Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart

by Lynn Schooler

  I went into the cabin for my hiking boots and removed the laces. Then I found a bottle of waterproofing oil in a drawer and started applying it to the leather, pushing back a feeling as I did so that there was always something waiting to rush out of the darkness—an avalanche, a tsunami, a gunshot, a cancer—by concentrating on rubbing the pungent fluid in with a circular motion. Wet feet was something I could prevent.

  Chapter 14

  The Loaded Backpack went over the side into the gray inflatable skiff with a thump. Rain gear, extra clothing, a stove, food, a camera, a lightweight fishing rod, binoculars, a large hunting knife and a small saw—with everything I might need to stay dry and reasonably well fed stuffed into the pack, it had the weight and heft of a large sack of potatoes. A side pocket held the luxury of a paperback novel to help pass the time if extreme weather confined me to my tent. I could save weight by ripping out pages for fire starter after I read them. In the same pocket was a plastic hip flask of scotch.

  The next thing to go into the skiff was a small inflatable kayak, carefully deflated, rolled, and lashed. Once onshore I planned to strap it to the outside of the pack along with a disassembled kayak paddle and a thin sleeping pad. The pump for the kayak was an ingenious contraption, a cone of lightweight fabric, open on one end with a plastic nozzle at the other, that allowed the user to capture a gulp of air by twisting the open end to form a bladder, then squeezing it to force the air into a valve on the kayak. Though slower and more cumbersome than a foot pump, it was a well-designed, ultralight alternative.

  Then came a vinyl “river bag” containing an emergency blanket made of Mylar and heat-reflective foil, a pack of rescue flares, a jar of wooden matches, two fat candles, a light sleeping bag, and a spare handheld marine radio. A one-pound chocolate bar sealed in a plastic sandwich bag went in on top of enough canned food to last several days. Before lowering the bag into the skiff, I looped the Swift’s longest mooring line through the handle.

  The outboard started on the first pull, sputtered and died, then started again after I flipped off the choke. I let it idle while I climbed back on board and sat at the galley table writing a note explaining that the boat was unattended because I was hiking to Dry Bay; if a passing fisherman or cruiser grew curious enough to investigate the empty boat, they might easily interpret my absence as a sign of something gone amiss. I did not want to instigate a search for a mysteriously missing person, so I signed the note, dated it, then thought to add the telephone number of a friend back in Juneau to contact if I had not returned within two weeks. I left the finished note on the table, using a spare bag of rice as a paperweight.

  It took an hour or so to skiff down the bay to a bight north of the entrance, move the backpack, inflatable kayak, and river bag ashore, motor back to the anchored Swift, wrestle the skiff into the davits, lift it out of the water, and launch the sea kayak, but the shuttle was necessary because the pack and river bag were too cumbersome to fit into the gear compartment of the slender kayak, and I did not want to risk leaving the inflatable skiff on the beach. Bears are curious creatures, given to exploring new things with their mouths, and while a grizzly coming across the hard-shell kayak might knock it around a bit, I had heard enough stories of inflatable skiffs being torn to shreds to think damage to the kayak would be preferable. I might be able to improvise a patch of some sort for any holes punched in the molded-polyethylene kayak by ursine canines, but returning to a skiff in tatters would mean being marooned.

  Once the skiff was secure, I took a last look around the cabin, checked the anchor lines, and slipped into the kayak.

  The Swift grew small quickly as I paddled away, its dull gray hull a perfect camouflage against the granite background. From a half mile off, it disappeared into the towering landscape, and I felt a pang at the thought of returning to find that the tide or a storm had taken it. It had been my home for more than a decade and the mainstay of my guiding business for twenty years. A hundred thousand miles of salt water had passed under its keel, and I had shared innumerable unforgettable experiences with clients and friends on its decks.

  Twenty years, I thought, the phrase prompting a quick calculation in my head: I was fifty-two years old, the boat twenty, and by dividing my age into the boat’s, then multiplying the result by a hundred, I pulled “38 percent” from the air.

