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

by Lynn Schooler

  I built up the fire, cribbing a half-dozen logs across each other, and sat back to watch the blaze. When it was burning well, I set up the stove, boiled a quart of water, and whipped up an instant dinner of something Italian-sounding that the bag described as a delicious medley of chicken, mushrooms, and carrots but that might have been more honestly labeled as a compost of chewy flesh, fungus, and roots.

  I put another log on the fire, poked it, and sat back to watch the evening fold into dusk. The prayer flag flapped in the breeze. The logs of the fire dropped like an animal settling into its nest amid a spray of sparks. Somewhere in the tangle of trees and brush behind me a great horned owl boomed, and its mate answered.* A few minutes later the male called again, this time much closer, and I stoked up the fire a bit, thinking I might see the shine of its eyes in the night if it was close enough.

  The owl’s renowned ability to see in the dark is a result, in part, of the tapetum lucidum, a membrane at the rear of its eye that gathers and reflects light back to the retina, where it strikes sensory cells five times as dense and numerous as a human’s. Most nocturnal birds and animals have a tapetum lucidum—deer, wolves, whip-poor-wills, lemurs—and it is this that causes their eyes to shine in the beam of a headlight or campfire. But owls, like most birds, have other advantages as well; unlike humans, they have no blood vessels in their retinas, which reduces scatter and refraction and allows them to make more efficient use of low light. A more dramatic difference is the way birds’ eyes use that light, as well as how their eyes are structured; differences that create for birds a way of perceiving the world that is beyond our limited ability to imagine. The nature of light and the colors it creates at varying wavelengths is the issue.

  Color is not, as we perceive it, an intrinsic property of the object being observed, but a function of the mechanism interpreting it—that is, the eye upon which light of various wavelengths falls and the neurological system of the brain that decodes the information. Every retina—human or animal—contains rods and cones, which are the photoreceptors that translate light into nervous impulses, which are then telegraphed to the brain. Rods provide black and white vision in dim light, and cones turn bright light into color. Humans have three types of cones—red, green, and blue—which absorb most effectively at those points in the spectrum. As any second-grade art student knows, all colors in our human world are some mixture of these three. We are blessed in this respect, because most other mammals, with the exception of a few old-world primates, have only two types of cones, providing them with color-limited vision that can perhaps best be emulated by turning down the red adjustment in a color television.

  Birds, however, have at least four types of cones. Some may have five. Tests have also proved that most, if not all, birds can see ultraviolet light, which occurs at the far end of the spectrum, at a wavelength beyond our ability to perceive. And although the ability to perceive ultraviolet light increases the range of light in which a bird can see, it is throwing the fourth or fifth type of cone into the equation that lifts the bird’s world into a place beyond our imagining, by creating a qualitative change in the very nature of color and vision that cannot be translated into human experience. Birds literally see in another dimension, where there are colors and hues we cannot envision. We have no fourth button on our television to allow us a reference point from which to emulate the effect.

  I did not hear the male again, but the female kept calling. It was late, deep dusk, but still light enough for the rods in my own retinas to be working. Gray and black, black on dark green, the surf a line of pale white in the gloom. In spite of the growing night, with their ultraviolet vision the owls could see the urine marks and small droppings of their rodent prey glowing like chips of bone or pearls under a black light, as well as things in that other dimension for which I had no concept.

  I waited until the fire burned down, edging closer as it grew smaller and the night grew colder, until it was time to cover the last embers with sand and slide into my sleeping bag. Zipping up the tent door pitched my world into darkness, leaving me with only my hearing. And that, too, faded as sleep overcame me.

  * * *

  In the smallest hour of the night the boom of the surf woke me. It was rising, growing higher as I slept. When I opened the tent to look out, a crescent of waxing moon hung low over the horizon. A single bright star—Venus, I thought—dangled beneath its lower limb like a pendant from a diadem. Even at that hour there was still so much light in the sky that only the brightest stars could be seen, peppering the heavens with incomplete constellations. Lying there, I remembered once realizing as a child that the stars are still present during the day, just not visible to us because of the light from the sun, and being struck nearly dumb by the thought, much as I was when I read in one of my schoolbooks about how the bold hues of autumn leaves are, in reality, present throughout summer. The colors are simply hidden beneath the green of chlorophyll, which bleeds away as the days grow shorter, leaving the ever-present yellow of carotenoids and red of anthocyanins visible.

  The moon was the color of a new dime, and the blue and white twinkle of Venus was breathtaking. I wondered what the flocks of plovers heading north at 20,000 feet were seeing, what array of colors and patterns they saw in the stars, or how the seas breaking far beneath them appeared in ultraviolet light. What else were they privy to, I thought, that I could not imagine, speeding through the dark heavens in their unimaginable planes of light, listening to the ultrasonic groans of the earth’s tectonic plates heaving below them?

