Travelers' Tales Alaska (10 page)

Kathleen Dean Moore is the chair of the Philosophy Department at Oregon State University, where she is a prize-winning teacher and director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word.
Riverwalking,
her first book, won the 1996 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award. Her second,
Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World,
from which is story was excerpted, won the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. Her essays have appeared in a wide variety of magazines and journals.

SUSAN BEEMAN

The trek to her parents' old homestead is a ritual return to the bush.

E
VERY
A
UGUST
, I
LOAD UP THE CAR WITH SLEEPING BAG
, cook stove, food, and tubs for picking blueberries. As I pack, I remember the sound, the
tink, tink, tink
the first fat berries make when they hit the bottom of the tub and how that sound becomes muffled the fuller it gets, until all the city chatter inside my mind is muffled too, and I'm just there on the mountainside picking quietly.

Headed north from Anchorage on the Parks Highway, I tune the radio to NPR for Saturday morning's “Savvy Traveler” and pretend I'm a savvy traveler. Where will I stop? Will I meet locals when I take a break from the wheel, and talk to them about the weather or the fishing or this year's berry crop? Or will I keep silent and eavesdrop on the old men who wear baseball caps with hunting lodge logos and drink coffee from thick white mugs? What new stories will I bring home? I relax into the road. No need to hurry. The blueberries are getting sweeter every hour, since nights are almost freezing.

I sing along to Mary Black and Natalie Merchant and Deep Forest through the long stretch of dull road between Willow and the Talkeetna junction, then settle into the silence of the road, the rhythm of driving. Birch trees, still hanging on to green leaves, line the roadside and wave me gently north toward an old family treasure at Byers Lake.

My parents' decaying cabin hunkers on one of the hidden knolls above the lake. It's been falling into itself for years now. At the trailhead, I study the piece of weathered paper taped to the Alaska State Parks sign to find out about the most recent bear sightings. Every year, the paper is taped here, with comments scrawled in pencil or pen. The most recent ones are these:

8/15, grizzly sow with two cubs by inlet;

8/17, small blackie in campground;

8/18, black bear hanging around outhouse, Alder Loop;

8/20, fresh tracks by old cabin.

But nothing for the last two days.

I follow the muddy trail over tree roots into the cool forest of birch and spruce, where mushrooms and mosses grow underfoot and high bush cranberries reach up to glint red in the dappled light, and I think of my parents living here forty-odd years ago, before the highway was punched through. I picture them snowshoeing these woods, Dad wearing wool pants that Mom hemmed to fit him; she setting a failed loaf of brick-heavy bread outside the cabin window for the gray jays and black-capped chickadees to peck. My parents launched their married life here in 1959, snuggled together in a bed frame made of sturdy spruce poles hammered together with spikes and a mattress of pungent boughs laid beneath sleeping bags.

Trumpeter swans chortle and loons lament on the lake to my right as I walk deeper into the forest. Voices echo across
the water from a couple paddling a canoe or someone fishing from the walk-in campground on the far side of the lake, but I can't hear what they say. Were those high-pitched noises really people, or just gulls crying? I glance behind me. Maybe it was a bear cub.

At the kinked birch my family used as a marker I turn off the main path onto the wide new trail to the cabin. We used to bushwhack to get here, back when we'd come on the weekend or school holidays, before we sold the cabin to the government as it swallowed more land for Denali State Park.

As I approach the cabin, I come to what once was a small clearing. It is overgrown now with devil's club, willows, grass, and young trees, but a tall cache used to stand in the clearing, its four thick spruce legs covered with cut-open tin cans, flattened and
nailed around the legs to keep bears and squirrels from climbing up. Fox, lynx, and wolverine furs were stored in the cache. Moose meat, too, and big sacks of flour for bread and pies.

The jagged metal corner of the cabin's porch sticks out from behind brush and I notice how tall the spruce and birch trees growing from the top of the grassy roof have become and how moss thicker than a down quilt hangs from the top of the sinking cabin.

