Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  Overflow turned out to be a constant annoyance but never bad enough to force us to turn around. In the early mornings the upper layers of ice were sufficiently hard to support our sleds, but by noon they developed the consistency of a Slurpee. The two of us had to run (or often, like our teams, slip and slide) along the side of our sleds; our weight, coupled with the drag caused by the overflow, would have made the sleds too heavy for the dogs to pull. It was grueling work, and we had to repeat it whenever we had to travel over hills. At the end of each day my arms had new bruises from breaking so many falls, and my boots were usually soaked with water. The routine was the same whenever we made camp. Remove the harnesses and connect the dogs to the picket line, away from the wind (though they are comfortable in temperatures well below zero, a bitter wind can harm them). Look for dead wood to saw into small pieces for cooking and heating. Melt snow for drinking water. Feed the teams. Set up the tent. Eat dinner, drink some rum, try to go to sleep. The mornings were miserable, with temperatures five or ten degrees below zero, even at the beginning of April. Any piece of clothing that so much as brushed against water the day before was frozen stiff when we woke up. My bare fingers were so numb (our heavy mittens were too awkward and cumbersome for the task) that hooking our dogs back onto their tug lines took ten times as long as it did later in the afternoon. But after the teams were taken care of and we’d had our hot coffee, the rush of air that refreshed my face as our sleds raced out of camp made the morning’s travails a distant memory.

  The strenuousness of our trip made reflection difficult, but there were moments when I was mushing through a valley or over a small inland lake that I was able to absorb the beauty and achieve an almost meditative state. My worries about the Jewish world washed away. My anxiety about feeling out of place as a rabbi didn’t seem to matter. I was a child of God in God’s back yard, and everything was going to be all right. Taking care of my dogs was like taking care of six screaming babies, but I loved them. Even though their ceaseless barking and fighting with one another often drove me to the point of madness, I trusted my team. They were my lifeline, my link to the outside world. And I owed them my gratitude and respect. I also owed Dave. Despite all my adventures, my encounters with jail cells, grizzly bears, and mountaintops, deep down I was just another Jewish intellectual, and I knew it. Once again I was dependent on others for my well-being. I could not have made the trip without the guidance and experience of my friend. And neither of us could have made it without our canine companions.

  Suddenly, the rowdy sounds of the pandemonium drop away as the dogs burst free, you and they adrenaline-pumped partners sailing through a snow-filled forest, no colors but the white of the snow, the shadowy green spruce, and the blue sky brightening your way through the dark woods. Today, my thirteen-year-old daughter Devon rides in the basket, entranced with the speed, the beauty, the strength of those sweet, sturdy dogs drawing her further into the unknown. I haven’t ridden behind a dog sled in twenty years, but a familiar thrill surges through my veins as my heart picks up the steady rhythm of the dogs’ gait, my body aligning with the curves of the trail in a fluid rolling motion that sends the balky sled arcing smoothly along its icy trajectory.

  “Do you see, Devon?” I ask my daughter. “Do you understand why I had to come back to Alaska?”

  —Pat O’Hara,

  “The Great, Big, Broad

  Land Way Up Yonder”

  Several days into our trip, on a Friday night, I tried to observe a makeshift Sabbath beneath the Endicott Mountains. Judaism in the rough. I took out two candles that I had packed back in New York and stuck them into the snow. Since it was spring, the midnight sun had just begun to emerge, and our campsite was draped with long shadows. I lit the candles. After I said the appropriate blessings, Dave and I ate dinner and talked in the tent about wild country and wild women until it grew dark outside. Cody, my wheel dog and Dave’s pet, was with us, lying between our two sleeping bags. Dave was ready to go to bed. I told him that I wanted to go for a walk down to the river but that he should go ahead and put out the fire. The dogs, silent but watching my every step, were curled into balls to insulate themselves from the cold. I was cold, too. And tired. I had been so busy dealing with the day-to-day chores of handling my team that I had forgotten what it was that had brought me to this spot on the Earth. But as I stood there alone on the ice and looked over the peaks into the purple sky, I remembered.