  Wondering about this started me thinking of all the other things we do not know or simply cannot comprehend. From there I drifted into wondering what I was missing in my marriage, what I was unaware of that could explain the inexplicable slide from harmony to dissent, from heat to distance; sorting through memories, I tried to think of what I might have done wrong. I have a tongue as sharp as a fishhook when hurt or angry, and I wondered if I had gone too far at some point, said something too piercing—or had I not said enough? Men show love through action—in my case, by building a home, digging up a plugged septic system at an apartment building she owned in the middle of the night, working up to my ankles in human waste in an attempt to placate unhappy neighbors, or taking a day off to go into town to do her laundry when she was too busy to do it herself. But women seem to need other things, small words and gestures that men are at times oblivious to.

  A series of waves higher and more violent than the rest rolled ashore, rising into a crescendo that roared and hissed up the beach. I wondered for a moment if the growing surge might reach the tent, then slid into worrying about what I would do if the marriage ended. I squirmed on the thin sleeping pad, trying to get comfortable. The ground was hard and my back ached. I felt too old to start over again.

  I refolded the coat I was using for a pillow and tried to settle down. The moon drifting above the violent, hammering waves was beautiful in its serenity, and I tried for a moment to calculate how many more times in my life I would have an opportunity to see such a thing. Twelve waxing moons a year for twenty years (at best) equaled 240 moons; divided in half—or more likely, thirds—for overcast weather, that meant perhaps 80; dividing that by my chances of ever being on a beach again at just such a moment, with powerful surf rolling ashore as the moon was going down, drove the odds into the single digits. The irritating math of mortality collapsed altogether when I considered that I knew almost nothing about the transit of the moon or Venus, how often one intersected the other, or if such a thing would even happen again in my lifetime. When I looked out of the tent again, they were already drifting apart, hurtling through the emptiness of space at different speeds.

  Chapter 20

  “Hard Shit Here.”

  That is the only note I scribbled on the topographic map I had been using to log campsites, thoughts, and observations during the trek, the only description I penned of the day spent slogging across Cape Fairweather. Why I sketched in a crude arrow pointing at
the particular spot on the north side of the cape where I finally descended back to level ground on the far side of the five-mile-wide, five-hundred-foot-high mound of rubble, muskegs, alder thickets, ponds, rushing streams, and small, postglacial trees huddled as close together as the crowd at an outdoor spectacle escapes me. Perhaps I blocked it from my memory as something particularly difficult, because the entire traverse now resides in that single notation as an experience that bordered on dreadful.

  The surf that morning was big, a storm of collapsing buildings that charged in one after another to fall thundering against the shore. The tide was rising, and the surge of the waves pushing into the slough formed a series of Vs that raced through the channel and ricocheted back and forth until their energy had dissipated.

  By the time I was packed and ready to go, a weather front was moving in, with gray clouds sagging down and the first sprinkles of rain peppering the slough. After I moved inland a short distance to calmer water, it took longer to unbundle the inflatable kayak and pump it up than it did to make the crossing. The kayak was small—a shade over five feet long and three feet wide, with just enough room between the tubes to stuff the loaded pack in and squirrel myself down into the remaining space with my legs draped over my cargo. Even calling the elongated doughnut a kayak was stretching the term, but it was enough for the relatively placid crossing.

  The slough was the color of pooled steel, and the south wind building behind the oncoming rain helped push me across. A flock of ducks scattered at my approach. Farther up the slough I could see something white that I thought must be a swan. After decades of emphasizing to my guiding clients the necessity of wearing a life jacket whenever we were on the water, I felt naked to be paddling without one. The roar of the surf made me feel vulnerable, although I calculated that the current pushing into the slough was probably nudging me inland, away from the mouth.

  A couple of miles ahead the blunt snout of the cape came and went between curtains of rain. During the Ice Age, Fairweather Glacier plowed up a plateau of rubble as high as a fifty-story building. When a series of violent earthquakes tore through the region in 1898 and 1899, the jumbled moraine sheared off, leaving a steep face littered along its base with enormous boulders. Over the years pounding surf has ground the boulders into fantastic shapes.*

  I had been warned that there was no easy way to cross Cape Fairweather. Ten years earlier a group of four friends had made the traverse, and when I asked one of them what the best course was, he curled his lip at the memory. Hank Lentfer is big, rawboned, and powerful, and his voice rumbled when he said, “The only way to do it is just do it. You just have to go,” meaning it was going to be a head-down, keep-moving endurance test. It was tempting to think that, approaching from the south, I could make my way around the cape by hopping from boulder to boulder along a narrow strand of beach exposed at low tide, then climbing up to side-hill across the face as the water rose, but I had been warned by a second member of Lentfer’s group that this was a sucker’s bet. Richard Steele worked as a wilderness ranger in Glacier Bay National Park for years and has probably spent as much time on the outer coast as anyone alive today, and he made it clear that trying to cross the face along the tide line could result in being trapped by rising surf. He laughed as he described how he had once narrowly escaped just that predicament, but then looked at me with a hard eye to make sure I understood he was not joking.

