I held the photo up to the horizon, then moved a bit and tried again. It was a simple matter to match a range of hills behind Huscroft to the contours of the shore and decide that here, or at least very close to where I was standing, was where he had once stamped his shovel into the ground and started to coax a living from the land. The smell of dry grass and new growth mingled with a faint musk of seaweed left high and dry by the tide, creating a faint, fecund scent like the ghost of a garden. It was easy to imagine him working contentedly, lost in the peace that comes with silence as he shoveled and stirred a rich compost of fish and kelp and his pet foxes played around his feet.
There is something in a garden that says home like nothing else, that stakes a piece of ground as one’s own, as a source not of mere shelter but of sustenance. During the early stages of excavation prior to the start of building my own house, I had broken through a layer of duff and been ecstatic to discover a small pocket of soil as rich and dark as any Mississippi River bottomland. It had been deposited in a shallow declivity in the bedrock through the slow accretion of organic matter over the centuries since the end of the Little Ice Age, and discovering it was like finding gold. With buckets, a wheelbarrow, a shovel, and our hands, my wife and I scraped and gathered the precious muck into a stockpile that would barely have filled an average bathtub. It was a small start, we agreed, but a good one. We would add to it over the years by stirring in pails of compost and seaweed much as Huscroft had.
At my wife’s urging, even before the first concrete was poured, I screwed a dozen cedar planks together to make a large garden box on a sunlit bench of land below the building site, then on my next trip into town picked up a load of manure and fertilizer. On a rare afternoon off work, she troweled peas, carrots, and several kinds of lettuce into the soil, then brought home a bag of flower bulbs to set out at the first sign of winter. I’d spent most of my life as a nomad, living on boats and in cabins, tents, and other temporary shelters, moving from season to season, first as a commercial fisherman and then in a variety of maritime and construction trades, before finally settling into guiding; I knew nothing of gardening. But the tangle of vines, leaves, and spidery carrot tops that shot up from the peat-black dirt that first summer looked permanent. I had given little thought over the past thirty years to settling down, but the act of putting down roots—literally—on a piece of ground as spectacular as the ridge, with its view of endless mountains and a free-flowing salmon stream nearby, had opened up a world of new dreams that made it easy to imagine how Huscroft, after having lived the life of an itinerant miner, must have felt as he watched rows of vegetables sprout from soil he had created with his own patient hands. I could imagine how at home he must have felt, how solidly planted.
And being a generous man, he wanted to share. Beginning in 1897, when Prince Luigi Amedeo, the duke of Abruzzi and the son of the king of Spain, summited 18,000-foot Mount Saint Elias after ten years of attempts on the mountain that had defeated, among others, expeditions from the U.S. Army, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Geographic Society, an enthusiasm for the unexplored coast began to burn among the world’s mountaineers. It took more than a quarter of a century for the next expedition to probe into the “American Himalayas,” but in 1926 two attempts were made to scale Mount Fairweather. The first approached from the east, through Glacier Bay, and failed. The second, led by a young research engineer named Allen Carpe, also failed, but Carpe became so enamored of Alaska’s mountains that he returned in 1930, accompanied by a twenty-three-year-old Harvard-educated economist named Terris Moore. Set on approaching the mountain from the north via a long, circuitous route that began in the mining village of McCarthy, crossed over the Skolai Pass, and climbed up Russell Glacier, Carpe and Moore found themselves in a friendly but determined competition to be the first up Mount Fairweather with an expedition led by then-twenty-year-old Bradford Washburn, who would take the photograph of Huscroft I would use to identify his garden site. Washburn’s team had already attempted the ascent from the coast near Cape Fairweather, but after encountering the hellish tangle of alder and devil’s club that girdles the lower reaches of the mountains, they had turned back. On Huscroft’s advice they then decided to start by climbing northwest along Lituya Glacier to Desolation Valley and up Fairweather Glacier, where they were stopped by a 400-foot wall of ice feet wedged between 2,000-foot cliffs. Carpe and Moore got no farther than Mount Bona, nearly 200 miles away, but in all of the comings and goings, Washburn became good friends with Huscroft. When Carpe and Moore returned in 1931 for Carpe’s third attempt on Fairweather’s summit, they, too, anchored in front of Cenotaph Island—probably in the same spot where I was anchored—to begin shuttling their equipment and supplies to a series of staging camps along the approach to the mountain. During the process they became friends with Huscroft as well. On June 8, 1931, after enduring sixty days of seemingly endless gales, torrential rains, and snowstorms, they became the first humans to reach the top of Mount Fairweather.
