Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

“July 30—3:53 A.M. Security check on bear trap.” “5:18 A.M. Security check on bear trap.” “7:07 A.M. Report of brown bear in trap. Caller contacting someone to come over and dart it.” Finally, the bear was caught—at least, hopefully this was the one. A few nights gone by would tell. Ted Spraker got the early-morning call; he was still at home having coffee with Elaina. He and Larry drove the ninety-plus miles from Soldotna to Seward to take care of our bear, to take care of our neighborhood.

  After the trapped two-and-a-half-year-old female brown bear was tranquilized, they fitted her with a tracking collar, took samples of her blood and hair, pulled a tooth, and tattooed her ear. After that they moved her to a place far away called Mystery Creek. That day the children spread out across the neighborhood to be children, some even playing late into the night.

  7

  Can a Glacier Cry?

  Our bright yellow, oceangoing kayaks were lashed to the roof of the boat. Hopefully on the way to our destination we wouldn’t run into any rough ocean that would try to wash them away. My daughter Rebekah and I were catching a ride from Seward out of Resurrection Bay, a bay too open to the fast-tempered winds of the Gulf of Alaska to allow for a several-day journey for a kayaker like me. It will always blow my mind that the Aleuts used to travel all around the bay, even across the open ocean to Kodiak and many other places, in their skin kayaks. Along with a friend, Mark Lindstrom, we were going to spend the next couple of days and nights in Aialik Bay.

  Aialik Bay (pronounced I-al-lick) was almost surrounded by the Harding Icefield. Nothing man-made can compare to the Harding Icefield. Several glaciers ease off of it directly into the sea. Some of these glaciers confronted the ocean, one of a few natural things powerful enough to dare to do this. The bay is about twenty-five miles long, and all sides are steep rock walls or even steeper glaciers. Black bears, some iceberg-white mountain goats, a few lone wolves, and occasional brown bears have eaten the few things that live on the mountainsides among the rocks and in the alders. Some small glacier-fed creeks with small salmon-spawning runs empty into this bay. As far as I knew, no one had ever died kayaking in Aialik Bay.

  The boat ride to haul us and our kayaks and equipment to our drop-off near Lechner Glacier was about forty-five miles. If a person knew he was going to die in two weeks, just that forty-five-mile ride would be an ideal top lifetime inspiration. A couple and their son from somewhere in California were getting dropped off before us at a U.S. Park Service wilderness cabin. They had made reservations a year in advance. It was hard to tell if they knew just how isolated they would be. Even though Aialik Bay was just a bay west of Resurrection Bay, it might as well have been a hundred miles deeper into the wilderness. If we got into any trouble, we’d have to handle it ourselves. I didn’t know Mark well, but I knew he had experience out here, and all over Alaska.

  When we got to the cabin where the couple and their son were to stay, I watched them look around. The wife looked at her husband. Was that fear on her face? Mostly they could only look up and up higher to the steep, stone-mountain faces, hanging glaciers, and sharp mountaintops surrounding them. What if something happened to them? They had a couple kayaks; what if the father and the son went across the bay and one capsized? Little happenings in Alaska can turn out to be major catastrophes. This family appeared to like each other, though, and you certainly wouldn’t want to be out in a cabin like this with no way out if you didn’t get along. I wondered if the Park Service allowed alcohol.

  We’d had a planning session with Mark a few weeks before. He’d asked us how much ocean-kayaking experience we had—a couple hours each—except Rebekah had done all that white-water wilderness canoe travel in southeastern Oregon on her monthlong NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) trip. Mark told us that it could be extremely dangerous kayaking anywhere here in the ocean, especially in the more remote bays, because the weather can quickly get severe, blow down off the Harding Icefield. Fog can float in and around unmovable objects and hide reality. He told us to get these waterproof bags to put out cameras and clothes and food in, just in case we flipped.

  He was studying the couple and their son. The man sounded as if he knew what he was doing, but all kinds of people talk a good Alaska game. Mark said he knew how to read the ocean and waves, how to gauge the truck-size pieces of ice breaking off the glaciers. He claimed to know about advancing bears and severe tidal flows and to be able to discern confronting cloud fronts. He seemed as if he would know how to fix a hole in the kayak and where to get wood and how to start a quick fire onshore to warm someone who’d been immersed.

