Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  Yet as we flew in with a local pilot on July 5, I was in a sour mood, still castigating myself for Hank’s and my feckless performance in the Kichatnas, and hoping to bag some unnamed summits to assuage the previous month’s failure. The craft we would use to conduct our journey was the two-man Klepper kayak I had bought the year before, in which we had floated happily down the Alatna River at the end of our Brooks Range excursion the previous August. The Klepper was a collapsible boat made of a lightweight wooden frame and a canvas-and-rubber shell with inflatable side tubes. It was ideal for wilderness voyages, since you could pack it up and check it as airline baggage or for portages from one stream to another, but pretty much worthless in even easy whitewater, as Sharon and I had learned the hard way in June 1969. Infatuated by my new toy, I had talked Sharon into putting in on the Colorado River upstream from Moab, Utah. A few miles along, we hit a wave sideways and flipped. Saved by the life jackets we had bought the previous week, we wasted all our strength trying crawl on top of the kayak, which rotated like a barrel under our desperate thrashings, as we were swept another mile through more rapids before eddying out. Sharon swallowed a lot of water and thought she was going to drown.

  That I aspired to travel at all in a kayak, since water scared me and I had never learned to swim, could be chalked up to counter-phobic obstinacy. But I also thought that since Sharon would never be comfortable as my climbing partner, we might find a wilderness idyll we could share in a boat. I went into our journey expecting a laid-back vacation, a “no-push, no-suffs trip,” as I called it in my diary. But for me Alaska was inseparable from ambition. I also planned a several-day circuit away from the head of Chauekuktuli, as we climbed the peaks above its western end and maybe even bagged Konarut, which for all I knew awaited its first ascent. The names of the lakes were Yupik Eskimo, so I also hoped to find vestiges left by ancient hunters on the shores and slopes, as we had near base camp below Igikpak.

  We set up our three-week supply of food in a cache covered with a plastic tarp, and headed the next morning for the heights. At once we ran into all but impenetrable alder thickets, some of the worst I had ever tried to bash through in Alaska, and the mosquitoes were relentless. Within hours, Sharon was in tears. We retreated, used the Klepper to move camp, and made a second start the next day, up a slash in the hillside where avalanches had torn loose most of the bushes.

  In the end, we accomplished only a timid three-day loop among the foothills above Chauekuktuli, reaching a single summit on which we stacked rocks to claim the first ascent. Our only map was a 1:250,000 quad, four miles to the inch. As I crowed in my diary, “The map is so bad nothing gibes. Altitudes are meaningless. The cirque above us doesn’t even show, and the peaks can’t be determined. It’s really neat, in a way.” I never saw Konarut, or if I did, I didn’t know it.

  But Sharon was unhappy. On our first day, we came across bear scat so fresh it was still steaming. She hardly slept that night, thinking about bears and worrying about our cache, which we had safeguarded only by scattering ammonia pellets around the tarp. Throughout the trip, Sharon would agonize day and night about bears, and once we were launched on the lakes, she lived in fear of waves blown up by the wind that might capsize our Klepper. All of the quarrels we had during our eighteen days on the Tikchiks were about bears, and caches, and dangerous waves. I pooh-poohed her fears and tried to rationalize away the risks that I claimed were imaginary.

  In retrospect, all these years later, I recognize how cruel was my cavalier dismissal of Sharon’s qualms. And I grant now that she was right about the dangers. Depending on ammonia pellets to keep bears (or other critters) away from our food cache was a haphazard bargain at best, though in 1970 there were few other options. The hefty canisters that are now required for food storage in places like Gates of the Arctic National Park (which encloses my beloved Arrigetch Peaks) had yet to be invented, and on the west end of Chauekuktuli there were no trees from which to hang our supplies. On our Igikpak expedition in 1968, we had left a food cache in a neighboring valley. A week later, when we retrieved it, we discovered that a bear had found our goodies and commenced to gorge on our candy bars and raisin bran. By sheer good luck, one of the animal’s first bites gouged a hole in a can of compressed butane. The burst of super-cooled stove fuel point-blank in the face had evidently sent the bear into headlong flight.

