Travelers' Tales Alaska (12 page)

Which, I think, is when Paul—who was quite a ways behind me—snapped the picture that someone thought might sell beer.

The weather held for a week, and we paddled back down the inlet toward Bartlett Cove, a trip that is a time-lapse lesson in plant succession. Two hundred years ago, Captain George Vancouver mapped what was then Glacier Bay: a five-mile inlet capped by a 300-foot-high wall of ice. Over the past two centuries, since the end of the Little Ice Age, that immense glacier has retreated almost sixty-five miles, and the land it exposed is all barren rock and sterile gravel.

But the planet is modest, and she quickly clothes herself with life. Even under White Thunder Ridge, on land that had been exposed perhaps a few decades earlier, we found “black crust,” an algal nap that retains water and stabilizes silt so that eventually mosses grow. They in turn support hardy pioneers like fireweed and dryas. These plants are plentiful a few miles from the retreating glaciers. Farther down the inlet, alders drop nitrogen-rich leaves, building a soil that enables spruce to take hold and eventually shade out the alders. At Bartlett Cove, which was under 200 feet of ice 200 years ago, there is a hemlock and spruce rainforest.

Down inlet from the alder breaks we thought we saw a kayaker, far out ahead of us, his paddle dipping from side to side. This was the first human being we'd seen in a couple of weeks, and we called out to him. The kayaker failed to respond,
probably, we decided later, because he turned out to be a bull moose. It was his antlers swaying from side to side as he swam that had looked like a kayak paddle.

Paul, had he known he was going to sell a photo to a Canadian beer company, might have taken a picture of that moose's head. Instead, he got a horse's ass. I never did see the poster, but you'd think those Canadian beer execs would send me a few cases of their fine product so I could go bungee jumping and talk to women. At least get my roof fixed.

Tim Cahill is the author of many books, mostly travel-related, including
Hold the Enlightenment, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, Pecked to Death by Ducks, Pass the Butterworms,
and
Dolphins,
as well as the editor
of Not So Funny When it Happened: The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventure.
Cahill is also the co-author of the Academy Award-nominated IMAX film,
The Living Sea,
as well as the films
Everest
and
Dolphins.
He lives in Montana, and shares his life with Linnea Larson, two dogs, and two cats.

IAN FRAZIER

There's no place like Nome…for embracing melancholy.

W
HEN
I
WAS YOUNGER
, I
USED TO
—
NOT ENJOY, EXACTLY
, but take a certain satisfaction from being melancholy and depressed. As a single guy in an apartment in New York, I often spent days at a time in an unbroken mood of gloom, regret, self-recrimination, dislike for the world and for other human beings, and general unearned despair. In later years, married and with kids, I had to give up this indulgence. Walking around depressed with no reason is disagreeable behavior for which family and friends will rebuke you, rightly.

Plus I just didn't have the time for it anymore. Whenever I'd get started on a good downslope of melancholy, family concerns or pleasures would distract me, and I would abandon my mood in irritation. Nowadays my only opportunity for an old-fashioned, self-indulgent sulk comes when I'm traveling.

I had one opportunity recently in Nome, Alaska, a far-northern town on the Bering Sea. I had gone there to do some reporting, which bad weather made impossible. I sat in my motel room for several days, getting gloomier and gloomier.
Rain fell constantly. The month was August, and the rainy twilight lasted from four in the morning until midnight. Outside my window Bering Sea waves the color of wet cement landed on the riprap shoreline with thuds. To say that Nome, Alaska, is mainly mud with pieces of rusted iron sticking out of it is to be unfair to that interesting place, but so it appeared to me at the time. On my motel-room bed I read obscure books to the sound of the rain and the waves, taking occasional breaks to stare at the ceiling. I saw almost no one, never cracked a smile, and was as sorry for myself as I could be. After three or four days, completely bummed out, I went to the airport and flew home. I arrived pale, monosyllabic, and wonderfully refreshed.

Ian Frazier is a frequent contributor to
The New Yorker
and author of numerous books, including
Family, Great Plains, On the Rez,
and
The Fish's Eye.
He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

ELLEN BIELAWSKI

Camping at Wal
Mart

At the proverbial end of the road, there's…a parking lot.

A
NCHORAGE
, A
UGUST
, F
RIDAY
A
FTERNOON.
C
HOICES
abound: the family cabin, backpacking in the Chugach, kayaking ocean or whitewater. Both new and familiar wild places are in easy reach of my home. I choose Wal
Mart.

All summer the question has gnawed at me: Why would anyone travel thousands of miles to Alaska, then camp at a big box store? We locals wonder aloud at the herd of RVs resting on the midtown pavement. Our fear and loathing of the wheeled vehicle set is such that we do not ask.

But I am a lapsed anthropologist. I have no excuse for avoiding the culturally insular. Indeed, dangerous as the expedition might be, I have a professional responsibility to explore the big box lot. After all, Wal
Mart is, well,
there.

So I borrow a pickup truck with camper on the back, a cheap passport to the unnerving but intellectually enticing RV club. Friends are incredulous. “You're spending a
summer weekend
at Wal
Mart?” Some express pity. My mother, who came
to Alaska alone in 1946, fears for me. “Will you be all right?” she quavers as she leaves for our cabin.

Despite the risk, I am as determined to conquer the pavement as I was to winter camp with Athabascan hunters last year. I climb up behind the high steering wheel, drive down the Seward Highway to Wal
Mart South (Anchorage is blessed with two Wal
Marts, one in midtown and this one, just off the highway to the Kenai Peninsula) and enter a strange new world.