Four Quarters of Light

by Brian Keenan

  I asked Mike about Moses and his accordion. ‘Music was not intrinsic to their culture,’ he said. ‘They had the drum and the chant and even dance, but music in the European sense was alien to their culture. The Eskimos have something much cleverer than music. They have this uncanny skill of studying something by simply looking at it and watching it work or how it moves. Leave them alone with it for long enough and they will dismantle it and put it back together in perfect order. They are superb fixers of things.’ He went on to relate how Moses Nick had once seen an accordion being played when he was a very young man working in the cannery. He had been mesmerized by the instrument and had sworn that one day he too would have one. Many years later he bought one in Juneau or Anchorage. He knew nothing about the thing or how it worked. He preserved it for a while until some German tourists sent him some tapes, and within months he could play every tune on the tapes as if he had been playing all his life. I understood what he meant, having spoken to the ivory carver in Nome. It was a short flight and I had opened up the question about his ‘lady friend’.

  ‘Mike, what would you have done if we had crashed on the trip out? I mean, that “lady” was extremely taken by you.’ Mike looked me directly in the eye. ‘What woman are you talking about? There weren’t any women on the flight!’

  During the drive back to the cabin I asked Mike about the chance of seeing some bears. I explained to him how I had told my son Jack before we left Ireland that we were all going on a bear hunt. I told him how We’re Going on a Bear Hunt was my son’s favourite bedtime story, and that although we had seen some bears in Denali I wanted something a bit more experiential than looking out of a tour-bus window. His answer was immediate: ‘Go to Katmai. You’ll see plenty of bears there and you’ll have to do it on foot. There are no buses. But it’s the best time to catch them. Whole families of bears will be feeding at the river falls and in the lakes, piling on the fat for the long hibernation.’ It seemed the perfect place.

  That evening, Audrey and I pored over the map. We could take a short flight to a place called King Salmon and from there catch a floatplane to land us on one of the several lakes in the Aleutian Range of mountains that ran through the Katmai Reserve. From there, we would have to return to King Salmon, dogleg back to Anchorage, then over the Alexander Archipelago to stay over in Juneau and Sitka. We were both conscious of the changing weather and the need to complete the last quarter before the first snows returned. It all seemed so hectic.

  ‘It’s a lot of hopping on and off planes,’ Audrey pointed out, ‘especially with all our bags, the two of us, two kids, two sets of buggies—’

  ‘And two sets of antlers.’

  Audrey stopped dead in her tracks. ‘Two sets? What do you mean, two sets?’

  ‘Well, there’s a set of moose antlers waiting for me in Anchorage. I’ll arrange to have them shipped on to Juneau and from there to Dublin. I picked them up while I was up north, just forgot to mention it,’ I said sheepishly.

  Audrey looked at me with a long, silent glare, then slowly shook her head.

  The Final Quarter

  As our small six-seater floatplane descended on the mountain lake I turned to Jack and Cal. ‘Look, boys, there’s a bear standing by the edge of the water.’

  Our pilot instantly asked, ‘Where?’

  When I pointed out the large brown bear ambling peacefully along the lakeshore he immediately hoisted the plane into an ascent and circled over the lake, quickly explaining to me that Katmai was brown bear country and the bear always had right of way. As the bear was near where he intended mooring the floatplane, we had to hang around until he moved on. It didn’t take long. The brown bear looked over his shoulder twice as he moved lazily along the lakeshore. We were an alien irritant in his world and he dismissed us with appropriate disdain. Eventually we landed on the still waters with all the grace of a snow goose, and motored to our mooring pier. Babies, buggies and bags were all unloaded and we set off into bear country.

  But there was something even bigger than bears in Katmai, for running parallel with the Shelikof Strait were fifteen active volcanoes. Flying across these incredible snow-covered Aleutian mountains that seem to go on for ever it’s hard to believe that below their forbiddingly cold, granite-hard surfaces molten rock lies boiling and bubbling. Steam plumes still rise from Mounts Mageck, Martin and Trident, declaring that creation is unfinished in Katmai.

