Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  When the tundra changed color, we went to the hills to pick berries. Wild cranberries slid off their bushes easily in solid handfuls, round and firm, into the warm palms of our hands. I thought of how good they’d taste with turkey come Thanksgiving. The air was crisp and fresh, the tundra smelled like fruit and spices, and we browsed like bears taking in the crisp air and the last warmth of summer, which left as the afternoon waned.

  —Dana Greci,

  “Plowing the Driveway”

  When my knees and lower back get tired from leaning down to pick, I sit on my backside and spread my legs in a V and keep picking. The berries are so thick I can pull off five or six at once, with one hand, using a light touch, an open pluck, to separate berry from bush.

  After a while, I take a break and wander across the field toward the bank overlooking the braided river. I’ve seen small bands of caribou down on the riverbar before, camouflaged by silvery willows and gray driftwood. But this time only the bushes are there, thick and yellow-green. I return to the patch and finish filling the tub with blueberries, plenty for a pie.

  As I head back through Broad Pass, fall colors dot the mountains on either side of the road. Muted reds of bearberry leaves cover the ground just above treeline, orangey-red dwarf birch whisk back and forth in the breeze, spruce point up darkly green to lead my eye to rocky patches of grass above long, slaty scree slopes. A magpie swoops at the windshield and lands on a bough unscathed, tipping back and forth for a moment to get its balance before it flies away, iridescent in the setting sun.

  Rain begins to spit as I pull back into the Byers Lake campground, this time to sleep surrounded by other travelers: motorhome retirees relaxing beside a crackling fire, young twenty-somethings with bicycles atop their Subaru station wagon and a husky tied to a tree nearby, a lone man setting up his tent, radio perched on the picnic table spewing country music into the air. I camp far away from him, in a spot on Cranberry Loop, a quiet space where I build a fire and huddle under my waterproof hood and listen to raindrops patter softly on top of my head while eating dinner. I wonder if any of the other campers have discovered the cabin.

  When I return home Sunday at midday, I prepare the kitchen for baking. I open my tub of blueberries and dump them gently into a mixing bowl. Lightly, so I don’t squash them, I rake my fingertips through the purply fruit and pluck a couple of worms that have crawled out from hiding, and leaves and twigs still attached or stuck with moisture to the berries.

  For the pie filling, I measure six cups of berries into another mixing bowl and bag the rest in Ziplocs to freeze for muffins or pancakes in December. The berries are the only ingredient I measure. From scratch means having a feel for something you love, making it up as you go along, building on the knowledge of the past and incorporating your own pinch of flavor into the creation, whether it is a pie or a new marriage in a small cabin.

  Sugar hisses from the bag. Then a few squeezed drops of lemon juice, dashes of cinnamon and nutmeg shaken in, a small handful of flour for thickener, and a few gentle stirs to mix it all up. I make the crust next, rolling to the left, to the right, toward the wall, toward my belly, rolling this way and that until the dough is a circle bigger than the pan. On the top crust, I make slits for steam to escape as the berries plump in the heat.

  With the dish in the oven and the timer set, I sink into a chair and call my parents. I invite them over for dessert while slowly the room, the house, even the air outside the kitchen fills with the sweet, hot tartness of blueberry pie.

  A world traveler whose favorite countries visited so far are India, Nepal, and New Zealand, Susan Beeman always returns home to Anchorage, where she is an editor for Alaska Geographic. When on the road she loves to sample local cuisine and has tried everything from “tomato nuddle soup” and “scrumble egg” in New Delhi to ice cream for breakfast in Rotorua, but never again will she eat steak in Kathmandu. She would, though, travel all the way back to Diu, on the tip of Gujarat, for more of Jay Shankar’s fresh fish curry.

  PART TWO

  SOME THINGS TO DO

  TIM CAHILL

  The Great White Philharmonic

  Crushed ice, hold the suds; even a beer-ad guy can appreciate Alaska’s glacial symphony.