  The rain had settled into a steady downpour by the time I started climbing, following a faint segment of game trail that started up at the verge of a steep, eroded cliff overhung by undercut trees, then quickly petered out in a warren of wind-twisted spruce and brush. Pushing on, I came to other faint paths now and then that seemed to wander from narrow opening to narrow opening, but the problem with game trails is that even a large bear is only four or five feet high at the shoulder, and I am a shade over six, probably closer to seven with the bundled kayak on my pack. Every step seemed to mean pushing through a barricade of eye-poking branches and limbs that grabbed at the paddle strapped across the pack, snagged my coat and hat, and reached out to scratch my face with sharp needles. Because the terrain was so uniformly uneven, with no consistent pattern of ups or downs and no prominent features to funnel game in any particular direction, any animals crossing the cape probably had to do just as I was doing: following the path of least resistance where possible, then pushing through the tight spots as I encountered them.

  Climbing higher, I began to encounter crusts of knee-deep snow. Skirting a pond like a sump where the first pale green tendrils of buckbean and marsh marigold were starting to show required “post-holing” across a field of rotting snow. At each step a skim of ice crumbled into the tops of my boots. The first few times, I stopped to finger the kernels of ice from around my ankles, but I quickly gave up and cursed myself for not having brought gaiters. The melting snow gradually wicked through my socks until my feet were soaked.

  The terrain rose, dropped, was cut by up-and-down gullies lined with thick, grasping brush. Climbing in the downpour, in loose-fitting rain gear that clutched and bound at every step, was exhausting. My feet were cold, but I was soon wet with sweat under the rain gear. At first I was concerned about coming face-to-face with a bear, but I put the thought out of my mind; between my cursing, grunting, crackling through the brush, crunching through the drifts of snow, and stumbling, I figured every living thing on the cape could hear me coming for miles. Stopping to break out the stove and melt a pan of snow to replenish my water bottle, I thought that I must—must—have wandered somehow into the toughest possible route for the crossing. There simply had to be an easier route I had not found.

  By late afternoon I still had not found it, but the slope of the terrain started to ease, then to drop again. Veering to seaward, I started to probe for a way down, making a false start down a too-steep gully, then climbing down a crumbling ridge of stone that required grabbing at roots and branches to keep from falling. When I finally stumbled out onto the beach north of the cape, I was so beat, sodden, and bedraggled that it was all I could do to slide the pack from my back and dig out a pair of dry socks. It was still raining, but I had been out of water for several hours, and I recognized the dull throb in my head as a sign of dehydration.

  Puzzling over the map, I was not sure where I was, but according to the chart, there was a stream somewhere ahead, so after resting a while, I grunted back into the pack and started walking.

  Flocks of shorebirds flew by at regular intervals, tumbling on the wind like blowing leaves. The stove hissed as it boiled a pan of water from the small creek, which I had come to after walking a mile or so. I put the pan aside to cool while I set up the tent in a copse of trees to escape the wind and stretched the tarp over the tent to shelter it. I was wet and cold but too tired to gather wood and start a fire. I barely remembered to rope the food bag up a tree before I crawled into the sleeping bag and passed out.

  I rose to consciousness only once during the night, just long enough to understand that it was the drumming of heavy rain that had woken me. I could hear wind in the trees and the tarp over the tent flapping, but the surf was diminishing, which meant the gale was passing. Burrowing deeper into the sleeping bag, I was immediately gone again.

  I woke thickheaded and sore, with my calves cramping. The wind had stopped, but it was still raining. I inchwormed out of the tent, crawled into my clothes, and looked around. The sea was gray-green, the sky streaked with black. The light was dull, and I was lethargic, moving slowly as I placed a small stone on one edge of the tarp to sag it into a funnel, balanced the water bottle under it to catch the trickle of rain, then waited until it was half full before I drank it.

  The insides of my boots were still wet from the snow, and my sweater felt damp under my raincoat. It took several cups of hot tea, an aspirin, and a double breakfast to get moving. During the slog across Cape Fairweather I felt as though the pack had gained twenty pounds, so before stowing the food bag in it, I rummaged through th
e remaining freeze-dried meals, sacks of nuts, chocolate, and plastic bags of dried fruit and sorted out enough for three days, consolidating it into a plastic bag, which I then lashed to a branch as high as I could climb in a nearby tree. I planned to retrieve the cache on my way south, reasoning that there was no point in carrying it all the way to Dry Bay only to turn around and carry it back again. I might be cutting my food supply close if it took longer than I thought it would to reach Dry Bay and return, but three days of food should be enough for the final leg from Cape Fairweather back to Lituya Bay and the Swift.

  Walking on, I felt beat down and stiff. There was a steady ache in my back and hips. I thought about stopping for a day to rest at a beach tucked behind a small hook of land sticking out into the sea, where the ground was crusted with a layer of an unusual soft purple color that I took to be the ruby sands sought by the early prospectors, but I was concerned that the rain might make the next river north impassable. When Lentfer and Steele had traversed the coast a decade earlier, they had flipped a raft during the crossing, dumping one of the four people in their party and nearly losing some vital gear.

  My worries were unfounded. The Tlingit called the small, silty river that flows into the gulf a mile north of that small hook of land Yáxwch’i héen, which translates literally as Sea Otter Creek (yáxwch’ for “sea otter” and héen for “creek”), making it one of the few geographic features in Southeast Alaska to retain its true name. And true to its name, a lone otter kept pace with me as I approached, eyeing me curiously from just outside the surf.