To mark my 100th (that's right!) blog post, a selection of photos and journal entries from my time in Alaska this summer.
5 May
The sky is teal against silhouettes of tall
pines, the half-moon reflected on the water, the white mountains lit
in stark contrast. This is the view from my window at Tutka Bay, and
though I haven't been here before, it feels good to be back. Back
where the moss is so thick you can lose your hand in it. Back to the
marine air, the rocky bluffs, the salty working docks with their
thick coils of rope and men clad in rubber and gulls reeling
overhead.
It is the same here, and yet it is
different. I have the ability to retreat indoors, to only look out
the window at the fine rain misting the spruce branches, catching the
sun in golden droplets before tumbling down to the calm, reflective
ocean. I shouldn't compare one place and one experience to another,
but still, I cannot help but notice how different it feels to be in
the midst of all this raw, wet beauty and not wake up every morning
with the scent of the forest rising to my nostrils, the sun creeping over the edge of my sleeping bag, the cold
air hugging my body. It's nice to wake up indoors and eat well and
have internet. But I do not feel as alive.
14 May
Everyone needs a little peace and quiet
in the sunshine. I need to write with a pen and paper, pausing to let
the ink seep in –- a different act, entirely, than the quick typing
of words on a keyboard. Here on paper, the delete key is less readily
available, and so I must stop and consider my words before they hit
the paper.
It is not solely the wilderness itself
that draws me in, but the people I find here. The people who turn
their backs on highways and shopping malls and television, who seek
solitude and, having found it, realize that in the emptiness they
have found others seeking the same thing. The wilderness itself
sustains, yes, but in the end there are few whom it can sustain
fully. The rest of us come here and take what we need from it and are
happy to run into each other eventually, to find companionship,
to someone to sit on the prow of a boat and drink a beer with and know
without speaking that they understand.
10 June
A rash of green is spreading up the
mountainsides, spreading north. A mottled, speckled green of a
million hues, it unfurls its tendrils and sends out its creeping
shoots slowly, imperceptibly, one day at a time.
I feel at times that it's bearable here
at the lodge, that I have the fortitude to stick with this job for
four more months and finish what I've started. I spend my days doing
menial tasks that challenge neither my body nor mind, but isn't there
some Buddhist philosophy in that –- letting go of the ego, losing
yourself in mundane tasks? I can read and write, use the internet,
sleep in a bed at night and perhaps even get a massage or play in the
garden or go for a hike once in a while. What perverse part of me
wants to trade that for more change and upheaval, days of sleeping in
the rain, weeks of hormone-crazy teenagers? Alaska Crossings has
offered me a guiding position, and while I'm sorely tempted to
accept, a part of me feels I should let that part of my life remain a
memory and continue to move on in a new direction. I tell myself I
should stay put here at the lodge. And then I wonder – why waste
time being unhappy? As Mary Oliver asked, “Tell me, what is it you
plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
14 June
Indecision: the story of my life. Stay
at the lodge or go back to Alaska Crossings? When I need to think, I
go to the sea, follow the shoreline aimlessly. I scramble up into the
woods when the cliffs and rocks become impassable, zigzag up and down
the pocket beaches. Here in Kachemak Bay, the rocky belly of the
earth crashes straight into the ocean, and in places there are gashes
where the earth itself has cleaved open into a mini sea-cave
accessible only at low tide. I crouch in one of these, feeling the
coolness of the earth, hearing the crackling of tens of thousands of
barnacles like a bowl of rice crispies. It is wet and dark. The rocks
drip with water. It seeps from above and falls one drop at a time
into the womb of the earth, echoing off the walls.
I emerge from the cave and clamber over
rocks strewn with the offerings of the shallow sea: triton shells,
mussels, sea weeds, chitons, limpets, butter clams, dead jellyfish.
The smell of the air is rich with life and death, growth and decay.
From above, in the forest, a chickadee sounds its two notes again and
again. I walk on and learn the secrets of this place: that dead
jellyfish hold water inside that gurgles and shifts when you hold
them, that the sacs of bladderwrack shoot water from pinprick holes
when squeezed, that barnacles really are alive, waving their fine
arms in the shallow water, reaching for a meal.
