Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart

by Lynn Schooler

  When I asked a Tlingit friend about this, he just shook his head and looked away. The Tlingit memory is long, and stories of drowning and loss in Lituya Bay are common. The worst was the time Kah-Lituya swept away an entire village. Only a single woman, who was up on a ridge picking berries when the wave struck, survived.

  Considering all this, I was not surprised by the reactions of my friends when I told them I was considering going by myself. Luisa just opened her eyes a bit wider and asked, “Alone?” Joel quietly recommended I take someone else. Jon, a friend who had shared his tent with me a decade earlier on the Tatshenshini River, just said, “You’re nuts.”

  I did not argue. Luisa had recently had one cancer-riddled hip replaced and was already going skiing daily. Joel has filmed wild tigers at close quarters in India. Jon bicycled across Russia when he turned sixty, then trekked through Nepal and climbed to 18,000 feet in the Himalayas. Juneau is full of such adventurers, and I count among my friends people who have rafted wild rivers in Chile, wrangled sled dog teams in Antarctica, and climbed some of the world’s highest peaks. Ed, the octogenarian from whom I’d bought the land I was building on, had been part of the climbing team that had made the first ascent of Mount Hess in the 1940s.

  I valued their advice and concern, but hiking the coast did not seem to be an adventure on par with clawing one’s way to the top of an unclimbed peak or skiing to the poles. Nor would it be a “first.” The Tlingit Indians were certainly familiar with every step of the way, and I had located accounts of early gold miners and trappers who had made it through (one party had killed an extremely rare blue, or glacier, bear en route, and another had survived only because it had stolen a Native family’s canoe). In modern times, several groups had covered the distance, although the last, which had attempted the trek the previous summer, had been stopped by a flooded river and forced to evacuate. That operation had resulted in two wrecked bush planes and the launch of a Coast Guard helicopter. But I could find no record of anyone having done it solo, largely, I imagined, because traveling with a group makes it easier to carry a boat of some sort for the water crossings. Doing it alone—and at my age—could prove difficult.

  And yet, my age also provided a motive for going solo: Should the load I would have to carry, or the conditions, or the distance, prove too much, I could simply turn around and go home without having to dissuade a more gung ho companion. I tried to convince myself that the opposite was also true, that without a partner who might fizzle, I could go on as I pleased. But the truth is that after twenty years of guiding in Alaska, I have grown conservative when faced with the elemental power of the wilderness. To travel by boat to Lituya Bay and walk over a hundred miles up and down that wild coast would expose me to storms, geological chaos, and terrifying tide rips. And the thought of carrying a heavy pack all day made my back ache. Once on the ground, I might change my mind.

  But the landscape alone should make the trip worth the effort. At Lituya Bay, Mount Crillon soars over 12,000 feet straight up from the water’s edge. Beyond Lituya, a line of 15,000-foot peaks marches up the coast past Mount Fairweather. North of Mount Fairweather, Mount Saint Elias towers 18,000 feet above Malaspina Glacier.* Nowhere else on earth do such mountains rise so abruptly and vertically from sea level.

  To persuade myself that it would be all right, I argued that I was not going to climb any mountains; I was going around them. I was just going for a walk on the beach, albeit a rather long one. As for Kah-Lituya, the odds of a major earthquake occurring while I was there were infinitesimal. Don Miller calculated the odds against a great wave happening on any given day at nine thousand to one (then fudged by adding that he believed the odds were actually much greater because of “a larger than average potential for slides resulting from the shaking and ground breaking associated with the 1958 earthquake”). And I presumed that the chance of encountering a kushtaka in the guise of either a beautiful woman or one of my own relatives was even smaller, because Miller also warned in his USGS report that within the region lie “thousands of square miles of wilderness counted among the least known and least frequented parts of Alaska.” Trekking the coast would mean facing solitude of a sort rarely found on the planet. The only company I could count on was that of grizzlies. Lots of grizzlies. Southeast Alaska has one of the highest populations of brown bears in the world.†

  My original reasoning—that stringing the beads of a dozen different trips into a necklace around Mount Fairweather and Glacier Bay National Park would somehow constitute a concrete accomplishment—was largely a rationalization designed to justify escaping the tiresome trials of construction and, even more important, allow me to find some breathing room to consider what to do about my ailing marriage. But beneath it whispered a nagging question: Could I still do it? Or had my abrupt entry into middle age reduced my physical abilities as thoroughly as it had turned me gray?

