by Tim Cahill
“Well, I didn’t know if it would really work.”
“What does it feel like?” I asked.
Marty grabbed my forearm and squeezed, careful not to dig his fingernails into my flesh. I calculated that he was squeezing at about three quarters of his full strength. “It feels like that,” he said.
Out on the deck, John McKenney shouted, “Hey, shark wranglers, we got four or five more blues coming up the chum line.”
We were, all of us, suited up in less than ten minutes: eight fools in dorky-looking rubber suits, one fool in a dorky-looking chain mail suit, each of us ridiculously eager to get in the water and battle man-eating sharks with broom handles. An outsider, someone who hadn’t been down there with us, would have to think we were brave as hell. Or dumb as rocks.
A twelve-footer was gnawing away at the chum box. I could see at least a dozen sharks milling around the cage. “Let’s go diving,” Jack McKenney said.
Kayaking Among
the Ice Children
In the unlikely event that I am commissioned to produce a horror film designed to frighten harbor seals, I’ll construct the soundtrack around the awful breathing I once heard while I was kayaking in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Monument.
It was late in the afternoon. Photographer Paul Dix and I were paddling across the icy waters of Muir Inlet on our way from Muir Glacier to a place called Wolf Point. The east arm of Glacier Bay is a fjord about two miles across, and we were out in the middle of it. Bare stone ridges stand on either side of the inlet so that echoes ping-pong back and forth across the water, which is still and milky-green in the shadows cast by the rock walls. In the center of the inlet, out of the shadows, the water takes on the blue of the southeastern Alaska sky. The land that projects above the ridges is reflected on the surface of the sea.
Our kayaks were slicing through the strangely shimmering image of ice-capped Mount Wright, which was a few miles to the south: a mountain that rises virtually out of the sea to a height of 5,138 feet. It was as if we were paddling across the face of the mountain, working our kayaks across a snow field. And there were small icebergs—bergy-bits, we called them—floating on the frigid waters. The sun was burning down from the ice-blue skies and the temperature stood at fifty-five degrees, so the paddle work and our long-john shirts were enough to keep us warm.
Then we heard it: breathing that sounded like that of a man surfacing after minutes underwater. But it was much louder than that, and some instinct told me that it came from a distance. Paul and I both looked south to the place where Muir Inlet empties into Glacier Bay proper. About three miles away we saw a plume of steam and spray shoot perhaps twenty feet into the air. Then, a second or so later, I heard a great exhalation of air that bounced like a fat aural balloon against the rock and rumbled up the inlet.
“Whales,” I said, needlessly.
“Orcas,” Paul answered.
There were eight of them, a hunting pod, and they were coming up the inlet—killer whales swimming eight abreast, so that there was no place we could go to avoid them. They were moving fast, coming directly toward us at about thirty miles an hour. Whales twenty to thirty feet long were rolling to the surface to breathe and then covering a quarter-mile or more underwater. Their six-foot-high, triangular dorsal fins cut the water on each roll so they looked, for a moment, like marauding sharks.
Glacier Bay regulations require kayakers to give any whale—humpback or killer—a quarter of a mile of respect. Paul and I decided to stay put, paddles across our laps, and let the whales break the rules. Neither of us had ever seen an orca in the wild, and now there were eight of them racing toward us, splashing through the snowy, blue reflection of Mount Wright. In that moment I felt a sense of wondrous privilege expand inside my chest, a sensation that I will forever associate with a warm spring afternoon outside junior high, when a girl named Jackie B. said she liked me, too.
The largest of the orcas was headed directly for my stationary kayak. Paul was snapping pictures, changing from the telephoto to the wide-angle lens, and he said, “Oh my God, I’m going to get you and the big one in the same frame.”
The whale surfaced one hundred yards in front of me. Its dorsal fin was broken and askew; its back was shiny black against the impossible blue of the sky, and I could see a pair of white oblong markings just above and behind the eyes. The orca’s great head rose completely out of the water. Its underside was snowy white. Then the whale was down again, the bent, black dorsal fin cutting in my direction.
The expansive feeling inside my chest vanished in an instant, and I felt as if my lungs had suddenly collapsed.
“Paul,” I said, my voice cool and steady as only intense apprehension can make it, “why do you think they call them, uh, killer whales?”
