The north wind picked up while I was poking through the trees, whispering in the branches, and I went back to the creek mouth for my coat to cut the chill. The sky had gone clear and icy blue. I decided that if the seniors on the Patterson could keep walking and crawling through a day and a night and all the next day, I could keep going too. Another thirty miles and I would have completed the circumnavigation of Mount Fairweather.
Chapter 22
I Woke Up cold the next morning. Unzipping the tent revealed a world white with frost, and the air was sharp. As I hurried into my clothes, hopping from foot to foot to pull on my socks and work my feet into my boots, a shower of tiny crystals slid off the tent to the ground. When I went to retrieve the food bag, something large had walked beneath the tree. Judging from the trail, it had almost certainly been a bear; the frost had been knocked from the grass in a swath as wide as my shoulders. Before lowering the bag, I followed the trail just long enough to read how the animal had turned and walked up the bank of the creek, going upstream far enough to cross and enter the forest out of sight of the tent. I decided not to follow any farther; the bear had clearly wandered down the beach until it had sensed my presence, perhaps smelling the ashes of the fire or spotting the tent, then diverted up the river to go around me. I could not tell if it had passed within minutes or hours, but it had made an effort to avoid me, and I would afford it the same courtesy.
It was early, around four o’clock, but I had slept long enough to feel rested except for the usual kinks and knots that come with being middle-aged and sleeping on the ground. The stove hissed in the frigid air, and steam rose off the first cup of tea, then a second as I huddled on a log with the sleeping bag over my shoulders. Watching the sky go from white to blue and a snowbank under the trees go from blue to white, I wondered what magic of light and color could cause such opposite effects simultaneously. The growing daylight poured over the mountains, setting fire to the horizon, then sweeping in from the sea, greening the waves and whitening their tops as it came. When it reached me, it threw my shadow across the beach in an instant. There was a growing warmth, then a glitter of sun peeking through a gap in the trees that immediately grew too bright to look at.
The fog seemed to come out of nowhere. One minute the world was a thousand miles wide; then the horizon grew vague, and tendrils of vapor began to rise off the river. Before I finished the second cup of tea and slung the remains to the ground, there was only the tent, the log I was sitting on, and the sound of the ocean. The trees were shapes behind a gray veil, the sun a pale pearl in the sky.
I dawdled over breakfast, waiting for the fog to lift, but it appeared to be growing thicker, so after an hour or so I shook the moisture off the tent, folded it and stowed it, strapped the kayak to the top of the pack, and started walking.
Moving through the fog was a combination of peaceful and disorienting, and I kept stopping to listen, not knowing if I was hearing something moving in the forest or only imagining things. I thought I heard women crying. There were voices ahead and laughter. The sound of footsteps. Something growling.
I finally managed to scare myself silly by imagining that I was about to walk into a bear or tumble into some blind hazard, so I moved down to the sand at the edge of the surf, where I could look over my shoulder and see my own tracks following me. When I looked again, a wave had erased them; it felt like I was walking into oblivion.
I walked for hours, moving slowly, seeing nothing but waves, an occasional drift log, or the vague shape of a boulder. The sun was past the meridian when a light breeze out of the north began to push at the fog and stir it. The wind picked up, subsided, then picked up again, peeling the fog away layer by layer until suddenly there was blue sky overhead. Within minutes I was walking through a world of green trees and blue waves again.
The wind kept increasing. Soon there were whitecaps cutting across the waves. Where there had been the chill of the fog, there was now the knife of the wind, and I had to zip up my coat to dull it. A few minutes later I stopped to get out a hat and gloves. By the time I was moving again, it was blowing twenty knots.
I was surprised to find the next creek running deep and strong. I could tell from the smooth power of the channel at the mouth that it was not going to be possible to wade through this one as easily as I had all the others, so I probed upstream until I found a wide spot where the stream broke into channels, took off my pants, stuffed them in the pack to keep them dry, and started moving slowly out into the current, reaching ahead with first one, then the other hiking pole to brace myself. The first two channels were shallow, but before I was halfway across the third one, the water had risen to my calves, then my knees, then my thighs.
I was careful to be sure I had both poles set firmly on the bottom before making a move. It was slow going, and the current heaving against my legs was getting stronger with every step. There was a moment of near panic when a rock moved under one foot and I teetered, stabbing furiously with the poles to regain my balance. The strength of moving water is always greater than one remembers, and every time I have had to ford a swift river, I have been surprised by the rapidity with which the power of the current grows, each additional inch of depth seeming to square the force trying to knock my feet out from under me. What at first might seem manageable becomes suddenly and startlingly on the verge of taking control, like the slow, easy coils of an anaconda becoming a muscular squeeze. It is standard procedure when crossing a river to leave the hip belt of your pack unfastened so it is easier to get out of if you slip and it takes you under, and by the time I reached the middle of the creek, the current was whipping the loose belt around my waist. After only a few minutes in the cold water my calves began to cramp. My steps were reduced to careful, minuscule gropings, and I had to move with my knees slightly bent, angling downstream, creeping crabwise across the slick rocks.
