Starting Out In the Afternoon

by Jill Frayne

  Six weeks from home, I’m longing for company. I get in small chats in grocery stores or campgrounds, but mostly I travel as though encased in Plexiglas. Crossing the country was a pleasure. Solitude was new terrain—like swimming underwater with a breathing hose—but I don’t think prolonging my isolation on the kayaking trip added to a good thing. Being alone in a group isn’t solitude, it’s lack of connection. Ultimately wearing.

  This guy from Wyoming was friendly, and after fifteen days in the Charlottes paddling incommunicado, an unrestrained gab with anybody would have been a relief.

  I wheel my bike onto the ferry this afternoon in a funk. The Malaspina has a vast storage belly and more decks than seems safe. In my present state no one on board looks like anyone I want to talk to, except for one ropy, white-haired woman on her own, with her sleeves rolled up over her elbows and very brown knuckles. She approaches me this evening and introduces herself as Audrey Sutherland, on her way to Juneau to paddle for the summer, her habit for the past twelve years. She lives in Hawaii and writes books about kayaking. She’s sixty-three.

  “You’re pretty intrepid, paddling alone all summer.”

  “Why not?” she says. “No one knows how fast I go.”

  She gives me her address and takes my picture on the doused black wharf at Wrangell when I get off with my bike at midnight.

  I speed along a battered, empty road to a baseball diamond where camping’s allowed, and put up my tent by feel in the inky dark. Just as I crawl in, I hear a van or some kind of truck pull into the park and come to a halt ten feet from me. Some locals and their dates, several sheets to the wind, settle in for the after-hours leg of the evening. I worm to the back of the tent, praying for cover of darkness. I don’t want an encounter in a strange town in the middle of the night. Either they can’t see me or the sight of a nylon hump out the truck window is unexceptional; nobody bothers me. While beer bottles thunk around the tent, I eavesdrop on a long, unimaginative excoriation of Wrangell citizenry. When they drive off at last, I get out of the tent and, irrationally, move it.

  JULY 22

  This morning the world looks sharp-edged and brilliant, like after a heart attack, every detail adrenalin-scoured. I see I’m in a cemetery, not a ball field, and I’m not alone. There are two backpackers fast asleep on a picnic table the next lot over. Where were they during the hijinks?

  There’s a ferry at noon and I don’t plan to stay around Wrangell. Riding out on my bike, the town looks frowzy and played out. I pass rusted-out car parts in untended yards, heaved sidewalks fringed with crabgrass, lanky wildflowers humpbacked in the ditches. A despondent sign, drooping on its fittings, announces, “Open Some Afternoons.” I hurry on, as if slowing to look would be unkind.

  There’s time before the ferry to hunt on the beach for the petroglyphs Audrey told me about. The rock here has a creased, soft look, like Plasticine. After a while I find them, worn spiral shapes and blocky human faces with bull’s eyes, depressions in the stone that seem pressed by some ancient finger, strangely stirring. While I stand in the clutter of rock, the bright green tide dashes in, filling the shore in minutes as if a huge gate on the horizon had been lifted.

  EVERY BOAT is more monstrous than the last. Could the Columbia be even bigger than the leviathan I was on yesterday? I can’t figure out what’s wrong with me. Another grand funk. Am I bad at being in motion? I’ve felt homeless and itchy since Ketchikan.

  I conclude it’s Haida Gwaii hangover, too fast a toppling from the heady air of those old camps and beaches to these clanging boat decks. The border between the nerves and the world is only skin, after all. We hurl ourselves from place to place, but really we don’t transpose so easily.

  And the boats wear me out.

  I like being alone when there’s no one around. It’s a nice freedom to be the only one there, humming and coping, following my impulse. Being by myself in a public place is different, though, and requires a certain sturdiness. It brings in the element of self-consciousness. I’m not past wondering how I appear to others, gear-encumbered and obviously on a journey of some length. I don’t look like a woman hopping up the channel to the next town to watch her son play baseball. Do people think I couldn’t get anyone to come with me? Maybe I look like I’m impossible to live with.

