by Jill Frayne
I leave my tent and ride away to scout.
The U.S. Forest Service has built a handsome visitor centre at the edge of the glacier, equipped with decks and telescopes and lofty windows, and at nine a.m. tourists in head scarves and mitts are milling around, beating their arms to keep warm.
Flanking the glacier on either side are ribbons of vegetation that show the history of its retreat. The swath of most recent withdrawal is stripped to bare gravel, but the next ribbon shows fireweed and lupine taking hold. The lesson on “Succession” in the visitor centre explains that fireweed is the emblem of the north, showing up in abundance after any assault. You see it washing the mountains in summer, its blowy purple spires dabbing the gash of clear-cut or fire. It is always the first growth in a recovery, and when it withers, it provides morsels of earth and nitrogen to root the next wave of vegetation, alder and willow. These shrubs flank the glacier we’re staring at, straying thinly down the slope. In a hundred years, or three hundred, their leaves will make enough compost for softwoods, Sitka spruce and hemlock.
Riding away from the glacier, I see tourists clumped at the side of the road, their attention taken by something. In a pool where the creek eddies, salmon are resting on their run. They swim slowly, their bodies bulging with eggs, their skin the intense vermilion of exalted effort.
JUNEAU IS LIKE A SPIDER. The sheer mountains make it impossible for the centre to enlarge, so the town sends out thin legs of habitation into the Mendenhall Valley and along the shore. The glacier at the head of the valley is now a Juneau suburb, complete with a bus stop. Downtown hangs on a mountainside seven or eight streets high, the climb from the waterfront nearly vertical. People mounting the streets have to bend in half or tack. It’s a gold rush town, and at the moment it’s full of cheerful tourists having cappuccinos. I have one too and then go visit Inuit technology in the state museum, scribbling tiny notes and trying to pin what I see to the backs of my eyeballs forever.
There are snow goggles—a slit in a deer antler, worn mounted on the nose; a gut parka decorated with lateral rows of curling bird feathers, each feather held in place by a tiny clamped beak; an umiak—an Aleut open boat—the frame made of driftwood, held together with hide lashing and pegs and covered in walrus hide, tough and waterproof, built for hunting large sea mammals, walrus and whale. Contrary to popular belief, the Inuit did not roll in their boats; the term “Eskimo roll” is probably a misnomer. The first sea kayakers carried floaters—the inflated stomachs of seals—to give their boats ballast in the ocean and to act as markers of animals taken.
There are dance mitts covered in puffin beaks, a belt of caribou teeth set close like pearls, gums overlapping. There is a 2000-year-old ivory sculpture—a phallus with a female head, the face simple and magical, the mouth a slit without lips, the nose long and solemn, the eyes hooded. I see reversible coats again, one made of skin from the breasts of cormorants, murres, auklets, puffins, loons and geese, worn with feathers out in wet weather or turned inward in the dry and cold. This dress is decorated with dyed porcupine quills, shells, dried berries, feathers and fur. Glass beads came later.
The ingenuity astounds me. How did they devise these curing baths of urine, caribou brains, water and roe? How did they know a smoky fire and hours of scraping would turn the hide to cream?
JULY 28
More rain. I dash into town and eat breakfast in a homesick coffee shop that reminds me of Queen Street in Toronto, the waitress presiding in shorts and T-shirt. She fries up blueberry pecan pancakes on the grill and entertains her customers with local baseball news. Baseball teams in the panhandle use the ferry to get to their games.
The Harbor Washboard, next on the chore list, is the best laundromat I’ve ever seen. Twenty-foot ceilings keep the air airlike, a shower token buys an unlimited burst of strong, hot spray, and a two-dollar deposit gets you a fragrant, worn towel and a washcloth. By the dryers an Asian grandmother tries to keep a rein on two toddlers, but gives up and lets them run around, slamming themselves against the warm machines.
No rules are posted in the laundromat, just the hours they’re open and an apology for no change. Aerial photographs of Juneau curl on the walls. Two rows of plastic chairs, smoking and nonsmoking, are set congenially side by side.
