Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  —Dustin W. Leavitt, “Doublestar (Why I Write)”

  I came out of the bar and stood in the parking lot in front of the cannery looking at the sky, trying to tell if it was going to blow hard enough to keep us in town, wishing hard that it would. All the accumulated debris of longing for warmth and the company of people other than the other guys on the boat came floating up out of the little box deep down inside where we all kept those pieces of emotion that had no place in the working environment at sea. My knees and wrists still hurt, I could have used a long nap up in my apartment in Aleutian Homes, and the thought of going out there again so soon was almost more than I was willing to take. For a minute I debated just walking away, telling the skipper he could fire me if he wanted, but I needed a trip off, I was toast. Instead I just stood there breathing, knowing I was in it till the season was over. I needed the money, and besides, anybody who might have wanted the job was either already on a boat, injured, or not worth taking out.…

  For a long minute I stood there, looking back across the boat harbor at the lights of town, thinking about the wind, the ocean, the work, the hyper-reality of the lives we led beyond the sight of land. I thought about how far all of that was from the lives of the people on land I loved and who loved me back, and then I turned and climbed up the stairs to the deck of the processor and walked across to the ladder that led down to the deck of the Irene. Twenty minutes later we were headed down the channel past the canneries, tying up the lines behind the house and securing the deck for the run to Chirikof.

  Looking back at the houses of town as the evening descended over them, I wondered if maybe someone was watching us from up on the hill above the harbor, pausing while they made dinner. Was someone looking down out their kitchen window, watching our mast light disappear into the gathering darkness of the open sea, wondering if we would be all right? Would they remember that moment in a few weeks as a last sighting before we disappeared with all hands, lost in what the Coast Guard would call “Circumstances unknown”?

  Years later I read a story by a reporter in Vietnam. A soldier he met there told him about a squad of rangers that had walked single file up a ridge one night and disappeared. The reporter asked him what happened, were they killed, didn’t anyone go searching for them? But the soldier just looked at him strangely and smiled and walked away, shaking his head. It took the reporter years to realize he’d been told everything he needed to know about the incident, that the soldier knew if he didn’t get it, well, he didn’t really understand the war.

  I read that story lying in my bunk one night in Kiska Harbor, with the rusted masts of the Emperor’s ships rising from the dark water along the far shore, lost markers for those men who never returned to Japan to tell their wives and mothers and fathers and children what happened to them. I recognized it immediately in a spooky moment of clarity as the ultimate ghost story, for the truth it revealed about witnessing, and remembering, about bringing back, and giving, experience. And I thought about all the sea stories that never made it back from the places where they happened, to the places where people wait to hear them, thousands of stories for thousands of years. And I thought of all the ways those stories can be lost, the last frantic radio call ending in mid-sentence, the missed cannery schedule, the empty horizon where a boat should be. And I thought of all the stories that are just simply lost in the telling, survivors’ stories forgotten as soon as they are told, or forgotten and lost before they are ever told at all. Unless we decide, deliberately, to remember our stories and to tell them, it will be as if they had never happened, or as if we had never returned to tell them.

  I could tell you what the sea looked like on certain days, tell you about the things we did there, about the people we knew and carried with us and the ones we left behind when we had to leave. I could tell you all that and hope that some of it might become a part of you, a story that you might remember, a piece of my life now become a part of yours. Because it is all one story anyway, mine, yours, all of us connected by the stories we tell each other, and they are all true sea stories. The nightmare hundred-foot waves, the quiet moments in warm houses on the hill above the harbor, the last sight of the women who waited for us there—the universe breathes within all of us through all of them. And at some point, mariners all, we untie and slip out of the harbor one at a time, light falling at dusk, a single file of mast lights heading out into the oceanic darkness, looking back at the warm yellow lights of the houses along the receding shore, the first drops of cold sea spray beginning to rattle against the wheelhouse windows. Long before we get there we all know the salt blood water of the Gulf of Alaska, of the Bering Sea, of the Shelikof, even Kiska Harbor. We taste it on our lips, feel it seeping through the spaces in our hearts, like water filling the cracks of the bedrock beneath the sea, remembering it, carrying it with us, down, down, down, one last true story, into the center of the world.

