess I’ll have to.

  In any case, such nuance was outside the agency’s purview, and in the Forest Service, rules are made to be kept, not argued over. The shotgun came along, deadweight, a John Wayne prop that failed to convey what was very clear to me and my crew: peaceful passage in bear country is far more dependent on the individual bear and how you meet it than the weapon of the day.

  Wild is noise in a quiet space, a whoop in a churchyard, and wild is silence amid bustle, a hush to the burble of small talk, barrage muted. Wild is giddy and weeping, kicked up heels, and also a monastic pacing, back and forth, tempo unvaried, destination in. There is wild in storm, and in the eye of storm, and also, in the steady beat of rain.

  Sea otters witnessed our daily commute. On bucket-dump days and limpid still mornings, otters floated behind the Whaler on their backs, tails poked out of the water like a whale’s fluke, poised in what resembled nothing so much as a friendly wave. Luxuriously thick, otter fur can have up to a million hairs per square inch. It’s spiky when wet, but despite constant immersion, otters never look soaked. A sea otter seems complex, its whiskered face dear enough to inspire children’s plush toys, yet inquisitive, as if it doesn’t miss a trick. An otter isn’t all cuddles. On the hunt, it smashes the exoskeletons of crabs and urchins, and rips apart a sea lion carcass with ferocity. Two young males were observed having “rough sex” with a dead baby seal, eating it when finished. (Such natural history rarely makes it into the toy store.)

  Notwithstanding the sex, as with most animals we’re drawn to, the qualities we love best in otters remind us of ourselves. For one, they are highly individual, showing dietary preferences from animal to animal, and they are a somewhat rare example of a mammal that uses and hoards tools, in their case, rocks to bash open the shells of their prey. Some otters even save a particular rock for regular use, tucking it into a skin pouch under the armpit, as handy as my favorite pen slid into pocket.

  Although they also exhibit solitary behavior, sea otters are social animals, grouping in rafts of a hundred on a stormy sea, eating off each others’ bodies like a floating dinner table, dozing on their backs with pups asleep on their chests. Otters make remarkable eye contact. I passed one in a boat that watched me, so dispassionate yet intent, it seemed to discern something that I could not. Was my paddling awkward? My fly unzipped? Had I dropped my sunglasses in the water? It drifted out of view, taking the friendly smirk. If it’s true, as Emerson said, that every word was once an animal, for their complexity, sea otters must be the root of many words.

  The northern reach of the Pacific Coastal rainforest extends into the southern end of the Chugach National Forest, and its trees are the biggest ones on Alaska’s main peninsula: Sitka spruce, hemlock, the occasional yellow cedar. Log work had always been an integral part of trailwork, and the tools and techniques were the same, but with trees of that size, the possibilities were new. On forest projects, we dropped trees for bridge stringers and milled them into decking for puncheon and running plank. To cross a narrow span, we could use a single log, snapping a chalk line up the middle and ripping it with a saw to make a Gadbury-style bridge, or adze a planed walking surface easily wide enough for a hiker, perhaps two children abreast. Imagine a tree this large—like the stumps in Northwest lore, big enough to build a house in—sufficient, not a component, not a material. A structure in and of itself. Which, of course, is also what it was before we cut it down.

  Fifty miles down the Copper River from the Chitina Bridge, Gabe’s crew had been out for four days on a work patrol, most of them wet. One afternoon, the sun gave a timid showing through clouds, warming the gravel bar where the rafts pulled out, shining in stripes on camp setup chores. One boat was still in the water when the sound of a plane droned overhead, a fixed-wing circling low, then lower, until a beach landing seemed imminent. Everyone looked up and a small package hurtled from the sky, landed on the beach with a bounce, and popped into the water. No one knew what it was, but delivered that way, as if chucked by the gods, it seemed important. A raft guide jumped into a boat, flipped the bowline off the mooring log, and rowed out to the package in one motion, before any one else had even thought to move. He scooped up the parcel—a brown-papered brick swathed in duct tape—and caught the tail end of the eddy that dumped him back into camp. His was a truly graceful feat, the motions instinctive and precise, but it was glossed over quickly in the excitement. The crew huddled around while Steve tore the package open. He thought maybe it was his wife, Donna, with their pilot friend. Her gift? A half-gallon container of softening chocolate ice cream. The rafter who made the quick grab became the day’s hero. The thought of that carton carried downstream by the current, never tasted, was almost unbearable. Steve tore the cardboard flaps open and Gabe brought spoons from the kitchen kit and they thoroughly chilled themselves, inhaling ice cream in the 45-degree mist.