  It was an irritating habit I had fallen into lately, this breaking down of the phases of my life into percentiles and fractions (for example, I had lived in Alaska forty years, or 75 percent; been at sea on the Swift or other boats more than half; been friends with Luisa 40 percent; etc.). It was as if I felt that by constantly measuring and calculating, I could somehow affect the amount of time I had left, which, using the biblical allotment of threescore and ten, minus my fifty-plus, was perhaps fifteen or twenty years. With three quarters of my life gone, ever smaller bits, like the two or three years it might take to finish the house (8 to 12 percent of the time remaining) or the time I had spent with my wife (to date, 4 percent of the possible total), were of growing importance.

  A flock of sea ducks clustered over an area of shallows close to shore rose whistling in alarm at the approach of the kayak, peeling one after another from the surface of the water into the air as a long line of wildly flapping wings. To the west an armada of slow-moving clouds sailed as stately as Spanish galleons across an infinity of blue that stretched from heaven to horizon. Behind me the mass of the Fairweather Range bulked in endless files of peaks and ridges, fading into an eternity beyond my ability to comprehend. In the span of that world, with only the thin shell of the kayak under me and so much light and space all around, a human life seemed nothing more than the tiniest bubble rising briefly to the surface of creation. Every paddle stroke pulled me closer to the entrance, from where the sound of the surf striking the outer shore came across the dead-still waters of the bay as a metronomic whump like the muffled beating of the ocean’s heart. We are candles, I remember thinking, and the wind is rising.

  I turned ashore near the navigation aid marking the inshore channel, levered the rudder out of the water and backstroked to slip the kayak sideways to the beach, then braced the paddle across the cockpit to steady the boat as I stepped out. The pack, inflatable kayak, and vinyl bag were still where I had left them, leaning against the base of the navigation aid.

  Shouldering the river bag, I pushed into the forest until I located an easy-to-climb tree and then began working my way as high as I could go into the branches. It took a couple of tries to toss the loosely coiled mooring line over a branch with one hand while clinging to the bag and the trunk of the tree with the other, and an awkward, one-handed, hoist-and-grab process to lift the bag higher. But once it was aloft and the line was lashed to a lower branch, I felt better, knowing that if I came back to find the Swift lost, there would be the added insurance of the Mylar blanket, sleeping bag, food, and candles—enough to get by on until I could flag down a passing boat. Climbing down from my perch, though, with the sharp young spruce needles scratching my face and my hands sticky with sap, I began to chide myself for the folly of thinking I needed the river bag and its minimalist camp ingredients cached near the beach to provide an extra touch of security. I already had enough in my backpack to support myself for an extended period and the Swift, with all its creature comforts and supplies, awaiting my return. In a place as unpredictable as the glacier coast, security is an illusory concept at best, and the river bag suddenly seemed an absurdly redundant precaution. After returning to the beach, I hoisted the kayak to my shoulder, carried it up the beach until I came to the trees, and lowered it to the ground to slide it deeper into the forest by the bow, laughing as I did so at the further absurdity of needing four boats—the Swift, the skiff, the kayak, and the small inflatable waiting to be lashed to my backpack—to go for a walk.

  After lifting the kayak across a downed log, I flipped it upside down so it would not fill with rain. Back out on the beach it took a bit of experimenting to devise a way
to lash the bundled inflatable kayak, the paddle, a life jacket, the sleeping pad, and a hundred-foot coil of rope to my pack, but I finally settled on rolling the disassembled paddle and the coil of line up inside the deflated kayak, then wrapping the thin, closed-cell foam pad around the lot and cinching the resulting bundle across the top of the pack. The life jacket clipped easily to a loop on the rear of the pack. It would swing as I walked but be handy for use as a padded seat when I felt like resting. Hoisting the loaded pack to one knee, I slid one arm through a shoulder strap and tried to stand upright, groping behind me for the remaining strap with the other hand.

  Two seconds later I was flat on the ground, with one leg folded under me on the slick cobblestones, my arms pinned in a tangle of hip belts and straps. Lying there stunned, I wondered how a backpack could have learned judo; the top-heavy load had thrown me as easily as a black belt drops a stumbling tyro.

