Rock, Paper, Fire

by Marni Jackson

  Leaving the raft and the bus, we hiked into Eagle, looking for a grocery store where we could stock up for the 155 miles ahead. What we found was a pile of salvaged canned goods and jury-rigged refrigerators crammed into a former tire warehouse. Five-foot chunks of river ice had torn apart almost every riverside building that spring, including the only grocery store in town. The trickle of tourist traffic that usually came here—aside from the daily flush of the Yukon Queen—had all but disappeared. After lively Dawson City, it was eerie. The gift shops were closed. No one was dressed in 1898 costume. No one waved. No one asked where we had come from or where we were going. These were ordinary Alaskans, many poor, just trying to get on with their work in the face of an often hostile environment. In our search for the Wild, we had almost forgotten that real people lived here; people with lives of their own and, a few months earlier, homes of their own. Spooked, we hurried back to our raft.

  We had almost floated by the last of the ruined buildings when a voice came thundering through a loudspeaker: “GET OFF THE RIVER NOW!”

  Hearts racing, paddling as hard as we could, we just barely managed to jam the raft against a rock before the river swept under a cutbank. On the shore was a U.S. customs officer, pistol on his belt, looking very unhappy. Evidently, we had also forgotten that we were crossing an international boundary. I dug out my passport, suddenly very aware of the six days since my last shower.

  The officer said nothing until he had our documents. “Where are you headed?” he demanded.

  “Circle,” Lee said, gesturing downstream.

  “Do you have maps?”

  I said yes.

  “Good,” he said after a moment. “People have had some problems before.”

  LEE AND I HAD just left Eagle and dusk was still hours away when the sun began to disappear. We hardly noticed it at first, but by the time we tied up our raft—now dubbed the Alaskan Intruder—the sun had become a dull, red ball on the leaden horizon. The sky in front of us, we realized, was full of smoke.

  That summer was one of the worst fire seasons in Alaskan history, with three forest fires burning a swath the size of a small country. Nobody had told us about this. The customs officer probably didn’t know they’d spread this far; out here a fire might burn undetected for days.

  Over the next couple of days, the smoke only thickened. Each night I woke up choking on it. On the third day, we saw an orange glow to the north and carried on nervously, late into the night, hoping to reach Circle as fast as possible.

  By the fourth day, we knew we must be getting close but had completely lost our position. From our maps, we knew that Circle was on a narrow channel to the left, at the point where the river starts to braid into the Yukon Flats, a silty labyrinth of shifting isles. The customs officer had warned us not to get lost in the Flats; the current there almost stops, so it would take many days to get to Fort Yukon, 140 miles downstream. People had died out there, he told us, when they stepped out of their boats and into the quicksand that lurked everywhere. We took him only half seriously. But, judging by the smoke, the Flats were now on fire too.

  The smoke was so thick that at times we could barely tell where the shore started. I dug into my pack and pulled out the GPS unit. I was checking the LCD screen every few minutes now, as the kilometres to Circle dwindled from thirty, to twenty, to two, to one. We stayed as close as we could to the right shore. If we didn’t, we risked being swept into one of the four channels leading into the Flats.

  Just before the last bend above Circle a sandbar appeared suddenly, forcing us to paddle hard to the right. Then a small island emerged from the smoke ahead. To our horror, the current started pulling us to the right, around the island, and our crude paddles did nothing to stop the drift. We passed over into the wrong channel and the current began to slow, signalling the start of the Yukon Flats.

  For the next forty minutes, we paddled until our shoulders screamed, fighting our way left across the current, panting for each smoky breath. Finally, exhausted, we looked up as a few houses appeared through the gloom of the left embankment, a faint orange glow in the sky behind them. We’d made it.

  We hiked up from the docks and down the dusty main street. Not a single person was in sight. At the gas station—the only building we could find that was still open—an attendant told us the town had been evacuated earlier that day. Only she and a few other locals remained to help the fire crews. Another woman, who had come to visit her firefighter boyfriend, was leaving late. We begged her for the last ride out of Circle, learning only later that the road was barricaded just a few hours after our escape. She dropped us off near Fairbanks with a couple of granola bars for the road.

  LEE AND I HAD had enough. I had a job waiting for me, and Lee had met a girl in Dawson just before we left. We hitchhiked back to Canada as fast as we could. After two days on the road, we caught a ride with Diane, an Alaskan of fifty-five years who took us back across the border to Canada in her sixteen-passenger minibus. It was a long drive, and all the grand boreal vistas of the Top of the World Highway were hidden behind a heavy coat of smoke. There was plenty of time to talk.

  Diane wasn’t particularly impressed by our story. There were plenty of places to tie up downstream of Circle, she said, and, anyway, we probably could have found one of the fire crews. The conversation wandered elsewhere. She told us how she could land a plane on muskeg better than most people with those fancy pilot’s licenses, how too many newcomers were making it hard to find big moose to shoot, and how she was so proud of the way her state had rallied behind “our hometown girl,” Sarah Palin. Then she told us exactly what she thought about that movie, Into The Wild, and played us a song that was not on the too-familiar soundtrack—a honkytonk parody written by “some local boys” and burned onto a cheap CD. It was called “Permafrost for Brains.”