  In the long run it’s probably easier, causes less wear and tear, to be with somebody. On the boats I notice most people are. They’re preoccupied in families or couples, and don’t have to think about what to do while visible to strangers. The usual dodge for loners is to read or make journal entries or watch scenery intently, but that’s a giveaway. The mark of a person travelling alone is to look resolute.

  IN LATE, BRIGHT afternoon, we churn in to Petersburg, a Tyrolean village strung along the shore. Many lacquered shutters with cutout hearts welcome the traveller, though not the camper: there is nowhere to pitch a tent.

  At last I scrounge a few feet in someone’s yard and think about leaving as soon as possible, my response to all these towns.

  In the laundromat, a fellow from California says there’s nothing to do around here but drink. Given he’s about twenty years old, I’m surprised he sees this as a drawback. He tells me he’s here canning salmon roe for the Japanese and can’t wait to take his five thousand dollars and go home.

  JULY 23

  Last night I dreamt about friends. We’d all been in Haida Gwaii or somewhere preternatural. An old lover had been doing some kind of work that discoloured his arms; they were blue as a tattoo. The trend of these dreams is always the same: I cannot quite find my place, I want to be closer in but can’t.

  I had a pleasant walk around the wharf after dinner, the water shining and languid at sundown and the pilings long. Timbered hills pen the town, and beyond them the crumpled mountains along the horizon flared pink. Norwegian decals on all the houses are something to overcome, but the gardens and waysides brim with nasturtiums, calendula and forget-me-nots, like a vote for anarchy.

  In this town, fishing proceeds year-round. Petersburg’s one street has a look of prosperity, two-storey frame buildings freshly painted and set tidily side by side. Today I have breakfast in a café at six-thirty, catching the men before they go out on their boats. Across the gender chasm I get into a conversation with a fisherman in his sixties, who tells me what he thinks about government regulations on fishing and forestry.

  “I hate these new rules. They’ve put a halt on roadwork and logging over in Sitka till they figure out who owns the land. A piece of stupidity because of a bunch of people in San Francisco who’ve never even been to Sitka, or anywhere up here. I don’t like meddling and I hate land claims settlements and I’ll tell you why. When Indians go to court and get it settled that they own the land, they don’t have to follow the same rules other loggers abide by—regulations on board feet, say. They’re free to clear-cut their trees, and they damn well do. This notion about understanding the land is bunk. Indians saw down their trees same as anyone else, and then they go to court for more land. I liked their granddaddies fine, but these here ones are not the same at all.”

  These are fighting words, but the anguish in his face stops me cold. When I leave, a bumper sticker on a pickup outside reads, “Make jobs, not wilderness.”

  I guess we want things simple.

  JULY 24

  Audrey’s address bit it this morning when I used the napkin she wrote on to mop up a spill in my tent. My connections here are so frail, I’m sorry to lose this one.

  I give up on a mountain hike, worried about bears, and settle for a cycle around town, during which I find some lower gears, my ten-speed behaving like a ten-speed after all. I spend the afternoon in a dried-up bog, reading and looking up every few minutes, sipping the view. Yellow grass and scabby lodgepole pine fan out in the distance, making their way to dark spruce, the trees spreading over black foothills and up at last to a crinoline of snow mountains where the sky fits the land.

  I’m reading natural history, how mountains
form soil. It did not occur to me that they do, that mountains are in motion. The force of ice and erosion works away down through millennia, breaking off bits of rock, shoving it downward off the mountains, grinding it finer and finer, pushing it into the lowlands, making soil, in an action that never ceases.

  Landscape, which looks so constant, is on the move. The mountains dream on the horizon, but mountains are just passing through. I watch them, wearing, grinding, rising up out there, their motion still the main beat.

  JULY 25

  The night I left Petersburg, the weather changed. I felt it on the ferry, the wind gusting around my deck chair, nosing into my sleeping bag. I had to get up and move under the solarium. Now the aberrant dry is gone; it’s back to rainy business.

  This is Sitka, first a Tlingit, then a Russian, now an American port, on the frayed outer edge of the coast. After some hunting I get a good campsite around the bay from the ferry dock, a den where the trees spread low, all hollows and alcoves, with a natural table where a limb sprawls sideways.