  Never mind that I knew there probably wasn’t another person within fifty miles; my first impulse, before taking inventory to see if I was hurt, was to scramble to my knees and look around to see if anyone was watching. I felt relieved that the only witness to the pratfall was a black oystercatcher—a spindle-legged bird not known for its grace that would be perfectly camouflaged among the dark stones of an Alaskan beach were it not for an enormous orange bill and the nervous habit of giving away its position with a series of high-pitched shrieks, which is what it did when I stood up and grasped the pack straps to try again. The oystercatcher burst from its hiding place between two boulders and flew away.

  Moving carefully, I shouldered the pack, tightened the hip belt, and shrugged to settle the weight before I started walking. I had not gone a hundred feet before I knew it was too much. The load was reasonably comfortable for the moment, but during the course of working on the house over the last year, I had come to recognize the straining sensation I could feel in the tendons and ligaments of my knees as the harbinger of an ache that would gradually grow and spread into the rest of my joints throughout the day. It was sixty miles to Dry Bay, and it suddenly seemed very far away.

  Half an hour later I had emptied the pack, spread its contents across the ground, and eliminated everything I could possibly do without. The fire-starter novel, the scotch, the fishing rod, the binoculars, and the camera—everything that was not essential went into a plastic bag and was stored in the bow of the kayak. I dithered over leaving the life jacket behind but finally decided I would risk the river crossings without it in order to rid myself of its minor weight. The rivers were small and their waters protected, I argued. If I ran into high water somewhere along the way, I could simply wait until it went down again.

  The abandoned gear probably weighed five pounds, maybe less, but shedding it made the pack feel, if not physically, at least psychologically lighter. I had enough food to last between a week and ten days, even with the increase in appetite that comes with living and sleeping outdoors. If I ate well the first few days, the load would decrease rapidly, and I could spend more time gathering wild edibles.

  Forming a plan has a way of making you think you know what you’re doing, and it was with a patina of confidence that I began probing the fringe of the forest for an opening I had been told was there, the remains of a trail cut north from Lituya Bay by a gang of gold miners in the early 1930s. The miners had intended to use a Ford Model T to prospect the coast in comfort and had set out to build a proper road, with logs corduroyed across the boggy spots and rocks pitched into the deeper holes, but what I found was a swath of small-diameter second-growth trees packed shoulder to shoulder with just enough space left between them to serve as a path. In places where brush or young saplings had sprung up, I was forced to angle sideways to keep the paddle lashed across the top of my pack from snagging in the branches.

  According to old mining records, the prospectors had gone bankrupt so quickly that their equipment, tents, and even caches of food had been abandoned to the elements, but I was not more than a few yards into the forest before I realized that in one respect the ambitious road project had been a success: Judging from the amount of scat and the number of platter-sized tracks pressed into the soft ground beneath the trees, the narrow, brush-encroached “road” had become a bear highway. In the first hundred yards I stepped over a dozen clumps of partially digested grass that ranged in color from the pale olive of last autumn’s leavings to the dark green of samples so fresh and wet-looking that the only thing to suggest they had not been deposited in the last few minutes was a lack of steam rising into the cool air. The tracks were so thick in one area that I could distinguish the claw marks of three different animals—two medium-sized grizzlies and one big-footed bruiser—overlapping in a single divot of sand. Patches of wispy brown hair clinging to the trunk of a young spruce tree beside the trail showed where bears had used the rough bark as a signpost, rubbing the scent of their backs and bellies against it to leave notice of their passing.

  I plucked a tuft and sniffed it, catching a trace of something dry and musky, like a hint of old dog bed, then stopped to think about the trail ahead. There was something comforting about the narrow green corridor after the overwhelming mass of the mountains, a confinement that seemed to bring the world down to a manageable size, but even as overgrown as it was, the trail still offered an energy-saving path of least resistance to bears roaming through the mad tangle of alder, devil’s club, and berry bushes. If I stayed on it, the odds of an encounter were fairly high.

