Safari

by Geoffrey Kent

  I run for the lake and get a rope from a canoe. I holler to the men watching: “Come! Help us!” They follow me to the plane and help me run the rope around the boss of the propeller. “They don’t speak English, Geoff!” Anthony yells.

  “Then I’ll teach them to count! One!” I lead. “Two! Three!” With the rope over our shoulders, we run as fast as we can. Suddenly, the propeller whips around, and with a loud bang the engine catches and starts.

  “Amazing,” Charlie Lafave says, turning to the film crew. “Did you guys get that?”

  The next day in our new location we’re coming back from a village, and our guide says to Lauren, “You see the women here, Ms. Hutton, how one breast is often much larger than the other?”

  Lauren looks up, looks around at the women rearing their children and watching us from their homes. “Well I hadn’t noticed,” she says, “but yeah, you’re right! Why is that?”

  “Well,” says our guide, “the most valuable thing they have are pigs, you see. If they don’t want to risk a young piglet being pushed off the sow’s teats by the other piglets, then they’ll nurse the piglet themselves.”

  Lauren goes completely berserk. “That’s one of the wildest things I’ve ever heard!” she says. “Are you making this up?”

  {Jorie Butler Kent}

  Market in Kamindibit Village—I still have some masks in my collection.

  “No, Ms. Hutton!” says the guide. “I’m not making this up, it’s true!

  “Geoffrey, it’s true?”

  “It’s absolutely true.”

  When we screen Lauren’s adventure, we decide to film another episode, this one starring the actor James Brolin, who wants to see a leopard in the wild. To the Ends of the Earth airs on the USA Network in 1994. The series receives two nominations for the Cable ACE Award, considered to be the cable counterpart to the Primetime Emmy Awards. To this day I like to look at the footage again and relive those one-of-a-kind adventures.

  {Harold Lassers}

  My first glimpse of Alaska from the plane, an awe inspiring wilderness.

  Chapter 15

  Alaska

  1997

  It’s no secret that one of my longtime dreams was to conquer America—both in polo and in business. After To the Ends of the Earth, I begin to focus on experiential travel opportunities that don’t require our American clients to travel internationally. That is, Abercrombie & Kent will make the United States as exciting a destination as many of the foreign locations our clients explore. To create the ultimate American escapade, we scout out wide, open spaces, a distinct cultural experience, and, most important, a total wilderness getaway. I worked to develop the early flying safaris in Africa, and the idea dawns on me: Let’s start flying safaris in America.

  And so, in the summer of 1997, Jorie and I fly from Florida to Anchorage, Alaska, to begin a two-and-a-half-week reconnaissance of a location where, as I note in my diary, one can have total isolation. Alaska is one mission that turns out to be as much play as it is work: our backwoods quest certainly brings out the love of the outdoors in both of us. It also thrills me with both the all-American exploration and the business opportunities to follow.

  The Regal Alaskan Hotel in Anchorage is not the quietest of places, situated only ten minutes from the airport, with aircraft and floatplanes flying incessantly overhead. However, the hotel lobby does seem to be an excellent spot for pilots to meet women. “Is there a beauty pageant here or something?” I ask the clerk at check-in. “What are all these pretty women doing here?”

  “No, Mr. Kent, unfortunately not,” he tells me. “These are the pilots’ wives.” He leans in and lowers his voice to a hush. “This area has a lot of widows.”

  “Oh dear, you’ve got to be joking.”

  He shakes his head. “You’ll see: in Alaska, you fly from city to city, often very low through the trees or over water. We have one of the highest plane crash rates anywhere. Already two planes have gone down this year.”

  “It’s only July.”

  He twists his face in a wistful way, as if to say, I know.

  As Jorie and I travel to our suite, I recall an aviation rule of thumb that I learned in the army: “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” When we reach our room, I wrestle out my diary and write:

  IT IS VITAL THAT A&K CONTACTS THE LOCAL TOUR OPERATOR IN ALASKA TO MAKE SURE THAT WE GET THE NAMES OF PILOTS WITH THEIR COMPLETE HISTORY. ONLY THEY, THE ALLOCATED PILOTS, SHOULD BE USED FOR CLIENTS AND NOBODY ELSE.

