My only choice was to go upriver until I found an eddy on the other side where I could land without flipping the kayak. But going upstream would mean going into the forest.
I did not want to go into the forest.
Let me repeat that: I did not want to go into the forest. Going into the forest would mean pushing through heavy brush, making my way through dense alder, and searching for a way through thick stands of trees, any one of which might hold a bear. The thought of leaving the beach, where I could see in all directions, and stepping into the dark understory made me queasy.
I was shivering. Another piece of the riverbank caved in.
I had no choice. I pushed myself to my feet and went in.
I do not know how long or how far I went, only that everything inside of me was stretched drum tight and more than once I thought to turn around, although the going was not as difficult as I had feared. In places the river ran in braids across a plain of sand and water-scoured stones where I could walk out in the open on gravel bars. In others I had to scout a way through tangled brush, swinging inland around the worst parts, then back to the river every hundred yards or so to look for an eddy. I found no place to cross.
It was early afternoon by the time I came to a fork in the river, where it split into a tumbling rush of concrete-colored water to the left, closest to me, and a shallower stream of clear water to the right. The silty water appeared to be coming from a glacier and made up the bulk of the flow, but the watercourse it flowed through was narrow. Upstream of the fork it ran even faster because of the constriction. As I moved inland, patches of snow became more frequent, and the undergrowth grew thicker.
Slogging through the thickets was exhausting. The pinched nerve in my neck was aching, and I was on the verge of giving up and heading back to the beach, when I spotted a downed tree on the opposite side of the river. The trunk lay in the water pointing upstream; downstream, in the lee of the roots, was a small eddy.
A skim of old leaves and debris swirled slowly in a weak countercurrent below the roots; the slick surface of the eddy was not much larger than the kayak. Upstream, on my side of the river, I could see no place to launch, no obstruction that would provide a place to slide the kayak into the water without it being snatched away.
The noise of the rushing current ate at my confidence; if I tried to cross and missed the eddy, I would spin off downstream on a wild, plunging ride that in all likelihood would end with the kayak’s being overturned.
I spent the next half hour searching up and down a quarter-mile stretch of the river, trying to think of a way to get the kayak in the water without being swept away and trying in vain to convince myself that I could make it across and spear the blunt, unwieldy inflatable into the tiny opening before I blew past it. But after I tossed a stick into the water to measure the speed of the current, I knew it was not possible; I simply did not have the skill required. It was not far—the river had narrowed to no more than fifty or sixty feet—but I knew I was not proficient enough to hit such a small target in such swiftly moving water.
My only chance was to get the rope across and pull myself over. But how? It was too far to lasso a tree or boulder like a cowboy; all I could do was try to throw the line across and hope it snagged on something. If I could throw it over a branch on the far side, it might snarl and hold somehow.
I tried several times to lash a rock to the end of the line as a weight, to make it easier to throw, but the knot kept slipping. When that failed, I broke out the wire saw and cut a length of alder, fastened the line to it, swung it, and tossed it.
The line dropped into the stream halfway across, and a stab of pain shot through my shoulder. I reeled the line in, coiling it carefully for a second try, then a third and a fourth, but each fell short; I tried underhand, overhand, and a lunging, full-bodied throw, but none carried the line far enough. Every try made my shoulder worse.
I blew out my lips in frustration. Any second-string Little League player could have tossed a ball into the underbrush on the other side underhanded, but with my neck flaring up, my right arm was nearly useless, and when I attempted to use my left, the result was so uncoordinated that I gave up after a single try.
I felt defeated, stuck, incompetent. For a moment I considered tying one end of the line to my pack and the other around my waist, then flinging myself into the river in an attempt to swim across, thinking that if I made it to the far shore, I could pull the pack across behind me and then figure out a way to deal with the wet gear and clothes. I dropped the idea after visualizing becoming tangled in the line or exhausting myself in the current and being washed away. I told myself that if I had brought a life jacket, I might have tried it, but a deeper part of me knew that I would have still been afraid. The thought of going into the rushing water was just too much.