  She also told us how devastating this fire would be. Out there in the Wild, fishnets were melting, cabins were burning to the ground, and livelihoods were going up in smoke. As acres of doomed forest rolled by, Lee and I sat quietly, buckled up in Diane’s bus. There was nothing more to say.

  Niall Fink

  NORMAN AND

  THE CROW

  IT WAS shortly after his wife died that Norman started talking to the crow. She was an old bird who nested at the edge of his trapline, and she told him where to find the rabbit runs and marten. In exchange, Norman brought her jerky and shared slabs of bannock.

  “Sorry I burned it,” he would say. “Myrtle used to do the baking.” But the crow didn’t mind. Both were glad for companionship.

  The crow had her nest beside a small lake where the beaver had built a single lodge. They met there for lunch every couple of days that winter, even through the long darkness of January.

  At first, Norman found it a bit strange talking to a bird. He hadn’t spoken with one since he was sent to residential school, eighty years before. The crow was surprised at this.

  “Were there no birds there?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “But they stopped talking to me. I think it was when I noticed the girls”—and they laughed at this, though both knew it wasn’t the girls that had changed things.

  When spring came, Norman continued to visit. The days were lazy and long, with lots of time to talk and tell stories. He couldn’t afford one of those new four-wheelers and he couldn’t ride his old mare as far as he used to, so they met halfway down the trapline, on a hill where a breeze kept the mosquitoes away. From the top, they could see the mountains in the east.

  “I remember that one,” he said, pointing to a snowy peak off in the distance. “They were going to put the road through there.”

  “What road?” asked the crow.

  “The Canol. A big American pipeline back in the war days, when they needed oil to fight the Japs. The army bought four head of horse from me and shot them for dog mush. Then they told me and some boys to scout a trail to the Wells. It took forty days, and we had to hunt two moose when the horse meat
ran out. They never even used our route.”

  “Why not?”

  “I guess they found a better one. It was a rough trail. But I always wanted to go back, you know. That’s God’s country out there. No white men or Indians or government agents.”

  “Are there any crows?”

  “Maybe. All I saw was a big black wolf and the two moose. Sometimes I think about how lucky he was, that wolf. The road would have changed everything.”

  In the fall, Norman shot a moose. The crow told him where a bull was feeding, and it was the biggest Norman had seen in many years. Years ago he would have hung the antlers above his cabin door, but he was too old for that now. It took him two and a half days to pack the meat out, and another three to make jerky.

  One morning soon afterward, when snow covered the hillsides and Norman knew that it would stay for good even on the south slopes, a government man came to visit his cabin.

  “Hello Mr. Martindale,” the man said. He had thick glasses and a clean blue parka.

  “What do you want?” asked Norman, who had bannock waiting in the oven.

  “Just to talk, sir. Please understand, I’m not here to take anything from you. I’m with social services. Your daughter, Mrs. McLeod, asked us to speak with you.”

  “What does she want?”

  “Mrs. McLeod said she was worried about you living alone out here. She asked us to talk to you about the new seniors’ centre in Whitehorse. You see, this is a very new facility, and I think you’ll appreciate some of its benefits . . .”

  “You tell Clare I’m just fine,” he said, and turned back for the cabin door.

  “Sir, please hear me out. This is a special facility for aboriginals.”

  Norman turned to face the man with his back straight like a gun barrel.

  “I’m not an Indian, and I don’t want your house or your talk,” he said. Then he went back inside to pull his blackened bannock out of the oven.

  When he was sure that the blue man had left, Norman saddled his horse and rode all the way to the little lake. His trail was not very long—it had shrunk every year for the last thirty—but he had not ridden that far in a long time now and it hurt him very much.

  He waited below the crow’s nest until the sun was gone and the snow was blue with twilight, when she came flying home on those big black wings.

  “They want to take me away again,” Norman said. The crow listened.

  When he was finished, they were both silent for a while.

  “I won’t go.”

  When he had said this, he felt strong again. He noticed that it was getting cold and that he should build a fire, so he hobbled the mare and pulled his axe from his saddle roll and then set to work.

  The crow watched him and helped as much as she could by bringing small twigs for kindling. Norman made a tall stack of logs and started a waist-high blaze, then settled into a bed of spruce boughs between the two, reclining on his saddle. His back hurt and he was tired, but the stars were out and he was happy to be beneath them. The crow sat on top of the wood stack, black as the night sky, and talked.

  Norman did not want to think about the home in Whitehorse, but now it was on his mind and he could not think of anything else, even though it was the end of fall and the crow had many things to tell him about the rut.

  “I told them I’m not an Indian,” he said.

  “Are you?” asked the crow.

  “I think I was, once.”

  “Then what are you now?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “What are you?”

  “I’m a crow,” she said.

  “Then I’m a man.”

  Soon they were both too tired to say anything more, and Norman began to doze. He would wake with the cold each time the fire died, add more wood, and then fall asleep again. Every time he woke, the crow was sitting there, watching him.