“The cure for anything is salt:
sweat, tears or the sea.” (Isak Dinesen)
23 June
So this is the trajectory my life is
going to take! It doesn't seem quite real. Yesterday, I quit my job
at the lodge and within two hours found myself thrown back on the
Homer spit, wandering among the tourists with a bewildered look on my
face, laden down with bags, without a home or a place to sleep or a
clue how I was going to get from Homer to Anchorage to Wrangell in
three days' time to return to my old job at Alaska Crossings. But
life works itself out, even when you make crazy decisions that seem
to make no sense in the moment. I struggle to make these big
decisions – to stay or to go – but in the end I always feel I've
made the right choice. My mother sent me a Chinese saying in an
email: “No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, go
back.”
I went back. Back to the Homer spit,
where, as I so often do in my travels, I was saved by the kindness of
strangers. I met up with a new friend, met more new friends and was
soon drinking a beer in the bright afternoon sunlight, laughing. I
went to a softball game (gem of small-town Alaskan summers!), tramped
through the woods and pitched my tent on the sandy spit yet again,
sitting around a fire under fluttering prayer flags, passing a bottle
of whiskey around. Traveling with Adam was fun, but I meet so many
more people when I travel alone.
There's an inherent danger in being a
solo female traveler, but in Alaska, despite the threat of bears and
weather and harsh landscapes, I have never felt safer. People here
are cut from a different cloth. Being a solo female traveler who
likes the outdoors also means that many of the new friends I meet
happen to be males, and therefore sometimes requires me to bluntly
dispel the myth that I want to sleep with them. But my new friend
Josh and I are frank with each other. He wants to have sex, I don't,
and after we establish that, I trust him enough to plan a backpacking
trip with him for the following day.
Which is how I end up writing in a mesh
tent away from the mosquitos (which were rabidly biting through my
shirt) on the gravel beach of Emerald Lake in Kachemak Bay State
Park. It's a postcard-worthy morning, the lake an oval mirror
reflecting green mountains tipped with white, a distant glacier, a
ridge of spruce trees. On days like today, Alaskan summer is the most
beautiful thing imaginable. As Edward Abbey wrote, “I am drowning
in light.”
24 June
I can hardly believe that this is real,
that I've left Homer and am flying back into the heart of the
rainforest, into the maze of islands and coves and ravines that makes
up southeast Alaska and the Inside Passage. I'm on the second leg of
a four-part flight from Homer to Wrangell, soaring over the land I
thought I'd left behind, returning to a part of my life I thought I'd
moved on from. It's a strange feeling, and I wonder what it will feel
like when the wheels of the plane hit the runway in Wrangell and I
see the old familiar places with older, more experienced eyes. In
part, it feels like a homecoming, and in part I'm worried that it
won't be as good as I remember. I'm worried that I've made the wrong
decision. I'm worried that I've forgotten what it takes to stay sane
and safe in the wilderness for six weeks with a group of teenagers
who make marginal decisions. But as I look down from my tiny airplane
window at the impenetrable treetops covering a misty, shadowy world
of moss and devil's club, I am mostly excited. I'm embarking on a new
adventure. I'm on the move.
Descending through the clouds into
familiar Petersburg, over a curving puzzle of green forest and
turquoise water. Glaciers tumbled down from the mountains, whitecaps
fleck the sea, the clouds gather thicker and lower. I truly, deeply
love this place. The land is what shapes the people, and the people
are what make the land so appealing. Where else do you board a plane
without having your carry-on inspected, smoke in bars, hop on
borrowed boats with strangers and trek 21 miles into the wilderness?
Where else can you sit alone on a warm, sandy beach naked in the
sunshine, brilliant mountains all around, cold beer in hand? Where
else do people carry halibut in their luggage?
Landed in Petersburg. The world is gray
and green, mountaintops shrouded in clouds. The airstrip is lined with
purple lupine, stunted spruce trees and friendly faces. One more stop
'til Wrangell town.
