—Ellen Bielawski
Next day, I was determined to spend more time outside, and to get an earlier start fishing. We spent part of the morning taking photos, wandering a small bog behind the cabin, and exploring the lake shore. About a foot back from the waterline there was a uniform band of gnarled, pinkie-sized, weathered wood pieces, like a bathtub ring of driftwood. Just beyond this were patches of knee-high grass, sprinkled with wildflowers so small and delicate that we hadn’t noticed them the day before. But on hands and knees, they came into view. I counted a dozen kinds within a few yards: columbines and lupines, geranium and Jacob’s ladder, cinquefoil and monkshood. Of all these, my favorites were the palest blue forget-me-nots, bending and blinking in the wind.
I was marveling at this miniature alpine world of fragile beauty when I looked up and caught sight of Aryeh methodically sprinkling sand and gravel on top of his baby sister’s head. In two breathless strides I was next to them, seething. Tziporah looked up at me with round, green-eyed innocence, staring up at her brother, then staring up at me. Her long eyelashes were covered with sand—it was a miracle none of the dust had blown into the eyes themselves—and there were tiny bits of gravel in the corners of her eyes, just above the pink rims. I gasped and stuttered and swept a hand over her face, which started her crying, since now the sand was in her eyes. In one motion I swept Tziporah into my arms and stomped away, fuming.
“I can’t believe him!” I ranted to Brian for the next few minutes. “He’s hurting her! He doesn’t care about anyone or anything!”
Brian smiled. “He’ll learn. He’ll figure it out.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, rocking the baby back and forth. I soothed the baby and Brian soothed me, and finally we called to Aryeh and all got into the rowboat.
“Let me have the stern this time,” I grunted.
With my back to my family, I took the oars. I rowed as hard as I could, enjoying the work of it, the strain against my shoulders and biceps. Never mind my wasted body from the stomach down; my shoulders and back were still strong. Stronger, even. I pulled hard, exhaling roughly, pushing my lips together, toiling against the wind. We moved slowly along the shore, past rounded humps of glacier-scoured bedrock, and more stunted spruce trees, bent into gnarled bonsai shapes.
For every three rows I had to correct our course with a one-oared row on the right side. I liked the rhythm, the sheer effort of it, with no one to see my contorted face as I strained and pulled. Row, row, row; correction. This is the best part of the trip, I told myself. Who cares about fish anyway? Row, row, row; correction. We had another day until the floatplane came. Maybe I’d just spend it rowing.
Finally, we rounded a small peninsula and we were in a protected cove, where the water was clearer and smoother, with views of deeply scored glaciers overhead, spilling from the encircling mountains. We could hear rushing water. We rowed a few yards more and anchored just in front of the stream, where we could see the water quicken and funnel around a bend, draining the lake. Our anchored rowboat swung lazily around its tether, pulled by the stream, and we could imagine fish swimming under and around us, dancing in the same cold currents.
Brian cast. Immediately, he pulled a grayling into the boat, slipped the hook out of its mouth and then released it. He cast again. Another catch. Another effortless release. Aryeh was squirming in his seat. So was I.
“Hand me a rod!” I called out. “Let me try!”
On my first cast, I felt a gentle tug at the end of the line. On my second, I felt a tug again, but this time it kept pulling. I reeled the fish in, and it came easily, it’s sail-like fin slicing and sparkling through the water. With a few more reels, I lifted the fish into the air. I pawed at its thrashing body, suspended from my line, and pulled the fish down into my lap. It was small, maybe eleven or twelve inches.
“Too small to keep,” I announced, trying to sound nonchalant. Brian handed me his needle-nosed pliers while Aryeh twisted and jumped in his seat.
I still couldn’t believe my luck. I alternately smiled and winced, breathing fast, trying inexpertly to work the hook out from where it was firmly embedded. Two of the hook’s three barbs had pierced the grayling’s delicate mouth, a tiny, smooth, muscle ring, opening into a pink cavern. I tried to be matter-of-fact, digging the pliers into the mouth, trying to do it one fearless motion. But time passed, and decisiveness turned into hesitant surgery.
“Darn it,” I muttered.