  This is essential . . . can A&K please activate.

  As a result of the noise from the airport, we’re up by seven o’clock on our first morning in Alaska: Thursday, August 7, 1997. We have coffee delivered and work to reorganize our luggage—with the cold-weather gear that we’ve packed, we have far too many bags! “I’ll get that for you,” says Michael, the concierge, when he arrives at our room alongside the waiter carrying our coffee. “Mr. Kent, where are the two of you headed today?” Michael asks.

  “We’re off to the Pribilof Islands.” Jorie’s first wish was to go birding on Saint Paul and Saint George, the two islands of the group, which lie to the southwest of the Alaskan mainland.

  Michael doesn’t quite see the appeal. “The Pribilof Islands? What on earth for?”

  “Well, I suppose we’d like to go and see the wildlife.”

  He shakes his head, as if trying to shake off my foolhardiness. “And how long will you be staying?”

  “Two days.”

  {Shutterstock/FloridaStock}

  8.3 million acres in Alaska were set aside in 2010 as a polar bear sanctuary to help protect these magnificent animals from extinction due to melting sea ice.

  “Well, please don’t spend any longer than that!” he cries. “And I hope you don’t get socked in!”

  “Socked in?”

  “The weather!” he says. “It’s a perpetual natural disaster!”

  “It gets that bad, does it?”

  “You do know that Pribilof experiences horizontal rain, don’t you, Mr. Kent? It rains constantly there, and the wind is so violent that it turns the rain so it comes at you sideways!”

  Jorie pauses from fastening her scarf around her neck to give me a glance. What can we do? her eyes ask me.

  “If you don’t mind, Michael.” He obliges and takes a load of our bags. Far too late for the concierge to talk us out of this now.

  By the time we board our plane to Saint Paul, it’s sufficiently evident that perhaps Michael was correct: the weather is one of the key determining factors for travel in Alaska. We’re scheduled to depart on PenAir flight 4250 for Saint Paul Island, but by the time we’re situated in our seats, our pilot announces that the weather is turning so rough that we have to take on extra fuel and fly via Dillingham to avoid the torrential rain. “What will flying via Dillingham do?” Jorie asks our stewardess.

  “In the event that we reach Saint Paul and can’t land because of bad weather,” the young woman replies, “we should have enough fuel to return back here, to Anchorage.”

  We exchange a glance. Oh dear.

  The four-hour trip is incredibly scenic, with particularly heated excitement when, to the north of us, we see Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America, towering to 20,320 feet. The stewardess leans down to us, her eyes fixed out the window. “You’re lucky,” she says with a smile. “Only one-third of summer visitors get a chance at that view.”

  Jorie grips my arm with a thrill. “We can take Mount McKinley off of our ‘to see’ list now.”

  The Pribilof Islands are famous for their rugged natural beauty, their large seal populations, and their migrating birds. The four islands are volcanic in origin, and only two of them are now inhabited. When we land on Saint Paul Island, the largest of the Pribilofs, Sean, our local guide, explains that the island is located 300 miles west of the Alaskan mainland and 240 miles north of the Alaskan peninsula. It’s also within the eastern Bering Sea archip
elago, which, to my shock, I learn is actually west of Hawaii!

  We drive out to Reef Point, a sanctuary famous for its fur seals. Saint Paul is home to rookeries that draw nearly three million birds, and the island is also home to eight hundred thousand fur seals, which migrate every spring from as far south as the Baja California Peninsula. This is probably one of the most concentrated numbers of mammals anywhere in the world, obviously nearly equal to Kenya’s wildebeest migration at one and a half million. However, all of the mammals in Saint Paul gambol in the sea and on the beaches of this one small island, with the males sliding around on their flippers staking their claim of the women. The male fur seals collect a harem of up to eighty females, which obviously produces some adorable cubs.

  Just as we’re about to leave, a beautiful Arctic fox crosses our path, only a few feet ahead of us. Sean tells us that he recently saw a bald eagle take one of these foxes, swooping right out of the sky and picking him up with its talons. “There’s a bald eagle right there,” I point out as we reach the harbor. The two of them glance up to discover the bird standing on top of a crane.

