I pulled out the plastic map case and extracted the maps carefully from the velcroed top.
“It looks like the first couple of days here are pretty straightforward. That’s Kokotuk Creek across from us now.” I pointed to the valley across the river from us and the corresponding line on the map. “And then we get to Esetuk Creek and the canyon on the third or fourth day—right here.” I pointed to the place on one of the map sheets where the contour lines bunched together. “Those are the only serious rapids—we think. Is that right?” I felt pretty confident of our route, but it seemed worthwhile to talk it through with a guide.
“Sounds right,” said Jamie. He took the next map sheet from me and ran his finger north along the braids of river. “Then you’re into the foothills, and pretty soon after that the coastal plain. Once you hit the plain, the river really starts braiding.”
“We’d heard that,” I said. Ned nodded and Sally looked on.
“You should be fine. Just try to stay in the main current. We always end up walking the rafts over gravel bars there, no matter which way we go. You will too.”
“How many times have you been down this river?” Ned asked.
“I don’t know, probably five or six,” Jamie said. “I’ve been guiding with Karen a few years now.”
“It seems from our dad’s journal that the water was a lot lower last year,” I said.
“It was,” Jamie concurred. “A lot more work this time last year.”
I looked down the line of the river from one map sheet to the next, following the marks I’d made indicating all of the campsites from Dad and Kathy’s trip. One more day, and we would be close to where Dad and Kathy had called me on Father’s Day, the last time I heard his voice. How could I have known that their brief visit to Seattle, in February last year, would be the last time I would see his face? February 10th at 7:30, according to Peter’s calendar, Peter and I had dinner with Dad and Kathy at Sostanza, a northern Italian restaurant in Madison Park. I remember Dad holding Kathy’s hand on the table, the low and intimate light. I remember friends of Peter’s parents at the table behind us, and a fire in the fireplace. I remember ordering halibut cheeks with a light lemon sauce and capers. February 10. Four months and sixteen days before I heard that they were gone.
Dad had thought about coming down for my concert with a local choral group in May.
“Mom’s coming for that one,” I said awkwardly.
“Oh, well, that’s great!” said Dad quickly. “I’ll come to another one.” Of course he wouldn’t be able to, but how could we have known?
I remember in Dad’s embrace I could feel the softness of his aging skin, something I’d noticed with increasing concern. And his voice. In moments of panic, I wondered how long I would be able to remember his face, his voice. I loved that voice. I missed that voice. Kathy’s laugh. Her smile. How could I not look back?
“I don’t want to die in some hospital somewhere,” he’d declared once with eyes sparkling, standing in the living room at the cabin as the river flowed at the base of the bluff outside the log walls. “If I start getting old or sick, I’m just going to walk out into the mountains, fall into a crevasse, maybe let a bear get me, be out in nature.”
“Dad!” I’d said, horrified. I could not have invented that conversation if I’d tried. We hadn’t talked much about death. It hadn’t been time. It was too early. But what did we know about timing?
For most of my life, not only Dad’s statements but his admonitions carried an urgency, a kind of veiled but panicked perception of the perils and shortness of life. In later years that urgency seemed to ebb, because of either the slow wane of age or, maybe, a satisfaction that his children were making their own ways, combined with a softening and opening of his spirit appreciating the pleasures and beauty of his faith, his marriage and family, and of the natural world around him. I like to know that this opening had already begun in him, this tendency of the soul toward things beyond this life.
We left the group with a dinner invitation for the following evening and headed back to our tiny campsite upriver. We had decided to forego bear watch, given our proximity to the guided group. I crawled into my sleeping bag happy for the full night of sleep ahead, even in continuous daylight. Ned and I were each in our own tents, and Sally was in her bivvy sack, all surrounded by the wire of the bear fence. I pulled a T-shirt over my eyes to keep out the light and let the quiet beep, beep lull me out of consciousness.
CHAPTER 9
A CEASELESS RIVER
The flow of a river is ceaseless and its water is never the same.
