Cenotaph Island got its name 150 years before the 1936 tsunami washed over the island. To this day no one knows what caused the wave. Bernie Allen got on the next passing boat and went back to Juneau, but Huscroft stayed, struggling through the winter on occasional handouts from passing boats and what little meat and fish he could catch. Those who knew him say that he never got over the loss of his garden, that the wave left in its place an old man in a state of slow decline who no longer showed any interest in carousing in the saloons during his annual trip into Juneau or having his cabin full of guests spinning yarns. By the spring of 1939 his health had deteriorated so badly that a passing friend, Ocey Nolde, insisted he come aboard Nolde’s boat and go into Juneau to see a doctor. He was down to skin and bones but only reluctantly agreed, and Nolde said later that as they crossed the bar, Huscroft stood on the deck watching Lituya Bay fall away astern with tears in his eyes. Two days later he died, alone, in the fo’c’sle of Nolde’s boat.
I lowered myself into the kayak and used the paddle to push away from shore. While I was thinking about Huscroft, the sun had fallen to a low angle in the northwestern sky, but the bay was still calm, and the warmth of its light on my face was comforting. The 1958 mega-tsunami that had sunk the Badger and drowned the crew of the Sunmore had also wiped out any remaining vestige of Huscroft’s cabins, but as I listened to the buzzing call of a varied thrush in the forest that had sprung up where the cabins had once stood, I could easily understand his attachment to the island. La Pérouse had named the island Cenotaph for a stone tower he’d had erected there after twenty-one of his men had drowned when the longboats they’d been using to survey the inner shoreline of the bay had been caught in the outgoing tide and overcome by the combers at the entrance. But it seemed too peaceful and full of life for a place named for a monument to the dead and swept by tsunamis at regular intervals. As I paddled, a lone seal rose ahead of me, stared, and went down again; the explosive chuff! of a harbor porpoise breaking the surface for a quick breath only accentuated the silence.
The historic record never again mentions the stone pyramid La Pérouse had his men erect to commemorate the loss of their shipmates; if anything remained of it by the time Russian, British, and American fur hunters began to arrive a few years later, it, too, was undoubtedly eradicated by one of Kah-Lituya’s tsunamis. But for some reason, although La Pérouse’s name for the bay, Port des Français, did not survive into modern use, “Cenotaph” did. The only other names from La Pérouse’s hand-drawn charts that stuck were La Chaussee, for the spit on the north side of the entrance, and le Paps, or the Paps, for a pair of neatly matched 500-foot hills that rise from the lowlands on the eastern side of the entrance. The outline of the two hills is said to have reminded the homesick French sailors of a woman’s breasts.
The forest draped over the smoothly rounded hills was dark green under the blue vault of the sky. Every paddle stroke pulled me farther from land, out into the placid mirror of the bay. As my perspective of the hills changed, it became clear that the name had stuck for over two centuries because ever since La Pérouse had left the bay, the Paps had continued to remind sailors and fishermen of the women and girls they had left behind. There was something in the sweet, temperate air of the early spring day and the lush forest quilting the landscape that was distinctly feminine, and I found myself thinking of my own wife, of how it was not so long ago that we would lie with our limbs entwined in a complex calligraphy of love, envisioning a future that extended out to grandchildren and laughing at how much fun it would be (although we would need to be stern) when they scribbled with colored pens on the walls. Her two now-grown daughters were planning families of their own, and when working on the house, I often imagined how we would soon be marking the growth of toddlers on a doorjamb with a pencil and learning to love the inevitable wabi-sabi beauty of the scratched floors, dented cabinets, and worn carpets that are the proper work of rambunctious grandchildren.
Without realizing it, I had stopped paddling and started to drift with my mind in a whirl of geology, home, and tsunamis. The map of the lowlands around the Paps shows a thumbprint of topographic lines dissected by lakes and forest corridors, and for reasons I cannot name, this brought to mind a day early in our affair when I had traced one finger slowly along the stretch marks on my wife’s belly, as if examining a map of new terrain, and realized that everything in my life seemed on course to change, forever and for the better. Since then, mysterious pressures had begun building along a series of ever-drifting fault lines, and a tectonic shift of some sort seemed unavoidable.
