North of Hope (24 page)

We had passed the main rapids of the Hulahula, but today we had rapids of another sort to navigate. We didn’t talk about it, except to confirm coordinates. An hour after breakfast, the sun had ascended and burned through the light breeze. I put my PFD on over my tank top, and sunscreen on my bare arms. We pushed off into the icy water. Another song flowed into my consciousness, mingling with the running river: “Deep river,” the old Negro spiritual went, one of that canon of prayer known as sorrow songs, “my home is over Jordan. Deep river, Lord, I want to cross over into campground.”

I was not sure what I was hoping to find, or what I thought might change. My growing sense of dread balanced against the understanding that this was someplace I had to be, something I had to do. The river’s sonority offered a temporary comfort against the dissonance of growing chaos, the sounds of the biggest rapids ahead, rapids that had little—and everything—to do with a river.

The river was rolling and gentle now. The raft bounced easily through small wave trains, moving happily on the glacial water. I watched the tundra carefully. The bank rose to a low plateau on the left, obscuring what was beyond, and the plain rolled away to the horizon on the right.

Ned stared at the GPS. “I think it’s right around here,” he said flatly.

“No, this isn’t it,” I murmured. “It doesn’t look like this. There should be a sandy beach.” I almost hovered over the back of the raft, my legs flexed, leaning forward, watching the banks intently.

“That’s it, on the right,” I said, as the sandy shore came into view. My throat constricted. “Paddle both, paddle left!” I pulled back hard on my paddle, and the raft swung with a strange ease into the eddy. Beach met the bottom of the raft with a sound like sandpaper. Sally and Ned jumped out and pulled the boat onto the beach. Ned took the 45-70, put it over his shoulder, and strode wordlessly off into the tundra.

I walked slowly along the beach from end to end. The sand was unusual; other beaches along the river had been rocks and pebbles. I walked around the green tundra behind the willow copse beyond the beach. On the tundra, the low, tenacious plants of the Arctic crunched softly under my river boots. To the south, the hieratic heights of Michelson and Chamberlin stood in sacerdotal solemnity against a clear blue sky.

“Pretty out here, isn’t it?” Sally asked.

I swallowed my disbelief. “Sally, I need some time by myself,” I said.

“Sure, sure,” she said, smiling.

There was something that bothered me those first weeks back in Seattle after the funeral. Something about needing information, even when it didn’t serve any purpose. Information that couldn’t be avoided and that came back to me now, on the beach.

It was the information about the bodies in the police report. They were just bodies then—not my dad, not Kathy. The bear had been eating them. And why not? He was a bear and had killed his prey.

Why had he started on Kathy? Perhaps Dad had died more quickly.

“Could he have had a heart attack?” a friend from high school had asked me at a coffee shop that summer.

“I guess so,” I said, having no idea. It seemed likely to me that the coroner would not have conducted an extensive autopsy. Why bother figuring out if anything had happened aside from the attack?

In the last picture of Kathy, she is wearing a hat and a fleece coat. Behind her is visible the sand of the beach, part of her red inflatable kayak, a rock securing a corner of their tent on the sand. She smiles broadly in spite of the cold. The willow copse had shielded Dad and Kathy from the freezing northeast wind that day. Then it had hidden their bodies when the bear dragged them there—dragged the bodies, that is.

The picture in the paper showed the brown humped hulk of the grizzly at the north end of the beach, glowering at the photographers; the collapsed tent had been pulled to the south. I looked around the willow copse and the south end of the beach for evidence of a bear digging, for animal tracks. Dessicated indentations of caribou hoofs and one large wolf track wrote a story of visits from the previous year. Bordering the beach were yellow daisies, the blooms of Eskimo potato, but nothing more auspicious. On the beach itself, the sand lay firm and untouched, a slate washed clean, healed by water and wind.

In a story about the opposite end of the earth, Jorge Luis Borges notes that the landscape “is on the verge of saying something. It never says it, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or perhaps we understand it and it is as untranslatable as music.”

The story that this landscape held, I knew in pieces.

Part of what I knew came from Jim. He was the last person to talk to Dad and Kathy. Jim and his wife, Carol, are owners and guides of Arctic Treks, one of the oldest Arctic river rafting companies. On June 23, 2005, he and an assistant guide, Cin, were rafting the Hulahula with three couples from Washington state. They had been on the river for a week. The water was running low, colder than normal temperatures slowing the typical freeze-melt cycle. It flowed thinly over gravel bars, a perfect blue, not muddied by the gray of upriver glaciers. But the raft was heavy, and the group had to get out frequently to pull it over gravel bars. Still, the eight rafters felt a sense of magic in the air and in the splendor of the Arctic landscape.

