Ahead was a bit of land shaped like an eagle’s head, jutting into the bay. We’d paddled ten miles or so. We hugged the beach, looking for an opening somewhere that Mark said led to a saltwater lake. He had pulled out away from the wilderness beach, farther into the calmer bay waters, and he motioned us to join him.
“We need to be careful here. The tide is coming out and the current in that passageway to the lake can be dangerous,” Mark said. He was a gentle, sensitive soul with eyes like a mischievous boy. “Follow my kayak and keep your bow into the current; you don’t want to get sideways and get flipped in that current, okay?”
“We will follow you,” Rebekah answered.
I could see turbulence, almost like whirlpools, where the water coming from Pedersen Glacier and the tidal lake met the prevailing water currents of the bay. Once past the agitated waters near the mouth of the creeklike entry, the water got shallow and clear as empty space. I looked for salmon or seals, anything swimming, but I saw nothing. Inside the cove we steered right and pulled up to a place to camp. There was no way to hike into this area. Mark immediately found bear sign everywhere. There was a metal container to put our food in, and we had gotten some “unbreakable” plastic containers from the park headquarters in Seward. We pitched our tents in an island of spruce, choosing the only area that had not been dug up too recently by bears. What were they looking for in the dark, loamy soil?
When I saw the claw marks in the soil, though, I realized what made me feel as if I were on another planet. There was almost no soil out here at all. It was mostly glaciers and ice fields and bare rock mountains and ocean and melted snow falling here, running there. The few trees or grass or lichen that did grow appeared lonely, just barely welcome.
There was bear sign all over. They had used some of the spruce to sharpen their claws. The ground was so shaded that little grew, but something must have been in the ground, grubs or roots or something tasty. Otherwise, why would so much of this dark soil be dug up? Some relatively big holes were here and there. The other thing I was surprised at but didn’t mention to Rebekah or Mark was the amount of bear crap. There were many piles, much of it fresh, as if a couple of big bears lived in this spot and slept here every night, whenever they were not out foraging for food. Some clearings in parts of this island-shaped woods appeared to have been cleared by bears, the ground raked clean with their long claws. Rebekah paid close attention to all this recent bear activity. From the look of some of the bear piles, the bears could have been here ten minutes before we landed. I wondered where they were; maybe in some tall marsh grass at the north end of where we camped?
We chose the least-disturbed place to set up our two tents. I had done such a careful job packing: my still camera, my video camera, my minidisc player, and shotgun mike—all so sensitive to water, especially salt water. Mark didn’t feel that we could get in too much trouble out here, or get lost. He had a handheld radio that could communicate if we needed to with any charter fishing-boat captain or tour boat that might be around.
I put all my electronic gear in a corner of the tent in a pile. We put our food in the “bearproof” containers. Rebekah was clearly accustomed to living in the wilderness after her recent monthlong experience. She had every piece of her equipment in an orderly pile. I looked around—something of mine was missing. I knew there should be a purple stuff sack I’d bought at REI in Anchorage, along with the waterproof bags. Where was it? It had my sleeping bag in it. I went back to the kayak; surely the purple stuff sack and the sleeping bag were in one of its holds. I went through every one, stuck my arm down the bigger ones until it disappeared. No sleeping bag. Okay, no problem. I did have my sleeping mat and the warm fleece pants and JanSport parka I’d used when we had gone to Tibet and Everest in 1984. I had warm socks and even a wool hat.
Rebekah noticed I was looking around too much. She lifted her head up from writing in her black notebook.
“Dad, what are you looking for, anyway?” she asked, mostly consumed with her journaling.
“Oh, nothing,” I answered, hoping for no follow-up question. I didn’t want to confess my mistake and look foolish.
She went back to writing. I just laid down my head and curled up on my mat. Only the faintest sound of her Pilot Precise Extra Fine pen was audible.
“Dad, what did you forget, some food?”
“No, it’s all here.” I hoped she would leave this alone.
“Well, what then, Dad? Let me see, you lost your paddle and now I’m going to really have to paddle you everywhere.”
“No, the paddles are safe.”
“Well, then what’s up?”
“Wass up den, Reee-BA-kah…”
I switched into one of our accents, something of an inside joke in our family. We were known to carry on lengthy conversations in a variety of accents gathered from some places we’d been like Appalachia, Mississippi, a northeast country club, an electronics store employee going out of business in New York City, The Simpsons. I was hoping to sidetrack her inquisitive mind.
“Dad, seriously, you must have lost something important. Will it endanger us?”
“No…”
“Well, then, what’s the big deal about telling me. What is it?”
“I forgot my sleeping bag!” I answered meekly.
“Dad, you’re kidding.”
“No, I’m serious, and it’s supposed to be in the forties, maybe colder, tonight.” The incredibly dramatic Pedersen Glacier was directly west of us; it looked so white and wide. It would certainly cool the night.
“Dad, before I was born, you walked where?” She seemed serious, then smiled with her warm eyes.
“I walked across the street.”
“I should let you have my sleeping bag,” she said, more serious.
“No, no. I’ll pile all my clothes on top of me, the ones I’m not wearing. No problem, I’ll be fine.”
