Yáxwch’i héen bore no resemblance to the frothing current I had envisioned after hearing Lentfer and Steele’s stories. It was low tide, and by bracing carefully with my hiking poles, I managed to pick my way across in shallow water near the mouth, where the creek fanned out before flowing into the diminishing surf. My feet were still wet from the snow on Cape Fairweather, so I didn’t care when it rose to my knees and sloshed into my boots.
I had been walking for only a couple of hours, but I decided to make camp, build a fire, and dry out. I knew, too, that going on when I was already tired might be imprudent. Fatigue leads to poor judgment, and poor judgment leads to accidents. In such a remote location a careless slip could have serious consequences.
In the time it took to set up the tent, secure the food in a tree, gather firewood, and get a blaze going, the rain slowed to a drizzle and stopped. While I made and drank a cup of coffee, a bright crack appeared in the clouds. By the time the fire had burned down, the beach was bathed in sunlight.
I pulled off my rain gear and stripped out of my damp clothes. The chilly air made the dry shirt and pants I hurried to dig out of the pack feel even warmer. Scuffing a hole in the ground beside a drift log on the bank of the river, I lined it with my raincoat, scooped it half full of water, brought a quart of water to a boil on the stove and mixed it in, then sat on the log to soak my aching feet, after stripping the laces from my boots and propping them open-tongued by the fire to dry.
It felt great. I sat back and let the sun wash over me, reheating the footbath once or twice and turning my boots to help them dry while I considered my options. I was not quite halfway to Dry Bay and was tempted to turn around, but the thought of going back across the cape was uninviting. A day of rest in the improving weather would certainly make it easier to go on to Dry Bay—and from there, covering another thirty miles to the dead end of an old logging road that would eventually lead to Yakutat was an option, provided I could resupply with food from the salmon fishermen on the Alsek River. But it was hard to think of walking another eighty miles while I was still tired. Before leaving Juneau, I had investigated the possibility of chartering a floatplane to pick me up in Dry Bay for a flight back to Lituya Bay, but the recent explosive increase in the price of fuel had driven the cost up to seven hundred dollars, which was enough to pay for a bundle of lumber, a dishwasher, or any of a hundred other things the house was still waiting for.
I used my damp shirt to wipe my feet, then pulled the raincoat from the hole and spread both on the log to dry while I continued pondering. Turning the possibilities this way and that, I considered the pros and cons, but could arrive at no conclusion.
A flash of white far out at sea caught my eye, and, looking closely, I made out a ship, rolling on a southbound course, flags of spray flying over its bow as it shouldered into the swells. I thought I could see the gantry of a dragger, or a research vessel of some kind, but it was too far offshore to tell.
I watched the ship until it disappeared over the horizon, then ate a handful of nuts and dried fruit before pulling the prayer flag from its pocket and tying it to a branch. The wind had swung to the north, and the flag lifted and fell in the breeze. Many Buddhists believe that every flap of a prayer flag sends a prayer toward heaven, and I still remember that moment, with the flag fluttering in the wind and the sun throwing my shadow at my feet, as one of the most pleasant I had had in months. The chuckle of Sea Otter Creek sounded almost friendly. It was hard to believe it had once engulfed a 600-ton ship and swallowed it.
Chapter 21
It was Blowing a gale on December 11, 1938, and there is no place in the world darker than the Gulf of Alaska at midnight in the middle of a winter gale. There is no horizon, no stars, nothing level in the world—just the deck under your feet, rising and falling in so many directions at once that the only thing any sensible man can do is climb into his bunk and hang on. All you can do is keep an eye glued to the compass that glows with a subdued red light, meant to keep your vision adjusted to the darkness so that when you scan the black world outside the wheelhouse windows, you might—just might—be able to distinguish the slight difference in the depth of the nothingness you are staring into that means you are about to run your ship straight into land. That pale, creamy line in the darkness could be surf breaking over a reef, or a flicker of light might be another ship appearing and disappearing in the swells, on a course that will bring you into collision. Steve Johnson, third mate of the 160-foot converted whaler the Patterson, did not have any of the satellite navigation equipment, radar, or sophisticated depth-sounding equipment of the trawler I had watched beat its way over the horizon—all the Patterson had was a compass mounted in a binnacle and an ancient tube radio.