  As the flames began to die for the third or fourth time, Norman had a dream. In it, he woke up by the red coals and was not a man anymore but a wolf, a big, black one. The crow was still sitting on the wood stack, and she greeted him.

  “Hello, wolf,” she said.

  “Hello, crow,” he said.

  “It’s getting light.”

  “We should be off now.”

  “Where to?” asked the crow.

  “Follow me,” he said, and started off east toward the snowy mountain, where a faint blue glow had appeared. The crow flew above his head as he loped along on four tireless legs.

  When the searchers found him two days later, he was covered in a white blanket of fluffy snow. A crow was perched on the spruce beside him.

  One of the men took a piece of firewood from the stack and flung it at the bird.

  “Filthy animals,” he said. “Can’t leave the dead alone.”

  But the crow could not hear this. It was already above the snowy treetops, black wings whistling as it flew eastward, out of the forest and into the mountains where no roads are built and wolves are strong and black.

  Andy Kirkpatrick

  WRITING ON THE WALL

  IN EARLY September of 2011 I packed up a lifetime’s worth of climbing equipment, piled it high inside my tired green van, said goodbye to my two children, and set off alone to drive over 1,000 kilometres from the U.K. to Norway. I bought only one-way tickets as I boarded ferries and crossed toll bridges; I had no idea when I would be coming back, and had no intention of doing so until I had climbed the Troll Wall.

  The Troll Wall is the highest big wall in Europe, higher even than Yosemite’s El Capitan. But unlike El Cap, bronzed and perfect in the Californian sun, the Troll is made from darker matter. I joke that I never believed in God until I saw El Capitan, but when I first trembled up through the forests and mists, rocks whizzing down from above, and touched the Troll, I knew there was a devil.

  Three times before I had made the long journey north to the mystical Romsdal Valley to climb the Troll: in summer and in winter, alone and with a partner. Three times I had been given lessons in fear and doubt like no other, then sent away to dwell. The poet-climber Ed Drummond called the Troll “the altar” and said only those who had climbed it would understand.

  But at the age of forty, I had put away all ideas of climbing the Troll. It was a thing for the younger, more foolish me, a climb I would point younger, more foolish climbers toward, or even boast about: “Ah, yes—I tried to climb the Troll Wall three times.”

  Then it struck, as I sat at home looking at flights to America, dreaming of warm Yosemite rock, that it was not yet time to give up on the nightmare of the Troll.

  And so I made plans to return that summer and attempt a route called Suser Gjennom Harryland, a 600-metre-high route named after a Swedish pop song. I also chose to blog every day, taking an iPad on the Wall. Perhaps, I thought, like a dieter who posts pictures of what he eats at every meal, that by sharing the experience I would gain some extra level of self-control, and lessen the weight of what I was about to do. Also, as a writer who had played about with Twitter, Facebook, and blogs on other climbs, I was fascinated by the rawness of what I had written on those trips—including some things I had never dared reread.

  When you attempt to solo a route such as the Troll, you are very close to insanity—while at the same time possessing levels of self-discipline and awareness that are beyond anything you will experience anywhere else. You are hunting the lion. That’s why I find what I have written during my climbs so hard to revisit: This is not my voice, I think; this is the voice of someone unhinged. Plus, the writer in me hates how rough and unedited it all is, like something a sixteen-year-old would write. But these are also the unfiltered words of a man who is struggling, with taped-out sore fingers and eyes dropping, relieved the day has ended and fearful of what the following will bring.

  Although what follows might be the least polished prose in this collection, I suppose, in my defence as a writer, it is the purest form of mountain writing.

  12TH SEPTEMBER 2011

  I’m b
ack in the campsite feeling well and truly wrung out. Today I had to carry the first of two loads up to the base of the route. A total of about 100 kilos. The way up is always a nightmare due to the awful state of the loose screes. Carrying a 50-kilo haul bag up such terrain just sucks it out of you. What makes it worse is that since my last visit the path that normally leads along a river to the screes has become an obstacle course of fallen trees.

  So just getting to the scree was like some sick assault course, climbing over trees, crawling under trees, bushwhacking, and generally getting my ass kicked.

  From the base, the route looked wicked steep, with one really nasty-looking first pitch: muddy, slimy, and green.

  I sorted out the gear. I knew I should lead the first pitch before going back to my camp. But as I procrastinated, the mist came down and it seemed like it was almost dark. Very spooky, and I took it as a sign to leave the first pitch till my next visit.

  I always forget (or the memory is erased) how much backbreaking work is involved in a big wall solo, and that anything beyond El Cap, with its short and easy approach, is a lot of work. I guess with this sort of climb, it’s all about work, and the knowledge that you did everything yourself. My body already feels as if it’s had a right good kicking due to the number of talus tumbles I’ve had over the last two days (hands, knees, and elbows have had a real bashing).

  Onwards!

  14TH SEPTEMBER 2011

  “The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.”

  —“The Long Rain” by Ray Bradbury

  Yep—it’s raining in Romsdal.