  “It is indeed,” Sean says. “It’s rare to see them this up-close—deceivingly dangerous predators!”

  In the afternoon, we drive through the town of Saint Paul, fascinated by its cultural heritage. The Aleut community here is the largest in the world, making this an area that is richly influenced by its Eskimo origins. The Aleuts migrated over the land bridge between Asia and North America toward the end of the last ice age and were the first human inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands. Today they comprise a large segment of this village, with its tiny population of five hundred people and its two homegrown industries: halibut- and crab-fishing, and tourism.

  Driving through the village, we observe how quaint and simple life is: there’s a pub, two policemen, a stoplight, and a deli. We drive past the town’s only school just as the children, sturdy-looking with their round faces and heavy coats and boots, are exiting for afternoon dismissal. Sean also points out the Russian Orthodox church, explaining that in the late 1700s, the Russian navigator Gavril Pribylov became the first European to discover these islands. He had followed Aleutian legend in search of fur seals, which he and his men hunted and took home to sell, and in return, they left their Orthodox faith. Fortunately today, fur seal hunting—a barbaric act that involves the clubbing of seals and their pups—has been outlawed, except for the Aleutians who are allowed to hunt two thousand of them each year as part of their staple diet. There aren’t many foods that I won’t at least try, but I couldn’t imagine anyone hurting one of those sweet seals.

  That night back at the abode, we’re amazed that one can literally sunbathe in one’s bed, as the sun hovers until midnight. The next morning, we wake up at sunrise: seven thirty, on the dot.

  On the way out, Sean points out the false arnica flower, bigger and brighter than a daisy, and another radiant yellow flower. “That’s an Arctic poppy,” he says. “Don’t pick it, Mrs. Kent!”

  Jorie looks at him, alarmed. “Why?” she asks. “Is it poisonous?”

  “Not very, but it’s an old Alaskan wives’ tale: if you pick the Arctic poppy, then today it will rain!”

  “Well by now, I ought to have a bouquet of them!” she says.

  We huddle under the hoods of our jackets to beat the rain toward Sean’s truck, and quickly he scans the radio stations to locate the forecast. “Northeast winds throughout the day,” says the meteorologist, “with periods of rain and fog.” But on our way past English Bay, the sun beams down on the beach’s thick, grassy sedges. “This whole island is only about three thousand years old and is thought to have been home to the last of the mammoths,” Sean says. “You see the cone of the volcano over there, and those rocks below it that look like cannonballs?”

  “Yes,” I say. Jorie glares through her binoculars.

  “We call those ‘splatterbombs.’”

  “‘Splatterbombs!’” She’s delighted. “It reminds me of the time Geoff and I camped overnight at the foot of the Nyiragongo crater in the Congo as it was erupting. Geoff said it was like a flaming soufflé!”

  Sean stops his truck on the high cliffs for us to take a long walk. We stop to study the only tree on all of Saint Paul Island, the Creeping Prostrate Willow tree, which is no more than half-foot high and grows parallel with the soil. We trudge past the rare globe wormwood, stretched tall and flowering as bright as a berry, and stop to view some red-legged kittiwakes with their chicks, some rosy finches, and a tame young rock sandpiper, which runs just in front of our feet.

  A short distance later we happen upon a group of blue-face foxes nimbly running across the tops of the cliff, daring the precipices in search of fresh bird eggs.

  “Look there,” Sean says. “That’s Rush Hill, the highest point on Saint Paul Island: six hundred sixty-five feet. If we were to spot any reindeer, it would be from right here.”

  “How many of them live in this area?” Jorie asks.

  “There’s a herd of several hundred, which were first introduced in 1911. During the occupation of the army in World War II, they killed them all but a few. In 1951 they were reintroduced . . . and now there are far too many.”

  We return to the airport for our four o’clock flight to Katmai National Park & Preserve. “You’re staying at Kulik Lodge, is that right, Mr. Kent?” one of the airport workers asks me.