  The dark night erupted before me. Waves of white-green light scrolled across the heavens. It was the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights. I had seen them before, years ago, but never from this perspective. They seemed to be directly in front of me, hovering over the mountains. Almost beckoning. Pythagoras, the early Greek philosopher, claimed that the cosmos itself could speak, that the motion of the celestial bodies was so great that the reason humans could not hear it was that it had been with us from the moment of birth and we could not distinguish it from its opposite, silence. Yet I swear I heard something that night. Not with my ears. But with some other part of myself. I watched the pulsations of light the way you watch panthers in the wild, with awe and amazement. I knew then and there that I was in the presence of something untamed and untamable. Transcendent and mysterious. Something that warmed my blood and made my soul tremble with new life.

  I’d found what I had come for. Alaska was my Sinai.

  Niles Elliot Goldstein is the founding rabbi of The New Shul in Greenwich Village, New York. He was the voice behind “Ask the Rabbi” on the Microsoft Network, is the National Jewish Chaplain for the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, and is the author or editor of numerous books, including God at the Edge: Searching for the Divine in Uncomfortable and Unexpected Places, from which this story was excerpted.

  ANDROMEDA ROMANO-LAX

  Seeking Paradise

  The rough beauty of an alpine fishing trip soothes a family’s growing pains.

  I CHOSE THIS REMOTE, APOSTROPHE-SHAPED LAKE, AND the cabin that shares its name, just because I liked the sound of it: Upper Paradise Lake. Paradise.

  After a long, difficult pregnancy and three weeks of sleepless new-baby nights, I needed some paradise. I’d heard how easy the fishing was up here: friends visiting this same Forest Service cabin had caught and released 500 grayling in a weekend. I’d never caught a fish in Alaska, but surely I would manage to catch one here. I would hold it firmly in one hand, and marvel at its iridescent, sail-shaped fin, and feel a part of the alpine wilderness. I would feel strong and able; whole again.

  There is also a Forest Service cabin at nearby Lower Paradise Lake, but that didn’t sound as good. Upper versus Lower is simply a geographical distinction, but the terms reminded me of Dante’s levels of heaven and hell. And if I was going to fly my nineteen-day-old baby, mischievous four-year-old son, and unhealed body into heaven for a weekend, I wanted a suite in heaven’s top floor, not in the lobby.

  We drove to Moose Pass, two hours south of Anchorage. The highway ends just south of Moose Pass, in Seward. But this was not the end of our trip, because any serious summer road trip in Alaska must extend far beyond roads. To escape, to feel that traveler’s high of pushing beyond what one knows—sometimes toward what one fears—one must take to the air.

  At the shore of Trail Lake, our pilot and a teen-aged assistant loaded our luggage into the floatplane that would take us to the cabin. They studiously avoided seeing the final item left on the dock: a bassinet-like infant carrier. Beneath the hood peered two small round eyes, as grayish-green as the glacial lake surrounding us.

  Finally, the pilot faced me squarely. “Baby’s going, too?”

  “Yep.”

  The pilot lifted his eyebrows but said nothing more, and then helped me straddle a pontoon and heft my baby daughter Tziporah and her carrier into the plane. There wasn’t enough room. My husband Brian and the pilot occupied the front two seats. Aryeh and I squeezed into the rear two. The narrow tail of the plane was packed with fishing rods, bedrolls, b
ackpacks, and duffel bags. Finally, I managed to make space at my feet, jamming the infant carrier with all my strength, wedging it tightly behind my husband’s seat. I waited, tensely, expecting the pilot—or the baby—to protest.

  Instead, the floatplane’s engines roared to life, interrupting my fretting. Our earphones crackled with static. Even Aryeh had a pair, the earphones as big as coconut halves, clamped to either side of his head.

  “You doing all right?” I asked him.

  His posture was so stiff with excitement that he barely turned his head to answer me. “Roger,” he said, beaming, pressing his lips together to force a swallow.

  I’d spent the morning snapping at my son, rushing him into the car, reprimanding him when he poked at his newborn sister or woke her up from a nap. We’d all been sleep-deprived and crabby for the drive to Moose Pass. It was a relief to see him happy at last.

  And then we were off. The small airport lake fell away and a misty, emerald-colored valley spread out beneath us. Within minutes, we could see no towns or roads, only more milky-green lakes and gray, braiding streams. The plane tilted toward the mountains, fighting blasts of wind. Out the window, just over my son’s head, narrow waterfalls spilled down the steep flanks of glaciated peaks. We passed close enough to see animal tracks stitched into the snow on nearly vertical mountainsides. And then close enough to see mountainsides where there were no footprints—no signs of life, past or present. We’d flown only ten minutes, but this was farther from roads and trails than I’d ever been in Alaska.

  At Upper Paradise Lake, our pilot wordlessly unloaded our gear with disconcerting speed, dumping our bags on a narrow gravel beach next to an overturned rowboat. Then he hopped back into the cockpit, started up the engine and sped away from shore. The plane’s roar softened to a whine, and the whine to silence, interrupted only by the asthmatic huffs of an unsteady northerly wind. Then we were alone—more alone than I’d ever felt on the Kenai Peninsula, since we knew the terrain was too difficult for bushwhacking back to civilization if the plane didn’t return, if an appendix burst, or if someone dropped an axe on his foot. We had no radio, no way to communicate with the outside world. That was the cabin’s chief flaw, and also its allure.

  The one-room log cabin that would be our home for three days was crafted of dark-stained timbers, fitted together like aged Lincoln Logs. It sat forty feet from the lake shore, surrounded by wind-stunted dwarf evergreens and shrubs. Songbirds darted over the shrubs, tossed about by gusts. Snow-streaked peaks rose in all directions, blending into the grayish-white sky. The largest, just in front of us, appeared to lean to one side. The soft moan of a distant waterfall, spilling down the peak’s face was occasionally audible over the wind, giving the mountain a voice.

  From the Panhandle to Interior Alaska, public-use cabins can be rented from the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, Alaska State Parks, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Modest prices ($15 to $75 per night) make these cabins among the best vacation bargains in Alaska.

  —Bill Sherwonit

  The calendar said July, but at this elevation, it felt like spring: temps in the low fifties, wind smelling of snow. I hurried to the cabin to get my bearings and nurse the baby. As soon as I lay down on the hard, wooden bunk, tiredness washed over me. I had intended to rush right back out and explore our surroundings, but then my uterus clenched suddenly, like a flower closing its petals for the night. With Aryeh, pregnancy had been easier, and I had healed so much faster. This time around, I felt like all my organs had dropped about six inches, like my insides were only barely resisting the pull of gravity. I hurt worse now than the morning after I’d given birth.

  The baby fussed, and I tried to bundle her more tightly against the unheated cabin’s chill. If I could just settle her down, I thought, I could sleep. Brian started building a fire in the wood stove, but the heat didn’t spread quickly and I felt cold. All my muscles ached. Aryeh kept running around the cabin, and then veering toward the baby and me with a menacing, maniacal giggle. “Touch, touch!” he’d screech, causing Tziporah’s sleepy, lavender-veined eyelids to jerk open nervously.

  “Be quiet!” I yelled. “Be gentle!” But my son only giggled more hysterically.

  The baby’s nerves were frayed by so much mischievous noise and poking. So were mine. This had been the problem at home, too. Why did I think it would be better on the road, and better yet away from all roads, in a cabin in the Alaska wilderness? At home, I didn’t dare leave Tziporah unattended for even the thirty seconds it took to leave the living room and throw away a diaper. Every time I rounded the corner from the bathroom back into the living room, I would hear a sound like the bleating of a goat—Tziporah’s fragile newborn wail. Proof that she had been jostled or frightened. And I would spot Aryeh tugging on the baby’s hand, or pushing his face into hers too roughly, or moving a pillow so that she was no longer guarded from rolling off the couch.

  “Don’t you realize you can hurt her?” I’d growl protectively. “Don’t you even know what gentle means? Can’t you be sweet to your sister?”

