Sixty Degrees North

by Malachy Tallack

  An answer to these questions was offered to me by Jacques Van Pelt, whom I met, so I thought, to talk about pelicans. This stretch of the Slave River is the northernmost breeding ground of the American white pelican. Their nesting sites are concentrated on the rocky islands of Mountain Portage Rapids, but I had seen them in the air, soaring like ghosts above the town. There are few people who have spent as much time observing, recording and studying these birds as Jacques Van Pelt. But on the day I met him, Jacques wasn’t much interested in talking about pelicans, at least not in the way I had expected. Instead, he wanted to talk about connections.

  Jacques came to the north in 1959 and moved to Fort Smith the following year. He was employed to work across the northern territories on community development projects for the government. Later, he and his wife ran a tourism company, taking visitors on excursions down the river and out on the land. When we met for the first time, Jacques greeted me with a hug and called me ‘Brother Malachy’. He moved laboriously, but his mind was quick. He talked with enthusiasm and excitement, though with no clear train of thought. Some of his words made me wince, reminiscent as they were of New Age platitudes. He referred to ‘the communion of people and nature’, and advised that ‘“I” must become “we”’.

  Jacques spoke often of circles, of how indigenous people had built circular homes rather than straight-sided ones. They’d understood the significance of the shape, he said, and recognised its physical and metaphorical strengths. The sixtieth parallel excited him for the same reason; it connected people and places. My conversation with Jacques also seemed to turn in circles. During the hours I spent with him we returned again and again to his vision of nature’s ‘connectedness’ and ‘togetherness’. When he did speak about pelicans it was to try and explain to me what these birds had taught him. Over the past few decades, Jacques had spent innumerable hours observing the Slave River pelicans, counting them, getting to know them and warning others about the fragility of their population. He had walked and kayaked throughout the region, often for weeks at a time. He had brought visitors to see this place that he loved, and to share it with them. And though he could no longer do these things, though his back was bent and his joints stiff and sore, he still coursed with a kind of static energy and a relentless positivity. And the time he’d spent with the birds, his time on the river and in the forest, were somehow at the core of the person he’d become.

  I was drawn to Jacques, to his openness and generosity, and to the joy that seemed to brim up inside of him as he spoke. But the cynic in me recoiled. As I listened, I found it hard to hold on to his vision of the world. I felt I was grasping at water, clutching at something that was vivid and alive, but which slipped through my hands as I tried to close them around it. And yet I couldn’t brush off his words. I couldn’t ignore the feeling that I had missed some fundamental point, something truly important that I’d not been able, or perhaps willing, to comprehend.

  It was not until later that it struck me: behind the spiritualised language, behind the platitudes and the positivity, Jacques’ lesson was simple. What mattered was not understanding, exactly. One could never, just by looking or thinking harder, fully comprehend the connections between your own body and the pelicans on the river, or the river itself. The extent of those connections was beyond understanding. What was important, rather, was recognition.

  In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote of a ‘land community’, encompassing the entire biosphere of a given place. This land community is not separate from, nor exactly additional to the human community; both are part of each other. What he described does not require any kind of spiritual insight or enlightenment to see, merely a certain awareness of reality. The food we eat is born of the earth and is fed by the lives of other organisms, by the sun that warms us and by the water that quenches our thirst. We are joined in a myriad of ways to the world around us. These relationships are matters of fact, and they exist at every level from the atomic to the macroecological.

  Jacques’ vision of connectedness was an active recognition of the interdependence of things. It was, in a sense, the most banal and commonplace of understandings, a conscious acceptance of what ought to be obvious. And yet today, like the very idea of community, that act of knowing feels radical. What Jacques was advocating was a kind of placefulness: an engagement with place that is united with and strengthened by our engagement with people. No one can disconnect themselves entirely from the world; we are all dependent, always. But if we fail to recognise and to consciously reassert these connections and this dependence, if we fail to build placefulness and community, then we risk being homeless. And that is no kind of freedom at all.

