“On a scale normally stretching from 1 to 4 (low, moderate, serious, high) an update from the Southeast Avalanche Center continues to call the avalanche danger ‘extreme’ or off the scale.”
“We do not normally use the fifth point of the U.S. scale,” said Bill Glude, director of the Avalanche Center, “but on those rare occasions when avalanche danger is so high that it is essentially off the scale and widespread natural avalanches are probable, the designator is ‘extreme’ or ‘black.’ Being anywhere near avalanche terrain or runout zones is not recommended.”
To avoid being “anywhere near” avalanche terrain in Juneau would mean leaving town. The best the city could do was open a public facility on the edge of the black zone to those wishing to evacuate their homes. “They should bring with them all needed medications, pillows, sleeping bags or blankets, and vital papers,” said the city manager. In other words, there would be nothing left of their homes if an avalanche occurred.
The city held its breath. The buttresses of snow overhead sagged and groaned. When it began to rain, every ear in town cocked heavenward for the first rumble of destruction. And still no one took the city up on its offer. The facility remained empty, perhaps because the bulletin also noted that pets could not be accommodated or because the refugees preferred to crowd in with friends living outside the danger zone. But it seemed like the reluctance of so many to evacuate also demonstrated the deeply human impulse to cling, when things get threatening, to the sheltering idea of “home,” just as so many did at the approach of Hurricane Katrina or when smoke started boiling out of the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Russia.
For days, obliteration never seemed far away. And the sword hanging over the community’s head made my decision for me. With the mountains under such a burden of snow, the likelihood of extreme levels of runoff when it started melting was inarguable. By summer, raging water would make the coast impassable, as it had for the expedition that had attempted the traverse two years earlier. My best bet was to go before that could happen. I decided to depart for Lituya Bay in early May.
Chapter 5
Gray Waves Rolled toward me from a horizon streaked with bruised clouds. The boat bucked into an oncoming wave, pitched hard to one side, and righted. I was 120 miles out of Juneau on my way to Lituya Bay, and a mile to starboard I could see the swells exploding into spray against Cape Spencer. For a moment I considered turning back, but I decided against it because I had already turned back once before, gone timid a day earlier at the sight of ten-foot rollers leaping and tumbling in a tide rip that pours out of Cross Sound into the gulf beyond the cape. Besides, though the sea frightens me, the weather and choppy water matched my mood.
Through some miracle of adhesion—some fine, hair-thin agreement between a million tons of snow and the urgings of gravity—the slide hanging over Juneau had stayed in place, though the weather had thawed, frozen, and thawed again through an improbable temperature cycle that had wavered back and forth across a single degree. But whatever miracle had kept the avalanche aloft over the city had not held for everyone; four days before I left for Lituya Bay, Luisa died.
I was upstairs, installing a complicated shower valve in the half-finished bathroom, when her husband called. The instructions for the valve had apparently been written in Chinese, then translated into English by someone with a loose grip on both languages; I was frustrated by a number of small plastic pieces that did not do what they were said to do. But everything—Juneau’s brush with destruction, the fatigue of laboring alone on the house for months through the record snowfall, and the lousy translation—became unimportant after I answered the phone.
Joel’s voice shook as he struggled to speak. Luisa had stopped eating, he said. Then a fever had set in and she was dying. I should come right away if I wanted to say goodbye.
I cursed as I threw my tools into a bucket. After I hung up the phone, it felt like someone else was in charge of my body, and I watched, hearing only the sound of my own breathing, as that someone got into my truck, put the key in the ignition, and dropped the gearshift into reverse. A week earlier, spring had finally begun to edge winter aside, with the sound of geese overhead and water trickling from banks of rotting snow, but the day was cold, harsh, and windy. The light coming through the clouds was as thin and gray as poorhouse gruel. I am normally a cautious driver, but when I finally slipped back into my body, the speedometer said I was doing eighty.
I had to brake hard to make the turn to Joel and Luisa’s beach house. The truck slewed to a stop at the top of a flight of stairs. The branches of an ancient spruce swayed in a gust of wind. A flock of crows rose tumbling and raucous as I passed, then settled again, shrieking. Twigs rained down on my head.
I stopped, reluctant to continue, and tried for a moment to decipher what message might be written in a hieroglyph of tiny branches and leaves at my feet, but there was nothing, just the crows and the wind. The metal stairs rang under my boots as I hurried down.
She was in the living room, propped up in an adjustable bed that a quartet of friends had carried down the long flight of stairs and into the house when it became clear there was nothing more to be done for her at the hospital. At the first sign of spring Joel had hung a sugar-water feeder on the porch, and the windows buzzed with rufous hummingbirds, dipping and swirling like spots of incandescent light. Beyond the hummingbirds the wind stirred the waters of Lynn Canal into tumbling whitecaps that hurried west toward Admiralty Island.
Luisa’s breath was shallow and uneven as I sank to a stool beside her. We have never been the sort of people who speak of love easily, but I took her hand. We do not speak such words effortlessly or often because to do so risks watering them down. Instead, they are the last arrow out of the quiver, hoarded for critical moments such as these, because, to paraphrase the writer Annie Dillard, what else are you going to say to the dying that does not enrage with its triviality?
I leaned in and squeezed Luisa’s hand. Her eyes were closed, but I knew she could hear me. At first all I could do was say how grateful I was to have had her in my life, and ramble back and forth over how our friendship had enriched me. Then I realized I was repeating myself and thought to say, “Don’t be afraid,” and “Don’t worry about Joel. We’ll take care of him.”
Then I told her I loved her and said goodbye.
On my way out the crows were strangely silent. The wind overhead hissed and sighed. I climbed into my truck and started the engine. Then I rolled up the windows so no one would hear me howl.
A memorial was planned for the end of May. By then the wildflowers would be blooming, and the odds of good weather would be high. But the rivers on the outer coast might also be flooding, so I considered canceling. It could take a month to get to Lituya Bay, hike the outer coast, and return to Juneau, and I did not want to miss the service. There was no guarantee I could get back in time.
When I mentioned this to one of the friends who had carried Luisa from the hospital and down that long flight of stairs so she could spend her last days at home, he grew solemn. Jon is exceptionally quick-witted, with an infectious laugh that bursts out from his sternum, but since Luisa’s death he had been grave. When he is serious—when he has something to say and thinks you should really listen—he tilts his head a few degrees and looks as stern as a deacon. This is what he did when I explained that I was thinking of canceling. We were in a bar. The waitress had just brought us drinks.
“I know what Luisa would say,” he said, pausing to toy with a napkin before he picked up his drink and pointed it at me. “She’d say go.”
He was right. Luisa had lugged heavy sound-recording equipment to the Arctic, Africa, and Greenland while producing films with her husband. They had built a log cabin in the interior of Alaska and spent summers canoeing wild rivers. In the twenty years I had known them, I had rarely known Luisa to decline an adventure. So I went home, dug out a small Buddhist prayer flag she had given me after a trip to Mongolia, and folded the Sanskrit-emblazoned
banner into a pocket of my pack.
Now the pack and the flag were safely stowed in the hold, I was three days out of Juneau, and my shoulders were stiff with the tension that comes of being alone in a small boat on a very large and boisterous sea. But the early-morning weather report had promised decreasing winds and calmer seas by afternoon, so I decided to press on.
The Swift lurched over the top of another wave, and I braced myself for the impact at the bottom. The morning broadcast had also crackled with a one-sided conversation between the Coast Guard station in Juneau and a vessel in trouble in a fjord south of Juneau. From what I’d been able to make of the static-filled transmission, a rescue helicopter was under way. I scanned the horizon and wondered what the chances of any sort of rescue would be where I was going. There were no boats in sight.
I throttled back, lowering the boat’s speed to decrease the violent motion. If I could claw offshore a few miles, I might find calmer water. The effects of tides and currents on the seas are more pronounced close to shore, and more “sea room,” the distance between a boat and land, is always a sailor’s friend. The farther offshore one is, the more time one has to deal with unexpected problems, mechanical or otherwise, before a disabled vessel can be swept onto the rocks.
A flock of pelagic cormorants flapped out of the way at the approach of the Swift. Soot-colored shearwaters soared along the backs of rolling waves. The currents that rage through Southeast Alaska flush a rich soup of nutrients from the depths that combines with sunlight at the surface to create masses of phytoplankton. Phytoplankton supports tiny animals like copepods and various larvae, which in turn become food for herring and krill. Everything from seabirds to whales feeds on herring and krill, and west of Cape Spencer, where the seabed disappears into an abyss, the sea and sky are always full of life.
A large shadow swept across the deck, and I glanced out the window just in time to catch a rare glimpse of a black-footed albatross, sweeping by on seven-foot wings. The black-footed albatross is a giant bird that breeds in Hawaii, then rides to Alaska in the summer on the winds that rotate around a static weather system called the North Pacific High, sleeping, it is said, on the wing, taking catnaps that can last a hundred miles. This one swooped, circled, and disappeared astern without moving a feather. In the distance rose the glistening back of a humpback whale.
A glance at the radar told me I had edged two miles outside of Cape Spencer. The foot of the cape was speckled with rocks and reefs. I reached for my cell phone and checked the signal—weak, but still strong enough for me to call my wife.
There was a single ring and a moment of static before the connection went straight to voice mail. She was too busy to talk.
“Call me back if you get this, will you, hon?” I said after a cheery recording of her voice invited me to leave a message. “I’m about to go out of range.”
Beyond the cape there would be no cell phone or other means of communication. I cut the throttle back and waited. Without steerageway the hull rolled broadside to the waves. Throttling up to regain control, I idled forward, poking the bow into the chop.
Half an hour later the radar told me I was three miles beyond Cape Spencer. I jogged into the waves for a few minutes, hoping the phone would ring, but it stayed silent. I spun the helm and turned northwest toward Lituya Bay.
Thirty miles and a couple thousand whitecaps later the clouds broke into rags and thinned. Silver sunlight poured across an iron-colored sea. White birds rose and fell between the waves. To starboard the blue-and-white tongue of La Perouse Glacier poured out of the mountains behind a surf-pummeled beach. There was no sign of humanity. No boats on the sea, no planes overhead. No activity in any direction. The radio had been silent for hours.
Through binoculars I could see the tops of trees rising from beyond the surf. The scene was identical to one Captain James Cook had noted while exploring this coast 230 years earlier, on a clear, fine day in May of 1778, as HMS Resolution and its sister ship Discovery crawled north in light winds over a rolling, glassy sea. Cook, writing in the staid, clear language preferred by the British Admiralty, recorded that the towering mountains in sight to starboard were “wholly covered with snow, from the highest summits down to the sea coast, some few places excepted where we could perceive trees, as it were, rising their heads out of the sea.”
It was such a fine, almost balmy day that Cook was inspired to name the towering mountain behind the next headland he came to Mount Fair Weather. In choosing to commemorate the weather that allowed him to see the 15,000-foot peak from miles away, Cook was unknowingly acknowledging something the Tlingit Indians had known for centuries: When Na goot Ku, a friendly, birdlike spirit that lives on Fairweather’s summit, lifts the clouds enough for “the paddler’s mountain” to be visible, the weather will be calm enough to travel at sea by dugout canoe.
Na goot Ku was not as benevolent toward all of the early explorers as he was toward Captain Cook. Alexei Chirikov, the Russian commander of the first European ship to approach North America from the west, never saw Mount Fairweather. It was cloudy and close to nightfall when a lookout aboard Chirikov’s ship, the St. Paul, spotted the coast on July 15, 1741. The St. Paul and a second ship, the St. Peter, under the command of a Dane named Vitus Bering, were all that remained of what had once been the greatest army of exploration the world has ever seen. When the Great Nordic Expedition had departed Saint Petersburg under Bering’s command in 1733, it had been ten thousand strong, a swarming horde of soldiers, carpenters, hunters, engineers, and scientists sent out by Peter the Great with orders to map Siberia, build the city of Petropavlovsk, sail across the unexplored reaches of the Bering Sea until they struck North America, then continue south to Mexico. Eight years later, by the time Chirikov’s lookout spotted the faint outline of a tree-covered island looming out of the night near what would one day be the border between Canada and Alaska, the ambitious expedition had been winnowed down to two worm-riddled hulks manned by tubercular, scurvied ghosts. Exhausted and in poor health, neither Bering nor Chirikov had the heart for further exploration.* The St. Paul and the St. Peter had lost contact with each other shortly after leaving Siberia, and Chirikov, leery of approaching the strange new coast without the support of another vessel, came cautiously about and stood offshore again.
On July 18, after three days of sailing north, a lookout at the St. Paul’s masthead spotted what appeared to be an opening to a large bay. Water was running low, so Chirikov ordered Fleetmaster Dementief to go ashore in a small boat with a couple of empty casks to explore.
Dementief armed ten men with muskets and a small cannon, launched the larger of the St. Paul’s two longboats, and rowed ashore, mindful of Chirikov’s instructions that he was to discern who lived in the bay and whether they possessed any valuable metals (i.e., gold). Chirikov had also given Dementief ten rubles to present to the bay’s inhabitants and ordered him to build a large bonfire upon landing to signal his safe arrival.
Dementief and the others were never seen again. The St. Paul coasted back and forth watching for five days, but the boat never returned. On July 23 the St. Paul stood in toward shore, sailing as close to the land as Chirikov dared, but no closer than two or three miles. Smoke was seen rising from the beach, and he ordered that a signal cannon be fired. There was no response, and no boat came off. Again and again the cannon signal went unanswered. Fearing that Dementief’s boat had somehow been damaged, Chirikov then sent in the ship’s second—and last—small boat, manned by the St. Paul’s bosun, a carpenter, and two helpers, with materials for repairs. They, too, disappeared.
The next day the Russians made the Western world’s first, fleeting contact with the coast’s inhabitants. Two canoes were seen coming out of the bay, one large and one small.
“We naturally thought they were our boats,” said Chirikov in his report, “and stood towards them.”
There was very little wind. Chirikov ordered the sails taken in and the shrouds tightened, but when the small
boat came closer, they became aware that it was not their boat, “for it had a sharp bow, and those in it did not row but paddled.”
The larger of the two boats hung back in the distance, and the smaller one would not come close enough for those aboard the St. Paul to make out the four occupants clearly or see their faces.
The small boat’s occupants stood up and began shouting, “Agai! Agai!” and waved for the St. Paul to follow them. Then they turned and paddled away.
“We could not pursue them,” said Chirikov, “because in the first place there was no wind, in the second place the small boat went very fast, and the large one had stopped a considerable distance from us.” The two canoes sped back into the bay, he continued, and “we became convinced that some misfortune had happened to our men, for it was the eighth day since [Dementief] had left us.”
Chirikov decided that the failure of “the Americans” to approach his ship indicated that they had killed or detained his men. When evening came, he ordered the St. Paul to stand offshore, where they drifted, waiting for two more days before abandoning all hope of recovering the missing sailors. With the ship’s carpenter lost, no boats on board, and no materials to build another, Chirikov had no way to get ashore. There was nothing more he could do. Low on water, and with fifteen of his crew missing, he had no choice but to order his remaining men to sail for home.
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 4