Standing in Huscroft’s garden with the sun in my face, Washburn’s photo in my hand, and silence ringing in my ears, I felt the hum of time wash over me. Seventy-five years earlier Carpe and Moore had stood where I stood, not long after clawing their way to the summit of Fairweather. Over the years I had lived in Ed’s cabin, he had at times related stories to me of his experiences as an avid young climber. In the late 1940s, after Ed had taken part in the first ascent of Mount Hess, northeast of Denali in the Alaska Range, it had been Terris Moore who’d flown over the summit, as an objective observer, to confirm his accomplishment. Through my connection with Ed, and his with Moore, and Moore’s with Carpe and Washburn, it felt like the distance between the hermit of Lituya Bay and me was no greater than the width of the garden.
After Washburn and Carpe spread word of Huscroft’s hospitality, a thin but steady flow of mountaineers bent on exploring the uncharted region began to appear in Lituya Bay. Washburn came back in 1932, 1933, and 1934 at the head of ever-larger and more complex expeditions and would continue to climb in Alaska for decades. (In 1940 his wife, Barbara, became the first woman to summit a peak in the Fairweather Range by climbing Mount Bertha.) Tragically, Carpe was killed in 1932 during a climb on 20,300-foot Mount McKinley (now called Denali), but Moore stayed on in the territory and eventually became the president of the University of Alaska, and he and his cohorts frequently showed up at Huscroft’s cabin. After Washburn described Huscroft and his garden in an article written for National Geographic magazine, the trickle of visitors to Lituya Bay became a small flood.
And Huscroft was ready for them. He had always welcomed the trappers, fishermen, prospectors, and other wanderers drawn by rumors of his hospitality and deep-dish berry pies, who sometimes dropped by in such numbers as to overflow his small cabin, and in 1930 he had started building a bunkhouse to accommodate them. The climbers quickly dubbed the twenty-six-by-sixteen-foot log structure the “Huscroft Hotel”: it had eight bunks, a large woodstove with an oven, and hardwood alder floors. As I kicked through a thicket of dried thimbleberry stalks to peer into the gloom beneath the forest canopy, I marveled at the strength of the man and the sheer effort he had expended to fell and drag enough trees into the open to stack into the shape of a 400-square-foot shelter.
Huscroft was fifty-eight years old—six years older than me—and green logs are damned heavy. I had sawed and milled several truckloads of twenty-foot logs into material for my own house project, but I had had the help of a winch truck and a crusty ex-logger named Monte Lewis. Monte lives in patched and faded overalls, with the smoke from a knockdown pipe clenched between his teeth rising up through the strands of an admirably neglected beard the way shreds of cloud twist through the treetops in the rainforest around Juneau, and he had a small sawmill set up on Douglas Island. Like most people who make their living in timber, Monte believes in hard work, which meant we laid off chopping, heaving, and sawing the heavy logs into planks and timbers only when the temperature fell
to nine degrees below zero. When the water dripping from a copper tube plumbed into a five-gallon can to lubricate the whirling blade began to freeze into small pellets that flew from the roaring machine and stung our faces, he wedged his axe into a stump, pulled his pipe from his teeth, and declared it was time to “let ’er heal up,” meaning we wouldn’t go back to work until the temperature climbed back above zero.
