Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  The rain had stopped by the time we crossed the Yukon on a steel-and-plank bridge, the only span of the river in all the 1,400 miles it flows through Alaska. Half a mile wide and six fathoms deep, gleaming like liquid brass in the evening sun, the river wound westward between high, wooded bluffs toward its meeting with the Bering Sea, where great whales breached and blew.

  We fueled up at a ramshackle gas station, where we got a look at two very different types of American traveler. One was a lonesome adventurer: a middle-aged biker whose Harley was so mud-caked it looked like a clay model. He had ridden across most of the Lower 48, up the Alaska Highway, then up to Dalton to Deadhorse, and was heading home to Ohio—a round trip of 8,500 miles. The other type—too many of them—climbed off a Princess Tours bus and walked into a café with the stiff gaits of people who spend too little time using their legs.

  The sight of them in their sneakers and bright synthetics got me down. If tour buses plied the Dalton, could it really be called a modern Oregon Trail? Worse yet, could concession stands, RV parks, flush toilets, and Best Westerns be far behind? It was hard to imagine them on the Dalton, but who could have imagined in the 1890s what Yosemite would look like today?

  Indeed, the opening of the Dalton has caused some conservationists to worry that it will draw ever more tourists and leave wild places like Gates of the Arctic as crowded and tame as some other national parks. One cause for worry lies in the conflicting mandates federal agencies have over the Dalton region. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) controls a five-mile-wide “recreation corridor” on either side of the highway and is already drawing up plans to develop visitor facilities and campgrounds. The National Park Service manages Gates of the Arctic, while U.S. Fish and Wildlife oversees the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and both are committed to preserving the “unimproved,” pristine nature of those areas.

  In Fairbanks, I had talked to Dave Mills, the superintendent of Gates of the Arctic, and Steve Ulvi, who manages the Nunamiut Eskimos’ subsistence hunting and fishing in the park. Ulvi makes a brief appearance in Coming into the Country. McPhee describes him as a “cinematically handsome” man of twenty-three, who was then pioneering near the Canadian border. He’s forty-four now, but still as handsome, with pale-blue eyes and an extravagant mustache that gives him the appearance of a gold-rush prospector.

  No sight or sound or smell or feeling even remotely hinted of men or their creations. It seemed as if time had dropped away a million years and we were back in a primordial world. It was like discovering an unpeopled universe where only the laws of nature held sway.

  —Robert Marshall, Alaska Wilderness: Exploring the Central Brooks Range

  He prefers to describe himself and others like him as “representatives of the landscape, senators for the wilderness.” He had told me that park officials hope to maintain Gates of the Arctic as a “black-belt” park, meaning that it is not for the unfit, the unskilled, or the timid.

  “The idea is to give hikers and campers a chance to feel like Bob Marshall did when he was exploring this country—a sense of discovery and adventure, and of solitude,” Ulvi had said. “Gates of the Arctic gets three thousand to five thousand recreational visitors a year. That’s less than the number of people who ride the elevator in the Statue of Liberty in a day. We have people who go in there on real expeditions, sometimes for six weeks. We don’t need to spend money on visitor facilities. We’re at the point in management of this area where Yellowstone might have been in 1900. Hopefully, we’ve learned from places like Yellowstone how to do things the right way. But now there’s this raw road into this incredible wilderness. Open a road and you open a Pandora’s box.”

  Mills, a balding man of medium build, had interjected: “I don’t think the road itself is a threat to Gates of the Arctic. It’s possible to develop reasonable access, but we hope the BLM manages its corridor as a buffer. If we do this properly, we’ll preserve the park’s integrity.”

  I reflected on those comments as we drove northward through mile after mile of taiga and tundra fells, ridges, and hills that occasionally crowded close to the road but mostly opened up and stretched away forever. On the Dalton Highway, all worries about the relentless pressures of modern civilization seemed unfounded. The only visible works of man were the road and the pipeline, zigzagging alongside on five-foot stilts.…

  By the next day, we were camped on the Jim River at the end of a rough track, about a mile off the Dalton. Nearby were two big beaver ponds, where nesting yellow-legged sandpipers went into noisy panic whenever we approached. The campsite was hard used by bowhunters (hunting with firearms is prohibited within the pipeline corridor, for the obvious reason that a stray bullet could pierce the pipe) and showed it: a fire-ring, a couple of huge cable spools, a table jury-rigged out of scrap lumber. But the frequenting by humans had not affected the wildlife in the area. There were wolf tracks, moose droppings, bear trails. And mosquitoes, which exist in Alaska in numbers as incomprehensible as the diameter of the known universe measured in miles.