  After the storm, Sam Stokell and Shawn Bell, housemates and journalists at the town’s paper, took pity on me and invited me to camp in their basement, which was drier than my spot beneath the pines. They looked after me, and supplied me with good food and good company. Then, on my last day in Fort Smith, and with the clouds departed, they took me to see the river.

  Inside the car, the radio demanded our attention. A story about North America’s growing Prozac addiction rolled into a feature on cocaine and its impact on the short-term memory of slugs. Inside the car, Sam, Shawn and I listened, and were finally unable to suppress our laughter.

  Outside, a trail of dust followed us along the gravel road out of town. We turned left on the track that leads east towards the river, drove a little further, then stopped and cut the engine. Quietness fell upon us and we emerged into a sharp heat, held immobile by the trees. A steep trail descended from the road, and together we clambered down through the forest, led onward by the sound of the water. At the bottom of the slope the track opened out at the riverbank, a sand and mud beach littered with dead trees and scattered wood of all sizes. Here the river was perhaps a quarter of a mile across, and a thick, soupy brown.

  Together we walked upstream towards Mountain Portage Rapids, the clamour increasing with every step. At the lower end of the rapids we gathered wood – lifting and turning the smaller pieces, collecting those that were dry – and arranged them in a sheltered spot on the pink granite bank. Beside us was the constant rush of the water, bound for the north. Surging white, the river twisted in upon itself in eddies and whirlpools, piling up in unbreaking waves. It was a ceaseless, tumultuous motion that was both hypnotic and unnerving. I found it hard to look away.

  Crouching over the wood pile we tried to light our fire. Sam and I held the matches close in among the bark and twigs, hoping they would catch. A flame. Some smoke. Then nothing. Again. After several attempts, the flakes of bark began to crackle and a gasp of light leapt among the sticks. We stood back and watched as it spread, and smoke lifted from the pile of wood, palling skyward. The fire raged into itself and we retreated, lying out in the sunshine, waiting for it to settle.

  Once the flames had sunk a little, the three of us gathered around the blaze. We skewered hotdogs with flimsy green sticks twisted from the forest’s edge and laid them out on an improvised grill, the smoke swirling up from the fire and into our eyes and lungs. As we coughed and choked, the meat cooked with varying degrees of failure, until eventually each of us had eaten enough to feel satisfied, and we abandoned our barbecue for the rocks up above.

  Two young pelicans paddled close to shore, and out in the river, amid the rocks and rushing water, were many others. Most were settled on the granite islands where they breed; some were fishing, holding themselves steady in the tumbling river, dipping their heads beneath the surface. Above us were more, heavy-bellied like seaplanes, with great yellow bills thrust out in front. The wings, pure white at rest, showed a dark edge as they lifted themselves skyward. Enormous and unwieldy on land, in flight they become graceful, gliding in the warm air with the black of their wings blinking as they fly. In a few months these birds would travel south to rivers and lakes around the Gulf of Mexico, returning again the next spring. Always they know when to move and when to stop moving.

  I thou
ght of Ib then, and of Jacques, who had come to Fort Smith and stayed, and of Sam and Shawn, who were here temporarily, to work, and then to move on to somewhere else. How can we know, I wondered, when we have found our place in the world? How can we know when we ought to cease our wandering?

  The sky was a cavernous blue, without clouds, and the breeze rising from the river was just enough to keep the mosquitoes at bay. A raven explored the fire’s edge looking for scraps of sausage, its silent mouth gaping wide in the heat of the day. On the baking pink rocks beside the river, the three of us sprawled happily out and closed our eyes. The smell of the fire was in our nostrils and our heads were filled with the roar and hush of the rapids.

