Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  The forest along Hobart Bay happens to be Native-owned. From the non-Native non-Alaskan point of view, this was trickier moral ground than the nuking and hammering of Tongass National Forest. Still, we loathed the defilement. Sue and I acting like weekenders driving past a wreck with dead and dying still in the road. We looked away and tried to will it out of consciousness.

  If the Satos noticed the off-color swath across the passage, they didn’t know what it was or what it might mean for Southeast Alaska. They were, at that point, in wonderment overload, gawking at things grander and wilder than they thought possible. Trouble couldn’t be part of the picture. I toyed very briefly with using Hobart Bay as a talking point. We could get serious for a minute, do some environmental proselytizing. Subsequent discussion would be especially piquant because the Satos are from Japan, number-one destination for the timber and forest products being stripped out of Southeast.

  We could, yes, have gotten heavy. But to hell with it. Nobody was in the mood.

  The mood on the way into Gambier Bay, our first overnight anchorage, was downright hilarious. A humpback whale and a troupe of Dall porpoises at the bay entrance celebrated the late afternoon’s calm and improbable sunshine. Maybe this was our welcoming committee. Maybe, for that matter, there are sound scientific reasons for a thirty-ton-plus humpback to roll on its side like a house cat and for porpoises to make like kittens in a tear-around mood. The boil of whitewater and huge and tiny flesh and fins had me momentarily flummoxed. It never occurred to me, until I saw it, that whales and porpoises socialized.

  A whale acting goofy, when you’re that close and there’s nobody but you and your friends looking, is way too much for decorous standing and observing. We carried on like a crowd in a sports bar. The whale fed the frenzy by lifting a flipper, giving us a good look at its chalky underside, then smacking it down. The whale lay on its side and washing-machined its tail. All this happened next to a low-tide rock at the end of a line of little islands. A swimmer could have pushed off the rock and grabbed the whale without taking a stroke.…

  Paddling my kayak, I could hear the orcas long before seeing them. On the flat waters of Southeast Alaska, sounds skim along like a stone. I was stretching out my leg, to rid it of a cramp, when I heard the familiar whoosh. Then I saw the large black dorsal, coming right at me. I heard a second whoosh and a third. Suddenly whales were blowing all around me.

  I happened to be opposite a cliff face. Dozens of orcas converged on this wall, driving salmon ahead of them. In their panic to escape, the salmon were ramming headfirst into the rock, knocking themselves senseless. The orcas zipped left and right, picking off the dazed salmon. Dorsals sliced through the water like so many black knives. Many came close enough to touch, but I was not about to stick out a hand while ten-ton carnivores were feeding.

  —James Dorsey, “The Whales’ Gift”

  The next day we took the dinghy ashore and hiked. Only Sue and I went, because an old skiing injury of Ted’s was acting up. Our first major venture was exploring and stream-fishing at the mouth of what seemed to be the largest river coming into Gambier Bay.

  The rising tide followed us across the river’s gravel-and-mud flat. Off the boat I went on brain vacation, so it was up to Sue to keep us moving away from rises that would shortly turn into islands. When we were up in waist-high grass she went on bear alert, staring down rocks and stumps and every other dark discontinuity in the meadow, which was strewn with dead pink salmon. With no river in sight, fish in the grass had a Magritte creepiness, as if a trawler had been upended over a hay field. The tide table explained all: A couple of days earlier, spring tides had floated the carcasses in from the flats.

  Bears explained the bigger mess at the riverbank, which was trampled and littered with heads, tails, once-bitten fish, and fish without so much as marks from birds. Everything four-legged or flying had gotten all the pink salmon it could stand. Fish still wriggled and slapped in the river, but they were late-run zombies, more rotten and dead-looking than the corpses in the grass. We had been hoping for a fresh run of silver salmon, which mob other rivers on Admiralty at that time of year, but found only spawned-out pinks. Sue thought she saw Dolly Varden in a deep pool, but nothing bit.

  The river mouth felt freshly abandoned, tired from festivity just ended. The festivity was summer. Out on the boat, the warmth was like June or July, but on shore we could see green going to yellow and feel the rush of autumn. The year was going around the corner.