All my clothes are in the wash and I sit naked in my rain gear, reading an old New Yorker. This is truly time out. For the time being I do not live in a tent on a freezing riverbank.
When the rain stops, the weather promptly turns muggy and buggy. I re-attire myself, take my bicycle downtown, park it outside a bookstore and start toiling up the hill, bent double, to take a walk in the mountains.
On the trail it takes a long time to get used to the sticky air and the coating of flies clinging to my arms and hair, and to surmount the ambivalence I have about hiking alone. But I’ve noticed this about leaving town: there comes a point when whatever zone of habitation you came from fades out and the venture opens up. The land spreads out, sparkling, and the sensation is mostly sound, a slight electric hum that you feel in your solar plexus, thrilling and quieting both.
The hills are steep, stroked in alder and spruce, which means the vegetation’s not very advanced. The land here must slide so often that the trees have to keep starting over. There are pale green bands running down the slopes, slowly filling the slide paths. The watery air makes the view glimmer. The mountainsides are tickled by thin, fast-falling rivers spreading like veins in an old hand from small, clean-cut dabs of snow in the hollows of the peaks.
A FUNNY THING happens in the bookstore later. When I’m ready to leave, a title catches my eye: Paddling My Own Canoe by a Hawaiian paddler, writing up her kayaking adventures. I recognize the name of the author from the defunct napkin. Audrey Sutherland, lost and found.
I GET INTO A CONVERSATION with a man and woman in a gold rush bar. He is a voluble, commanding person with a wide, rippling white beard; she, years younger and rather quiet. Perhaps she’s heard his stories too many times, but she’s diplomatic and relaxed and we pass a pleasant time. He’s well travelled, a connoisseur of Native art, which leads us to the Haida. He checks my effusiveness.
“They weren’t angels, you know. They had a stratified society—slaves and aristocracy. Those poles were built on cheap labour, same as the pyramids.”
He says if I’m going further north I must go to Atlin, back of the coast in the mountains of British Columbia. This is the second time someone’s told me Atlin is the most beautiful place on earth. Bonnie, who ran the bed and breakfast on Sandspit, said she’s moving there as soon as the Charlottes are ruined. The anticipation of dry air comes as such a relief, it’s as though I’ve been holding my breath. When I look at my map later, I see I can get off the coast and over the mountains at Haines—next stop.
JULY 29
Haines, Alaska, is the homeland of the Chilkat, a proud, wealthy people famous among the coastal tribes for their woven blankets. They could get anything they wanted in barter for the gold and blue work of these capes. Their village is now a spacious town on a broad swerve of shore, the streets and buildings laid out roomily in front of vaulting mountains. The mountains I take on faith, since it’s drizzling when I steer my bike off the ferry, the sky drooped about twenty feet above the road.
Haines, unlike all the other panhandle towns except Skagway, is connected to the interior by road, an old trade route that follows the Chilkat River through the mountains. During the Second World War the route was upgraded to a paved road to connect with the under-construction Alaska Highway. As I ride into town, the sense of greater access is palpable. The place draws overland visitors from Tok and Anchorage as well as people off the cruise ships. I pass a formidable number of gift and craft shops downtown. A bunch of ten-year-olds are standing outside a forty-six-flavour ice cream parlour smoking and shoving each other.
Looking for a campground, I find the Chilkat heritage curiously represented on a hillside south of the town. The historical site of Fort Seward is
on a broad, treeless slope sweeping up from the sea. The perimeter of the lawn is set with tidy English frame buildings, resembling garden sheds, their symmetry at odds with the soaring disorder of mountains behind. In the centre of the lawn, encircled by the English buildings, is a Chilkat lodge, brand new, built in the traditional style, with carved house posts facing the sea and painted dark coral, turquoise and black. I wonder if building the lodge surrounded by English buildings is intended to be symbolic.
