Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  I did remember someone telling me that a young whale breached somewhere near Juneau and landed on a sport fishing boat. So I agreed we should probably play it safe and stay to the side of the bay until the whales moved on by.

  The hunting whales traveled closer to the glacier. Their passionate lunge feeding leaps became more numerous. The sun broke through the clouds and shone upon the glacier, and the whales were backlit by it each time they broke out of the water.

  SHE COULD NOT TOUCH THE BOTTOM

  The whales were halfway to the glacier now, so Rebekah began paddling. Mark was at least a half mile ahead of us. We paddled and paddled across the two miles, and I kept waiting to hear the whales’ breath again. There must have been much feed for them toward the glacier. Right in the middle of the bay we passed a small bunch of feeding, deep-diving puffins. Once across we rounded a rock point into Quicksand Cove. There a dampness was in the air, and not a ripple anywhere. It was completely different from Holgate Arm, though we were right beside it.

  This part of the Alaskan coast reminded me of Maine, where I had spent a couple summers during college. The irregular rock coastline, the preponderance of evergreens, the numerous bays, all reminded me of that northernmost eastern state. But for each rock outcropping in Maine, you’d have to add a rock mountain on top of it to get an idea of the magnitude here in Alaska. Also, Alaska’s almost twenty times larger in area and has about half the population. No offense meant, Maine.

  How could this cove be so radically different from the bay we just crossed? Quicksand Cove was total tranquillity, with a smooth and comparatively wide beach. A narrow, rushing, powerful creek ran into the end of it. Mark told us there was a small salmon run here. We could see some of them jumping out of the water where the creek flowed into the cove. At the end of Quicksand Cove, where we would set up our tents, several large logs had washed up; the land rose slightly into forest, then rocketed almost straight up from sea level over four thousand feet. A couple of smaller hanging glaciers were on top of the mountain. Every place we had been on this kayak trip had overwhelmed us, being singularly spectacular, and in every place we were the only humans around. In fact, all of Alaska had reignited my love for life; my soul felt as it had when I was in my twenties.

  So often in my life, when I saw something that inspired me or something good happened, I found myself reaching for a phone to call my parents, to let them know about something that would make them happy or proud. I knew they would have been thrilled to hear that Rebekah and I were together in such a place. Rebekah was their first grandchild; they knew my divorce from her mother had been most unsettling, saddest, most traumatic for her.

  Why did the differences between Quicksand Cove and Holgate Arm bring my parents to the movie screen in my head? We’d pulled our kayaks far up onto the beach; as we unpacked in silence, I looked out beyond the driftwood to the protective horseshoe of land that outlined the polished peace of this little bay. It was so completely different from the larger bay we’d just paddled across. Holgate Arm’s surface was agitated, big and brawny. The glacier met the ocean dramatically, violently, pieces of itself smashing, almost exploding, into the sea. That bay scared you with its forcefulness. That bay was like my father.

  Quicksand Cove was perfect, still, like my mother. Even the water fell from the mountaintops gently. The surface of the ocean was the definition of tranquil. Even the glaciers, their forces almost supernatural, were not at the water’s surface but high up in the mountaintops, not too loud or threatening, not overpowering. By the time their dangerous pieces broke off and reached the water where we were, there was basically no impact.

  Mark had set up his tent, hung our food high up in a tree, and was fishing. Rebekah had set up our tent as well and was leaning against one of the largest driftwood logs, writing in her journal. She seemed at home for being in such a place. Was it her long neck, the perfect way she printed, her thin face, the way she loved taking care of little children—whatever it was, Rebekah constantly reminded me of my mother. Though there were also parts of Rebekah—her fire; her quick ability to defend; her wild, impenetrable head of hair—that had no relation to my blond mother. Maybe the passing on of our genes was a way for our loved ones to always be with us, their memory never fading.