  Having hiked past half a dozen grizzlies browsing among the lowland bushes on my previous expeditions without provoking a charge, and having twice before had bears walk right through camp as we slept, I had grown blasé about the threats posed by Ursus horribilis. On Igikpak and in the Arrigetch, we had toted a 30.06 through a month of wanderings without ever having to load and aim it, let alone fire. Yet other climbers in the Far North had had to shoot bears that invaded their base camps, and I was aware of those rare events when bears had killed unwary hikers in the Alaska wilderness. So serene was I in my overconfidence, however, that I had not even brought a pistol to the Tikchik Lakes.

  Later in the trip, as we boated down Chauekuktuli and Nuyakuk, the waves whipped up by steady winds gave me pause, and several times I acceded to Sharon’s fears and stayed put in camp rather than launching out against the whitecaps. But our arguments were always one-sided, Sharon pleading for caution against my sanguine assessment, “It doesn’t look so bad out there.” I should have learned from our spill on the Colorado just how unstable the Klepper was when buffeted by waves, and though I was a novice paddler I floated in the Tikchiks on the surface of my ignorance. Many years later, in Patagonia, a world-class mountaineer and kayaker, Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face and Esprit, had his kayak overturn in high winds on a lake that would normally have been child’s play for him. He died of hypothermia before his mates could rescue him.

  Had Sharon and I flipped the Klepper on Chauekuktuli or Nuyakuk, we might not have perished at once, but if we had lost our boat or even just the gear and food we had stored fore and aft, we would have faced a desperate fight to survive. We had no radio, and sat phone use in the wilderness was still decades in the future.

  I had hoped that the weather in the Tikchiks would partake of the benign pattern that obtained in the Brooks Range, but alas, the storms we waited out were all too reminiscent of the gales and blizzards of the Alaska Range. A week into our trip, we were marooned by three days of wind and nonstop rain a few degrees above freezing. We lay in our double sleeping bag, reading the few books we had brought as slowly as we could, scrounging for topics for conversation. The driftwood branches scattered along the lakeshore were so thoroughly soaked we couldn’t keep a campfire going. I had gone into our Tikchik trip expecting a relaxing lark in a landscape much tamer than the glacial immensities of Denali and Deborah, but now I was awed by the raw grandeur of our surroundings. “It’s a wild, often gloomy place,” I confessed to my diary on July 9, “and the two of us seem very alone in it.” And on July 15: “I can’t rid myself of the sense of size and emptiness and ‘Alaskan-ness’ of the place.”

  Day by day, we grew accustomed to the strangeness of our wilderness, and by midway through our 67-mile journey, we found whole hours of tranquil delight to counterbalance the gloom. Birds were everywhere: flocks of ducks and geese skittering along the lake’s surface, hawks and eagles soaring high above us as they rode thermals, the plaintive cries of gulls and terns and loons wafting from dark cliffs we floated past. On calm days the lake turned into a glassy mirror, reflecting the distant hillsides in inverted duplicate images. When the sun came out, we threw off our jackets and paddled in T-shirts. Each morning as we climbed into the Klepper, we clasped hands, and Sharon leaned back from her front seat to give me a good-luck kiss. During the first days our arms had ached from paddling, but now we were fit, and our swiveling strokes blended in a thoughtless choreography. Since we had seen no bears during the first twelve days, Sharon began to relax.

  On July 17, we neared the western end of Lake Nuyakuk, five days ahead of our scheduled float-plane pickup. A
pair of coves, called Portage Arm and Mirror Bay, nestled beneath the nameless peaks beyond. We could spend the remaining time leisurely exploring those sheltered mini-lakes. I had lost my peak-bagging ambitions: instead, I was content to poke among the miniature surprises that lay nearer at hand.

  And then we found the perfect campsite. Half a mile inside Portage Arm, we came upon a small island just offshore. We pulled the Klepper out of the water to check the place out. Only a few yards back we found a clearing in the bushes swathed in a lush carpet of tundra. We pitched our tent there and sprawled inside. The tundra beneath the floor felt like a limitless mattress of down. Just outside the tent, instead of a sandy shore, a geologic quirk called greenstone pillows shelved into the water, sensuously curved like waves caught in mid-splash. Not far away, we found enough dry alder and willow branches for a week’s worth of campfires.

