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

by Lynn Schooler

  “Birds flying over the Rockies can hear the surf of both the Atlantic and Pacific,” claimed Susan Sharbaugh, a senior scientist at the Alaska Bird Observatory, during a lecture at the University of Alaska, although “hear” might not be an accurate description of the ability. A blind person’s ability to sense the size of a room or the distance to a wall might be a better metaphor for the birds’ experience, except their “room” is the entire planet.

  I finished the last of the water and slipped the empty bottle into its holder on the hip belt as I thought about how much larger and more powerful the things we do not know or understand are than the things we do. Another cluster of western sandpipers twittered to a halt in the same spot where the earlier gang had stopped to feed, then immediately bolted, leapfrogging up the coast in a nervous land-and-leave sequence that brought them back to earth, then into the air every hundred yards or so until they disappeared in the distance. Smoke from the surf smeared the horizon, blurring the outline of Cape Fairweather just fifteen miles away, but in my mind’s eye I could imagine the view the cranes and high-flying raptors must have as they work their way north, with the largest selection of 16,000-foot peaks in North America pressing in on one side and the sea, with its line of white surf shuttling back and forth, down below.

  The ice fields, peaks, and fjords of Glacier Bay National Park cover 3.2 million acres and butt up against the even larger Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve, which, at 13.2 million acres, is the largest park in North America; it extends north all the way to the village of Slana on the Copper River, 400 miles away. In 1992, when Glacier Bay and Wrangell–St. Elias national parks were joined with Canada’s Kluane and Alsek-Tatshenshini provincial parks to form a transborder UNESCO World Heritage Site, it became the largest chunk of protected wilderness in the world, a sprawling jigsaw of glaciers, powerful rivers, eye-bulging peaks, and untracked forest that encompasses more than 24 million acres. And that is just the beginning of the world spreading out below the migrating flocks. If I wanted to—and had the gumption to cross several ice fields, glaciers, and fjords and pick my way through the jumbled Fairweather Range—I could keep going after I got to Dry Bay, walk north until I passed Yakutat, then circle around 18,000-foot Mount Saint Elias and head up the Copper River until I came out at Slana. And if I had any boot leather left, I could head due north across the edge of the Clearwater Mountains into the Yukon–Charley Rivers country, cross the Yukon Flats at the Arctic Circle, and wander up the Sheenjek River until I reached its headwaters in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. From there I could step across a divide through the Davidson Mountains, drop into the Kongakut River drainage, and follow that north to the Beaufort Sea, a thousand miles from where I was sitting. Along the entire distance I would cross only a single road, somewhere near the tiny settlement of Tanacross.

  Envisioning the immense, untrammeled distance before me, I wondered if this was how the pioneers of the 1800s felt when they stood at the edge of the known world with a vast, sparsely peopled continent unrolling in front of them, in the grip of a mitochondria-deep human zugunruhe that has wrestled with our desire for the security and comfort of a home since the first Australopithecus wandered across the burning plains of Ethiopia, holding out to us, it seems, an eternal promise that there might be something better, more thrilling or enriching, on the other side of the horizon, on the next continent, in a different town, at a new job, or with another person. If only we just keep moving . . .

  It was thrilling to think of being able to travel from that bouldered lip of my own known world all the way to the Beaufort Sea (and from there, if the ice was thick and stable enough and it were humanly possible, across the top of the world for another 4,500 miles until I staggered ashore in Norway’s Svalbard islands) without encountering a single man-made impediment. But the trade-off for this sense of wonder was that I had never felt so small or so alone. I have never been a particularly bold or brave man, and the mental image of all that distance and space pierced me with a trembling loneliness that even the presence of another person could not have allayed.

  I stood up, brushing the sand off my hands, and shouldered the pack, determined to shake off the feeling. What I was doing was not difficult by Alaskan standards. People dash off on footraces through a hundred miles of wilderness carrying nothing but a sleeping pad and a few pounds of granola, run dogsleds 1,100 miles through the frigid heart of winter, make solo ascents of virtually unclimbable spires, and think nothing of paddling homebuilt kayaks through the Aleutian Islands.

