Voyager

by Russell Banks

  Halfway to Homer, I checked the onboard dashboard computer and noted that I was averaging just over ten miles a gallon. And did I connect that fact with the feeding frenzy I’d just observed along the banks of the Russian River? Of course, I did. These were the Last Days. The planet was running out of everything except human beings. Clean water, boreal forests, wild animals, birds, and fish—soon all of it would be forever gone. Fossil fuels, too. Gone. Yet we Americans, especially, were consuming fossil fuels at an accelerating rate, and to aid and abet our consumption, we were building and buying with each year more and more ten-miles-per-gallon vehicles—Suburbans and Expeditions and Navigators and Land Cruisers and $100,000 Hummers painted sunset-orange metallic. It was a different sort of Last Days feeding frenzy than the one along the Russian River, but related, and the planet, as if preparing to explode, was heating up. The paradox was that here in Alaska, with fewer people per square mile and more square miles of protected wilderness than any other state in the union, the calamitous effects of global warming were more obvious than anywhere on earth. Since the 1970s, mean summer temperatures in Alaska had risen five degrees, and winter temperatures had risen ten. The permafrost had gone bog soft, glaciers were shriveling, the ice pack was dissolving into the sea like sugar cubes, and on the vast Kenai Peninsula nearly four million acres of white spruce, thirty-eight million trees, had been killed by the spruce bark beetle, a quarter-inch-long, six-legged flying insect that, because of the increased number of frost-free days, reproduced now at twice its normal rate, enabling it to overwhelm the trees’ natural defense mechanisms.

  I wasn’t puzzled as to why GM, Ford, and Toyota built and sold vehicles like the Hummer, the Expedition, and the Land Cruiser, and couldn’t condemn them for it; they were in the automobile business, and these behemoths were big sellers. What puzzled me was why so many Americans were jostling for a place in line to buy one. It would not have surprised me if there were something deep in the human psyche, the vestigial male chimp-brain, maybe, that makes us rush to the trough as soon as we sense it’s nearly empty and snarf down as much of what’s left as we can. It isn’t greed. It’s an atavistic fear mechanism kicking in, the sort of move made by our lower primate cousins, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, whenever they notice that the troop’s population has outgrown its food supply and they are going to have to move to a new forest, one controlled by an unfriendly, possibly tougher troop, or else stop having sex. In a paroxysm of anxiety, the big males instantly start gobbling up every banana in sight.

  Such were my melancholy thoughts as I made the long, gradual descent on the Sterling Highway from the town of Soldotna to the old Russian settlement in Ninilchik. On my right was Cook Inlet and on the far side of the bay, profiled in purple by an evening sun still high in the cloudless sky, were the volcanic cones of the Aleutian Range. On my left, as far as I could see, was the ancient spruce forest, devastated by the work of that little yellow bark beetle. The trees were withered and gray, all of them dead or dying, miles and miles of tall, ghostly specters of trees that looked like they’d been hit by radioactive poisoning, as if the Kenai Peninsula were downwind from Chernobyl. I was doing eighty along the wilderness highway in my Hummer, cruising through a vast forest destroyed by the gas-gulping culture of which there was no purer expression than this vehicle, and I was feeling bad. Not that it wasn’t fun to drive this damn thing. It was just that I’d have to be a cynic not to feel a wrench of conscience driving it here. These drooping gray trees were like accusatory ghosts.

  The Russian settlement was from another century, however—a cluster of small, white, wooden houses with tiny windows and a graveyard and an Orthodox church atop a grassy hump overlooking the sea far below. It was a Chekhov story waiting to be told. I turned off the main road and found my way along a twisting lane down to the narrow beach at the base of a set of high, sandy cliffs shot through with runnels and caves. A magnificent pair of bald eagles flew back and forth along the cliffs, switchbacking their way toward the top, looking for an easy-picking supper of seagull and plover eggs. At the top, they crossed over me, gained altitude with a half-dozen powerful beats of their enormous wings, and headed out to sea, floating on rising currents toward the distant mountains. I wanted to follow them, and actually did try it for a while, driving the Hummer a short ways into the water and south along the beach, testing the manufacturer’s claim that it could drive in twenty inches of water. It more than passed the test. For several miles I guided the vehicle over rock slabs and through shifting, wet sandbars, until the beach gradually narrowed, and soon I had no choice but to drive in the water now, for the tide was coming in, and I couldn’t go back. I could only go forward and hope that I’d come to a break in the cliffs and a road leading away from the beach before I had to abandon the Hummer to the sea.