  We spent our last five days on the island. Because we were separated from the coast of Portage Arm, Sharon felt completely safe for the first time during the whole expedition. (Bears can swim, of course, but why would they bother?) On the warmest day of all, we took off our clothes and basked on the greenstone pillows. Then we tiptoed over to the tundra cushion beside the tent, where we made love, our skin bare to the sky and sun, our souls in harmony with our temporary universe—and with each other.

  I reread my Tikchik diary recently. It left me disappointed—all the talk of miles paddled, of topography unraveled, of rations and weather and schedules calibrated. Why had I not paused for a single day to reflect, to try to place our eighteen-day trip in context? By the end, it became the idyll I had hoped it would be. Why did I not try to weigh just how that brief escape from our normal lives fit into the uncertain journey Sharon and I had pledged to make through life together?

  Years later, at a time when Sharon still dreamed of a career as a writer, she put a poem on paper that plumbed the murky depths of our time in Alaska in a way I never could. It ends with a rueful reminiscence of those days on Chauekuktuli and Nuyakuk:

  Between your loves and mine

  that summer on the Tikchik lakes

  we found a small island

  the size of a wilderness

  which made you happy

  and me safe

  Remember the anniversaries we had

  the glacial distance through the maze

  black rain for days the small

  fires on rock where I read

  you were a wonder then

  dreaming a route the lakes to the sea

  What if we had needed it

  I would have thought we were dead

  you would have thought alive

  even now the difference rivers

  between us the trivial drift of summer

  until we flood when it thunders.

  Every couple that weathers the vicissitudes of a life together, that resists the temptation to chuck it in and start over, must confront the prospect of a last act to the play that fate weaves around its long trajectory. Barring a catastrophic accident—a car crash, a house burning down, an avalanche scouring the face of a mountain—one partner will in all likelihood die before the other. It is a denouement impossible to prepare for. I saw it happen to my mother, who lived on for seventeen years after my father died in 1990.

  Throughout the decades of our marriage, Sharon and I never really talked about the scenario that seemed to lie so far in the future. But during the last year and a half, we have not been able to keep it far from our minds for very long. Still, we have scarcely discussed it, as if keeping our fears unarticulated might push the event further into the fog of the future.

  Given, however, all the depredations that cancer has wreaked upon my body, and given the normal course of metastasis, I am pretty certain that I will die before she does. Illness drastically narrows one’s imaginative scope. During the depths of my worst tribulations, when I lay in a hospital bed clinging to life, I could barely think beyond the pain and confusion. The world outside me shrank and dimmed; all I cared about was taking the next breath. Though death might be happening to me, it seemed an abstract matter: a pity, no doubt, and a nuisance, but not a turn of events over which I had much control.

  During the last several months of even keel since my last medical crisis, however, I have turned my thoughts toward ultimate things. Yet it seems hard to reach beyond the threads of fantasy that float through my mind. As human beings, perhaps uniquely among the creatures on earth, we know that we are going to die. In an ideal world, we would claim the privilege of writing the script that trails toward the final page. Instead, thanks to doctors and hospitals and the desperate hope for another chance, the end usually arrives as an insensate spiral into coma, or in the smother of morphine dulling the sharp edge of pain. We are left all but powerless to orchestrate our last moments among the living.

  For one who does not believe in God, prayer is a waste of time. In its place, I have only hope, or wish.

  What I wish for, then, in that last conscious moment before the darkness closes in forever, is not the shining memory of some summit underfoot that I was the first to reach, not the gleam of yet another undiscovered land on the horizon, but the touch of Sharon’s fingers as she clasps my hand in hers, unwilling to let go.

  Note on Sources

  CHAPTER 1: FARTHEST NORTH

  Fridtjof Nansen’s classic expedition narrative, Farthest North, first published in 1897, is available in an excellent Modern Library paperback edition (New York: 1999). Roland Huntford’s biography, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero (London: 1997), offers valuable information about the later careers of both Nansen and Johansen.