I knew, of course. Most whales lack real teeth; they feed by straining the sea for plankton. But orcas are actually large dolphins: they have teeth and bite things like sea lions, seals, porpoises, sharks, squid, and even other whales. They have been known to kill and eat one-hundred-ton blue whales. In Glacier Bay these highly intelligent “wolves of the sea” hunt in packs. There has never been a substantiated case of an orca killing a man, despite the 1977 movie Orca, in which a killer whale seeks revenge on Richard Harris by eating all his costars. The movie was so silly, unscientific, and unbelievable that one critic suggested Harris fight a duel to the death with his agent for getting him the role.
Silly, silly movies tend to weigh on the mind when it’s a virtual certainty that at this very moment there is a huge, toothy carnivore only a few feet under your kayak—a craft so light that you can carry it on your shoulders for miles.
“They’re going for the seals,” Paul shouted.
Twelve miles to the north at the head of the bay, the harbor seals live and sun themselves on the icebergs in large, gregarious colonies. Occasionally a seal slips off a berg to dive for fish or shrimp. The waters are rich in food, the climate’s pleasant—by arctic standards—and the harbor seals grow fat and complacent. At the head of Muir Glacier, they have but one natural predator: the killer whale.
The guidebooks say that orcas avoid the glacier, and rangers say that killer whales don’t like to navigate among icebergs at thirty miles an hour. But this pod of eight was steaming toward Muir Glacier, taking what can only be described as a quick trip to seal McDonald s. Fast food on ice.
Several orcas, acting in concert, have been known to come up under one side of an iceberg in a heaving mass. The seals sunning on the berg slide willy-nilly into the open mouths of other killer whales cleverly waiting on the downside of the suddenly treacherous ice.
The orcas were after seals. So there was nothing for me to worry about out in the middle of the Muir Inlet, where the water is only a few degrees above freezing and prolonged immersion would be fatal.
Morbidly, I began calculating my resemblance to a harbor seal. The males can be six feet long; I am a little over six feet long. They carry an insulating layer of blubber and weigh as much as 290 pounds; I can’t get rid of this roll around my waist and I weigh 195. Harbor seals sun themselves on icebergs; I was sitting in what might appear, from below, to be a long sliver of floating ice.
It occurred to me that the killer whales could make a completely understandable gastronomic error. I suddenly felt like an appetizer.
An orca rolled no more than fifty yards to my right and I heard, in the harsh gasp of its breath, the glottal pop of some fleshy mechanism opening and closing. Another one surfaced, spouting, to my left, and then the big fellow with the slightly bent dorsal fin, the one who’d torpedoed under my kayak, rose and rolled beyond me, to the north.
They were rising regularly, rhythmically, first one … then another … and another … so that altogether, over the space of minutes, their sound resembled the awful, amplified breathing of some masked ax murderer in a slash-em-up drive-in horror film.
The orcas disappeared into the distance, but I could still faintly hear them and see their spray
when they were four miles away and going around a bend. They’d cover the eight miles to the head of Muir Glacier in a quarter of an hour, but the seals would sense them long before that. They’d hear that homicidal breathing coming at them at thirty miles an hour and there’d be terror on the ice.
“Some of our pals are going to buy it today,” I said.
“Yeah,” Paul agreed, “blood on the ice before sunset.”
We were being tough about it because we’d just spent several days camping and kayaking at Muir Glacier, where we’d come to think of the seals as our own personal pets.
Glacier Bay, a 4,375-square-mile national monument located about 70 miles northwest of Juneau, is like an immense amphitheater beside the Pacific Ocean. The bay is sheltered from coastal storms by a range of mountains that’s noted for its foul weather and absurd name. Mount Fairweather, at 15,300 feet, is the world’s highest coastal mountain, and the Fairweather range catches the brunt of hundreds of Pacific storms yearly. The moisture falls as snow, and it’s there, high in the Fairweathers, that the glaciers are born. Over the millennia, the ceaselessly falling snow—each year’s accumulation atop the previous one’s—crushes lower layers into a kind of elastic, flowing ice that pours down the slopes of the mountains and smothers the land.
