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

by Lynn Schooler

  It took a while to sink in, but in the end the extremity of the trek, from the heart-lifting experience among the migrating birds to the screeching terror of being stalked by the bear, also made the transition easier; after all, being peeled down to the point where you are nothing more than just another mammal trying desperately to stay alive puts things in perspective. Looking into the dull eyes of that grizzly undressed me in a way that I had never been undressed before, reminding me that the “real” world is still out there, and that it is a medieval place where nature is not always pretty and humans are not always in charge.

  Balance this with the experience with the birds. There are six billion people on the planet, and life is short; we flicker and disappear like sparks rising from the campfires of the gods, who sit in the heavens watching ice ages come and go, mountains rise and fall, and civilizations disappear. But as with the enormous flock of migrating shorebirds, it is the totality of the organism that matters, an ongoing unison of such scale that the sheer abundance of its moving parts makes it seem infallible. There is continuity. We stand smack in the middle of life, evolution, and history, and we are vital parts of the system. No one can be certain, of course, what Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi was doing up on that glacier when he died, but studies have established to a remarkable degree who he was, if not by his given name, then by his lineage; DNA samples gathered from 250 members of the Champagne and Aishihik bands in the interior and the Tlingit communities in the coastal areas have positively identified seventeen living relatives. Tlingit culture is matrilineal, based on two descendant groups designated as Eagle and Raven; all of Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi’s relatives are of the Eagle moiety. Even in death, some part of the young warrior lives on through his mother’s line.

  There is almost no chance the bear is still out there. When I described the animal’s initial motionless state to a biologist, he noted that the behavior was consistent with a loss of vision. The odd gait indicated neurological damage. An animal so badly wounded almost certainly died of starvation, leaving its body to be consumed by scavengers or melt away into nutrients that fertilized the grass. We are all inevitably a source of life for something else. “Loss,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “is nothing but change, and change is nature’s delight.”

  The novelist Leif Enger wrote that “drift is the bane of the epilogue,” but there is one more thing I want to share with you, so please bear with me.

  The last day of the long run home from Lituya Bay back to Juneau was also the day of Luisa’s memorial service. From Elfin Cove, on Cross Sound, through the Inian Islands into Icy Strait, and all the way north around the farthest tip of Admiralty Island, the sea was as flat as a plate of mercury. Rags of mist hung along the shore. The horizon came and went between brushstrokes of rain. The ceremony in remembrance of Luisa’s life was scheduled to begin at four P.M., a few minutes before the day’s lowest tide.

  I could have been there. In such calm weather it would have been a simple matter to lay a course from the north end of Admiralty Island down around the bottom of Shelter Island, then shoot east across Favorite Channel to the beach where she and Joel had built their home. But after the immense solitude of the outer coast and the intensity of my experiences there, I was not ready to mingle with the hundreds of people I knew would be present. And while friends were flying in from all over the globe to say goodbye to Luisa, dropping anchor in front of such a crowd and rowing ashore would have felt like grandstanding. Instead, I went south, running along the shore of Admiralty Island until I came to a small cove at the foot of a mountain I knew was visible from Joel and Luisa’s front window. At 3,600 feet Mount Robert Barron is the highest peak on Admiralty Island, and Luisa had immersed herself in its view as she’d lain in the front room with the hummingbirds hovering outside the window during the last days of her life. By three o’clock the Wilderness Swift was anchored in the cove, and I was rowing ashore with the prayer flag, a coil of line, some tarred seine twine, the hip flask of scotch, and a thermos of hot tea in my pack. A smear of rain drifting down the channel caught up with me as I stepped ashore and became a pelting shower.

  The tide was an hour from low and still falling, so I balanced the skiff’s small mushroom anchor on the bow, looped a line through the eye, and waded out as far as I could go without water going over the top of my rubber boots, pushing the skiff in front of me. Then I gave the skiff a shove, watched it drift to the end of the tether, and gave the line a yank, pulling the mushroom off the bow into the water to anchor it. Barnacles crunched under my boots as I walked ashore.

