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

by Lynn Schooler

  The memory ached like a sore tooth. I probed at it a bit longer with more memories of that week—a sunny hike through an open meadow, a burst of laughter at the absurdity of trying to bring pasta to boil over a smoky fire in heavy rain, and the odd, surprisingly comfortable feeling of knowing that one is among kindred spirits.

  Then I willed myself to put such thoughts away. The dull ache in my back brought on by sleeping on the ground was pain enough without adding the sharp flavor of loss. Besides, the thought of having to hump my way across a mile or more of another boulder hell to the main outlet of the lake, then fight my way upstream was making me grumpy. That first week of bear watching with Luisa and Joel had become a spring ritual that lasted several years, during which we explored a large portion of Admiralty Island, but now I just wanted to not scramble and drag myself across another boulder field and not push myself through a mile of brush while hoping to avoid any close-quarters encounters with bears . . . and it was thinking about bears that presented me with a possible solution.

  Given that no bear traveling the beach would want to walk across the jumbled moraine of boulders and sharp-edged rocks any more than I did, it was likely that over the centuries they had established another route. And finding it was simple. After packing up my gear, all I had to do was walk a few hundred yards back down the beach, turn around, and start walking north again, trying to put myself in the mind-set of a bear that had been avoiding the rough patch throughout its life. At the point where the beach began to go from sand to rock, I veered toward the forest, probing into likely openings along the base of the steep ridge behind the beach. On the third or fourth try I pushed aside a low branch and stepped onto a game trail as distinct and clear as a path through a city park. The first thing I saw was a pile of fresh bear droppings. The second thing I saw was another pile, but the trail looked easy, so I went on.

  An hour later I was standing on the shore of the lake. The water was milky turquoise, the color of the sky reflecting off the lake’s burden of silt, granite ground so fine and weightless by the movement of the glacier that it hung suspended in the water column and turned it opaque. There was still ice on the lake, but it was half a mile away. Beyond the ice the view was stunning. Grand Plateau Glacier lay draped over the mountains like a wedding veil. Immense, glaring-white peaks pushed up into a hard blue sky.

  Grand Plateau Glacier crawls out of a staggering warren of 3,000 to 9,000-foot mountains that run generally parallel to the coast north of Mount Fairweather, riven in all directions by a web of ice fields and glaciers that spans the area between Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon. Before the partitioning of the region into the territories of modern nations—and more recently into a cluster of national and provincial parks—the Tlingit knew and used the network of glaciers as travel corridors, moving back and forth between the coast and the interior, where they traded with the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations and the Athabaskan Tutchone. In 1999 three sheep hunters—Mike Roche, Warren Ward, and Bill Hanlon, all from Nelson, B.C.—were eight hours above their base camp, high in the peaks above the Tatshenshini River, when they made a remarkable discovery. They had already taken two big rams and were working their way along the edge of a glacier searching for a third when they saw something extraordinary: a piece of wood. Roche was a science teacher, Ward taught English, and Hanlon taught shop at the high school in Nelson, and all three had enough experience in the sterile environment of the glacial highlands to understand that wood of any sort was out of place. A bit farther on they found another piece, and when they put the two pieces together, they formed what looked like a walking stick. Then they spotted a third piece—and this one had a hook carved in one end like an atlatl, a short throwing board used to increase the power of a hurled spear.

  “That’s when we began to realize we’d come across something really special,” Roche later said. Ward used his binoculars to scan the area and quickly spotted a mitten and what looked like a pile of debris out on the glacier. Carefully working their way there, they found something that took their breath away: Wedged in a crevice were the frozen remains of an ancient hunter. Nearby lay a primitive knife with a bone handle in a leather sheath. Next to that was a cloak made of ground squirrel fur and what appeared to be a backpack of some sort.

  To their everlasting credit, they understood immediately the magnitude of their discovery and had the presence of mind to spend half an hour carefully marking the location on a map before making the decision to call off their hunt and head back to their base camp. The next morning they started walking out so they could report their find to archaeologists at the Beringia Museum, a hundred miles away in Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory. They decided to take the knife and sheath along to prove their claim, although Ward later admitted he’d been reluctant to remove anything, saying that he had taught The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb to his English students for twenty years, and “since all the people involved with that [discovery] died of unnatural causes,” it had made him uncomfortable to do so.

