Dirt Work

by Christine Byl

  Late afternoon as we were heading home, the ocean came alive with pink salmon, leaping at the mouth of the creek we had to cross to get back to the cabin. We had no fishing gear; we could practically catch them with our hands. Still, they were faster than they looked, so we got creative. In log piles at the head of the beach, I found a buried section of net and a serrated takeout knife to cut it free. Chloe and I held the net, gating the width of the creek. Gabe waded upstream, forcing the fish into our arms like the loser in red rover. Only one got tangled. Most of the salmon darted beneath the net or found its torn holes. But one was enough. Alaskans don’t go far out of the way to eat pinks, which, far inferior in texture to silvers, reds, and kings, are usually saved for cannery products, smoking, or dog food. But this one flopped on the sand, opalescent and firm. Ocean-fresh pink, one-minute-dead, over an open fire, is still worth eating. Gabe pinned its tail, Chloe thanked it for its life, and I cracked its skull with a driftwood cudgel. Back at the cabin, Chloe wrapped the fish in foil. Gabe and I rooted through the tide-line plastic and we built a fire from all the wood we could haul. Log rounds sanded by waves, the blade of an oar, a broken pallet. The refuse was damp and it smoldered, but it burned.

  And now for our special feature: Indiana Jones and the Bridge of Horror. Midway through the Copper River trip, our five-person crew had covered four miles over four days, clearing an epic amount of brush and deadfall from the easement alignment. The ground was wet with fallen leaves and mud, and every half hour, one of us toppled, knee-deep in a hole, tripping over a concealed root, failing to notice that the ground, obscured by devil’s club, dropped out from under our feet. At first, it was funny to see a crewmate disappear suddenly, head and shoulders visible above the brush line and then nothing, like they’d fallen through a trap door. At first, we hollered, “Man down!” and tallied who’d taken a plunge. Soon it was old news. No one commented. Pick yourself up, pull the chainsaw dogs out of your neck, and move on. Only a full-on face-plant or a bloody injury was worthy of mention.

  We knew from our GPS data that the alignment would cross a few creeks. There are no bridges on easement trails, but previous crews felled a tree or cobbled together a rock crossing to make some fords easier. The first creek had a log spanning the fifteen-foot channel, but de-barked and soaking wet, it was too slick to walk across upright, especially in Tufs. We shimmied across on our butts, straddling the log and mantling with our arms. Staggered along the span, we passed the power tools over our heads, trying to pivot on the seat of our Hellies without losing balance or ripping holes. Our legs gripped the log tight to counter the slip of rubber raingear against the slimy wood. Later, when I looked at the photos of this procedure, it was hard to imagine how it had ever made any sense, that lineup of people sitting two feet above the current with chainsaws hoisted in the air, raindrops sweating on the camera’s lens.

  After the first crossing, which we surmounted twice daily, there were several miles without any major obstacles, only the constants of trail and work. By the last day, it looked like we’d make it to our GPS-ed termination point if we pushed hard. We were blissed out on the peeking sun and the high of impending completion, a rare luxury in easement land, when we dropped into a gulley and saw the final hurdle. Another river crossing. This one three times wider than the first, spanned similarly with a slick old-growth log, a whitewater hole just downstream. Intimidating, at best.

  I charged up to the log with the brainless drive that sometimes overtakes me when a group is paralyzed. I have to just do something. We’ll use the same technique as with the other bridge, I told them, undaunted by the wider span and the higher-stakes plunge I’d take if I fell in. Offering myself as bridge guinea pig, I sat on the log and began the shimmy. A few feet off the bank, I smelled an intense fishy odor, sharper than it had been since we’d left beach camp that morning. As I got farther out, the log bowed and the water level rose until it almost touched the bottom of the log and the soles of my dangling, splayed-out feet. It was scarier than I thought it would be. Then I noticed the fish, a layer of dead salmon trapped in the limbs on the log’s upstream side. Spawned out and done in, they’d given in to the downstream push and ended up stuck and rotten, disintegrating under my boots. I’m not particularly squeamish, but I recoiled from the spooky fish carcasses with the instinctive clutch of doom I used to get as a child when I turned my back to go up the basement stairs.