  I stopped at the edge of a grassy isthmus beside a spreading spruce tree, took off the pack, and pulled out the prayer flag. It took a couple of tries to toss the coiled line over a wrist-thick limb ten feet above my head and my full weight to bend the branch down far enough to reach the tip. Standing on the line to hold the branch in place was awkward, but I cut two pieces of twine and used them to lash the prayer flag to the end of the branch, working slowly, using the knife to trim away smaller branches so the flag could flutter without becoming snarled. After securing two corners of the flag with round turns and finishing the lashings with square knots, I stepped back, took my weight off the line, and let the branch rise. There was no wind. The flag hung as limp as sodden laundry, a scrap of cloth out of place in a tree.

  The rain began to fall harder, coming down with enough velocity to rattle off the brim of my hat and spackle the surface of the cove with overlapping circles. I sank to a seat on a stone with the pack between my knees and pulled my raincoat around me. Then I dug out the thermos, unscrewed the cap, and poured. A trickle of rain inched its way under my collar, but the cup of tea in my hands was warm. I took a sip and closed my eyes, trying to think of Luisa.

  I am not sure what I was expecting. I suppose some part of me thought a swarm of hummingbirds might appear, or a deer, or an eagle would drift low overhead to inspect the prayer flag. A few years earlier Luisa, Joel, and I had gone with a group of friends to a creek on the eastern shore of Admiralty Island to hold a memorial ceremony for an older, wilderness-loving friend who had died a year earlier of thyroid cancer. Stan Price had homesteaded at Pack Creek for nearly thirty years, living cheek by jowl with a couple dozen grizzlies who had become so familiar with his comings and goings, as had he with theirs, that it was not unusual to find a bear sleeping under the porch of his cabin or see one wander into his shop while he was working. When a young bear walked out of the brush during our informal ceremony and lay down a few yards away, put its head on its paws, and listened until we were finished, then got up and ambled away, we all agreed that in some fashion the bear was Stan’s spirit, dropping by to hear what we had to say. Now a part of me was hoping for something similar, some sign I could interpret as an assurance that those we love never truly leave us.

  The rain became a downpour. It gushed and pounded, falling so thick and fast that rivulets began to trickle from the brim of my hat into the cup of tea. I sat for half an hour, still hoping. Nothing moved. Just the rain.

  At four o’clock I gave up and tossed the diluted remains of the tea on the ground, then pulled out the scotch, tipped a shot into the cup, and raised it to the prayer flag in lieu of a prayer. The smoky liquid burned as it went down. I was not sure if the tears trickling down my cheeks were from the scotch, for Luisa, or just the rain.

  I was on my feet, coiling the line in preparation for leaving, when it started.

  First the rain stopped. It ended so abruptly that it was like having a roaring engine or a blaring radio switched off, leaving only the sounds of water dripping from the trees and runoff trickling through the rocks. Then a raven called and another answered. An eagle I had not seen perched in the top of a tree overhead shrieked and shrieked again, its falsetto cry tapering off into a tremolo. Next came the back-and-forth buzz of several thrushes from deep within the trees, and within a few seconds a mob of crows, jays, robins, ravens, eagles, and a dozen species I cannot name were cawing, calling, whistlin
g, singing, and chirping from the sky, the forest, and the grass covering the isthmus. A flock of herring gulls appeared overhead, arguing and screeching. The musical cacophony swelled until I stopped in my tracks, looking in all directions for the cause of it.

  It lasted at most half a minute. Then one by one the calls stopped. Before I knew what to make of the frenetic chorus, it was over, leaving me standing on the beach with the half-coiled line in my hand, listening to a single distant gull yammer at a passing crow . . .

  Everything went still again. It grew so quiet I could hear the faint pop of bubbles rising through the seaweed at the water’s edge, exposed barnacles and mussels closing with tiny clicks.