The thought brought on a grinding pang: What if the marriage did not work out? What if our problems couldn’t be resolved? Huscroft had died old, alone, and depressed in the cramped fo’c’sle of Ocey Nolde’s boat, which left me wondering if after twenty years in Lituya Bay the smooth proportions of the Paps had continued to stir a memory of someone from his past, and if it was this, along with a premonition that he was leaving his home forever, that had brought tears to his eyes as he and Nolde steamed out of the bay on their way to Juneau. Had Huscroft been on the run from a failed romance when he’d come to Lituya Bay? Had there been a connubial disaster of some sort in his past that he had never shared with anyone?
If my own marriage failed, being divorced in my fifties would be different from being alone in my thirties or forties; I was caught in the onrush of time in a body going gray and sagging, and the odds of my entering into another relationship during the time I had left did not seem promising. And without the succor of the marriage, why bother with the house? With no family or lineage, it would be little more than a shell of a building, capable of sucking up endless amounts of work and money. I would have fractured my health and spent my life savings for nothing.
I put the rudder over and stroked hard to turn around. To my left lay the island, where every vestige of Huscroft’s life had been obliterated; to my right a long ridge ran down from the mountains in a smooth curve that reminded me of the shape of my wife’s back as she lay sleeping. As the preceding winter had progressed, I had seen more and more of her back, until it seemed as if I seldom saw her face at all. There was a burst of interest when it came time to choose paint for the walls, with repeated trips to the paint store from which she returned flush with excitement and bearing fistfuls of sample color chips, but after the paint was applied, her interest waned and plural pronouns disappeared from her vocabulary. It had been weeks, perhaps months, since I had heard her speak of “we” or “us.”
It was late, almost nine o’clock, when I got back to the boat, and the stark details of the mountains were growing soft in the evening twilight. The swallows were still flitting in circles around the boat. As I came alongside, I could see a strand of grass in the scupper. They had started a nest; there were dabs of mud along the rim of the opening.
I climbed aboard and secured the kayak to a cleat, then wedged a small buoy into the scupper to plug it. There was no sense in letting the birds have false hope.
After a late supper I cracked the window over the galley sink a few inches and climbed into my sleeping bag. The water outside was still and dark enough to reflect the first stars. I tried to read for a while, but my mind kept leaping from image to image: my wife, Luisa in her sickbed, Huscroft, La Pérouse, and the tsunamis. I tried to relax, but my ears stayed cocked for a distant roar.
After departing Lituya Bay, La Pérouse had sailed south to California before crossing the Pacific to Macao. From there he continued on to Manila, the Sea of Japan, and the coast of Siberia, then set course for the South Pacific. When he left France, he was forty-three years old and healthy, but by the time he reached the Samoan Islands three years later, his hair and teeth were falling out, and he was muttering of dark “presentiments.” At Tutuila a dozen of his men were killed in a fierce battle with the Natives. From there the expedition limped to Botany Bay, in Australia, where they stayed until March of 1788, before setting sail for Tonga.
They never
made it to Tonga. After leaving Botany Bay, the expedition disappeared and was never heard from again. Buried under the pyramid of stones La Pérouse had erected on Cenotaph Island was a bottle containing a written account of the incident that had drowned twenty-one of his men in the combers at Lituya Bay’s entrance. It began, “Reader, mingle your tears with our own.”
As I burrowed deeper into my sleeping bag, a faint scent of cottonwood curled in through the open window. When I finally slept, it was with the sweet perfume of disaster in the air.
Chapter 13
I was up early the next morning, boiling water for coffee and lighting a fire in the stove to drive the chill from the air. When I stumbled outside to relieve myself over the side, the deck was slick with frost, and a pale quarter moon was rising into the morning light behind Mount Crillon. While I waited for the water to boil, I tuned the ship’s radio to the weather channel, then listened as a disembodied voice mumbled of swell heights and barometric pressures. The previous evening’s thoughts of home and my stumbling marriage were still stewing in my brain, and I almost missed the phrase “winds light and variable,” followed by “seas three feet or less.” After the first cup of coffee I listened more carefully as monitoring stations up and down the coast reported lakelike conditions along two hundred miles of the gulf.