  I don’t like to give up, especially not with the crew watching from shore, especially not on a task I asked for. I squinted my eyes and dragged on, butt muscles clenched. The odor made me gag. The heels of my Tufs dragged through the scaly debris, separating chunks of flesh from the skeletons. I made it to the far bank, barely, slipping as I stepped off so one leg dropped into the river knee-deep and water filled my boot. This misstep is called “topping out,” and it means you owe the crew a six-pack. But no one had noticed. They were too busy cheering that I’d made it across without drowning. On dry ground, I jumped around and shook my freezing hands, shouting to bleed out the horror of the crossing. Worst, I still had to get back. It was late in the day and obvious by then that the crossing, which took me ten minutes unencumbered by tools, was neither efficient nor safe for a crew of five people with chainsaws and brushers. Not even possible for Bess, with very short legs and a low tolerance for risk.

  After a brief foray on my side of the river, including a covert boot-dump, I was buoyed to report that in fact, the GPS-ed end was not in sight, there was no survey marker that I could find, and we likely would never have finished even by the following day, let alone this one. We’d already be pushing overtime just to get back to camp. (This made it easier to leave than if the finish had been right before our eyes but unattainable.) On the passage back across the log, all the limb stobs faced the wrong way, and as I wriggled along they jabbed me in the crotch. Once, I looked down too long at the hollowed-out eyes of fish and almost fell in. When I reached the bank, the crew slapped me on the back. Gabe concurred that the crossing was not in the stars for us. We found a spruce with low boughs downstream from the fish stench and ate a quick snack, stale Clif Bars and soggy trail mix. For a few minutes, the sun shone brighter than it had in days.

  “That was fully creepy,” said Bryant. I might have agreed, but I was too preoccupied with the moral dilemma I’d been mulling over since I’d rejoined the crew. When we arose to begin the hike out, I had made my decision, the honorable one.

  “Guys,” I confessed, “I owe you a six-pack.”

  Once, I called them “sea gulls.” My friend, a birder, laughed and said, “You know there’s no such thing as a sea gull, right? That’s just a common misuse. What do you call a gull in a bay, a bagel?” Feeble sea gull, shot full of holes. Truth is, then, commonly, I did not know. Now I know, having lived momentarily at ocean’s edge, woken to their daily complaint. Now I know legal sea gull names: Glaucous-winged Ross’s Sabine’s Mew Bonaparte Little Laughing Ring-Billed Black-headed Franklin’s California Herring Iceland Black-tailed Thayer’s Yellow-footed Glaucous Western Heermann’s Ivory Lesser Black-backed Greater Black-backed Slaty-backed Gull! (Thank you, Mr. Sibley.)

  I have floated through jiggling rafts of seagulls, pealed out of harbor in a rickety Whaler ducking from fecal seagull debris. I have cleaned halibut down by the dock, tossing heads and tails and bloody entrails to gulls in murkish harbor water lapping at the Auklet’s slip (old wooden trawler fish-gut hull). On drafts of seaside breezes, brave as eagles, sea gulls, fishing for salmon in the jaws of bears.

  Regal sea gulls, kings of ocean edge I dub you: white pretty bird common and dull. Greedy shopper, haggler, always wants the best fish heads for nothing! Bird of my youth—free gull—wailing above the Great Lake like you owned the place.

  High up above the sea’s fall, I found a seashell at two thousand feet. What whimsy takes gulls far from tides and up toward passes on wind—lee, lull—to drop a shell near the summit of the peak we
climbed on the last day before fall rains began?

  Linked with liquid, salt and silt, boats and stink and salmon milt, fogged-up windows overlooking the sea, gulls run ocean towns. They let me stay.

  Traildogs are adrenaline junkies. We take to the mountains full-throttle. We drive old trucks and station wagons with gear racks on top, our kayaks and bicycles and skis worth more than the vehicles below. On days off, we pursue backcountry adventures with the discipline and fervor that other people apply to stock portfolios or child rearing. There’s always a map out on the desk, a trip plan in the back of the mind. The great outdoors can seem a giant playground, with unlimited equipment, and (in remote places) no lines for the slide.