  At midday, we trucked the rafts to a crossing eleven miles north of our camp. Jeannie would drive the Tahoe back to camp and wait as Tony, Marc, and I floated downriver.

  Tony took Marc and me to a quiet slough and showed us how to handle the rafts, called Water Otters, which consisted of a seat mounted on a platform and two rubber pontoons belted to an aluminum frame. You face the bow instead of the stern, and row by pushing rather than pulling the oars—except when the current threatens to sweep you into a rock or some other hazard. Then you turn the raft and row conventionally, tacking across the stream.

  “That’s about it. You turn, face the danger, and row away from it,” Tony said, wreathed in the smoke of a Swisher Sweet—a thin, utterly foul cigar that was our most effective bug repellent.

  After the lesson, we strapped our fly rods to the Otters; loaded rope, fly boxes, and essential survival gear into watertight compartments beside the seats; and launched into a stretch of calm water. Tony had told Jeannie to expect us between eight and ten that night. The Jim is an easy river with only a few short whitewater stretches, so we wouldn’t be delayed by frequent portages around rapids. Besides, it was a fine, warm, cloudless afternoon. We weren’t thinking about the fact that even easy rivers can be dangerous when you’re north of the Arctic Circle and the water is somewhere between ice and forty degrees.

  After traveling about a mile, we made the first of our fishing stops. Behind us, tiers of spruce climbed toward a mountain far to the northeast, its peak white against the unblemished sky. For a while, I was content to admire the scenery and watch Marc, a novice fly-fisherman, cast some very pretty loops. He made six presentations with a streamer and hooked three grayling, which were striking any fly we cast at them. When each of us had caught and released at least two, we rafted on. The float went like that, hour after hour, until midnight, when we realized that the solitude and the perpetual Arctic daylight had bewitched us. We were hours overdue, with three or four miles to go. We decided to row hard for home.

  As the Arctic dusk fell, the mosquitoes boiled out of the woods and muskegs. I paused to apply a varnish of Alaskan cologne—100-percent DEET—and to light up a Swisher Sweet. Ahead, Marc and Tony prepared to negotiate a tricky passage. Just beyond, the river drew into a bottleneck between a high bank and a gravel bar, then picked up speed and curved in a frothing rush past an undercut bank, where several big spruce had fallen; their roots still clung to the soil, causing them to stick out in the current in long sweepers. A few yards downstream, more fallen spruce formed a nasty looking jumble of snags.

  Tony rowed bow-first into the bottleneck; then, as the accelerating current drew him toward the sweepers, he turned his raft and paddled cross-current to stay clear of the trees. He sailed easily into quieter water below. Marc followed. I was positioning my raft when I saw Marc suddenly spin broadside into one of the fallen trees. His right oar jammed under it and, acting as a lever, flipped the Otter onto its side. The
raft careened into the snags downstream, where it stuck with one blue pontoon in the air, the other caught in the trees. Marc, pitched overboard, was clinging to the sweeper, water rushing over him. I could see only his head, the top of his orange life vest, and part of his right leg, flung over a branch.

  Tony beached his raft and ran to Marc’s aid. That was the sensible thing to do, but when it’s your son clinging to a log in an Arctic river, you don’t think about what’s sensible. I rowed straight into the fast water, back-paddling hard to avoid capsizing myself on the sweeper. Bumping into it bow-first, I sculled into a back eddy strong enough to brake the main flow. The raft slipped against the bank and was moored there by the currents.

  Straddling the sweeper, I inched toward Marc. My plan was simply to grab him and pull him to safety.

  The river was golden brown beneath me and then dark brown. It must have been seven or eight feet deep, and the current was stronger than it had looked from upstream. While I knew things were serious, I didn’t think they were critical. Then I realized that Marc’s left leg was trapped underwater, probably in the crook of a submerged branch. His waders had filled, despite his cinched wading belt.