  After waiting a minute or two, I finished coiling the line, threw the pack over one shoulder, and walked down the beach to pull the skiff in. The tide was changing, the sea starting to rise. I stepped into the skiff and fitted the oars into the oarlocks. For three weeks I had been traveling in the wake of people with remarkable endurance—Chirikov, La Pérouse, and Jim Huscroft; the crews of the Badger and the Edrie, who rode out the world’s largest tsunami; Hans and Hannah Nelson, whose marriage endured a winter of murder and privation; the castaways of the Patterson and their rescuers; and last, the Tlingit people, who continue to salvage their culture from the devastation of the past.

  The oarlocks squeaked in time with my strokes. I was in no hurry to get back to the boat. We are all the end product of a million years of survivors; your mother and father both had to be sufficiently strong and healthy as babies, children, and young adults to live long enough to meet, mate, and produce you, often against the incalculable odds of disease, war, famine, and troubles beyond name and number. Consider their parents—your grandparents—and this run of luck has happened five times. Go back to the time of Edgar Allan Poe or Lincoln, and we are the direct descendants of approximately 240 very strong, lucky people. By La Pérouse’s day, the number reaches one thousand. At twenty generations, it breaks a million, all of who possessed the fortitude and fortune to live long enough to throw their genetic material into the relentless collusion that would culminate in you. Scramble back down the evolutionary ladder far enough, and the odds against being here to read or write these words reach into the trillions.

  I pulled alongside the Swift and climbed aboard, locked the skiff into the davits, and started the engine. There would almost certainly be rough seas ahead—friends would die, relationships stumble, sooner or later my body would decide not to do all I asked—but for now just being alive was miracle enough. There won’t be anything I cannot handle.

  As for the last few miles of the unfinished circumnavigation of Mount Fairweather, I will save it for my dotage. A level hike on a broad beach might be just the thing when I am seventy or eighty. This winter, instead of chipping ice off the table saw and fighting blizzards, I may go for a walk across the island of Hawaii—a warm, 120-mile hike from a protected beach at sea level, up, over, and around a pair of 14,000-foot volcanoes, then down through an ancient koa forest and grasslands, until I drop into a deep valley that broadens into blue surf and gentle trade winds at its mouth. It will be easy; there are no rivers to cross and no bears.

  Or maybe I will just rent a car and drive around the island. Why not? I am fifty-five years old; they are all victory laps now.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I relied on the help of far too many people in the writing and preparation of this book to adequately acknowledge each and every one, so I should start with a blanket expression of gratitude to the numerous biologists, geologists, guides, rangers, researchers, fishermen, and mariners who shared their often hard-earned knowledge with me so generously.

  Next comes a very large debt to Gayle Goedde, Jim Simard, Gladi Kulp, and the rest of the staff at the Alaska State Historical Library, without whose help much of this book would have been thin on facts. My appreciation for you all is incalculable.

  A very special thank-you is owed to Ed Huizer, without whose help, support, and steady stream of doughnuts this book might have never been written and the house I now call home would certainly never have been built. Ed, thanks for sharing both your memories of Alaska during its territorial days and so many volumes from your personal collection of Alaskana. They all have been invaluable.

  I must also say thanks to the numerous writers and historians whose work over the past two hundred years played such a large part in igniting my interest in Lituya Bay. No one planning to visit the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park should do so without carrying along a copy of Francis E. Caldwell’s Land of the Ocean Mists, which was so expertly edited by Alaska’s finest living historian, Robert N. DeArmond. If space in one’s backpack or boat locker allows, Philip L. Fradkin’s Wildest Alaska is a truly fun read as well.

  And last, to the Tlingit Indian elders and storytellers who have dedicated themselves to preserving the traditions and history of their people, I send my very small and inadequate Gunalch’eesh!

  Lynn Schooler

  Juneau, Alaska

  2005

  Footnote

  * It’s commonly pronounced “KLEEN-kit” by English speakers, but the first syllable is more properly pronounced with a breathy l sound that does not exist in English.

  * Alaska did not become a state until 1959.

  *This is not a typo. The wave was 400 feet higher than the World Trade Center towers.

  † The Coast Pilot is a compilation of navigation information, descriptions of bays and harbors, tide and current data, and meteorological tables published by the U.S. government. No prudent mariner would travel the coast of Alaska without one.