By eight o’clock I had eaten a batch of oatmeal from the pan and pulled the anchor and was motoring slowly past Cenotaph Island. I knew from the phase of the moon that the current pouring out of Lituya Bay at the change of the tide would be relatively minimal. So after a glimpse at the tide and current tables confirmed that the day’s tide would be the smallest and weakest of the month, I convinced myself that I should take advantage of the unusually placid conditions and get a closer look at the coast south of the bay, in case I ever decided to hike from Lituya Bay back to Cape Spencer.* During the voyage north the seas had been too rough to get close enough to the shore to see what the land was like.
The Swift slipped through the entrance with no more disturbance than if it had been entering a sheltered marina. The sea outside was so flat it was hard to believe that the smooth, silky water was the same unruly ocean that had thrown me about so violently only two days before, or that the clear blue sky had been so gray and threatening. On the horizon a large southbound vessel with the brightly varnished cap rails and cabin trim of a private yacht rolled slowly on a low, almost imperceptible swell easing in from the northwest.
I suppose it is a measure of my state of mind that I turned to port, nudged the throttle up to cruising speed, and had traveled several miles before I realized I wasn’t looking at the shore or thinking about a future hike; I was running well offshore instead. It took a moment for the truth of what I was doing to rise up through the strata and substrata of my consciousness, but when it did, it was like having a swell loom up from the horizon: I was on autopilot, heading home, on a fixed course back to Cape Spencer and Juneau.
I started to throttle back, then began composing a list of reasons to keep going (there was so much work to do on the house; I didn’t want to risk missing Luisa’s memorial; I might never have weather this calm for the passage again; etc.). The stark white mass of La Pérouse Glacier was growing visible through the cabin window before I could allow myself to admit the real reason behind what I was doing: I missed my wife. I didn’t want to end up old and alone like Jim Huscroft.
The needle of the compass swung back and forth, drifting first a few degrees to port, then to starboard as the Swift lifted over each passing swell. I wish I could say I composed a neat mental ledger with reasons for going home on one side and arguments for returning to Lituya Bay on the other, then reached a decision through some form of balanced reasoning. But rather than a neat toting of pros and cons, the process was in fact a messy one, a chaos of impulse and insecurity, fears and emotions. Did I really want to go back to the stress of building and wondering where my wife was at night? And how would she react if I reappeared before she expected me? I had been gone less than a week; did she even miss me?
The compass quivered. I wavered but held the course. I had been talking about the trip all winter, and for weeks anyone coming by the house had been forced to step around piles of gear, freeze-dried food, books, and maps in the dining area. The question of what I would say to my friends if I abandoned the trek flitted through my head—a ludicrous consideration, of course, and one that can probably be attributed to the burden of the Y chromosome or free-floating testosterone. Nonetheless, I was a bit reluctant to face the rough-edged ribbing that would follow if I turned back before I had even started.
Then I thought of the dinner I had sat down to with my wife a few nights before I had left. By then the gear for the trip was sorted into a somewhat orderly stack in the middle of the dining room. A bundle of nautical charts and topographic maps lay on the table. She was stirring a pan of chicken adobo, a Filipino dish that is one of her specialties, while she filled me in on the problems she was having with a new associate. When the meal was almost ready, I started to clear the charts from the table and thought to mention that I would be leaving early on the morning of my departure.
“High tide’s a little after six,” I said. “If I leave by six thirty, I can ride the ebb as far as Icy Strait.”
“What?” she said, looking up from a clove of garlic she was chopping.
A taste like sour milk rose in my mouth as I remembered the blank look on her face when I’d reminded her that I would be leaving soon, and how she had asked, more distracted than curious, “Tell me again where you’re going? What is it you’re doing?”
The compass swung from 150 degrees to 90, then 60, then 30, before settling on the return course to Lituya Bay as I brought the Swift around. With the puny tide and calm weather, I had no problem pushing through the current at the entrance. The adobo had been delicious, but it dulls the appetite to know you’ve disappeared from a loved one’s radar.