  Throughout the summer the question grew louder, rising above the sound of power saws and hammers. Slowly, the wiring got done. The drywall was finished. I bought a dozen bags of plaster and forty gallons of paint. And every night as I popped the top off a bottle of aspirin to battle whatever ache was at the moment dominant and waited for my wife to come home, I thought of a long curve of beach stretching northwest between a range of ice-clad mountains and the sea.

  Chapter 3

  Winter Arrived in the form of small, dry snowflakes that came straight down out of a blue sky and hissed as they hit the ground. In early November the first of several howling winter storms slammed into the coast, dumping a trainload of moisture gathered up by the weather system as it moved along a storm track between Alaska and Japan. By Thanksgiving there was three feet of snow on the ground. As I worked—outside, under a tarp, with the shavings from a power planer flying out to mix with the blizzard—I kept tossing around what it really means to be middle-aged. The planks were from trees I had felled two years earlier, trucked to a small sawmill, and sawed into material for cabinets and flooring. Now I had two truckloads of lumber to mill, and it is no exaggeration to say that the shavings piled up faster than my insights into aging. According to U.S. census data, the average life expectancy for white males had increased from forty-eight years in 1900 to seventy-seven in 2007. The figures were skewed by turn-of-the-century infant-mortality rates, but nonetheless, fewer than two thirds of the twenty-year-olds alive in my grandfather’s time could expect to reach my current age. Now, nine out of ten men live into their sixties, and nearly half reach eighty. In a little over a century—less time than it had taken for the trees I’d cut down to reach maturity—the odds of growing old had risen exponentially.

  Feeding another plank into the planer’s whirling cutterhead, I wondered what such statistics should mean to men like myself who don’t spend much time fretting over things like retirement portfolios or risk management, or what they would have meant to someone like my grandfather, a West Texas rancher who climbed into a saddle when he was a young boy and stayed there until he dropped seventy years later. For generations my ancestors all worked the same patch of flint and cactus studded ground, and for such men—hardened by a relentless desert sun, two world wars, and a dust bowl—slowing down with age was never an option. (It was not until Franklin Roosevelt introduced his New Deal and social security in the 1930s that retirement became a possibility for any but the very rich. Now, thankfully, even those who make their living through sweat and labor are entitled to some leisure.)

  Marveling at the way the spinning blades transformed raw wood into a finished surface, I sorted the emerging boards by color and quality while I wondered if all the aerobics and motorcycling engaged in by various men within my peer group were not just groping attempts to define middle age as an extension of youth, or if our society had simply changed so fast that we had not had time to develop a more appropriate approach to aging.

  A board patterned with an attractive swirling grain emerged from the planer, and I set it aside for consideration. Throughout the building pr
ocess, I had tried to pay attention to small details. If I could match the plank to others, they would make handsome panels in the cabinet doors. The woods I was using—spruce and hemlock for the cabinets, fir for the timbers and frame of the house, rot-resistant cedar for the outside decks and siding—were softwoods, without the defenses against marring offered by hardwoods like oak and maple or “engineered” products like laminated bamboo.

  But this was part of the plan. In time, I hoped, day-to-day wear, weather, guests, and rambunctious children or grandchildren would eventually mark and smooth the various parts of the structure into what the Japanese call a wabi-sabi home. At its simplest, sabi can be defined as the beauty that comes to physical things with the passage of time, such as the way an old wooden door weathers into striking colors and patterns, or the grip of a tool develops a glowing patina after years of respectful use. Wa, the root of wabi, means “harmony” and connotes a life of ease within nature. When applied to objects, wabi-sabi implies the beauty of simple practicality. More important, the phrase carries a Zen overtone of living in the moment and accepting the inevitability of decay. It might take decades, but years of good living would transform the assemblage of wood and concrete into a comfortable wabi-sabi home, where my wife and I could grow old together graciously.