Turning a man-high stack of logs into several thousand board feet of finished planks and timbers was some of the hardest work I have ever done, but in the end the sight of the wood stickered and stacked to dry at the building site was worth the weeks of frozen fingers and aching muscles. Huscroft’s task of dragging, poling, and levering the logs for his “hotel” into place without machinery had undoubtedly been even more difficult. But as I stood back from the edge of the forest to imagine the two cabins snuggled side by side, with a pole-and-shake roof spanning the space between them to create a storage area for firewood and kegs of dried salmon, I knew the satisfaction he must have felt as he lifted each squared timber into place. And I marveled at the character of a man who would perform so much labor for people he did not know, who strained his back and blistered his hands for the benefit of those who only might—perhaps—someday come.
But he did and they came. For the next six years the bunkhouse was often full, and Huscroft’s only surviving diary notes the arrival and departure of group after group of climbers, geologists, scientists, students, travelers, fishermen, and appreciative visitors. In winter he might not see another human being for months at a time, but during the summer the number of visitors swelled until it was a wonder he managed to feed them all with his garden. Somehow his patch of carefully nurtured ground always supplied enough produce to feed dozens of people, with enough left over to carry him through the winter. Or it did until Kah-Lituya changed everything.
Chapter 12
In 1936, Jim Huscroft was sixty-four years old and starting to slow down. He tired more easily than he had when he first arrived in Lituya Bay, though he still thought nothing of strapping a heavy pack on his back and heading off to spend a few nights at one of the small shelters he had thrown up at various locations along the coast for his trapping and prospecting forays. In the spring of that year, he made his usual trip into Juneau, hitching a ride on the troller Mine. The Mine was owned by Nick Larsen, a friend of Huscroft’s who had spent the winter trapping around Lituya Bay with a partner, Fritz Frederickson. Once in Juneau, Larsen and Frederickson set about selling their winter’s catch, and Huscroft went off on his usual round of gathering up a year’s worth of staples, picking up his newspapers at the Elks Club, and dropping by a few of the town’s rough-and-tumble saloons. At some point during his rounds he made the acquaintance of a young man named Bernie Allen, who had heard enough stories about Huscroft and Lituya Bay to think he was interested in taking a stab at the hermit’s lifestyle. Could he come along when Huscroft went back to Lituya Bay? he asked. Huscroft, of course, was agreeable.
By all accounts Huscroft and Allen got along well. The young man was personable, worked hard, and was excited by the adventure of living in such a remote and beautiful spot. It was starting to seem like Huscroft would have company for the winter when Allen was still there in October, even though the autumn had been a miserable one, with a series of gales drenching the coast with record rainfalls. October is by far the wettest month in Southeast Alaska, but a storm that began on October 20 and continued for the next six days dropped 150 percent of the period’s normal rainfall.
Throughout the pounding storm, Larsen and Frederickson were stuck outside the bay aboard the Mine, rolling and heaving on the waves as they waited for the weather to abate enough to allow them to cross the bar. They were there to get ready for another trapping season, and at about four o’clock on the evening of the 26th, just before dusk, the combers finally laid down enough to let Larsen pilot the troller in.
They anchored not far from Huscroft’s cabin. Frederickson later told a friend that they could see a light in the window, but the weather was still lousy, and after days of pitching and rolling on the ocean waves, they were too tired to row ashore. The rain was still hammering on the boat’s cabin top when Larsen and Frederickson turned in.
The next morning Huscroft was up at daybreak, making his usual pancakes. Larsen and Frederickson were sitting in the fo’c’sle of the Mine having coffee. Allen was still in bed, in no hurry to get outside and face the soggy weather. There are a few conflicts in the various accounts of what happened next, but all agreed it started with a terrible noise that Allen later described to a reporter for the Alaska Daily Press as “the drone of a hundred airplanes at low altitude.”
Huscroft yelled at Allen to get up. Larsen and Frederickson piled up the ladder into the wheelhouse to see what was going on. It was still gloomy outside, and no one could tell where the noise was coming from.
The roar just kept growing louder and louder. It continued for five minutes, then ten, then twenty. At six twenty A.M. an increasingly nervous Larsen started the Mine’s engine. Huscroft ran out of his cabin, expecting to feel the jolt of an earthquake; Allen tumbled out of his bunk in his long underwear.