The Patterson was three days out of Kodiak with a deck load of gasoline in steel drums. The weather was “stinking,” blowing snow mixed with rain and seas that just kept building. The captain, Henri Bune, had been sailing in Alaskan waters for over two decades, first on square-rigged ships, then on steam- and diesel-powered vessels. He had chased whales, run freight for the salmon canneries, and pushed into the ice of the Bering Sea and the Arctic to trade for ivory. His second-in-command, a Swede named Gustaf Swanson, had also earned his master’s ticket in Alaskan waters, and both thought the prudent thing to do after departing Kodiak was to set a course for Cape Saint Elias, at the entrance to Prince William Sound, where a lighthouse could guide them into shelter if necessary or, if the weather moderated, confirm their position so a new course could be set for Cape Spencer, three hundred miles to the south. What neither seems to have considered was the effect the pile of fuel drums on the deck was having on the compass. The steel barrels were throwing it off.
They never spotted the light at Cape Saint Elias. The wind backed from the southeast into the northeast, the temperature dropped, and blowing snow obscured everything. When the time Bune had calculated it should take to reach Cape Saint Elias had lapsed, he ordered a dead reckoning course for Cape Spencer.* Although no one on board knew it, the Patterson was lost.
The first indication that anything was wrong was a hard thump somewhere forward, at ten minutes to midnight, just as the second mate came into the wheelhouse to relieve Johnson of his watch. A second blow struck as Captain Bune ran to the bridge.
Bune telegraphed the engine room for full speed in reverse, then sent an order to the radio shack to send an SOS. No sooner had the radio operator complied than a third hammering jolt was felt, this one so violent that it disabled the radio.
Some of the sixteen crewmen aboard panicked, but others kept their heads. Someone—the records do not indicate who—fought his way forward to check the damage and sent word back to Bune that what he had first thought was snow-covered mountains looming in the dark off the bow was actually monstrous surf pounding a sandy shore. Hearing this, Bune made a remarkable counterintuitive decision that confirmed his seamanship and probably saved several lives: He sent an order to the engine room for full speed ahead, calculating in an instant that the Patterson was hard aground and had no chance of backing off; the only thing to do was to try to drive the ship as far up the beach as possible, so that when the tide dropped, if the hull remained intact, his crew would have some chance of getting off.
The ship slewed in the waves and ground forward. When the Patterson’s 325-horsepower engine had driven the ship as far up the beach as it would go, he ordered the lifeboats rigged and a store of survival supplies assembled.
The waves were tremendous, breaking over the stern and shoving the ship sideways to the beach. A photograph taken at daybreak from a seaplane responding to the SOS shows the Patterson lost in a surge of stark white foam with the dark curl of an incoming wave hanging over the hull like a fist drawn back to hammer it. The masts lean at a crazy angle, and the ship’s bottom is exposed. From the bow of the ship dangles a “Jacob’s ladder” of ropes and planks. After one crew member was washed overboard and a second man was lost after he insisted on going over the side to
try to rescue him, the crew of the Patterson rigged an ingenious system known as a breeches buoy to escape to shore. Launching a lifeboat during a lull in the waves, four men managed to row ashore, drag the heavy lifeboat up the beach, then use it as an anchoring point for a line from the ship’s bow. The supplies were lowered on a second line shackled to the breeches buoy line. Then the remainder of the crew went over the side down the wildly swinging Jacob’s ladder and used the lines to pull themselves through the surf.