  The planer growled and bogged down on a knot. I cranked a wheel to raise the cutterhead and tossed the plank aside. Some of the boards were so peppered with knots that they would serve only as firewood. In others, a well-placed knot or a twist in the grain brought the wood alive.

  The next piece was a beauty, a chunk of mountain hemlock so perfectly free of defects that it ran through the planer like butter and came out the color of fresh cream. There are two species of hemlock in Southeast Alaska: western, which is larger and more common, and mountain, which is exceedingly slow growing. I remembered the tree the board had come from. A rise of bedrock on the ridge where the house was to be built had dictated that I cut it down before laying out the foundation. It was small, only ten inches in diameter, and as soon as it fell, I regretted it. The stump was a blur of growth rings packed so tightly together that it required a magnifying glass and a needle to count them.

  The tree was 299 years old. It had taken three centuries to grow to the size of my leg. When it sprouted, Benjamin Franklin was an infant and Louis XIV was the king of France. Alaska was still firmly in the grip of the Little Ice Age, and the first Europeans would not arrive on the scene for another thirty-five years.

  I turned the board over and ran it through the planer again, then turned it on edge to square it. The grain was perfect, quartersawn into a pattern of clean, straight lines arranged so closely together that they resembled the edge of a book.* If properly dried, the wood would have little tendency to cup or warp.

  I flipped a switch to shut off the planer and removed my earplugs. The tarp over my head flapped in a gust of wind. Laying the plank across a sawhorse, I brushed away a litter of shavings and blew on my fingers to warm them. I knew what I wanted to do with this wood.

  Thirty years earlier, during a pilgrimage to the now-deserted family ranch in Texas, I had hiked across the parched and stony land to the site of my family’s original ranch house. The ranch had been vacant since 1958, abandoned after eleven years of drought. The house my great-great-grandfather had built in the nineteenth century was gone, except for a square of hand-cut limestone blocks outlining the foundation. Shards of weathered siding littered the ground. A jumble of old paint cans, nails, and rusty tools marked where the barn had once stood. Even in the best of times the house had been too humble to claim a living room or parlor, but growing out of the foundation of what had been the “front room” was a twisting, rough-barked tree. Mesquite trees yield wood that is blood-red and iron hard; it took me most of the morning to cut the tree down with a rusty saw I dug out of the wreckage of the barn. Afterward, I kept a few small boards from that mesquite log squirreled away, believing that someday I would turn them into a cabinet as a way of remembering my ancestors.

  Eyeing the clean, white face of the mountain hemlock, I decided that combining it with the rosy hues of the Texas hardwood would create a beautiful contrast. And I liked the idea of a material connection between a tree grown within the foundation of my ancestral home and one sacrificed for the home I was building. In Japan many older houses have a tokonoma, an alcove or recess decorated with a simple scroll or a vase of flowers that is considered the spiritual center of the home. I imagined a small wall cabinet crafted from the hemlock and the mesquite serving the same purpose.

  Unplugging the work lights, I drew a sheet of plastic over the planer, tucked the plank under my arm, and started toward the house. Halfway there I stopped to listen. It was perfectly quiet but for the sound of snow blowing through the trees. The wind smelled of fresh shavings. I thought again of the mesquite and the hemlock, and the passage of time they represented. It was dark, and snow hurtling out of the night stung my face. Kicking through a knee-deep snowdrift, I worked my way under the house and stored the plank in the crawl space. It would need to dry for a year or two before I could use it.

  Chapter 4

  Winter Just Kept growing harder. Cold air flowing down from the glaciers pooled in the cove, and the temperature plummeted, falling so low that sawdust froze into a fist-sized knot around the spindle of the table saw, preventing me from raising or lowering the blade. Storm after storm sailed in from the gulf, until by Christmas nearly twenty feet of snow had fallen. It was the worst winter in Juneau’s recorded history, and by January the land had begun to starve. Deer, driven from the forests, died by the dozen on the beaches. A hungry wolf took my neighbor’s dog.

