Travelers' Tales Alaska (23 page)

Several days into our trip, on a Friday night, I
tried to observe a makeshift Sabbath beneath the Endicott Mountains. Judaism in the rough. I took out two candles that I had packed back in New York and stuck them into the snow. Since it was spring, the midnight sun had just begun to emerge, and our campsite was draped with long shadows. I lit the candles. After I said the appropriate blessings, Dave and I ate dinner and talked in the tent about wild country and wild women until it grew dark outside. Cody, my wheel dog and Dave's pet, was with us, lying between our two sleeping bags. Dave was ready to go to bed. I told him that I wanted to go for a walk down to the river but that he should go ahead and put out the fire. The dogs, silent but watching my every step, were curled into balls to insulate themselves from the cold. I was cold, too. And tired. I had been so busy dealing with the day-to-day chores of handling my team that I had forgotten what it was that had brought me to this spot on the Earth. But as I stood there alone on the ice and looked over the peaks into the purple sky, I remembered.

The dark night erupted before me. Waves of white-green light scrolled across the heavens. It was the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights. I had seen them before, years ago, but never from this perspective. They seemed to be directly in front of me, hovering over the mountains. Almost beckoning. Pythagoras, the early Greek philosopher, claimed that the cosmos itself could speak, that the motion of the celestial bodies was so great that the reason humans could not hear it was that it had been with us from the moment of birth and we could not distinguish it from its opposite, silence. Yet I swear I heard something that night. Not with my ears. But with some other part of myself. I watched the pulsations of light the way you watch panthers in the wild, with awe and amazement. I knew then and there that I was in the presence
of something untamed and untamable. Transcendent and mysterious. Something that warmed my blood and made my soul tremble with new life.

I'd found what I had come for. Alaska was my Sinai.

Niles Elliot Goldstein is the founding rabbi of The New Shul in Greenwich Village, New York. He was the voice behind “Ask the Rabbi” on the Microsoft Network, is the National Jewish Chaplain for the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, and is the author or editor of numerous books, including
God at the Edge: Searching for the Divine in Uncomfortable and Unexpected Places,
from which this story was excerpted
.

ANDROMEDA ROMANO-LAX

The rough beauty of an alpine fishing trip soothes a family's growing pains.

I
CHOSE THIS REMOTE, APOSTROPHE-SHAPED LAKE, AND
the cabin that shares its name, just because I liked the sound of it: Upper Paradise Lake.
Paradise.

After a long, difficult pregnancy and three weeks of sleepless new-baby nights, I needed some paradise. I'd heard how easy the fishing was up here: friends visiting this same Forest Service cabin had caught and released 500 grayling in a weekend. I'd never caught a fish in Alaska, but surely I would manage to catch one here. I would hold it firmly in one hand, and marvel at its iridescent, sail-shaped fin, and feel a part of the alpine wilderness. I would feel strong and able; whole again.

There is also a Forest Service cabin at nearby Lower Paradise Lake, but that didn't sound as good. Upper versus Lower is simply a geographical distinction, but the terms reminded me of Dante's levels of heaven and hell. And if I was going to fly my nineteen-day-old baby, mischievous four-year-old son, and unhealed body into heaven for a weekend, I wanted a suite in heaven's top floor, not in the lobby.

We drove to Moose Pass, two hours south of Anchorage. The highway ends just south of Moose Pass, in Seward. But this was not the end of our trip, because any serious summer road trip in Alaska must extend far beyond roads. To escape, to feel that traveler's high of pushing beyond what one knows—sometimes toward what one fears—one must take to the air.

At the shore of Trail Lake, our pilot and a teen-aged assistant loaded our luggage into the floatplane that would take us to the cabin. They studiously avoided seeing the final item left on the dock: a bassinet-like infant carrier. Beneath the hood peered two small round eyes, as grayish-green as the glacial lake surrounding us.

Finally, the pilot faced me squarely. “Baby's going, too?”

“Yep.”

The pilot lifted his eyebrows but said nothing more, and then helped me straddle a pontoon and heft my baby daughter Tziporah and her carrier into the plane. There wasn't enough room. My husband Brian and the pilot occupied the front two seats. Aryeh and I squeezed into the rear two. The narrow tail of the plane was packed with fishing rods, bedrolls, backpacks, and duffel bags. Finally, I managed to make space at my feet, jamming the infant carrier with all my strength, wedging it tightly behind my husband's seat. I waited, tensely, expecting the pilot—or the baby—to protest.

Instead, the floatplane's engines roared to life, interrupting my fretting. Our earphones crackled with static. Even Aryeh had a pair, the earphones as big as coconut halves, clamped to either side of his head.

“You doing all right?” I asked him.

His posture was so stiff with excitement that he barely turned his head to answer me. “Roger,” he said, beaming, pressing his lips together to force a swallow.

I'd spent the morning snapping at my son, rushing him into
the car, reprimanding him when he poked at his newborn sister or woke her up from a nap. We'd all been sleep-deprived and crabby for the drive to Moose Pass. It was a relief to see him happy at last.

And then we were off. The small airport lake fell away and a misty, emerald-colored valley spread out beneath us. Within minutes, we could see no towns or roads, only more milky-green lakes and gray, braiding streams. The plane tilted toward the mountains, fighting blasts of wind. Out the window, just over my son's head, narrow waterfalls spilled down the steep flanks of glaciated peaks. We passed close enough to see animal tracks stitched into the snow on nearly vertical mountainsides. And then close enough to see mountainsides where there were no footprints—no signs of life, past or present. We'd flown only ten minutes, but this was farther from roads and trails than I'd ever been in Alaska.

At Upper Paradise Lake, our pilot wordlessly unloaded our gear with disconcerting speed, dumping our bags on a narrow gravel beach next to an overturned rowboat. Then he hopped back into the cockpit, started up the engine and sped away from shore. The plane's roar softened to a whine, and the whine to silence, interrupted only by the asthmatic huffs of an unsteady northerly wind. Then we were alone—more alone than I'd ever felt on the Kenai Peninsula, since we knew the terrain was too difficult for bushwhacking back to civilization if the plane didn't return, if an appendix burst, or if someone dropped an axe on his foot. We had no radio, no way to communicate with the outside world. That was the cabin's chief flaw, and also its allure.

The one-room log cabin that would be our home for three days was crafted of dark-stained timbers, fitted together like aged Lincoln Logs. It sat forty feet from the lake shore, surrounded by wind-stunted dwarf evergreens and shrubs.
Songbirds darted over the shrubs, tossed about by gusts. Snow-streaked peaks rose in all directions, blending into the grayish-white sky. The largest, just in front of us, appeared to lean to one side. The soft moan of a distant waterfall, spilling down the peak's face was occasionally audible over the wind, giving the mountain a voice.

The calendar said July, but at this elevation, it felt like spring: temps in the low fifties, wind smelling of snow. I hurried to the cabin to get my bearings and nurse the baby. As soon as I lay down on the hard, wooden bunk, tiredness washed over me. I had intended to rush right back out and explore our surroundings, but then my uterus clenched suddenly, like a flower closing its petals for the night. With Aryeh, pregnancy had been easier, and I had healed so much faster. This time around, I felt like all my organs had dropped about six inches, like my insides were only barely resisting the pull of gravity. I hurt worse now than the morning after I'd given birth.

The baby fussed, and I tried to bundle her more tightly against the unheated cabin's chill. If I could just settle her down, I thought, I could sleep. Brian started building a fire in the wood stove, but the heat didn't spread quickly and I felt cold. All my muscles ached. Aryeh kept running around the cabin, and then veering toward the baby and me with a
menacing, maniacal giggle. “Touch, touch!” he'd screech, causing Tziporah's sleepy, lavender-veined eyelids to jerk open nervously.

“Be quiet!” I yelled. “Be gentle!” But my son only giggled more hysterically.

The baby's nerves were frayed by so much mischievous noise and poking. So were mine. This had been the problem at home, too. Why did I think it would be better on the road, and better yet away from all roads, in a cabin in the Alaska wilderness? At home, I didn't dare leave Tziporah unattended for even the thirty seconds it took to leave the living room and throw away a diaper. Every time I rounded the corner from the bathroom back into the living room, I would hear a sound like the bleating of a goat—Tziporah's fragile newborn wail. Proof that she had been jostled or frightened. And I would spot Aryeh tugging on the baby's hand, or pushing his face into hers too roughly, or moving a pillow so that she was no longer guarded from rolling off the couch.