  Toby Sullivan is an author and a poet in addition to being an Alaskan fisherman. This story won the Grand Prize in the Anchorage Daily News Annual Creative Writing Contest. He lives in Kodiak, Alaska.

  SHERRY SIMPSON

  I Want to Ride on the Bus Chris Died In

  Was he a hero or a young fool? Pilgrims seeking answers travel into the wild.

  BEFORE WE STARTED OUR SMALL JOURNEY LAST YEAR to the place where Christopher McCandless died, I wondered whether we should be traveling on foot rather than by snowmachine. It was probably the last weekend before the sketchy snow would melt and the river ice would sag and crack. If we waited a few weeks, we could hike the Stampede Trail to the abandoned bus where his body was found in 1992. Wouldn’t it seem more real, more authentic somehow, if we retraced his journey step by step?

  No, I thought. This is not a spiritual trek. I refuse to make this a pilgrimage. I will not make his journey my own.

  And so we set off on the tundra, snowmachines whining across a thin layer of hard snow. The five of us moved quickly, each following the other westward through the broad valley. To the south, clouds wisped across the white slopes that barricade Denali National Park and Preserve. I wore ear protectors to dull the noise of the grinding engines. When the sun burned through, we turned our faces toward it gratefully, unzipped our parkas, peeled away fleece masks. It had been a long winter—warmer than most in Interior Alaska, but even so each day was filled more with darkness than light.

  We kept on, the only motion against a landscape that seemed still and perfect in its beauty. It was the kind of day when you could think about Christopher McCandless and wonder about all the ways that death can find you in such a place, and you can find death. And then, a few minutes later, you’d look out across the valley, admiring the way the hills swell against the horizon, and think, “Damn, I’m glad to be alive in Alaska.”

  A few summers ago I rode in a shuttle van from Fairbanks to the park with a group of vacationers and backpackers. As we left town, the driver began an impromptu tour of McCandless’s final days. In April 1992, he had hitchhiked to Alaska, looking for a place to enter the wilderness. The van driver pointed out a bluff near Gold Hill Road, the last place McCandless camped in Fairbanks. The driver talked about the purity of McCandless’s desire to test himself against nature. He slowed as we passed the Stampede Road, the place where a Healy man had dropped off McCandless so the young man could begin his journey. He ignored all offers of help except for a pair of rubber boots. He did not take a map.

  In the van, people whispered to each other and craned their necks to peer at the passing landmarks.

  McCandless had hiked about twenty-five miles along the trail before stopping at a rusting Fairbanks city bus left there in the 1960s by a crew building a road from the highway to the Stampede Mine, near the park boundary. He had a .22 rifle and a ten-pound bag of rice. In the back of a Native plant lore book he scribbled brief, often cryptic entries.

  In July he tried to leave but apparently was turned back by the roiling Teklanika River. He did not know enough to search for a braide
d crossing.

  By August, a note tacked to the bus pleaded for help from any passerby: “I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here,” it said in part. In early September, hunters found his body shrouded in a sleeping bag inside the bus. He had been dead for more than two weeks. Although he had tried to eat off the land, and had even succeeded in killing small animals and a moose, he had starved, an unpleasant and unusual way to die in America these days.

  The strange manner of his death made the 24-year-old infamous in Alaska as authorities tried to puzzle out his story. A 1993 Outside magazine article by Jon Krakauer, followed by the 1996 best-selling book Into the Wild, made him famous everywhere else.

  The van driver was maybe in his early thirties, mild and balding. As he drove and talked, he held up a copy of Krakauer’s book, a sympathetic and compelling portrait of McCandless. The driver said he kept the book with him always because he felt close to the dead man.

  “I understand his wanting to come here and go into the wild,” he said. Like McCandless, he’d attended Emory University, and he and his wife had recently moved to Anchorage in search of whatever it is people want when they come to Alaska.