There were few other people on the river so early in the summer. The group had seen only two other people, traveling together in inflatable kayaks. Because the wind whipped most strongly in the late morning and early afternoon, the rafting group started late that day to miss the winds and ended their day late as well.

It really didn’t matter, because the sun never sets. It’s called Arctic time, this quiet shifting of schedules. There is light for your journey any time of day or night. This endless daylight lends a sense of well-being, a blissful detachment concealing the dangers of wilderness.

The couple in the inflatable kayaks were on the opposite schedule. They rose early in the morning to get on the river, stopping to camp before the winds picked up. Jim’s group and the couple leapfrogged each other down the river through the Romanzof Mountains and the foothills leading out to the coastal plain. The rafting group noticed an impeccably kept camp, boots lined up neatly outside of the tent, boats pulled up well clear of the water. The night of June 23rd, when Jim’s rafting group passed the kayakers’ camp, the couple had not yet retired. They sat at their tent, preparing for bed. A cold northeast wind blew, but the couple had pitched their tent below a small bluff and a copse of willows to their east to shelter them from the elements. The man noticed the rafts coming and walked down to the shore.

The man and the rafters exchanged a few words of greeting. “There was something special about that night,” one of the rafters later recalled. “There was magic, love in the air. Both of their faces shone with happiness—they loved being out there with each other. When we got into camp, we talked all night about what a special night it was, and how the couple we passed just radiated joy.” Each of the couples recounting the story does so with tears glistening in their eyes, betrayed by that magic of Arctic light.

Like most stories, this one started even earlier than that. In the fall of 1997, I returned from Bosnia. I had led my second flight platoon, and we had flown the valleys of Multi-National Division North from our camp in Tuzla West in support of the Dayton Peace Accords.

As I was coming home from Bosnia, looking forward to going
home, somewhere in the Arctic the Inupiat caught their September whales. Millions of migratory birds set out toward southern climes, and silence settled over the tundra. Somewhere in that wilderness, a sow grizzly, impregnated in the spring by a male and well fed by the summer’s bounty, wandered to the south slope of a mountain and used her long claws to excavate a den. She crawled in, escaping the swirling snow and icy wind and scarce nutrition outside. Her heart rate dropped to a few beats a minute. She slept. During that sleep, one or two cubs were born, tiny, hairless, and blind. The sow licked the mucus from their bodies, licked them alive, and they suckled in the new womb of the den.

One spring day in 1998, the sow brought her cubs out onto the tundra. One of these cubs—or maybe he was the only cub—will one day kill my dad and Kathy. He has never seen a human, but he will taste human flesh, only a day or maybe two before he tastes his own blood as he stumbles and falls for the last time.

It is possible that Dad and Kathy slept in their last day. It was cold outside, and they were tired. They were not in a hurry. The next day was their sixteenth anniversary. Each had brought a card for the other, protected in Ziploc bags.

Dad and Kathy were in the wilderness. They had always loved the wilderness, and with kids gone, they could take the time to enjoy it together. For all who escape to true wilderness, one of the reasons to go is that there is not another soul anywhere around you. You go to be engulfed in and connected to the majesty of creation. You go to forget yourself. There is no unnatural noise, no kids yelling, tires screeching, bosses nagging. There is also no one to hear you scream.

The yellow nylon of the tent flapped in the wind curling over the tundra bluff and copse of willows on the eastern banks of the Hulahula River. The flapping of a nylon tent can lull you to sleep, or in harsher winds keep you up all night. The continuous
snap! snap! snap!
of nylon and metal grommets can make you crazy.

Sometime in the morning, Dad, with pepper-and-salt hair disheveled from his week in the wild, sat up in his sleeping bag and unzipped the tent while Kathy remained in her bag. Maybe he got up to go to the bathroom, or maybe he had heard something. The tent zipper opened the cocoon of a tent onto a sandy beach and turquoise river water, just upstream from a small rapid.

The man drowsily unzipping his tent does not see just the river. The massive bulk of a grizzly fills his view. His heart jumps; his blood pressure skyrockets.

Gerald May describes the first time a bear comes into his campsite: “The bear is right next to me, its side brushing the tent canvas, its growl deep, resonant, slow…. It’s like some kind of fierce embrace … another deeper voice … whispering ‘Be frightened. Just be frightened.’ … My heart is beating so loudly I’m sure the bear must hear it. And I have never felt so alive.”
⁹

John Haines imagines an encounter with a bear: “The bear suddenly lunged from its hiding place with a terrible, bubbling roar and struck me down. In that instant of confusion and shock I was joined to the hot blood and rank fur at last. All my boyhood dreams of life in the woods, of courage and adventure, had come to the final and terrifying intimacy.”
¹⁰

And Mary Oliver’s words: