Drilling the Arctic comes with a 75 percent chance of a large oil spill

Imagine an oil spill off the coast of San Diego. Now imagine the nearest port from which to launch an emergency response is in Seattle, more than a thousand miles away, and that San Diego is suddenly bereft of grocery stores, leaving most residents dependent on the ocean for sustenance. Then take the Southern California ocean in your mind’s eye, increase the biomass, encase it in ice, bathe in darkness for a few months, and sprinkle with polar bears. That’s what an oil spill in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea would look like.

Arctic sea ice.

NASA/Kathryn Hansen

Whether such a spill has a chance to happen is largely dependent on what the Interior Department does with a draft Environmental Impact Statement released this month by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). The report examines Lease 193, a controversial sale that, in 2012, enabled Shell to drill the first exploratory wells in the Chukchi in decades. Since then, drilling has been held up by Shell’s own grave missteps and by a series of lawsuits, which prompted an appeals court this January to throw out the previous environmental impact statement because it cited an “arbitrary and capricious” amount of recoverable oil....

Read the rest here. 

I went to the desert.

I went to the desert because it had been too long since I'd slept in the cold air, under the stars. I went because I had nowhere else to go. I went because for the first time in a long while, I was alone.

Jesse left for Peru the day before, to be gone for six weeks. I don't mind these long absences, I tell myself. They sweeten the time we spend together, and give me the space I crave – the space to sit in my pajamas long into a Sunday morning, writing and puttering, or to walk outdoors at my own pace, learning the stories of the land.

And so I sit on a sun-warmed slab of sandstone on the far western edge of Colorado, where Utah's red rock canyons have seeped across the border. North, the Grand Valley is a tabletop wound through by the Colorado River; south, the mesas and cracked canyons of this country spread out like an intricate taproot, a living network of veins and capillaries. I sit at the nexus of five canyons, at the center of a wobbly star pressed into the earth. The sun slips lower and my pack remains where I dropped it; the thought of spending 13 hours of darkness out here is unnerving, and I hold out the possibility that maybe I'll hike back to my car.

At 4:30 p.m. on this mid-winter day, the circle of sun drops behind the canyon wall, and I put on another layer of clothing. I think of the people who wander the desert alone. I think of Jesse, who hikes under the moon until midnight. I tell myself that there's nothing to be afraid of, and yet the prospect of my thoughts stretching out across 13 hours of fireless night fills me with trepidation.

Every so often a plane passes overhead, and as I watch their tails of exhaust cross my lone slice of sky, I think of Jesse in one of them looking down on the earth and my heart nearly breaks.

The last stripe of light hugging the rim of canyon disappears. The croaking raven has flown away. The winter sunset is not a real sunset at all, just a gradual deepening of light from washed out blue to indigo to purple to black. In the darkness I read and wait for the moon to rise. The canyons are frosted and still. It's probably about 20 degrees.

***

In the morning, the sun turns the red rock wall behind me a burnished orange, then creeps down slowly, lighting the juniper branches and dead grasses until it's warmth finally reaches my camp. The glint of it off my cooking pot is a beautiful thing, and I am inexpressibly happy to be alive and in this place.

Last night, the moon lit up the entire canyon, and a great horned owl called again and again.

the latest blow in the fight for pebble mine.

Last summer, the excavation of some of the world’s richest mineral deposits – and the degradation of some of the world's richest salmon habitat ­– seemed well within the grasp of global mining interests. But with the release of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's long-awaited environmental assessment on Jan. 15, the development of Pebble Mine in southwest Alaska's Bristol Bay slipped just a little bit further from reach – the latest and perhaps most significant in a series of defeats for the embattled project.

The EPA assessment confirms Pebble’s potential to severely damage salmon runs, using stronger language than previous drafts (“could” has turned to “would”) and describing in detail the acidic waste that could leach into watersheds even under routine operation. The report is also turning the tide of political opinion. "Wrong mine, wrong place, too big," U.S. Sen. Mark Begich told the Anchorage Daily News after reviewing it. Begich, a Democrat, is the first member of Alaska's congressional delegation to publicly take a stand against Pebble Mine, though previous politicians have also opposed it. Former Gov. Tony Knowles called it “terrifying.”

Despite its gargantuan size – the mine itself would consume up to 94 miles of stream and 5,350 acres of wetlands, with an additional 64 streams affected by road building, the EPA found – Pebble has come to represent more than just a fight for one place or one ecosystem. Even people who have never stood on the banks of a river teeming with salmon are deeply invested in this corner of Alaska as a symbol of wildness, a vestige of the ecological and cultural riches that were once bountiful across North America. As HCN senior editor Ray Ring wrote after visiting Bristol Bay last summer, "the restoration efforts I'd reported on (in the American West) were kind of desperate, almost pathetic" in comparison: "The Lower 48 will never regain the kind of wildness that survives in Alaska."

Read the rest of my story by clicking here: http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/final-epa-report-the-latest-in-a-series-of-blows-to-alaskas-pebble-mine

the fastest woman in the West

Last week the media jumped all over the story of a 30-year-old vegan hiker who broke the speed record for the Pacific Crest Trail. Dude deserves credit for sure, but it's important to note that he had help from Whole Foods, and his record was for a supported hike. Far more impressive was a lone female hiker who arrived at the end of the 2,650-mile trail at midnight the night before, exhausted and alone. Heather Anderson, a 32-year-old hiker, has been kinda ignored by the press, but earlier this month she became the fastest woman to ever hike the PCT and the fastest self-supported hiker of any gender, shattering the previous record by four days. This girl -- who was overweight in high school and didn't get outside til she was 20 -- hiked an average of 44 miles a day for SIXTY STRAIGHT DAYS. No matter what you think about speed-hiking, that deserves some recognition.

http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/the-fastest-woman-in-the-west

In praise of inefficiency.

Tonight I lay in bed reading The Monkey Wrench Gang, wanting just to escape into a story, to forget for a moment about the craft of writing and editing and pitching stories that consumes my days. But once you've entered that world it's impossible to close the door and leave it behind.

I remember hating my high school English teacher for forcing me to think about structure and dialogue and other writers' tools that until then I'd taken for granted. But once I began to notice those things, they were impossible to ignore. No longer could I open the covers of a book and simply lose myself. Rather than diminish the pleasures of reading, though, my reluctant literary education made me appreciate a well-written story even more, in the same way that a well-educated oenophile better appreciates a quality bottle of wine.

So here I am, three beers into forgetting a day rife with sentences and structure, thinking I could snuggle into some pajamas, slide under the covers and enjoy some Edward Abbey. I got two pages in when when I read a passage: "Hayduke reflected. That was true. There was truth in that statement," and the subconscious editor in me flared up. Or rather, the writer who lives in fear of the subconscious editor. Most editors I've worked with wouldn't think twice about cutting the second sentence. Superfluous! Repetitive! The sirens go off. The words slashed. Good writing is all about efficiency. Clarity and brevity are the name of the game.

The books I read say that writers who break the rules are allowed do so only after they've mastered them. Maybe by the time Edward Abbey wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang he'd already reached that point. Maybe Dave Eggers and Hunter S. Thompson had to spend years proving their adroit efficiency before they were able to get a single rambling train-of-consciousness sentence published. But you know what I say? I say fuck that.

Everywhere I turn, I'm encouraged to be efficient. My car is very fuel efficient. There are only 24 hours in the day, so I must be efficient with my time. Most annoyingly, I'm encouraged to be efficient when I head into the backcountry. Nature has no room for superfluity – even the most extravagant flower is born of function – so perhaps it makes sense that we are stripped to the bare necessities when we venture outside. But really? Ultralight backpackers who cut the tags off their clothing to save weight and measure their freezedried food by the ounce seem only to further distance themselves from the natural world, more in tune with the machinery of urban life than the meandering nature of the trail. When I used to work on trail crew, the attitude was that the more weight you carried, the tougher you were. Leave sparseness to the monks. I find beauty in the excess weight, the unnecessary sentences, the pleasure in lugging a bottle of beer or a book of poetry 12 miles into the backcountry. I don't want my life — or my writing — stripped to the bare minimum. I want to spill over the edges, explode with extravagance, resist the pressure to reduce word count and fit only into the space allotted. Ramble on. 

tongass transition.

Phasing out old growth logging in the Tongass National Forest may be the timber industry's dying gasp -- but local communities are already moving on. Read all about it in my newest blog for High Country News:

https://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/tongass-transition

without a trace.

 

Colorado's Weminuche Wilderness

Recently I voted in a one-question online survey for a chance to win a pair of sunglasses. The question was: Do You Leave No Trace?

I really wanted to win the sunglasses, so I checked the box marked "Yes, mostly." I mean, I consider that a fairly accurate response, but I also thought that if I was more truthful and checked ones of the boxes marked "Um, I take a rock every now and then," or "Don't camp within 200 feet of water? Really?", I might jeopardize my chances of winning the sunglasses. And did I mention the sunglasses were really sweet?

The author of the survey, who comes across as a strong Leave No Trace proponent, wrote that "LNT has done a fantastic job of getting the message out, and, incredibly, without coming across like a nag. Too many wilderness proponents are shrill, annoying, and self-righteous... but Leave No Trace principles are clearly grounded in our own best self-interest. And they aren’t so difficult to follow.

"But," he concluded, as if with one eyebrow raised, staring right at me, "Do you?"

LNT as a concept is easy enough, but the seven LNT principles (memorized by anyone who wants a wilderness job) are pretty rigid. I clearly remember my first night camping on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River (a Wild and Scenic River as revered as the holy grail) and asking my group innocently if I should toss the stubby carrot-ends from our dinner into the churning, silty river.

My friend Chris looked at me aghast. "Do you know," he asked, his voice dripping with italics, "where we ARE?"

Fair enough. But fair, too, that the sediment in the river would likely have ground those three carrot stubs into shreds that soon would have joined the bits of leaves and other biomass in that turbulent, dynamic ecosystem.

There are diehard LNT proponents (like my friend Chris) who will never build a fire in the backcountry, who eat their apple cores, wipe their ass with pinecones, and practice the endearing habit known as self-sumping: wherein, after cooking and eating a meal, one sloshes an inch of precious water into the pot, uses one's grubby fingers to scrub off all remaining grease, bits of food, burned tidbits, etc., then drinks the resulting dirty dishwater to avoid leaving any bits of food behind. Though self-sumping was born in environments where water is precious or food smells might attract grizzlies, it's now practiced nonchalantly even in environments where it's completely unnecessary. Some people actually claim to enjoy the taste of dirty dishwater.

The alternative to self-sumping is to dig a hole far from where you'll be sleeping, place a piece of mesh or a hash of twigs over it, pour the dishwater into the hole, fling the bits of food caught in your sieve into a trash bag, then cover the hole. Is this a pain in the ass? Maybe. If you're not in bear country, can you simply fling the water into the bushes? I say, why not?

In parts of Alaska, Leave No Trace is almost laughable. There are places so rarely visited by humans, where the land is so fecund and so resilient that it erodes, eats up, grows over, and washes away any prints left by a lonely camper within a matter of days. There are places where the rivers are so enormous and silty and filled with hungry organisms that they immediately devour last night's leftover spaghetti. Should campers in such places be ashamed into not carrying out a rock as a memento when miners a few hundred miles away are blasting into watersheds with TNT?

I believe that Leave No Trace is a worthy principle to teach anyone new to backcountry travel, or anyone who believes that burying toilet paper or tossing orange peels off the trail are acceptable practices. But after a while, you (hopefully) learn that LNT is just that: a principle, not a set of unbendable rules. Obviously, respecting fire bans and leaving cultural artifacts are important, but there's a lot to be said for having a campfire: not only when it's necessary for warmth or to dry out, but to help ensure that kids or even wilderness newbies have a positive experience in a place that can otherwise be cold and scary. There's a lot to be said for being hands-on: for picking flowers and edible plants, for catching frogs, for being the kind of kid who has a rock collection. There's a lot to be said for leaving the hard-packed trail behind and venturing into the unknown.

There are places to rejoice in these small vagrancies, and places not to. It's more important to practice LNT on highly used lands that receive a lot of impact, or in sensitive environments like alpine or desert areas. And while I often walk off trail, choose a waterfront camp or take home a porcupine quill, I always pick up others' trash and carry out my own. It's all a matter of judgement.

For information's sake, the seven Leave No Trace principles:

Plan ahead and prepare
Travel and camp on durable surfaces
Dispose of waste properly
Leave what you find
Minimize campfire impacts
Respect wildlife
Be considerate of other visitors

 

Waterfront camping on the Stikine River, British Columbia

sacred rivers.

San Juan River, Utah
Honaker Camp
May 22

When I'm standing in front of a body of water, I can brush my teeth forever.

The air is perfectly warm against my bare shoulders, alive with the chirping of crickets, the gurgle of river and a rustle of wind. I'm not getting paid much to be here, running a gear raft down the San Juan River with a school group, but the idea that I'm getting paid at all to be on a trip I otherwise would have paid for still astonishes me. It astonishes me that I walked into a pub and got this job; that I've managed to see so much of the world this way. It astonishes me that three weeks ago I was in a New Zealand rainforest. How is it possible to move so quickly from one world to another, from green rainforest to ocher desert just like that? Sometimes science fiction seems more plausible than reality -- Dune, for example, where the desert-world exists on another planet entirely. Here, it's mind-blowing that this is one world, one month in a lifetime of months.

Bats swoop overhead. On a muddy, serpentine river cut through towering sandstone cliffs, the sky becomes small, a misshapen canvas of moonlight outlined by the silhouettes of cliffs. The full moon traverses across this oblong patch of sky, and stars come to life in its wake. As with everywhere else I've been, this world is defined by water -- the lack of it, and the power one ribbon of water has to cut through eons of rock.

May 23
Camp three

Days on the river, long and hot, sun beating between canyon walls, onto the brims of our hats, into water thick and muddy. Our boats are small spots of blue against vertical cliffs of red. The sand blows hot, scouring everything. In the afternoon, when I'm tired from rowing, the sun drops behind a wall and brings shade, cool and beautiful, the colors of dusk painting the canyon walls in the middle of afternoon heat, the burnt red striations in the rock becoming hazy and soft. Fighting off a dehydration headache, drinking as much water as possible, I row the heavy gear boat in the back. I challenge myself, thinking about lines and form and technique. I mess up and get myself out of my messes with no one around to see. I try to learn. I get frustrated, landing on the rocks I want to avoid, and repeat to myself like a mantra: don't look at where you don't want to go. Focus on one line. Nervous before a big rapid, I nail it and surge with confidence, only to get stuck on a teeny submerged rock later on. There's so much time to think, but I think about little except the river.

From Siddhartha: "I am only a ferryman, and it is my task to ferry people across the river. I have transported many, thousands; and to all of them, my river has been nothing but an obstacle on their travels. They travelled to seek money and business, and for weddings, and on pilgrimages, and the river was obstructing their path, and the ferryman's job was to get them quickly across that obstacle. But for some among thousands, a few, four or five, the river has stopped being an obstacle, they have heard its voice, they have listened to it, and the river has become sacred to them, as it has become sacred to me."

Now, at night, the moon rises from within a canyon and illuminates the cliffs like a spotlight.  The moon-shadows of mesas on the cliff look like a city skyline. From deep within the canyon, desert frogs scream like pterodactyls.

May 24
Grand Gulch camp

Another magical day in the desert. The last four miles or so of river today were stupefyingly dull except for getting beached on the occasional sandbar, and I was prepared for a lackluster final camp. But Grand Gulch is grand indeed -- breathtaking, surreal. Spillover pools of clear, still water surrounded by oases of green, climbing in tiers higher and higher up a side canyon, each layer revealing a new world. There's more life and diversity in this desolate landscape than in the moisture-laden city where I grew up. I spend the final evening wandering around snapping photos and learning new flowers and cacti, birds and insects and lizards.

the beauty of simplicity.

 

Aldo Leopold: "Experience... is actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living."

Life is more beautiful when reduced to the essentials. It seems at times like we are surrounded by superfluousness since birth, at least here in America. The accumulation begins when we're still in the womb, at a baby shower – so many things in so many boxes, and really, is the convenience of a new gadget offset by the inconvenience of organizing a house full of stuff?

Some stuff is unnecessary but beautiful – pottery, I think, and books and glass and art – and therefore necessary for its beauty. We need beauty. But so much of what fills our lives is just throwaway clutter. We think of ourselves as consumers, but really, it's our habits that consume us. There are people I love dearly who are convinced of the necessity of changing one's curtains twice a year, ironing the doilies, and keeping the exterior of their cars impeccably clean. They become stressed when they lack the time for these perceived necessities.

These, of course, are not earth-shattering observations. In an increasingly complex world, we are urged at every turn to simplify. But instead of actually doing it, we buy a magazine about simplifying our lives and add it to the stack of Things To Read, after which it's relegated to Things To Organize and Dust, and later, Things To Recycle. Rarely does anyone truly downsize: when we decide to get rid of something, we eventually buy something else to take its place.

Spartanism is an ugly alternative, though, and I certainly don't want it. There are few things I love more than going to a flea market and spending a morning pawing through other people's junk, marveling at the discarded bits of life that are sold and sold again, cycled through generations and across borders. I walked away from one last weekend with a cast iron pan – something I hope will last a lifetime, but I don't delude myself. Tastes change. Even while espousing against it, I add more clutter to my life with great enthusiasm.

And yet caught in the cycle, I pause. Past a certain point, more stuff unequivocally equals less time. Today I scoffed at my mother when she said she'd be happy living in a one-room cabin, but my grandmother – who is one of the people convinced she needs to do housework that I find completely unnecessary – defended the statement, reminiscing about the times she lived on the road for months in a small RV after she and my grandfather retired. She loved the simplicity of having everything its place in her tiny home on wheels; it was like being on a ship, where everything has a function and nothing is extraneous.

I've experienced this myself: traveling, to an extent, is an exercise in simplicity, living off only what you can carry on your person. I did it for years. But the truest example of this kind of beauty has come from my time with Alaska Crossings, when, for seven weeks at a stretch you live fully in the present day. Every morning you wake up and think only about the essential needs of the group: getting from point A to point B safely, finding water, gathering wood and making a fire, cooking food, setting up shelter, and sleeping. You move no faster than your own arms or legs can carry you. You live by the weather and the tides. You find water from the earth, and sleep under the trees. There are no bills to pay, no errands to run; no distractions from the important work of building relationships and living unobtrusively in the wilderness -- and somehow, the outside world carries on without you and you find you can still be happy.

In nature, as on a tidy ship, there is nothing without purpose. It's only during these times living in the bush that I've come to understand what's truly important and what can fall away as easily as a leaf from a tree, and even as I pack my car full of stuff to take with me to Colorado, I'm grateful to have had the opportunity. 

where the wild things are

 

Why does it matter that we preserve wilderness in the United States?

Some people argue that we need to preserve wilderness for its own sake; others that wild places heal and replenish the human soul, and are necessary to our very being. There is a current wave of “neo-environmentalists” who argue wild places have economic and social value and should be preserved for those reasons. The point can also be made that wild plants and animals may hold medical secrets that could benefit humans, and there are countless other reasons stretching across time and literature and academia. But none have held up against our ongoing march toward progress.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Ralph Beistline from Alaska ruled against afederal Fish and Wildlife proposal to protect a 187,000 square mile chunk of the Arctic – an area larger than California – from oil and gas exploration to preserve rapidly shrinking polar bear habitat. Judge Beistline's ruling was applauded by nearly every public figure in Alaska: Governor Sean Parnell called the ruling a victory against “the latest in a long string of examples of the federal government encroaching on our state's rights.”

I have never been inside the Arctic Circle, and I have never seen a wild polar bear. I do not have personal experience of the financial and physical struggles of families living on Alaska's North Slope. But I like to think that I have a degree of empathy, and I've worked closely with Alaskan teenagers who have come from such families. I've spent many weeks in the wilderness with them and many hours paddling canoes and talking with them and I think that in the process I've gotten a glimpse into life in villages of the far north. It doesn't sound easy. But a line has to be drawn somewhere.

Though I haven't met with a polar bear in the wild, I have watched one at the Chicago Zoo – a massive creature with a range of hundreds of miles in the wild, forced to swim in circles in an artificially blue pool in 90 degree heat in the middle of Chicago. I've also encountered a good number of wild Alaskan brown bears, and their smaller black cousins. I've paddled a canoe next to a swimming brown bear, watched them snatch salmon from a river and spied on them through binoculars as they lumber over brown tundra. And I have seen enough other large animals – sharks, manta rays, whales, wolves, moose and buffalo in the wild – to know the contradictions that exist in such creatures: violence and grace side by side, power on one side of the coin and fragility on the other.

In response to Judge Beistline's ruling, Gov. Parnell issued a statement that he is “pleased the State of Alaska was able to fight off this concerted effort to kill jobs and economic development.” Meanwhile, environmentalists elsewhere in the U.S. have raised their collective megaphones to express outrage over the decision, protesting on behalf of the bears. All well and good, but their voices aren't heard in the one place where it matters most: Alaska, which, as a state, sued the federal government for trying to intervene in local affairs. Alaskans know that a bunch of liberals in Washington D.C. don't know shit about what goes down in northern Alaska. It's a different country up there, a different culture. And when students are dropping out of school to hunt walrus to support their family, it's hard to turn down development that brings jobs and hope to a region still struggling to define itself in the modern world.

In New Zealand, where I am spending six months, there are no large native mammals. The only native land species of any substance were the moa – large emu-like birds that were hunted to extinction by the Maori – and the Haast eagle, which died along with their main food source, the moa. True there are dolphins and whales in New Zealand's waters, but it is utterly strange to tramp through thick forest, beneath towering peaks and glistening glaciers, in deep valleys that seem as wild and remote as you can get – and not have the slightest fear of running into something that can kill you. Edward Abbey said that it ain't wilderness unless there's something big out there that can kill you, but perhaps he had never been to New Zealand. It's plenty wild down here on the South Island, but you can cook dinner right in your tent without fear of a bear attack and walk barefoot up the trails without worrying about a snakebite.

In a way, it's freeing: a hiker's paradise, free of danger as long as you bring the right clothing and don't get lost. It offers a relaxed sort of wilderness experience, and that's a nice change after spending months camping in bear country. But imagine a world where all the wild places were like that? It would get boring pretty fast. Part of the allure of spending time in the wilderness is not knowing what you'll see, what you might run into around the next bend. There's a sense of trepidation and excitement. There's the knowledge that you're not the biggest, baddest thing out there.

So why preserve wilderness? Because it's of value to use as a species, because we need it as much as it needs us, economically and spiritually and ecologically. Preserve wilderness for its own sake, in the spirit of altruism. And preserve wilderness because I personally do not want to live in a world where buffalo are nothing but a roadside attraction on the outskirts of Yellowstone and polar bears swim in hopeless circles in Chicago and people can walk in the wild places without any chance of encountering something that bigger than they are, something very much alive and breathing.

Alaska journal, part 2

Dug this out of my journal from the summer, back when I was in Alaska.
 

4 August

Another month, another program. I forget what it was like, to not be fully absorbed in your job, to not live, eat and breathe it. In a way, it is too consuming: I have little time or inclination to write or be creative. That part of me falls away as easily as a label peeled off a bottle, and I wonder whether I have the self discipline to conjure it back up when I leave. Do I need the structure of a writing job to live the life of a writer, or can it be like flipping a switch: wilderness guide one week, writer the next? How are these two parts of me conjoined, and where do they diverge? Most importantly, how can I connect them?

On the other hand, it is a blessing to be fully present in each moment. I am absorbed by the girls in this program, the guide team, the group, the expeditions, the daily tasks and routines – every piece of it requires my undivided attention until the extraneous thoughts drift away into the cobwebbed corners of my mind. Today I was doing paperwork and looked at the date – 8.4.12 – and had to pause to consider how unreal is seems. Has it really been nine months since my heart was stomped on like a burning cigarette on a cold night? Now, days pass and I hardly think of him except with a twinge of regret that it wasn't what I'd hoped it would be. But I am glad to be here and doing this again, and glad to have the freedom afterward to go anywhere, do anything.

14 August

Time, as usual, flies, and I have little of it to spare for writing. Two guides and five kids is a demanding ratio, and in the evenings I like to sit and talk with Jesse. But there is so much I wish I could write down, because I know that without writing, it will become lost. It is not the words that count, looking back at it years later, but the act of writing itself, as if sitting and making yourself aware of where you are and what it smells and tastes and feels like is more important than the words themselves. I remember being about 9 years old and sitting behind a dresser, writing in my diary while cookies baked in the kitchen. I wrote about school that day, but what I remember most is the moment I put pen to paper: the smells of Christmastime, the grey slush outside the window, the toys on the floor. We cut and paste together our lives in this way, words and old photographs coalescing until we develop stories, memories, explanations, selves. 

Last week, we attempted to hike 3,700-foot Mount Etolin and made it to approximately 1,300 feet, or roughly one mile in four days of hiking. Since there was no chance of summiting, we were able to come down a day early and dry out at the floathouse: we were soggy to the core, filthy and stinky. All the girls got their periods at once and I didn't pack nearly enough tampons, and everyone was drenched to their socks and underwear within the first hour of hiking. How to possibly describe such rank wetness, with no dry place to escape to? We slogged through mud, slept in wet sleeping bags, hung wet clothes from our bodies. It was one big fat bucket of suck, and yet, there were moments: bending over with a 70-lb pack on to lean on my trekking pole and noticing how alive the forest floor is, how much life thrives in the wetness that drives humans away. Hair-like worms waving, centipedes skittering under leaf litter, tiny spiders and beetles and nameless insects crawling and dangling and jumping. Everything fetid, fecund, alive; growing, rotting, struggling to carry on.

And let us not forget the black flies. The hoards of no-see-ums that erupted fro the muskeg pools upon our arrival, enlivened by the first human prey they'd likely seen in their brief, miserable lives. They dropped into our food by the hundreds, flung themselves into our eyes, noses and ears; invaded our tents and brains and sanity. Let us not forget them.

Then today, for the first time in 20 days, we awoke to sunshine. Beautiful beach, fire, dry everything. We are on the move agin, circumnavigating Etolin Island. I move my home every night, carrying what I need from the canoe to the woods, setting up my tarp and sleeping bag again and again under different trees, in different forests – all different and all, somehow, the same.

17 August

I'm sitting on the long flat-rock beach of South Etolin Island, watching the tide creep closer to my feet. We are staying here for three days for reflection time, and it is nice to rest from the rigors of expedition. The embers of the morning cook fire crackle and the occasional salmon throws itself out of the water and lands on its side with a smack. Ravens fan the air with their heavy wingbeat and, as in a Grateful Dead song, the eagles fill the sky – four adults and two juveniles swooping back and forth, dropping feathers along the beach. The woods are like a park here – flat and mossy ground under a canopy of widely spaced cedars and ancient spruces. The sun is shining and the sky is blue for the fourth unbelievable day in a row, and I'm living in shorts and a tank top. Life is grand. I do not doubt for a second that returning here was the right decision, that ending a two-year relationship and quitting the lodge were all right in some roundabout way and that this is the track my life is going to take: wandering, loopy and beautifully unpredictable.

The water is a flat powder blue with ripples of electric teal wavering toward the rim of sky. The sky itself is wide and blue and the horizon is a haze of blue mountaintops and blue islands. It is a whole landscape painted in shades of blue, a blue that is alive, flecked with silver and light, always changing.

Later – Walking back from across the long beach at twilight, Jesse's figure as he stoops by the water to wash the dinner pot is striking – a lone silhouette against an enormous backdrop of sky and ocean. It is sometimes easy to forget, being part of a group all the time, that we are essentially the only people on these distant, scattered beaches; that we alone make these untouched islands our home. I am more comfortable walking barefoot across this beach with a drom of water collected from the creek than I am on any city street. Stumps and trees and rocks become my landmarks. It is not a life I want to live forever, but I will always miss the simplicity of gathering water from a stream, cooking over a fire and sleeping under a tree.

“There are no unsacred places – only sacred places, and desecrated places.” – Wendell Berry 

 

imagination.

(Above: The world's only alpine parrot, a native Kea peers down into New Zealand's Fiordland region from nearly 5,000 meters above sea level.)

Living here requires imagination. I steer my kayak into a slough of the Arthur River, a narrow channel of water where ferns of every size and shape gather along the banks and moss-covered trees intertwine their arms overhead. In the luminous, chlorophyll-filled sunlight filtering through the forest, birds' melodies fall like raindrops. It is like paddling through Jurassic Park.

Imagine, for a moment, that it is not the year 2012, that you do not live in a Jetsons-like world of sleek electronics and tiny computers, a world where cities encroach ever further into wild places. Imagine you live in the year 1200 a.d., when the Maori first reached the shores of New Zealand and discovered an evolutionary wonderland devoid of mammals and overrun with birds. In the absence of predators, the islands' birds lost their defense mechanisms and grew to outrageous proportions. There were enormous moas that no longer needed to fly to escape from hungry jaws; flightless parrots that roamed the forest floor beneath brilliant green and turquoise plumage; penguins that nested among evergreens. There were eagles capable of plucking a fully grown man into the sky. The only native mammal was a small bat. People took a long time to arrive.

In the morning, the birdsong was deafeningly loud, bouncing off steep valley walls. Early European explorers wrote that they couldn't hold a conversation while enjoying their morning tea because of the competing choruses of songbirds. But by the time they arrived in the 1800s, the Maori had already decimated many of the defenseless giant birds, hunting them one by one for meat until 26 species were eliminated. The Europeans inadvertently finished the job, bringing rats and cats and opossums that further wiped out New Zealand's native bird populations by preying on their eggs. Today, the flightless kakapo parrot lives on only in isolated, controlled islands off the coasts. The emblematic kiwi is critically endangered. And in the still mornings, only a handful of bellbirds fill the air with their clear, beautiful melody. Some environmentalists argue that the government-led effort to control invasive mammals is further poisoning the forest, ushering in a third wave of extinctions even as it tries to restore an ecological balance.

But forget about that. It is relevant, and yet it is not. On mornings like this, the past is still present, still very much alive. Squint your eyes until you are gliding through a web of green jewels. Dip your kayak blade into the water. Forget that you live in a time when species are disappearing in rapid succession, when animals and plants must adapt to an anthropogenic world or be relegated to a few protected strongholds. As John Haines writes, it is foolish to believe that we erase life by killing it off. Vanquished in one place, life springs back in another. Echoes remain. Use your imagination. 

 (Above: Endangered Whio, or blue ducks, live exclusively in New Zealand's clear, swift-moving streams and rivers, often playing in whitewater rapids.)

Thoughts on roads and the power of wilderness

 

What difference does a road make?

It's a question I found myself asking last weekend in Maine. I was staying with my mom at a backcountry lodge owned by Maine Huts & Trails, a relatively new non-profit organization working to create a 180-mile stretch of backcountry trail in western Maine with “huts” spread out every eight to 12 miles. The organization strongly promotes skiing between huts in the winter, modeled in part after the 10^th Mountain Division ski-in huts in Colorado, except far less crowded and a bit classier.

The huts are no rustic backpackers' accommodations, but state-of-the-art, energy-efficient marvels that manage to be both ultra-modern and classic New England simultaneously. Each evening, after a family-style meal cooked with local, organic ingredients, the hut caretakers offer energy tours showcasing composting toilets, radiant heat powered by a high-tech wood boiler and massive solar panels. Afterward, if it's a clear, moonlit fall night as it was when I was there, you can take a canoe out on 20,500-acre Flagstaff Lake and hear nothing but loons and distant coyotes.

Despite the fact that we only had to hike two miles from our car to reach Flagstaff Lake Hut, it felt plenty wild. There were moose and loons and eagles, and a starry sky far from any light pollution. Yet we learned, after hiking in, that the ingredients for those delicious, locally-sourced meals (as well as the craft beers available for purchase) are brought to the lodge in a truck via a service road that connects smack with the “backcountry” hut.

Wilderness is a strange concept. For some people, it's a campground in a state park. For others, it's a trail-less, unmapped mountain range crawling with grizzlies. To the U.S. government, the 1964 Wilderness Act defines wilderness as an area devoid of roads or human habitation.

Without roads. Opponents of dams, wind turbines and logging oppose the creation of roads through pristine habitat as much as they oppose the operations themselves, and proponents of wilderness tend to be solidly anti-road-building. Though the argument can be made that roads make wild places more accessible –- and that in today's nature-deprived culture we need all the “wild” we can get –- I tend to be more in favor of Edward Abbey's curmudgeonly attitude that keeping the wild places from being overrun with people is more important than making them accessible to anyone with a set of keys in their pocket.

I am admittedly a bit of a wilderness purist. A snob, my mom would say. After spending considerable time in the rugged backcountry of Idaho and Alaska, I don't consider it wilderness unless it meets a few of my own criteria. One is that there's got to be something out there that can kill me. Two, there must be no cell phone service and few people. And three, you've got to work hard to get there. That's the reward: you drive a long ways down a terrible road, hike until you're sweaty and unhappy, and then and only then are you allowed to lay down your pack and earn the indescribable feeling that you are alone and inconsequential in the wind and the wilderness and vastness of the earth.

I might be getting off-topic. Clearly, this was a deluxe lodge experience in Maine, and I had no delusions of what I was signing up for. I was going with my 60-year-old mother, afterall. I was happy to be spending time with her, and happy to be in a quiet, beautiful place, regardless of how “wild” it might actually be.

But even in moments of utter bliss, I found myself thinking about the not-too-distant road. In New England, unlike in the west, the land was settled and the roads built long before anyone entertained any notion of preserving an area dedicated solely to wilderness. The protected, wild places that were later carved out were created around existing infrastructure. It's therefore difficult to get far away from a road here the same way it is out west. And what does it matter? Flagstaff Lake smells, looks and sounds like a wild place.

But still, I insist to myself, it feels different. I cannot get over this one hang-up.

Later, before we hike out, my mom and I walk down to a small peninsula covered almost solely by a stand of gnarled, pure-white birches. We walk in silence over moonlit leaves, dry and smelling of autumn. Through the thin branches, the lake gleams in shades of silver. We stop at the edge of the water.

There is nothing spectacular here, none of the dramatic cliffs or expansive geography or surreal geology that outdoor enthusiasts love about the west. But there is nonetheless an ordinary, unassuming beauty that is just as powerful. It was too quiet to speak, there, and my mom and I stood apart, silently, until I realized she was very quietly crying.

My mom and her mother cry easily, while my dad's family is stoic and at times emotionless. I am blessed and cursed with both. Sometimes I turn on the latter to escape the former. But on this night, when my mother looked out at the lake and tears welled in her eyes, I understood that road or no road, wild places still speak to our souls. I felt tears drawing to my eyes as well. Sometimes there are no words needed. 

Hiking Grace Ridge

The alpine ground is warm where it's free of snow, but two inches above it the wind blows steadily, sweeping the snowfields clean. We aren't very high -- about 1,500 feet -- but on these jagged, nascent peaks rising straight from sea level, it feels like being on top of the world. Wind is the only sound. Patches of light and shadow slide over the snowfields. Delicate alpine flowers seem to brace themselves against the cold, growing despite the wind, teased from the earth by the lingering sun. I sit on a patch of lichen-covered earth surrounded by hills of snow, while on another bare patch, not far away, a marmot suns himself, occasionally casting a glance my way. A pair of ptarmigan startle from behind a rock, explosions of white against the sky.

No matter the elevation -- 1,500 feet or 14,000 -- the alpine zone is hushed, reverential, a place you feel you ought to speak in a whisper; a place where miniature flowers withstand the harshest, most inhospitable winds but the single fall of a hiking boot may wreak irreparable damage.

"Truly, we live in those long-ago times people will talk fondly of." (John A. Murray)

Reluctant birding

Published in the July/August 2013 issue of Alaska magazine



It is nearly midnight, and still light. The mountaintops are bathed in alpine glow; the trees below stained gold by the setting sun. On nights like this, no matter how tired I am, it's hard to close the door and go to sleep. Outside, hummingbirds zip back and forth to the sugar-water we hang out for them. A bald eagle waits in a spruce above the lagoon, watching with sharp eyes for the shadow of a fish below. The single, scratchy jazz note of a thrush reverberates from a stand of alders.

I've never been much of a birder. Birds are beautiful and diverse and it's cool that they can fly and all, but birds as symbols of wildness have always seemed to me inferior to bears and moose and other big, sexy mammals. Somehow, the fact that an incredible array of birds manage to adapt and survive in smog-clogged cities and suburban monocultures the world over has never really impressed me. Instead, it made the birds seem somewhat mundane and commonplace. I've always respected the passion and knowledge of avid birders, but I've never longed to join their ranks.

