On the way into town I swung onto a side road that curved toward the beach and bumped past an empty campground before parking under a towering spruce tree and clattering down a steep flight of stairs to a friend’s home on the waterfront. Luisa had spent the last fourteen years battling breast cancer and was in slow recovery from her third round of chemical and radiological insults to her body. She was also one of those rare, naturally gracious spirits who will inevitably brush aside their own hammering misfortune to quiz a visitor on his or her own well-being.
“Was this you?” she asked, knowing the answer even as she held out the morning paper, where a photo of my boat, the Wilderness Swift, and the Coast Guard response boat covered half the front page. “That must have been horrible for you.”
“It wasn’t,” I replied. What I was feeling, I realized, was something like anger. How dare Sullivan give up so easily, while someone like Luisa—breast-lopped, bald, chemical-burned, and shaky, her voice weak with tribulation—was struggling to keep the flame alive?
“It pisses me off,” I said, dropping the paper on the table. “There’s people like you, trying so hard, and he . . .” I did not want to feel any empathy. I didn’t want to understand why someone would waste his own life. Luisa sighed, exhausted, and curved her spine into the enveloping softness of the couch before glancing out the window at a flock of goldeneyes paddling close to shore. “It’s just so hard for some people . . .”
“How’s your appetite?” I asked, rising to leave.
Luisa lifted her chin and smiled. There was something beatific in her eyes. “I eat like a horse,” she laughed, then stifled a choking cough. I bent down to brush my cheek against hers—her skin was as soft as a baby’s—then looked around the living room at the mementos she and her husband had gathered while traveling around the world making natural history films. An antique engraving of polar bears purchased in England after a trip to the Norwegian Arctic adorned the fireplace mantle. There was a photo of a much younger Luisa with a colorfully dressed African tribesman, and the massive horns of an argali sheep from the mountains of Mongolia, where two years of intense effort and genuine deprivation had made them the first people ever to film a snow leopard in the wild. For two decades Joel and Luisa had been what I think of as “burning building” friends, because I suspected that either one of them would rush into a burning building if I needed them. This may have been hyperbole, but I knew without question that they would come if I called in the middle of the night and would stand up for me if a time ever came when I could not stand up for myself. We didn’t touch each other often or say certain things out loud, but they were family without the benefit of blood or genes.
“I’ll check back in a couple of days,” I said, retrieving my hat from the table. “See how you’re doing.”
“How’s the house coming?” she asked, keeping her voice low to avoid another coughing fit.
I blew out a sigh, not wanting to set loose the litany of careless subcontractors and soaring costs that seemed to boil on my lips these days. It seemed petty to even consider such things in front of someone whose every thought must be of the looming possibility of losing her own life.
She read me like a book. She and Joel had been through the same frustrations a few years earlier during the construction of their own home. “Don’t worry. In another year this will all be over,” she said.
“When I get the porch built, we’ll sit on it and have a beer,” I promised. On the way out I prayed she would still be around when the time had passed.
Two-by-fours, a box of screws, a case of silicone window caulking in tubes—one by one I checked things off my scrawled list until the truck was full and then spun out of the building yard, hurrying to get back out the road. At the last second I cranked the wheel right instead of left, deciding to head for a supermarket a half mile away. Sullivan’s suicide was nagging at me, and I could grab a newspaper there, maybe learn something that would explain his jump and help lay him to rest. It seemed like a variety of death’s swords and scythes had been punching holes in the backdrop of my life for months, and all morning it had been hard to stop thinking about them. Only a few weeks earlier I had found one of my neighbors, an older woman who had lived alone on a beautifully manicured piece of ground she and her long-passed husband had carved from the rocky coast back in the 1950s, dead in her bedroom, after a concerned friend had called and told me she was not answering her phone. When I found her, a medical encyclopedia lay open on a dresser by her bed, bookmarked to a section on the symptoms of heart attacks. And earlier that spring a lifelong friend had died from the effects of nearly thirty years spent trying to lighten the weight of two tours in Vietnam with alcohol. All around me, it seemed, people I knew were being picked off with increasing frequency as accidents, disease, and old age closed in. Sometimes I cried and sometimes I didn’t, but the sum of it all was disturbing.
At the market I hopped out of the truck and strode for the door, still intent on getting back to the building site as quickly as possible. It was the height of summer, the days were long, and a lot could get done if I moved fast and worked hard. I kept telling myself that the sooner my wife and I could move into the house, the sooner some of those bumps in our marriage would smooth out. Hurrying, I looked up just in time to catch a reflection in the market window of an older fellow moving toward the door and stopped, unbalanced for a moment by the realization that the reflection was me.
Puzzled, I stepped closer for a better look at the pale figure looking back at me. Silver, brush-cut hair ringed his balding scalp. Unshaven whiskers glittered on his cheeks. There was slack in his chin and something thin about his neck. Bags of exhaustion drooped under his eyes. He was a grizzled old coot and he was me.
“My god,” I wondered out loud. “How’d I get so old?”
What I meant was that I’d thought I was younger.
What I really meant was that I’d thought I had more time.
After picking up the newspaper, I sat in the parking lot to read it. Sullivan had been despondent over his lack of insurance to cover the treatment of a spreading cancer.
Back out the road, with the truck unloaded, I took stock as I rushed up and down a ladder, boring holes and pulling wire. The auger bucked in my hands, and the way the bit chewed through the studs felt good, as did feeding the thick yellow cables through the holes and knitting them together into the complex web of a modern electric home. It was good work, satisfying in the way that things that have a clear purpose and a definite end often are, but I had to admit I was tired. I had been working hard, going eight, ten, sometimes eleven or twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for over a year, and my body was a catalog of aches and pains. Still, the realization that I had somehow drifted into middle age without noticing was a shock and a surprise. True, my knees hurt more or less all the time from the kneeling and crawling, the constant lifting and bending kept a permanent knot in my back, an accident with an excavator when I’d first started clearing the site had left me with a pinched nerve in my neck that had prevented me from sleeping well for months, and the fatigue often left me cranky, but these were things I felt would ease up after the house was finished and I could sit back and relax. And yet, sitting back—or rather its corollary, getting up again—had come to require a grunt of exertion and the use of my hands. So what was next? Grousing with the other old duffers about the size of my prostate? One of those pillboxes with compartments lettered for the days of the week like the ones Luisa jokingly referred to as her “Sun City castanets”?
In all probability, yes. The body is a Judas, and mine was starting to consider turning me in for the silver. I unbuckled my heavy tool belt and let it drop to the floor. Then I walked out the door and down the stairs. The site my wife and I had chosen to build our home on provides a fine view of what I consider heaven. To the east the forested humps and curves of the Herbert and Eagle river drainages wind out of a gash in the northern Coast Range. Both rivers spill from blue and white glaciers in t
he alpine. To the west is Lynn Canal, the world’s longest fjord, where the passage of humpback whales, sea lions, and orcas is a daily occurrence. The far side of Lynn Canal is picketed by a series of 5,000-foot peaks. Beyond these lies one of the world’s premier wilderness areas, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. Eagles and herons are as common around here as seagulls, and grizzlies and black bears amble through the surrounding forest on trails blazed by browsing deer. There is a stream less than half a mile away so rich in fish that during one recent summer commercial seiners working nearby harvested an astonishing twelve million pounds of salmon.
It was a fine day, and I wandered down a sloping path of crushed stone and stepped off into the forest on a faint trail that crosses a narrow gully and winds up a rise to a favorite overlook of mine above the cove. Once there, I forced my way through a thicket of huckleberry and blueberry bushes before settling on my haunches against a moss-padded stump. Below me, on a ledge just out of reach, glittered a patch of red salmonberries. There are days during Alaska’s brief summer that are so soft and warm and rich that the smells alone make me want to live forever. And this was one of them. Thinking back, I realized the last time I had sat down to watch the clouds move or the sun set behind the mountains had been in early spring, during a brief respite between putting the last of the metal roofing on and starting on the siding. In the interim, eagle chicks had hatched and learned to fly, swarms of migrating shorebirds had passed through on their way north to the Arctic, and the seals had given birth to their pups. And all without my noticing.
I watched as a puff of wind swirled Lynn Canal into a pattern of sunny sparkles. Spruce needles pattered down on my head. If through some miracle of sustenance I could have sat there for the rest of my allotted years—say twenty, or forty if I was very lucky—the slow accumulation of needles and other forest litter would eventually have covered me entirely. For a minute I thought of how everything around me was in a constant state of change, even such seemingly immobile monuments as the mountains and glaciers. In the twenty years since I had arrived in the area, both Herbert Glacier and Eagle Glacier had receded several hundred yards. Over the two hundred–plus years since George Vancouver had first explored Alaska in 1794 and named Lynn Canal after his birthplace in King’s Lynn, England, they had retreated several miles. Judging from the way I had aged without noticing, the amount of time I had left to sit and watch the tides roll up and down Lynn Canal or the salmon come and go was no more than a blink, especially when measured against the scale of my surroundings. I was fifty-two years old—though in the reflection I had looked sixty—and was not sure how much of my remaining blink I wanted to spend working like a Trojan.
A mile offshore, a whale rose and blew beside a submerged rock. In the distance the peaks of the Chilkat Range came and went behind drifting clouds. The whale dove, and I considered the fact that beyond the buoy marking the rock there were no more works of man. No roads, mines, electric lines, or lights for hundreds of miles. Behind the Chilkats lie the ice fields of Glacier Bay. On the other side of Glacier Bay the land rises and rises again until it reaches the summit of 15,300-foot Mount Fairweather, the fourth-highest peak in North America. Beyond Mount Fairweather the landscape drops steeply down to Lituya Bay, on the Gulf of Alaska, from where it is another sixty miles north along one of the wildest coasts in North America to a few scattered cabins at Dry Bay. And there is not a single man-made structure along the way. No construction projects eating up anyone’s life.
But I did have a house to finish, which could easily take the rest of the year, then a shop and a carport to build, followed by a small guest cabin I envisioned for the spot upon which I was resting. The amount of time all this would take seemed overwhelming. Perhaps it was even more than I had to spare.
So I decided to take a walk instead.
Chapter 2
On a Map it looked easy. I could plant my thumb on Lituya Bay and cover the sixty miles to Dry Bay with an outstretched pinkie. At Dry Bay the Alsek River pours in from the east, running gray as cement from a burden of glacial silt gathered up by the river as it cuts through a range of granite mountains between Canada’s Yukon Territory and Alaska. The Alsek serves as the northern boundary of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve and runs north of Mount Fairweather. Mount Fairweather also marks the border between the Yukon and Alaska, not far from where the tumbling green water of a river called the Tatshenshini joins the Alsek. Several years earlier, a group of friends and I had carried inflatable rafts north into the Yukon, thrown them into the Tatshenshini, and floated downstream to the Alsek. At the conjunction the two rivers combine to become a single throbbing monster with more than four times the volume of the Colorado River. Ten days and a staggering 140 miles of rapids and glaciers later, the silty giant had popped us out onto the coast beneath the largest nonpolar ice field in the world.
Since then, while working as a wilderness guide throughout Alaska, I had hiked, paddled, and boated the coast south and east of Mount Fairweather and sailed up the western side as far as Lituya Bay. Trekking north from Lituya Bay to the Alsek River, I told myself, would complete a circumnavigation of Mount Fairweather and close a circle around more than five thousand square miles contained within one of the world’s wildest and most spectacular national parks. All I needed was a backpack and a pair of good boots to do it.
Of course, there would be obstacles. Several rivers would have to be crossed, along with a large tidal slough and a lake wedged between a tumbling waterfall and a glacier. There would be a five-hundred-foot-high moraine of glacial rubble to climb, and the weather along the coast can be frightful. Hurricane-force winds, storms that drop several inches of rain in an hour, and fog are all common. It is, as pioneering geologist Don Miller noted in a report to the U.S. Geological Service, “an area of bold contrasts,” where a traveler will experience “every extreme of environment.” For more than a hundred miles a belt of forest and underbrush as dense as any jungle on earth borders “a vast ice-covered land desolate and arctic in appearance.”
Anyone traveling in Miller’s footsteps would understand why the legends of the indigenous Tlingit Indians pinpoint the area as the site of Creation. Great plains of ice pool among the peaks, spilling deeply crevassed glaciers from every valley. To the Tlingit the glaciers were sentient beings that writhed and pulsed through the countryside, grinding and gnawing it into a land suitable for brutal gods. One of the most capricious gods is Kah-Lituya, a sullen, toadlike spirit that lives in a cave beneath the entrance to Lituya Bay. Kah-Lituya keeps a giant brown bear as his slave, and when angered, he orders it to seize the bay in its powerful jaws and shake it, creating giant waves.
Studies by Miller and other geologists have verified the Tlingit interpretation of the coast’s geologic activity; their research shows that for millennia the glaciers have advanced and receded, carving the land into its given shape over aeons of successive ice ages. Lituya Bay also sits directly atop the Fairweather Fault, a 180-mile-long fracture in the earth’s crust that geologists describe as a “strike-slip fault with lateral movement”—meaning that in Kah-Lituya’s domain the entire North American continent grinds slowly along the plate underlying the Pacific, with results that can be catastrophic. In 1958 an earthquake measuring 8.3 in magnitude caused a mammoth rock slide to cascade into Lituya Bay, generating a wave that was the highest ever recorded on the planet. The tsunami surged 1,720 feet above sea level and scoured the mountain down to bedrock.* Incredibly, one of the three fishing boats anchored in the bay survived. This was one of several mega-tsunamis generated by Kah-Lituya’s slave over the past 150 years.
But before I could concern myself with giant waves, I would have to get to Lituya Bay, which would require a sea voyage of 170 miles. My boat, the Wilderness Swift, is small and light and has a single engine. Its hull was designed for salmon fishermen working in sheltered waters. Cruising from Juneau to the outer coast would mean going north around Admiralty Island (the second-largest island in the Uni
ted States), then west out Icy Strait to Cross Sound. Cross Sound broadens into open ocean at Cape Spencer. Past Cape Spencer, I would be exposed to the fury of the gulf for nearly fifty miles.
And crossing the open water to Lituya Bay was not even the riskiest part of the trip. It is getting into the bay that gives navigators nightmares. My copy of the U.S. Coast Pilot cautions mariners that tidal currents at the entrance to the bay can be as strong as twelve knots and warns that “the ebb currents, running out against a southwest swell, cause bad topping seas or combers across the entire entrance, through which no small vessel can hope to live.”† In 1898, Lieutenant George Emmons of the U.S. Navy called it “the most justly feared harbor on the Pacific.”
Lieutenant Emmons was not exaggerating. Since the French explorer Jean-François de Galoup, Comte de La Pérouse became the first European to enter Lituya Bay in 1786, the tide rips at the entrance have claimed dozens of vessels and more than one hundred lives. La Pérouse’s expedition lost twenty-one men. After he was safe inside the harbor, the Tlingit occupying a village on the shore pantomimed to the adventurous Frenchman that shortly before his arrival they had suffered the loss of ten canoes carrying between seventy and a hundred people.
Drowning was a terrible fate for the Tlingit. If a body could not be recovered and cremated, a drowning victim might become a kushtaka, a half-man, half-otter changeling that occupies the realm between life and death. Like the toad Kah-Lituya, the kushtaka moves between land and water, and it has been known to take on the appearance of a beautiful, seductive woman or even a person’s own loved one in order to lure him or her into deep water or away into the forest. People who get lost or disappear are often the unwitting victims of a kushtaka. Many become otter-men themselves.
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 2
