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

by Lynn Schooler

  From Yakutat to Grand Plateau Glacier there was the Boulder House of the L’uknáxadi, or Coho Salmon clan, and the village of Gus’eix, with six great houses, including the Frog House, named for a frozen frog found beneath the ground when the hole for the first corner post was dug, which thawed out, came back to life, and hopped away. Gooch Shakkee Aan, the “hilltop town,” and Gunaaxoo, lay north and south of Dry Bay, respectively. Clam Hand Fort and Eddy Fort were built up the Alsek River, and I am sure there were others of which I found no record.

  Two days of strong north wind had knocked the surf down, and I angled down the beach to walk on the wave-packed sand, thinking about how I, too, had saved all my life to build a home, and about the enormous effort it had required to fall and saw trees, pour concrete, and move truckload after truckload of wood, drywall, glass, metal, tar paper, and insulation up the ridge to the building site, all of which was preceded by an equally demanding effort to build the half mile of gravel road necessary to get trucks to the hill.

  This last had been a community effort not unlike the Tlingit building process, with numerous meetings, detailed negotiations, a division of labor, and no small number of barbecues and parties. The neighborhood get-togethers may have fallen short of being true potlatches, because no riches were distributed, but they were often their equal in the amount of fresh crab, salmon, halibut, and berry dishes shared. The ridge I was building on separates two small coves, Amalga and Huffman harbors, along whose shores stand fifteen households constructed on toeholds of postglacial bedrock with their faces to the sea and their backs to the forest. Several of the homesites have been in the same family for generations, and for decades the homes and cabins on the Huffman Harbor side of the ridge were accessible only by boat or a long hike down a trail so rough it wound up creeks that often washed out in heavy rains, through berry thickets occupied by browsing bears, and down a rocky gorge so steep and slick with ice in winter that ascending or descending it required the use of a rope. By the time I relocated to the area, there were four people in Huffman Harbor over eighty years old. The trail was getting hard for them, and it was agreed that what was needed was a road.

  Everyone in the neighborhood pitched in. Rob surveyed the route and drew up the plat; his wife, Kay, kept the books for the project. Bob was elected “president” of the neighborhood for his skills and patience in negotiating easements and rights-of-way between all the landowners. On a frosty autumn day a librarian, an artist, a dealer in septic tanks, and his brother, who sells glass, shouldered chain saws, axes, and brush cutters and walked into the forest, followed by a teacher, a fisheries commissioner, a computer programmer, and a public employee. A six-year-old girl with a fuzzy yellow dog and her older brother came behind. Together this unlikely group of neighbors, who range the political spectrum from ultra-liberal to sternly conservative, chopped, sawed, dug, burned, stacked, and dragged dozens of trees and a mountain of brush to clear a sixty-foot-wide swath through the forest. We labored weekends and evenings, as fall turned to winter and rain turned to snow, and all through that winter, until the following spring, when trucks came bearing loads of dynamite-blasted rock. And—miraculously—there was never a cross word among us, in spite of sprains, sore muscles, and blisters. Instead there was always a thermos of coffee shared around at lunch and a bucket of cold beer at quitting time.

  It is a rare thing in modern times to be able to say one lives in a true community, with the implications of mutual help and concern the phrase implies, but one of the richest experiences of my life was to participate in the building of that road. When I made a stumbling effort to put my feelings into words, I was saved from my sentimental groping by the grown son of the family four cabins over, who glared at me and growled good-naturedly, “That’s why it’s called a neighborhood, you jackass.” Then he took a slug from a hip flask of whiskey and tossed it over to me. We have picnics and birthday parties together. When my wife and I stood on the unfinished deck of the house and said our vows, they were there, and when one of us dies, we all grieve.

  There is little or nothing left of most of the villages along the coast now. The Tlingit survived repeated episodes of dramatic climate change (although the village of Klem-sha-shick-ian, or Sand Mountain Town, in what is now Glacier Bay, was entirely destroyed when a rapidly advancing glacier plowed over it), but they were unable to deal with the diseases that came in the wake of the Russian invaders. Smallpox struck in 1775, measles in 1800, and typhoid fever in 1819. A second wave of epidemics that began in 1836 wiped out entire villages. After typhoid raged along the coast again in 1848 and 1855, there was almost no one left to keep the fires in the great houses burning. Many of the seventy-four clans recorded by Frederica de Laguna have ceased to exist.

  The wind died away entirely. To the south a high, thin haze was beginning to creep across the sky. I had walked a mile or more while thinking about the long-gone villages, taking only casual notice of the occasional wolf and bear tracks I crossed. That the Tlingit culture survived at all is a testament to the strength of community. (And survive it has: A totem-pole-raising ceremony I attended in the village of Klawock shortly after my wedding began with a “grand entrance” by over five hundred drumming, singing dancers that literally shook the rafters of the gymnasium where the ceremony took place with their power.) But there are far fewer people north of Grand Plateau Lake now than there were when La Pérouse sailed over the horizon—only a small handful live there year-round—and I had to wonder what vanished songs a descendant of one of the great houses would hear in the wind along the coast today, what forgotten dances he or she would hear in the drumming surf.