Until now. Beyond my doorstep stretches hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, a vast northern rainforest that hides blue glacier bears and black wolves and their mysterious, shadowy kin. As the cool night descends, I look out across the treetops and imagine the animals below, breathing the damp air, padding over thick moss, their breath caught in clouds. The lodge where I'm spending the summer is a tiny dot in an oversized landscape of fjords and bays, a place where mountain goats clamber over lichen-covered rocks, moose amble through stands of spruce, and the lip of the ocean curls back to reveal a garden of anemones, sea stars and nudibranchs.

But in the midst of this natural extravaganza, I'm surprised to find it's the birds I've come to love most. The other animals appear only in rare, brilliant flashes. You know they are there, but most of the time, they remain unseen. The birds of Kachemak Bay are constantly present, bringing bursts of song and color, ushering in the season; comical or majestic or simply beautiful in their way. Each week, a new bird species appears for me to learn, and the process is exhilarating. Anyone can spot a moose, but learning to identify birds by sight and sound is a more intricate, delicate art. If big mammals are checkers, birding is chess.

Last week I saw my first-ever kinglet, a tiny bird of the north that has developed incredible adaptations to allow them to survive bitterly cold winters without migrating south as most birds their size do. Weighing about the same as a nickel and no bigger than my thumb, kinglets overwinter in boreal forests that drop as low as -40 F by fluffing up their thick feathers, sleeping in tree cavities and shivering themselves warm. Here, they flicker through the forest like glimpses of a dream, conjuring images of conifers blanketed in snow, northern lights dancing overhead.

There are the pine siskins, little brown and white songbirds that chase each other in swoops around the bird feeder, and the chestnut-sided chickadee, another tiny bird that winters in the far north, living on the knife edge of starvation and survival. Each morning, whether it's snowing or raining or the sun is shining, I walk along a boardwalk from my cabin to the kitchen and am greeted by chickadees and pine siskins darting through the branches.

Thus begins my day among the birds. As I sip my first cup of coffee, I stand at the kitchen window and watch Stellar's jays hop comically along the deck railing, quibbling amongst themselves. Their feathers splay out in a geometric blue-black pattern, topped by a finely-serrated mohawk and two electric blue eyebrows. Like many members of the family corvidea, they are full of spunk and smart as a whip, ready to snatch the food right off your plate. And like all flocks of birds, a group of jays has a name: a party of jays. Our party presides over the lodge in small gangs.

A party of jays, and a conspiracy of ravens: another bird in the family corvidae. Ravens are among the smartest of birds, as well as the most widespread and steeped in lore. They figure prominently in native folklore and totemic symbols: raven, the trickster, the shapeshifter, the one who stole fire and created earth from a watery prehistoric world. In the city, working together to tip a trashcan or walking, one foot in front of the other like a hunched Hollywood detective in a black raincoat, the raven seems crafty, mischievous. In deep forests, ravens grow more ominous, their croaked voices echoing through fog, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once, their heavy wingbeat stirring the stillness of moist, mist-shrouded air.

A conspiracy of ravens – and a charm of hummingbirds. We have a charm of rufous hummingbirds that buzz overhead like fighter pilots practicing a fly-over. Like many birds, the female is drab, while the male gleams with a shot of iridescent red on his throat. From sunup at 5 a.m. to sundown at midnight, they zip back and forth from the hummingbird feeders to the tips of alder and spruce branches, driven mad, it seems, by the lingering light.

In the evenings, I walk around a small peninsula of old-growth Sitka spruce. The path is a tunnel through thick sphagnum moss, winding among decaying logs and trees draped with lichen. It's another world in there. Sounds are muffled by the carpet of moss and the ceiling of intertwined branches overhead. My path leads to a bald eagle nest, a balcony of branches set high on a bluff above the ocean. If the paired eagles see me approaching, they swoop angrily from their nest, demanding my retreat. I imagine them sleeping there on cold nights, curled together around their eggs, their hooked talons and beaks buried in each others' feathers. If both eggs hatch, the larger eaglet will kill its sibling while the parents watch nonchalantly, and the eaglet's dead body will be tossed from the nest. Six weeks later, when the surviving eaglet is ready to fly, the irony of the situation is revealed: more than 40 percent of eaglets do not survive their first flight. If one does, the learning curve is steep. It shares its parents' size, but not their agility. While the adult eagles look on, dignified, the mottled eaglet careens through the sky like a teenager learning to drive.

As summer spreads to this northern peninsula, my list of birds increases. I see sandhill cranes passing by on their way north, bodies heavy as they propel themselves further toward the terminus of their migratory route. Warblers flash overhead like a splash of yellow paint on the blue canvas of sky. Sharp- shinned hawks release a battle cry as they swoop to attack prey. And the water birds – puffins perched on rocky islands, flocks of murres like miniature penguins flapping over the water, black cormorants still as a statue. Harlequin ducks, looking ready to attend a ball with their fine black, white and brown suits. Guillemots and kittiwakes bobbing in the swell like toy ducks. Each bird with a personality of its own, a niche carved out in this landscape of sea and forest, a name, a call, a season. Even as other wildlife retreats farther and farther from human development, the birds hang on, large and small, the last vestiges of wildness to remind us of what it is we stand to lose.

notes from maine

 

Directions to Andover, ME: 91N to ex 9. 93S to ex 40. Merge onto NH10. Left onto Rt 3N. Right on 115N. Right on 2E. Left on ME-5/Ellis River Road.

Beginning.

3 Sept

I expected this solo wilderness paddle to release floodgates of writing, but in fact I don't feel much compelled to write. I feel almost... ambivalent. It is lovely here. Not jaw-dropping or show-stopping, but still plenty pretty, sky the soft ombre of dusk: pink fading into orange into purple-blue. Darkly silhouetted shorelines, silver water reflecting the sky, a loon calling. My tent is perched on a soft carpet of pine needles on a wooded point that juts out into Richardson Lake. From inside it, I watch the water darken through a frame of hemlock boughs. It's all very nice. The weather is nice. I am warm and comfortable and relaxed.

I am also cynical, dissatisfied with the wild places of the east after spending time out west. This is supposed to be a “primitive wilderness tent site.” This 17-mile lake is supposed to be remote and untouched. But at this hour of the evening, a steady parade of motor boats zips back and forth across my little picture window. Across the channel, someone is building something. Earlier, he was hammering and drilling, now, he's calling his dog – “come, Molly! Molly, come!” – again and again. He might be a good mile away, but with the way sound carries over water, he could be sitting outside my tent. I turn on my headlamp with a great, self-important huff. I hope that once it gets completely dark everything will go still and quiet.

I don't know when I became such a wilderness snob, or why I feel the need to be somewhere free of motors or structures or other people. Why is it so dang hard to just find a place like that around here? I am getting frustrated. I want to be alone and not hear anything except the wind through the trees and the lake slapping against the rocks.

When I imagined my solo wilderness adventure, this was not the place I imagined. This is a place for happy summertime pleasures – Vacationland! – and it would be a great place to bring a group of friends. But it's not exactly what I had in mind for my solo trip. I wanted to go somewhere raw and wild that would challenge me.