  As I looked to make sure I was leaving nothing behind, the thought came to me that so far the trip had been a metaphor for life, from leaving the womb of the boat, with its ready supply of nourishment and comfort and the amniotic pull of the sea, to crawling and scrambling infant-wise on all fours across the rocks. Now it was time to walk upright and find my way. Grimacing at the trite analogy, I reminded myself that while the birds, fish, and whales might need all manner of astounding navigational abilities, all I had to do was keep the Pacific Ocean to my left and North America to my right, and I could not possibly get lost.

  Chapter 16

  I Unscrewed the cap of the water bottle and bent to fill it from a creek that should not have been there. Either my navigation was off or the map was inaccurate, but in an area as dynamic as the coast of Southeast Alaska, where glaciers can crawl several miles in a few years and whole mountains fall down, misplacing a small watercourse was no big deal. The aerial survey the map was based on had been done forty-five years ago, and almost nothing was the same, so the odds of the map or my navigation being wrong were fifty-fifty either way. It was not much of a river at the moment anyway, just a sheet of water that barely reached my ankles. The flock of teal and pintail ducks that had fled at my approach would have had to squat to get their butts wet. This creek and one I had crossed earlier were both so low that I was starting to wonder if I was carrying the kayak for no reason.

  I took a swig from the bottle, capped it, and put it away, then decided to walk upstream a bit. La Pérouse had written of a Tlingit fishing camp, on one of the creeks within a few hours’ walk of Lituya Bay, that had an intricate weir designed to make harvesting salmon easier, but a couple hundred yards upstream there was still nothing to indicate I was in the right place.

  The odds, of course, were against it. In the two centuries since La Pérouse sailed off to oblivion, some areas along the coast have risen eight to ten feet above sea level through a process called isostatic rebound. During the Ice Age, when ice fields the size of inland seas blanketed the Fairweather Range to a depth of several thousand feet, the sheer weight of the ice compressed the earth, bedrock and all, like a brick placed on top of a sponge. When the ice started melting, the earth began decompressing, as if it were taking a deep breath and giving a sigh of relief. In Glacier Bay the rate of rebound has been measured at over half an inch a year—too slow to watch without delicate instruments, but the geologic equivalent of a mountain range doing calisthenics. As the land rises, the old shoreline moves farther inland, which meant that the location of a two-hundred-year-old waterfront campsite might now be deep inside the trees. If there were any trace of an ancient fishing camp, it would take a better-trained eye than mine to see it.

  It was low tide, and the trickle of water curved downstream between waist-high cutbanks that were a sure sign the stream ran deep and swift during periods of heavy rains and when the snow in the alpine was melting rapidly. For now, the frosty nights were keeping the snow in place. I poked farther upstream, stepping from stone to stone along the nearly dry creek bed, then climbed up the cutbank, hoisting myself over the top onto one knee and stabbing the hiking poles into the ground to pull myself upright. The ground was soft and peppered with sharp spires of new grass. Gray and black coils of goose droppings lay scattered among the new growth where a flock had stopped to rest and feed. Bears, too, had been at the grass—both black and grizzly, judging from the tracks; grizzlies leave spade-sized in
dentations tipped with long claw marks, and black bears have a rear track that looks more like a small, misshapen human foot, with the points of the claws closer to the pad.

  I snapped off a blade of grass and rolled it between my fingers for a minute while I watched upstream for movement, feeling for the bumpy, triangular cross section that identified it as a sedge before putting it in my mouth. I chewed for a minute, then spit it out. It wasn’t bad; it was just grass—a bit fibrous for my taste, but obviously attractive to the geese and bears. Everything along the creek bank had been cropped close to the ground, leaving ragged tufts and patches that made the thin new growth look like it had been trimmed with shears.