  The stillness and green color of the water here reminded me of a past vacation; it was the same color and the same calmness as the setting for a significant experience of Rebekah’s and mine. It was the summer of her sixth year; we were in North Carolina, and for two days she had been “swimming” where she could not touch the bottom. It was a freshwater lake, so it was the kind of dark water that held so much mystery down deep where none of us could see. It was like trying to see into jade. At first she kicked a lot but tried to hold on to my neck, almost choking me. Late in the first afternoon, she moved her arms and legs and breathed and at times even let go of me as I swam underneath her. Every several seconds she touched my back with her hand or foot to make sure I was still there, even if the back of my head was right in front of her.

  On the afternoon of the third day, Rebekah said she wanted to swim out to the float in the deepest part of the lake where the teenagers were diving off or lying in the sun. I asked her how she wanted to do it; she said she wanted me to swim next to her. She started out, then stopped where she knew she could still stand. She gazed for a moment across the deep, opaque water, then pushed off again. She swam slowly, always keeping her head out of the green water. I stayed close. Less than halfway there, she veered toward me as if she were going to ask me to help, but then she moved back. She would make it there on her own; I could see that on her face. She had realized that she could swim on top of the deep water. She sped up as she got closer to the little ladder. Reaching it, she climbed out, and a tanned fifteen-year-old god and goddess lifted up their heads to see who had invaded their heady world. When they saw it was a six-year-old, they shut their eyes again, returning to dreams of each other, or whatever. Rebekah didn’t say any foolish words or make obnoxious gestures; she looked around to see where I was, climbed down, and swam back, not asking me to accompany her. Of course, I did. For the rest of our time there she swam back and forth, thinking at the end of another two days that maybe she could swim out there faster than I could. And she did, on the last swim before we left.

  Mark had hooked a pink salmon; they were jumping where the stream they would die in emptied into our private bay. Mark had said that salmon mill around at the mouth in the salt water until they’re ready to spawn. I got up from my place on the beach and began gathering driftwood for a fire. Some pieces were too heavy to lift, so I dragged them to the spot, along with some sun-dried seaweed that made excellent kindling. Soon we had an outstanding fire, giving off the rich odors of smoke and salt. A pair of oyster catchers whose nest was nearby cried out their piercing calls. This was their beach usually.

  We ate and then crawled into our tents trying to keep any mosquitoes from getting in with us.

  I was sleepy; I hadn’t slept but a few hours the previous night and it was warmer here, possibly because of the cove’s protection from the wind. Rebekah and I hadn’t been this close to each other for a long time, and I had a feeling these few days would become moments that we would remember for a lifetime, moments shared by us alone. Why was it so difficult to make times like this happen? As I fell asleep, I vowed to do more with my children. Nodding off, I could hear the winds from far above in the kingdom of the hanging glaciers whooshing down to us and over toward Three Hole Bay.

  When Rebekah and I are together, I tend to be more emotional and more reflective, I’m not sure why. But whatever the reason, I had a dream that night. The dream was actually a replay of a day we’d spent with my parents. Rita, Julianne, and I had gone to my hometown, Greenwich, Connecticut, to see my parents. It was in early July 1995. Julianne was almost five; looking at pictures of my mother when she was that age, she and Julianne could have been twins.

  Mother had wanted to go for a ri
de around town. My father actually agreed to go along, which was a surprise. We had a rented car, something new, which was a delight for them, I’m sure. Mother normally drove a 1970s, blue Chevy Impala. A woman from their church had left it to Mother in her will, after Mother had nursed her through the last months of her life. My mother, still naturally blond at sixty-nine years old, was actually telling me where she wanted to go. That was unusual, a rare moment of self-indulgence for her.

  First she wanted to go to Bruce Park, where we’d had many family picnics on a certain hill with big boulders. The three of us boys, her sons, had made forts in the rocks, only briefly blowing through where my parents and sisters sat to eat. Then Mother wanted to go by the flower gardens in the park, a spot she loved but that we didn’t normally stop to see. Everyone else except maybe my sister Winky wanted to feed the ducks.

  Then Mom wanted to drive over to the Mianus River. She remembered we boys used to go over there in the summer to jump off the rope swing. She pointed just up the hill toward Old Greenwich; my youngest brother, Fred, had married Coleen at that Catholic church. Now Fred and Coleen had four children, and Mother had been baby-sitting for them lately. Mother asked me to head back toward town past the YWCA, right across from the Congregational church and the temple. She’d run the YWCA day-care center for years and was so beloved that they’d named a playground after her. I asked her if she wanted to turn in. She asked if I wanted to see the playground. So we turned in and saw the place where Mother had encouraged hundreds of children to have fun, to not fight, to love other living things. Six of her own children were not enough for all the pure love she had in her heart.

  I pulled the Ford Taurus out onto the Post Road and drove out to Craig McAllister’s old house. Craig had been one of my best friends, a prep school kid who sometimes drove his mother’s two-door, white Mercedes down to our low-rent neighborhood. He took my mother for a ride once. He was always teasing her because she called him Craig when he wanted to be called Craze. When we got to the deeply shaded, dead-end street where the McAllisters used to live, Mother asked how Craig was doing. I told her we had recently reconnected; he was back to being Craig, with two beautiful daughters and a wife he loved, and he lived in California. Mother was happy to hear it. The whole situation felt a bit odd to me; Mother seemed so deliberate, lingering everywhere, much more emotional than usual. Maybe it was just that I hadn’t seen her in too long. Maybe I’d changed and become more sensitive. Anyway, something was different.

  She wanted to drive down Greenwich Avenue and told us about walking three of us in a stroller up the avenue to Woolworth’s. I’d seen a black-and-white photo, her thin arms and narrow face like Rebekah’s, her blond hair pulled back, wearing shorts even though she complained that having all those babies had given her varicose veins. We drove farther, by the Greenwich Police Department. She asked me if those really were our clothes and bikes the police had confiscated back in high school. The three of us brothers and a couple of friends were accused of skinny-dipping in four straight pools. We’d gotten nailed, and they’d taken our clothes and bikes. We’d had to walk the more than two miles home nude. Twenty-eight years later when I told her it was us, she laughed and laughed and laughed. I don’t think I’d ever heard her laugh like that before. Maybe she was just getting more carefree. Maybe she’d taken a class at the YWCA; something about Mother was different.

  We drove by where we used to board the Island Beach boat, our town’s own “island beach” on Long Island Sound. She remembered how I learned to swim on my dad’s back. She remembered how Dad used to be a lifeguard, a very handsome one at Rye Beach, where they’d met and married. Mother asked if there was anywhere we wanted to go, but we said no. Mother was directing us, and we were doing what she wanted. Dad didn’t say much, if anything. He went along with it, even enjoyed it. That ride was a completely different time from any other I could ever remember with my mother and father.

  When we got home to the house on Pemberwick Road, the one they had moved into the year I went off to college, I opened their red door and we all walked in. For my first eighteen years, we’d lived mostly in a federal housing project named Wilbur Peck Court. Inside, the old radio was playing “Wichita Lineman” by Glen Campbell. I went to the hall to look at a collage of pictures on the wall of our children that we’d given them last Christmas.

  Mother told me she loved the pictures, then turned and said, “Let’s dance.”

  It was something I never thought I’d hear my mother ask me. She grabbed my hands and tried to waltz or do some box step in that little space with me. I am her first child, the one they slipped up and still sometimes called “cowboy.” Dad, Rita, and Julianne looked at us as if we were crazy. As we tried to dance, I thought of how we used to harass Mother because she loved this song by Lou Christie, something about “in the jungle, the mighty jungle.” Being a loving son, ready to do any rare thing my mother asked, I danced with her, awkwardly, if that’s what she wanted. Late that evening we caught our plane home from White Plains to Nashville.

  A few days later we got a call at home in Tennessee. Something was wrong with Mother, my sister Winky said. Dad had said she’d had stomach pain for some time, but she’d kept it to herself. Mother was an RN, so she knew about the human body. Winky’s husband, Randy, said something about the possibility of pancreatic cancer. None of us knew then that pancreatic in front of cancer was perhaps the worst combination of words in the world. Randy said he’d looked it up on the Internet and it was really bad.