I was stymied until a small, niggling idea began to take form, first as a piecemeal memory, then as a solid shape. More than a decade earlier I had worked with a BBC film crew on a documentary about eagles, part of which had required placing a small platform high in a tree near a nest, where a cameraman could squat inside a blind, waiting to capture footage of the eagles feeding their chicks. The production company’s rigger, a squat, immensely strong fellow with ice blue eyes and a jaw darkened by three days of beard, had used a pistol-sized crossbow to shoot a “messenger” line of thin cord across a stout limb eighty or ninety feet up the tree. The messenger line had then been used to pull a proper climbing rope aloft, giving us a means to go up and down the tree as we’d hoisted the preassembled platform into position.
At first I tried to think of a way to make a small crossbow or to use the flare pistol to fire a messenger line across—perhaps by carving a stick to fit into the barrel, then emptying the smoke-producing compound out of the remaining shell and using the detonator and propellant to fire the stick and an attached line across. Except I did not have a small-diameter line long enough, and besides, unlike with the tree limb, where gravity had dropped the end of the messenger line back down to us, I would have no way to retrieve a messenger line and thus no way to use one to get the heavy line across and secured.
But a larger crossbow might work. I started searching for a stick or branch to make into a bow, but the brush was all too small or twisted. A waterlogged branch I dragged out of the river snapped when I flexed it.
I had to search for a while before I found what I needed—a young spruce tree growing in the middle of a patch of alder. Then it took some time, having wormed my way into the alder, to use the saw to cut the sapling down and whack off enough of the limbs to drag it out of the thicket. But another hour of work and I had the slender trunk trimmed down into a tall pole as thick as my wrist. When doubled and twisted, one of the small-diameter cords I had used to rig the ground tarp as a shelter was strong enough to serve as a bowstring.
Green spruce is amazingly flexible, and Sitka spruce is the strongest wood for its weight in the world. It took a couple of tries before I figured out how to butt one end into the ground against a tree root and use the tree trunk as a fulcrum to bend the sapling. I had to brace one knee against the tree and pull with both hands to fit the string. Stringing the bow around the tree left the trunk of the tree between the shaft and the bowstring, which made it easy to use another cord from the ground tarp to lash the bow horizontally to the trunk. The bow was so stiff I had to hold the bowstring with both hands to draw it, but when I let go, it snapped forward with a satisfying thunk.
Next came the arrow, or bolt, as a crossbow projectile is called. I needed something heavy enough to carry the line across the river and substantial enough to penetrate the growth on the other side. A four-foot chunk of the spruce sapling did the job. I trimmed and smoothed it with the knife, hacked a deep V in the end to fit the bowstring, then cut a groove around one end for the line. After thinking a moment, I reconsidered and carved a second groove near the middle, then retied the line; the bolt was more likely to tangle and hold if it could “toggle,” or tw
ist sideways, in the brush on the other side.
I tied the remaining end around a tree and laid the body of the line out in careful coils, making sure there were no snags that might interfere. I wanted the line to pay out with as little drag on the bolt as possible.
I notched the bolt into the drawstring, muttering a small prayer that amounted to nothing more than “please, please, please,” and flexed the bow to make sure the line was clear. I did not really expect the crude contraption to work, but if it failed, I would just have to keep trying until it succeeded.
I gripped the bowstring on either side of the bolt and reared back, pulling hard and angling the bow a few degrees skyward. I heard wood fibers start to crack and let go. The string snapped, the bow jumped, and the bolt shot across the river in a shallow arc that carried it straight into a copse of trees, leaving me staring openmouthed as the line fell into the water and the current snatched the slack downriver.