  The town is draped along the shore a few miles down, and when I’ve got my camp organized I ride out. A supermarket I pass along the way stocks fresh orange juice and pesto and stays open till eleven every night. These towns may be mountain-locked, but they’re American through and through.

  Sitka has a compact centre with a long stretch of park around the beach. The Tlingit and Russian heritage leans forward on every street to catch tourists. I ride around in fine rain, get my bike adjusted, buy a tiny argillite carving for Leon. When it starts raining hard, I take cover in the museum, in the wild lost lives salvaged there, the artifacts of the Northwest tribes—Aleut, Athapaskan, Tlingit, Tsimshan and Haida.

  It’s a dusky place, grey light coming through windows high in the walls, the planed floor set with old glass cases like cupboards, the objects inside faint and melancholy. The collection is arranged chronologically. Remnants of a thousand years’ culture work up to the arrival of the Europeans, the new tools and materials the foreigners brought comically and intricately absorbed into the old designs: carved top hats adorning warriors, teacups made of grass. Chilkats went mad on beadwork, stitching bits of European glass into their ceremonial bibs and leggings. The Aleut made exquisite baskets, twined impossibly tight and embellished with tiny designs, vestiges of an interim trading time when the two cultures, European and Native, benefited alike.

  In dull glass cases are some Athapaskan garments made of moose and caribou hides. These inland forest people left the fur on the skin, turning it inward against their bodies in winter. The skins were tanned in an animal-brain solution and smoked to the colour of pollen.

  In another case are Inuit clothes: tailored parkas of skin, fur and translucent gut, footwear lined with dried grass, woven grass socks to fit inside boots. They used the intestines of sea mammals or fish skins to make opaque Early Gore-Tex garments, waterproof and windproof. We think insulation, convection and wicking away moisture are new-tech, but the Inuit knew all about staying warm and dry.

  Their wooden masks were planed smooth and painted a limpid white, with simple cut-outs for eyes and mouth. They look like thin ghosts sprouting scrawny and comical feathers from their heads. There are finger masks and carved rings with tiny antic faces mounted on them.

  Inuit hunting weapons were ivory, fantastically carved. I see one with a procession of caribou half an inch high trailing over the arc of a bow. Another has inlaid figures, spidery and delicate in the yellowing bone. The everyday objects of these people’s lives were works of art—cooking baskets, tools, weapons raised far beyond function.

  The Russians came to Sitka in the eighteenth century to hunt sea otter to decorate the czars. Swatches of the pelts of a dozen fur-bearing animals are displayed, showcasing the beauty of the sea otter’s dense and sparkling fur, superior even to mink. The Russians called the pelts “soft gold” and hunted sea otter to the brink of extinction.

  WHEN THE RAIN subsides I reel outside, where the story continues, history portrayed on a two-mile loop through the rain forest. There are Haida totems in the park, brought here in 1939 and reconstructed by local carvers. They show fine craftsmanship, but for me the new paint severs the link with the past.

  Sitka was Tlingit. When the Tlingit got in the way of the Russians’ full-bore plunder of sea otter, they were driven out of Shee Atika, their ancestral village. The story goes that the Tlingit came back a generation later and rebuilt their homes outside the Russian barracks. Along the path there are bleached paintings showing the burning of the Russian fort, Redoubt, by Tlingit in 1802 and the retaliation of a thousand Russian soldiers in 1804. One painting shows Katlian, a Tlingit warrior, his hammer raised in a Mel Gibson arm, his head stuck in a helmet like a bucket, bearing down on a dozen armed Russians in Buster Brown sailor hats, who stagger back in dismay. The courage of these stumpy men astounds me, chanting and fasting and paddling their war boats hundreds of miles in the open ocean, attacking halibut and enemies with their toothed clubs. They are always depicted as ferocious, yet what strikes me is their fear. Why else chant and fast but to ward off abject terror?

  I read the following account:

  When the Russians returned with their navy, the Tlingit entered the stockade where ships’ cannon pounded for six days. The night of the sixth day, Russians heard chanting from within the stockade. At dawn, flocks of raven were hovering over the fort. Within the abandoned walls, Russians found dried fish and provisions for over seven hundred inhabitants and the bodies of dead children. The Tlingit had disappeared into the forest. After burning the fort to the ground, the Russians looted and burned Shee Atika. On the ashes of the village, they built the stockade settlement of New Archangel—the forerunner of Sitka.

