At the next slack water, we repeated our tenuous and terrifying passage across small floes in reverse and returned to terra firma, having travelled a net distance of one mile away from our goal.
For the next week, we inched southward, averaging about 1,200 yards a day. In places where the shoreline was still covered with winter snowdrifts, we dragged overland. Occasionally we paddled short distances between giant pressure ridges, and once we were forced to portage over talus and rock. Several days we waited, going nowhere. Finally we reached a zone where steep cliffs dropped sharply into the sea. We could no longer travel a mile or two and return safely to land. If we were caught in the strait when the ice closed in on us, we would be crushed between unimaginable forces.
A good friend, Paul Attalla, had advised us, “Be patient. Don’t do anything stupid.” We broke our bags apart, counted our food, and then grimly packed everything up again. Don’t do anything stupid? Fine. It would be stupid to paddle into the ice and get crushed, and equally stupid to wait and starve.
We needed a south wind to push the ice out of the way and hold it clear for the five hours it would take us to race past the cliffs and reach the next safe landing. On the morning of July 21, the compression seemed to be easing up, and we had a weather report of favourable wind. We paddled into narrow channels between the floes. A twenty-foot iceberg collapsed moments after I paddled past it. Ok, no worries, I told myself. Nothing bad actually happened. But I couldn’t stop worrying any more than I could stop breathing.
In whitewater, the current is flowing, but at least the rocks stay still. Here, everything was moving, so there was no stable reality. Our open-water channel slammed shut, so we dragged our boats onto a large floe and started hiking toward the south edge, where a remnant of open water remained. Boomer was ahead and urged me to move faster, but I was going all out. There was no “faster” left inside me. No, this wasn’t right. We couldn’t continue if our survival constantly depended on split-second timing.
We travelled another mile until, just offshore of Cape Union, fear overpowered desperation. Reluctantly, we retraced our tenuous steps to our old camp, elated to be unscathed.
We slept to let the adrenaline drain away. When we woke, even more open water presented itself, so we paddled out for a second time that day. But after about half a mile, we got scared again and retreated. Discouraged, we pitched the tent and ate dinner. It seemed as if we would never leave this place. After all, when Adolphus Greely set up camp to the south of us in 1881, he was isolated for three years before a resupply ship could break through. Nineteen of his original twenty-five men died of starvation, drowning, hypothermia, and, in one case, firing squad. Greely ordered a man shot for stealing food, after which his comrades may have eaten him (no one knows for sure). I wanted to close my eyes and stop thinking about our predicament, but Boomer took one last scouting mission to watch the ice. He returned breathlessly.
“Looks good out there. I think we can go for it.”
For the third time on that long day, we paddled southward toward the rockbound coastline. The summer sun had swung into the northern sky to cast a subdued greyness across the seascape, offset by the soft, white glow of the ice. We were already exhausted from our previous two ordeals, but this is the moment you live for as an adventurer. It is comparable to pulling out of an eddy into a big rapid or turning skis into the fall line and dropping into a steep, snaking couloir. It is the moment when you must trust yourself and your partner absolutely and completely. A trust earned by travelling across the Arctic, alone, together. It is the glorious moment when fear vaporizes because you have decided to commit, and fear is now a needless distraction.
A major league baseball player reaches the Hall of Fame if he connects once out of every three times at bat. An NBA basketball player draws a multimillion-dollar salary if he hits fifty percent. An adventurer must have a lifetime batting average of 1,000. Nothing less. I had a gut feeling that we would make it that night, but don’t remind me how much we were depending on blind luck.
It was July 21. For us it was the first day of summer because, after seventy-six days, it was the first time we paddled our kayaks as if we were on a sea kayak expedition. And, in true Arctic fashion, it was the first day of winter as well, because in the wee hours of the morning, as we were battling the fatigue of an all-night ordeal, a thin film of ice formed on the sea. It made a tinkling sound as we dipped our paddles and moved southward, toward home.