  Seeing no movement upstream, I walked farther in, angling away from the tree line until a line of fresh tracks on a muddy bar caught my eye—a wolf, I thought at first, but getting closer, I saw that they were too small and struck in a non-canine gait pattern. A faint line of web between two toes told me it was a river otter, traveling with the queer hunching lope of a Mustelidae, or member of the weasel clan. The tracks disappeared at the edge of a thick bed of last year’s grass but were aimed at a low opening into the forest. Bending low to keep the pack from hanging up on a branch, I used one hiking pole to push a stalk of spiny devil’s club aside and stepped through.

  Beyond the fringe the forest opened up and I felt a flutter of trepidation, the stories of the kushtaka flickering through my mind the way the otter-men are said to flit back and forth between the spirit world and the shadows of the forest. The forest here was different from the woods closer to Lituya Bay; beyond the reach of the tsunamis, the trees were older, bigger, with deeper spaces between them and darker greens. The stillness beneath the canopy seemed to absorb light the way the quilt of moss creeping up the tree trunks absorbed the sigh of the wind and gave it back as silence. The green maze of rough-barked pillars crisscrossed with windfalls and thickets of brush made the thought of a soul-snatching shape-shifter luring me off into the netherworld seem not so far-fetched; after a few minutes of walking beneath the light-filtering canopy, I found it difficult to stay aligned with the sun, to distinguish north from south or east from west. It was only a few hundred yards to the beach, but it felt like I was in the middle of a thousand square miles of forest that all looked the same. Were it not for a slight slope of the land that would lead me back to the creek, it would have been easy to take a few missteps in any direction and begin to drift in aimless spirals until I disappeared.

  A tingle went up my back at the thought of the number of people who over time must have wandered, growing thin and ragged, deeper and deeper into the dark forests and alder thickets on the trail of the kushtaka and never come out again. North of Yakutat lies a forest made up of trees growing at fun-house angles, each leaning in a different direction than its neighbors. The entire forest is growing atop the Bering Glacier, rooted in debris and soil collected on top of the ice as it crawls so slowly through the mountains that an entire oddball ecosystem has had time to develop. The helter-skelter attitudes of the trees are the result of the slow heaving and melting of their platform as it flows forward, its arboreal covering tilting and waving like the spines of a sea urchin crawling across the ocean floor. A hiker taking a single careless step on the mossy floor of the ice-cored forest could disappear into a yawning crevasse forever.

  In “Mont Blanc” the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote of how the glaciers of the Alps “creep . . . like snakes that watch their prey from their afar mountains,” and his wife Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein ends with the monster disappearing into the ice of the Arctic like a traveler dropping into a sinkhole on the Bering Glacier. The coast, I thought, with its icy serpents, moving forests, drifting watercourses, and population of angry, earth-heaving gods like Kah-Lituya, is itself a kushtaka, always changing shape, shifting back and forth between life-giving and deadly.

  I went back the way I had come, worked my way through a crackling fringe of dead stalks at the edge of the forest, and walked back to the beach. An eagle sitting in a tree overhead spread its wings and dropped into the air at the commotion, flapped hard to gain speed, then rose, banked, and coasted out of sight up the creek. It did not seem possible for the small trickle of water fanning out into the surf to support a run of salmon pushing in from the sea, but a single violent storm could change everything. At the end of September a weather trough called the Aleutian Low drifts into the Gulf of Alaska and begins spinning off a series of low-pressure systems that make the gulf one of the most storm-pounded regions in the world. During winter the gulf averages a storm every five days, some with winds strong enough to generate waves more than a hundred feet high. Standing on the beach with the breeze in my face, I found it terrible and thrilling to envision what it would be like to be on the exposed coast with such swells charging in from the west, rising even higher as they encountered the ocean bottom a mile or more out, then beginning to lean forward and break. Every wave would be like having a train wreck at your feet, a thunderous avalanche that would shake the ground, squeeze the breath from your chest, and drive an elemental fear in under your ribs to take its place.