—Kamo no Chomei, Hojoki
We planned to stay at the same campsite for another day and night, allowing time to hike up the rising terrain east of camp. A gentle valley cut into the mountains, allowing a slow climb of about a thousand feet, according to the maps, at which point we could hike through the mountains to Esetuk Glacier. The opportunity to head up the side of a mountain in the Arctic put me back into my element. We spread out across the hillside for better visibility, to avoid damaging the fragile tundra, and because walking on the tussocks made it hard to get into a rhythm, so we each enjoyed having plenty of space around us. My thoughts settled into the slow movement of my legs up the mountain.
Memories flowed more freely as blood coursed through my veins with increasing power and speed, thought lubricated by movement. Some were thoughts I’d rather have avoided. For example, this one: no one who knew Dad and Kathy had actually seen them dead. Why had I not asked that family be able to see Dad at the funeral home when his body was delivered? Since the bear had been at the site for at least ten hours after their deaths, I figured their bodies weren’t in very good shape.
I had failed. I had allowed fear to take over, and missed not only my chance but my responsibility to see them. Other cultures prepare a body with meticulous care. In the Jewish tradition, the foundation for the Christian faith, a family carefully washes a body in a prescribed order, ending with the face and hands in tandem. Those parts of a person that identify them: faces, hands.
After the body is washed, someone stays with it until it is buried.
My faith tradition has done a terrible thing in losing these rituals surrounding death, which tell us so much about what we believe about the body and the soul. Without the guidance of such traditions, and with only terror at my inability to handle what I might see in those massacred bodies, I’d allowed the saccharine funeral home representative to do all the work.
I hadn’t even thought to bring clothes to the funeral home until they called and asked; I had tried not to think about what might be in those caskets. I’d assumed clothes wouldn’t be helpful. And then I picked out Kathy’s khaki-colored suit and shoes and Dad’s khaki pants and houndstooth blazer, along with his cranberry-colored tie with the little squares on it that I loved. They would have looked nice together dressed like that. I also brought an undershirt for Dad, and boxer shorts and brown shoes and brown socks. I brought hose for Kathy. I wished later I’d polished Dad’s shoes.
The next day at the funeral home someone said, “Mr. Huffman looked very handsome.” I felt my throat closing again. Why hadn’t I seen Dad, at least? Why hadn’t I stayed with their bodies, kept vigil? That was the last time; there would be no other opportunities. How had life so suddenly stolen my last chance?
A watery cloud bridging earth and heaven hung in the valleys a thousand feet above the river on either side. Just outside of camp, a caribou trotted seemingly from out of nowhere, skirting us by a safe distance. It seemed to have a place to go, moving steadily toward the northwest. I wondered where the rest of its herd was; it was exposed, in danger on its own. Even so, it had a perky optimism to its gait, power in those thin legs, head held high. Then it stopped, looking directly at me. His heart, a heart the Gwich’in believe is part human, because they believe their own hearts share his, pounded under quivering flanks. I smiled broadly at him. He looked back with eyes brown and wide. His eyes held the col
lective consciousness of his species, like a messenger from another world or perhaps from the wisdom of our shared world.
The caribou pranced out of sight on the tundra, seeming to melt into the rarefied air from which he had appeared, and we headed up the mountainside toward the cloud. A razor-sharp awareness of the topography and vegetation directed my eyes to any place where our presence might surprise an animal. The little draw just there, the rise in the small stand of willows—each prompted a minor diversion in one direction or another just to be sure we didn’t surprise ursa arctos horribilis.
With a conflicted mix of anger and reverence, I had embarked on this trip believing that if we did come across a bear, it would know that it owed me one; it would leave us alone out of respect. Losing Dad and Kathy had sliced me to my core. Understanding that I had lost them because of the violent action of another being twisted the knife. Even so, I did not wish to harm any bear with the weapons we’d brought.
Wait. That isn’t true. A part of me wanted to find that bear, or its progeny, hold up the shotgun, pull the trigger, feel the recoil, watch the bear crumple, thick brown fur matted with red, watch its eyes glaze and dull. A part of me wanted that, but it was a weak, thin part of me, afraid like a small child. And that bear was as dead as my dad, as dead as Kathy, killed as quickly and with as much intent.