  As far as I know, no misfortune has befallen the three hunters since their discovery, but the excitement it caused was understandable: It was the first discovery of a human body frozen into a glacier in North America. Eight years earlier a body found in a glacier straddling the border between Austria and Italy had turned out to be 5,300 years old, and some wondered if this was North America’s equivalent.

  Three days later a helicopter bearing a team of archaeologists and representatives of the Champagne and Aishihik tribes, whose traditional territory included the area where the body had been found, flew into the site to confirm what was there. The next three days were spent carefully surveying and documenting the condition and location of artifacts associated with the body. Then the body was removed by a team of specialists, after being prayed over by Champagne and Aishihik elders, who had given the name Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi, or Long Ago Person Found, to their recovered ancestor. What followed was a blending of traditional knowledge and modern forensic technology that allowed the story of Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi to unfold in a remarkable way.

  Within weeks it had been determined that the warrior had been between nineteen and twenty-one years old when he’d died. The initial radiocarbon dating indicated that he had died approximately five hundred years ago. The examination of bone and tissue samples through stable-isotope analysis and mass spectrometry showed that he had spent most of his life subsisting on a diet of seafood, which indicated that he had been born into one of the coastal bands that harvested salmon, halibut, and shellfish. Next, a chemical analysis of his hair showed that for several months prior to his death he had not eaten seafood, but had instead been in the interior, where the Native diet is based on moose and caribou. Pollen and spores from interior plants removed from his clothing confirmed this. Yet most amazing was what the contents of his digestive system revealed: There was partially digested beach asparagus, or glasswort, in his stomach and meat from a crustacean, possibly shrimp. Beach asparagus is a common coastal plant known for its salty, crisp flavor, which I had been hoping to find during the trek to augment my diet of freeze-dried food. It grows only next to salt water.

  I dropped my pack to the ground and stared at Grand Plateau Glacier. I was not as tired as I had been after crossing Cape Fairweather, but I was feeling the wear and tear of the past few days in my knees and shoulders. Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi had been found 4,500 feet above sea level (which meant that, give or take a few hundred feet for however far the glacier had traveled since he had died, he could have been as high as 5,000 feet or more). Yet glasswort, which has a high water content, is quickly digested, and the location where he was found was nearly seventy miles from the nearest salt water. In other words, he had been traveling remarkably fast and light. (Two pieces of dried chum salmon, a species that spawns only in the lower, coastal reaches of the region’s rivers, were also found among his things.) The glasswort in his stomach indicated that he had left the coast less than three days before he had died
, yet he had already hiked, climbed, and pushed himself to an altitude that even a well-equipped climbing party might take weeks to reach. There, it was thought, he had probably been caught in a storm and died of hypothermia.

  I looked at the sweep of the glacier rising into regions of permanent snow and naked stone and wondered what could have sent a young man on such a mad scramble across such inhospitable mountains. The evidence shows that after a life on the coast, he had gone inland for a few months, returned to the coast for a brief period, then turned around and set off again almost immediately on what must have amounted to a headlong run across terrain that usually forces people to move slowly and carefully, or prevents them from traveling at all. The beach asparagus, the salmon, and the pollen found on his clothes indicate that he was almost surely traveling during the first or middle part of August, at the end of the summer, when the chum salmon were spawning, but radiocarbon dating of his equipment indicates that his final journey took place sometime during the tail end of the Little Ice Age, when conditions would have been more extreme than they were by the time I stood on the edge of the lake wondering about his motivation.

  I was also puzzled by how he could have been caught by a storm. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that after decades of living and working at sea and in the wilds of Alaska, I have a “weather eye” that is somewhat more acute than the average city dweller’s. Armed with the knowledge and experience of his ancestors, the young warrior must have been able to look at the sky and sniff the wind for approaching weather changes with skills a quantum leap beyond my own. It was hard for me to believe that he didn’t know what he was looking at when he saw the sky begin to darken, or when the clouds wrapping themselves around the peaks took on the lenticular shape that means strong winds are blowing aloft. But for some reason he kept going.