25 June
Wrangell, Alaska: a soggy, isolated
town of 1,800 souls perfectly content to remain soggy and isolated.
There's construction on Main Street, and Chief Shakes house is being
torn down and rebuilt with a grant from the Smithsonian, but mostly,
things are still the same. Gas is still $5 a gallon, everything is
closed on Sundays and the same people work the cash registers at the
IGA. Bruce, who rings up my purchase of GoldBond, lighters, coffee,
work gloves and chocolate bars, welcomes me back. Thirty years ago,
he says, he traveled all over the country and the state, looking for
something he couldn't quite articulate. When he arrived in Wrangell,
he knew he'd found it.
The cruise ships bypass Wrangell on
their way to other places and Wrangell gets by without their
business. The store owners and bartenders know what the tradeoff
would have been: Wrangell could have been another Ketchikan, or
Sitka, another stop for masses of people to disembark from their
floating resort, walk around, take pictures and spend money. The
shops could have been bought out by the cruise ship companies and
passed off as locally-owned businesses selling tourist kitsch. But
Wrangell refused to sell out, and whether it has suffered or thrived
because of it depends on your perspective. The cruise ships pass by
in the distance, sliding through the fog, and the stores on Main
Street sell fishing gear and marine hardware and rifles instead of
shot glasses and picture frames. On Saturday nights, the three dingy
bars are packed with people who know each other, people who know all
the songs on the jukebox, people who have chosen to stay.
2 July
The sun is shining for the first time
since I arrived in Wrangell on June 24, and how glorious it is! A
sudden break in the clouds, columns of them pulling away on every
side, retreating into the mountains and leaving us in a bowl of blue.
The sun sets earlier down here, and at 8 pm it is striking the
silhouettes of clouds, edging them with gold and silver. It is
hitting the smooth green hulls of our canoes, propped against a log
in a tidal meadow. It is catching the moisture on each blade of
grass, flecking the meadow with glimmers of light, turning the green
blades iridescent. In the distance, as always, there are mountains
capped with snow, the flat blue ocean, the forested hills. Pure
silence. Wild lupine and indian paintbrush and yarrow among the
rocks. A beach coated with rockweed and mussels and barnacles.
Today is day 6 of a 41-day wilderness
expedition. Yesterday it pissed rain for 24 hours and we were all
drenched and fairly miserable. We woke up this morning with the rain
dripping incessantly against our tarps and hauled ourselves out of
our warm, damp sleeping bags to slog through mud portaging canoes.
Carrying totes, opening and closing dry bags, tying knots: that is
what makes up the days, countless repetitions of each. Each day, we
consult our maps and pack our canoes and paddle to a new site, and
each one recalls vague, uncertain memories. I've been here before,
but when? What was it like? What happened here? The names and places
are returning to the realm of my reality, pulled from the cobwebs of
memory: South Wrangell Island, North Deer, South Long. A map of sea
and islands and coves and channels beings to re-emerge in my head.
When we left town, a search was
mobilized for our friend and former co-worker Colin. He'd been on a
solo traverse over a mountain pass with an inflatable kayak on his
back, and was going to drop into a tributary of the Stikine River and
paddle back to Wrangell. Five days before we left for program, his
family stopped getting his SPOT messages. Three days after he was
supposed to have returned to town, there was still no sign of him.
The night before we left, his gear and kayak were found on the
mountain: nothing else.
Now we get word on the sat phone that
the search has been called off. It's hard to process out here, away
from everything, caught up in the work of expedition. It doesn't feel
quite real. As Kate says, if you do this work long enough, you're
bound to have someone close to you get caught in an avalanche or
drown at sea or something of the sort. But that knowledge doesn't
prepare you for when it actually happens.
In town, they'll hold a memorial
service. Out here, we can only stand in the evenings on the same
points that Colin once stood on and look out to the sea, asking
questions that may never be answered.