The rest of me needed to know the bear, to understand it, as deeply as its animal act had cut me. I imagined an encounter with a bear, close, human face to bear face, in which his small eyes considered me with wisdom and compassion, and then he turned his muscled body and moved back into the wild. But this was lunacy. The wilderness and the bear would show me no sympathy.
Bears appear in the oldest records of humankind. The Chauvet Cave, which sits in the Cirque d’Estre at the edge of the Ardèche River Gorge in France, is one example. The cave is dated at 32,000 radiocarbon years, or 35,000 calendar years. Vivid paintings and etchings of large animals cover the walls. Nearly two hundred bear skulls have been found throughout the cave, fifty-three in what has come to be known as the Skull Chamber. Scientists are still hesitant to claim that this ancient grouping of skulls indicates a bear cult, although it is the best of myriad examples of apparently careful and ceremonial placement of bear bones across northern Europe. Scientist Philippe Fosse, one of the world’s preeminent cave bear researchers, spends a month a year at the Chauvet Cave, and believes that “predators played a very important role in human evolution.” In the varied and multifarious relationship between humans and bears, this cave appears in all respects to be the foundation.4
When we consider any number of ancient and modern indigenous cultures, not to mention the ubiquitous presence of bears in our own culture, it is hard not to be intrigued by the evidence of our spiritual connection to this creature. Carl Jung once said that “there is a bear with glowing eyes deep in the heart of human consciousness.” The Gwich’in believe that this spiritual connection includes the bear’s awareness of thoughts and words. “You can’t talk about bear,” says Catherine Mitchell of the Gwich’in. “Our people say it can hear you.” Other native cultures refer to bear only obliquely, calling it grandmother, grandfather, all familial terms of respect. I never would have that kind of understanding. But it seemed there must be more for me to learn.
I hoped that indigenous, and specifically Inupiat or Gwich’in, spirituality might offer a way to understand this connection to the wilderness that our culture does not have words to describe. Maybe those answers would be salve for my wounds.
The Inupiat are primarily ocean people and are more familiar with the polar bear, or nanuk. Grizzly and polar bear rarely interact (though changes in wild animal behavior because of warming trends in the Arctic have resulted in more frequent interaction and even interbreeding), so the interior Gwich’in are more familiar with grizzly, which they call shih. Though the Gwich’in call themselves the Caribou People and think of themselves as sharing part of the heart of the caribou, they hold bear in even higher esteem. “Our ancestors say that long ago animals on earth used to talk to one another and to humans. There were shamans who talked to animals. The animals warned people of how to protect themselves from animals,” says Gwich’in elder Hannah Alexie. “Grizzly is the strongest animal of the north. I always have respect for grizzly bear. They are on their own out there. We were told not to interfere with animals, not to tease them. They are on their own, like we are on our own. Be careful when you go onto the land, be alert.” Then she adds, “All things are from our Lord. We have to protect our animals, never take more than we can use. This is what our elders taught us.”
The bear is central to religious beliefs in nearly every Arctic and northern boreal culture from ancient times to the present, with uncanny similarities of beliefs and practices even among peoples of disparate geographies. The cult of the bear and the “sending home” ceremony practiced by the Ainu of Japan continued as late as the 1930s. In this ceremony, the Ainu men brought a bear cub home to the village. The cub was raised according to strict protocol in a cage kept in the village, and then killed and consumed with extraordinary intricacy of ceremony. For the Ainu, the bear was an intercessor between humankind and the mountain gods. The sending home of the bear allowed the god to return to the home of the mountain gods and report on his time in the village, judging the villagers by the careful execution of the rite surrounding his death.