  YOU KNOW HOW GUYS IN BEER ADS ARE ALWAYS PICTURED doing stuff you wouldn’t do—or shouldn’t do—when you’ve been drinking beer? In the Beer-Ad Universe guys continually engage in potentially dangerous activities like bungee jumping, or roofing their houses, or talking to women.

  Recently I discovered that I am a beer-ad guy.

  It was a print campaign, and apparently there were posters, along with a lot of those little cardboard tents they put on tables to encourage people to buy beer. The picture on the posters and on the cardboard tents was of me. I was a small speck of a guy in a kayak, surrounded by floating icebergs and dwarfed by an enormous tidewater glacier looming 200 feet above me.

  I suspect the ad campaign was designed to suggest that this beer is as cool and refreshing as a couple million pounds of ice grinding down a mountainside.

  The picture was taken in Glacier Bay National Park, about sixty miles northwest of Juneau, Alaska. A guidebook I read before my visit encouraged folks to book mid-summer trips, but it was late September and snowing maniacally when I arrived at park headquarters, at Bartlett Cove, near the mouth of the bay. Here I would hop a boat for the glaciers at Muir Inlet, starting point for a sixty-mile kayak trip back to Bartlett Cove—a journey that serves as a painless course on botany-in-action and is about as close as any of us will ever get to time travel. Throw in calving tidewater glaciers, the northern lights, mile-wide beds of mussels, friendly harbor seals, killer whales, wolves, bears, and bald eagles perched on icebergs, all roaming a seascape ringed by mountains that rise from sea level to 15,000 feet, and you’ve pretty much got the premier North American sea-kayaking trip. Even better: In late September you can have the place completely to yourself.

  The next day I rented a kayak. The concessionaire said there was only one other rented out: Some crazy guy paddling around all alone in the snow. That was my partner, photographer Paul Dix, the future beer-photo entrepreneur.

  I was a day late, but Paul had said he’d meet me in Muir Inlet, near the “snout” of McBride Glacier. Despite the delay, I suspected he’d still be there, waiting, because Paul takes his commitments seriously. Also I was bringing the food. I lugged my kayak through ankle-deep snow down to the tour boat, which would drop me at a gravel bar south of McBride Glacier, a place, I learned later, that Paul had renamed Hungry Point. It was a two-and-a-half-hour trip, and of course it snowed. You really couldn’t see anything. Then the wind picked up.

  The boat dropped me off at the gravel bar. Here, predictably, the snow was being driven horizontally by the wind. Worse, it was falling as corn snow, which consists entirely of exceedingly hard little pellets, so the situation was rather like being sandblasted with crushed ice.

  The few tourists on the deck of the boat regarded me with that somber homage our society pays to the visibly deranged, which is to say they were pretty much doubled over laughing. So the boat pulled away, and I was left alone on a gravel bank, unable to see more than fifteen feet in any direction and feeling quite sorry for myself, when Paul Dix came paddling out of the ice storm and greeted me with a hearty “Where in hell’s the food?”

  Tourism in Glacier Bay is nothing new, explains Karen Jettmar, author of Alaska’s Glacier Bay. Inspired by John Muir’s descriptions of ice-lined fjords, tourists began arriving by steamer in 1883. By the turn of the century, steamships had carried 25,000 visitors to Glacier Bay.

  —Andromeda Romano-Lax

  We sat in the tent, and Paul filled me in on his adventures to date. There were Alaskan brown bears all over, which were like the grizzlies we were familiar with from Yellowstone, only bigger. Yesterday Paul had paddled into a sandy cove, looking for a place to camp. A bear had recently padded across the beach, and Paul was measuring his own foot (diminutive an
d pitiable) against one of the prints (colossal and appalling) when he noticed that the bear had left something else on the beach. What it had left wouldn’t fit in a gallon pail and was still steaming. Paul decided to paddle on.

  “Good thing you weren’t carrying any food,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Paul replied pointedly, “I sure was lucky.”

  In fact, we were lucky. The next day dawned clear. The sky was cobalt blue, there was not a breath of wind, and the sea was like glass, a mirror to the sky and the mountains on either end of the inlet, which was about a mile wide in that spot. We paddled over the reflections of snowcapped peaks on our way to Muir Glacier, as the sun shone and the temperature rose to a little over seventy degrees, which is about as warm as it ever gets in Glacier Bay.