Finally there was a step that did not take me deeper, then another and another until the water began to drop. My feet were numb when I at last scrambled out on the other side, and I told myself that at the next stream I would turn back and inflate the kayak as soon as the water reached my knees.
I found an opening out of the wind in the trees and used a shirt to dry my legs before putting on my long underwear, socks, and pants. Then I spread the shirt on a tree limb to dry while I boiled water for tea and lunched on dried fruit and chocolate. The burn of cold water on my skin became a pleasant sensation when the blood returned to my legs. With a second pan of water boiled and cooled to refill the water bottle, I was ready to start moving again.
Walking back out into the wind was like reentering the current. It was blowing hard enough to flutter the sleeves of my coat, the kind of stiff wind old-time sailors called “half a gale.” In the stronger gusts I had to duck my face into my shoulder to shield my eyes from blowing sand. I tried moving into the forest again, but the only trail I found petered out in heavy brush, started again, then faded and curved inland. I worked my way back into the open, where every step was as much work as if I were walking uphill.
A couple of hours later I stopped for a break after crossing a small watercourse that barely wet my ankles, ducking upstream far enough to get behind a screen of trees. According to the map, the rivulet drained from a large lake at the foot of Grand Plateau Glacier. Perversely, after the deep and threatening crossing of the previous creek, the shallow water worried me.
Where the glacier emerges from the Fairweather Range, it is five miles wide across its face; the lake, which has a surface area of several square miles, is drained by a few small streams that drift and meander through the ridges and hills of the lowlands, and a single large, powerful outflow that drops through a slalom course of boulders. The larger outlet lay three or four miles ahead of me. Like everything else on the map, though, the positions of the glacier, the lake, and the streams that drain it were at best approximations, and two weeks before leaving Juneau, I had walked over to the cabin of a neighbor who had once lived in Yakutat, thin
king he might be able to recommend a bush pilot who could advise me on current conditions. After chatting for a while, Dean reached for the phone and called a friend who he thought might have flown the coast recently.
Dean cradled the phone against one shoulder and leaned on the kitchen counter, drumming a piece of paper with a pen as he outlined my plan to his friend. There was a snort of tinny laughter followed by an indecipherable burst of words from the receiver, and Dean grinned at me as he agreed, “Yeah, he’s a crazy fucker.” Then there was a brief discussion of a group who had tried to hike the coast the previous summer and the two bush planes that had been wrecked when they’d had to be rescued.
“How about the lake?” Dean asked after scribbling “he says you’ll never make it!” on the piece of paper and sliding it across the counter to me. “Is it open yet?” Given the severity of the preceding winter, I was concerned that even by mid-May the lake might still be covered with rotting ice. If it was, I would have no way to cross it.
After a few more jokes about life insurance and psychiatry, Dean hung up and explained that there was open water on the lake just east of the mouth of the main drainage. “He said it’s breaking up. The opening is small, but who knows? Maybe it will have melted off by the time you get there.”
I leaned back against a tree and listened to the wind, wondering if the low water in the creek meant that the stiff northerly had shoved the softening ice into its outlet and clogged it. The main drainage from the lake flows through a braided warren of islets, car-sized boulders, and rocks in a rush so potentially violent that when I called a park ranger stationed in Dry Bay for advice on the trek, he warned emphatically that it would be foolish to try to cross it. At the mouth the cascade spreads out before flowing into the sea, but the bottom of the river is studded with files of boulders and shattered rock that make stepping into a crack or a hole and being trapped by the force of the current a dangerous possibility. Even a knee-high current can hold someone under if it is flowing fast enough. If the outlet was clogged with ice, the only way to keep going would be to work my way inland until I came to open water through brush so thick it might make Cape Fairweather look like groomed parkland. Another option would be to push inland until I reached the glacier and try to cross it, but doing that alone, with no ice axe or crampons, seemed a dubious proposition.
Reminding myself that it was also possible that it had been so cold the night before that there was no snowmelt or runoff to fill the creek, I gave a mental shrug and decided there was no point in worrying about it until I got to the outlet and learned the facts.
I was on my feet again, about to put on my pack, when a shape in the grass caught my eye. There was a slender curve, then an eye and a beak. Toeing the matted residue of last year’s summer rye aside, I bent down and tugged a piece of driftwood the length and diameter of a child’s toy bow and arrow free. A small knot near one end formed the eye, and the stubbed remains of a secondary root or branch formed the beak. Time, sun, and however many miles of tumbling in the surf and sand it had taken to bring the stick to the creek, then push it high onto the bank and quilt it beneath last year’s grass had also worn and rubbed the knot and root down until they had taken on an uncanny resemblance to a traditional Tlingit carving of a raven.
According to the art historian Norman Feder, Tlingit art was “perhaps the most complex and developed in North America,” rich with highly stylized carvings that decorated everything from spoons and bowls to totem poles and immense wall-sized carvings, all ripe with themes meant to convey the connections between humans, animals, and the Tlingit cosmology, in which Raven was a primary character. It was Raven, in the form of Yéil, who had made the world.