“What? What?” Aryeh demanded, trying to sit higher in his seat and peer over my shoulder.
“Nothing, it’s just…not working.”
I went after one barb, then the other. The mouth tore. The fish fought the clutch of my hand. I winced and tried again.
“Are you getting it out?” Aryeh asked.
“Almost,” I said. But I wasn’t.
My heart raced along with the grayling’s. I was shocked to notice that I could feel its pulse, through my glove, against the palm of my hand. Looking down, toward the steady thrum, I noticed that in my excitement, I had been squeezing too hard. On the black cotton palm of my glove, there was a rainbow of sequins—fish scales, rubbed off the side of this long-suffering fish. I stared at this for a long moment. And then I stared at the grayling, this torpedo-shaped, speckled tube of flesh and blood, its once-beautiful fin now collapsed against its body, its iridescence fading.
“It’s not working,” I said. “I think I’ll have to kill it.”
Aryeh shrieked: “Don’t kill it!”
But this reaction didn’t make sense. Why should he have cared? He and Brian had caught three fish yesterday. They’d killed those fish, too, but evidently more swiftly.
I turned the pliers around, intending to use the red, rubberized handle to deliver a solid knock on the grayling’s skull. But my grasp slipped, and the pliers delivered only a timid thump. The grayling started thrashing even more. The violence of all this startled me. The casting and reeling had been so satisfying, and now this part was clumsy and confusing and awful. And what about the part that I’d imagined for weeks: where I would just hold the fish, and feel happy, and able, and whole?
“I’ve got to do it,” I told Aryeh. “It’s bleeding.”
“It’s bleeding!” he shouted back, panicking now. “Don’t kill it, Mom! Don’t kill it!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
All this had happened in two minutes, maybe three, but it felt like forever. Now I rested for a moment, staring at the still-thrumming fish in my palm, and at the red, rubberized pliers handle.
Brian was silent. Aryeh hadn’t spoken since his last shriek. I didn’t want to raise the pliers again. Everyone was waiting. I felt suddenly heavier, bolted to the seat of the rowboat, and weak.
Then Aryeh spoke up, his voice an octave lower, steady and reassuring. “If it’s hurt, kill it,” he said. “We’ll just have to keep it.”
His switch from panic to smooth calm was so sudden that it startled me.
“That’s O.K., Mom,” he said again. “It’s bleeding. Kill it. Go ahead.”
And at that moment, I stopped worrying. At that moment, for a moment, I knew that Aryeh understood more than I’d ever given him credit for: about gentleness, and violence, and the subtleties of both. I’d misjudged him. I’d let my own body’s wounds—the cramps, my exhaustion—color a whole weekend needlessly red and raw. Tziporah will be safe with her brother, I told myself. We’ll all keep learning from each other.
I raised the pliers more forcefully this time, and delivered a death blow. Then I set down the grayling in the blue-gray bottom of the boat, just inches from Tziporah, sleeping in her blanket cocoon. And I sat with the rod in my lap and stared out at the lake. Behind me I heard the gentle whir and dunk of Brian casting again, and then Aryeh taking a turn with Brian’s rod.
“Are you feeling sad for the fish?” Aryeh asked finally, addressing my back.
“I am,” I said, not turning around, not wanting him to see my wet eyes and cheeks. “Is
n’t that strange?”
It didn’t seem right bringing this too-small grayling back to camp, with its missing scales and mangled mouth. I felt some pride for having caught a fish, my first Alaska fish, but I didn’t want to eat this one, though I knew it would be a waste not to.
Suddenly, an eagle appeared in front of us. It spread its wings, lowering itself daintily into the tip-top branch of a skinny spruce tree guarding the stream’s mouth. I watched it, and it watched us.
Then unexpectedly, I stood up in the rowboat, surprising even myself, and with all my strength lobbed my dead grayling into the air. The eagle swooped as the grayling arced and splashed down into the water. But the eagle stayed on course, and just as the lake’s riffled surface closed over the grayling, the eagle’s talons splashed down into the water, spearing it. The bird rose and circled us, wagging the grayling over our heads. It landed on the lake shore, just beyond a small rise, to eat the sacrifice in seclusion.