3 July
It's 10:15 pm and I know that with a
5:30 am wakeup and more of the same for the next month, I should be
going to sleep. But under a tarp at the base of a massive, ancient
cedar, a huge porcupine just walked nearly into my sleeping area and
the encounter has left me wide awake. Most nights I sleep just fine
under a tarp. It leaves you feeling more exposed and vulnerable than
a tent, but in reality the thin nylon walls of a tent offer
protection from nothing but bugs and perhaps vision. I've adapted
easily to tarp life, and most nights I enjoy sleeping with my face
close to the spongy, pungent earth.
Every once in a while, though, it can
be slightly unnerving, especially when you're lying alone in the
shadowy half-darkness and hear the crackling of sticks, the rustle of
leaves, and you wonder whether you're imagining it or whether it's
real. Are you on edge for no reason but an overactive imagination?
But wait – there it is again. You begin to prepare, mentally –
noting where your bear spray is, where your escape routes might be.
You slowly unzip the top of your sleeping bag, just in case. You hear
it moving closer and then, suddenly, there it is, just a big
lumbering porcupine, but a large and spiny wild animal nonetheless
and how are you to know you haven't set up your tarp right on top of
his own favorite resting spot? He turns tail – fat tail like a
beaver, black and white quills swaying as he retreats – and
disappears into the thick forest. Long after he's gone, his presence
remains. This is his territory, not yours. You curl under your thin
later of synthetic protection reaching blindly for a headlamp while
he deftly navigates this jumbled mash of forest: stumps rising from
steep hills, cedar trunks fallen and criss-crossed, roots upended,
standing sideways, stands of devil's club like thorny walls. A place
entirely inhospitable to anyone with a pack full of gear and only two
legs to walk on, but home sweet home to a slow, waddling climber
covered in quills. Where will he go, now that I've interrupted his
evening stroll? Will he find another tree to climb, another bed to
sleep in and forget about my intrusion, or will a memory of me
shouting at him linger in his consciousness as he lingers in mine,
reminding him to stay away from the base of the big cedar?
5 July
Back at the floathouse for 15 hours to
prepare for the next 30 days in the wilderness. A flurry of cleaning
and repairing and organizing gear. Tomorrow we head off to an area
unknown to any of us, a tangled cluster of islands colored pale green
on our nautical charts: the Kashekarof group.
9 July
Through my sleep I hear the lonely echo
of foghorns, sounding twice. I open my eyes and see only the damp
darkness of the inside of my sleeping bag. Thrusting my head out to
check the time – 4:30 am – I enter a world shrouded in fog, the
moss-draped tree branches overhead spiraling into gray oblivion. Out
on the wet, rocky beach, the fog closes in from the ocean, shutting
out the islands and the mountains and channels that last night
defined our sense of place and helped us make sense of the chart
we've been following for days. Today we are lost in the fog, stranded
on an island of green in a sea of gray mist, ocean calm as a
mirror.
I follow a trickle back into the woods
to collect water. The stream is a series of stagnant pools full of
water stained a rusty brown by the tannin of tree roots. It seeps
from beneath logs, pooling around the edges of ferns and giant skunk
cabbage leaves. Everything is still and muffled except the croaking
of an unseen, solitary raven somewhere in the treetops. The forest
stretches on into the deep, thorny interior of the island, away from
the clean salt air of the sea, getting thicker, darker and heavier
until it finally disappears into an impenetrable tangle where every
living thing is soft and rotting.
11 July
Being dry is the only thing that
matters. Warmth you can create, but even when GoreTex and rubber and
neoprene keep the layer closest to your skin somewhat dry, it is
miserable having the outside of you dripping wet. It's miserable
having to peel off soggy layers before climbing into bed, knowing
you're going to have to put them on again in the morning. The rain
falls hard for hours and it seems like it will never stop, like I
will never be dry again. One of the girls wakes me up at 1 am with an
urgent whisper and I have to stand in the rain and change out a
pee-soaked sleeping bag and wonder why I choose to do this work.