  And it could go on for days. Twenty-five years earlier I had been working on a tugboat towing bargeloads of logs across the gulf from a logging camp on Afognak Island to a sawmill on the Kenai Peninsula when one such storm had roared in from the southwest. For three days the anemometer mounted atop the Gale Wind’s wheelhouse bounced back and forth between 80 knots and 100, with higher gusts pegging the needle at 110. The skipper used every one of the screaming engine’s twenty-nine hundred horsepower to bring the 90-foot tug and 210-foot barge into the tenuous shelter of a slender cove, where we shortened up the tow and circled endlessly to keep from being driven ashore. Lashing the tug alongside the barge to increase maneuverability meant crawling on hands and knees below the steel bulwarks for protection from four-inch hawsers that parted with reports like artillery fire. If the swede wire—a compound nylon-and-braided-steel cable with a breaking strength of well over a hundred thousand pounds—snapped, it would cut a man in two. On the first day I was frightened, on the second terrified and praying, and by the third, before the needle of the anemometer started easing a knot, then two knots or so every half hour to signal that the storm cell was passing, I had drifted into a calm acceptance that an “end” of some sort was inevitable.

  Steel, horsepower, and the skill of the captain brought the Gale Wind through, but for the remainder of the journey, after we pulled out of the sheltering cove into the rolling post-storm swells of the gulf to continue on to our destination, there was something about the color of the light on the heaving gray-green waters and the taste of food as I sat at the galley table listening to the rumble of the engine and the rattle of crockery in the cupboards that was somehow unreal. Everything seemed too sharp and too clear to be true.

  A storm like that, with its megatons of explosive energy, could rearrange everything I was looking at, push surge after surge of raging water up the creek, bulldoze it open and dig pools sufficiently deep for salmon to spawn in, or shove enough sand, rocks, and debris into its mouth to force it off in another direction. Boulders the size of an SUV could be knocked around or disappear entirely, buried under mounds of sand hurled up from the deep. If I ever came this way again, even the boulder hell could be gone or completely reconfigured.

  I sat on a stone to rest a minute, leaning back to let the rock take the weight of the pack, and thought about how things come and go, rise and disappear, seem solid but are in fact transient. Nestled in the brown grass beyond the reach of the surf was a white plastic bleach bottle and a slat from a packing crate marked with faded Asian writing—bits of jetsam dropped over the sides of fishing boats out on the gulf or cast off from lands on the far end of ocean-spanning currents. In their salt-worn state they had the look of artifacts from an extinct civilization. The notion that the earth itself could be constantly changing shape seemed to lift the lid off the world and fiddle with its inner wor
kings. If the ground we walk on is fluid, what is there that can be fully trusted?

  During the storm on the Gale Wind I had, of course, considered the possibility of death and given some thought to the friends and family I would leave behind. But I have almost died several times—by wandering into a field studded with leftover land mines in Southeast Asia, by being blown out of a raft by a wild hammer of water during a Class V white-water run, and through assorted misadventures aboard other boats on various oceans, among other things. The big question at such times always seems to be whether anyone truly loves us or will miss us when we are gone. Of course, no one “almost” dies—either you do or you don’t; if not, it’s just a dicey situation you got out of. And over the years I have known enough people who went down with boats or small planes or were killed in logging accidents or other forms of industrial mayhem to understand that in the larger picture, death often leads to no more than a few column inches of newsprint or a round of glasses being hoisted to someone’s memory in a bar. Things return to business as usual fairly quickly.

  I leaned forward to lift myself from the rock, then sat back again to consider camping where I was for the night, telling myself I was tired from the long hump across the boulder field and the few miles I had covered, then realized that the appeal of stopping had more to do with proving to myself that after laboring nonstop on the house for so many months, I finally had no appointments to keep, no commitments to fulfill, no work to get done. I could do as I pleased. I could take a nap or just sit and watch the tide rise and fall. I could scribble in the sand with a stick or keep walking. It is a Newtonian basic that a body at rest tends to stay at rest, but just knowing that I was free to let my mind and body wander in such circuitous directions instead of checking chores off a list gave me the energy to get moving. So I pushed to my feet and started walking. A few miles to the north lay a creek that had been the scene of one of the strangest tragedies ever to occur in Alaska. I had been working on a novel and a screenplay based on the event for several years, and I wanted to see where it had happened.