Travelers' Tales Alaska (35 page)

I sat there in the B&B, warm and drowsy with the beer I'd drunk, wondering what I'd seen in the mirror, a stranger with a red beard and a white hat who'd hesitated at the door of the bar, and then decided to go back down the street to the boat harbor, or something else.… I knew without being told that one way or another the dead were as much a part of us now as they had ever been when they were alive. And in a way I knew, more deeply the older I got, that the glimpses of long-dead men I saw turning corners around buildings in broad daylight, or standing bright and forever young before me when the room was dark or my eyes were shut, were really them, not just my memory of them. And I knew too they were with me for keeps, that they weren't going anywhere,
they were permanent visitors inside my head from all those last trips they'd never come back from.…

I came out of the bar and stood in the parking lot in front of the cannery looking at the sky, trying to tell if it was going to blow hard enough to keep us in town, wishing hard that it would. All the accumulated debris of longing for warmth and the company of people other than the other guys on the boat came floating up out of the little box deep down inside where we all kept those pieces of emotion that had no place in the working environment at sea. My knees and wrists still hurt, I could have used a long nap up in my apartment in Aleutian Homes, and the thought of going out there again so soon was almost more than I was willing to take. For a minute I debated just walking away, telling the skipper he could fire me if he wanted, but I needed a trip off, I was toast. Instead I just stood
there breathing, knowing I was in it till the season was over. I needed the money, and besides, anybody who might have wanted the job was either already on a boat, injured, or not worth taking out.…

For a long minute I stood there, looking back across the boat harbor at the lights of town, thinking about the wind, the ocean, the work, the hyper-reality of the lives we led beyond the sight of land. I thought about how far all of that was from the lives of the people on land I loved and who loved me back, and then I turned and climbed up the stairs to the deck of the processor and walked across to the ladder that led down to the deck of the
Irene.
Twenty minutes later we were headed down the channel past the canneries, tying up the lines behind the house and securing the deck for the run to Chirikof.

Looking back at the houses of town as the evening descended over them, I wondered if maybe someone was watching us from up on the hill above the harbor, pausing while they made dinner. Was someone looking down out their kitchen window, watching our mast light disappear into the gathering darkness of the open sea, wondering if we would be all right? Would they remember that moment in a few weeks as a last sighting before we disappeared with all hands, lost in what the Coast Guard would call “Circumstances unknown”?

Years later I read a story by a reporter in Vietnam. A soldier he met there told him about a squad of rangers that had walked single file up a ridge one night and disappeared. The reporter asked him what happened, were they killed, didn't anyone go searching for them? But the soldier just looked at him strangely and smiled and walked away, shaking his head. It took the reporter years to realize he'd been told everything he needed to know about the incident, that the soldier knew
if he didn't get it, well, he didn't really understand the war.

I read that story lying in my bunk one night in Kiska Harbor, with the rusted masts of the Emperor's ships rising from the dark water along the far shore, lost markers for those men who never returned to Japan to tell their wives and mothers and fathers and children what happened to them. I recognized it immediately in a spooky moment of clarity as the ultimate ghost story, for the truth it revealed about witnessing, and remembering, about bringing back, and giving, experience. And I thought about all the sea stories that never made it back from the places where they happened, to the places where people wait to hear them, thousands of stories for thousands of years. And I thought of all the ways those stories can be lost, the last frantic radio call ending in mid-sentence, the missed cannery schedule, the empty horizon where a boat should be. And I thought of all the stories that are just simply lost in the telling, survivors' stories forgotten as soon as they are told, or forgotten and lost before they are ever told at all. Unless we decide, deliberately, to remember our stories and to tell them, it will be as if they had never happened, or as if we had never returned to tell them.

I could tell you what the sea looked like on certain days, tell you about the things we did there, about the people we knew and carried with us and the ones we left behind when we had to leave. I could tell you all that and hope that some of it might become a part of you, a story that you might remember, a piece of my life now become a part of yours. Because it is all one story anyway, mine, yours, all of us connected by the stories we tell each other, and they are all true sea stories. The nightmare hundred-foot waves, the quiet moments in warm houses on the hill above the harbor, the last sight of the women who waited for us there—the universe
breathes within all of us through all of them. And at some point, mariners all, we untie and slip out of the harbor one at a time, light falling at dusk, a single file of mast lights heading out into the oceanic darkness, looking back at the warm yellow lights of the houses along the receding shore, the first drops of cold sea spray beginning to rattle against the wheelhouse windows. Long before we get there we all know the salt blood water of the Gulf of Alaska, of the Bering Sea, of the Shelikof, even Kiska Harbor. We taste it on our lips, feel it seeping through the spaces in our hearts, like water filling the cracks of the bedrock beneath the sea, remembering it, carrying it with us, down, down, down, one last true story, into the center of the world.