  The June 1912 eruption of the Novarupta volcano altered the Katmai area dramatically. Severe earthquakes rocked the area for a week before Novarupta exploded with cataclysmic force. Enormous quantities of hot, glowing pumice and ash were ejected from the mountaintop and nearby fissures. This material flowed over the terrain, destroying all life in its path. Trees upslope were snapped off and carbonized by the blasts of hot wind and gas. For several days ash, pumice and gas were ejected and a haze darkened the sky over most of the northern hemisphere. When it was over, more than sixty-five square kilometres (forty square miles) of lush green land lay buried beneath volcanic deposits as much as two hundred metres (seven hundred feet) deep. At nearby Kodiak, for two days a person could not see a lantern held at arm’s length. Acid rain caused clothes to disintegrate on clotheslines in distant Vancouver, Canada. The eruption was ten times more forceful than the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens. Only one eruption in historic times, Greece’s Santorini in 1500 BC, displaced more volcanic matter than Novarupta. The terrible 1883 eruption of Indonesia’s Krakatoa belched out little more than half as much, yet killed thirty-five thousand people. Vastly isolated Novarupta killed no-one. Had the eruption occurred on Manhattan Island in New York City, the writer Robert Griggs calculated, residents of Chicago would have heard it. The fumes would have tarnished brass in Denver. Acid raindrops would have burned your skin in Toronto. In Philadelphia, the ash would have lain waist deep, and no-one would have been left alive in Manhattan.

  Our short-lived flight over the Katmai Reserve confirmed that what Griggs wrote almost a century ago was as true today, if not more so. The apocalyptic energies of nature do not bring about disasters as much as recreations. The theory of tectonics may explain why such things occur, but it does not capture the austere and terrible beauty that Katmai has become. Maybe because of its cataclysmic eruptions and its remoteness, there are no roads or railways to fetch you here. Nature has been allowed to heal herself in her own unique way. Looking at a map during our flight, then trying to comprehend Katmai’s bulk with my own feeble eyes, I began to understand how the true nature of wilderness eludes us. We were looking out on mountains I only wanted to bow before. Beneath me were enormous lakes and island-studded bays. There were hundreds of rushing rivers and open waterways that would take a lifetime to navigate. There were mountain passes and valleys windswept by gales in excess of a hundred miles an hour. No pilot will go near them, and even the most determined backwoods hiker gives them a wide berth.

  I looked along the lakeshore before we left it. The big brown bear had gone. ‘Must have been seven hundred pounds and more,’ said our pilot as he lashed the last ropes to the pier.

  At Brooks Lake, where we had landed, it was compulsory to sign in at the ranger centre, confirming when you would be leaving. There was only one way in and one way out, and if you didn’t show up at the time of your departure it meant Katmai had got you. To ensure this didn’t happen everyone had to sit through a fifteen-minute safety talk. We were given a small hand-printed map showing distinct pathways through the woods and along the lakeshore. These were not tourist routes as much as safety routes. All led away from and back to the ranger station. On these paths no-one could get lost, and in emergencies everyone could be found. ‘Remember, just because you don’t see anything doesn’t mean you are not being watched,’ the map declared. It then encouraged hikers to ‘talk loudly or sing in the forest. Creatures of the wild do not like to be disturbed suddenly.’ I am no singer, and walking through the Aleutian Range singing songs or rhyming fairy-tales did not tally with my idea of an
Alaskan experience. But the sight of the seven-hundred-pound bear as we arrived made me forget my inhibitions. As an extra precaution, we bought several small bells and tied them to the buggies. Then we set off on the Great Alaska Bear Hunt.

  After ten minutes, I conceded I was glad of the buggies, the bells and the narrow hikers’ path that would eventually bring us to the Brooks Falls. From our floatplane, the awe-inspiring geography of Katmai had been added to by the lavish autumnal colours that were beginning to burn up through the foliage. But now, as we walked through it, there was a different kind of awe. The kind that made your eyes sweat so that you saw things that weren’t there. A silence that made you sing, whether you could or not, so that you felt less vulnerable and alone. But you were never alone. In this wilderness through which we were walking, caribou, fox, lynx, wolverine, porcupine and squirrel moved silent and unseen.