As July slowly morphed into August, the sea ice was fractured, moving, and sometimes thick, but not impenetrable. Most days, we paddled in narrow channels through an infinite maze of glistening floes. Occasionally the floes converged and blocked our passage, but after the Robeson Channel, these compressions were short-lived. When we could go no farther, we hauled out on land, or onto a large floe, and waited for a change in tide or wind. Sometimes we dragged on the closely packed ice, jumping across small, tippy floes.
One day, on the water, Boomer was attacked by a walrus—a ton and a half of awkwardly graceful skin, blubber, and muscle, its gleaming ivory tusks rearing above Boomer’s head. Or maybe he wasn’t attacked after all; maybe the walrus was just curious, getting a better look. In any case, whack, whack, Boomer smacked the monster in the face and paddled away ferociously. On another day when we were camped, a polar bear slobbered over the vestibule and gently bit a small hole in our tent. Was he attacking, or, like the walrus, just visiting in his polar bear way? We’ll never know, but we do know that the Arctic and its creatures revealed their power to us and then showed us their gentle side to grant us safe passage.
Boomer and I paddled into Grise Fiord on August 19, after 104 days and 1,500 miles. We celebrated by sautéing up some potatoes, cabbage, and onions, and binging on chips and salsa. We’d done it, together, and hadn’t died in the process.
Then, thirty-nine hours after arriving in town, I woke in the night and discovered that I couldn’t pee. It’s a body function that you normally take for granted, like heartbeat or digestion. But when it failed, my blood pressure and potassium levels shot sky high. The nurse at the local clinic listed my condition as “life threatening.” Pilots from Global Rescue flew their jet through a fast-closing weather window to carry me south. They saved my life.
Now I am back home in the mountains of western Montana. My urologist tells me that it was merely a coincidence that my system shut down immediately after the expedition was complete. But endurance athletes, trainers, and naturopathic doctors tell me that in that wonderland of sea and ice, my body was on the brink of collapse and the brain said, “Not yet, old friend. We’re in this together, you and me, brain and urinary tract. Hang on. You can shut down after we get to town.”
There’s no way to know. But I can tell you that out there, surrounded by walruses, storms, polar bears, and ice, I felt a cathartic oneness of all things, animate and inanimate. If it were somehow possible to absorb the essence of a landscape into one’s being, I think I would become the Ellesmere coastline.
Niall Fink
THE MAGIC BUS
“LEE, CHECK this out.”
Lee finished tying our raft to an aspen trunk and scrambled up the grassy bank to join me. When he saw it, surrounded by knee-high fireweed, he too stopped, stunned.
“No way.”
I nodded, grinning.
“It’s the, you know, the bus, the f-ing—”
“The Magic Bus.”
“Jesus. It’s not—I mean, is it?”
“It can’t be. It’s supposed to be close to Denali, which is like four hundred miles away.”
Still, though much of the paint had chipped away and the back half was partly crushed, the shape and colour were unmistakable. Dropping our packs, we moved in close to touch the rusted metal. It felt very real.
I tried to laugh, but the sound came out strange. Lee shook his head. “This is bloody creepy, man. Bloody creepy.”
It was 2009. Into the Wild had been on screens for two years, and Chris McC
andless and his magic bus were everywhere. They appeared on posters, album covers, book jackets, and Facebook profiles. I would hear the soundtrack on the radio sometimes, driving out to the mountains for a weekend campout where some engineering student, loosened by firelight and seven-dollar six packs, would confide that he was secretly dreaming of, you know, taking a year and just living out there. Out there in the Wild.
I was sick of it.
But if you were not twenty-something that year, or single, male, middle-class, and desperate to escape the impending yoke of a white collar, then you might not be as familiar with the story, or the bus. So here’s the short version.
In September, 1992, a moose hunter found an emaciated body rotting in the back of a converted bus, twenty miles into the backcountry north of Denali State Park. The young man inside it had evidently starved to death that summer. On a sheet of plywood covering one window, he had carved his story:
TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH. NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST: AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD... TEN DAYS AND NIGHTS OF FREIGHT TRAINS AND HITCHHIKING BRING HIM TO THE GREAT WHITE NORTH. NO LONGER TO BE POISONED BY CIVILIZATION HE FLEES, AND WALKS ALONE UPON THE LAND TO BECOME LOST IN THE WILD.
ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMP
MAY 1992
Supertramp was an alias. He was born Christopher Johnson McCandless, and came from a well-to-do family in Washington, D.C. He was, by all accounts, a bright academic and an excellent athlete. In 1996, Jon Krakauer published Into the Wild, unravelling the full story of the young idealist’s odyssey through the American Southwest, Midwest, and finally, fatally, the “great white North.” The first edition spent 119 straight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Eleven years later, in 2007, Sean Penn’s film adaptation would gross $56 million in theatres worldwide.
That same year I was on a number of my own “aesthetic voyages.” While I was still somewhere in Montana or Arizona, my grey-haired dad bought the Into the Wild Collector’s Edition DVD, thinking it would make a perfect welcome-home present. We watched it together the night after I returned from 700 miles of hitchhiking and desert walking. I could not forget the look on his face after watching the gruesome death in widescreen format. Over the next sixteen months, I would dismiss McCandless as reckless and naive and not at all like me. But his story hung like a starving, bush-bearded spectre above my dreams and fantasies. And now, just a couple of hours after crossing the border into Alaska on a driftwood raft, the Magic Bus was back.
It was not the same bus that McCandless died in, of course. But it looked almost identical: an old green-and-white Fairbanks City Transit bus, dating to at least the 1940s. This one sat in a weedy trash heap outside Eagle, Alaska, a small town on the Yukon River a few miles inside the Alaskan border. The other one, the one McCandless called the Magic Bus, had been skidded into the bush near Healy during the 1960s. It was outfitted with a barrel stove so it could house construction workers on a temporary mining road, and subsequently abandoned. But forty-five years later, when it graced the cover of Jon Krakauer’s book and the posters for Sean Penn’s movie, the bus became an icon that transcended any one piece of industrial trash.
On closer inspection there were many differences. This bus had been filled with all kinds of garbage—old aluminum chairs, mouldy foam mattresses, beer bottles, plastic bags—and almost all of the windows had been smashed. The bus number was different too, 156 instead of 142. And, of course, beyond it lay the refuse of domestic life: heaps of old toasters, washing machines, and ovens. The feeling of black magic began to fade.
Lee and I laughed at the strange coincidence, posed for pictures, and finally shouldered our packs and walked toward the town of Eagle. Omens were things in movies and books, not part of the world that we knew.
OUR JOURNEY had begun 150 miles upstream, in Dawson City, Yukon. Like many things in Dawson, it started at the bar. Dawson has a reputation for its bars. During the summer, the town boasts ten of them, despite a population of less than 1,800. Caravans of RVS and enormous tour buses pass through daily, injecting summer cash that pays for refurbished historic sites, garish “Boomtown” facades, a huge museum, and a transient community of summer workers who for several years formed an annual “tent city” where, legend has it, the parties lasted for days.
Dawson’s summer scene originates in one historic summer 115 years ago, when 40,000 transients stampeded what was then a subarctic fish camp, seduced by news of gold. It was a gold rush unlike any before it. For the first time in history a majority of North Americans now lived in cities. The western frontier was closed. Unlike their predecessors in California fifty years before, many of the men and women who converged on Dawson in 1898 were hardly prospectors at all. They were poets, artists, and idealists from the city—aesthetic voyagers of one stripe or another, searching for a disappearing wilderness. Their spirit was immortalized by a young voyager named Jack London, who travelled down the Yukon River on a log raft and whose classic novel The Call of the Wild was found inside the Magic Bus, right next to Christopher McCandless’s deathbed.
It was inevitable that Lee and I would connect in Dawson. We hit it off immediately, chatting one evening on the brightred ferry that bounces day and night between the banks of the Yukon River. This had a lot to do with a shared passion for expensive axes. I carried a well-oiled Gransfors Bruks in my pack, and I dropped this name the way a car collector might mention his Ferrari.