The wood was damp from lying beneath the grass, which accentuated the swirls of the growth rings that formed the eye. Eyes in the shape of circles and ovals are often the central motif of Tlingit art, perhaps because they are the means by which a sentient being looks out at the world and, conversely, the portal through which the world may look back into the consciousness of that being. The stubbed root made a perfect beak, as blunt and chiseled as the tool with which Raven was said to have pried open the clamshell from which humans emerged, then the wooden box in which his grandfather kept daylight captive, bringing light to the world.
Prankster, savior, creator, and troublemaker—it seemed fitting to find this limber switch with the whimsical herald at one end hidden in the grass near Grand Plateau Glacier. Once I crossed the lake at the foot of the glacier, I would be within striking distance of Gus’eix, the village site where the first Tlingit to settle in the Dry Bay area had built a clan house of planks split from enormous trees. The Lukaaxádi, as they called themselves, knew Gus’eix was a fine place to build their house. Not long after Raven had brought daylight to the world, he had spotted a large canoe floating out on the sea near Gus’eix; carving a long cane in the shape of an octopus tentacle, he had used it to pull the canoe ashore. The canoe—or “ark,” as some versions of the story refer to it—held every kind of fish in the sea. A house attached to the bow contained all the birds. When Raven opened the door, he gave birds to the world. It is said that Raven’s tracks can still be seen in the sand near Dry Bay at the place where he dragged the canoe ashore.*
I hefted the stick in one hand, then ran my fingers along its surface, feeling the smoothness of years of sun and salt, as fine as anything a woodworker could hope to replicate with sandpaper or a blade; the last thing I needed was more weight to carry, but there was something in the texture of the wood, the delicate curve of the shaft, and the way the eye-knot seemed to stare out at the world that made me want to carry it home and keep it.
I hesitated, started to toss it down, then thought better of it and pushed the small end of the stick into the ground, thinking that if I was not going to carry it away, I could at least leave it standing upright so it could look out to sea, from where Raven had brought fish and birds to the world. Then I put on my pack and walked away.
I was only a few steps away when I went back and got it.
The prayer flag stuttered in the wind, which had eased a bit but still blew with enough force to remind me that there was nothing but a thin line of beach and four thousand miles of open ocean between me and Japan. Lashed to the Raven stick for a tiny mast and braced upright in a cluster of rocks, the flag fluttered and popped while I wrestled with the tent, which kept trying to blow away every time I relaxed my grip to reach for a stake. The unhemmed edges of the flag were starting to unravel, but I figured that if, as the Buddhists say, every flap was a prayer, supplications for Luisa’s soul were streaming heavenward at a devoted acolyte’s pace, so I let it fly.
I was still a mile or more from the main outlet of the lake, but the beach had gone from easy walking to a thick jumble of boulders, an obstacle course I was too tired to negotiate, so after a hundred yards of scrambling, I had turned around and gone back to make camp for the night on level sand. The wind was throwing itself against a steep ridge skirting the beach, creating an updraft in which a dozen ravens tumbled and soared like flakes of ash rising above a fire. They were the first sign of life I had seen all day, so I hunkered in the lee of a massive drift log to watch their aerial antics while I cooked and ate first one bag, then another from my diminishing stock of freeze-dried food. It was clear from the way they rose and dropped on the updraft, first rocketing skyward, then falling in barrel rolls and various sweeping maneuvers, that their behavior was play, undertaken for the sheer enjoyment of using the wind to show what they could do, much as a gang of skateboarders will take turns showing off daring moves. The wind was too loud to hear their calls, but I had no doubt that if I could have, and had been fluent in raven-speak, I would have heard a whooping, back-and-forth cacophony of good-natured insults and praise, with perhaps a few catcalls directed at the pathetic earthbound biped down below, who for some reason was trying to hide from the glorious wind behind a log.
They were still there, weaving their complex diagrams i
n the wind, when I crawled into the shuddering tent and zipped myself into the sleeping bag.
Chapter 23
I Dreamed of Luisa. Nothing symbolic or deeply meaningful; she was just there, wearing a floppy blue beret that hung to one shoulder. In the manner of dreams, the image was already fading by the time I was awake, and maybe it was just the flapping of the prayer flag that had insinuated thoughts of her into my sleep, but the dream did serve to remind me how she had always had a way with hats and the ability, or perhaps the grace and self-possession, to bring a spirited sense of fashion to odd bits of clothing that on others would have appeared simply outlandish.
I was still thinking about her while I stirred up some instant oatmeal, drank a cup of hot chocolate, and prepared for the trail. The first time we had met she’d been wearing red rubber boots, a gray wool coat with frazzled cuffs, and a warm smile, in spite of the frigid downpour that was sweeping along the shores of Admiralty Island, where we and a half dozen others had gathered for a long week of bear watching and photography one early May. The smell of the hot chocolate reminded me of the first night of that trip, when we had gathered around a tiny sheet metal wood-burning stove in an old-fashioned canvas tent to warm ourselves with mugs of cocoa dosed with peppermint-flavored schnapps, which is a dreadful drink unless one is cold and wet enough.
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 20