  So we rehearsed our bedtime story aloud. We chanted together as the little brass bells rattled against the side of the buggies. After a few more miles we finally made it. The falls dropped water some thirty feet in a gentle descent broken by huge boulders and rock shelves. The river at this point must have been fifty feet or more wide and the roar of its white water hit you before you saw it. A long raised platform had been built to allow travellers to view the falls from a safe distance and at a height no bear would think of climbing. The spectacle it presented was the fairy-tale fantasy come true. At first six, then eight bears of varying age and size were wallowing in the water, making occasional dives at the salmon that swam past them. Older and wiser bears stood solidly on rock platforms and waited for the leaping salmon simply to jump into their mouths, or so it seemed. Jack sat on my shoulders, silent and fascinated. Then he excitedly pointed out each new bear as he spotted it. One juvenile bear attempting to gain a fishing ledge like the mature bears was swept off his feet and carried ignominiously downstream by the torrent of water. Jack was concerned by his plight but my reassurance calmed him.

  For almost two hours, we sat and watched. The bigger bears could fillet a large salmon in seconds, and the carcasses they threw away were immediately set upon by a squabbling pack of gulls. Further downstream, far from the falls, other birds circled and swooped down on the fish-filled stream. It was difficult to distinguish what kind of birds they were, for bald eagle, falcon and hawk all inhabit Katmai.

  I took time to study Jack as we lingered, knowing that we would probably never return to this magical place. I had told him as much as I could explain to his young mind about where we were and about the Eskimos and the Indians I had gone to live with. I had shown him photos of these people and the landscape they lived in. I noticed how tall he had grown and knew that as a young man he would be much taller than me. He is a bright boy, full of questions. There is a tenderness in him; sometimes I think he is too like me. I sat and watched him as he studied the bears and for a moment I knew that the fairy-tales had overtaken the fact. Jack was staring beyond the fishing bears into a land of his own. For an instant, he looked back at me. I was sure he knew what I was thinking. But it was not knowledge, more a shared sense of something. I remembered carrying him from his mother the moment he was born. He was only minutes old, but even then he knew what I was feeling. I waved to him, and he waved back.

  But Cal, having found his legs in Alaska, was determined to walk all over it, so we walked up and down the platform, pointing out the bears. When I’d had enough of walking I played at being a bear, scooping salmon out of the air and biting off their heads. After a few minutes of watching me as if I was demented, Cal tugged at my hand and commanded me to ‘Wak!’

  We headed back the way we came, reversing the story while bounding along the pathway, the buggies bouncing off it and the bells jingling erratically. ‘Run, run, here he comes, the bear, the big brown bear. Maybe he thinks we’re a fish!’ The boys squealed with laughter. Then it suddenly poured with rain, so we ran faster and the boys laughed louder as we squishy-squelched through the mud.

  Back at the ranger station we dried off and ate a quick lunch as the short monsoon abated. It was a rapturous day. One of those days that you know will go on for ever because it was so unforgettable.

  As we sat on the jetty waiting for our pilot, I watched Audrey and the boys talk excitedly about the bears at the falls. A part of me wonders if Jack and Cal will ever understand why I brought them here. Yes, it was to see great mountains that go on for ever, to stand beside rivers that frighten you with their roar and speed, to catch fish bigger than you would dream of, to fly like an eagle over ice fields and glaciers, and to see bears and wildlife not imprisoned in a TV screen. But it was more than that. It was to let them experience in their innocence that life is more majestic than fairy-tales. I wanted them to be touched somewhere inside themselves with the magnitude of such wonder that life could never crush or diminish. In short, I wanted to enlarge their spirit in the only way I knew. But would they remember all this? Yes, for I know that above all things the mind forgets nothing. In the majestic landscape of the mind and the imagination, they could return here, to this special place, when they wished. It would always be magical, and it would nourish their spirit like the salmon and the bear.