  {Harold Lassers}

  The Atlantic puffin lives most of its life at sea. Its short wings are adapted for swimming with a flying technique under water. In summer, the puffin’s beak is red, blue, and yellow and explains the bird’s nickname of the “sea parrot.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I’m sorry, you’ll be about an hour behind. The charter plane that the lodge has sent for you had to make a stop on the way here.”

  “More fuel in case the weather strikes, I suppose?”

  “No,” he says. “Another pilot has died. They needed to carry his body home to Saint George Island for the burial.”

  Incredible, the risks these pilots have to take.

  On our eastward flight toward the volcanic landscape of Katmai, our captain points out Augustine volcano, which erupted a decade ago. He was around to see it and says that the ash blew up to forty thousand feet! Indulging our intrigue, he flies around its perimeter and shows us several fissures where the smoke remains wafting high.

  We fly over beautiful country with snow-topped hills, landing after an hour’s flight on the Kulik Lodge’s rough pebble airstrip. Out come a handsome, hearty couple—presumably Bo Bennett, who manages the lodge, and his wife, Amy. They escort us into Cabin 11, where the owner, Sonny Peterson, joins us. His father founded this famous lodge in 1950. “Be prepared,” Sonny says with his tongue in his cheek. “I understand tomorrow will be your first ride in a floatplane.”

  “That’s right,” I tell him. “We can’t wait to learn to cast.”

  “For now, settle in and then join us for dinner in the dining room,” Amy says. “We have a classic Alaskan menu to welcome you.”

  We get into our cabin and turn to wash up. “Geoff,” says Jorie. “Have you got my bag?”

  “No, I don’t think so . . . wait a second, both of my bags are here—”

  And the realization strikes us: the bellboy at our hotel in Saint Paul had taken both of my suitcases and had left Jorie’s. “No suitcase,” she says.

  “And no clothes.”

  “It’s rather cold here . . .” She breaks into a wide smile, and I know exactly what she’s got up her (rather drafty) sleeve: she gets to squeeze in a shopping trip before our day of fishing tomorrow.

  In the lodge’s office, Amy Bennett gets on the radio to the tour operator. “Is there no telephone anywhere on the property?” Jorie whispers.

  I shake my head. “Evidently not.”

  “So you think it could come in on the next flight?” Amy says, sliding paperwork to me across the desk. “Your fishing licenses and regis
tration cards,” she whispers, covering the radio’s mouthpiece. “If you’ll fill them out before you leave today, please.” She turns her voice back to the radio. “But the next flight doesn’t arrive until tomorrow afternoon!”

  Jorie wanders to the window that looks down to the front of the lodge. “Geoff!” she says with a gasp. “Come, look!” There, down in front of the lodge, stands a burly brown grizzly bear looking for fish in the stream.

  “Sonny will take you out to Brooks Falls in the floatplane today,” Amy calls. “The truck’s waiting out back to take you to meet him!”

  We take off from the nearby airstrip, and for once, the weather is glorious.

  Sonny flies us over the rivers, where we witness flashes of red resembling coral thick in the crystal streams. “This is a salmon run,” Sonny says. “It’s especially red right now because they’re spawning.”

  We fly over emerald-green lakes with backdrops of snow-capped mountains, and we pass over a series of rocky lakes studded with spruce-clad islands stretching to the far horizon—beautiful and unspoiled. There’s also a crater lake that’s a different color than the other bodies of water—much more opaque. Sonny tells us that it’s because of the glacial sediment and volcanic ash. We were now at a mere thirty-five feet.

  We land at Brooks Falls, between Naknek Lake and Lake Brooks, in Katmai, and immediately it’s clear why the lodge there is famous for its bears. A bear—a male—stands on a bridge, making it impossible for us to cross to the lower river platform. “You don’t want to get near him,” Sonny says. “The rule is to stay one hundred yards away from a sow, especially if she’s got a cub with her. For the bears, stay back fifty yards.”

  “That one looks hungry,” Jorie says.

  “Yep, and he knows where to find the salmon. From late June until late July, the largest sockeye salmon run in the world takes place here. The bears have a helluva feast. By now, he oughtta be migrating downstream with his cronies, though.”