I pad slowly around to the front, careful not to lean too close to the sharp-edged porch overhang, the rusty corrugated tin roofing bent down by many wet winter snows. I peek in the side window, the glass long shattered, to see the living room where my parents cooked and ate and sang and skinned pelts and read aloud to each other by Coleman lantern light. Where they built wood fires each frigid morning in December when the day would not brighten until the sun glowed at its zenith behind Curry Ridge at noon. Only remnants of those days remain now. Over the years the cabin has been vandalized, cleaned out. Even the spruce-pole couch frame Dad built is now gone, ashes in a campfire somewhere nearby. The little table he made still sits in the corner, though, and candle wax is still pooled where it dripped so long ago, next to flies twenty years dead.

I pull my head carefully back from the empty window frame. Out front, I trace with the tip of my index finger the official wood-burned state parks sign that reads in neat loopy letters,
Beeman's Cabin 1959.

Another sign outside reads
Unsafe
—
Keep Out.
Visitors aren't supposed to crawl inside the cabin, where they might break an ankle jumping over the root cellar built into the middle of the living room floor, collapsed onto itself with rotten planks jutting up from below. Or a person might whack his forehead on the low log over the doorway between
the living room and the bedroom, the doorway where my parents stapled a cutout magazine photo of a mallard so they wouldn't forget to duck. Visitors might squeeze into the bedroom and sit down on the edge of a bunk bed to see more clearly the drawings my brother and I sketched on the ceiling and the frame could crack, injuring them.

But I'm not a visitor. I crouch through the front entrance and step carefully over the root cellar in the dim light and duck into the bedroom to see the old artwork. Yes, those were my horses. I did lie there thirty years ago, drawing long-backed stallions with squarish legs and foals with perky, pointed ears, laughing and telling stories with my brother as he uttered boy noises in the other bunk, drawing pistols and bullets on his side of the room.

Now it is time to go, time to pick berries. I've seen all I can see at the cabin. I've remembered all I can, the memories only hints of what had gone before, more bird track than bird.

I drive on, through Cantwell, and park just past the Nenana River. Carrying my empty tub, I walk the highway shoulder a few hundred feet. Two huge boulders hug the edge of a tundra field on the left. I drop down the steep side of the roadbed and push through tall grass, careful not to trip on hidden dead-wood underfoot, and crest the lip of the field. My hiking boots sink into spongy mosses and lichens and I scan the ground for blues.

It's a good year and the bushes hang thick with fruit, like grape clusters, the blueberries fat and juicy and waiting to be plucked before they freeze and shrivel. Late afternoon sun shines up the valley, and across the river against the steep mountainside, the train's rumble and whistle sounds. I'm not far from the road, but once over the field's edge, kneeling on my folded rain pants, and pulling fruit from the twigs, all is quiet. The blueberry patch is my own private place. I pop a
few berries in my mouth and roll them around on my tongue before mashing them and tasting their sweet sourness.

When my knees and lower back get tired from leaning down to pick, I sit on my backside and spread my legs in a V and keep picking. The berries are so thick I can pull off five or six at once, with one hand, using a light touch, an open pluck, to separate berry from bush.

After a while, I take a break and wander across the field toward the bank overlooking the braided river. I've seen small bands of caribou down on the riverbar before, camouflaged by silvery willows and gray driftwood. But this time only the bushes are there, thick and yellow-green. I return to the patch and finish filling the tub with blueberries, plenty for a pie.

As I head back through Broad Pass, fall colors dot the mountains on either side of the road. Muted reds of bearberry leaves cover the ground just above treeline, orangey-red dwarf birch whisk back and forth in the breeze, spruce point up darkly green to lead my eye to rocky patches of grass above long, slaty scree slopes. A magpie swoops at the windshield and lands on a bough unscathed, tipping back and forth for a moment to get its balance before it flies away, iridescent in the setting sun.

Rain begins to spit as I pull back into the Byers Lake campground, this time to sleep surrounded by other travelers: motorhome retirees relaxing beside a crackling fire, young twenty-somethings with bicycles atop their Subaru station wagon and a husky tied to a tree nearby, a lone man setting up his tent, radio perched on the picnic table spewing country music into the air. I camp far away from him, in a spot on Cranberry Loop, a quiet space where I build a fire and huddle under my waterproof hood and listen to raindrops patter softly on top of my head while eating dinner. I wonder if any of the other campers have discovered the cabin.