  Maybe it’s just hardwiring, I told myself, trying to be reasonable. Maybe little boys can’t help it. But then I’d catch a malignant gleam in my son’s eyes. Even when I was doubled over in pain, he begged for me to pick him up, or to run to another room and fetch him something. No compassion, I thought. And: Where did we go wrong? And even when Tziporah was crying, Aryeh giggled and shrieked louder, delighted by the chaos, though he said over and over and over that he loved her. We’d started a reward chart on the refrigerator: one sticker for every day Aryeh didn’t actively menace his sister. But he couldn’t make it through a single day. He couldn’t earn a single sticker. I agonized: Hadn’t we taught him that people can hurt, that living things can hurt, that he is not at the center of the universe, the only thing that wants or feels?

  At home, there was simply no escape from Aryeh’s volume and motion—his tireless pinball-like trajectories, which made every room seem too small. Here in this dark log cabin in the Kenai mountains, there was only less room, fewer places to hide. But I hoped the simplicity of this primitive lodging, and this location—no phone or email, no visitors at the door every hour, no work demands—might help us sort things out.

  Within an hour of our arrival, the wood stove was popping and hissing, a steamy warmth was saturating the cabin, and the baby had faded into slumber, wrapped in a tight cocoon of blankets. I urged Brian to take Aryeh outside so that I could nap, too.

  Sleep rejuvenated me. When Aryeh pushed open the cabin door two hours later, cheeks patchy red from the cold, I couldn’t even imagine why I’d felt impatient or angry, today or ever. He stood in the open doorway—gusts of wind whipping his blond curls—chattering about fish and grayling and how he’d caught one and sixteen inches and could I come down to the rowboat to see.

  I wrapped myself and Tziporah in more layers and we all headed out again in the rowboat. Brian and Aryeh had caught three grayling, enough for dinner, but now I’d get my chance to catch a fish, an easy fish, my first fish. Brian rowed us north along the shore, toward the leaning mountain and the waterfall.

  “Can we stop and cast here?” I asked.

  “Wait,” Brian said. “There’s more of a cove up there. It will be better.”

  The wind plastered my bangs against my eyes, my gloved hands were cold already, and I knew the baby might not tolerate this outing much longer. Minutes passed as Brian slowly worked the oars, battling small, choppy waves. The rowboat seemed to stand still. The waterfall at the head of the lake was no closer. The wind battered our ears and snatched at our words.

  “How about here?” I called out.

  “This isn’t a good spot,” Aryeh said, mimicking his father. “Around the curve. I know how to do it. I’ll show you.”

  Finally, we gave up and set the anchor along a straight stretch of scrubby shore, and I took one of the two rods we’d brought. I tried to remember how this
worked, how far back to pull my arm, how to avoid nailing innocent bystanders with a sharp hook.

  I cast once, enjoying the simple feel of it, and the sound—a sharp whizzing through the air before the satisfying pa-lunkkk of lure hitting water. I cast again. No bites yet. Then Aryeh started reaching. “Can I try? I know how. Can I try?”

  “Let Mom do it,” Brian said. “You caught your fish already.”

  I tried to cast again, but Aryeh kept reaching, waving and pulling at the air. He insisted on using the smaller rod I was holding.

  “Just one more time,” I said. “Let me.” But then, worrying as he reached toward me that he might stand up in the boat and fall into the icy water, I relented, handing the rod to him.

  Brian, from his seat in the stern, reached precariously over the bundled baby to hand me the other rod. But Aryeh and I were seated too close together to both cast. I needed all my attention to duck and throw my gloved hands up to my face every time Aryeh’s hook came arcing wildly through the air.

  “Maybe this just isn’t a good spot,” Brian said finally, as the wind pushed at us. The baby’s face looked pink and chapped from the wind. Red pinpricks were appearing around her almost-invisible hairline as she slept—tiny bites from bugs we’d never seen.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I’m cold, too. Forget it.”

  It is July, but we are in the Arctic and it snowed over-night. We are camped on a gravel beach, just above sea ice jumbled along the shore. My son, age five, wakes in the frigid tent. “I have to pee, Mom.” “Put your parka on,” I say sleepily. “No,” he replies automatically. I wait, knowing the Arctic is about to teach him a lesson no words of mine can. By the time he undoes the double canvas doors of the tent, stands outside briefly, comes back, does up the doors, and crawls into his sleeping bag, his small body is practically blue with cold. But he’s never done that again.