  At the last possible minute, the beach suddenly widened, and the cliffs receded, and I came upon a caravan of a dozen or more RVs parked where Fall Creek entered the sea at Clam Gulch. A herd of bearded, big-bellied beer drinkers in duckbill caps and flannel shirts leaned on the hoods and fenders of their vehicles, smoking cigarettes and talking about fishing. These were the guys known in their hometowns as “hot shits.” Their wives and girlfriends lounged in beach chairs close to a big driftwood fire on the beach and watched their kids chase their dogs.

  The men spotted the Hummer first and reacted as if a mastodon were stomping up the beach toward them. Their mouths dropped; they grinned and pointed and called to their wives and kids to come look, look, it’s a goddamned Hummer! A brand-new, bright red Hummer, its huge tires thickened with clinging sand, had come dripping wet from the bottom of the sea. They waved me to a stop and crowded around the vehicle, firing questions as to its engine, its weight, its cost, and when I had answered, they and their wives and children all stepped back for a long, admiring look as I dropped it into gear and pulled away in what I hoped was an appropriately cool manner.

  The Hummer did that to me—made me feel watched, observed, admired for no deserved reason. I felt the way Madonna must whenever she leaves her apartment. Every time I stopped for gas, waited at one of the three stoplights on the 225-mile drive from Anchorage, or pulled over for a minute to photograph a spectacular view of mountains and glaciers and sea, people came up to the vehicle and stared at it as if waiting for an autograph. They stared in an appropriating way—I felt myself enter their fantasy life. Mostly it was a guy thing, especially young guys, teenagers, and preadolescent boys, whose faces brightened with lust when they saw the Hummer. They were clearly getting off on its sudden, overall impression of brute, squared-away power. The women’s gaze had a somewhat different quality, however. To them, the profile and face of the Hummer were grotesque, weird, almost comical looking, and they’d laugh, I felt, if the vehicle didn’t also signify the presence of a man with money, which made it somehow socially acceptable. Everybody seemed to have a fairly accurate idea of the Hummer’s price tag.

  When I drove it onto the long, narrow spit that was downtown Homer, slowed to a crawl by the sudden presence of Saturday night, bar-hopping traffic, a crowd gathered around the vehicle and kept pace with it, waving to me and hollering hey. You’re never lonely when you’re the only boy in Homer with a Hummer. I rolled slowly through the traffic, trying to ignore the gaping drivers and pedestrians and not wrap the vehicle around a pole or kill somebody with it.

  Suddenly among the crowd a dark-haired woman in a nurse’s uniform caught my attention. She was less than four feet tall—a dwarf with a characteristically large, square face and head and short, blocky body and muscular arms and legs. She had spotted the Hummer, not me, for I was invisible to her, and a warm, utterly delighted smile spread over her face, as if by accident she’d run into a long-lost, dear old friend. I waved at her, and she waved happily back, the recipient of an unexpected gift from a stranger.

  Most of the town of Homer—described by a local bumper sticker as A QUIET DRINKING VILLAGE WITH A FISHING PROBLEM—was situated o
n the long spit of land extending several miles into the Kachemak Bay and was made up of restaurants, bars, stores, and motels catering mainly to the crowds of people who’d driven here to fish for salmon and halibut. The parking lots were crammed with RVs and pickups towing camper-trailers and boats, and every few yards was another charter fishing outfit. Halfway along the spit I came to a nearly landlocked bight, clearly man-made, about the size of a football field. A sign told me it was called the Fishing Hole. Curious, I pulled in and parked.