Toby Sullivan is an author and a poet in addition to being an Alaskan fisherman. This story won the Grand Prize in the
Anchorage Daily News
Annual Creative Writing Contest. He lives in Kodiak, Alaska.

SHERRY SIMPSON

Was he a hero or a young fool? Pilgrims seeking answers travel into the wild.

B
EFORE WE STARTED OUR SMALL JOURNEY LAST YEAR
to the place where Christopher McCandless died, I wondered whether we should be traveling on foot rather than by snowmachine. It was probably the last weekend before the sketchy snow would melt and the river ice would sag and crack. If we waited a few weeks, we could hike the Stampede Trail to the abandoned bus where his body was found in 1992. Wouldn't it seem more real, more authentic somehow, if we retraced his journey step by step?

No, I thought. This is not a spiritual trek. I refuse to make this a pilgrimage. I will not make his journey my own.

And so we set off on the tundra, snowmachines whining across a thin layer of hard snow. The five of us moved quickly, each following the other westward through the broad valley. To the south, clouds wisped across the white slopes that barricade Denali National Park and Preserve. I wore ear protectors to dull the noise of the grinding engines. When the sun burned through, we turned our faces toward it gratefully,
unzipped our parkas, peeled away fleece masks. It had been a long winter—warmer than most in Interior Alaska, but even so each day was filled more with darkness than light.

We kept on, the only motion against a landscape that seemed still and perfect in its beauty. It was the kind of day when you could think about Christopher McCandless and wonder about all the ways that death can find you in such a place, and you can find death. And then, a few minutes later, you'd look out across the valley, admiring the way the hills swell against the horizon, and think, “Damn, I'm glad to be alive in Alaska.”

A few summers ago I rode in a shuttle van from Fairbanks to the park with a group of vacationers and backpackers. As we left town, the driver began an impromptu tour of McCandless's final days. In April 1992, he had hitchhiked to Alaska, looking for a place to enter the wilderness. The van driver pointed out a bluff near Gold Hill Road, the last place McCandless camped in Fairbanks. The driver talked about the purity of McCandless's desire to test himself against nature. He slowed as we passed the Stampede Road, the place where a Healy man had dropped off McCandless so the young man could begin his journey. He ignored all offers of help except for a pair of rubber boots. He did not take a map.

In the van, people whispered to each other and craned their necks to peer at the passing landmarks.

McCandless had hiked about twenty-five miles along the trail before stopping at a rusting Fairbanks city bus left there in the 1960s by a crew building a road from the highway to the Stampede Mine, near the park boundary. He had a .22 rifle and a ten-pound bag of rice. In the back of a Native plant lore book he scribbled brief, often cryptic entries.

In July he tried to leave but apparently was turned back by
the roiling Teklanika River. He did not know enough to search for a braided crossing.

By August, a note tacked to the bus pleaded for help from any passerby: “I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here,” it said in part. In early September, hunters found his body shrouded in a sleeping bag inside the bus. He had been dead for more than two weeks. Although he had tried to eat off the land, and had even succeeded in killing small animals and a moose, he had starved, an unpleasant and unusual way to die in America these days.

The strange manner of his death made the 24-year-old infamous in Alaska as authorities tried to puzzle out his story. A 1993
Outside
magazine article by Jon Krakauer, followed by the 1996 best-selling book
Into the Wild
, made him famous everywhere else.

The van driver was maybe in his early thirties, mild and balding. As he drove and talked, he held up a copy of Krakauer's book, a sympathetic and compelling portrait of McCandless. The driver said he kept the book with him always because he felt close to the dead man.

“I understand his wanting to come here and go into the wild,” he said. Like McCandless, he'd attended Emory University, and he and his wife had recently moved to Anchorage in search of whatever it is people want when they come to Alaska.

In a van full of out-of-state vacationers, the driver felt safe criticizing the response of Alaskans to the story of McCandless. “They called him a young fool who deserved what he got,” he said. “There was not a positive letter to the editor written about Chris McCandless. It went on for days.” He checked our reactions in the rearview mirror. “It was pretty chilling to read.”

Through some strange transmogrification, Christopher McCandless has become a hero. Web sites preserve high school
and college essays analyzing
Into the Wild
, which is popular on reading lists everywhere and frequently seen in the hands of people touring the state. A California composer has written a concert piece meant to convey the dying man's states of mind—fear, joy, and acceptance. A Cincinnati rock band has named itself “Fairbanks 142,” after the bus where McCandless lived and died.