“Thank you,” I mouthed toward the eagle, for having removed this indelicate reminder of my rough, ungraceful errors.
And then, a little louder, to myself: “O.K., O.K. All right. O.K., O.K. All right,” the same rhythm as casting and reeling, or watching a child grow up, or rowing a boat, making a few corrections here and there to stay on course.
Andromeda Romano-Lax is a co-editor of this book and the author of several books, including Searching for Steinbeck on the Sea of Cortez: A Makeshift Expedition Along Baja’s Desert Coast.
PHILIP CAPUTO
The Last Road North
A father and son seek “the true wild” on a drive through the Arctic. What they discover is both frightening and exhilarating
WE WERE TWENTY MILES NORTH OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE and alone on the Jim River, three of us floating on one-man rafts under a sun that never set. Tony Oswald, a photographer and former Alaskan fishing guide, was in the lead, my twenty-two-year-old son, Marc, was behind him, and I, feeling the miles we had rowed as well as the effects of the late hour, brought up the rear. If I had judged the time by the sky, I would have said it was late afternoon, but my watch told me it was midnight. We’d been on the river for more than ten hours, making frequent stops to catch grayling, from gravel bars littered with driftwood and printed with the tracks of moose, wolves, and grizzlies. We hadn’t seen any bears or wolves, but we had passed a cow moose and two calves grazing on weeds in a slough. They raised their heads to eye us, then trotted off with hardly a rustle into a stand of tall, leaning spruce. Every now and then, we’d caught the faint, distant rumble of a truck on the Dalton Highway, the dusty supply road for the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and the Trans-Alaskan pipeline. Otherwise, we hadn’t heard a man-made sound nor seen a sign of our own species—not a single boot print.
That was welcome but not surprising. The Jim, a tributary of the Koyukuk River, itself a tributary of the mythic Yukon, flows through a wilderness bigger than California: Arctic Alaska, the last frontier of the state that calls itself the Last Frontier. The nearest human settlements to us were two tiny villages: Coldfoot, thirty-odd miles north on the Dalton, and Bettles, fifty miles to the west.
The trip was a graduation present for Marc, and for me the fulfillment of an old dream. In 1959, when Alaska was granted statehood, I was a restless high-school senior, a bit intoxicated by Jack London and Robert Service. I wanted to quit school to be a fur trapper in the land where, in Service’s words, “the mountains are nameless and the rivers all run God-knows-where.” I never went, and the dream went into a long hibernation. It was finally awakened by the news that the Dalton Highway had been opened to public traffic.
The highway runs for 414 unpaved miles from its starting point at Livengood, north of Fairbanks, to the town of Deadhorse, near the Arctic Ocean. It was named for James W. Dalton, an oil explorer who played a major role in the discovery of the Prudhoe fields and died in 1977, only three weeks before the last weld on the 800-mile-long pipeline was completed. In those days, the road was restricted to service crews hauling supplies and equipment to Prudhoe Bay. In 1981, a section of it became accessible to the public, and on December 2, 1994, the whole length was opened.
The Dalton is the only major road in Alaska north of the Arctic Circle, a region of some 150,000 square miles. It bridges the Yukon River, climbs the Brooks Range, and crosses the Arctic coastal plain. Along the way, it passes through or near three refuges and a national park whose total area almost equals that of the six New England states combined: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Preserve (19.8 million acres), Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve (8.4 million acres), the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge (8.6 million acres), and the Kanuti National Wildlife Refuge, a postage stamp at 1.6 million acres.
Maps now show where Robert Service’s rivers run; yet many of them remain nameless, and are still highways for the epic migrations of salmon and Arctic char that grow to twenty pounds. Most of the mountains also remain nameless, and beneath them, caribou wander across fenceless ranges in numbers recalling the tides of bison that once inundated the Great Plains. Above all, there is the grizzly, the incarnation of all that was wild in the Americas before the arrivals of Cortez and the Massachusetts Bay colony. As many as 40,000 range through British Columbia and Alaska; by comparison, only about 1,000 roam the U.S. Rocky Mountains.