  ALASKA

  back to nature

  The rain was not falling, exactly, but clinging to the air, as though in expectation of a fall. A haze of grey evening mizzle softened the street, washing all memory of warmth away. I sat alone, looking out through the window of a café, my fingers cradling a heavy caribou burger. I was the only customer. Outside, crowds of elderly men and women trudged up and down Fourth Avenue, wrapped in dark waterproofs, their hoods raised like congregations of monks all bowed against the unholy elements.

  Seward’s small-boat harbour was filling up with cruise ships and charter vessels, from which these sodden swarms were emerging. All along this part of the avenue were restaurants, souvenir shops and businesses flogging fishing and wildlife trips. Most of the buildings strove towards a kind of small town quaintness, but did not succeed. They seemed too desperate, too insistent, to be anything other than what they were: tourist bait.

  The door opened and cold air poured through, shrinking the room. A gaggle of damp children and parents followed the draught in towards the counter, chattering to each other. I hauled my coat up around my shoulders and continued to chew at the thick slab of bread and meat in front of me.

  All around Resurrection Bay, the mountains were swaddled in cloud, almost hidden and yet as present and as dominating as if they’d been standing among the shops and cafés. The mountains were the backdrop to everything here, and I gazed out across the water at them, eager to ignore, for a moment, the foreground of noise and activity.

  Seward is a tourist town, and offers its visitors plenty of ways to part with their money. There is, on its streets, that sense of hospitality polluted by retail, where smiles and warm greetings feel always like the foreplay to a sale. Yet despite the proliferation of souvenir stalls and nice-places-to-eat, and despite the affected charm of the old town, Seward’s main selling point is not itself but its surroundings. On the east coast of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, which lies south of Anchorage, the town is at the end of both the highway and the railway, and is a convenient platform from which to dip one’s toes into ‘the wilderness’. Both Kenai Fjords National Park and the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge are close by; forests, glaciers and fjords are all easily accessible. Like many other such towns, Seward has become what it is because of its proximity to what it is not.

  Without doubt, the most effort-free way to experience these wild places is to be taken to them by boat. Day-trips and mini-cruises in the national park abound, each promising views of wildlife – sea otters, sea lions, whales – as well as lunch stops on remote beaches and empty islands, and a chance to see the Alaska that lies beyond the tarmac. Each morning, beneath heavy clouds, I watched the flotilla of tour boats pushing southwards through the bay, their onboard guides audible even from shore, the crackle of loudspeakers drifting over the still water. It was a strange sight, this armada, with its cargo of expectant tourists, eager to glimpse something that perhaps even they could not quite specify. For what was this thing that drew them out there? What was it that took them north in the first place? What exactly did they hope to find?

  It is said that Vitus Bering, who was not quite the first European to reach Alaska, but who thought that he was and is widely remembered as such, was not impressed by what he saw. Suffering, perhaps, from the stifling melancholy of one who does not expect to see his home again, and from the unknown malaise that soon would kill him and prove his fears well-founded, the Dane looked upon this place ‘indifferently and without particular pleasure’. This was his second voyage to the Russian far east, in the service of the imperial powers in St Petersburg, and in the summer of 1741 his ship, the St Peter, finally reached the North American continent. According to Georg Steller, the German naturalist on board, their captain did not rejoice at his discovery, but instead ‘in our very midst shrugged his shoulders while gazing at the land’. The crew were fools, Bering declared, ‘full of expectations like pregnant windbags!’ They ‘do not consider … how far we are from home, and what accidents may yet happen.’

  The St Peter anchored on 20 July, near what is now called Kayak Island, in the Gulf of Alaska, five degrees east of Seward and only a couple of miles from the sixtieth parallel. Steller spent the few hours he was granted ashore breathlessly exploring the island, gathering new plant species and making notes on the native human inhabitants, half intoxicated by the delight of discovery.