Nonetheless, I feel confident, and confidence is what I need right now, with the rest of my life full of such uncertainty. The drive here was long: mostly backroads, low, heavy skies, interesting towns, windows down and music on, feeling pretty good about myself: 27 years old and doing ok. I've worked hard to nail down all these skills, to gain the self-assuredness to come out here alone on Labor Day weekend. If I'd have packed just a few more things in the car, I could have lived out of it for months. I daydream of loading it down with my bike, kayak, camping gear, books, maps and camera and driving away, away from my job and the stuff I own and all my obligations.

On the way here earlier today, I drove for three and a half hours before I realized I'd forgotten my sleeping bag. I'd been wanting a summer-weight bag anyway, but the one I bought at the tiny outdoor store that was thankfully only 5 miles off-route is probably not that one I would've picked out had I more than five choices. Then upon arriving at the lake I realized I forgot my paddle as well, and borrowed a heavy plastic one from Dottie, the woman at the South Arm office who issued my permits. I also had to borrow $3 from a stranger to pay for my “remote wilderness site:” cash only. Dottie and the stranger seemed to think I was nuts to be heading out paddling by myself. The weekend forecast called for thundershowers every day.

8:40 p.m. Sky a deep purple, almost black. I have never before in my life heard an entire chorus of loons, but I am hearing it now. Some are long and haunting, like train whistles in the fog. Others are chattering, loony, hysteric. One overlaps the other, layers of sound echoing over the still water, bouncing off the shores. Then at once they are all silent, and I notice there are bugs singing in the treetops and the air itself smells like a sharp, dank lake.

8:52 p.m. The loons are back. I think I can pick out six distinct voices, each coming from a different point in the half-circle of lake that hugs my little ridge. I sit upright and peer into the near-dark but can't see anything except the stars and the bright half-moon and its double, reflected on the water. Two halves of a moon – does that make it a full moon? Tomorrow I'm supposed to camp at Half Moon Cove. With the rainfly off my tent, I feel like I'm sleeping on a veranda in a lakeside cabin. I feel protected and yet exposed. I can feel the breeze. Summer is nearly over. 

 

4 Sept.

At 3 a.m., the sky was starry and clear. At 6 a.m., a thick fog has closed in my little piney point. I think about Alaska. Yesterday, when the motorboats paused and the only sound was my paddle dipping into the gray water, again and again, I thought of the rhythm of a canoe paddle in the ocean, of my canoe sliding through glassy coves alongside rock walls dripping with salt water and starfish. I thought of how often I've done that; and how much I miss it now, stuck driving to an office every day. The loons last night reminded me of camping on the Alaskan coast and falling asleep to the haunting sounds of whalesong reverberating through the ancient forest.

Maine is not dissimilar from Alaska, though of course it is not the same either. Instead of raven, it is crow talking in the big pine above me. When they fly off, I hear the beat of air beneath their wing feathers. The loons still call through the pea-soup air; occasionally there's the splash of a fish. I like the fog. It shuts me into my own permeable world; encloses me in an airy sphere that moves with me as I push across the water. Last night, I dream that half a canoe, sawed right down the middle, washed up on the beach and I took it out into roiling waves and whirlpools. I saw another canoe get sucked into a wave. My mom appeared and I wanted her to leave so I could prove things, but I was glad she was there and couldn't send her away.

9:39 a.m. The on-and-off drone of motors is back. It's not that I'm opposed to motors, but surely a human being needs to escape them once in a while.

I've never thought before about the significance of the term “human being.” BEING is in our very nomenclature. A being is not simply something that's alive. A plant is alive; it is not a being. Only animals. Being is somehow related to consciousness of experience. To be. I am you. Are. He is. Je suis, tu es, il est. And on and on. We are.

I do not have the words to explain why I need, on occasion, to go to a wild, unforgiving place where no one else is around. It is something inherent in me that, if suppressed for too long, causes me to forget who I am, to become cranky, unaware, overburdened. A pretty park won't do it. I need someplace raw and untamed, someplace that claws at me and leaves me to emerge wild-eyed and awed.

Is this something that everyone needs, only some people just don't know it? Or do some people simply love being around other people, all the time? I like to think that solitude is an inherent part of being human, but perhaps it is only a handful of us who are driven to seek out the lonely places of the world, the places where we can feel the weight of the sky pressing down on us, stripping us of our vanities, revealing our barest selves.

11:17 a.m. Utter perfection. Paddling in the sunshine with the wind at my back, exploring silent, calm coves, feet up, dragonflies landing on my knee. The further north along the lake I find myself, the quieter it gets. The motor boats are gone. Thank you, Vacationland.

In some places, rocks and boulders seem to have fallen down the steep slope of the forest, landing in a jumble at the water's edge. There are pocket beaches and sandy points around every turn. Elsewhere, the woods taper to meadows flecked with delicate waving flowers that stretch to the lake. I stop in a cove to float and lay on my back with my face to the sun and listen to the birds. To see what comes out when I stay still long enough.

12:26 p.m. The sandy beaches and fascinating coves and wetlands are never ending. I couldn't be paddling at a more relaxed pace or in a more content state of mind. This has become a very pleasant retreat indeed.

Lunch and yoga on yet another sandy point, picture perfect. Read an Edward Abbey piece with my crackers and fruit. “It ain't wilderness unless there's something out there bigger than you that can kill and eat you.” I know what he's getting at, but literally speaking, that makes any place wilderness. A storm can come up anywhere: wind is bigger than me. And if it killed me, the earth would surely eat my dead body right up.

Middle.

2:17 p.m. Well this is crazy. I was paddling under an untouchable blue sky, dilly dallying along, and started hearing rumbles in the distance. Far away, muffled. The sky got darker, and then – bam, out of nowhere, what meteorologists would probably call a “severe thunderstorm” rolled in just as I was filling my water bottle at a stream. Fortunately, I wasn't far from a small island ringed with sandy beaches. I pulled up, grabbed stuff from my kayak and rushed to set up my tarp, made out of a parachute-like material, in a stand of low pines unlikely to be struck by lightning. There is a strong wind and nonstop thunder but the spitting rain seems to have stopped. My tarp is low, and from where I crouch under it I can see through the scratchy underbrush to the beach and the water, now a choppy gray. Hopefully this is just a passing storm and I can continue to Half Moon Cove this evening, although if I have to hunker down here I won't mind too tremendously. It's a beautiful spot, but there is someone else staying in a cabin on the other side of the island.

OH SHIT. All light was just sucked out of the sky. It's dark as a witch's pocket. Rain is pelting my tarp. Thunder is cracking super loud, making me literally jump. I like storms, but this is a little intense.

Ok, officially nervous now. Challenge of a solo trip accepted. OH MY GOD. Lightning touched down on the island. Can't see very far beyond my tarp. A moose spooked by the storm is probably going to come crashing through my impromptu camp at any second. The woods are VERY DARK. THIS IS TERRIFYING. So glad I pulled over immediately at first sign of storm, and so glad I packed my tarp. No metal rods on it.

5:34 p.m. The storm passed, and I emerged dazed from under my tarp and walked out to the beach, looking at the swiftly clearing sky and the lighting still crackling in the east. I looked around some more and decided to stay the night. But no sooner had I taken down my tarp and dried it out on a bush, moved all my stuff a few hundred yards down the beach to a more appealing spot and sat down on a wide swath of sand to read and smoke a joint but it started again. Same as before: unmarred blue sky and distant rumbles, then the black, deep clouds seeping out of the western mountains, thick and malevolent, with thunder lurking within. They're moving this way again. Goddamn it. Why did I have to complain that I wasn't challenged enough?