  In a van full of out-of-state vacationers, the driver felt safe criticizing the response of Alaskans to the story of McCandless. “They called him a young fool who deserved what he got,” he said. “There was not a positive letter to the editor written about Chris McCandless. It went on for days.” He checked our reactions in the rearview mirror. “It was pretty chilling to read.”

  Through some strange transmogrification, Christopher McCandless has become a hero. Web sites preserve high school and college essays analyzing Into the Wild, which is popular on reading lists everywhere and frequently seen in the hands of people touring the state. A California composer has written a concert piece meant to convey the dying man’s states of mind—fear, joy, and acceptance. A Cincinnati rock band has named itself “Fairbanks 142,” after the bus where McCandless lived and died.

  There’s a thousand ways to die in Alaska, yet cheechako Michael Myers was unconcerned with them all. He seemed unusually at ease in this environment, this city kid from back East.… Turns out, he didn’t know any better. And he had bigger concerns than the perils that confront adventurers in wild Alaska. His biggest fear was that one of us would go mad in camp and later dine upon his flesh. Once, as we hiked a well-trodden animal trail, he remarked on our good fortune in finding a man-made path. I replied it was Mr. Bear’s trail, and punctuated my statement by stepping aside to reveal a fresh pile of scat. The scat, as scat will do, sunk in. Mike slowly realized that maybe, just maybe, his travel chums were less threatening than natural hazards. For at least the last evening of his trip, Mike knew he was on the right end of the serving spoon.

  —John Woodbury, “Reality Bites Back”

  And then there are the pilgrims, the scores and scores of believers who, stooped beneath the weight of their packs and lives, walk that long Stampede Trail to see the place where Chris McCandless died—and never take a step beyond.

  For two hours we rode along the rim of the shallow valley. Heat from the engines warmed our hands. We followed a trail used by dog mushers and snowmachiners; here and there other trails curved to the north or south. Russet scraps of tundra patched the snow, and the packed trail wound across the ground like a boardwalk. We had barely beaten spring.

  A Healy woman named Connie led most of the time because she knew the way. The others in the group were my friends Kris, Joe, and Charles. Kris and Joe live just outside the park; Kris, a freelance writer, covered the McCandless story when it first broke in Alaska, and she’s the one who told me that people had been visiting the bus like it was Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris. Joe had visited the site shortly after the body was discovered. Charles, a photographer, came along to document the bus and to make tasteless jokes. He wasn’t alone. I suggested our journey should be titled “Into the Weird.”

  Now and then we rode by other trails looping across the snow, and an hour into our trip, two snowmachiners passed us before we reached the Teklanika River. They were friends of Joe’s on their way northward to fix an off-road tracked vehicle that had broken a fuel line during a fall moose hunt. Their trail curved across a distant ridge, and I admired their ease and confidence roaming around out here, where machines can break down or dogs can run away and the walk home will be long and troublesome. You couldn’t call it the middle of nowhere; the Stampede Trail has been mapped for decades. Still, you’d want to know what you’re doing, so as not to make your next public appearance in a newspaper headline or as another statistic.

  The Teklanika River ice had not yet softened, and we crossed its smooth expanse without trouble, just below where it emerges from a gulch. We cruised through Moose Alley, dipped into the forest, wound across the beaver ponds, and rose along an alder-thick ridgeline. Occasionally moose tracks post-holed the snow. I tried to imagine hiking here in the summer, calling out to bears and waving away mosquitoes.

  We rounded a bend and suddenly there was the bus, hollow-eyed and beat up, the most absurd thing you could imagine in this open, white space. Faded letters just below the side windows said “Fairbanks City Transit System.” The derelict bus seemed so familiar because we had seen its picture many times in newspapers and on the jacket of Krakauer’s book. For decades it had served as a hunting camp and backcountry shelter, a corroding green-and-white hull of civilization transplanted to a knoll above the Sushana River. Now it was haunted real estate.

