Travelers' Tales Alaska (25 page)

I raised the pliers more forcefully this time, and delivered a death blow. Then I set down the grayling in the blue-gray bottom of the boat, just inches from Tziporah, sleeping in her blanket cocoon. And I sat with the rod in my lap and stared out at the lake. Behind me I heard the gentle whir and dunk of Brian casting again, and then Aryeh taking a turn with Brian's rod.

“Are you feeling sad for the fish?” Aryeh asked finally, addressing
my back.

“I am,” I said, not turning around, not wanting him to see my wet eyes and cheeks. “Isn't that strange?”

It didn't seem right bringing this too-small grayling back to camp, with its missing scales and mangled mouth. I felt some pride for having caught a fish, my first Alaska fish, but I didn't want to eat this one, though I knew it would be a waste not to.

Suddenly, an eagle appeared in front of us. It spread its wings, lowering itself daintily into the tip-top branch of a skinny spruce tree guarding the stream's mouth. I watched it, and it watched us.

Then unexpectedly, I stood up in the rowboat, surprising even myself, and with all my strength lobbed my dead grayling into the air. The eagle swooped as the grayling arced and splashed down into the water. But the eagle stayed on course, and just as the lake's riffled surface closed over the grayling, the eagle's talons splashed down into the water, spearing it. The bird rose and circled us, wagging the grayling over our heads. It landed on the lake shore, just beyond a small rise, to eat the sacrifice in seclusion.

“Thank you,” I mouthed toward the eagle, for having removed this indelicate reminder of my rough, ungraceful errors.

And then, a little louder, to myself: “O.K., O.K. All right. O.K., O.K. All right,” the same rhythm as casting and reeling, or watching a child grow up, or rowing a boat, making a few corrections here and there to stay on course.

Andromeda Romano-Lax is a co-editor of this book and the author of several books, including
Searching for Steinbeck on the Sea of Cortez: A Makeshift Expedition Along Baja's Desert Coast.

PHILIP CAPUTO

A father and son seek “the true wild” on a drive through the Arctic. What they discover is both frightening and exhilarating

W
E WERE TWENTY MILES NORTH OF THE
A
RCTIC
C
IRCLE
and alone on the
Jim River,
three of us floating on one-man rafts under a sun that never set. Tony Oswald, a photographer and former Alaskan fishing guide, was in the lead, my twenty-two-year-old son, Marc, was behind him, and I, feeling the miles we had rowed as well as the effects of the late hour, brought up the rear. If I had judged the time by the sky, I would have said it was late afternoon, but my watch told me it was midnight. We'd been on the river for more than ten hours, making frequent stops to catch grayling, from gravel bars littered with driftwood and printed with the tracks of moose, wolves, and grizzlies. We hadn't seen any bears or wolves, but we had passed a cow moose and two calves grazing on weeds in a slough. They raised their heads to eye us, then trotted off with hardly a rustle into a stand of tall, leaning spruce. Every now and then, we'd caught the faint, distant
rumble of a truck on the Dalton Highway, the dusty supply road for the Prudhoe Bay oil fields and the Trans-Alaskan pipeline. Otherwise, we hadn't heard a man-made sound nor seen a sign of our own species—not a single boot print.

That was welcome but not surprising. The Jim, a tributary of the Koyukuk River, itself a tributary of the mythic Yukon, flows through a wilderness bigger than California: Arctic Alaska, the last frontier of the state that calls itself the Last Frontier. The nearest human settlements to us were two tiny villages: Coldfoot, thirty-odd miles north on the Dalton, and Bettles, fifty miles to the west.

The trip was a graduation present for Marc, and for me the fulfillment of an old dream. In 1959, when Alaska was granted statehood, I was a restless high-school senior, a bit intoxicated by Jack London and Robert Service. I wanted to quit school to be a fur trapper in the land where, in Service's words, “the mountains are nameless and the rivers all run God-knows-where.” I never went, and the dream went into a long hibernation. It was finally awakened by the news that the Dalton Highway had been opened to public traffic.

The highway runs for 414 unpaved miles from its starting point at Livengood, north of Fairbanks, to the town of Deadhorse, near the Arctic Ocean. It was named for James W. Dalton, an oil explorer who played a major role in the discovery of the Prudhoe fields and died in 1977, only three weeks before the last weld on the 800-mile-long pipeline was completed. In those days, the road was restricted to service crews hauling supplies and equipment to Prudhoe Bay. In 1981, a section of it became accessible to the public, and on December 2, 1994, the whole length was opened.

The Dalton is the only major road in Alaska north of the Arctic Circle, a region of some 150,000 square miles. It bridges the Yukon River, climbs the Brooks Range, and
crosses the Arctic coastal plain. Along the way, it passes through or near three refuges and a national park whose total area almost equals that of the six New England states combined: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Preserve (19.8 million acres), Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve (8.4 million acres), the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge (8.6 million acres), and the Kanuti National Wildlife Refuge, a postage stamp at 1.6 million acres.