  Bering, in contrast, did not even bother to disembark. In this place that so thrilled and enthralled the scientist, the captain had little interest. Instead, he seemed haunted by the fear of what lay ahead, and anxious to escape before a possible change in the weather. On the morning after their arrival, before his crew had even had time to fully replenish the ship’s fresh water supplies, Bering announced that they were to sail westward again for Kamchatka. Those who protested the decision were ignored, and the St Peter that day began its journey back to Russia. The captain, along with thirty of his seventy-six-strong crew, did not survive the crossing.

  The land Bering found that summer was a place thus far untroubled by the careless hands of colonists, traders and professional adventurers. It was a place of immense forests and towering mountains; of fish-filled rivers and wing-beaten skies; of coastal waters crowded with sea otters, fur seals and whales; of plenitude and abundance; of a natural wealth that seemed, at first, boundless. And though like others after him Bering was unable to see it, Alaska was a place of dazzling, exhilarating potential.

  The men and women who crowded onto these tour boats every morning, and who chugged out of the bay and then back again at night, were looking for what Steller saw. They were hunting for that place of abundance and boundlessness which greeted the very first arrivals in Alaska. They were trying, in some curious way, to go back in time. I found myself torn. I wanted to join one of these tours, to sail away from the town and see for myself the wildlife and the wilderness, and then to return to Seward in the evening, to a café meal and the relative comfort of my sleeping bag and tent. But something held me back, and for some days I struggled to reconcile my feelings. What troubled me most, I think, was the idea – advertised incessantly – that out there somewhere was the real Alaska, and what was here was something else, quite different. Those well-waterproofed tourists had been promised a journey into another world, and yet it seemed to me that that world was made impossible by their very presence within it. For what those passengers were being promised was their own absence, and that is something we can only imagine. Perhaps I was wrong, but I thought I could see disappointment in those faces as they disembarked and spread out among the town’s restaurants and hotels in the evening.

  On my final night in Seward I sat beside the shore, looking southwards across the bay, a cheese sandwich clutched in my hand. That afternoon, the sky had been a wide palette of greys, but the clouds were dispersing as the light diminished. I was close to moving on when I saw it, and when I did I almost laughed. Down in the water, just a few metres away, was a sea otter – pale-faced and as sleek as polished walnut. I watched it, amazed. I saw it dive, then resurface, oblivious to or unconcerned by my presence. It lay there, sprawled on its back, one foot then the other breaking the surface, then sinking again. The otter had caught what looked like a crab, and I could hear the crunch of its teeth against the shell. It clu
ng on, sometimes knocked off balance by the swell, but each time rolling back into position, like a kayaker.

  I sat for ten minutes or more and I could see, or thought I could see, the pleasure it found in its meal, the catlike satisfaction on its face. And when, moments later, a sea lion porpoised its way past the otter, I did laugh. I hadn’t needed to leave town. The other world had found me.

  ‘This is about as far from pristine Alaskan fishing as you can get’, said Jeff, from the other side of the boat. I smiled back. ‘That’s okay,’ I said, and nodded. And it was okay. Like many anglers, I had dreamed about coming to this place for so long that I wasn’t going to let my enjoyment be dimmed by the fact that I wasn’t there alone. I felt lucky, and perhaps even a little smug. I certainly did not feel disappointed.

  The Kenai River runs from Kenai Lake in the centre of the peninsula to Cook Inlet, eighty miles to the west. It is a beautiful river – milky blue and sun splashed – and extremely popular with fishermen and seekers of white water. We had launched our boat (a ‘cataraft’, in fact: a metal frame held between two inflatable tubes, with a pair of seats on either side and another perched in the centre for the oarsman) at Cooper Landing, just below Kenai Lake, and were drifting downstream in search of fish. We shared the river with other anglers, in boats and on the shore, as well as with tour groups chasing rapids. In addition to these mostly quiet companions was the Sterling Highway, which ran alongside the upper stretch of the river. And though it may not be the busiest of roads, the hum of traffic was nevertheless a continuous accompaniment to the sighing of the water.