  No, we didn’t see any bears. But they surely saw us. We inferred a large and active ursine community from tracks, trails, beds, droppings, and rotten logs torn to pieces among the gargantuan spruce. Spring Song, anchored a few hundred yards offshore, looked homier than ever. Nights in a tent on shore would have made us very nervous.

  Ted and Reiko were surprised to see us fishless. When we set out, catching something had seemed like a foregone conclusion. No fish wasn’t a problem, though. Just that morning we had hauled in the crab-pots with five keeper-size Dungenesses, which were boiled and buttered within the hour. Breaking open claws and legs and pinging bits of meat at the ceiling, we averred that fresh Dungeness shamed the frozen king crab back in Chicago. Reiko made surprising cat growls. “Oishi,” she said. The English “delicious” didn’t say enough.

  No fish still wasn’t a problem at that afternoon’s high slack tide, when we anchored across the bay in 110 feet of water and lowered huge hooks baited with herring for halibut. The silence was almost continuously broken by sea mammals. The whales out at the bay mouth whooshed and chuffed like antique steam engines. One spouted with a very distinct whistle. Sea lions made shorter breath blasts, and seals plopped heads up and down. Most of the animals were out of sight in the scattering of small islands, but the sounds crowded around us.

  After an hour and a half we gave up on halibut fishing. Taking Spring Song out to try some trolling for salmon, I saw one of the heavy breathers, a Steller’s sea lion. It was alone, and it seemed to be working on a routine. When the boat drew abreast it inverted itself and wriggled the tips of its hind flippers.

  Trolling didn’t get us any salmon, but it got us whales. We pulled the lines in and idled alongside passing singles and small groups, which didn’t seem to notice or mind. I thought back to my uncle’s dairy farm in Minnesota. The humpbacks grazed their sea pasture like Holsteins, giving the same sort of dreamy, honest comfort. We watched the ridged black backs rising and falling, now and again a flourish of tail. There wasn’t much clowning, no lunge feeding or whole-body breaching (the ultimate humpback trick), but we were enthralled for more than an hour. We would have kept on watching except we needed to get to an anchorage before dark.

  “No fish,” I said.

  “The whales!” Ted said, looking a bit crazed.

  He was right. The whales were better than catching fish. They were better until supper, when we started joking about the sashimi and tempura supplies that the Satos had brought to prepare the huge authentic Japanese fish lunches and dinners we were all counting on—because this was Alaska, world capital of fish.

  No fish was getting to be an embarrassment. Everybody, you could tell, was feeling it, but Sue and I were feeling it more because we were the hosts. Sue took it harder than I because she came up north with a big, bad fish jones. Fishing was high, if not highest, among her reasons for cruising on Spring Song. I don’t altogether understand her deep need to connect with gill-breathers via hooks and monofilament, but it’s very bracing.

  We found our focus in the morning, when the crab pots came up empty. The gauntlet had been thrown. Fresh seafood wasn’t the issue. We would fish to remove shame from ourselves and Spring Song. We got ready to troll the way The Prince of Wales got ready to chase the Bismarck. But of course grimness of purpose does not impress salmon. Hooking seaweed, which did a briefly convincing imitation of big fish, hurt worse than nothing on the line. Something down there was laughing at us.

  We were still fishless at slack tide,
halibut time. We anchored on a hundred-foot flat, which seemed neither promising nor unpromising. We had a no-nibble half-hour and were starting to talk about moving when a rod wagged. “They’re heeeeeere!” Sue sang. For a while the fish pulled on the bait, and nobody managed to set a hook. Sue finally talked one in. “Come on come on come on,” she said, as if she were hand-feeding it. Then, “Ha! Gotcha!” She hauled up on the rod, which hauled back down. Sue’s fish turned out to be a twelve-pounder, at the small end of the size range the locals call chickens. Big guys run up beyond three hundred pounds. Chickens, though, are much more delicious than the trophies.

  Reiko’s catch of number-two chicken halibut was amazing. “Yes! Yes!” she said. “Yes! Yes!” Then, when the fish was banging around the boat, she was talking to a parakeet. “Pretty boy, pretty boy.” I gave her the gaff and told her to hit her fish on the head. “Really?” she said, then, “Jesus Christ!” and whacked it between the eyes. She went on Jesus Christing and whacking until the fish lay still except for a dying fin-quiver. Then she started saying, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She caught another and went through the whole business again.