I was stirred by the idea of driving a road that is a modern equivalent of the Oregon Trail. Perhaps I would get an idea, however faint, of what America looked and felt like to the pioneers, who called the Rocky Mountain West “the Big Open.” Having hiked, camped, canoed, fished, and hunted in many parts of the continental United States for more than half my life, I had come to the melancholy but inescapable conclusion that the Big Open is all but closed. Vast cattle ranges are being carved into ranchettes for refugee Californians. Most “protected” wilderness areas, when they aren’t being clear-cut, are becoming wilderness simulacrums—defanged, declawed, domesticated Disneylands, teeming with video-recording tourists.
Even in relatively uncrowded national parks, there are enough bureaucratic regulations to make you consider joining a citizen’s militia. You must reserve campsites as if they were hotel rooms. You have to obtain permits. You have to stay on marked trails, and, in some parks, you are not allowed to have ground fires.
John McPhee, in his 1976 classic about Alaska, Coming into the Country, observed that our society has “an elemental need for a frontier outlet, a pioneer place to go—important even to those who don’t go there…all we have left is Alaska.” He was right. At 586,000 square miles, it’s so sparsely settled that if its population density were applied to New York City, only 250 people would live in the five boroughs. And one of the biggest, most open parts of Alaska is the Dalton region, where there are no marked trails. In fact, there are virtually no trails of any kind, and no permits are required. You can walk or camp wherever you choose. Of course, there is a yin to that yang. If there are no rangers to hassle you with red tape, neither are there any to pull you out of trouble. No first-aid stations around the bend, few search-and-rescue teams. Suffer a broken leg or some other mishap, and you will have to do what the prospectors and explorers did in the old days: send for help and hope you don’t die before it comes.
The isolation and wildness were a little daunting, but they were the reasons we had come to Alaska’s far north. There can be no true freedom without wilderness and no true wilderness without freedom, and neither comes free. A toll is levied in sore muscles, sweat, and, occasionally, as we would find out, fear.
Late in June, Marc and I joined Tony and his friend Jennie Chandler in Fairbanks. For the next three days we bought supplies and gear and worked out a rough itinerary, poring over topographic maps in our motel rooms. We would float and fish the Jim and Koyukuk rivers for grayling and salmon, trek across the tundra to photograph caribou and musk ox, and hike the Brooks Range in the footsteps of Robert Marshall, the naturalist and explorer who had mapped some 12,000 square miles of those mountains in the late 19
30s.…
My first view of the pipeline was at the Bureau of Land Management’s visitor stop north of Fairbanks, where you can pose for photos with the pipeline, read about its history, buy t-shirts and magnets made from chunks of scrap metal (the magnets, not the t-shirts), and become one with the pipeline as much as allowed by federal law and corporate private ownership restrictions. Young wo/man, that pipeline is not a toy! Do not climb on it! Don’t even think about climbing on it! Thinking about climbing on the pipeline constitutes Thought Crime #1784-B, and you know who you are! The funny part is that if you get on the Internet and find people’s diaries of traveling the haul road—a lot are available—they almost all include a photo of the participants standing on the pipeline at some point. Come get me, coppah! You’ll never take me alive!
—Robin Cerwonka, “Paris! Rome! Deadhorse!”
We headed north on the Elliott Highway. It was a somber, rainy afternoon, and we were happy to get out of Fairbanks. Urban Alaska, what little there is of it, is remarkably drab and ugly—as if the overwhelming landscape suppresses the human impulse to build things that try to match nature in beauty or stupendousness. Seventy-three miles later, the Elliott ended. Ahead was a small green-and-white sign:
JAMES W. DALTON HIGHWAY
YUKON RIVER 56
ARCTIC CIRCLE 115
COLDFOOT 175
The Yukon River! The Arctic Circle! Coldfoot! Other names beckoned from farther up the road, some given long ago by gold-fevered prospectors, some more recently by oil men, some by Eskimos and Athabascan Indians in a time beyond recorded history. Bonanza Creek. The Sagavanirktok River. The Sagwon Uplands. We were headed up a raw and open road into the Far North’s far north.
Travelers' Tales Alaska Page 15
