Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart
Page 27
* A century later Henry W. Elliott, who visited Alaska in 1882 as an agent of the U.S. Treasury Department, noted the continuing effect of the Russians’ “brutal orgies” against Alaska’s Natives, writing in his report to the government that “the wild, savage life which the Russians led in the early days of their possession of this new land . . . beggars description, and seem[s] well-nigh incredible to the trader or traveler who sojourns in Alaska today.”
* Why La Pérouse made his estimate in Spanish piastres is a puzzle, but it may have been because gold was relatively scarce in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and silver, which the Spanish possessed in abundance from their mines in South America, was commonly used in matters involving foreign exchange.
* It is an interesting footnote that the survival of the sea otter in Alaska can be attributed to the rise of nuclear weapons and the advent of the Cold War. The animal had been wiped out across most of its range by the end of the 1800s, and the only viable population remaining was located near Amchitka Island, in the remote Aleutians. When the Atomic Energy Commission announced that it planned to perform nuclear tests on Amchitka Island in the 1970s, the resulting uproar over the threat to the sea otters resulted in the AEC’s funding the research that made transplanting the little-studied and poorly understood otters—whose sensitive physiology had turned every effort to reintroduce them to Southeast Alaska and British Columbia into a disaster—viable.
* Birds do not blink like humans do. They have three eyelids: one upper, one lower, and a nictitating membrane that lies between the other two and the cornea. The nictitating membrane has a lubricating duct and is used to clean and protect the eye. And when a bird wants to close its eyes, the lower lids move instead of the upper ones.
* The moment magnitude scale has replaced the more commonly referred to but less accurate Richter scale, which suffered from “saturation” during quakes greater than approximately 7.3 on the Richter scale.
* Silver tape is considered indispensable by many outdoorsmen. Originally designed to seal the joints in metal air ducting, it is strong and highly adhesive and can be used to improvise repairs to leaky rafts, rubber boots, raincoats, and tents. I have also seen it used to provide first aid for heel blisters and to close open wounds, splint a broken canoe paddle, patch a torn sail, and close a tear in the fabric of a damaged airplane wing. For a backpacker, carrying a large roll is impractical, but a dozen or so turns around a set of tent poles or hiking poles means having some available without adding much weight to one’s load.
* A pony wall is a short wall framed on top of a standard eight-foot wall, in this case as an addition built with “pockets” between sections of two-by-six framing into which the ends of the roof timbers and trusses were secured, so that the roof load would be carried by the fully framed wall underneath. Construction nomenclature varies from region to region—and sometimes from carpenter to carpenter—and pony walls, knee walls, and stub walls may be referred to interchangeably.
* Fox farming was a common vocation among the inhabitants of Alaska’s island archipelagoes in the years after World War I, when prices soared as women’s fashions began to dictate the use of fur. The foxes were raised on small islands near salmon streams, which supplied a cheap source of food.
* Quarter moons occur when the sun and the moon are at right angles to each other relative to the earth, and the gravitational pull of each cancels to some degree the pull on the sea of the other. This in turn creates weak, or “neap,” tides. “Spring” tides, on the other hand, occur when the sun, the earth, and the moon are in alignment during new or full moons, and they are the largest and strongest of the lunar cycle.
* Scope is the ratio of anchor line to the depth of water beneath a vessel. Because the effectiveness of an anchor increases as the angle of the line to the seabed decreases, a larger ratio is preferred. For example, a 7-1 scope, or 350 feet of line out for a boat anchored in 50 feet of water, will hold much better in a strong wind than a smaller scope of, say, 2-1, or 100 feet of line used in the same depth. Anchors pulled at a low angle to the seabed tend to dig in, whereas strain more perpendicular to the seabed may cause an anchor to “break out,” or come loose. “Paying out more scope” means putting out more line so the angle decreases.
* All cranes are precocial, meaning they are able to walk and feed themselves soon after hatching. Superprecocial species such as the mound-building megapodes of Australasia hatch fully feathered and able to fly.
*Interstadial refers to warm periods between episodes of glaciation, during which the climate warmed up enough to allow lush forests to grow.
* The male great horned owl calls five times, a female eight.
* An 1893 topographic map of the Cape Fairweather region shows a straight coastline projecting nearly three miles farther out to sea than its present position, including a mile-long lake in an area that is now part of the continental shelf. This was not a case of careless cartography. The 1898 and 1899 earthquakes were so violent that some areas of the coast rose and fell more than fifty feet, altering the shoreline dramatically.
* Dead reckoning is navigation based on time, speed, and direction from a “fix,” or known location. Piloting is navigating by visible landmarks, and celestial navigation uses the sun, moon, and stars. All three have generally been supplanted by electronics and satellite systems. The Patterson’s last sure fix was Kodiak.
* Jim Huscroft also strapped on a pair of snowshoes and set out with a packload of grub and blankets when he first heard of the wreck, but had to turn back when his arthritic old legs failed him.
* Raven’s ark is not the only Tlingit story with an Old Testament flavor. Mount Fairweather’s real name is kées’ Kanadaa, which translates as “high tide all around,” and ancient stories tell of a time when the people and animals had to take refuge there to escape a terrible flood.
* There is controversy over whether it is even possible for a large snake to swallow a full-grown human and over whether such an event has ever occurred. Most man-eating-snake stories cannot be documented, and several have been proved false.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Lynn Schooler is the critically acclaimed author of The Blue Bear and The Last Shot. He has lived in Alaska for almost forty years, working as a commercial fisherman, a shipwright, a wilderness guide, and an award-winning wildlife photographer.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Blue Bear:
A True Story of Friendship, Tragedy, and
Survival in the Alaskan Wilderness
The Last Shot
First published in Great Britain 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Lynn Schooler
This electronic edition published 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
The right of Lynn Schooler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 1483 3
www.bloomsbury.com/lynnschooler
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Map
&n
bsp; Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Footnote
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Imprint