  I stopped to rest on a log and pulled out the map. According to it, I was sitting in the middle of an estuary big enough to float a small ship, but there was no sign of it; the land had risen so much since the shore had been charted that trees had sprung up in what had once been the estuary’s mouth.

  I dug out the stove, made a cup of tea, and drank it. I was tempted to throw the nearly useless map into the waves but scribbled a poorly remembered quote from the poet John Keats in the margin instead, something to the effect that “nothing in the world is permanent; uproar’s your only music,” and put it away.

  The day was growing warmer, and the surf, which had been lapping gently at the shore, was beginning to thump with an increasingly insistent rhythm. I put away the stove and started walking again, and thinking about the tragedies the coast has seen made the pack feel even heavier. In addition to the disease-racked villages there were the drownings in the entrance to Lituya Bay and the 1958 tsunami, the victims of murder and hanging at Justice Creek, and the crewmen lost from the Patterson. The coast seemed littered with bones.

  The prayer flag flicked the back of my head, hung limp for a moment, then flicked again, as if trying to draw my attention to a light breeze filling in from the south. I stopped to fold it away in the pack, and the feel of it in my hands brought to mind again the morning’s dream of Luisa, and from there my thoughts skipped to the startling number of deaths that had peppered every circle of my society over the past year. There had been the elderly neighbor I’d found dead in her bedroom and my neighbor with Lou Gehrig’s disease, who had succumbed to its slow paralysis; the friend who had died from thirty years of Vietnam-induced post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol; the stranger who had jumped from the bridge; a cousin dead of a gunshot wound in a park outside Dallas, Texas; and a friend felled by a burst aorta while traveling in Europe.

  I kept walking, my boots keeping time with the timpani of cold green waves. Every boom of the surf seemed to add to the mortal litany, and as I walked, my thoughts kept guttering along the lines of wondering why I should bother returning to Juneau to labor on a home that might or might not house an ailing marriage, and contemplating the larger folly of opening one’s heart and life to others who must so often die or go away.

  I was several miles into this black fugue when a single western sandpiper fluttered past. The sound of
its wings brought me out of my funk long enough to notice that the haze moving in from the south had consumed half the sky, a sure sign that the weather was changing. I was glad to see the sandpiper; with the exception of a few ravens I had not seen a living thing for two days—not a single bird, no otters or bears, no ships on the sea or planes. There was only me, alone in a thousand square miles of wilderness, with the wide, open swath of the North Pacific on one side and the hulking, ice-clad mountains on the other. I felt completely isolated and relentlessly gnawed at by the question of life’s purpose.

  The sandpiper pip-pip’d and sped away. Its sudden appearance and disappearance made me feel as if I had been abandoned somehow. Then another bird appeared—a plover this time, in the wild black and gold plumage of a male getting ready to breed—then another and another. Within minutes a small chaos of birds was trickling and stopping, starting and fluttering past me. For the next hour or so plovers, dunlins, sandpipers, and surfbirds twittered and spurted by in groups of two or three, forming a staccato trickle of birds that was broken by long periods when there were none.

  Then suddenly it was as if a dam had burst, and the trickle became a wave. In the space of a few minutes, tens, then hundreds, then literally thousands and thousands of shorebirds appeared out of nowhere, storming north in a veritable tsunami of beating wings.

  I thought I knew what was happening. In the North Pacific, low-pressure systems rotate counterclockwise, bringing southerly winds and rain. High-pressure systems spin clockwise, which often means north winds and clear skies along the coast. The stiff north wind that had been blowing for two days had been hitting the migrating flocks dead on the beak and keeping them grounded; now the low-pressure system presaged by the haze moving across the sky was coming, and the birds had gone airborne en masse to gain an energy-saving boost by surfing north on the oncoming pressure wave.

  I understood all this intellectually, but there was also something else going on. High overhead I could see a long, wavering line of sandhill cranes. At sea level flock after flock of phalaropes sped by just outside the breaking waves. Hundreds of dowitchers and turnstones sped up the beach. Most impressive of all were the flocks of sandpipers, which roared past by the thousands, parting to fly around me like water flowing around a boulder in a stream.

  During my forty years in Alaska I had never seen anything like it. Over the sand and the heaving sea, flock after flock rose and fell like ribbons in the wind, twisting and turning, then bending back into themselves like an endlessly writhing animal. Thousands of birds maneuvered as if possessed of a single mind, banking first left, then right, then left again before breaking into separate groups that rose, spiraled, and flowed back together in a tightly braided stream. They seemed to have no fear of me. Clouds of birds passed so close that I imagined I could feel a light turbulence on my face. I put a hand on my hat as if it might be blown away.

  Then for a moment—a flash, really, less time than it takes to read this sentence—I saw the sinuous speeding flock as a congregation of souls released from the dead and dying of all humanity, and I understood that the first bird I had seen, the lone fluttering sandpiper that had intensified my morose feelings, was simply that, a single bird, alone in a harsh and vast landscape. In its solitude, it was inconsequential. But a thousand birds, or ten times ten to a hundred thousand, had become a single consciousness, traveling in perfect unison.