  “Dad! I’m frozen! I can’t hang on much longer!” he yelled above the rush.

  Carefully, I stood and put all my weight on the tree trunk. It sank an inch or two, enough for Marc to free his leg. I inched farther out, almost prone as I reached to grab him. The standing waves sloshed over me, the cold numbing my fingers within seconds, but I somehow got a grip on Marc’s arm with one hand. I couldn’t budge his 180 pounds, not with the added weight in his waders, not against that current. For a second, I thought to tell him to let go and let the river carry him into the quieter water. Then I could pull him ashore without fighting so much current. But he could be drawn under by his flooded waders; if that happened, he could be swept into the snags and trapped. And the chance of drowning was just the half of it; the other half was exposure. Anyone up to his neck in forty-degree water can survive for only ten or fifteen minutes. I had to get him out quickly.

  “The rope!” Marc hollered. He was the one in trouble, but was thinking more clearly than I.

  I backed down the log and got the thirty-foot painter stowed in my raft. I made a loop with the bitter end, while Tony crawled back out onto the sweeper but could get the loop only to within inches of Marc’s hands.

  “I can’t! Fingers…frozen! I’m going to let go!”

  “No!” I screamed. “Grab it!”

  Marc reached for the rope with his left hand and willed his fingers to open and grasp it. When he got hold with both hands, I scrambled to the bank. Tony took up the slack and we hauled him in. He lay shaking, spent.

  We pulled off his waders—gallons of water spilled out—then helped him out of his drenched clothes and told him to walk around, to keep moving. Mosquitoes leapt on him ravenously. He was shivering violently. He was on the cusp of severe hypothermia, when the body begins to lose its ability to warm itself. It can be reheated only by an outside source—hot liquids, a fire, or another body. I was wet and chilled myself, but had more body heat then he. Stripping to the waist, I embraced him tightly, and almost cried out from the sting of what felt like a thousand mosquitoes biting me at once. Tony later said my back was almost black with them.

  I held Marc for several minutes in what I like to think of as a life-giving embrace, but the truth was that it helped only a little. We tramped through the woods to a gravel bar about a hundred yards downstream, gathered a pile of driftwood, and got a fire going. Marc huddled beside the blaze. He was still shivering uncontrollably, and he was getting drowsy—a dangerous sign. We told him to get up and gather more wood—anything to keep his body moving, his mind alert.

  For the next two hours, we sat by the fire, the flames leaping and falling as the evening dusk blended seamlessly into the dusk of the Arctic dawn. As Marc began to recover, Tony and I went back to the logjam and retrieved the two rafts, but we couldn’t find Marc’s oars. Both had been sprung loose from their locks and sent downriver.

  “They’re probably halfway to the Yukon by now,” Tony said as we returned to the gravel bar, where we found Marc ready to travel.

  “Dad, Tony I’m sorry,” he said. “I was rowing away, but…”

  “Listen,”Tony said, “there’s no fault-finding out here.”

  “Well, thanks, you know, for saving my life.”

  Tony shrugged it off, and I said, “Glad you’re still here, son,” and then we set about solving the problem of how to get home with three rafts and only two sets of oars. Tony volunteered to tow Marc’s raft, and that is how we went down the Jim—Marc’s and Tony’s rafts tethered, mine in the lead. When we were nearly back to camp, we swept past a great bald eagle standing on a jutting gravel bar. His head, white as cotton, turned toward us, his dark wings spread to the breadth of a tall man’s arm span. He rose with his talons extended because he was flying only to a high poplar at the end of the bar. There he perched, gazing down, looking for fish. Behind him the spruce forest stood silent in the shadows of the morning.

  In the following days, Marc came to recognize his mortality, so alien a notion to a healthy young man. As for me, I had wanted the true wild, and almost had got it in spades. In the wilderness, a small mistake or a moment of blind, bad luck can have grave consequences, and there is neither anything nor anyone to rely on but yourself and your skills, your friends and their skills. Not that we came to look upon the wilderness as heartless or hostile. Nature and her creatures are neither cruel nor compassionate. They are complete unto themselves, and therefore indifferent to human fate and emotions, to human ideas of right and wrong. Curiously, Marc’s close call made us feel more a part of the world we had entered, because it humbled us. In the wilderness, where things die every day, we’re merely creatures, subject to nature’s laws and deserving of nothing. I knew I never would forget the look on Marc’s face as he clung to the log, nor my own thought that I was going to lose him; yet, if the worst had happened, the rivers, forests, and mountains would not have acknowledged my grief and loss no more than they would the she-wolf’s loss of a pup.