Then, exhausted, I crawl back under my tarp and lie in the blackness
listening to the rain pinging and drumming against my tarp. Each drop
has its own weight; each inch of tarp its own tautness. The result is
a symphony of raindrops; the rhythm of a drummer with a thousand
arms. I sigh and close my eyes.
Dawn. Eagles swooping through the
opening blue sky, sunlight filtering green through the canopy of
trees. The world is washed fresh again; we can paddle with the wind
at our backs while whales spout in the distance. We are surrounded by
life: blankets of starfish and sea urchins as we glide over the
shallow rocks; silicone-like jellyfish pulsing in the waves; a carpet
of bull kelp floating on the surface of the ocean, glimmering in the
sun, stretching to the horizon. Seals pop their heads out and watch
us curiously as we pass, and a pile of sea lions basking on a
navigational marker grunt and snort at us, indignant at our
intrusion. In the distance, a barge stacked with brightly colored
shipping containers chugs up to Juneau behind a tug boat.
At camp, we get the girls to bed early
and wash our hair in a rushing freshwater stream. Our little cove is
calm except for the splashes of jumping fish, and we are dry and warm
and clean once again, remembering why we love this crazy life.
11 July
In the wilderness, there is nothing
extraneous, nothing that does not matter. In our manufactured,
efficient world, beauty may seem like a frivolous extra tacked on for
our pleasure, but out here, even the most delicate purple orchids
pushing from the litter of the forest floor are born of form and
function. Where everything has a place and a reason, beauty is
abundant: in the painted surface of this cove reflecting the sunset
sky; in the tiny shells that make up the beach; in the simplicity of
my tarp and sleeping back tucked between driftwood logs and clumps of
beach grass. We carry only what we need. We collect water, we move,
we cook food, gather wood, sleep. There is nothing extraneous, and
pure beauty in the simplicity. Nothing is wasted in nature.
What I dream about, under my tarp doing
paperwork: a cabin, planning for the winter, ordering five-gallon
buckets of dried fruit and nuts and grains, chord books and strings,
journals and pens and books. Planning and organizing, preparing,
chopping wood, making jams and sauces. Always by my side there is
some unseen person, some blank face yet to be filled in... who? When?
And when do I just go do it alone?
12 July
Cozy in my sleeping bag, ready to fall
asleep to the sound of dripping water – not rain, for once, but a
stream that dribbles over logs and cascades between shelves of fern.
I just talked to the office on the sat phone and agreed to do another
girls' program from late July to mid-September, and suddenly, this
all feels real. I'm back at Alaska Crossings, back where I never
thought I'd be. The life I was leading in New Hampshire seems so far
away, a glowing fire on a distant plain. My apartment, my car, my
desk in the newsroom – is it possible that that was the same year,
the same life?
16 July
Each day is a year, a full cycle of
seasons. Morning is spring, the world fresh and wet with dew.
Daytime, the summer sun beats on the earth, wakening it. Evenings are
fall, the light slanting golden, crisp air, wind rustling the leaves
before the darkness of winter settles in for the night.
We woke this morning to the overcast
skies of Alaska and then were transported up the Stikine River to the
Canadian border, to a different world. Hemlock and cedar is replaced
with cottonwood and alder, and the loamy forest floor has given way
to sandy beaches. The river is running at 20 feet, and tree trunks
are half-buried in silt. The fine grit gets everywhere, in our teeth,
our food, our fingernails, our eyelids. We sleep in tents pitched on
sandbars while the great river flows around us. The sun shines
sideways on our little island and the clouds are electrified with the
sunset, edged with neon. The sound of the river sliding past seeps
into our dreams.
17 July
The wind has picked up, blowing upriver
from the sea, pushing against the current. The clouds shift in the
wind, settling into the bowls and valleys of the mountains. We are
warm and dry and sandy, and I am so happy to be in this particular
place in the world, on this particular river: the longest undammed
river in North America, a paddler's dream. Waterfalls stream down
steep-walled mountains and drop into turquoise pools. In one week, I
leave this program to embark on another. After that, my life unfolds
blankly yet again, a thousand possibilities waiting to be written on
its pages.