This ceremony is shared by the Sami of Scandinavia, the Gilyaks of Eastern Siberia, and the Inupiat and Gwich’in of North America. The hunt for a cub is conducted when the bear is denned in early spring, and meticulous instructions explain the use of the implement for killing the bear. Additional prescriptions detail the preparation and consumption of bear meat by a village, with specific gender restrictions. In the case of the Gwich’in, the skin is stretched, and the women preparing the skin must walk around it clockwise. Bones are separated at the joints, so that no bones are broken. Finally, the various cultures follow strict tradition with the ornamentation of the bear skull and special preparation of the bones in order to support the bear soul’s journey back to the home of the gods.
Environmental historian Paul Shepard suggested that these ancient cultures believed that bear is tutor to man. “The human question went beyond ‘How do we survive the cold winter?’ to ‘How do we survive the cold death?’ The bear more than any other teacher gave an answer to the ultimate question—an astonishing, astounding, improbable answer, enacted rather than revealed … the bear was master of renewal and the wheel of the seasons, of the knowledge of when to die and when to be reborn … the bear seems to die, or to mimic death, and in that mimicry is the suggestion of a performance, a behavior intended to communicate.”5
Shepard believed that the survival of the wilderness is key to the survival of the psyche of humankind. He contended that wilderness, and specifically the presence of and human coexistence with predators, and especially bears, which share habitat and omnivorous characteristics with humans, helped to form the psyche of homo erectus by teaching us to come together as communities to protect ourselves from predators. Grizzly expert Doug Peacock agrees that “a hundred thousand years of evolution bind our genome spiritually and psychologically to those ferocious beasts … the anchor of the wild keeps us tethered. Somewhere in the modern psyche we crave contact.”6
A tethering. A ferocity. This is the dichotomy I wrestled to hold in my mind, holding it gingerly away from my heart as it worked desperately to heal.
There was a time when I thought I would be happy if I died. The past year, I’d wanted to die, wanted to stop the pain of grief. But another time, after my freshman year in college, I’d hiked alone in Hatcher Pass in the Talkeetna Mountains north of Anchorage with Oakley, our golden retriever. Granite ridgelines sliced the clear Alaska air, carving away extraneous thoughts. When I brought pictures from that hike to college the next year, one roommate, a debutante from Louisiana, gasped, “Oh my God! Is that Switzerland?” No, more vast. More wild. More beau
tiful.
I had not seen a soul on my hike, and heated by exertion, I stopped to let my head hang back, feeling my pulse pounding at my throat and the breeze, cool from the snowfields, warm from the sun, passing over my skin. Oakley and I scrambled up a scree slope and walked along a ridge, stopping to rest where we could look across the verdant valley under a cerulean sky. There was no water near, so I squirted water from a bike bottle into Oakley’s mouth. He lapped it up appreciatively. A marmot whistle cut through the mountain air. Another answered from across the valley. I listened and thought I heard all the wisdom of the world. In sound and wind and light and blood, the pleasure I felt through every part of me could only be called erotic. I remember thinking that if I died, right there, right then, I would be happy with my life, and with my death. It was enough.
In these Arctic mountains, though, I wanted to suffer. I wanted to live, so that I could suffer, believing that if I was hurting more, I was somehow closer to Dad and Kathy, impossibly closer to the time of their deaths and thus closer to their lives. I wanted that pain, reaching for it with growing desperation in the moments it ebbed.
Even as we gained altitude, the ground remained boggy, and my spirits sagged. Because of permafrost, summer tundra is frequently soggy; there is nowhere for water to go. Arctic grasses grow clumped together, attracting and holding dust blown by the wind to build up peat around the base of the grass. This helps protect it in the deep freeze of winter, when icy blasts hurl frozen particles across the landscape. In the summer, though, the unwieldy tussocks foil foot placement, interrupting any rhythm of movement. Each step was a struggle. I put one foot in front of the other, ascending into cloud, driven only by hope and the familiarity of moving my legs up the side of a mountain.
Along the way a caribou antler, bleached white by the sun, contrasted sharply with the tundra. Both male and female caribou grow antlers and shed them every year, the females after calving, and the males after the fall rut. It seemed as good a spot as any to rest.
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