  CHAPTER 2: BLANK ON THE MAP

  Eric Shipton’s account of the 1937 reconnaissance of the Karakoram, Blank on the Map, is available in the omnibus Eric Shipton: The Six Mountain-Travel Books (Seattle: 1985). Jim Perrin, in Shipton and Tilman: The Great Decade of Himalayan Exploration (London: 2013), imparts details of the long and complex relationship between the two great explorers that their own writings do not cover. Ang Tharkay’s Sherpa: The Memoir of Ang Tharkay (Seattle: 2016) presents a publishing enigma. The book was originally dictated in English to a mysterious go-between named Basil P. Norton, but no trace of an original English edition can be found. First published in French as Mémoires d’un Sherpa (Paris: 1954), the book was retranslated into English only in 2016 by Mountaineers Books.

  Shipton’s beguiling memoir, That Untravelled World, which first appeared in 1969, has likewise been reprinted by Mountaineers Books (Seattle: 2015).

  CHAPTER 3: PREHISTORIC 5.10

  Marjorie Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (Ithaca, NY: 1959) is the classic exposition of the revolution in the Western aesthetic of nature wrought by the Romantic era. Antoine de Ville’s procès-verbal about the 1492 ascent of Mount Aiguille is reprinted in W. A. B. Coolidge’s Josias Simler et les Origines de l’Alpinisme (Grenoble: 1904). Peter Hansen’s The Summits of Modern Man (Cambridge, MA: 2013) contains the dubious claim that shepherds regularly climbed Mount Aiguille in the sixteenth century.

  A good overview of the two-decade effort by the Dutch archaeological team to analyze the culture of the Tellem of Mali can be found in Rogier Bedaux’s “Tellem: Reconnaissance Archéologique d’une Culture de l’Ouest Africain au Moyen Age,” in Journal de la Société des Africanistes (Paris: 1972), 103–85. My own account of a month in Mali investigating the Tellem achievement appears in Escape Routes (Seattle: 1997). Keith Muscutt’s Warriors of the Clouds (Albuquerque, NM: 1998) offers a good overview of the Chachopoya. Tony Howard’s “The Bedouin: Hunting Routes of Rum” is available online at http://www.nomadstravel.co.uk/files/8514/1856/8483/Bedouin_Hunting_Routes_of_Rum_by_Tony_Howard.pdf.

  CHAPTER 4: FIRST DESCENT

  Richard Bangs’s moving essay “First Bend on the Baro” is reprinted in Cameron O’Connor and John Lazenby, eds., First Descents: In Search of Wild Rivers (Birmingham, AL: 1989). My own “Rafting with the BBC” appears in Moments of Doubt (Seattle:
1986). Bangs’s account of the Tekeze expedition centers his memoir, The Last River (San Francisco: 2001). My own “First Down the Tekeze” is reprinted in Escape Routes (Seattle: 1997).

  Ben Stookesberry’s river-running exploits are detailed on his Facebook site, at https://www.facebook.com/redonkulous2u.

  CHAPTER 5: FIRST CONTACT

  The film First Contact was released in 1983 in Australia. Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson’s book, First Contact, which includes much detail not covered in the film, was published in the United States by Viking Penguin (New York: 1987). The Land that Time Forgot, by Michael Leahy and Maurice Crain (New York: 1937), gives Leahy’s own (expurgated) account of his adventures in the New Guinea highlands.

  My interview with photographer Michael Friedel appeared in American Photo, September/October 1990. My account of the last twenty-five years of the Chiricahua Apache wars against the Mexican and American governments, Once They Moved Like the Wind, was published by Simon & Schuster (New York: 1993).

  CHAPTER 6: THE UNDISCOVERED EARTH

  A good introduction to the painted Paleolithic caves in Spain and France can be found in Gregory Curtis’s The Cave Painters (New York: 2006). Cenote expert Sam Meacham’s website, which contains his philosophy of exploration, is at www.meachamdiving.com.

  James Tabor’s excellent chronicle about the quest for the world’s deepest cave is Blind Descent (New York: 2010). Bill Stone and Barbara am Ende narrate their own efforts to push the Huautla and Chevé cave systems in Beyond the Deep (New York: 2002).