The storm holds off, and good thing, because it took me an hour to drag my tent off the exposed beach and to the edge of the woods and put the rain fly on and set up my tarp again. There's no good place to set it up here; had to settle for tying the high points to taller pines at the edge of the forest, and the low points to logs I dragged across the sand. It's about 15 feet from my tent, and feels less safe than my earlier spot.

6:21. The storm is still hanging threateningly in the distance. Just went over and said hi to my neighbors; they came in on a motor boat and are staying in a little cabin that was once part of a steamship that trolled up and down this lake. They were sitting in lawn chairs on the beach drinking beer. Had a nice chat. I haven't worn shoes since I got out of my car yesterday.

I feel like a moose could appear any minute. But you rarely see animals when you're looking for them. In Vermont, I tracked three moose all winter long through the snow, over a frozen beaver meadow crisscrossed with winding streams, choked with willow and alder; through a bog dotted with pine snags and dead timber. I'd heard that most of being a wildlife photographer is simply being still and waiting, so come spring, I set up a hunting blind on a hill above the beaver pond and got up at 5 a.m. and crept through the woods with my camera and a headlamp and sat still. Morning after morning, there was nothing. No moose. Then in the high desert in Idaho, in the last place in the world I'd expect to see a moose – I was on the lookout for rattlesnakes instead – a big bull came crashing out of the narrow band of cottonwoods and willows and scared me half to death.

It looks like the storm may have fizzled. The western mountaintops are visible again, the sky quiet but tie-dyed like a silk scarf in shades of gray. The lake is rough and whitecapped. Weather changes quickly here.

This part of the lake feels more wild, like you have to glance back over your shoulder into the woods once in a while to make sure nothing has snuck up on you. I like it, but it makes me slightly uneasy too. Uprooted trees are scattered along the shore, some gray and weather-beaten, others freshly decaying, bits of earth still clinging to the maze of fibers. You can tell the weather gets rough here. Nature has not been kind.

6:45 p.m. and getting chilly. The woods are thick, hard to penetrate, full of broken limbs and scratchy brush. This forest has become young again, unruly, keeping its secrets in the dark, wet understory. A cold, slow creek, rich in tannin, carves a path out of the forest, curls around the bog, cuts through the sandbar and joins the lake.

There is a tree here that catches my attention, a small dead spruce lying on a mossy shelf. It looks as if, when it was still standing, someone took a paint bucket full of white-gray, curling lichen and threw it at the tree, knocking it over and splattering the ground around it with lichen too.

It is soothing to walk unimpeded along a shore, mindlessly following that silver line where water meets land.

The light just turned suddenly so beautiful.Wisps and shreds of clouds hang low in the seamless spaces between mountains. 

There is a pile of scat on the beach that looks like nothing more so than a big ol' pile of horse manure, which it cannot possibly be. It's too big for a black bear. Must have come from a moose, but it looks like no moose poop I've ever seen. Sasquatch?

7:30 p.m. In my tent, in my sleeping bag. Lighting on three sides, but not here. Storm coming from the south this time. Haven't heard a single loon since the first storm. Crickets are at it now, though. Thunder getting closer.

I want to lay in my sleeping bag and read, but it's hard not to watch the sky. It's hard to tell what the storm is doing. Is it passing to the east or is it just taking a really long time to get here? That last thought is disconcerting. There's no counting the seconds between thunder and lighting; the lighting is all around, pulsating high in the clouds. The thunder seems to come from the south, steadily, bearing no connection to the constant flashes of lighting. It is like the sound of a distant army thundering toward battle. Figuring this storm out is like trying to predict the movements of a bear. No rain yet.

8:00. Oh fuck me. Here it comes. Goodbye, warm sleeping back. Goodbye, tent. Please don't become a lightning rod or fly away. Hello, crouching barefoot in the sand under my tarp as the dark sky gets even darker, the loud thunder gets even louder, the bright lighting sharper, closer. Please let this be the last storm of the night.

When I've said in the past that I like storms, I guess I like them from a front porch in the summertime, when the worst that will happen is the street will temporarily flood and the neighbors will set up lawn chairs along it and sit there with umbrellas watching cars struggle through or get stuck in the giant puddle. I do not so much like storms after dark in a rather wild place when I am crouched alone barefoot under a tarp. I feel confident that I've done what I can to prepare for this and am relatively safe, but then again, I'm also on an island in the middle of a big lake – a storm magnet. I don't have a whole lot of options but to wait it out.

Oh god. This is worse than the last one because it's dark. Read to distract yourself. Read about surfing in Hawaii.

8:20 p.m. Whew. That one passed fairly quickly, but I don't think this is over. There are patches of stars directly overhead, now, and I am standing with my mouth in an actual O watching the storm travel north. Lightning bolts that seem miles long shoot from the sky down to the earth, bright, shocking, awesome. I cannot help but gasp, suck in air, and occasionally exclaim, 'holy shit!' This is an amazing thing to witness.

HOLY SHIT IS RIGHT. Storm #3 rolling in close on the heels of #2. This one is the mother. This is the big one. I'm back under the tarp. Rain is pelting from all directions, wind howling. The lightning is continuous, the sky pulsing with light, the thunder deafening when it cracks like a deep gunshot directly overhead. I can feel it in my bones, like a loud bass. I can see the lightning bolts behind my eyelids when I close them. A bolt flashes down and strikes nearby; I close my eyes and see its neon double, again and again. I remember thunder storms in Hermit Island when Dad would make us sit in the truck, our faces pressed to the windows, rubber tires safely beneath us.

It hit right near me. My legs are shaking. My heart pounding. My mouth won't close. I am hugging my knees in a face-down fetal position.

How many storms before I make a dash across the island to knock on the door of the cabin? I keep thinking each will be the last, but they keep coming, and of course I can't run across the island in the middle of one.

There was just a lull, and now it's starting again. It's as if the storms are swirling around the lake and coming to rest every time they find this island. This is utterly terrifying. Having another human being here with my wouldn't make it any safer, but it would be comforting at least.

End.

11:10 p.m. During a lull in the storm I walked cautiously to the cabin and was very warmly welcomed. The people thought I was absolutely insane for having withstood the last five storms alone under a tarp. I accepted two beers, which were amazing, and sat indoors, where it felt a hundred times safer, though the thought of a massive pine getting struck by lightning and falling through the roof was in the back of our minds. The people have been coming to this island for 30 years, and got married here. We talked for two hours while the storm continued to ebb and flow around us.

Blame it on the beers, but leaving the cabin and walking back to my tent, I slid on a rock and sliced the outside of my foot wide open. A 5-inch-long gash that bled all the way back to the tent. Busted out the first aid kit, tried to wipe the sand away, winced, swabbed it with alcohol wipes, slathered on neosporin, slapped on a nonstick bandage, wrapped in an ace bandage and lay on my back with my foot up in the air above my hear. I wonder if I need stitches. It is throbbing.

5 Sept

9:17 a.m. What a difference the daylight makes. Woke this morning to a steady drizzle and packed up a soggy camp: it reminded me of all the mornings I woke up in the rain in Alaska, and reminded me too that Alaska was full of this wet, sloppy misery and that I shouldn't curse my comfortable day job so often. Got on the water by 8 a.m. and remembered too that with misery comes reward. In this case: a calm, glasslike lake reflecting the dripping pines and not a soul or a boat in sight. Paddled four quick miles without hearing anything but birds, then pulled over to boil myself some water for tea and watch the loons, who have reappeared, dip their shining black heads under the lake.