  So much for the Tlingit.

  It’s the old story I remember from grade school, the meaning incomprehensible to a nine-year-old. History had a different interpretation then. It was more a football scrimmage, nature and Indians on the one side, pernicious and anonymous, and white Europeans, persevering and destined, on the other.

  Being on site like this has peculiar force. In the rain and dark trees, the drab ocean flopping beside me, I catch the way it must have gone: The Russian presence, not large but longstanding, the fur trade proceeding with the Tlingit in a bearable way, gradually heating up as the demand in Russia grows and the Tlingit commit themselves more and more to trapping. But the Indians content to have it grow, thriving, paddling out in their boats to meet the ships, relishing an interlude of fair trade, a rise above subsistence. Then some competitive poking around from the English and Spanish, more ships abroad, more pressure. Still the liaison holding. More village labour goes to trapping, the balance kept but doomed. More and more Europeans in the New World, more people than the Indians have ever seen. Then the real cash crop is found: “soft gold” on the bodies of sea otter. Sea otter fur booms among the Russian aristocracy, a fashion must. The demand swamps the villages. The Russians don’t want middlemen any more, find it more expeditious to hunt sea otter themselves. They know how; they’ve been in the region for years. So they hunt sea otter almost to extinction. They take them all.

  I make my way along, coming out of the hoop of history like waking up, and all at once I’m fed up and weary, as though I’ve been in the woods forever—the weight of these trees, the whirling salal bushes, the hiss of shore water on small stones, the forever burbling and commentary of raven, bundled close and smothering under the sodden sky. I’ve attended so closely to these grey beaches, had so little relief, it’s as though there’s no difference between us. My forehead is the drizzling air, my eyeballs the wet trees, the pads on my fingers the round beach stones.

  JULY 26

  The trip’s half over. Home is a distant town, the tracts of country between here and there too huge for home to seem real. Overall my mood is glum, but in one respect I’m at a good stage. I’m getting the hang of this. I’ve worked out the bugs of camping on and off the ferry. When I started I seemed to
spend about half my time looking for the grommets on the tarp with rain running down my neck. Now I’ve sped it up a bit, got it going smoother. I can find the shower on the boat reliably, I’m down to the five items of clothing I really use, I’ve located all the gears on my bike. A bit of know-how makes me grin from ear to ear. I don’t take competence for granted. Everything in the life of a ferry-hopping cyclist is a feat: reconnoitring; finding a flat, drained, protected, hospitable, bear-free, legal spot every night for the tent; getting oriented fast so I can explore and have some fun; then packing up and doing it all over again in the next place.

  I know women can do it. There are woodswomen all over the place. Probably these physical skills are matter-of-fact to a great many of them, but to me they’re completely alluring, the crème de la crème. Nothing I’ve done matches the pleasure, the pure exuberance of these small occasions when I can get it all going, when I’m out of doors, comfortable and dry, stuffing my senses. Despite a late start I expect to spend the rest of my life dashing off the highway, pursuing this know-how, plumbing the outdoors side of life. I expect to be a little old solo woman with outdoors acumen, poking around with tarps and knots and fussy camp stoves somewhere out of range.

  JULY 27

  I’ve been looking forward to Juneau, to the thrill of docking at four in the morning in this big panhandle town that got to be state capital, a gold-mining settlement wedged between two mountains. Because the channel’s clogged with glacial sediment, the ferry docks fourteen miles north of town.

  It’s daylight when I get off, water and sky the colour of cold silver. I call my parents, and my father, eating breakfast in Ontario, says, “Come home. All is forgiven.”

  I pedal to a campsite described in my guidebook as impressively close to Mendenhall Glacier and put up my tent in a thicket of willows beside the speeding runoff. I mean to crawl in and sleep, but the riled, probing cold off the water is unnerving. I see the glacier beyond, a dirty blue sponge clamped to the base of the mountains. Chill envelops the campground, the water in the taps iron-tasting, the ground sooty. There’s a gloomy, ill-natured damp to the place, and I wonder if the glacier is to blame.