  There was a narrow inlet from the sea and a gently sloped embankment surrounding the shallow saltwater pond, for that’s all it was, a pond. People with fishing rods stood side by side and two and three deep around the Fishing Hole, while below them the water churned with trapped king salmon, and the people along the embankment hauled them in, snagging them without bait or lures. It was a pitiful sight. I asked around and learned that salmon eggs raised in hatcheries were transferred here as smolts, held captive in floating pens in the Fishing Hole until they were large enough to be released into the ocean. Later, when they were grown and the ancient impulse to spawn kicked in, the salmon returned to the Fishing Hole, their birthplace, in actuality a gigantic, carefully designed weir, and on a midsummer night like this, huge crowds of people scooped them up as fast as they could. The people stumbled against one another, stepped in each other’s buckets, swore and shoved and cast again. “It’s called combat fishing,” a grizzled fellow in an NYPD cap told me. “It’s wheelchair accessible,” he added.

  I climbed back into the Hummer and headed out to reconnoiter with the friend who’d loaned me her wilderness cabin for a few days. I knew only that it was a dozen miles from town and had no water or electricity and was located on the bay. Two hours later, my friend’s directions in hand, I drove the Hummer off-road. It was after 10 P.M., but the sky was milky white. It felt like midafternoon, and the difference between what my watch said and what the absence of darkness said was disorienting and made me feel uncomfortably high.

  The Hummer shoved its burly way through chest-high brush and ferns, over washes and gullies, and then up along a tilted ridge to a clearing, where the lane stopped in front of a small, slab-sided cabin with a short deck. I shut off the motor, stepped down as if walking ashore from a large boat, and stood in the middle of the ferny clearing for a few moments, savoring the silence and the view. Below the cabin was the bay, and across the bay was the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, a vast, mountainous wilderness area split by three glistening white glaciers, a world where no Hummers roamed, where most of the salmon fishing was done by bears and the native people, where there was nothing like the Homer Fishing Hole and the white spruce trees had not yet begun to die.

  After a long while, I went inside and made a fire in the woodstove and uncorked the bottle of red wine I’d picked up earlier in town. Out the window I saw the Hummer sitting in the brush, looking like an alien vehicle sent to earth in advance of a party of explorers scheduled to arrive later. I sipped wine and wondered what the space people, when they finally get here, will make of our planet. All those dead trees! All that flooded land and the dead villages that once prospered alongside the bay! And the dead and dying rivers and seas! The space people will shake their large, bald heads and say, “If the humans had stopped devouring their planet, they might have saved themselves. Those Last Days must have made them mad.”

  THE WRONG STUFF

  Two days and three nights in Quito adjusting my sea-level cardiovascular and respiratory systems to the ninety-three-hundred-foot altitude, and I was out of there. Enough already. Enough hanging around the crowded, noisy New City cafés on Amazonas; enough window-shopping and strolling the jammed, narrow streets of the Old City; enough of tourist hotel life and of gloomy Spanish colonial churches and bleeding, thorny icons; and enough already of the international cadre of mountain climbers—those slender, tanned, super-conditioned young men and women in hiking shorts and T-shirts, those jaded connoisseurs-of-climb lounging around the patios of the hostels and outfitters on Juan León Mera like Aussie surfers waiting for the perfect wave. It was all very charming, even exotic, but not what I had come to Ecuador to see or do. So I was out of there, headed finally from the city into the mountains. And traveling the way I like best—alone, and by public transport—riding the packed Latacunga bus south from Terminal Tereste to El Chaupi.

  It was a bone-dry morning, cool and clear, with an endlessly high sky above the mountains that ringed the city like Inca ruins. I gaped at the otherworldly scenery from the open window of the bus, while the rest of the passengers—men, women, children, and babies alike—stared up at the dubbed Star Trek rerun on the TV screen at the front. In minutes, the top-heavy bus had chugged its way up and out of the congested bowl of downtown Quito onto an arid ridge where it lumbered southward along the potholed Pan-American Highway. Goats with eyes that flattened sunlight like coins and an occasional melancholy cow foraged on the trash-strewn shoulders of the highway. Scrawny blond dogs trotted purposefully along the median strip as if late for an appointment while huge, smoke-belching trucks and rattling old cars and overloaded commuter buses fought one another for the right-of-way in a mad, mechanized, sixty-mile-an-hour rugby scrum. At the edge of the road, thousand-foot cliffs dropped through scrub and eroded, bloodred arroyos to the vast, tin-topped barrio spreading like an effluent along the broad valley south of Quito.