  We bundled ourselves back into our floatplane and headed back to King Salmon, then on to Anchorage to connect to Juneau en route to Sitka. Juneau was to be the jump-off point for Jack London’s Yukon, where I imagined I might catch up with and befriend the ghost who had brought me here. But I had been thinking long and hard about heading in Jack London’s Yukon footsteps. Certainly it was in the Klondike that the author declared he had got his perspective. I kept thinking about his other statement about Alaska: ‘When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many things he has learned, he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods and often times he must reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped.’ Something inside me was telling me to jettison my ghost hunt in the Yukon. If I was to take London’s imperative to heart and abandon the old ideals and the old gods, then that might also mean abandoning my Yukon trip.

  In any case, finding perspective is about distance, about creating a mental landscape in which we might evaluate the relative importance of things. My travels in this compelling land, the experiences and thoughts it had induced, my stay with the Gwich’in and with Lena and Charlie, the ‘otherness’ of the land itself, and especially the portal Debra had opened up for me, all required that I extract from these things a new set of compass bearings for my life’s trajectory. As I thought over these ideas, more than a little unbalanced by the dizzying perspectives they threw up, I remembered my own words written years ago on the night train from Temuco to Santiago in Chile: ‘there was another landscape to be discovered and negotiated, the landscape of the heart. The emotions and the imagination had to be opened up and new route maps planned.’ My travels in Alaska had been a confirmation of that and more. They had given me a sense of direction. Jack London, I determined, was one of the old gods that had to be cast off. My own spiritual life had to be nurtured, and I had been instructed in the method of achieving this. A great sense of urgency was married with an exhilarating feeling of liberation and well-being.

  When I apprised Audrey of my thinking as we awaited our flight to Juneau, she was both surprised and relieved. Though she admitted she hadn’t been looking forward to many more weeks living out of a suitcase, she was perplexed at my sudden decision to abandon Jack London. ‘I’m too old to believe in ghosts,’ I said. Audrey looked at me, knowing there was always a lot more behind my throwaway remarks. ‘We all need a holiday anyway. And I need to stop somewhere for a while to get my perspective.’

  The idea behind staying in Juneau was so that we could collect all our baggage together in one place and store it there while we did whatever travelling we chose to do, then return for a last overnight before leaving the Final Frontier. The small two-storey travellers’ hotel we booked into was centrally located, and it had sent a courtesy bus to pick us
up from the airport.

  Juneau looked like nowhere else I had been in Alaska. The city rises steeply up from the waterfront to cling onto the mountains behind it. It is a cross between a mini San Francisco and a Swiss mountain village. It has all the cosy sophistication of a state capital without forgetting what manner of state that is. It was all summed up for me one day as we strolled through the downtown area to be confronted by a ‘typical’ Alaskan dressed in cowboy boots, worn denims and a checked shirt with heavy lumberjack braces. He was leading a young but fully grown timber wolf on a strong leather leash. I stopped to talk to him, but the eerie yellow twilight in the animal’s eyes spoke more to me. I thought of the creatures in The Call of the Wild, Buck leaping above the pack and howling at the moon, crying out his unearthly paean to the wilderness. This wolf was also beautiful, but there was something pathetically hideous about it as well. Its eyes were empty and soulless. The owner had acquired the animal as a weaning pup from a trapper friend and had raised it as a pet. I wondered if he had ever read Jack London’s books. Then I realized the owner had obviously had too much to drink. What kind of relationship could there be between this caricature of a man and this beautiful creature with its haunting, empty eyes?

  The evenings were colder now and the staircase streets of the city were frequently slicked with downpours of showers. I was enjoying the comforts of hot showers, flushing toilets, restaurants that served good wine and the supremely fine local beer, Alaskan Amber. But after a few days I was getting edgy. Maybe I had been too long in the bush. Juneau was too settled and enclosed. A guidebook note informed me that it is the only capital in North America you can’t reach by road. It has more than a hundred miles of pavement road around it, but none of it goes anywhere. Every year two hundred scheduled flights never make it because of bad weather. I could feel the bad weather in the air and the pressure of a place confined within itself.