  We’d been slogging away at rock steps for weeks when Steve pulled us off that project for a welcome diversion: fly to Montague Island with the cabin crew to replace the footings and build a new porch on a public-use cabin. Dan and Frank made up the whole cabin crew, but for this job they needed extra hands: Randy, Trent, and me.

  We landed on the beach at high tide in a de Havilland Beaver and ferried two planeloads of gear a mile inland to the cabin. Tents, carpentry tools, a generator, piled at the foot of the stairs. The off-kilter cabin stood on rotting wooden piers and our work was clear. Dan, an ace carpenter, lined us out fast, taught us the quick tricks of 3-4-5 squaring and the hammer flip from one hand to the other. Jacking and pounding and rocking out to Hank Williams on the battery-powered radio, the work went smoothly.

  At 5:30 sharp, the focus shifted: beach-combing. This cherished pastime thrives on coastlines that face the Gulf of Alaska. These beaches are littered with junk. Empty orange juice jugs and busted electronics, the flotsam of a plastic-based culture. But hidden in the wreckage are glass fishing floats from Japanese nets, treasures that drift across the Gulf to end up on the Sound’s beaches after big storms. I’d seen them on local porches, blue, green, or clear, some the size of an orange, others big as a basketball, sometimes still wound in old bits of net encrusted with barnacles. Turns out, Dan was a float scavenger. As we traipsed to the beach after work that first afternoon, he explained their history, how many he’d found over the years, which beaches in which seasons brought the highest yield. “The rarest kind,” Dan said, “is called the rolling pin.” An oblong float the size of a bratwurst in a bun, with small grooves on each end where nets attached. “I’ve been looking for one since I moved up here,” he said. “Thirteen years.”

  Ten minutes later, my toe hit a knot in the sand. I kicked at it and the glint of blue glass caught my eye. I unearthed it further and pulled out the oblong shape, brushed it off, and held it up to Dan. “Is this a rolling pin?”

  “Holy shit!” he said. “Ho. Lee. Shit.” He grabbed it and looked at me, turned it over, handed it back, shook his head. I offered it to him but he shrugged me off. You had to find it yourself; I knew this, even without being told. Thereafter, I was hooked on scavenging. The previous night’s storm proved a lucrative one and three of us gathered more floats than we could carry. We tied the ar
ms of our sweatshirts into makeshift sacks to get the loot home. I was the only one who’d found a rolling pin, and I remembered my childhood penchant for finding Petoskey stone fossils on the shores of Michigan lakes, when my dad used to crow, “Good eye, kiddo!” and I would thrill with shy pride. When we finished the porch, we lined up the floats on the railing and took photos with the sun glistening off their Japanese curves. Dan said it was one of the best single-day hauls he’d ever seen.

  I found one more rolling pin that summer, on Hinchinbrook Island with a visiting friend. She found a rare float, too, a two-hander, wrapped in a piece of rotten net that stunk of fish. She didn’t dare take it on the airplane, so she left it with me. The last week of the season I tried again to offer Dan one of my rolling pins. Glass-rich, with my lucky summer behind me, it was no sacrifice, and, as I told him, I loved the finding more than the objects themselves. Dan still refused, though he wasn’t as bitter. “Unbe-fucking-lievable,” he grinned. “Rookies.”

