Looking for Alaska (20 page)

“July 27—2:59
A.M
. Brown bear reported at Second Avenue.” Now they were getting close to downtown, close to Providence Hospital. One especially outspoken female neighbor said that at least if someone was mauled in that part of town, they'd be close enough to the hospital to crawl there. “6:26
A.M
. Small black bear in the trap.” No one had ever seen this bear. “8:38
P.M
. Bear trap moved to 2025 Dora Way.” The trap was moved to the yard of the wildlife officer who'd given me the ticket for having the wrong fishing license.

“July 28—3:12
A.M
. Security check of bear trap.” “5:29
P.M
. Caller from Dora Way concerned for children playing in area due to the brown bear sightings. Requested a poster be put on his door.”

“July 29—4:36
A.M
. Advised of brown bear eating trash in the 300 block of First Avenue. Caller did not have their trash secured.” Here we go again. “2:55
P.M
. Report of a brown bear chasing kids at Creekside Trailer Park. Trooper responded.” Uh-oh. A brown bear in middaylight chasing children. The tension around town was growing. The fuse was not only lit, it was nearing an explosion if something wasn't trapped soon. Even after this entire series of events, not one person had fired a shot. “5:54
P.M
. Caller advised she could hear a child screaming from the Bayview Apartments, yelling, ‘No, no.' Officer patrolled area and no screaming was heard.” Surely no bear had broken into the child's apartment. “11:23
P.M
. Security check on bear trap.”

“July 30—3:53
A.M
. Security check on bear trap.” “5:18
A.M
. Security check on bear trap.” “7:07
A.M
. Report of brown bear in trap. Caller contacting someone to come over and dart it.” Finally, the bear was caught—at least, hopefully this was the one. A few nights gone by would tell. Ted Spraker got the early-morning call; he was still at home having coffee with Elaina. He and Larry drove the ninety-plus miles from Soldotna to Seward to take care of our bear, to take care of our neighborhood.

After the trapped two-and-a-half-year-old female brown bear was tranquilized, they fitted her with a tracking collar, took samples of her blood and hair, pulled a tooth, and tattooed her ear. After that they moved her to a place far away called Mystery Creek. That day the children spread out across the neighborhood to be children, some even playing late into the night.

7

Can a Glacier Cry?

Our bright yellow, oceangoing kayaks were lashed to the roof of the boat. Hopefully on the way to our destination we wouldn't run into any rough ocean that would try to wash them away. My daughter Rebekah and I were catching a ride from Seward out of Resurrection Bay, a bay too open to the fast-tempered winds of the Gulf of Alaska to allow for a several-day journey for a kayaker like me. It will always blow my mind that the Aleuts used to travel all around the bay, even across the open ocean to Kodiak and many other places, in their skin kayaks. Along with a friend, Mark Lindstrom, we were going to spend the next couple of days and nights in Aialik Bay.

Aialik Bay (pronounced I-al-lick) was almost surrounded by the Harding Icefield. Nothing man-made can compare to the Harding Icefield. Several glaciers ease off of it directly into the sea. Some of these glaciers confronted the ocean, one of a few natural things powerful enough to dare to do this. The bay is about twenty-five miles long, and all sides are steep rock walls or even steeper glaciers. Black bears, some iceberg-white mountain goats, a few lone wolves, and occasional brown bears have eaten the few things that live on the mountainsides among the rocks and in the alders. Some small glacier-fed creeks with small salmon-spawning runs empty into this bay. As far as I knew, no one had ever died kayaking in Aialik Bay.

The boat ride to haul us and our kayaks and equipment to our drop-off near Lechner Glacier was about forty-five miles. If a person knew he was going to die in two weeks, just that forty-five-mile ride would be an ideal top lifetime inspiration. A couple and their son from somewhere in California were getting dropped off before us at a U.S. Park Service wilderness cabin. They had made reservations a year in advance. It was hard to tell if they knew just how isolated they would be. Even though Aialik Bay was just a bay west of Resurrection Bay, it might as well have been a hundred miles deeper into the wilderness. If we got into any trouble, we'd have to handle it ourselves. I didn't know Mark well, but I knew he had experience out here, and all over Alaska.

When we got to the cabin where the couple and their son were to stay, I watched them look around. The wife looked at her husband. Was that fear on her face? Mostly they could only look up and up higher to the steep, stone-mountain faces, hanging glaciers, and sharp mountaintops surrounding them. What if something happened to them? They had a couple kayaks; what if the father and the son went across the bay and one capsized? Little happenings in Alaska can turn out to be major catastrophes. This family appeared to like each other, though, and you certainly wouldn't want to be out in a cabin like this with no way out if you didn't get along. I wondered if the Park Service allowed alcohol.

We'd had a planning session with Mark a few weeks before. He'd asked us how much ocean-kayaking experience we had—a couple hours each—except Rebekah had done all that white-water wilderness canoe travel in southeastern Oregon on her monthlong NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) trip. Mark told us that it could be extremely dangerous kayaking anywhere here in the ocean, especially in the more remote bays, because the weather can quickly get severe, blow down off the Harding Icefield. Fog can float in and around unmovable objects and hide reality. He told us to get these waterproof bags to put out cameras and clothes and food in, just in case we flipped.

He was studying the couple and their son. The man sounded as if he knew what he was doing, but all kinds of people talk a good Alaska game. Mark said he knew how to read the ocean and waves, how to gauge the truck-size pieces of ice breaking off the glaciers. He claimed to know about advancing bears and severe tidal flows and to be able to discern confronting cloud fronts. He seemed as if he would know how to fix a hole in the kayak and where to get wood and how to start a quick fire onshore to warm someone who'd been immersed.

I'd heard the story of a couple guys catching a hundred-plus-pound halibut from a kayak. It pulled them around, they couldn't control it. I'd brought my fishing pole. Mark said we'd see all kinds of black bears. We couldn't bring a gun even if we wanted to because on the land where we'd be camping out in Kenai Fjords National Park, there were “no firearms allowed.” The last time I'd seen him, Captain Bob, the local shark fisherman, had mentioned that a halibut long-liner who had been a few bays farther west, in Black Bay, had said the whole bay was full of sea otters and their babies.

We packed our stuff into our kayak; it took careful consideration. I would be in the back and Rebekah the front; loading us, especially me, called for precision. Rebekah leapt around the kayak like a butterfly; I was not like a butterfly. We barely squeezed in our clothes (we were prepared for squalling, wailing weather), then had to find room for our tent and fishing poles. I don't like to wear life preservers, but I wore mine out here. If one or both of us fell in halfway across the bay a mile from either shore and couldn't get back into the kayak, we'd have to be towed to shore by Mark. Surely he could climb back in his kayak in the middle of the bay, but what if the waves and wind shot up? A few people had told me that winds could blow off these glaciers or down from the rugged, uninhabitable wild around us as if they'd been shot out of a cannon. In winter, there was fifty feet of snow out here. There were many whales; orcas fed in this bay where the current pushed up feed fish. A local fishing guide and our neighbor on Dora Way, Eric Jackson, had seen some orcas attack a baby humpback whale out here somewhere. He said two humpbacks had eventually pushed the baby between them and saved it, but it got bloody before the killer whales left. Surely the orcas would never mistake a kayak for something to eat.

I'd just seen a TV show where someone was experimenting towing a surfboard around great-white-shark country because they surmised that great whites attack surfboards because they mistake them for seals or sea lions on the surface. I'd seen enough of orca behavior to believe they were much more aware and intelligent than great white sharks. Captain Bob said he'd been out exploring deep in these bays and fjords and had seen times in Three Hole Bay and others when salmon shark fins seemed to fill the bay. The sharks seemed uninterested in people entirely. They appeared to be lolling on the surface. Maybe they'd already eaten their fill.

This beginning of this trip reminded me of a movie that begins on this bird-singing, sun-shining, no-wind, everyone-smiling day, and there's only one way to go from there—way down. We pushed off from the rocky beach; the three people we were leaving behind waved good-bye. We paddled north, staying along the exceedingly rugged coastline almost completely untouched by human intervention. Mark said we were going to go to the end of the bay and then kayak across by Frazer Rock to Aialik Glacier.

Mark and me in front of Pedersen Glacier.
P
HOTO BY
R
EBEKAH
J
ENKINS

Mark managed a seaside B&B in Lowell Point, Alaska Saltwater Lodge, in the summer and worked with sled dogs around Mount McKinley in the winter. At one time, he'd been a tour-boat captain. He was a trail official during the Iditarod, following the entire race and trained sled dogs and assisted top mushers in running their dog kennels. Like many Alaskans he did almost anything to keep living here. He was from Oregon. He said the right way to live in Alaska year-round was to live by the sea in the summer and in the deep, dry, bright, powdery interior in winter. The idea is to glide on the water in summer and glide on the powder in winter. He motioned us to his side and said we'd paddle into this little cove.

It seemed the past and the present and the future, three streams of my vision, were fighting inside my head to see which one would dominate. Scenes from our past seemed as real as this very moment. I saw Dr. Andonie of Metairie, Louisiana, holding Rebekah up by her ankles, red and creased, a few seconds after she'd been delivered by C-section. It was odd, as if that memory of her birth were more real to me right now than being here in the yellow kayak. Maybe it was being on the water together, or the isolated purity of this moment. I could feel Rebekah as a six-year-old clinging to my back in a cool lake, wanting to swim in water over her head, water as deep as the water we were in now. I swam underneath her and she was grabbing hold of my neck as the water got deeper and darker and more filled with the unknown. I finally had to release her grip, I thought I would choke. Rebekah has always surprised me with her physical strength, not to mention her strength of will. Before she could walk, before there were any brothers or sisters, she hated sleeping alone in her room in her crib. One night after apparently sitting in there fretting, upset, I heard something crash onto the floor. She had leapt out of her crib. It was the first but not the last brave, daring, rebellious leap she would take. I was surprised, thankful, she would even spend this time with me in Alaska.

“Dad, paddle,” Rebekah reminded me, politely but with a tone that could be intimidating.

I was having trouble coming back into this moment, this scene; I was in the past yet still present enough to be paddling forward atop this brilliant ocean water.

In my mind I saw Rebekah when she was five running as fast as her fawnlike legs could move her, through an open gate on what was then our farm. It was a Tennessee spring, when the new grass, the new green leaves of the trees, and the darker little clover leaves are so intense as to be almost blinding. Yet the green is so welcome, like the new warmth in the sky. I always encouraged Rebekah to run as fast as she could. She was athletic from the start. This time, right before she went through the gate, she slipped abruptly on a fresh cowpatty. She adjusted her fall in midair but still fell partially into the green and brown of it. She jumped up, mad and sickened and furious and grossed out, and looked around for someone to vent to or even to blame. She began to shout. I quickly went up to her and, grabbing some dried, dead grass, wiped her off a little.

“Rebekah,” I said as softly as I could, “congratulations, honey.”

She looked at me, puzzled, quieter, still angry, red-faced. “Why do you say that, Daddy?” She was standing in the newborn light of spring.

“Because someone told me the other day that you're not a real cowgirl until you walk right through a cowpatty. Well, since you just fell in one, I guess that qualifies you as a genuine cowgirl.”