Four thousand years ago, Glacier Bay was a massive icefield. The bay and the land that surrounds it are new—brand new. As little as two hundred years ago, they simply didn’t exist. In 1741 a Russian packet boat sailed by what is now Glacier Bay, and Captain Alexis Tchirikov noted no inland passage, only a sheet of ice that was nearly a mile high. Fifty years later Captain George Vancouver found a small inlet that became known as Icy Strait. Sailing east through the ice-choked waters, Vancouver found, to the north, a cliff of ice that was four thousand feet high.
Then the ice retreated even more; it grumbled back toward the mountains in what amounted to a single geological heartbeat. In 1879 naturalist John Muir found the wall of ice forty-eight miles farther north. Where the glaciers once reigned, Muir found a seawater bay that was miles across. The northeast arm of the bay, Muir Inlet, didn’t exist in 1860. Today it is an awesome fjord over twenty-five miles long, seventeen hundred feet deep, and two miles wide. Muir Glacier stands at the end of the inlet, still in retreat, groaning, rumbling, roaring in the agony of its defeat. The glacier is being driven back into the mountains at a rate of at least a quarter-mile a year.
Glacier Bay is surrounded on three sides by a horseshoe-shaped rim of high mountains: the Fairweather, Saint Elias, Alsek, Takhinsha, and Chilkat ranges. Glaciers still form on these mountains and flow slowly down to the new sea. Nowhere else in the world are there so many tidewater glaciers. Nowhere else are the glaciers in such rapid retreat. A warming trend that started at the beginning of this century has made Glacier Bay a master of the ice.
The Tlingit Indians are native to the bay, and their legends encapsulate this geological history in myth. They tell a story of the ancient ones, the Hoonah Kwan, who lived in the time of the ice. They speak of a young girl, Kahsteen, who was kept in seclusion until her marriage. Unbearably lonely, Kahsteen called down the ice to punish her people. The glacier drove the Hoonah Kwan all the way back to Icy Straits. Kahsteen was sentenced to be left behind as a sacrifice to the ice, but an old woman, Shaw-whad-seet, who was past childbearing years, gave herself up to the ice so that the girl could strengthen the tribe with children.
It is Shaw-whad-seet who is said to cause the tidewater glaciers to retreat so rapidly, over so short a time. The old woman in the ice gives birth to her children—the great slabs of ice that calve off the tidewater glaciers and thunder into the sea.
Bartlett Cove, at the mouth of Glacier Bay, lay crushed under a mile of ice just two hundred years ago. Today it is a dense rain forest, a jungle of Sitka spruce so thick that little light reaches the forest floor, which is carpeted in luxuriant moss that holds the imprint of a boot for days.
Paul and I began by loading our kayaks aboard a tour boat at the edge of the dark forest. As we sailed north toward Muir Glacier, we were able to leisurely view the bay’s spectacular wildlife and geologic scrapbook. There are golden beaches where you can see fifteen-hundred-pound Alaskan brown bears plodding across the sand.
Out ahead, a kayaker is crossing an inlet. But no, closer now, you can see that it’s a moose swimming across the water with its antlers swaying side to side like a kayaker’s paddle. Toward the center of the bay a humpback whale bursts forth, all fifty feet of it arching up over the surface before it crashes back into the sea.
As you approach Muir Inlet, the scars left by the ice are still apparent on the land. There is nothing like the rain forest of Bartlett Cove here. Dense thickets of interlocking alder willows that are no more than ten feet high—a backpacker’s nightmare—have covered this land that emerged from under the ice less than fifty years ago.
Near Muir Glacier, the alder stands give way to small meadows of dryas, palm-sized leafy plants that bear a single bell-like flower. This is land the glacier relinquished only in the last two decades.
The tour boat pulled into a small cove that’s set amid the rock and talus of ice-scoured land. Not a plant grows on this new earth. It’s all hard planes and sharp angles, less than ten years old. The trip from Bartlett Cove was a lesson in how the earth clothes herself in foliage over the years. Now we saw her naked and newly born.
We lowered our kayaks into the water, where they sat precariously amid floating chunks of ice. Paul and I wanted to paddle to the glacier, alone.