  I’d heard the story of a couple guys catching a hundred-plus-pound halibut from a kayak. It pulled them around, they couldn’t control it. I’d brought my fishing pole. Mark said we’d see all kinds of black bears. We couldn’t bring a gun even if we wanted to because on the land where we’d be camping out in Kenai Fjords National Park, there were “no firearms allowed.” The last time I’d seen him, Captain Bob, the local shark fisherman, had mentioned that a halibut long-liner who had been a few bays farther west, in Black Bay, had said the whole bay was full of sea otters and their babies.

  We packed our stuff into our kayak; it took careful consideration. I would be in the back and Rebekah the front; loading us, especially me, called for precision. Rebekah leapt around the kayak like a butterfly; I was not like a butterfly. We barely squeezed in our clothes (we were prepared for squalling, wailing weather), then had to find room for our tent and fishing poles. I don’t like to wear life preservers, but I wore mine out here. If one or both of us fell in halfway across the bay a mile from either shore and couldn’t get back into the kayak, we’d have to be towed to shore by Mark. Surely he could climb back in his kayak in the middle of the bay, but what if the waves and wind shot up? A few people had told me that winds could blow off these glaciers or down from the rugged, uninhabitable wild around us as if they’d been shot out of a cannon. In winter, there was fifty feet of snow out here. There were many whales; orcas fed in this bay where the current pushed up feed fish. A local fishing guide and our neighbor on Dora Way, Eric Jackson, had seen some orcas attack a baby humpback whale out here somewhere. He said two humpbacks had eventually pushed the baby between them and saved it, but it got bloody before the killer whales left. Surely the orcas would never mistake a kayak for something to eat.

  I’d just seen a TV show where someone was experimenting towing a surfboard around great-white-shark country because they surmised that great whites attack surfboards because they mistake them for seals or sea lions on the surface. I’d seen enough of orca behavior to believe they were much more aware and intelligent than great white sharks. Captain Bob said he’d been out exploring deep in these bays and fjords and had seen times in Three Hole Bay and others when salmon shark fins seemed to fill the bay. The sharks seemed uninterested in people entirely. They appeared to be lolling on the surface. Maybe they’d already eaten their fill.

  This beginning of this trip reminded me of a movie that begins on this bird-singing, sun-shining, no-wind, everyone-smiling day, and there’s only one way to go from there—way down. We pushed off from the rocky beach; the three people we were leaving behind waved good-bye. We paddled north, staying along the exceedingly rugged coastline almost completely untouched by human intervention. Mark said we were going to go to the end of the bay and then kayak across by Frazer Rock to Aialik Glacier.

  Mark and me in front of Pedersen Glacier. PHOTO BY REBEKAH JENKINS

  Mark managed a seaside B&B in Lowell Point, Alaska Saltwater Lodge, in the summer and worked with sled dogs around Mount McKinley in the winter. At one time, he’d been a tour-boat captain. He was a trail official during the Iditarod, following the entire race and trained sled dogs and assisted top mushers in running their dog kennels. Like many Alaskans he did almost anything to keep living here. He was from Oregon. He said the right way to live in Alaska year-round was to live by the sea in the summer and in the deep, dry, bright, powdery interior in winte
r. The idea is to glide on the water in summer and glide on the powder in winter. He motioned us to his side and said we’d paddle into this little cove.

  It seemed the past and the present and the future, three streams of my vision, were fighting inside my head to see which one would dominate. Scenes from our past seemed as real as this very moment. I saw Dr. Andonie of Metairie, Louisiana, holding Rebekah up by her ankles, red and creased, a few seconds after she’d been delivered by C-section. It was odd, as if that memory of her birth were more real to me right now than being here in the yellow kayak. Maybe it was being on the water together, or the isolated purity of this moment. I could feel Rebekah as a six-year-old clinging to my back in a cool lake, wanting to swim in water over her head, water as deep as the water we were in now. I swam underneath her and she was grabbing hold of my neck as the water got deeper and darker and more filled with the unknown. I finally had to release her grip, I thought I would choke. Rebekah has always surprised me with her physical strength, not to mention her strength of will. Before she could walk, before there were any brothers or sisters, she hated sleeping alone in her room in her crib. One night after apparently sitting in there fretting, upset, I heard something crash onto the floor. She had leapt out of her crib. It was the first but not the last brave, daring, rebellious leap she would take. I was surprised, thankful, she would even spend this time with me in Alaska.