  That evening we had the first sashimi followed by tempura fish and vegetables. This was Ted and Reiko’s big production number, which included special bamboo serving plates. Reiko held her sashimi slices up to the light and made lusty growls and mmmmmms which didn’t sound so surprising now. The fish let light through like lightly frosted beach glass. Clarity, Reiko said, is freshness. The sashimi tasted as clear and unlike fish as it looked. Warmed by wine, the group was suffused with gooey, familial friendship, which nobody, thank heaven, tried to speak. The sublime food became our proxy recipient of praise for one another and Spring Song and the trip.

  Mike Steere is a frequent contributor to Outside.

  DAVID ROBERTS

  Shot Tower

  Face to face with rock, a climber opens up to the world around him.

  ALREADY WE’RE MAKING EXCUSES. “YOU PROBABLY WON’T have to wait around too long,” I tell my wife, Sharon. “We may back off right at the beginning.” Ed Ward voices similar doubts; the tower looks hard. The date is only June 22, but it’s too warm—hot, almost, at six in the morning. In the last few days, we have run into mosquitoes as high as 6,000 feet. And I am worried about lightning: even as far north as the Brooks Range, you can get it on a warm afternoon.

  The peak itself: for Ed, a discovery of that summer. But I remember Chuck Loucks describing it, as he’d seen it in 1963; maybe the best peak in the Arrigetch, he had said. And I had glimpsed it, obscure but startling, from an airplane in 1968, and again, from summits a few miles north in 1969. Not an obsession yet; but something under the skin, part of my dream wilderness.

  We take our time sorting hardware and food. Still down on our chances, we pretend to Sharon that we feel more casual about the peak than we do. At least I haven’t had trouble sleeping the night before, as I have often in the last few years And I feel good about going up there with Ed.

  We get started. The first three pitches initiate us gently: clean, easy pitches on a sharp-edged spine. Old plates of granite, covered with scratchy black lichens: then fresh-cut blank plates of almost orange rock. Sharp cracks, good for nuts and pins alike. Gradually we get involved, as we discover the quality of the climb. “Pretty fine rock,” says Ed. “Yeah, the best we’ve seen.”

  For me, this is what climbing has become: a question, always, of how much of myself to give to the mountain. As I get older, it becomes increasingly hard to give, to surrender to the novelty of risk and cold and tiredness. You can’t really give to the mountain itself, of course, to unfeeling rock in the middle of an empty wilderness. So the giving you do, perhaps, is to your partner, and that too gets harder as you grow older. Instead you hedge with easier climbs, or talk yourself out of hard ones, or back off prudently. But now and then a mountain teases you into commitment.

  On the fourth pitch things get hard. Ed leads it, and I can tell by how slowly he moves that it’s tricky. “Not so bad,” he shouts down. “It’s neat.” Above him, the rock stretches dully into the sky. Way up is the “Mushroom,” the first crux, we guess.

  I feel the first half-pleasant gnawings of fear. What if the next pitch doesn’t go? What if I get psyched by all these left-hand flakes? And what if there’s no good belay ledge? The sun is sliding around from the south. Soon we’ll get it directly. My God, it’s hot already—what will it be like then? To be sweltering here, north of the Arctic Circle—absurd!

  The fifth pitch, my pitch, goes, but it is hard and devious. I overprotect it, and the rope drag makes me shaky. Standing on a skimpy ledge, I bring Ed up, and notice that my toes are starting to ache, my arms to feel tired.

  The obverse of commitment—and this, too, I always feel—is doubt. About whether the whole thing is worth it. About why I have to do something artificial and dangerous to feel content. About whether I haven’t used up the impulse—can anyone really go at it year after year, climb after climb, without deadening his openness to other things? And about the danger, pure and simple—I want to stay alive. I can’t understand why I must eventually not exist: that makes no sense at all. But I can easily believe that I could fall and be killed.

  Or that Ed could fall now, leading the sixth pitch. It looks as hard as mine. He pauses on an awkward move. A simple slip, a twelve-foot fall, a mere broken ankle…and then what do I do? Or if it happens higher, after we have gone farther into this labyrinth of inaccessibility—what could I do for him? And supposing I had to leave him? Is it all worth it, and why do we both feel it matters so much?