  * Compare this with Mount Everest, which rises slightly more than 11,000 feet from its base on a plateau at 17,575 feet to 29,000 feet at its summit.

  † Though dozens and dozens of taxonomic subgroups were once used, biologists now agree that all brown bears and grizzlies—including European brown bears—belong to a single species, Ursus arctos. The names grizzly bear and brown bear are used interchangeably.

  *Quartersawn describes lumber from a log that has been sawed into quarters lengthwise. Boards are sawed from each quarter by cutting at right angles to the annual growth rings, which then appear as parallel lines on the face of the board. Quartersawn wood is prized for its stability and resistance to warping.

  * Vitus Bering, who is often credited with “discovering” Alaska, spotted land on July 16, a day after Chirikov, when he saw Mount Saint Elias rising above the clouds approximately 200 miles north of Chirikov’s position.

  * Read, for example, as “Fifty-seven degrees, fifteen minutes north,” 57° 15’ North indicates a position fifteen nautical miles north of the fifty-seventh parallel in the northern hemisphere. Each “minute of arc” (equivalent to one sixtieth of a degree) measures one nautical mile, obtained by measuring the height of the sun above the horizon at noon.

  * The scholar Allan Engstrom makes a strong argument for Chirikov’s men having landed at Surge Bay, on the southern shore of Cross Sound. According to local fishermen, Surge Bay can be dangerous during westerly seas. Engstrom’s hypothesis is also strengthened by the recent discovery of a stone petroglyph, carved by an unknown Tlingit artist, that appears to represent a two-masted ship resembling the St. Paul.

  † Frederica de Laguna, one of the foremost ethnographers of the Tlingit culture, has postulated that the cries of “Agai!” that Chirikov heard were the Natives saying, “Haa•déi!,” or “Come down! Over here!,” a phrase used to summon visitors to traditional ceremonies.

  * There is irony in this, in that Rousseau did not in fact equate the state of “natural man” with that of the “noble savage,” as has so often—and so mistakenly—been claimed. For Rousseau, the “goodness” of uncivilized man was that of behaving according to his true nature, rather than one codified by artificial notions of virtue and morality. Rousseau’s political philosophy also greatly influenced the French Revolution, which led to Louis XVI’s being guillotined. The king is said to hav
e asked, “Is there any word of La Pérouse?” on the way to his execution.

  * Alaska has semidiurnal tides, meaning there are two complete cycles from high to low in every twenty-four-hour period. More accurately, each rise or fall takes a bit more than six hours, causing both highs and lows to occur approximately forty minutes to an hour later every day.

  * By comparison, Niagara Falls flows at approximately 100,000 cubic feet per second. The Colorado River’s average flow through the Grand Canyon is 30,000 cubic feet per second, and the Colorado is considered one of the premier white-water rivers in the world.

  † Ten years after La Pérouse visited Lituya Bay, the master of a Russian vessel entering the harbor recorded a drop of “one and a half fathoms,” or nine feet, at the entrance, which his vessel shot “with irresistible speed and great danger.” The drop the Swift went over was much less than that.

  * The name of the elder varies among traditional Tlingit oral accounts of La Pérouse’s arrival. In some he is called L’eiwkut or Yeahlth-kan, while in others he is referred to only as “an old man.” Other details vary slightly as well, but the gist of the story has been handed down with remarkable consistency for over two hundred years. In choosing to use Yeahlth-kan as the elder’s name, I mean no disrespect to those who relate the account using other names.

  * In 1937 a Tlingit man of the Wooshkeetaan clan that claims traditional use of lands north of Juneau told a game warden for the Territory of Alaska that he still had the bell, saying that at that time it had been in his family for eight generations.

  * The Tlingit already possessed a few pieces of iron when La Pérouse arrived, possibly from trading with the Eskimos of Prince William Sound and the inhabitants of Kodiak Island and the Aleutian Islands, more than 500 miles to the west, who were already under the sway of the Russians. There is also evidence that the ocean currents of the North Pacific had on occasion deposited the hulks of disabled fishing boats from China and Japan on Alaska’s shores. The iron fittings from such shipwrecks would have been priceless.