I dashed for the line and grabbed it, hauling it in hand over hand until I felt resistance on the other end, then stopping, hesitant to tug too hard and pull it loose. I need not have worried. I pulled, then pulled harder, and nothing gave, even after I reared back and put my full weight against it. The toggle had worked. The bolt turned sideways and lodged between two trees. I walked downstream and jerked, but the line held.
I was almost jubilant until I realized I had another problem. With the line knotted around a tree on my side of the river, if I pulled myself across in the kayak, I would have no way to retrieve it. I would have to abandon it, but there were more rivers to cross, and I might need it.
I tugged on the line and paced back and forth, trying to imagine a slipknot of some sort or a way to cut the line after I was across, maybe by wedging a sharp stone or my knife between the tree trunk and the knot, then working the line back and forth from the other side until it parted . . . but it might not work . . . or if the line got cut before I was across, the kayak would swing downstream and . . .
That was the answer. With the line fixed on the far shore, all I had to do was secure the kayak to the line, turn it loose, and let the current swing me across like a pendulum. It was pure luck that I had chosen a tree upstream of the root wad to use as a base for the crossbow; this made it an easy matter to estimate the distance from where the line was toggled into the brush downstream to the eddy and to measure the same distance back along the line, which gave me the point at which I could fasten the kayak in order to have the current ferry me across. If I was right, the arc would carry me into the calm water below the root wad.
While I pumped up the kayak, I went through the procedure in my head, trying to imagine everything that could go wrong, thinking about how the force of the current would act on the kayak and the line, and wondering if I should try to steer with the paddle or just hang on. My stomach rolled at the thought of getting into the kayak without a life jacket, and what it would be like if the kayak flipped and I made it to shore but lost my gear. I might be able to make it to Lituya Bay and the emergency supplies I had stashed in the river bag on the beach there, but it would be a long, cold walk with no dry clothes and no sleeping bag.
After inflating the kayak, I dug out the small waterproof bag that held my toothbrush, toilet paper, and aspirin, and added a film canister of waxed matches, the remaining half of a chocolate bar, a pair of dry socks, the knife, and the handheld radio. Then I took off my belt, placed it crossways on the foam sleeping pad, and folded the pad over and over around the leather belt until it formed a thick roll, which I secured with the silver tape I had wrapped around the hiking poles while I was preparing for the trek. With the belt buckled around my chest below my armpits, the pad made a plausible if uncomfortable life vest. After trying it on, I decided to wrap the ground cloth around the pad as well; I could use it as a shelter if I needed it. With the bag clipped to the belt and the knife, the bear spray, and a foil bag of freeze-dried potatoes and eggs in my pockets, I was as ready as I could be to go.
I noticed a light tremor in my hands as I pulled the line tight, knotted a loop into it, and ran a second, shorter piece of line from the bow of the kayak through the loop. The kayak bucked and jumped when I slid it into the water, as if it was trying to get away. I secured it to a root protruding from the bank with a slipknot and dangled the free end of the line where I could reach it after I was seated in the kayak.
I tossed the pack into the heaving boat and strapped it in, then put the paddle on the bank where I could reach it. Getting into the kayak required a fumbling squirm to lower my butt into the lurching craft without losing my balance. Once I was in, with my knees tucked under me and the slipknot in my hand, the kayak suddenly seemed much too small, the river too swift, the whole thing absurd.
I jerked the knot loose. The kayak slipped backward, the bow falling off downstream as I grabbed the paddle and started thrashing at the water, trying to gain control; the boat spun halfway around, wobbled over a boiling surge of water, and started plunging downstream sideways. A wave sloshed aboard, and a gout of cold water hit my face. Just as I thought the whole thing was going out of control, the line began to tighten and the bow swung upstream.
The kayak bumped and slewed in the current, but slowed and began moving across the stream, swinging in an arc that carried it swiftly toward the root wad. There was a heart-seizing moment when I thought the line would be too long or too short and I would miss the eddy, or it would tangle in a snag hanging out from the bank, but instead the kayak slipped into the still water behind the root wad as calmly as a horse stepping into a stall.