The photographer’s name is not on the photo, but it was probably taken by an affable, stocky young man from Idaho named Shell Simmons. A picture of Simmons shows the quintessential Alaskan bush pilot, wearing a fur-collared leather flight jacket, with an intelligent face, a devil-may-care grin, and wrinkles of good humor around his eyes. Daring, innovative, and apparently fearless, Simmons started his flying career with a damaged Stinson monoplane he bought for one dollar. A few years later he upgraded to a boxy Lockheed Vega, a workhorse known for its carrying capacity and heavy-weather abilities. He had already earned a reputation for hair-raising rescues around Alaska when word came that the Coast Guard in Ketchikan had received the Patterson’s broken SOS indicating it was aground somewhere between Cape Fairweather and Yakutat. Simmons climbed aboard at first light, took off into the gale, and felt his way through the blowing snow and fog to the outer coast. The Coast Guard was in the process of assembling a crew and dispatching the cutter Haida from Ketchikan, but it was hours away, and it was Simmons who found the Patterson and radioed the cutter with its location. There were, he reported “about a dozen” survivors on the beach at Sea Otter Creek. (There were actually eighteen, plus the ship’s cat, which had been sent down the breeches buoy line in a basket.) It was low tide, and there was not enough water in the creek for Simmons to land. Nor would there be high water during daylight hours for at least a week.
With visibility dropping and the severity of the squalls increasing, it was two o’clock in the afternoon before Simmons found the Patterson. He had no choice but to head back to Juneau. When the Haida arrived at the scene just before dark, its crew found the surf so heavy that a violent cross sea was breaking two miles offshore. There was no way to reach the men on the beach.
Thus began an ordeal that was to last until Christmas Eve. For a solid week the survivors huddled in a makeshift camp as the storm continued. Simmons made several air drops of supplies to the stranded men, taking off at first light into conditions no sane person would fly in to probe his way out to the coast through fog and squalls and making it back to Juneau just before dark, while the Haida and a second cutter, the Morris, which had been diverted from a voyage from Seattle to Seward to help, wallowed and pounded in the waves. Many of the crewmen on both vessels were completely disabled by violent seasickness.
After a week a desperate plan was devised to help the castaways walk out to Lituya Bay, where they could be picked up by seaplanes and the Haida, whose commander thought he might be able to get his surfboats through the breakers at the entrance. A third vessel, the Cyan, was also standing by. A critical link in the plan was to somehow get a guide to the stranded men, someone who knew the coast and could escort them south to meet the rescue party. A complicating factor was that many of the shipwrecked men were in their sixties and a few were in their seventies. The world was nearly a decade into the Great Depression, and no one could stop working just because he was getting old. More important, they were sailors, not hikers or outdoorsmen, and more accustomed to short walks on a rolling deck than to forcing their way across twenty-five miles of glaciers and flooding rivers in wind-driven snow and rain.
At a meeting in Juneau the first problem was solved when it was decided that a trapper named Nels Ludwigson, who had spent a couple of seasons running a trapline near Cape Fairweather, was the most likely man to get the Patterson’s crew out. The only trouble was that no one knew where he was. When they finally found him, he was in jail, serving a ten-day sentence for getting drunk and trying to break up a bar in downtown Juneau. A cooperative judge quickly suspended Ludwigson’s sentence, but there was nothing to be done about the survivors’ ages or physical conditions; they would just have to do the best they could, march or die.
Simmons hustled Ludwigson aboard the Lockheed early the next morning along with several boxes of food and jerry cans of extra fuel Simmons planned to cache on the beach in Lituya Bay.
After dropping off the fuel, they headed north up the coast, with the plane slamming through pockets of violent turbulence. A terrified Ludwigson tried to cover up his fear with nonstop complaints and cursing.
Once over the castaways’ camp, Simmons steered the Lockheed in a tight circle and dumped the boxes of supplies out the door, then flew as low as he dared to inspect the creek for a landing. It was too turbid to see any obstructions.
He was about to give up when he spotted a series of mountainous waves about to break across the mouth of the creek. Realizing that as the combers broke, they would hurl a flood of frothing water up the creek, he immediately banked the Lockheed into a plunging dive and landed on the brief upsurge of water.
It was an insane thing to do, but it worked. Simmons gunned the engine to drive the plane to the bank, quickly threw open the door, pitched a white-faced Ludwigson out, and shouted at the sailors that he had room to take the two worst cases of hypothermia. Third Mate Steve Johnson and Chief Engineer McDowell were helped aboard. Johnson had pneumonia, and McDowell’s feet were nearly frozen.