Once inside Lituya Bay again, I unrolled a chart on the galley table and stared, trying to imagine the effects of winds and currents on various sections of the shoreline. Where I chose to leave the Swift at anchor while I was away was critical.
My choices were limited. Anchoring near Cenotaph Island was out, because Huscroft’s records made it clear that the strongest winds blew through the bay from the northeast, and my biggest concern was dragging anchor. If I anchored on the east side of the island and the anchor lost its grip, the boat could be driven ashore and damaged. But if I anchored on the west side of the island and it broke free, the ebb might suck it out to sea through the combers at the entrance.
I traced a finger along the shore of Gilbert and Crillon inlets, as far from the entrance as possible, and considered for a moment an area of shallow water at the foot of North Crillon Glacier and another against the back wall of the fjord, then dismissed them; I would have to anchor so close to the near-vertical wall that the odds of a spring avalanche or rockfall hitting the boat or creating a wave were unacceptable.
Trying to decide was like planning a military campaign. Between storms, rocks, avalanches, currents, and the slim-but-still-possible odds of a tsunami, it was the equivalent of choosing a defensive position; I needed an avenue of retreat and a way to minimize the chance of casualties. I finally settled on an area along the northern shore where the steep walls of the bay’s interior eased into the rounded hills and sloping ridges of the lowland; the softening terrain might mean that any wind blasting down from the head of the fjord would lose some velocity before reaching the Swift’s position. For nearly a half mile in both directions, the water ranged from thirty feet deep to a hundred instead of the two hundred to five hundred feet prevalent throughout the rest of the fjord. This meant that with plenty of line out, if the anchor did lose its grip, there was a chance it might grab again before the boat was driven into deep water and out the entrance.
The anchor rattled over the bow as I payed out sixty feet of chain, then a hundred feet of line, and put the engine in
reverse. When the anchor bit into the seabed, the line grew tight and the engine slowed. I payed out another fifty feet of scope,* then opened the hatch and wrestled a second, heavier anchor that I usually reserve for riding out storms onto the deck. The second anchor went over the side, and by maneuvering carefully with the engine, I managed to drop it a couple hundred feet from the first anchor, at an angle perpendicular to the shore, so that the Swift rode at the yoke of a Y that would allow it to swing with changes in the wind direction and current. Then I put the engine in reverse and backed down hard, pulling first toward the head of the bay, then toward the entrance, then toward shore, revving the engine to simulate a pulling force I estimated to be the equivalent of a fifty-knot gust hurling itself against the cabin.
The anchor lines grew bar taut, but the anchors held. As a final measure I retrieved a length of hose meant to serve as a spare in case of a problem with the engine’s cooling system; cutting it in half and splitting each piece lengthwise along one side with a hunting knife, I slipped a piece of the stiff hose over each anchor line at the point where it went over the side, then secured it in place with multiple lashings of twine. If a storm rolled in and the Swift had to ride out a prolonged period of pitching in choppy waves, the improvised chafing gear might prevent the anchor lines from rubbing through and parting.
The surface of the bay was rippled by no more than a suggestion of wind, and the spring air was so warm that despite the patchy snow dotting the beach, I had started to sweat under my coat from wrestling with the anchors, so I shut down the engine, peeled down to my shirt, and leaned on the gunwale as I tried to imagine what other dangers might threaten the Swift while I left it unattended. In spite of the three glaciers at the head of the bay—Lituya Glacier, North Crillon Glacier, and Cascade Glacier—icebergs were no problem; twenty years earlier, when I had first sailed to Lituya Bay, there had been icebergs dotting the water, but in the interim all three glaciers had gone dormant. Lituya and North Crillon had slid to a halt in the late 1980s. Cascade had receded up the eastern wall of the fjord to hang like a shrunken thumb several hundred yards from the water. And if Kah-Lituya decided to kick the Fairweather Fault into motion or topple a mountain and set loose a tsunami, there was nothing I could do about it.
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 12