  We turned off the snowmachines and stood stretching in the sunshine and the kind of quiet that vibrates. A trash barrel, a fire grill, plenty of footprints, and frozen dog shit provided evidence of passing dogsleds and snowmachines. A wire chair leaned against the bus. I wondered how many people had posed there for photographs. The bus made me uneasy, and I was glad to be there with friends. It must have sheltered many people over the years who came to shoot and drink and close themselves up against the night.

  Kris and I squeezed through a gap in the jammed door and climbed in. It was warm enough to remove our hats and gloves while we looked around, though an occasional draft swept through the broken windows. A bullet hole had pierced the windshield on the driver’s side.

  The bus was littered with messages scratched into the rusted ceilings and walls referring to McCandless’s death, which seemed to bring out the earnestness of a Hallmark card in visitors: “Fulfill your Dreams, Nothing Feels Better,” “Stop Trying to Fool Others as the Truth Lies Within,” and “The Best Things in Life are Free.” Also, “Keep This Place Clean You Human Pigs.”

  Scattered among the needles and twigs on the floor were bizarre artifacts: frayed hanks of rope, a mayonnaise jar lid, a camp shower bag, blue playing cards. The driver’s seat was missing, but downy grouse feathers lined crannies in the dashboard. A few liquor bottles—big gulps remaining of the Jack Daniels and the Yukon Jack—crowded a small stand, which also held an electronic guitar tuner, a tin coffeepot, shotgun shells, a yellow container of Heet, and a can of Copenhagen Snuff.

  Stowed beneath were worn Sorel boots and pairs of filthy jeans, one set patched crudely with scraps of a green wool Army blanket. Were these the jeans mentioned in the book? Hard to believe they were still here considering that locals joke about dismantling the bus and selling it on eBay. It was creepy.

  A stovepipe lurched from a small barrel woodstove and poked through the roof. A green tent fly covered the rusted springs of a twin-size mattress. And here was the disturbing part: the bed lodged sideways against the bus’s rear, mattress stained, straw-like stuffing exposed, the remnants of the cover torn and shredded. That’s where his body was found.

  On the wall beside the bed was a brass plaque left by his parents that read:

  Christopher Johnson McCandless. “Alex.” 2/68-8/92. Chris, our beloved son and brother, died here during his adventurous travels in search of how he could best realize God’s great gift of life, with his final message, “I hav
e had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God Bless All,” we commend his soul to the world. The McCandless Family. 7/93

  Three notebooks sat on the plywood table. They included a three-ring binder protecting a photocopy of Krakauer’s original Outside article with its blaring headline “Lost In the Wild.” It was a Monty Pythonesque moment when someone pointed out an unrelated title on the magazine cover: “Are you too thin? The case for fat.” This kind of humor is one reason why Alaskans fear dying ridiculously: the living are so cruel to the foolish dead. It’s a way of congratulating ourselves on remaining alive.

  Kris and I began flipping through the steno notebooks, which had been filled with comments by visitors, the way people write in logbooks in public cabins or guestbooks at art galleries. The chronology began with the July 1993 visit by McCandless’s parents. His mother wrote:

  “Sonny boy, it’s time to leave. The helicopter will soon arrive. I wondered briefly if it would be hard to enter your last home. The wonderful pictures you left in your final testament welcomed me in and I’m finding it difficult to leave, instead. I can appreciate joy in your eyes reported by your self-portraits. I too, will come back to this place. Mom.”

  These heartfelt words were followed by a single sentence from Krakauer himself: “Chris—Your memory will live on in your admirers.”

  “Oh, gag,” Kris said.

  Kris is not what you would call romantic about the wilderness. She and Joe are among the most competent Alaskans I know. They hunt, guide river trips, paddle whitewater all through Alaska and Canada, and travel frequently in the back-country. In March, they had wanted to catch some of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, so they’d snowmachined from their house near McKinley Village through the uninhabited midsection of Alaska to Rainy Pass, winter camping along the 300-mile route. I was embarrassed about my modest survival gear when I saw how well-rigged their machines were with snowshoes, a come-along, and other useful equipment compactly stowed. To people like them, the adulation of Christopher McCandless is just one more reason to stay in sensible old Alaska.