  It was scary up there. But exhilarating, especially after the relative confinement of the last few days, and no one else on the bus seemed scared, not with Spock and Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise watching over us. So I let it go and rocked happily along with the others—black-haired, dark-eyed natives, small, calm, cinnamon-colored people who smiled politely at the oversized, gray-haired yanqui with the backpack and squeezed over to make room for him.

  I had come to Ecuador to climb in the Andes, like those elegantly tanned athletes back in Quito—although they all appeared to be twenty-five to thirty years younger than I and gave every indication of being in much better shape than I have ever been. They had the body fat of ten-speed bicycles. Even the ponytails on the men looked functional. The women in their nylon short-shorts and mesh T-shirts and running shoes looked like they were built to rescue men like me from ice crevasses and had been taught by counselors how to do it in a nonthreatening way. I was in my mid-fifties, and for more than six months had trained in pain for this, and it did not comfort or reassure me to see people who seemed genetically programmed to climb these twenty-thousand-foot peaks between workouts. So I was glad to be away from them, at least for the day.

  Most of the year, I lived in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, where for exercise I took occasional day hikes and played a little tennis—aging boomer guy-stuff, nothing strenuous. It was my good friends and neighbors back home, Laurie and George Daniels, who had first signed on for this trek with Rock and River Guide Service and talked me into joining them. They are wonderful, intelligent people, owners of a small independent bookstore and health food store in Keene Valley, but they, too, were twenty or more years younger than I, built like gazelles, and they were experienced climbers. Laurie did triathlons and was a rock-climbing guide. George had a ponytail. I was, therefore, secretly relieved that on this first climb, my test run at altitude, they had decided to stay in Quito with the other members of our expedition and help Alex, our guide and wagon master, buy supplies. If I had made a serious mistake and had wasted six months of nonsmoking, lung-bursting, muscle-developing daily exercise, not to mention several thousand dollars in transportation and equipment costs, I preferred to find out alone.

  An hour out of Quito, the bus shuddered to a stop and dropped me and my backpack off at the side of the road, then rumbled on to Latacunga. I was suddenly the only human being in sight, and except for the steady rush of the wind, it was absolutely silent. The sun was shining brilliantly, and the air was desert dry but cool, barely fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Across the highway was the entrance
to Cotopaxi National Park. A dusty, rutted track led through eucalyptus trees and over humpbacked ridges, where it wound across the plain toward Mount Cotopaxi in the distance—the highest active volcano in the world, and the object of all our desires on this trek. In nine days, after several preliminary conditioning climbs of somewhat lower mountains and a day of “snow school,” learning how to climb a glacier, we were scheduled, Laurie and George and I, our guide Alex Van Steen, and the four other yanquis in our group, to climb to its 19,400-foot snow-covered summit.

  Not today, however. Despite the blue sky overhead, I couldn’t even see Cotopaxi today. It was shrouded in clouds, a vast, white, shapeless mass that rose like a storm from the alto plano in the east and blotted out the horizon. For some reason, I had started thinking of the mountain as She, as the mother of all volcanoes in Ecuador’s fabled Avenue of the Volcanoes. Chimborazo, in the north, at 20,561 feet, was the slightly taller father, an extinct volcano nicknamed El Viudo, the widower, and no longer smoldering. Cotopaxi, La Viuda, boiled beneath her snowy cap, and long plumes of steam rose regularly from the crater. The last time she erupted was 1928, and the slopes and plains that surround the mountain are covered for miles with ash and room-sized ejecta from that eruption.

  Today, though, I was after smaller game—the three twelve-thousand-foot peaks of El Chaupi. Lomas, they’re called, “hills”—towering behind me in the west and tied together by a scalloped, narrow twelve-kilometer ridge. I turned, grabbed up my day pack, and started walking. A mile or so ahead of me, the land rose abruptly from the valley to the first of the lomas. Soon, I feared, my body will tell me that I am a vain, deluded, late-middle-aged fool and should have stayed home. But, on the other hand, I thought, if I am lucky, perhaps my body will call me master and will say, Where to next? Rumiñahui? Only 14,436 feet. Or how about Sincholagua? Great views of Cotopaxi, and only 16,500 feet! And in nine days, master, the great Cotopaxi herself!