  And then, there in front of us, was the glacier, pouring off the mountain and into the sea. The enormous wall of ice, the terminus of the glacier is called the snout, and this one looked to be about 200 feet high and maybe a mile across.

  The whole of Glacier Bay is shaped a little like a horseshoe, open end toward the ocean, with the inland section surrounded by mountains. Snow falls in the upper elevations, never melts, is compressed by the next year’s snow, and the next decade’s, until it turns into heavy, dense ice that flows downhill, as all water must. The ice makes pretty good time, too, sweeping down to the sea at the rate of two to five feet per day.

  The snout is subject to tides that rise and fall as much as twenty feet, eating away at the base of the glacier so that great slabs of it “calve” off the main body and crash into the ocean in an explosion of spray. The sound of the glacier calving can be heard for miles, and the mountain across the inlet from Muir Glacier is called White Thunder Ridge.

  Paul and I camped on a gravel slope below White Thunder Ridge, and we might have gotten some sleep except for the damn Northern Lights, which arced across an ebony star field like phosphorescent green smoke interspersed with dozens of red lightning bolts running in ultraslow motion. All the while the sound of calving ice rumbled off the ridge above. It was like having the whole New York Philharmonic come over to play Beethoven for you at midnight: The mindless and ungrateful go to sleep so they can rise fully rested and spiritually impoverished.

  For the next few days, Paul and I played chicken with the glacier. Kayakers are cautioned to stay at least half a mile from the snout, but distances were impossible to calculate. I’d get in there, way too close, and hear what sounded like the amplified cracking of automatic gunfire. Then a great 200-foot-high block of ice would separate from the glacier and fall, slowly it seemed, into the sea with a roar that echoed against the mountains for a full minute. And afterward, maybe five minutes later, a small ripple of a wave would roll past my kayak. So I figured I could maybe move in a little closer.

  I avoided the icebergs, big as mansions, and made my way through a watery field of bergy bits, smaller slabs of ice that pretty much covered the surface of the sea. There was a strange sound all around, a crackling, like static electricity, and it was getting louder as I paddled toward the foot of the glacier before me. It took a while to understand that the bergy bits themselves were doing the crackling, in the manner of an ice cube dropped into a glass of water.

  There were harbor seals basking in the sun on the larger slabs of ice, and some of them dropped into the water, disappeared for a time, and then surfaced near my kayak. They had heads like wet Labrador retrievers—that same friendly curiosity—and one came close enough for me to touch with my paddle, had I wanted to. He tilted his head in a quizzical manner, dove, and then surfaced again, on the other side of the kayak. I thought he wanted to play tag and paddled toward him, at which point my kayak was rocked by a sound so loud it could actually be felt.

  I looked up to see a block of ice the size of a twenty-story building falling in my direction. Time slowed, as it does in these situations, and I had the leisure to appreciate fully what an enormous horse’s ass I was. Eventually, about a month later it seemed, the ice thundered into the sea far in front of my kayak. It threw up a wave that rolled toward me in a ten-foot-high crest, topped by pieces of ice ranging in size from fist to Ford. I paddled forward to take the wave at a run so that it wouldn’t crest over me. My kayak rolled easily over the top and slipped down the back side. The last rumble of the calving was echoing off White Thunder Ridge, and I could hear the bergy bits snapping all around. Some insane person was beating a drum hysterically inside my chest.

  Which, I think, is when Paul—who was quite a ways behind me—snapped the picture that someone thought might sell beer.

  The weather held for a week, and we paddled back down the inlet toward Bartlett Cove, a trip that is a time-lapse lesson in plant succession. Two hundred years ago, Captain George Vancouver mapped what was then Glacier Bay: a five-mile inlet capped by a 300-foot-high wall of ice. Over the past two centuries, since the end of the Little Ice Age, that immense glacier has retreated almost sixty-five miles, and the land it exposed is all barren rock and sterile gravel.