Maps now show where Robert Service's rivers run; yet many of them remain nameless, and are still highways for the epic migrations of salmon and Arctic char that grow to twenty pounds. Most of the mountains also remain nameless, and beneath them, caribou wander across fenceless ranges in numbers recalling the tides of bison that once inundated the Great Plains. Above all, there is the grizzly, the incarnation of all that was wild in the Americas before the arrivals of Cortez and the Massachusetts Bay colony. As many as 40,000 range through British Columbia and Alaska; by comparison, only about 1,000 roam the U.S. Rocky Mountains.

I was stirred by the idea of driving a road that is a modern equivalent of the Oregon Trail. Perhaps I would get an idea, however faint, of what America looked and felt like to the pioneers, who called the Rocky Mountain West “the Big Open.” Having hiked, camped, canoed, fished, and hunted in many parts of the continental United States for more than half my life, I had come to the melancholy but inescapable conclusion that the Big Open is all but closed. Vast cattle ranges are being carved into ranchettes for refugee Californians. Most “protected” wilderness areas, when they aren't being clear-cut, are becoming wilderness simulacrums—defanged, declawed, domesticated Disneylands, teeming with video-recording tourists.

Even in relatively uncrowded national parks, there are enough bureaucratic regulations to make you consider joining
a citizen's militia. You must reserve campsites as if they were hotel rooms. You have to obtain permits. You have to stay on marked trails, and, in some parks, you are not allowed to have ground fires.

John McPhee, in his 1976 classic about Alaska,
Coming into the Country
, observed that our society has “an elemental need for a frontier outlet, a pioneer place to go—important even to those who don't go there…all we have left is Alaska.” He was right. At 586,000 square miles, it's so sparsely settled that if its population density were applied to New York City, only 250 people would live in the five boroughs. And one of the biggest, most open parts of Alaska is the Dalton region, where there are no marked trails. In fact, there are virtually no trails of any kind, and no permits are required. You can walk or camp wherever you choose. Of course, there is a yin to that yang. If there are no rangers to hassle you with red tape, neither are there any to pull you out of trouble. No first-aid stations around the bend, few search-and-rescue teams. Suffer a broken leg or some other mishap, and you will have to do what the prospectors and explorers did in the old days: send for help and hope you don't die before it comes.

The isolation and wildness were a little daunting, but they were the reasons we had come to Alaska's far north. There can be no true freedom without wilderness and no true wilderness without freedom, and neither comes free. A toll is levied in sore muscles, sweat, and, occasionally, as we would find out, fear.

Late in June, Marc and I joined Tony and his friend Jennie Chandler in Fairbanks. For the next three days we bought supplies and gear and worked out a rough itinerary, poring over topographic maps in our motel rooms. We would float and fish the Jim and Koyukuk rivers for grayling and salmon, trek across the tundra to photograph caribou and musk ox, and hike the Brooks Range in the footsteps of Robert
Marshall, the naturalist and explorer who had mapped some 12,000 square miles of those mountains in the late 1930s.…

We headed north on the Elliott Highway. It was a somber, rainy afternoon, and we were happy to get out of Fairbanks. Urban Alaska, what little there is of it, is remarkably drab and ugly—as if the overwhelming landscape suppresses the human impulse to build things that try to match nature in beauty or stupendousness. Seventy-three miles later, the Elliott ended. Ahead was a small green-and-white sign:

J
AMES
W. D
ALTON
H
IGHWAY

Y
UKON
R
IVER
56

A
RCTIC
C
IRCLE
115

C
OLDFOOT
175

The Yukon River! The Arctic Circle! Coldfoot! Other names beckoned from farther up the road, some given long ago by gold-fevered prospectors,
some more recently by oil men, some by Eskimos and Athabascan Indians in a time beyond recorded history. Bonanza Creek. The Sagavanirktok River. The Sagwon Uplands. We were headed up a raw and open road into the Far North's far north.

The rain had stopped by the time we crossed the Yukon on a steel-and-plank bridge, the only span of the river in all the 1,400 miles it flows through Alaska. Half a mile wide and six fathoms deep, gleaming like liquid brass in the evening sun, the river wound westward between high, wooded bluffs toward its meeting with the Bering Sea, where great whales breached and blew.

We fueled up at a ramshackle gas station, where we got a look at two very different types of American traveler. One was a lonesome adventurer: a middle-aged biker whose Harley was so mud-caked it looked like a clay model. He had ridden across most of the Lower 48, up the Alaska Highway, then up to Dalton to Deadhorse, and was heading home to Ohio—a round trip of 8,500 miles. The other type—too many of them—climbed off a Princess Tours bus and walked into a café with the stiff gaits of people who spend too little time using their legs.