  In the valley below us flowers are blooming, hillsides of tundra creeping out from under the nine-month smother of snow. There are birds reconnoitering the willow thickets, and butterflies, and bumblebees—a beautiful part of the earth, wild, and for a month, all ours. Why is it not sufficient?

  The climb eases off. A bit of lunch, but we are mainly thirsty. Sips from the water bottle, then, from a cake deep in a crack, a few blessed chips of ice. We are both tired, and it’s well into the afternoon. The clouds are building up in the southeast, over the Alatna Valley; wasn’t that thunder just now?

  The climb gets hard again, harder than it looks, complicated. I lead the ninth pitch, all nuts in a left-handed crack. We’re under the Mushroom, which looks especially rough. We talk about going straight over it—but a ceiling bulges ominously, and that new-cut rock on the right is sheer and frightening. Ed leads left. We’ve brought a single fixed rope. Here’s the place for it; no hope to rappel the delicate traverse he’s doing now.

  Little things preoccupy me. How many shots left on my roll of film? Should I save some for the descent? Do we have enough hardware? Already—I curse our clumsiness—we’ve dropped two pins and had to leave one. If the lightning comes, could we get off quickly? Or better to hole up somewhere? My arms are tired, my knuckles have raw, scraped places on them. How should I string out the fixed rope?

  I realize that I haven’t thought for quite a while about Sharon waiting below. The climb has indeed teased me into commitment. For some time now I have been acutely aware of each crack in the plated granite, of the grain of the rock under my fingers—and of little else in the universe. On the one hand, it is all so familiar; on the other, utterly new. This is the way the Romantic poets saw the world, it seems to me; no wonder mountains were for them so primeval a presence, comparable only to the open sea.

  But just as Keats could not see a nightingale without seeing a Dryad, so, on a climb, it is almost impossible for us to encounter nature directly. We dare not descend to the simplicity, the banality of rock itself: we keep those touchstones of sanity safely packed in our minds—the awareness of time, and the abstract thread of a route. What becomes precious to us on a climb is not the mountain itself, in all its bewildering intricacy, but the things we bring to it, the cheese and the candy bars in our pack, the invaluable metal things dangling under our arms, the quarter-inch of rubber under our feet
. More than fear, more than self-consciousness, it is thirty centuries of acquisitive, aesthetic Western culture that stand between us and any unfiltered contact with what is there.

  Ed has done the pitch, bypassed the Mushroom. Seconding, stringing out the fixed rope behind me, I am absorbed by the delicacy of the pitch, the nicest yet. On the ridge Ed has found a platform. More lunch, a patch of ice to chop up and add to our water bottle. But above us the going, which we had thought would be easy, looks tough, and the vertical wall below the summit shines unrelenting in the afternoon sun.

  Pitches eleven and twelve go slowly; meanwhile the lightning is flashing southeast of us. We’re too high to get off fast now. If it hits us, we’ll simply stop somewhere and wait it out. It’s still hot, too hot, sweaty and weird. The thirteenth pitch uncovers an incredible “moat,” a slash across the ridge, as deep as a chimney, with a long patch of ice for a floor. We suck greedy mouthfuls of water off its surface, while the thunderstorm passes just east of us. A friendly place, this moat.

  Evening now. The real crux is just above us: a sixty-foot wall, quite smooth, overhanging by a degree or two. From below, a week before, I had thought I saw a bypass on the left, over the north face. Now it simply vanishes, was never there. Nor any hope on the right. A single shallow, crooked crack splits the wall. Ed’s lead. He goes on aid, the first time we’ve had to. The pins are lousy, tied off, bottoming. He doesn’t like it. I belay in a trance of tiredness. Halfway up, Ed says, “We just don’t have the pins to do it.” I know it, too, but I urge him to keep trying.

  He climbs doggedly, nervily. Two tiny nuts in shallow rivulets of rock. A cliff-hanger, even, which he’d brought along as a kind of joke. A nut in an overhanging groove comes out; Ed falls three feet, catches himself on a lower stirrup. I’m not frightened any more; only afraid that we will fail.