I was across. I was on my way home.
Epilogue
The Rest of the trek back to Lituya Bay was uneventful except for finding the cache of food I had left at Cape Fairweather gone. Something small had gotten into it, perhaps squirrels or a marten, and there was nothing left but a litter of shiny, finely gnawed scraps of foil strewn across the ground. I was on short rations for the next few days, but there were no more floods, no aggressive bears, and the weather turned fine. The Wilderness Swift was where I had left it, riding peacefully at anchor when I paddled up, although a shattered coffee cup and a jumble of books on the cabin sole told me it had ridden through at least one gale-tossed night. The voyage from Lituya Bay back to Juneau was easy, with ten knots of wind and following seas across the gulf, followed by a stop in the tiny village of Elfin Cove for fuel and a phone call to my wife.
She did not answer. It is autumn now as I write this, and she has been gone for two years. It turned out that getting a divorce in Alaska is not hard. She moved out the day after I got home. There were papers to sign and a waiting period. We held hands as the magistrate dropped the hammer and went for coffee afterward. A week later she left for Italy with her lover. Our own love, she said, had simply faded; people change and grow apart; she did not blame me. There was more, but it was difficult to respond to such well-practiced lines.
Now, at the end of a long, hot summer that saw temperatures in Southeast Alaska soaring into the eighties, the salmon are massing at the mouth of the creek near the house, blackening the water with the sheer number of their bodies, waiting for a rising tide to push them up a small waterfall that stairsteps down a face of jagged rocks. Once above the falls, the salmon will swim inland, spawn, and die. Their decomposing bodies will then release nutrients into the stream that will fertilize the tiny plants and feed the insects that in turn will provide food for the salmon’s offspring until they are strong enough to swim downstream into the ocean. Only a few of the fry will survive life among the predators of the open sea long enough to reach adulthood, and 90 percent of these will be caught by fishermen or eaten by seals, sea lions, or killer whales before they can return to their natal stream. Of those that make it back into the river, still more will be consumed by bears.
It is tempting to dismiss the salmon’s perseverance in hurling themselves upstream to spawn and die as simple instinct, but as with all migrating animals—birds, whales, caribou, even the
wildebeests in Africa—everything they do, whether by instinct or consciously, is for the benefit of the coming generations.
I lost traction for a while after the divorce, downshifting from working seven days a week to days of sitting on the unfinished porch or in a chair by an upstairs window. When his own wife left him for a London playboy, the British satirist Evelyn Waugh wrote in a letter to his friend Harold Acton that he “did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live,” adding, perhaps as an afterthought, “I am told it is a common experience.” Were it not for my own friends, who pushed back my drift toward reclusion with insistent invitations to dinners, hikes, and evenings out, it would have been difficult, or perhaps impossible, to rise out of the sump of doubt and confusion one falls into when forced to acknowledge the remarkable capacity of the human heart to see what it wants to see and believe what it wants to believe in the face of all reason and evidence. And it was the kindness of neighbors who shoveled a path through hip-deep snow to the house to keep an eye on things when I left town for the winter that showed me how when the bottom drops out, it is the gentle, unspoken web of community that breaks the fall and catches you.
Eventually, of course, I returned to working on the house, but there was no longer a rush, and now my days rarely end in exhaustion. Yesterday I started making a closet door out of two planks that at one time might well have gone into the firewood pile. The first is riven with wind shake scars, dark, jagged cracks formed when the tree was still living, and the second is plagued with knots. It will require hours of sawing, planing, and sanding to turn the wounded wood into panels, but the slow work of deciphering an attractive pattern in the deformities will be worthwhile if it allows me to turn something so deeply flawed into something beautiful. The house is well built; it could stand for a hundred years. With proper attention to detail, it may provide a comfortable, wabi-sabi home for the generations that come after me.
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 25