Rain, constant and unremitting. The sky, the water, the land: everything’s the color of lead. The fog’s driven over the sea in wind-whipped shards. There is a silence here so immense that the whisper of the wind and the patter of the rain are swallowed up inside it, as the beam of a flashlight is engulfed in the darkness of a bottomless pit. And then—an explosion sharper than the crash of thunder, a sound that rumbles on for two, three, four seconds and is felt inside the chest like the boom of a bass drum at a parade. Shaw-whad-seet, the old woman in the ice, has given birth.
Paul and I were still a mile from the wall of ice, dimly seen ahead, but a small tidal wave that was spawned by the calving glacier lifted our kayaks and the icebergs we’d been navigating through.
We camped that first night at the base of a bare rock mountain in a gravelly cleft formed by a river that had changed its course. There were no flies, birds, bears, bees, wolves, or moose. We were camped on the new, still-lifeless land. The eerie silence of the night was broken now and again by the groaning of the glacier and the roar of the ice children as they crashed into the sea.
John Muir called Glacier Bay “dim, dreary, and mysterious,” by which he meant to indicate that it rains every single day, four hundred days a year, there in the shadows of the glaciers. Somehow Paul and I didn’t feel at all cheated when the next day dawned clear and bright.
In the distance, Muir Glacier spilled off the mountains behind it. The snow and ice flow down into the sea where they form a vertical wall of groaning glacial ice, 250 feet high and a mile wide. As rising and falling tides eat away at the base of the glacier, great slabs of ice come crashing into the water with a roar beyond rage or fury. From our campsite we could see the strange towers and gothic spires that stand together in bizarre profusion atop the glacier. The frozen cliff face took on the colors of the rising sun, so that there were crystalline pinks and golds glinting for a moment before the entire wall began to glow, as if from within, with a crimson that suggested a great heart pumping inside the ice.
As I paddled out in the kayak, moving closer to the wall, I lost sight of the spires above, and the ice seemed to loom over me. There were icebergs everywhere—white ones containing bubbles of trapped air, dense blue ones, and black ones with the mud of another era frozen inside—floating past me on the outgoing tide, as I paddled toward the glacier. There was a cracking sound and I looked to the wall, where ice fell in tumbling slabs against the frozen face of the c
liff and bounced into the sea with a booming thunder.
The sound rumbled down the inlet, and there was silence again. To my right a towering iceberg was melting under the unfamiliar sun. Water dripped rapidly from various craggy points, and a small waterfall that had formed near the top spilled into the sea. Slowly the iceberg lurched over onto one side. All at once the whole affair tipped over, and the bottom side bobbed to the surface.
Harbor seals by the hundreds, sunning on flatter icebergs, watched curiously as I paddled by. One surfaced just behind me, with only its head, like a periscope, projecting above the surface of the water. Its face was very much like that of a dog—a golden retriever, say—with the mouth turned up, as if in a smile. As long as I didn’t look directly at them, the seals might stare and smile in this way for a minute or more.
The sun was warm on my back, and I stripped off my shirt. Harbor porpoises rolled among the icebergs, and arctic terns and gulls wheeled above. Everyone was out having a fine time on a bright sunny day.
It seemed then that I was perhaps too close to the wall. All around me the icebergs were cracking in the manner of an ice cube dropped into a drink. It sounded like electricity. I looked at the wall. The Park Service recommends that kayakers give the glacier half a mile, but it was difficult to judge distances. Something about the ice, glowing aquamarine in the early-morning sun, drew me closer.
“I’m going in,” I called to Paul, and paddled fast until I could clearly see the terns circling against the wall, waiting for the falling slabs of ice that would bring shrimp and stunned fish to the surface. Closer. Crackling electricity all around. There was an indentation at the base of the glacier where the tides had eaten the ice and undermined the wall. I moved closer still, until I could feel my hands tremble.
A great pillar of ice perhaps two hundred feet high, the size of an office building, separated from the main body of the glacier and fell in slow motion. The pillar cracked down on the ice that was floating at the base of the glacier, and spray exploded in an upward blast that obscured almost a quarter of the wall. At the base of the glacier, a wave of about twenty feet high rose and rolled rapidly toward me. The wave was white with glacial till, dark with ancient dirt, and it crested like high surf, tossing barge-sized icebergs before it.