  Then I remembered how when I’d been in my twenties, I had fallen in love with a dark-eyed girl with a quick smile who lived in Anchorage, 135 miles from where I was living, in the small town of Seward, at the far end of a narrow, winding highway that was often closed by blizzards and avalanches. I was making my living as a fisherman, longlining halibut during the summer and picking up odd jobs as a carpenter and a sawmill hand in the winter. I owned a 1963 Dodge pickup with 90,000 miles on the odometer that I had bought for three hundred dollars from the U.S. Forest Service at a surplus-equipment auction. Gas was sixty cents a gallon, and love, to paraphrase a country and western song popular at the time, was only three dollars away.

  The affair burned like magnesium through July and August, on into autumn, and deep into the heart of winter. By the time that dark-eyed girl called on a stormy December evening to say how much she missed me, frequent trips up and down the highway had worn the tires on the Dodge paper-thin. The only gas station in town closed at six o’clock, and the gas gauge was on empty, but there was a tone in her voice that said she truly wanted to see me that night.

  The highway department had already announced that a road closure was imminent due to the avalanche danger, but a sympathetic friend helped me siphon five gallons of fuel from a generator at the sawmill where he was a night watchman. I stuffed three one-dollar bills into an envelope, pushed it under the door of the mill’s office, and was on my way, sliding almost out of control in wet snow that was already a foot deep and growing deeper every minute. The barrage of fat, wet flakes was coming down so thick and fast that the windshield wipers could barely keep up with it.

  Six hours later I was still crawling along at twenty miles an hour, working the stick shift and trying to stay off the brakes as I slipped past the flashing yellow warning lights 130 miles away, at the northern end of the worst of it. It was one o’clock in the morning before I got to her cabin on the outskirts of Anchorage, but the lamp in the window was still burning.

  There is no fever in the world like it, and standing there in the cold north wind, watching ruffled whitecaps roll across Grand Plateau Lake toward me, I remembered how that flaming love had eventually burned down and gone out, then wondered how long, or if, the diminishing fires of my marriage could be kept burning. I had no doubt that Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi, after coming of age on the coast, had gone inland, perhaps with a trading party, and met a girl with dark eyes and long black hair who moved in a way that reminded him of tall grass in the wind and touched something inside him he had never known before.

  Any serious scientist would rightly scoff at such a notion for lack of evidence, but I had no trouble envisioning Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi stumbling back to his home on the coast with his heart still behind him somewhere in the interior. What else could account for a young man in the prime of his life throwing a knife, a few chunks of fish, and some odds and ends into a bag and taking off at what must have amounted to almost a dead run across such hostile territory? What else would push a man up into that world of ice and bald stone by himself, other than the realization that summer was passing, winter was looming, and once the passes closed, it would be another year before he could see her? Maybe he had looked at the sky and seen boiling weather approaching, but, just as I had done when I’d gotten a late-evening phone call during a growing storm, he’d said to himself, “I can make it.”

  But he was wrong.

  Chapter 24

  Crossing the Lake was almost easy. By the time I worked my way to a point well east of the outlet and inflated the kayak, the wind had begun to drop. Dotted among the clusters of softening skim ice out in the middle of the lake were a few icebergs, car-sized bits that had crumbled away from the face of the glacier the previous summer. The wind had slowed to a strong breeze before I had the pack loaded into the kayak and the prayer flag on its raven mast wedged into the bow, but it was still strong enough to push me crabwise across the lake toward the outflow whenever I stopped paddling, so I angled toward the mountains and dipped hard, kneeling in the bottom of the kayak, wishing I had brought a life jacket. A steepled iceberg a quarter of a mile away gave me something to aim for; once I reached it, I knew I was far enough across the lake to tack back toward the northern shore without being blown or sucked into the outflow, which I could hear roaring off to my left like a waterfall. I was sweating under my clothes by the time I pulled up to the beach, unwound my cramping legs, and stepped out into ankle-deep water. I ate an energy bar while I let the kayak deflate, then I rolled it and tied it to the top of the pack, wedging the prayer flag into the lashings, where it could fly upright behind my head.