  I felt for the bear spray in its holster on the hip belt of the pack and decided to keep going. The only alternative was to go back to the beach, cross the spit, and head north along the shore, and I knew that for a mile or more north of Lituya Bay the beach was a relentless jumble of boulders and cobbles piled one on top of the other, a moraine of rubble bulldozed into place by the advance of Lituya Glacier during the Ice Age. As the glacier gouged the fjord out of the bedrock, much of the stone it ripped loose was shoved out of the fjord and spilled north along the edge of the ocean, where it has been lying in a heap ever since, slowly being polished by the surf into smooth, ankle-busting boulders that vary in size from cannonball to small car. The only person I had talked to who had walked that part of the coast in the last ten years had called it “boulder hell” and said he would never do it again. The trail was said to outflank the worst of it.

  Shoving my way through a cluster of head-high spruce saplings, I lifted one arm to protect my eyes from the needles, then froze at the sound of movement ahead. Leaves rustled, then went silent, then rustled again. Listening carefully, I thought I could hear a ragged, uneven panting.

  I put one hand on the bear-spray holster and loosened the flap. My heart rate kicked up a notch as I stood frozen, ears straining to define the source of the sound; the hairs on the back of my neck struggled to sense the micro-movement of air that indicates something is very close and in motion.

  Then it was behind me. And all around.

  A flicker of movement through the trees to my left caught my eye, and I let out my breath; they were alive with small bodies, fluttering from branch to branch and alighting on the ground to kick through the detritus at the bottom of the trees. It was a flock of migrating thrushes. The “breathing” I heard was the muffled start-and-stop flutter of their wings.

  A varied thrush with a bright orange stripe over its eyes flicked past a few feet away, followed by a flurry of hermit thrushes and robins. Farther along I could hear the faint whit! of a Swainson’s thrush. Everywhere I looked, birds were moving through the forest in groups of two, three, five, or a dozen.

  It did not last long. The pulse of birds passed in a few minutes, and the forest grew quiet again. The great migrations of birds that flow up the coast from wintering grounds as far away as California, Mexico, Panama, and Argentina are the first line in the poem of spring in Alaska, and it was reassuring to know that in spite of the recent brutal winter, the clock of the world was still ticking. Their brief presence had enlivened the day with their p
assing.

  I was in a reverie, thinking of how the next tick of the seasonal clock would be the wild explosion of green that hurls Alaska’s mountains and forests headlong out of the cold grays and blues of winter into an almost lascivious state of lushness within the space of a few days. In the more fecund parts of the great arc of forest that sweeps a thousand miles from Ketchikan in the south to Kodiak Island on the other side of the gulf, halfway to the Bering Sea, twenty hours of daylight combine with copious amounts of rain to photosynthesize hundreds of tons of new growth per acre. Thickets of spindly, dry stalks and spare, leafless shrubs become almost impenetrable overnight, interlaced with hip-high ferns, head-high devil’s club, and knee-tangling grasses. Skunk cabbage can grow four feet tall in three weeks.

  Hard on the heels of the mad, loud tick of unruly green would come the musical tock of the wildflowers: first the yellow marsh marigolds and buttercups, then pale red columbines and purple shooting stars, followed by chocolate Kamchatka lilies and swaths of blue irises and forget-me-nots. Hedges of loganberry would soon be putting out perfectly white blossoms so fast it would be like watching popcorn cook off. By the solstice every meadow, riverbank, and opening in the forest would be a palette of colors as dazzling as the boldest van Gogh or Monet.

  Then would come the salmon, their bellies swollen with the promise of another generation, muscling their way up the rivers to spawn. And when the salmon arrive, the real party starts, with bears, wolves, eagles, killer whales, sea lions, and otters scrambling to get at the silver hordes. The thrushes, I knew, were just the first pulse in an approaching storm of life in many forms, all hurrying to feed, grow, and procreate before the rushing hands of the clock swept summer aside and slid autumn, then winter, into its place. There is always so much to do, it seems, and so little time.