  The Rubus genus claims salmonberries, related to black- and raspberries, fruits with a honeycombed structure and a jolt of sucrose upon first bite. They’re named for the color of bright-red salmon flesh, not the flavor, which was a relief to me upon first tasting one. The bushes grow all over coastal Alaska; in a good year branches are dotted with heavy-headed fruit you can pick just by running fingers through the leaves. If they aren’t too ripe, berries fall unbruised into an open palm.

  Downtown Cordova spanned five blocks between the harbor and our apartment. We did errands on foot and factored half an hour into every trip for foraging berries. My first attempt at canning resulted in salmonberry ice-cream topping: too runny for jam, too seedy for syrup. It glowed from squatty jars with earnest iridescence and gave me a pang of homegrown satisfaction. I presented a jar to my mother, an expert canner, with delight not just in the homemade, but in the specific, a gift signifying—in the jar, in the mouth—a harbor town’s wall of bushes, July’s warm rain.

  John showed up at O’Brien Creek the first morning of our Copper River float trip looking every inch a rafter, and small-town Alaskan, and outlaw. Dressed in paddling gear with a ragged ponytail, a faded T-shirt, and an oddly capped gold tooth, he seemed like the perfect wing nut to usher a Forest Service crew one hundred miles down the third-biggest river in Alaska. My crew had disbanded when Randy left early and Trent went back to school, so I joined Bess, another loner, and Gabe’s easement gang for the last hitch of the season. The Copper originates high in the Wrangells, flows past the Mentasta Mountains, and through the Chugach to empty into Prince William Sound about fifty miles southeast of town up Cordova’s only road. Because there’s public land along the river, and plenty of reasons to access it (rafting, salmon fishing, sheep hunts), easements pepper its entire, remote length. Lucky for the trail crew that meant a semi-annual rafting trip. It was more expensive for the district to buy the gear and maintain a certified guide on staff than it was to contract the service on an as-needed basis, so we had guides. Lucky for John and his sidekicks, it meant being paid to ferry us downstream, prep our breakfasts and dinners, and hang out on the beach and drink while we thrashed in the wet brush.

  A ten-day hitch rafting the Copper River sounds grand. In many ways, it was. But on a private trip, you set your own pace, sleep late, play dice while waiting out wind, and crack a beer on board by noon. A work trip is different. We had to cover the distances between easement pullouts fast enough to leave us days for clearing in between, and we had to ferry along a boat full of tools and gas cans like a slow dog on a long leash, and we couldn’t wait out bad weather, and we definitely couldn’t crack a beer before noon. Not even before 5:30. Not even ever, according to stringent Forest Service rules about alcohol on government trips. Still, the float was a very cool bonus, and none of us, beer or no beer, would have turned it down.

  We began the late-August adventure by boarding the state ferry to Valdez, off-loading under the first brilliant aurora we’d seen in months. Mitch and Allan, the other guides, picked us up and we drove several hours to Chitina, a tiny town on the Copper where we’d camp that night until John showed up with the rafts in the morning. Like most traildogs, we were proudly self-sufficient outdoors. Only one of us had been on a guided trip before. I didn’t like the idea of it at all, the weird boundary barring the usual easy fraternity among seasonals. We were clients, and it would take a few days to distinguish ourselves—helping with the dishes, taking a turn at the oars, complaining about the feds— to show the river rats that we were allies, not a batch of government fat cats watching for a broken rule. We assured them that fat cats stayed behind with the paperwork. We were dirtbags, just like them.

  By the end of the hitch, there was little worry about fraternity. During ten days in boats, we bonded with Allan, Mitch, and John over dirty jokes told standing up on the gunnels, an all-you-could-eat hot-dog roast, the sighting of a black wolf on the Bremner flats, a couple of epic weather days, and contraband whiskey and cheap beer. We trusted their river skills and were grateful for their presence in camp, the hot meals at the end of fourteen-hour workdays. They admired our work ethic, slapped us double high fives when we stumbled onto the beach at dusk with chainsaws on our shoulders, raingear shiny wet.