  But the planet is modest, and she quickly clothes herself with life. Even under White Thunder Ridge, on land that had been exposed perhaps a few decades earlier, we found “black crust,” an algal nap that retains water and stabilizes silt so that eventually mosses grow. They in turn support hardy pioneers like fireweed and dryas. These plants are plentiful a few miles from the retreating glaciers. Farther down the inlet, alders drop nitrogen-rich leaves, building a soil that enables spruce to take hold and eventually shade out the alders. At Bartlett Cove, which was under 200 feet of ice 200 years ago, there is a hemlock and spruce rainforest.

  Down inlet from the alder breaks we thought we saw a kayaker, far out ahead of us, his paddle dipping from side to side. This was the first human being we’d seen in a couple of weeks, and we called out to him. The kayaker failed to respond, probably, we decided later, because he turned out to be a bull moose. It was his antlers swaying from side to side as he swam that had looked like a kayak paddle.

  Paul, had he known he was going to sell a photo to a Canadian beer company, might have taken a picture of that moose’s head. Instead, he got a horse’s ass. I never did see the poster, but you’d think those Canadian beer execs would send me a few cases of their fine product so I could go bungee jumping and talk to women. At least get my roof fixed.

  Tim Cahill is the author of many books, mostly travel-related, including Hold the Enlightenment, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, Pecked to Death by Ducks, Pass the Butterworms, and Dolphins, as well as the editor of Not So Funny When it Happened: The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventure. Cahill is also the co-author of the Academy Award-nominated IMAX film, The Living Sea, as well as the films Everest and Dolphins. He lives in Montana, and shares his life with Linnea Larson, two dogs, and two cats.

  IAN FRAZIER

  Woe Is Me

  There’s no place like Nome…for embracing melancholy.

  WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, I USED TO—NOT ENJOY, EXACTLY, but take a certain satisfaction from being melancholy and depressed. As a single guy in an apartment in New York, I often spent days at a time in an unbroken mood of gloom, regret, self-recrimination, dislike for the world and for other human beings, and general unearned despair. In later years, married and with kids, I had to give up this indulgence. Walking around depressed with no reason is disagreeable behavior for which family and friends will rebuke you, rightly.

  Plus I just didn’t have the time for it anymore. Whenever I’d get started on a good downslope of melancholy, family concerns or pleasures would distract me, and I would abandon my mood in irritation. Nowadays my only opportunity for an old-fashioned, self-indulgent sulk comes when I’m traveling.

  I had one opportunity recently in Nome, Alaska, a far-northern town on the Bering Sea. I had gone there to do some reporting, which bad weather made impossible. I sat in my motel room for several days, getting gloomier and gloomier. Rain fell constantly. The month was August, and the rainy twilight lasted from four in the morning until
midnight. Outside my window Bering Sea waves the color of wet cement landed on the riprap shoreline with thuds. To say that Nome, Alaska, is mainly mud with pieces of rusted iron sticking out of it is to be unfair to that interesting place, but so it appeared to me at the time. On my motel-room bed I read obscure books to the sound of the rain and the waves, taking occasional breaks to stare at the ceiling. I saw almost no one, never cracked a smile, and was as sorry for myself as I could be. After three or four days, completely bummed out, I went to the airport and flew home. I arrived pale, monosyllabic, and wonderfully refreshed.

  Ian Frazier is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and author of numerous books, including Family, Great Plains, On the Rez, and The Fish’s Eye. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

  ELLEN BIELAWSKI

  Camping at WalMart

  At the proverbial end of the road, there’s…a parking lot.

  ANCHORAGE, AUGUST, FRIDAY AFTERNOON. CHOICES abound: the family cabin, backpacking in the Chugach, kayaking ocean or whitewater. Both new and familiar wild places are in easy reach of my home. I choose WalMart.

  All summer the question has gnawed at me: Why would anyone travel thousands of miles to Alaska, then camp at a big box store? We locals wonder aloud at the herd of RVs resting on the midtown pavement. Our fear and loathing of the wheeled vehicle set is such that we do not ask.