That night I could never get warm. It seemed that I went to sleep after it was very dark, when it was already getting light again. Soon after I finally fell asleep, I heard something. Either Rebekah was yelling something or I was dreaming.
“Bears. Bears. Look…”
I opened my eyes. She was talking in her sleep, loudly. She opened her eyes to say she’d heard something walking around outside our tent.
“There are bears,” she almost shouted. “Bears!”
Turned out it was only Mark walking around outside our tent, warming up or something. Somehow he’d forgotten his sleeping bag too. Since it was light, we all got up, packed everything into the kayaks, and decided to see if we could paddle to the edge of the tidal lake, enter a little river, and weave our way to the face of the glacier to see the iceberg. Mark said that the only way there was by kayak or canoe, and our problem was that the tide was going out. We risked getting stranded at the glacier if the water level dropped so low we couldn’t back down this narrow, gravel-bottomed river or creek. We decided to take the chance; Mark said if we could make it, we would have one of the most amazing experiences anyone could have in Alaska. He also said few people have been where we hoped to go.
The paddling was relatively easy even as the current from the retreating water wanted to pull us back into the massive bay. Being in the bay was like being the only leaf left on a two-hundred-year-old oak. Traveling back through this mysterious passageway was like crawling through an ant colony. How fast Alaska can change what it shows you. After not much more than a half mile, we left the confines of the narrow drainage river and entered a small tidal lake. Small icebergs, the size of boats, were floating exotically here and there. Some bizarre and rare sea ducks shot up from the water, several of them surprised they were seeing humans.
As we went along, I would stop paddling to see how long it would take Rebekah to notice. Just as she would begin to turn her head, I would start paddling again.
She would exhale, then say, “Dad, you’re not funny.”
This new world we were entering created its own microclimat
e. Fog hid and revealed the landscape. The wildlife in this place of mystery and isolation seemed surprised that humans existed. We came across some seals lying on the small ice chunks. They opened their large, round eyes and blinked surprise at our materializing. Our kayaks made little sound; we crept on top of the water, sneaking up on them. One seal seemed shocked, as if we were actually odd-colored killer whales. Those silent stalkers would never be able to reach this place. It was probably one reason the seals had come here.
More exotic, large sea ducks were startled as we paddled into a bit of open water. They flew over us; their wings made the sound of a faint whistle. A seal dropped into the water. We glided past small icebergs as they moved so slowly in the slight current of water stemming from Pedersen Glacier. For it was the glacier’s melting that was the source of this little river of ice-cold mystery. Every so often cold breaths of air hit our faces.
Mark found the continuation of the water passageway where it left this interior lake and went farther toward the face of the glacier, the sculptor that you couldn’t see, no matter how hard you watched, still working. It crept forward ever so slowly, carving away at the land. This entryway into the glacier’s kingdom was filled with pieces of floating white ice, some the size of a sofa, a few narrow and tall and unsteady. Did icebergs block our way? This was the start—or really the end—of this gigantic slab of ice and compacted snow that stretched for hundreds and thousands of square miles. Few have been here to see it, for all the time that has passed. Several huge pieces of ice had broken off the front of the glacier and floated in the water, blocking us. It required real effort to squeeze through, but they finally allowed us into the inner sanctum.
Now it was before us; its throne room was the lake we now floated in, its surface dark and still as a mirror. The reflective water made the glacier’s face double in size. I was overwhelmed by the colors, hues I’d never seen this close in nature. There were variations of light blue and ocean blue, a green shade of gray and an opal color. Some of the ice was the color of turquoise in silver that had faded to a dull polish. The height of the ice wall and the colors and the stillness—the sight of it all silenced us.
A couple of icebergs in front of the main glacier wall stood the size of a three-or four-story building. One was shaped like the profile of a polar bear head. Mark paddled right up to it. He disappeared behind it, then reappeared in a hole that went through the entire iceberg. Rebekah and I just floated in front of the multicolored face. Here, it was quieter; there didn’t seem to be as many ice chunks falling into the water. Mark called us over, and it was an odd perception to hear his voice in the silence. The closer we got, the more serene it became. As a kid, I had thought that heaven would be green fields of grass and vivid blue sky and clouds as warm and white as a cotton shirt coming out of the dryer; but here was the version for those who like it cool.
We lingered for some time, but then Mark said we needed to head back to the bay or we might be stranded. We paddled out with the current this time, and when we got to the tidal lake where we’d camped on the far beach in the tender green grass, we saw a black shape, a black bear. We watched it for a bit, then shot out the mouth of this drainage back into the ocean.
The bay was sun-bright; a strong wind blew through it freely. It did not seem possible that the secret kingdom we’d come from could be only about a mile from here, and a neighbor of this light, airy bay.