  In the Lower 48, this description typifies outdoor professionals and those who flock to mountain towns in search of what their homelands didn’t offer—the freedom of the hills, and companions to travel with. The worst incarnation of this culture is the Boulder, Colorado, caricature, the Outside magazine marketplace addict for whom place is commodity and pursuit status symbol. But for many of us, climbing peaks and riding single-track is a treasured way of life, a spine we’ve strengthened to hold up lives we love. I don’t say this scornfully. I have the truck, the rack, the kayak, the bike, the skis.

  And I moved to Alaska with all this gear, lured in part by the notion of adventure’s Last Frontier, whose geographical realities and mercurial weather would dwarf all but the smallest of my dreams. What I found in Cordova instead was surprising, a mentality, embodied by many of Alaska’s rural inhabitants, that was not defined by an emphasis on leisure. Though Cordova is surrounded by craggy peaks and ocean, most local people did not spend their days on mountain traverses or paddling trips. People spent their days picking and canning berries. Catching and preserving salmon. Halibut fishing, mending nets, boat up on sawhorses for tinkering. Sheep hunts. A greenhouse to build. Watching birds.

  The climate explained it some—the snowpack by the time we arrived was too rotten for late-spring ski runs, and rain shut us out of the high country plenty of days, a chill and muddy playground too grim for outdoor recess. Also, there was the languid pace of isolated, small-town life, where motivation is easily sapped by the relaxed ethos and days pass chatting with neighbors, helping get wood in, lending a hand. But more than that, Cordova’s outdoor rhythms, as in much of nonurban Alaska, were dictated by the necessity of subsistence in a way I had never imagined in the Lower 48. Cordova is cut off from the road system and groceries are expensive, so most families supplemented the American diet with all the wild food they could bag, net, or shoot. Halibut trips were referred to as “grocery runs” and the vigorous, end-of-berry-season canning frenzy really felt like “putting up.”

  This Alaskan disposition is due also in part to the values of native communities, a more integrated part of the state’s identity than anywhere else I’d lived. Alaska Native people’s relationship to this geography has for eons been founded on the presence of nature, not the mitigation of it. It’s easy to romanticize this too much, to make of every rural Alaskan a wise elder or a salty Sourdough, humble and self-sufficient. Yet, lots of Alaskans do live like this, for many reasons. Because they always have—subsistence not just a tradition, but a way of life in some communities, and because they can—there is space here, and the animals and plants that come with space. Because they want to—drawn by culture or principle or temperament to the effort and the meaning that a worked-for life confers—and because, sometimes, out of need, they must.

  In Montana, we’d return to work after days off and friendly competition ensued among the crews. We narrated weekend escapades, vying for the gnarliest accomplishment: climbed five peaks in ten hours, skied the three bowls you can see from the pass, biked to Polebridge and back, hopped the border for cragging in Canada (yes, they searched the truck). In Cordova, our weekends were shorter, with little bragging. Caught a few fish. Went for a spin in the boat. Puttered in the rain, looking for critters. The scope changed, and with it, the assumptions about what nature should deliver.

  At times, I missed the old days. I longed for the weather and the stretch of time to rage the peaks I could see through shifting clouds outside our apartment window. Some weeks, I yearned for a place where people pushed themselves to their VO2 max, where someone else’s personal best could spur you to transcend physical limits of your own. I longed for the old me, who woke up chafing at the bit, ready for any distance, any summit, any plan. Instead, the truck sat parked, the skis in the closet, even the hiking boots mostly nixed for XtraTufs. Adrenaline, and the pursuit of the edge, seemed like a relic from a different life.

  But I’d had those days. And I’d have them again. Despite the claustrophobia, the torpor, even, of that rainy summer, I am grateful for the lessons Cordova and its people underscored for me. A reminder that though soft-shells and front shocks and fat skis have their place, they do not themselves confer connection. Outdoors is not catalog or movie set, not just work site, not even sanctuary, no matter how nuanced my desires appeared (name the plants, still the soul). Outdoors is a place where salmon swim upstream to die where they were born, where bears eat the salmon so they can survive their winter dens, where humans move through calling loudly, intent on fish and berries and bears. It’s a place to be reminded that, while sport is fun, while the rush of summits, linked ski turns, and belay stances are a joyful thing, they are second. Auxiliary to a world that is not playground but homeschool, where I am taught to settle in, over and over, until being outside isn’t about endurance or leisure, but life.