  Thus endeth the lesson. We put the mishap behind us and went on.…

  M.M. 235—JUNE 29. We passed the northern limit of the tree line, marked by a short white spruce and a sign that said LAST SPRUCE TREE—DO NOT CUT. From there to the Arctic Ocean, 180 miles away, the tundra would be as barren as a desert. In fact, the coastal tundra, receiving an average of only eight inches of rain a year, would be a desert if not for the permafrost.

  M.M. 240, THE CHANDALAR SHELF—JUNE 30. A grizzly’s tracks led across the tundra and down the bank of a nameless mountain stream that fed the Chandalar River. The tracks were old, but I was apprehensive. The night before I’d seen a couple of square yards of tundra mat gouged to a depth of three feet, excavated not by a psychotic backhoe operator but by a grizzly, probably pursuing some small, burrowing animal; you could almost feel its savage determination. The bears of southern Alaska, fattening in rivers thick with salmon, have so much to eat that they’ve grown selective and wasteful, just like humans. They often suck the roe out of female fish and toss the rest away. But on the Chandalar, nature’s shelves are not well-stocked; here, even the fiercest predator in North America has to settle for prey fit for a house cat, and work hard to get it.

  Yes, I had come to be where the grizzlies roam in great numbers, but I did not want to run into one at close quarters. That led me to wonder if Marc and I should push into the thickets across the stream. The age of the tracks was no guarantee that their maker was not lurking about; and a bear so famished that it had exerted tremendous efforts to capture a tiny animal would probably welcome an intrusion by two well-fed human beings. If I had to subsist on crackers, wouldn’t I welcome a porterhouse delivered to my door? I was petrified of the grizzlies.

  Tony, a veteran of hundreds of bear encounters during his years guiding out of King Salmon, had a deep respect for
the creatures, but they didn’t terrify him. He told us it is mannerly, as well as prudent, to make noise if you think a grizzly might be near. Talk, sing, ring bells. Marc and I started chattering and bantering and thrashed through the alders like a troop of urban Boy Scouts on their first outing.

  We passed through without any ursine confrontations and tramped on to a ridge, where we scanned the valley for caribou. The big migrations take place in the fall and spring, herds of 100,000 or more surging over distances of 1,000 miles. But in the summer, in flight from the tormenting mosquitoes and flies, smaller bands of, say, 100 or 200 move from the valleys and coastal tundra into the high ranges.

  Late the day before, after passing the last spruce tree, we’d backpacked into the Chandalar hoping to spot a summer caribou trek. After hauling our forty-pound packs over the tussocks for three full hours we had seen a pair of shed antlers but no caribou. And we had covered just three miles. I felt as if I were walking on a waterbed with a sack of rocks on my back. A thunderstorm, building up over the Brooks Range, had given us an excuse to pitch our tents on a desolate windswept meadow.

  Marc and I scanned the valley below with binoculars. It was empty of game, as were the mountains on the far side, their slopes green at first, then black with scree, then white. The silence was dense and primeval, a silence that had never been sundered by the clatter of industrial or post-industrial civilization.

  After the storm passed, Marc opened our tent door and said, “Look at this.” A rainbow, its colors so vibrant that it appeared solid, arched over the river. It must have been 1,000 feet across and 1,000 feet high, and we were looking down on it. No caribou, I thought, but this is enough. More than enough.…

  M.M. 414, DEADHORSE—JULY 3. This was it, the end of the road. We voted Deadhorse the strangest and ugliest town any of us had ever seen. Every structure, whether warehouse, office, or airplane hangar, looked the same, built of extruded steel or aluminum and set on pilings (to avoid melting permafrost and causing the buildings to collapse). There were no churches, schools, bars, banks, or shops—we did find one general store, where a box of Triscuits went for $5. Deadhorse exists solely to house and feed the 1,500 men and women who work in the oil fields.