  While we fell for each other, I also fell for the river. The sound of the Copper is a constant hiss, the glacial water so thick with silt it’s like liquid sandpaper against fingers dipped in the river as you float downstream. This suspended material is called glacial flour—the river’s origin on the glaciated slopes of the Wrangell Mountains means it brings with it rock and ice dust that impede the river’s clarity. The size of the Copper River is confusing. John pointed off to the far shore: guess how far? It’s a mile across, which I’d never have guessed until, paddling out on it, Why does it take so long to just get there, right there? The temperature of the Copper River is just above freezing. John said if you fell in it wouldn’t matter if you could swim. The strength of the current, even in “still water,” prevents much more than a controlled float, and if you aren’t hauled into the boat quickly, hypothermia will kill you long before you get kicked out in an eddy. The opaque waters conceal so many victims, a great remote Hudson that would be a perfect repository for mobsters’ collateral damage. We wondered who was beneath us that we couldn’t see. A gold miner missing after a bar brawl in 1921? That kid who fell in at the Chitina picnic, rough-housing with his siblings on the bridge? The dip-netter who scorned a life jacket and ropes, and got pulled quietly under by three flashing fish in his net, a mother lode quickly turned to cement block when he didn’t let go? Poor suckers, I thought. And, May I stay in the boat.

  Near the Million Dollar Bridge outside Cordova, the Copper widens into Miles Lake, an anomalous river-lake formed by the retreat of the Miles Glacier. In bright sun and calm water, we rowed across the huge expanse, ringed by glaciers and full of iceberg chunks that bumped against our boat in the current. Our final campsite was on the edge of an exposed gravel beach, open to all that river, ice, and sky. It was prefall crisp. Dinner was a hodgepodge of leftovers and stashed treasure—no need to hoard Snickers or bacon—and Mitch built his long-promised waxed-box fire, an integral part of any rafter’s camp arsenal. Opening the top and bottom flaps of a produce box (emptied of the fruit eaten on the trip), he created a combustible chimney that channeled an orange flame twenty feet into the air. It was incredibly impressive. We danced around the fire, barefoot and whooping in the gritty sand.

  Like the packers in Glacier, John refused to bring out alcohol that should have been drunk on the hitch. So we drank. Midnight came and John got out his flare gun—for emergencies only—and shot off four blanks at the indigo sky. Such a cry-wolf violation of USFS safety parameters might have been grave, had we been closer to town. Luckily, there was no one who cared within fifty miles, no officials to initiate a rescue even in dire straits, no bosses to see the beer bottles all over the beach. Nobody to sneer when half of us
never made it back to our tents. Midmorning we woke blurry to find John, arms and legs spread wide, collapsed on the beach beneath the flapping tarp. With goldish sand in his stubble, a beatific smile on his face, he was an angel come back from a bender. Not fallen, just passed out cold.

  My friend Chloe visited from Sweden, and with an Outsider at my side, I marshaled my few months’ experience into local status. I showed her around town like an old hand—here were the docks, the fishing boats, our Whaler in its slip. Here were the tide charts, the weather reports. I fed her fresh halibut and berry pancakes.

  A few days into her trip, Chloe, Gabe, and I flew to Hinchinbrook Island, southwest of Cordova in the Sound. When the pilot lifted the red Beaver off the beach and left us and our small hump of gear, the clouds covered the plane in minutes and we were alone for three days, no way to go anywhere but where our feet would take us. Which was plenty of places. We walked beach miles. We explored the shell of a shipwreck and climbed limestone cliffs. We found and hoarded glass floats, Chloe as big a scavenger as I, Gabe happy to scan with us but blessedly uncompetitive when it came to our final sprint toward the found object, hip-checking each other to get there first.

  Hinchinbrook is a remote island by any but Alaska standards, where a short flight from a small town means it’s downright accessible. To us, the beach felt close to untouched, and yet, up along the tide line, chocked beneath driftwood stumps and burnished logs, debris coiled around itself. Every trace of civilization, dumped, could end up here. Cracked plastic buoys, a raincoat, scraps of net, one flip-flop, Happy Meal toys. The junk surprised Chloe. No one pictures garbage on the Last Frontier.