Taking off was as bad as landing. Simmons had to taxi the Lockheed downstream into the mouth of the creek, then turn around to take off against the current. On the way downstream he hit a sunken log, and a huge sea broke just as he reached the mouth, smothering the Lockheed in a slurry of foam and sand. While he was turning the plane around, another wave roared in, flooding the creek, and he gunned it. The heavily loaded plane lifted off the water at the last second, passing so low over the sailors’ camp that the canvas tents shook in its prop wash.
Only a lunatic would have had the temerity or sheer courage to do what he had done, but Simmons returned to Juneau a hero. He tried to shrug it off but later admitted to a reporter that if there had been another pound on board, “we’d never have gotten out of there.”
As soon as he received word that Ludwigson was on the beach, the commander of the Haida ordered his cutter to head for Lituya Bay, where it was joined by the Cyan. Both managed to get surfboats manned by crews of volunteers through the wild breakers at the entrance. Within hours a shore party was headed north to meet Ludwigson and his castaways.
There were things in the report later released by the Coast Guard that puzzled me, including references to the northbound guardsmen’s being forced to crawl across a mile-wide logjam over deep, swiftly running water; a dangerous crossing of a watercourse dubbed “Twelve Mile River”; and the rescue party’s finally meeting up with Ludwigson and his charges at a large waterfall—none of which described any features I had seen, unless Twelve Mile River was the Fairweather slough during a strong ebb tide and they had skirted Cape Fairweather at sea level atop driftwood piled up by the pounding surf. Perhaps whatever geological structure had once formed a waterfall was wiped out by the terrible earthquake in 1958. In any case, what is clear is that the conditions were desperate. The temperature fell to zero with blowing snow. After the first night only four of the presumably fit young guardsmen were able to go on. These were the party’s leader, Ensign Rollins; a gunner’s mate named Brown; and two volunteer citizens from Juneau, Anthony Thomas and Howard Hayes. The rest were too weak to continue and had to turn back for Lituya Bay.
Meanwhile, Ludwigson was heading south with sixteen aged, exhausted men and a cat. Rollins and the others had to build a log raft to cross one river, almost losing a man when he lost his footing and was swept downstream. By the time the two parties made contact, some of the Patterson’s sailors could barely crawl. But in such weather, stopping was not an option, so they headed out in single file, with two
of the rescuers taking point and Ludwigson and two others coming behind to help the slowest castaways. At one river some of the men were afraid to attempt the crossing, and Rollins was forced to spend nearly half an hour in waist-high cold water, coaxing them across one by one.
Sitting on the log in the sunshine in dry clothes, I found it hard to imagine how men in their sixties and seventies, after more than a week of being shipwrecked on the beach, had been capable of making a forced march over terrain that I had just taken three days to cover and that, for all my camping gear, hiking poles, hot food, and dry clothes, had left me feeling bruised and tired. All I could think was that perhaps no one quit because each man knew that if he stopped or lay down, anyone who stayed to help him would die too. A man on his own may give up, but the same man will keep going if others are depending on him.
Seventy years later Sea Otter Creek held no hint of the disaster. All of the survivors, including the cat, had made it out by Christmas, but every last trace of the ship was gone. Six hundred tons of steel had evaporated, including a cast-iron engine the size of a tanker truck. The following summer searchers found a skull and a pair of boots with feet and leg bones still in them, but it was impossible to be certain the remains were those of either of the two drowned crewmen; two brothers from Juneau had disappeared while prospecting in the same area the previous September. The decomposed body parts could have been from any of the four missing men.
My boots were dry when I slipped them on, so I wandered upriver to look around. There was a windrow of driftwood and man-made detritus, tossed off fishing boats and passing cruise ships, scattered along the verge of the woods. Some of it was at least twenty feet above sea level, which gave testament to the height and power of winter storm waves, but none of it could have come from the Patterson. There is not much in the record regarding what became of Ludwigson, Rollins, or the others who made such heroic efforts to get the survivors out, but Simmons went on to see his small air company grow until it was absorbed by a major airline. * The hangar he flew out of has been converted into a waterfront bar where I would probably meet friends for a drink after I returned from the trek. All but a few old-timers have forgotten the Patterson, but Shell Simmons’s name will be around for a while; the road that runs in front of Juneau’s airport is named after him.
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 19