  I arrived in Cordova on the ferry, seasick and jelly-legged and curious. I left Cordova on a plane, an initiate into the cult of boats, but not a full-fledged member. Over four months spent seaside, I rode in or on a raft, a jet boat, a kayak, a ferry, a Whaler, a bowpicker, a canoe, and a wildlife cruise ship. I piloted, briefly and illegally, the crew boat, with Gabe’s licensed hand ready to take the wheel, and the row oars of the raft on a mellow section of the Copper until, after about half an hour, my saw-weary shoulders went numb. I unloaded and loaded boats, backed the trailer into its spot in the yard (but not down the steep boat ramp at the harbor, in front of all the fishermen), helped repair the prop on the Evinrude, filled fuel cans, changed spark plugs, recoiled pull cords, and bettered my bowline, which I could almost do one-handed (not quite). Yet of all the tools I’d used for work and loved, the boat remained the most resistant. I knew it would take me seasons longer to become a true pro, comfortable on the water with chop and wind and passengers who leaned too far over the side and made my stomach clench. I wouldn’t have that time. Our Cordova season was to remain singular, epic, almost mythic in status. The time I’d look back on fondly from farther inland, those months when I got my feet wet, and fell, tentatively, in love with the sea.

  Rain gear. Foul-weather wear. PVC coat, stiff hood up. Sleeves gape. Why don’t they put a cinch on these damn cuffs? Cotton lining soaks fast: rain in, damp sweat. Gore-Tex is pointless, waterlogged in minutes. Why buy this crap? Rain like this skunks technology. Fishermen’s gear, off-the-dock our only prayer for dry. Helly Hansens. Grundens. Stove-pipe legged rubber overalls, suspender buckle click. Orange. Green. Yellow. Bright and thick, knees slick. Too hot to hike fast. Clammy cold when still. Clothes hardly matter, except wet cotton kills. Grit your teeth. Keep moving, steady, tough, outlast. Shiver. Brain over rain. Dry always comes.

  XtraTufs were my Cordova souvenir, what I took with me from the coast to use everywhere else. (Thank you, Steve.) Statewide, Tufs are the badge of a local. If you see them on someone’s feet in the Seattle airport, you can guess they’re going home to Alaska, like you. In recent years, Tufs have made the leap from work prop to fashion statement, and like Carhartts on movie stars, they now crop up in settings unrelated to tides, dirt, or sweat. I’ve seen chic Anchorage girls sashay through town in miniskirts and glossy new Tufs, work boots recast as couture, ready for the nightclub. They’re trying to
own a place, I know, trying to stake the local claim, just as I was, getting off the ferry in my shiny pair. But the girls have missed the point. Tufs are ugly, more sweaty than hot. The thing that makes them sexy is what they’ve done, what they bear to prove it—fish stink, mud, moose dung mashed in the tread. Few of us are local, and those who are know best: we don’t own anywhere. All we—or our boots—can say is where we’ve been.

  SKID STEER

  Terminology A skid steer is a compact earthmover with a hydrostatic transmission. Left and right tires operate independently, granting dexterity in tight quarters. Technically, skid steers are wheeled, but track loaders are often lumped into the same category, and whether a Cat or a Deere or a Kubota, people call it “a Bobcat”; like Kleenex, one name fits all. Some call a skid steer a loader, but minus the prefix “mini” or “skid steer,” loader more precisely refers to a front-end loader, the heavy equipment with an articulated front end and a lift arm positioned in front of the operator’s cab. (A Bobcat’s lift arms pivot from the side, tightening its footprint.) Loaders do the massive lifting and digging, while a Bobcat tackles smaller-scale tasks, with far less expertise required to operate one safely. Toddlers have the best name for skid steers. “Auntie C,” my three-year-old niece says with awe, “you can drive a digger?”

  Uses For trailwork, a Bobcat moves gravel. It loads a five-yard dump truck, or a flatbed pickup, or power wheelbarrows, called toters, used to get fill into place on a trail. Other tasks: moving vegetation for replanting, cutting bench trail, spreading mulch, perfecting dirt work, hauling brush, and plowing snow. But remember, and this is very important, a Bobcat is not a man-lift. It should never be used to transport a crew down the trail all piled into the bucket. You should never stand in the bucket while the operator raises the arms so you can limb a high branch on a tree, or hide somebody’s ball cap on top of a tool shed.