WALKING
HOME
A JOURNEY IN THE ALASKAN WILDERNESS
LYNN SCHOOLER
Dedicated to the memory of Luisa Stoughton
Contents
Cover
Title
Dedication
Map
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Footnote
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Imprint
PROLOGUE
In May of 2007, I stood on a remote Alaskan beach, on the bank of a flooding river, desperate to find a way across. The stream of muddy, hissing water cut through a rock-studded beach and hurled itself headlong into a line of breaking waves. Every few seconds another swell rolled in from the Gulf of Alaska, rose into a steeple against the outflow of current, then collapsed in an avalanche of foam. The gulf is seldom still, and a stiff wind bullied the gray water into tumbling heaps.
To my left the river rushed straight out of a wall of thick brush. As I watched, a clump of roots torn loose by the flood swept by, washed into the surf, and was thrown back again. The clatter of cobblestones rolling downstream under the surface sounded ominously like the rattling of old bones.
I was afraid and I had been for two days. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been stalked by a grizzly in a terrifying cat-and-mouse game of such prolonged and unrelenting intensity that my insides were still shaking. The hunt had gone on for hours, and everywhere I looked I could still see the fixed stare of the bear’s small, dark eyes and the rubbery black lip that hung beneath its lower jaw, swinging grotesquely out of rhythm with the animal’s stride as it came for me time after time.
It was only by the slimmest chance that I had escaped, and given that I was alone in the middle of more than 2,000 square miles of wilderness, with the tenacious bear still somewhere behind me and a flooding river in front of me, my survival did not seem guaranteed. There was no way the small inflatable kayak I was carrying to ford creeks and tidal sloughs during my trek along the coast was adequate to cross the frothing river. If I didn’t get swept into the surf and drown, being overturned would still be disastrous; I was several days’ walk from the nearest help or shelter, and to risk losing my pack, with the sleeping bag and extra clothing inside, was unthinkable.
I was tired, my back and feet hurt from running over boulders and through wet sand with a heavy pack on my back, and the spent adrenaline had been replaced by a growing dread. I had no choice but to go upstream into the thick forest to try to find a way across the swollen river, and I didn’t want to go into the forest. To leave the open beach where I could see in all directions and push into that tangle of alder and devil’s club where the visibility would at times be limited to a few yards or less was too frightening. The canopy of an Alaskan rainforest can be so thick that 80 percent of the light never reaches the ground and the world underneath it is a silent, mossy place of deep shadows. I couldn’t help imagining the moment when one of those shadows would begin to move and become the bear. I kept playing and replaying a scenario in which there was a crackle in the underbrush, a glimpse of dark fur, and a sudden rush . . .
I couldn’t let myself think about the rest. Since the ancestors of the Tlingit* Indians wandered across the Bering Land Bridge and spread into Southeast Alaska by hopscotching across ice fields and climbing down glaciers into ice-free pockets along the gulf, the region I was in has been lightly trod. A handful of European explorers blew through in the late 1700s, followed by a brief but furious swarm of fur hunters in the 1800s, bent on extirpating the gulf’s sea otters; a trickle of prospectors nibbled at the sand with picks and shovels during the first half of the twentieth century. But after the Tlingit were nearly exterminated by new diseases and the area’s sole permanent white settler died in 1939, human presence grew as thin as at any time since the beginning of the Ice Age. Now the five-hundred-mile arc of wilderness that sweeps northwest from near the present-day settlement of Gustavus to Prince William Sound is traversed primarily by the 298 species of birds common to Alaska, which include the ducks, sandpipers, cranes, plovers, and songbirds that migrate north along the corridor every spring by the millions, along with occasional individuals of another 150 or so species that ornithologists refer to as “accidentals,” meaning that although they have been seen and noted by qualified observers, they do not belong here. Rather, they have become lost or struck out on their own for unfathomable reasons, such as the lone Steller’s sea eagle (a species indigenous to the northern islands of Japan) that appeared in Southeast Alaska a few years ago and surprised everyone by settling down with an American bald eagle for a companion.
A new home, discovery, glory, gold, and the opportunity for unbridled plunder—humans have pushed into this country for a variety of reasons throughout history, but my own was something else. I was in flight. Two weeks earlier I had left my home in Juneau hoping to find some relief from the exhaustion and stress that came with laboring seven days a week for months on end to build a home meant to house a marriage that now seemed in danger of crumbling. After a lifelong love affair with Alaska’s wild places and natural history, I had thought I might find some ease in the wilderness, a respite from the heartache and confusion plaguing my marriage, and perhaps might learn something that would help me form a bulwark against the shortfalls of middle age and a looming sense of mortality.
It hadn’t worked out. The confrontation with the bear had left me feeling as shaken as I had ever felt in my life, alone and off balance, as out of place as one of the avian accidentals. I wanted out, but I was a long way from nowhere, with a pulsing river before me and a shower of hard rain pelting down.
I don’t know how long I stood there listening to the angry growl of the surf and sorting hopelessly through options that didn’t exist, but it was long enough for the wind to eventually work its cold hands up under my coat and push me to get moving. It was early spring, there were still patches of snow on the ground, and I knew I could either stand there until I became hypothermic, try to cross the river and risk drowning, or swallow my trepidation and plunge into the waiting forest.
What I didn’t know was that the sum of the whole experience would turn out to be one of the best things that had ever happened to me. What follows is the story of how that came to be.
Chapter 1
I Could Begin with a death, that of one James Sullivan, age forty-seven, who climbed, muttering and despondent, onto the rail of the bridge that spans the churning waters between downtown Juneau and Douglas Island. From his perch seventy-five feet in the air—closer to ninety, really, since it was low tide at the time and the tides of Southeast Alaska average fourteen feet from high to low—Sullivan could have looked south down Gastineau Channel to a breathtaking view of the blue and green mountains of the Coast Ran
ge, or to his left across the rooftops of a cluster of homes and small businesses nestled along the foot of a closer range of forested mountains.
Of course, a crowd gathered. Juneau is a small town and people care. They vote regularly, school board meetings are well attended, and every spring a large part of the population turns out to make a celebration of harvesting the litter that sprouts from beneath the receding winter snow, volunteering their time to clean the limited grid of roads that stitch Juneau to the surrounding landscape. This effort, community spirited and admirable as it is, is really no more than window dressing, an effort to impose a sense of order on what is otherwise a notably disorderly corner of the world. A small, isolated place, Juneau is composed of fewer than thirty thousand souls perched precariously amid a jumble of glaciers, ice fields, and mountains that sprawl endlessly in every direction. To seaward, a narrow archipelago of equally wild islands separates the city from the Gulf of Alaska, where files of towering gray waves throw themselves ceaselessly against the shore. The clean streets and neatly painted houses provide no more than a diaphanous, even illusory, membrane of safety between the clinging pocket of humanity and the enveloping wilderness, one penetrated at will by nature’s whim. During spring and summer the police column in the daily newspaper is as likely to report bears ruckusing through the streets breaking into trailer houses and kicking over bird feeders as it is episodes of drunken driving or domestic violence. More significantly, a large portion of the town sits directly in the path of one of the most dangerous avalanche chutes in the world. Every winter a broad alpine funnel pointed directly at Juneau’s heart waits for an accumulation of heavy, wet snow to build on top of a layer of older snow that has been scoured to an icy crust by relentless arctic winds—a combination that will someday send several thousand megatons of snow exploding at speeds of up to 180 miles an hour through the back doors of the houses below. In 1972 one avalanche blew down the mountain and screeched to a stop at the very verge of the imaginary membrane, mere yards from a densely populated neighborhood. The powder blast generated by the slide obliterated the town from view, startling the city’s residents into a breathless recognition of the true nature of their town’s setting. Nonetheless, they dutifully swept away the ice crystals that settled like glittering ash across the sidewalks and within a disturbingly short time began referring to the communal brush with destruction in joking tones.
Across the board, experts agree it is only a matter of when, not if, the Big One will occur, and when it does, it will be no joking matter. But no one, to my knowledge, even considered leaving town after the ’72 slide, because Juneau is, after all, a genuinely great place to live. The surrounding wilderness, for all its ability to snatch through the curtain and leave nothing in our place but a vacuum, is also a treasure chest of riches. The mountains give forth deer, wolves, and mountain goats in great numbers. Tumbling streams lined with giant spruce and hemlock trees teem with trout and salmon. The channels and passages fingering in from the gulf boil with shoals of herring, which in turn provide food for whales and sea lions that swim above a seabed alive with shrimp and crabs. At the moment Sullivan was climbing onto the rail of the bridge, I was only a short distance away, on an outing with my nephews on my boat, trying to catch some of those crabs. Our first pot came up empty, but the second held two crabs. A lone crab had wandered into the third pot, but the fourth, only a few yards away and a fathom or so deeper, broke the surface bulging with a snapping, squirming dozen. After spilling the pot’s contents onto the deck, we did a quick check with a tape measure and confirmed that all of them were legal, large enough across the carapace to satisfy even a hungry man. About then was when Sullivan jumped.
“It wasn’t like the movies,” said a friend who grabbed Sullivan’s arm as he stepped into space. Though fit and athletic, Tom admitted, “There was no way I could hold on.”
My nephews and I recovered the body. As we were urged on by the yells of the crowd on the bridge, it took only a quick calculation of the current’s set and drift and a search pattern of expanding squares to motor up on what from a distance looked like a scrap of rag, then, as we drew closer, became a T-shirt ballooning with captured air. Two boot heels stuck up from the water. In the roiling current, it took me two or three tries with the boat hook to snag Sullivan’s belt. Then there was a burst of frantic activity as would-be rescuers in the form of two strikingly young Coast Guard personnel roared alongside and jerked the corpse from our grip onto their bright orange, overpowered emergency response craft and began a fumbling, wide-eyed CPR before zooming away to a waiting ambulance. They were trying their damnedest, but the light was already gone from Sullivan’s eyes.
After we returned to the dock and cleaned our catch, I loaded the butchered crabs into a plastic cooler. My oldest nephew helped me carry the heavy cooler up the dock. Then I dropped my nephews off at home and headed out the road. For several years I had been living in a one-room cabin twenty-five miles north of Juneau, on a small, quiet cove more than halfway out the only highway that runs any distance from the mountain-corralled town. Go fifteen miles farther and the road dead-ends at a point of nowhere that serves best to remind Juneau’s residents that though we may be physically attached to North America and its five hundred million or so other human inhabitants by the bedrock of the continent, we are in essence an island community, accessible only by airplane or ship.
On the day of Sullivan’s suicide the twenty-five miles to the cabin was far enough for me to have time to think over the day’s events. As I drove, I realized I found them neither particularly disturbing nor traumatic, probably because during my forty years in Alaska I have known death to reach up from the water, out of the trees, down from the peaks, and out of the noise and violence of avalanches, car wrecks, and bear attacks with what some might consider unsettling frequency. I am neither callous nor inured, but in trade for the vast, beautiful heartache of its landscape and other treasures, Alaska often exacts a shocking tithe. Hikers get lost and die within sight of downtown Juneau. Climbers slip and fall. Simple fishing jaunts turn tragic when a boat overturns.
Still, I mulled over what might push a man to leap off a bridge instead of simply waiting for time to throw its dark shadow over him and relieve him of his burdens. A vision of Sullivan floating with his feet slightly spread, arms at his sides, and face gray with lack of life drifted across the windshield of my truck. I saw new leather work boots with no sign of wear; unstained denim pants and a nice belt; a decent shirt; and a full head of hair only slightly in need of cutting. Not a poor man or a street person addled with drugs. So why? A savage divorce? A bankruptcy? The loss of a child?
I could not know. So I let it go and started wondering if I had any beer at the cabin to go with the crab.
The next morning I had to go back to town, a quick run to pick up building supplies for a house I had been laboring on for more than a year. After nearly three decades of living on boats and in rustic cabins, even in tents, I had finally decided to “swallow the anchor,” as old-time sailors said, and settle down. The previous summer there had been a brief, explosive courtship with a woman of great charm and breathtaking beauty, and when an opportunity had arisen to build our own home near the cabin, I had decided to do as much as I could with my own hands. Half Filipino, half Chinese, slender, athletic, and exotic, she had come to me with a glitter in her eyes and open arms. “A fifty-year-old bachelor,” laughed a friend familiar with my reclusive ways. “You never had a chance.”
Our wedding took place amid bales of lumber and rolls of tar paper. The wedding feast was laid out on planks and sawhorses. Ed, the eighty-two-year-old owner of the cabin I was living in, gave the bride away. Ed had come to Alaska when it was still a territory, in 1946,* after training to fly torpedo bombers during World War II. Ten years later, after graduating from college in Fairbanks on the GI Bill and joining one of the earliest expeditions to put a man on top of 20,300-foot Mount Denali, he had acquired the land I was building on through a gover
nment program that gave veterans preference. He and his wife, Marjory, built their own home a few miles closer to town, rowing in every morning from a nearby island that had been homesteaded by a family named Weshenfelder in the early 1920s. The two worked from first light to last, digging a basement by hand, mixing concrete with a shovel, and moving twenty-four-foot timbers into their roadless homesite with a wheelbarrow. Marjory sprouted a seedling from a maple tree grown on the island by the Weshenfelders and planted it next to their new house. She and Ed watched it grow for forty years, while making plans to someday build a second, smaller home near the cabin. When Marjory passed away unexpectedly, Ed decided to sell the land to me, and he came around on a daily basis after I started building to keep an eye on my progress. One day he arrived with a clutch of thumb-sized seedlings sprouted from Marjory’s maple.
I pickaxed four holes into the stony ground on the hill below the half-framed house and watched contentedly as my new bride knelt to gently pack a mixture of potting soil, sand, and compost around the tender shoots while admonishing them in a singsong voice to grow strong. When they grew tall enough to drop seeds of their own, I thought, we would sprout some and pass them on to her two grown daughters from a previous marriage, who would in turn pass seeds to their own children someday.
Shortly after the walls were up and the roof was on, however, the marriage started to slide. Immediately after the wedding my wife had begun a new career in a field for which she had great talent, and as word of her abilities spread, she landed first one position, then another and another; by the time the windows were installed, she had not been to the building site for months. Three of the seedlings had died, and after putting out a few nickel-sized leaves, the fourth had been nipped by a porcupine. I had been glad to see a tiny new bud starting out of the gnawed stump that morning and had meant to mention it to her, thinking the news might provide a positive point to help offset a note of friction that had been building between us lately, but she had left in a rush while I was making out a list of supplies. Now, an electrician was coming by in the afternoon to help me lay out the wiring, and I had to put my worries over the troubled marriage aside.
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 1