“Ah, balls,” he said. “I wish I’d brought mine.” Lee was from England, and had two Gransfors axes back home. We were brothers immediately.
We got to talking later that night over a couple of pints of Yukon Gold at the Midnight Sun tavern. A handful of local musicians were letting loose after a long, long winter, and the bar was packed. I leaned forward across my glass and hollered: “I’ve got this idea. I’ve been reading about the river, and I think it wouldn’t—”
“What?” Lee shouted.
“I want to build a raft!”
Lee grinned, took a sip, and leaned back in his seat. “Fack it, why not?” he said.
A few mornings later, still tipsy and carrying rucksacks loaded with an axe, a week’s worth of food, and a coil of rope, we left the hungover town. A few miles down the north bank of the Yukon River we found a huge tangle of driftwood piled on a gravel bar. Here we lashed together nine heavy logs and covered them with spruce boughs. To power the raft, we cut long poles and carved paddles out of a split spruce log, swinging the well-sharpened Gransfors until our arms ached.
Raft and paddles took just a day and a half to build. We launched, expecting to take another six days to drift the 175 miles to Eagle, but with the river roaring along at high water we found ourselves nearing Eagle after just three days on the water.
They were glorious days, full of long hours lounging on spruce boughs, daydreaming, dozing, and watching wilderness slip past. There was hardly a cloud in the sky, and hardly a cabin on the shore; just us and the current and the rocky bluffs of the Ogilvie Mountains plunging into the river, with the odd moose or bear on the shore. At night we tied up the raft and cooked bannock on a campfire, lost in a Jack London idyll. Or, at least, we would have been, if not for the Yukon Queen.
The Queen, a complement to Holland America Cruise Line’s tour bus program, ran up and down the Yukon River between Dawson and Eagle every second day before protests shut it down in 2010. It averaged around forty miles an hour, with tour guides on board to interpret the wilderness that blurred past tinted windows. Locals complained about the hundreds of salmon left stranded above the waterline by the Queen’s two enormous jets, and on the river they worried about getting caught in the backwash themselves.
Lee and I were lucky. We didn’t meet the Queen at a bend in the river, and she had time to put on the brakes and slow to a crawl as she passed us. Dozens of passengers with white hair and white shoes—passengers for whom the Magic Bus meant (if it meant anything at all) Pete Townshend or a VW minibus
painted with psychedelic swirls. They snapped pictures of us leaning on our paddles; shirtless, barefoot, pants rolled up like Huck Finns.
“Are you all right?” A man in a Tilley hat shouted. “Do you need help?”
ONE OF THE most disturbing details surrounding McCandless’s death was the fact that a simple piece of paper might have prevented it. When he first crossed the Teklanika River in May, it was barely deep enough to flood his rubber boots. But two months later, when, weakened by starvation, he tried to find his way back to civilization, McCandless found that the trickle had become an impassable torrent. We know this from the notes he left behind, which tell a harrowing story of pain and desperation as he died slowly over the following days. If he had looked at a map, McCandless would have known that a cable car, left behind by a hydrologic survey, crossed the river only a mile or two downstream. He could have walked out alive.
Before leaving Dawson, I’d bought a coil-bound series of river charts, wincing at the thirty-dollar price tag. I’d also packed a GPS unit—a graduation present from my parents, one whose message was not lost on me. There was a SPOT emergency beacon, a first-aid kit, at least four ways to start a fire, and a bundle of warm clothes stuffed in the bottom of my backpack. At my insistence, both Lee and I also had life jackets.
I am reluctant to mention these details, because they reveal an embarrassing truth about our journey: I was scared. I didn’t have the passion, or the hubris, to plunge completely into the wild like McCandless. The Yukon Queen and her bourgeois passengers presented an unsettling mirror, so that well before the Magic Bus made its ominous appearance I had decided I would go further, through the Yukon-Charley wilderness preserve to the town of Circle. “Fack it, why not?” said Lee.
Rock, Paper, Fire Page 5