  I watched as a flock flew up the beach. It moved like a boneless creature or a gossamer curtain blowing loose on the wind, and for that moment it seemed the jubilant, rushing mass was inseparable from all the human souls I imagined to be departing the earth that day, in an uprush from every sickroom, hospital, battlefield, and accident scene on the planet, all flowing in graceful unity toward some distant but promising horizon. In their aggregate, the birds—or souls, if you will have it—were no longer individuals but a single thing.

  I knew that many of the birds would not survive the journey. Theirs is a hard life, lived in constant motion, battling weather, scrambling for food, and being chased by the seasons from one part of the globe to the next in the interest of survival and procreation. Every year a large percentage fall prey to starvation and predators. For the individual there is no reasonable hope of a long life, but in the cyclical flocking, migrating, nesting, hatching, and migrating again, over and over through the centuries, there is continuity. And that, I understood, is what truly matters, for we, too, contribute to our own kind’s continuation, whether through children and grandchildren or by building a solid home to provide a shelter for coming generations. Though we will inevitably die and be forgotten, as have the majority of kings and generals throughout history, it is a consolation that in the absence of any permanence there is such continuity. In sum, it does not matter if we are forgotten; what matters is the effect we have on those around us and those who come after us. What matters is how our own lives affect the larger, perpetual community of the living.

  Slowly the flocks thinned out, and it began to rain. I made camp that evening within a few hours’ walk of Dry Bay. Rain drummed on the tent all night, but I was warm and dry inside. And some time in the night I decided to head back to Juneau. As with the birds, I realized, it is a connection with one’s own kind that matters. The solitude of the outer coast was a grand, almost overwhelming experience, but now it was time to go home, to be with my neighbors and friends, sharpen my tools, and court my wife again. It was time to catch up with my own flock.

  When the sun came up the next morning, I was already walking home.

  Chapter 25

  I Flew. Light feet, light pack, light heart. I was buoyed up by the numinous experience with the birds, and my boots found sure footing. No rock rolled underfoot, and loose sand felt solid. I did feel a twinge of regret at turning back only a few hours short of completing the circumnavigation of Mount Fairweather. But the hesitation faded quickly, and walking my backtrail gave me a comfortable, familiar feeling, not unlike the faintly remembered childhood sensation of nodding half asleep in the backseat of the family car as the sound of pavement turned to the sound of gravel on a country road, signaling that the long drive to my grandparents’ ranch was almost over and would soon be replaced by a grandmother’s hugs, a bed of warm quilts, and the feeling of being home at last.

  It was warm, and I traveled so fast that I stopped only twice, the first time to strip down to a light shirt under my raincoat and the second time to let a grizzly lingering near the start of the trail to the lake’s north shore wander away, which it did, up the trail, in the direction I wanted to go, which compelled me to sit on a log and wait for it to put some distance between us. After half an hour I followed it into the brush, singing Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song” at the top of my lungs in case it was still nearby, giving particular attention to the yodeling chorus of “Daylight come and me wan’ go home” and the “Day-o!” line that follows.

  Clearly, it worked (as any such caterwauling probably would), because I saw no sign of the bear other than a darkly fresh calling card of half-digested grass on the trail, and soon enough I stepped out of the woods into a light drizzle at the edge of the lake. A thick layer of low clouds obscured the view of the glacier and mountains, and the gray lake combined with the pale clouds and dark forest along the far shore to form a chiaroscuro of illusion and distance—it could have been a mile across the misty lake or a dozen.

  It seems now that it took less time to inflate the kayak, paddle across the lake, and make my way back to the beach on the other side than it does to tell about it, although by the time I covered the additional miles to the small outlet where I had found the driftwood raven stick, my legs were tired and my stomach was growling. Only two days had passed, but the small creek was much higher, and the knee-deep wade it took to get across convinced me that it was time to build a fire, dry out, and sleep for the night.

  The mist turned to steady rain around midnight. Late the next morning I woke to the sound of bright chirping and lay p
uzzled for a moment as I tried to reconcile the drum of rain on the tent with the sound of birds—an unusual thing, since birds do not usually sing in heavy rain—then came fully awake with the recognition that the chirping was the call of a river otter. Family groups use sharp whistles to keep track of each other when they are traveling.

  I groped for my watch and compared it with the dull light coming through the tent. I had slept eleven hours. It was the longest rest I had had in years, the thought of which filled me with energy and certainty. But had I possessed some sixth sense attuned to portents and omens, I might have heard the chirping not as the familial call of an otter but as the cry of a kushtaka. Maybe some deep, animal gland inside of me did recognize it as such, because I was tempted to pull the sleeping bag over my head and stay in the tent. Instead I crawled out, slipped into my rain gear as quickly as I could, and went about making a double helping of instant oatmeal and washing it down with hot chocolate. When I started walking, my feet did not feel as light as they had the previous day, and I had to concentrate on the clicking cadence of the hiking poles to keep up a steady pace.