  Getting back to the coast again was almost a mirror image of the morning, with an easy walk on a generally well-defined trail. Here and there it wandered off into red herring byways where bears had decided to divert into thick patches of brush, but these inevitably petered out into riots of thorny, head-high devil’s club that quickly turned me around.

  It was probably no more than a mile to the beach, and I covered it quickly, in under an hour, but stepping from the sun-dappled forest into the sound of the surf on the north side of the glacier was like walking into a different world. The scope of the sea and the wall of trees were the same, but something simply felt different. It was not just that spring seemed more advanced there, although there were fewer snowbanks and more spears of false dogwood and twisted stalk poking up from the moss. It took spotting an axe-cut limb and an arrangement of stones darkened by fire to make the difference apparent; after days of walking through untracked territory, I was once again in the presence of people. A quarter of a mile on, the beach was marked with a set of wind-blurred tire tracks. According to the map, I was only seven miles from the first cabin at the Doame River and another three or so from a branch of the Alsek River. A fisherman had probably been out for a joyride on one of the four-wheelers kept at the camps for moving nets between fishing sites.

  I was surprised at the twinge of resentment I felt. The eighty miles of coast between Cape Spencer and Grand Plateau Glacier is some of the wildest in North America, but the sixty miles of broad lowlands from there to Yakutat has always been “people country,�
� ever since the first aboriginals came over the ice from the interior. It was rich land, a cornucopia overflowing with such a wealth of fish, greens, berries, and game that generations of Tlingit had no experience with famine. Centuries of use had scattered the names of a dozen villages across the map.

  I stopped to adjust the prayer flag, which had come loose while I was walking, then looked back down the beach at the forest, trying to imagine canoes coming and going, or the smoke of campfires drifting in slow curls above the trees. Traditional Tlingit villages were not, in the Western sense, permanent, in that the residents did not occupy them year-round; they were winter settlements, where a band’s members would congregate after spending the spring and summer in scattered hunting and fishing camps, gathering food for winter before coming together to spend the snowbound months dancing and telling stories in the great houses of their respective clans.

  According to Lieutenant George Emmons of the U.S. Navy, who along with the anthropologist Frederica de Laguna produced the most thorough ethnographs of life among Alaska’s coastal Indians, building a house was the most important event in a Tlingit’s life. Enormous amounts of labor were required to cut, transport, form, and fit the huge timbers used to construct the artfully crafted structures, which might be fifty feet wide and sixty feet deep and provide a living space for up to fifty people. The planks, split with mallets and wooden wedges from huge old-growth trees, could be thirty feet long, two or three feet wide, five inches thick, and free of knots for their entire length. To be able to marshal the manpower and resources necessary to build such a structure was a sign of great wealth, as were the intricate carvings and paintings that decorated every surface. Old drawings and photographs of great houses in villages like Klukwan, Yakutat, Angoon, and Sitka show structures so carefully engineered and decorated that it requires no great stretch of the imagination to find comparisons with the early Roman temples or European cathedrals. The comparisons become even more apt when one considers that every step of the building process was accompanied by ceremonies and rituals. From choosing the house site, which required formal consultation with representatives from every clan involved, to the cutting of the trees and their transport by fleets of canoes to the cutting, hewing, and carving of the logs into planks and beams, each act had a requisite ceremony, which Emmons described as being “in every sense a religious observation,” meant to honor the spirits of the Tlingit’s ancestors. Upon the house’s completion, an enormous potlatch was held that often involved the builder’s giving away the remainder of his wealth; a name was also given to the house that reflected the history and status of the builder’s clan. “It was the ambition of every man to build or rebuild a house,” wrote Emmons, “and to that end he saved throughout his life, and if he died before being able to accomplish this, it was a solemn ambition to be carried out by his successor.”