Rebekah was a paddling energy machine, ready to make a wake, see more of this ocean and sharp rock world. I really wanted to pop my paddle into the water and splash her, but she seemed too focused for obnoxious Dad humor. Instead I dug in and felt my chest and back and shoulder muscles activate and assisted in pulling us through the salt water. It seemed like just a few weeks earlier that she and I had gone for a bike ride down our curving, downhill gravel driveway in Tennessee, out onto the paved roads leading away from town. At our house, you can often hear more birds singing than anything else. She was in fifth grade. We had just turned onto the paved road when I noticed I had to pedal without lagging to keep up with her. I looked over, and her thin, springy legs seemed a foot and a half longer than they had just the week before. Her arms had long, defined muscles; her neck seemed elongated; her whole body had a different energy, her face a different glow. I didn’t stare but I noticed, and I remember thinking that she was the most beautiful, most coordinated, elegant, energized eleven-year-old girl in the world. And then I thought, why couldn’t I keep focused on the passing of time? I seemed to spend too much time wanting to make life speed up or slow down.
We pulled up to a narrow, round-rock beach with almost black sand and hauled our kayaks out of the water to have lunch. I could not stop imagining what it would have been like for the Native people who lived here hundreds of years earlier, making a life in these sometimes sublime and sometimes intensely extreme water worlds.
Several hours later, moving quietly south, we had almost reached the tip of Holgate Head. The contour lines showing elevation gain were so close together around here on the map that the land just appeared brown. If we kept traveling west and then north in these kayaks, it would be about 140 miles to Homer from here. If we could have flown over the mountains and glaciers, it would have been about 65 miles. Why does Alaska make me feel that I can fly?
Mark had said we’d like it when we got to Holgate Head, the north point of land that opened into a small, five-mile-long bay called Holgate Arm. There were pillars of rock coming out of the ocean and arches. The tide was falling; exposed on the rock were many starfish, overlapping, offering up unusual colors to this world of blues and grays and whites.
“Dad, where are we going from here?” Rebekah asked.
Mark was a hundred yards ahead of us at a point where he’d either have to turn right to stay close to the rock or go straight and make an ocean crossing of a few miles. If we flipped our kayaks, we wouldn’t be able to crawl up on the land because much of it was too steep. You could tread water for a bit, maybe hold on with your hands, but then your extremities would go numb.
Mark waited for us. He laid his head back on the kayak, kind of squeezed himself farther down in the boat, and seemed to become deeply relaxed. He made me think of a sea otter on its back; they spent most of their lives floating on the water’s surface. They floated so well because they have the most follicles of fur per square inch of any mammal, and the fur traps air. It’s one reason they roll in the water, to replenish the air in their fur.
“We’ll cross Holgate Arm, and on the other side of here is Quicksand Cove, where we will probably camp for tonight,” Mark said, confident leader that he is.
“How far is it?” I asked.
“A couple miles. The water here is a bit rough; just ride the waves and keep going until we get there, okay?”
“O—” was all I got out before a booming breath-sound interrupted me and forced me to turn my head.
A humpback whale had surfaced not one hundred feet from us. Mark told us that out here where the bay and Aialik Bay merged, an underwater shelf went straight across from land to land; it was where Holgate Glacier’s face had once been. Today the face of this glacier was about five miles away. Mark had said that the humpbacks, killer whales, salmon, and Dall porpoise liked to feed here because currents loaded with herring and other small fish came out of the deep and were pushed up along this shelf, where the water’s depth goes abruptly from three hundred or four hundred feet to sixty feet.
Mark paddled with quick strokes toward the whale, as if he wanted to join it. Then two whales surfaced, one after the other, feeding aggressively and breathing in shorter intervals.
“Dad, how do the whales know what’s on top of the water when they’re coming up to breathe? How do they keep from hitting boats or driftwood?” Rebekah asked.
She had stopped paddling. I could tell that until she was confident in my answer, we’d be staying here.
“I would think the whale looks up before it breaks the surface, turns one eye up,
wouldn’t you?” At that moment, another whale came shooting out of the water, straight up like a missile. It was lunge feeding, diving down and coming straight up through a school of small fish. The water around us was strongly turbulent; the whales were feeding, surfacing quickly, moving fast.
“How about if we’re not sure, we let these hungry whales pass by?” Rebekah suggested, tucking in her hair, which was tied back in a red scarf. “Have you ever seen a whale look up before it surfaced, Daaaad?”
“No, I haven’t been that close.”
I tried to visualize a humpback whale coming up directly underneath our kayak. What would that kind of force do to us? I could see that painting of Moby Dick, breaking apart the large oceangoing whaling ship. Are whales color-blind or would they be able to see the yellow of our little cork?
We floated by a rock spire. The mountains on either side of Holgate Glacier, about five miles from us, formed the sides of a stage. The clouds dripped down from high above and softened the hard rock sides of our private show. The backdrop for the stage was the face of the glacier, which was lit bright ice-blue, like a million fluorescent lights. The top of the sea was the floor, the hunting whales the actors with the biggest parts. We were the audience, just us three. Nothing I have ever seen, including Mount Everest; my first sight of the Pacific Ocean by Florence, Oregon, after taking five years to walk there; my farm pastures, ringed by red and yellow maples at the height of fall, lit by the late-day sun; the canyon land around Moab, Utah; nothing could compare to the sight made by this stage and these actors.
Looking for Alaska Page 16