  “Dad, paddle,” Rebekah reminded me, politely but with a tone that could be intimidating.

  I was having trouble coming back into this moment, this scene; I was in the past yet still present enough to be paddling forward atop this brilliant ocean water.

  In my mind I saw Rebekah when she was five running as fast as her fawnlike legs could move her, through an open gate on what was then our farm. It was a Tennessee spring, when the new grass, the new green leaves of the trees, and the darker little clover leaves are so intense as to be almost blinding. Yet the green is so welcome, like the new warmth in the sky. I always encouraged Rebekah to run as fast as she could. She was athletic from the start. This time, right before she went through the gate, she slipped abruptly on a fresh cowpatty. She adjusted her fall in midair but still fell partially into the green and brown of it. She jumped up, mad and sickened and furious and grossed out, and looked around for someone to vent to or even to blame. She began to shout. I quickly went up to her and, grabbing some dried, dead grass, wiped her off a little.

  “Rebekah,” I said as softly as I could, “congratulations, honey.”

  She looked at me, puzzled, quieter, still angry, red-faced. “Why do you say that, Daddy?” She was standing in the newborn light of spring.

  “Because someone told me the other day that you’re not a real cowgirl until you walk right through a cowpatty. Well, since you just fell in one, I guess that qualifies you as a genuine cowgirl.”

  The tears stopped. Her chin jutted higher and tilted slightly. “Really? Well, good.”

  We walked back to the house. She started to head inside still wearing all that green on her side, her shorts, her T-shirt, her shoes, like a ribbon won in a race. I suggested we hose off her shoes and leg first.

  “Dad,” Rebekah said now with a teasing tone. “Earth to Dad. Where are you, can you see this unbelievable waterfall?”

  I was coming back slowly. Had I paid enough attention to each and every moment we’d spent together? Did I do all I could for her brothers and sisters? Even when we were together, like now, was I somewhere else some of the time? Much of the time.

  “Yes, it’s fantastic, isn’t it?”

  I remembered my mother, who, although she was blond and hadn’t matched Rebekah in “fight back” strength, reminded me a great deal of Rebekah. One Saturday in a field at one of my college professors’ farms, my mother had run from one wildflower to the other, filled with joy. I remembered being slightly embarrassed at her childlike expression.

  “Dad, what’s up, where are you?” Rebekah kept pulling me back.

  “I’m thinking back on our life.”

  I watched the water running down the front of that unrelenting rock face, falling, falling, falling, never stopping until it froze again. I saw that water as my tears, tears of joy at being in this kayak with my little girl, who was now a woman. The glacier and the rock were me: too often frozen, seeming still, expressionless. But glaciers do cry in Alaska.

  “Dad, this kayak is way heavier back there on your end, so paddle. Look, Mark’s right up to the waterfall.”

  “All right, honey.” For most of the rest of our journey together I paddled and was present with her, Mark, and our often truly unbelievable environment. But maybe its power was what had brought the memories welling up in me in the first place. When we got right up to where the waterfall hit the ocean, the mist was cool and cleansing, and it washed over me.

  LIKE ANOTHER PLANET

  I began to dig my oar into the glass-clear ocean with more energy. We headed west out of the cove and across the bay. Two or three miles in front of us was a wall, a wall that could enclose a contented people, a wall of white and blue ice, the face of Aialik Glacier. More than halfway across the water we began to see chunks of floating ice, like mini icebergs, some the size of our kayak above water. Occasionally crashing, cracking sounds, sudden and violent, came from the direction we were headed. In an irregular, puffy wind, we moved toward it, silently cutting the salt water, which was surely several hundred feet deep below us. Clouds hung on top of the peaks rising up behind the glacier. Was that a front? Would it overtake us before we made it to the other side?

  We were now in the middle of this twenty-five-mile-long bay, and it was only us on the water as far as we could see. We were as insignificant as a dry spruce needle floating on a lake. Mark said there were bears all over but we would not see them unless they crossed the barren fields of boulders or we found them grazing on a just-melted patch of avalanched snow.

  Floating in this place was more like being in another world than anyplace else I’d ever been. Photographs I’d seen of planets with rock mountains and no plant life almost seemed to have more in common with this place.

  We made it to the other side and pulled our kayak out of a beach made of rounded, smooth rocks. We were now at the side of Aialik Glacier. From our little toehold on the beach at sea level to a little over three miles inland, this world rose over five thousand feet. The humbling sound of the glacier calving was intimidating. Crack. An ancient piece of glacier fell from the face of Aialik Glacier and hit the ocean. A resulting large ring of waves came toward us, some big enough to surf on. A few people in Alaska have been killed by kayaking up to the face of a glacier. Out here alone, the power of this magnificent structure creates a false sense of invincibility. Only those who know what can happen can force themselves to be wary and remember how quickly humans can be swatted by the power of even a little bit of it.

  We pulled our kayaks far onto the beach. Ours was so heavy, Mark and I had to pull it together. People on an Alaska high may get careless. They don’t pull their kayaks far enough onto the beach; a glacier calves or a salmon seiner goes by, sending a wave high on the beach. The kayakers are off hiking or distracted by some awesome sight. When they come back their kayak and all their supplies are floating away, there is no way to reach it. You don’t swim out to get your kayak in glacier-cooled, numbing Alaskan salt water. A local might swim out a short way, but you get too far out and your arms and legs quit working and you’re gone, sinking, though your brain is still functioning. Many Alaskans have watched loved ones, brothers, best friends, barely known crew members, strangers, drown, unable to do anything to save them. Some have tried, knowing better, and died too. No wonder people dive in; the pristine water doesn’t look dangerous. It is so enticing, so seductive. But because of the temperature, it is deadly.

  Dark sand dunes rose from the beach. We walked over them toward the face of the glacier. A fresh line of wide tracks led away from the beach up toward the steep rock mountains. Mark said t
hey belonged to a large black bear, that he could have been there a half an hour ago, even fifteen minutes. When we got to the left edge of the face of Aialik Glacier, it seemed that the glacier could be the size of twenty five-story buildings, stacked side by side. Some large pieces of ice, some the size of a pickup truck, were floating in front of it. Crack. A piece the size of a house popped off the glacier without warning and fell like an ice guillotine. A couple of seals, laying on floating pieces of the glacier’s ice that had already fallen, were given quite a ride.

  A rushing, turbulent creek streamed out of the far left side of the glacier. You could almost do some white-water kayaking down it, if you were skilled enough. Rebekah and I stood together, not talking, being uplifted by what spread out before us, feeling the cold blasts of glacier air, hearing so much. Sound was now coming from all around us. Bang came the largest sound we’d heard yet, as if a third of a mountain peak had just broken off. Large pieces the size of small cars had fallen into a heap at the mysterious hole in the bottom of the glacier that was also the source of this creek. The water was a brownish gray, full of silt. Pieces of the glacier were being washed down the fast-moving creek as they fell, some too large to float. They were the most pure ice-blue color, bouncing, rolling over the rocky creek bottom and standing out vividly from the opaque silver-brown water.

  Rebekah and I stood silent and overwhelmed; we shared this spectacular moment, just us. I realized we didn’t need the “spectacular,” just the moment, just the two of us. Mark was relaxing on top of one of the dunes.

  Mark and I dragged the double kayak across the sand until about three-quarters of it was in the water. Rebekah waded in and spryly eased into her front spot. I climbed in and, to keep water from getting in the kayak, attached my spray skirt to the plastic lip around the hole I sat in, and then we were moving. Our plan, really Mark’s plan, was to make it to another hard-to-reach glacier and camp there. We paddled along about a hundred yards offshore. There were pieces of a narrow beach, and then the land began to climb and climb. I saw a black bear feeding. We were so silent it didn’t notice us at first, then it ran into the dense underbrush. All we could see was the movement of the brush as the bear made its way up the mountainside. Even the bear had to squeeze and maneuver in and around the seemingly impregnable alders that grew up from the oceanside until there was mostly just rock.