  By this point in the events of that time, I couldn’t handle the dream and had awakened. It was quite dark and still in our tent.

  After talking to Winky and Randy, I’d quickly arranged a trip back to Connecticut with Rebekah, Jed, and Luke. All her children and grandchildren gathered around Mother. She asked to speak to all of us and said she just wanted to ask one thing of us: “that you all love each other.” Mother died a week or so later. When I stood in her room the last time I saw her, I looked at her and wanted to be strong and smile and be happy for her, but all I could do was cry and cry and cry. Mother was beyond crying; she was already somewhere else that I will someday know. She pulled me to her and whispered, “You don’t worry about me, you love those kids.” Rebekah, who had her spirit, was sitting by her side.

  I fell back to sleep eventually, but had a hard time getting up the next morning. Rebekah and Mark were already sitting on the beach talking when I emerged from the tent. A fog hid everything but a small piece of the cove. Our boat was to pick us up in a few hours. Rebekah got into the single kayak and paddled steadily into the fog until she was gone, off to explore by herself. She returned when she heard the boat’s diesel motor rumbling faintly in the fog.

  8

  No Road

  The word road is so boring, so unappreciated, but so essential, even resonant. Some of my favorite songs are about hitting the road. Many of my life’s most inspiring moments came from traveling down unknown roads until I found something that surprised me and I stopped for a bit. But in Alaska, so many places cannot be reached by a road. Cordova, Alaska, is one of them. Dominating barriers surround this picturesque fishing village. The Chugach Mountains and the Robinson Mountains rise up on one side, the Copper River delta on another. The ocean, which has taken so many lives, is on the other. Adding to the city’s protection is glacier after glacier after glacier after glacier. They seem at first glance to be coming to crush the city, but actually they are retreating ever so slowly.

  Beyond that first row of mountain, water, or glacier blockades lie even more. There are the Wrangell Mountains, which are part of the 13-million-acre Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve, the largest U.S. national park. There are also the Talkeetna Mountains, and beyond them, the Alaska Range. Seventeen of the twenty highest mountain peaks in the United States are in Alaska. Some of these, the majority of Cordovans think, help to guard Cordova. Many of the people in this fishing village are actually glad that cars, trucks, campers
, and SUVs can’t reach them. Of course this means they can’t drive away, either. For restless people this would be awful. In Cordova you need to fulfill your need for movement in a boat, on a snowboard, in a float plane, on a snow machine, atop a surfboard, or on foot. You could drive out their main road until it ends, over fifty miles away. A fifty-mile trip in a place like Cordova on a road is practically a cross-country journey. You would cross some of the most inspiring country in the world on a journey like that.

  Being able to drive away, to listen to great long and winding road songs, is not that big of a deal to Alaskans. You cannot even drive to Juneau, the capital of Alaska. Alaskan citizens who are tough on politicians say that the governor, state senators, and representatives like being isolated and hard to reach. They claim Alaskan politicians hide behind their mountains and glaciers. In Alaska it’s difficult to get mad enough at what the politicos are doing to go to the capital and protest when you can’t drive there.

  Roads in general are difficult to build and maintain in much of Alaska, always have been. Just as you’d imagine, the state gets massive amounts of snow in many parts. In some passes they get over seventy-five feet per winter. Valdez, the community closest to Cordova to the northwest, but still really hard to reach from Cordova, has so much snow they have in the past used the resulting banks as movie screens. The abundant snow around Valdez is one of the main reasons they host the extreme-snowboarding championships every winter. Then there is permafrost, ground that never thaws completely. In some places in Alaska they only have roads after everything freezes. They build them on the frozen foundations of snow and ice. All in all, though, there aren’t many roads in Alaska, and what roads do exist are deeply appreciated and even loved for the freedom of movement they allow, just as long as they don’t bring too much interference too. Alaskans are a stubborn, strong people; they must be to survive. Please, don’t get in their way.