Despite the eclipse of Native culture in all these towns—or so it seems—Chilkat ancestry at Haines is visible in the land itself, in the choice of site. Scrape off the town and you see the way the natural protection of the cove would have set the original village at a good advantage in war and hemmed it against the wind. The river into the mountains provides passage to the interior and a supply of fish and game. The middens remain, hollows on the beach full of shellfish bones, remnants of summer meals. From the woods comes the creaking cry of Chilkat descendants, great-grandchildren eagles gliding from perch to perch.
I FIND A CAMPGROUND past Fort Seward, a drenched triangle of grass above the shore. My tent is soaked by the time I get it up. It’s in my mind that in a day or so I’m off the coast, out of this rain and over the mountains, and as usual when change is coming, I don’t want to go.
I dip into town life tonight in the Bamboo Room restaurant. It’s shaped like a boxcar with Naugahyde banquettes down two sides, Formica tables and astonishing views of the mountains. There aren’t more than a dozen tables, all of them full. I notice that no one is conversing. People sit alone or in morose groups, eating. There’s a family of five in the corner, all the children very small. Every time the baby cries, the father looks down at the floor. A man with long bony thighs sitting by himself across from me is reading a manual beside a meal that appears to be six muffins covered in an inch of sour cream. A woman in sweatpants and earrings dithers over the menu, asks for spaghetti, leaves the restaurant for about ten minutes, and returns having added a black wool toque and dinner rings. A rumpled woman with huge, yellowing hazel eyes sits down next to me and begins a dialogue with the waitress.
“What vegetables do you have?”
“Carrots.”
“Again?”
She asks the waitress for a side order of mushrooms.
“Canned or fresh?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well, one comes from a can and the other’s fresh.”
“Canned. And an order of carrots and a small french fries.”
Later on, this woman is joined by Ray, with whom she shares her fries. Ray puts them in a Styrofoam cup. “I’ll heat them later,” he says.
I begin talking with them and Ray tells me about the greatest Canadian cowboy, Lorne Greene.
JULY 30
The wind shifted this afternoon, chasing the rain out of the channel. I sat on the shore and watched the barricade of clouds that blocked the view thin and creep away up the mountains, unveiling timber, bald rock and snow. The shore across the water is quite close, the channel blowing aquamarine spray. On my beach stones, fireweed and scrawny spruce lie about higgledy-piggledy, as if dropped from an airplane. There are some comely boat wrecks in back of the beach, and a bunch of ravens overhead are bellyaching in the wind.
I have a perfect dinner: macaroni alfredo on my tiny camp stove, served with screw-top white wine. Out over the fireweed two hummingbirds joust in mid-air. The water is grey-green silk, the colour of bay leaves. The wind has dropped and there are no bugs. Mountains across the way are banded in light and shadow, and in the shade the timber looks like animal fur, plush and dark. Against the dark, the lit snow gleams in geographic shapes—England and Africa. A skirt of cloud, edges wafting and dissolving, floats up.
JULY 31
I’ve stowed my bike in a back room at the ferry dock. In the Yukon the distances will be too great to use a bike. I’ll pick it up on the way back. I’m down to a backpack with camping gear and one change of underwear.
I leave Haines on the 6 a.m. bus bound for Haines Junction in the Yukon. The driver is garrulous and regales the dozen or so of us on his run with facts and folklore. “Now this is how fireweed got its name: You see how this plant goes through its cycle. The purple flowers open bottom to top through summer. When they start to die, the leaves turn red—‘blaze’ you could say—and the end of the stalk looks like a wisp of smoke. Just before the snow, it goes off like a puff.”
As the bus climbs, he explains an upcoming phenomenon: alpine tundra in the Haines Pass. “We shouldn’t have alpine conditions at this latitude, it’s too low. By alpine I mean, no trees. We’re above the treeline in the pass at 3,500 feet. Normally you need 12,000 feet to get alpine conditions. And the reason we get it here is the earth’s tilt. In these northern latitudes like we have in Alaska, we get conditions you normally don’t see.” (The Haines Pass is actually in British Columbia, but Americans generally ignore this detail.)
The sober drama of the coast falls behind us. Within an hour of leaving we’re well above sea level and blessedly dry. Dust from the road gently sifts up through the floor onto our laps and sandwiches while the driver exhorts us to look out the window. The land is bald. We pass over a high plain where even black spruce have faltered. In the roll of rock and lichen there is only a scribble of alder shrub. The colours are achingly subtle—a precious slipcover laid over the land, worn to silver, green and grey, all wavering tawny pale. The hills bounding the plain have been rubbed smooth and blunt, their bare sides soaking the warmth of the sun like old faces. In some places the rock is rose-gold where some patient lichen has been crawling over the stone for centuries. Some of the hills are stippled by thin waterfalls.
At the height of the pass the driver stops and we tumble out—a group now, bonded by this naked plain, by the amphitheatre of sky, a dry wind coming almost soundless from the edge of the world.
Soon afterwards, back on the bus, we drop under the treeline again and chug over an invisible line into the Yukon. The hand of wind erosion in the pass behind us was old, but these Kluane peaks rip youthfully at the sky, their sides pure grey. This is the lower end of the St. Elias range, the driver drones, containing the San Andreas Fault and many volcanoes.
When the bus drops us in Haines Junction, it’s summer, the air warm and piney. My clothes are instantly a burden. I could weep. How long have I been in the damp? The Kluane Park office is here, located at the foot of the mountains. While we wait for the bus to Whitehorse, we watch a slide presentation in the Visitor Centre. Kluane and the American Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, their heart a vast icefield, the largest on earth but for the poles. I’ve entered an entirely different ecosystem, this land in rain shadow behind the mountains. The soil is cold and gritty, containing little humus. The broad-leafed trees are limited to birch and trembling aspen. The pine and spruce are stunted. Plants of Northern British Columbia, a book I peruse after the slide presentation, says tersely, “Only those trees capable of tolerating extended periods of frozen ground occur.”
The region is as unlike Central Ontario as the coast I’ve just escaped, but, standing in the parking lot in warm, dry air, squinting at Kluane’s icy peaks, I think, now I’m really here. This is what I came for.
Six
WHITEHORSE
AUGUST 3
My third day in Whitehorse, and from the minute the bus pulled in it’s been easy to be here. The restlessness that dogged me on the coast is gone. I slid under the weight of those drowning trees.
The Yukon is sere, the air thin and dry like the best fall days at home. There’s frost in the mornings—my fingers ache setting up my stove for tea—but soon the sun heats the air and bakes it all day long. The campground’s full of the scent of little pines that are very old and don’t grow tall. In the Yukon I sleep long, like an unwinding.
I like the town—or city, rather—four downtown streets, laid out along the Yukon River, trailing into suburbs in the
valley wherever space allows. It’s a two-minute walk from city hall to the escarpment on the edge of town. If you like, you can climb the cut banks, pant your way straight up above the streets, sinking in fine sand, your nose full of wild sage. Sometimes I return to the campground this way, running along the top of the ridge, a windy tabletop where they built the airport.
In 1990, Whitehorse is a modern city of 22,000 with government buildings, a dozen two-storey hotels, a handsome library, ethnic restaurants, a big health food store and at least three adventure outfitters. Everything you find here is imported except a little timber and metal. Big transport trucks roll in on the Alaska Highway from Edmonton and southern cities days away; Canadian Airlines flies in and out twice a day. Originally a portage on the Klondike Trail, the city is still a frail graft on the land. In 1898, stampeders could float from the Yukon River headwaters in Lake Bennett a thousand miles to the goldfields at Dawson, except for the Whitehorse rapids, the champing waves the city is named after. The White Pass Railway solved the problem of the costly portage at Whitehorse and greatly eased the journey from Skagway. In 1959, to power the city that had sprung up from the gold rush, they built a dam that lowered the knots through Miles Canyon and brought the rearing water at Whitehorse to heel. The river is no more than a swing of fast current now, icy green, just beyond the downtown sidewalk.
Many residents are southerners with government jobs, on furlough in the Yukon. They will become smitten and stay or, after a couple of years, leave. Many are young people, young families who’ll stay any way they can for the sake of raising their kids in a young place. More and more residents are Europeans, people who bring their own money and don’t have to rely on the boom-or-bust economy.