Larsen suddenly barked, “Get the anchor up!” but didn’t wait for Frederickson to follow the order before he gunned the engine and started steaming for deeper water. A thin white line had appeared in the gloom at the head of the bay, and he knew it could only be a huge wave, breaking as it rolled toward them.
Huscroft ran back into the cabin, shouting, “Get out, Bernie! Something’s broke loose up there!,” then ran outside again. He later described what he saw when he went back out to a U.S. Forest Service employee as “all the water in the bay rushing out toward the entrance in one big tidal wave.”
The Mine had reached a spot in seventy feet of water a quarter of a mile northwest of Huscroft’s cabin when the wave broke around Cenotaph Island. Frederickson later admitted he was “terrorized” when the wall of water struck the troller, throwing it aloft so fast he thought his feet were going to go through the cabin floor. Somehow Larsen managed to keep the boat under control as it hurtled skyward and plunged over the top, falling “at least fifty feet” down the back of the wave.
Huscroft and Allen bolted for high ground with the sound of frothing water and snapping timber right behind them. The Mine had barely righted itself when a second wave struck, then a third, and Huscroft stared, awestruck, as the surge of water rolled past the island and swept toward the mouth of the bay, then bounced back as it encountered the heavy ocean swells at the narrow entrance, sending an enormous “back wave” hurtling toward the island. Blocks of ice and tree trunks tumbled and rolled across its face.
Allen was already far up the hill, and Huscroft wasted no time plunging into the brush after him. The returning surge swept up the beach behind him, tearing away his dock and demolishing a shed in which he had stored fifty barrels of dried salmon; then it struck the cabins. The two men did not stop running until they were as high as they could go.
After the series of giant waves passed, the bay continued to heave and boil, but the roaring noise had stopped, and no more waves came out of the paling darkness. Huscroft and Allen stood shivering in the pouring rain at the top of the hill, listening to the sound of water sloshing back and forth below them. It wasn’t until everything grew quiet that they could work up the courage to start slowly picking their way down again.
True to his nature, Huscroft barely gave the cabins a glance as he passed by on his way to the beach; his only thought was of his friends on the Mine, which he had seen enter the bay the previous evening. When he saw the battered troller picking its way through the floating debris toward the island, he shouted, “Thank God they made it!” and waved his arms to let Larsen and Frederickson know he and Allen were okay.
I folded the photocopied picture of Huscroft in his garden and slipped it into my breast pocket, then untied the bowline before sliding the kayak back down the beach into the water.
Jim Huscroft, Bernie Allen, Nick Larsen, and Fritz Frederickson had all survived a tsunami that had washed 490 feet up the side of Crillon Inlet. Allen later told a newspaper reporter that he thought the wave had probably been caused by the collapse of an ice dam on Crillon Glacier, which had allowed a huge lake of trapped rainwater to flush into the bay. But a scale model of Lituya Bay built by geologist Don Miller at Stanford University disproved this theory. Nor had there been an earthquake, because neither Huscroft nor Allen reported any shaking. Other theories proposed a sudden surge forward by one of the glaciers, a landslide, and a meteor strike, but no evidence was ever found to support any of these. The only certainty was that it was a miracle Huscroft and his friends had survived.
For Huscroft, however, the miracle quickly turned into a disaster. After reassuring himself that Larsen and Frederickson were alive, he went with Allen to inspect the cabins, which were okay. There was mud up to the windows, and the floors were a sodden tangle of books, magazines, clothes, bedding, and supplies. But both were still structurally sound and sitting solidly on their foundations. And incredibly, the fire in the woodstove was still burning.
But Huscroft’s heart must have dropped when he went to inspect the root cellar; it was flooded, and his entire supply of produce for the coming winter was spoiled. And his heart must have broken when he saw what the tsunami had done to his garden. There was nothing left of it; every last spoonful of the soil he had so carefully built up over the past twenty years had washed away.
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 11