  On the first day of March I began to write out a list of things I would need to hike the outer coast and started sorting equipment. A sleeping bag, a tent, rain gear, and extra clothing went into the “indispensable” stack, along with a cooking pot, a stove, and waterproof matches. A coil of strong, thin line would be important to hang my food from a tree at night to keep it out of the reach of bears. My camera and headlamp went onto a pile of things I wanted but could do without if necessary—carrying everything on my back made every ounce critical. And just as important was setting a date for departure. There were several factors to consider.

  First was the bears. The grizzlies along the gulf come out of hibernation in late April and head for the coast, where new grass provides them with an excellent source of fresh protein. Throughout May patches of fresh beach rye needling up through the remains of the previous year’s vegetation hold the bears’ attention. In early spring every bear on the coast would be grazing on the beach, right where I planned to be walking. By June the snow cover would begin to melt in the higher altitudes, and the bears would move inland, following the snow line in pursuit of new vegetation. During summer, bears feed deep in the forest and up in the alpine until the salmon runs begin, in July, when they drop down to the coast and the rivers again. If I timed the trek for the period when the majority of the bears were away from the beach, it would decrease the chance of a confrontation.

  The flip side of this was that the greening coast offered me the same advantage it gave the bears. In spring the stems and leaves of young “twisted stalk” plants are tender and edible, as are the tightly coiled fronds of the fiddlehead fern. Crisp beach asparagus and goose tongue pedicels push up through the soil, and the pale green buds of devil’s club are tasty when lightly steamed. In other words, the foraging can be excellent. Combining wild greens with the salty meat of limpets and chitons pried from the rocks at low tide might reduce the amount of food I had to carry. In May an hour or two of picking and plucking every day could provide a decent meal.

  My next consideration was the rivers. Poring over a map of the coast, I ticked off the thin blue line representing a watercourse in at least a dozen places. Judging by the size of the watershed each one drained, some would be little more than creeks. But even an ankle-deep rivulet can rise waist-high during one of the co
ast’s infamous rainstorms. And by midsummer this would be compounded by runoff from melting snow in the higher altitudes. April and May are usually cool, with little runoff, but June’s twenty-plus hours of daylight and warmer weather can bring on the perverse phenomenon of flooding caused by too much sunshine.

  Last, but just as important as any other consideration, was the isolation. Early in the year, before the first salmon approach the coast from offshore, the cabins at Dry Bay are unoccupied. Not until mid-May do the fishermen who make their living there fly out to begin overhauling their nets. Likewise, very few fishing boats would be traveling the outer coast, and even fewer pleasure boats. I had a small handheld marine radio in the must-have equipment stack, but its range was limited to a few miles. If there were no vessels along the coast, I would be completely out of communication. In such a setting even a small accident can develop complications quickly. Taken to an unlikely extreme, a twisted ankle could mean starvation.

  Three weeks later I was still moving gear from stack to stack and debating whether to eat better and face more bears, or avoid the flooding to make the water crossings easier and feel excommunicated. And all the time, the answer was falling from the sky, coming down in the form of intricately crystallized flakes of frozen moisture that fell one at a time, by the millions and the trillions, until the combined weight of their falling threatened to obliterate the world.

  The calendar said the twenty-first of March was the first day of spring, but it was lying. There was four feet of snow on the ground, and more was coming. The forecast called for a warm front to roll in from offshore and drop another trainload of snow when it hit the coast. It would be worse if the warm front brought rain. The wind was already moaning through the mountains above Juneau, sweeping the existing snow into ever-deeper drifts along the lip of the avalanche chutes aimed at the city; even a light rain falling on the snowpack might loosen it enough to send a mile-wide slab of snow and ice thundering into the most vulnerable neighborhoods. Early that morning the Department of Transportation had used a howitzer to create a “controlled” avalanche south of town that plunged so wildly out of control down the mountain that when the powder blast finally cleared, it revealed a thousand-foot section of highway buried under twenty feet of debris. At two P.M. the city manager, working with the Southeast Alaska Avalanche Center, released the following bulletin: