After finishing my dinner, I scraped the remains of the glittering fish skin and bones over the side and watched them turn aqua white, then dark blue as they sank out of sight in the dark water. I watched as a lone sea otter paddled by a hundred yards away, lying on its back, whiskers twitching, the thick rudder of its tail propelling the sixty-pound animal along with an easy, sinuous wake. It was the only otter I could see anywhere in the bay. It had not taken long after the Frenchmen had left for the Russian, British, American, and Spanish fur hunters to converge on “Port des Français” and decimate the great rafts of sea otters. Within a few decades they were entirely gone. The lone paddler I was watching was probably an heir to a reintroduction program undertaken by the federal government in the 1970s.* The sea otters had disappeared, as had the Tlingit living and hunting in the area. The latter had made a fine profit off the Frenchmen, but in the end it had proved a devil’s bargain, cracking open their world as it had to new diseases, alcohol, and a near deathblow to centuries of tradition. Gone, too, was the immense herd of harbor seals that had once thrived in the bay and fed the Tlingit. Harbor seals haul out on icebergs for protection from predators and to bear their pups in spring; as Lituya Bay’s glaciers had retreated and gone stagnant, the seals had been left without refuge, and their numbers had plummeted.
I rolled out my sleeping bag and prepared to climb into my bunk. Without the sea otters, seals, and Tlingit, Lituya Bay was as silent as it has ever been in history. Glaciers advance, recede, and grow still; great nations of animals and men rise and fall. The last thing I remember thinking about before I fell asleep was how the world can change irrevocably in a moment, suddenly, beneath our very feet.
Chapter 8
The Next Morning I rose early to sit on the deck and drink a cup of coffee in the vivid morning air. I was tired, but the sky was clear; the weather front predicted to roll ashore in the night had veered and gone south of Cape Spencer, leaving in its place a crisp spring day that was warm in the sun but cold in the shade. I wanted to do some exploring, so I slipped a kayak over the side and tethered it to a cleat before finishing the leftover salmon and rice for breakfast and pouring a second cup of coffee. The days and distance of the journey from Juneau to Lituya Bay seemed to be slowly easing the knot left in my chest by Luisa’s death and the strain of my marriage.
While I sipped at the coffee, I did nothing but watch a barn swallow flutter out from shore and circle the boat. Time after time the sparrow-sized bird flew out from the beach, skimming just above the water, then rose in a graceful arching loop that carried it past the Swift only a few feet away. I had been working seven days a week for over a year, and with nothing pressing—no materials to order, no subcontractors to schedule, none of a thousand never-ending details to see to—watching the fluid, agile flight of the fork-tailed bird seemed enough to attend to.
As I watched, I grew curious about what it was doing; swallows are insect feeders, with demanding metabolisms, and this one had probably just arrived from its wintering grounds in South America. Some of Alaska’s swallows make a 14,000-mile round-trip to Argentina and back, and it seemed puzzling that after such an energy-sapping undertaking, it wasn’t feeding, but instead seemed intent on inspecting the Swift as closely as possible. Swallows have been known to starve to death when inclement weather drives their insect prey under cover for even short periods, yet this one, which had almost certainly depleted the bulk of its reserves, was finding a fiberglass boat hull more interesting than the swarms of midges and gnats I knew the sun would be bringing out of the brush onshore. Over and over it returned to the boat, flying around and around before darting off a few yards and then heading back. And each time it would break into a hover at the starboard scupper, suspending itself on rapidly beating wings a few inches from the opening. The feathers on its back were iridescent blue black, streaked with green in the morning sun.
It seemed to have no fear of me. Each time it hovered to inspect the scupper, it cocked its head to peer up at me as I leaned over the side to watch. The blink of a nictitating membrane across its tiny black eye seemed to give it a questioning look, as though it were asking for permission to enter the hole.* After fifteen or twenty minutes of this (or however long it takes a lethargic man to drink a cup of coffee and a swallow to fly back and forth from an anchored boat to a beach a dozen times) it rattled off a staccato of high-pitched chirps and sped away.
Alone again, I dipped my cup over the side to rinse it, then looked around at the mountains spanning the fjord. They were dazzling white in the sun and streaked with dark faces of rock too broken and precipitous to carry snow. Towered over by peaks that rose more than two miles above sea level yet were in their turn diminished by the size of the sky over the open ocean, the scale of the landscape felt so vast that I could gain no perspective of my own place in the universe of ice, water, firmament, and stone except to feel spectacularly unimportant and alone; for a moment I wished the curious swallow would return.
When it didn’t, I pulled the kayak alongside and started assembling my gear. First came the paddle, a lightweight composite of carbon and hard plastic, then a spray skirt and a bulky purple life jacket. (A spray skirt is a cone of waterproof material that fits tightly around a paddler’s body. The hem is fastened over a lip around the cockpit with an elastic drawstring to prevent water from entering the kayak if it becomes necessary to paddle in breaking waves.)
The water was so calm that I could see the faint dimples and rings of salmon smolt that had recently out-migrated from their natal streams and were rising to feed on copepods and other tiny invertebrates beneath the surface a hundred yards away. But the weather in fjords like Lituya Bay can change so rapidly that any venture away from the shelter of the boat had to be treated as if I might be gone for days. On a clear day like today, warm air rising above the sun-drenched forests and surface ocean waters might leave a vacuum in its place that would draw colder air down from the upper reaches of the mountains. The glaciers that feed into Lituya Bay are part of a complex system of ice fields and glaciers that sprawls over more than a thousand square miles, and when the cold, dense air of this wintry alpine kingdom begins to flow downhill, the wind may rise quickly. The narrow fjords create a natural Venturi effect that can squeeze and accelerate the moving air in a manner not unlike that of the furious rush of fuel and oxygen through a hot rod’s carburetor. When these outflow winds strike, it can be the meteorological equivalent of going from zero to sixty in a few seconds.
Watching a wisp of cloud that hung without moving near the summit of a peak at the back of the bay, I thought such a thing unlikely, but I dug around in the hold until I found a paddle float anyway. A paddle float is an inflatable ring that can be slipped over the blade of a paddle to create extra stability if a paddler is dumped from a kayak. Braced at a right angle to the hull, the paddle and float create an outrigger that allows a paddler to climb back into the kayak without tipping over again. I tucked the float under a net of shock cords fastened to the kayak’s foredeck along with a spare paddle, so both would be in easy reach, then searched through the jumble of packs, boxes of food, and boat gear in the Swift’s hold for a waterproof vinyl bag. Matches, a tube of fire-starting paste, and the handheld radio went in first, followed by a chocolate bar and a metal cup stuffed with four or five packages of dried soup mix. A pile jacket and an extra set of polypropylene long underwear went into a second bag along with a square of lightweight waterproof material I had been using for years as a tent ground cloth. With fire, food, dry clothes, and the means to create a shelter tucked into the kayak’s watertight hold, I should be okay if I somehow wound up wet and marooned by bad weather for a few days. I was already in the kayak and about to shove off when I remembered the bear spray. Bear spray, or repellent, is a pressurized aerosol containing a concentration of oleoresin capsicum, the oily inflammatory ingredient found in red-hot chili peppers. Thumbing a trigger mounted on top of the six-inch can is a bit like firing a small fire extinguisher;
it releases a jet of intensely irritating spray that creates a burning sensation in the eyes, nose, and respiratory system of anything encountering it.
I did not expect to need it. Bear spray has proved to be relatively effective in countering aggression, and I usually carry it when traveling in bear country, plus a twelve-gauge shotgun if circumstances warrant, but in the twenty years I have been guiding in Alaska, I have never used either. Bears—both black and grizzly—are generally much better behaved than we give them credit for. The bulk of my guiding work has been with wildlife photographers and natural history film crews, which frequently requires spending days or even weeks at a time in close proximity to grizzlies, but I had come to believe that with enough caution the risk could be greatly reduced, if not eliminated. During an estimated two or three hundred close—and sometimes very close—encounters with grizzlies and black bears, neither I nor any of my clients had ever been seriously threatened or injured.
This is not to say that bears are not dangerous. On average, one person is killed by a bear in Alaska every year, and five or six more are injured. Two thirds of the victims are hunters who surprised a bear in thick brush. Such “defensive” attacks occur when a startled bear responds to something it perceives as a threat, or a female bear feels her cubs are at risk, or an animal is defending a source of food such as a moose kill. The victims of defensive attacks are often clawed or bitten badly, but the attack usually ceases when the bear believes the threat has been eliminated. “Playing dead” by not resisting can be an effective method of surviving a defensive onslaught.
On the more horrific end of the spectrum are “predacious” attacks, when a bear actively targets a human as prey. Predacious attacks seldom occur spontaneously and are usually presaged by escalating aggression; the bear may circle, move in, retreat, then return again, as if probing its target or working up the nerve to attack. A bear’s becoming increasingly less responsive to the shouts, pot banging, gunshots, or other loud noises that would usually repel it is a hallmark of an impending predatory event.
In the past ten years I had lost two friends to grizzlies, but in spite of this I knew that predatory attacks are in truth extremely rare; after forty years in Alaska, I could count the number of purely predacious attacks I knew of on the fingers of one hand. As a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game once noted, with thirty thousand brown bears roaming the state and more than a hundred thousand black bears, “if bears really wanted to eat people, they would . . . We’d lose somebody every day.”
Nonetheless, I kicked the rudder to the side and dipped the paddle to swing the kayak back alongside the boat, then grabbed the bowline and hoisted myself out to retrieve the bear spray. I was not planning to take any long hikes into thick brush that day, but I am cautious by nature and would feel better taking it along.
Easing back into the kayak, I snapped the spray skirt into place and shifted my hips to settle my weight. I was bending forward to secure the bowline when I heard a familiar chirring—the swallow was back, hovering again in front of the scupper; only this time a second bird had joined him. They took turns fluttering up to the very edge of the opening, then backing out so the other could move in to take a look.
“I’ll be damned,” I said as one of the apparently fearless birds landed on the lip of the scupper and tilted its head to peer inside. Barn swallows nest in hollow trees or on sheltered ledges, where they can build cup-shaped nests of mud and grass, and now I understood that the first swallow to circle the Swift that morning was probably a male reconnoitering a potential nest site; the second bird was a prospective mate. I may have laughed out loud as the male fluttered up to the perched female making a chirk-chirk-chirk sound, as if asking her opinion. It’s waterfront! he seemed to say. A sun-drenched opening, just perfect for a home! When I dipped my paddle to back the kayak up a bit, the female tipped off the edge of the scupper and flew away. The male followed, chattering.
The water was so calm that a few paddle strokes were enough to get the kayak up to speed. Within a hundred yards I was growing warm as the chill of the early morning gave way to the repetitive reach-and-pull of the paddle. The only sound was that of water trickling off the blade. I was stiff and sore from bracing myself against the tossing waves the day before, but it felt good to be doing something with my body besides carrying planks and lifting sacks of concrete. The pinched nerve in my neck from the excavator injury two years earlier was bothering me, creating a slight numbness in my arm, but the kayak slipped so smoothly and musically through the water that I convinced myself that a few hours of paddling would be okay, or perhaps even therapeutic.
In fifteen minutes the Swift was half a mile behind me; in twenty minutes I could barely make out its shape against Cenotaph Island. By seven thirty, sunlight pouring over the mountains had washed away the last shadows on the walls of the fjord and turned a waning moon overhead pale white. It was a perfect morning, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was leaving something important behind.
As the day grew warmer, a sweet odor filled the air. For five miles along the edge of the fjord, from a steep rocky point just ahead to the bay’s entrance off my stern, a band of cottonwood trees lined the shore. Every twig and branch on the rough-barked trees was tipped with a pale green bud. The ripe, heady scent was the smell of a resinous secretion known as balm of Gilead, drawn to the surface of the nascent, tightly coiled cottonwood leaves by the sun.
The closer I got to shore, the thicker the smell grew, and I stopped paddling so I could just drift in the sunlight and perfume. The cottonwoods spread a quarter of a mile inland from the water’s edge to an abrupt border with an ancient spruce and hemlock forest, where the new green buds presented a stark contrast to the darkness of the evergreens.
As I drifted, a low, distant roar mumbled across the fjord. I could not see where it came from, but I could tell from the sound that somewhere up among the alpine ridges at the back of the fjord, cornices of snow carved into the shape of breaking waves by the passing winter’s winds had begun to sag under the weight of the sun’s warmth and succumb to gravity. Again and again the rumble of faraway avalanches muttered across the water, and as I breathed in the balm of the cottonwoods and floated in the sun beneath the walls of doomed snow, I marveled that I had arrived at the exact point in time when the land was beginning to heave and writhe beneath its winter coat and burst into life with the sounds and smells of spring. It was a fleeting moment, I knew, because by evening—or at most within a day or two—the surge of photosynthesis and rising sap generated by the cascade of sunlight would begin to explode the cottonwood buds into small but full-fledged leaves, signaling that the grove’s embryonic stage of life had passed and the work of procreation had begun. After the persistence of the preceding winter, with its never-ending threat of destructive avalanches and record snowfall, this seemed like a miracle, so I dipped the paddle and pulled for shore.
The tide was rising, and I hoisted the kayak onto one shoulder to carry it up the beach, moving carefully to avoid losing my footing on the algae-covered boulders. At the high tide mark I eased the kayak to the ground and tied the bowline to a drift log. I wasn’t planning to go far, but more than one careless kayaker has been marooned in Southeast Alaska when the region’s oversize tides sneaked up and stole an unsecured kayak away.
The cottonwoods were rimmed with a thick line of alders. A mat of last year’s beach grass lay in a dense tangle on the shore, stippled along its outer edge with needles of new growth. I could see where an area of sedge grass sprouting along the banks of a small seep of melting snow and rainwater had been cropped by a browsing bear. With patches of rotting snow still lying in the shadows beneath the alders, the fresh sedge had probably been the bear’s only source of protein. There were thin straws of twisted stalk starting to protrude here and there, bunchberry leaves poking up in tightly wound spirals, and tiny buds as soft and furry as a kitten’s paw on a stand of willows growing along the seep. Even with the rampant suns
hine to hurry things along, it looked like it could be a week or more before there would be enough plant life to meet a bear’s needs. Every bear on the coast would be on the move, traveling constantly in search of food.
I checked the bear spray on my hip, snapping the holster open and closed a few times to make sure it was working smoothly, adjusted it on my belt so it would fall naturally under my hand if I had to reach for it without looking, then practiced a couple of “quick draws” to prove it. The gunslinger posturing would have felt foolish if there had been anyone around to witness it, but it reassured me enough to push through the alders and into the cottonwoods.
The smell was enough to get drunk on. Balm of Gilead got its name from a biblical passage, in Genesis, in which the caravan that carries Joseph away into slavery is also transporting a cargo of medicinal balsam. The caravan had come from the ancient city of Gilead, east of the Jordan River. After being soaked in olive oil, the resin emitted by cottonwood buds emulsifies into a salve that is reputed to have analgesic properties, so I thumbed a few buds off a branch into the palm of my hand and squeezed them, hoping to force out enough resin to ease the burn of the pinched nerve in my neck. The buds crumbled into a pulp that left my hand sticky and sweet smelling. After the accident with the excavator, I had never taken time off to let the injury heal, and now, as I rubbed the crushed buds into my neck and shoulder, I wondered how a balm carried by a slave-trading caravan had become a symbol of delivery from overwork and suffering.
The thought was interrupted by the koowk of a raven calling from farther inland, then an answering ka-hoowk! from a second bird behind me near the shore. Given their documented vocabulary of more than thirty vocalizations and their well-deserved reputation for problem-solving skills and pranks, it is easy to understand why the Tlingit revere the big-brained raven as a symbol of the Creator. And it seemed fitting to have their company as I wandered through the cottonwoods, awash in the scent of salvation at the end of a vicious winter. There on the cusp of spring, with the past year’s troubles beginning to seem far away, I realized that for the first time in months I was feeling almost relaxed, and I sent an imitative kawk! in response.
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 7
