Travelers' Tales Alaska (6 page)

From the time he dropped into the cloud bank, Geeting was irrevocably committed. The peaks looming unseen in the mists beyond his wingtips left absolutely no room for error: If the pilot were to complete a turn a few seconds late, or steer a few degrees too far to the left or right, with each subsequent maneuver he would unwittingly compound the mistake, and the airplane would eventually plow blindly into one of a dozen icy mountainsides at 110 miles per hour.

“I made my way down through the cloud between the mountain walls,” Geeting says, “watching the compass, the clock, and the altimeter real close, listening for the climbers to yell, ‘Now' when I buzzed over them. I figured touchdown would be right at seven thousand feet, so when the altimeter showed seventy-five hundred I lined up for final, slowed to landing speed and went on in. It was a real odd feeling, because in a whiteout like that you can't tell where the sky stops and the glacier begins. All of a sudden my airspeed went down
to nothing, and I thought, ‘Son of a bitch!' Then I looked out the window and saw these climbers running out of the cloud toward the airplane. Damned if I wasn't on the ground.”

Jon Krakauer is an outdoor and adventure writer and the author of
Into the Wild, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster,
and
Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains,
from which this story is excerpted. A contributing editor to
Outside,
he writes for many national magazines and newspapers. He lives in Seattle.

BARBARA BROWN

A paddler finds soggy serenity.

T
HE PADDLE ENTERS THE WATER WITH A SCATTERING
of splashes and a
plonk
. It glides backward, rises from the water, and the
plonk
moves to the other side of the kayak, to the other paddle.
Plonk
,
plonk
.
Plonk
,
plonk
. One thousand-one, one thousand-two. This is the only rhythm of my week. This and the tides. High tide in the afternoon, high tide late at night.

My husband, Tim, and I have thoughtfully arranged this trip in Prince William Sound to coincide with the one week of rainy weather all summer. We are out in weather that would lead Californians to say, “Let's just reschedule; the weather will be great another day.” But as my friend Ann says, “There is no bad weather, only bad gear.” And as my friend Rob says, “If the weather were great, this place would be as crowded as California.”

So we get rain and privacy, rain and emptiness. It's a good trade. If it weren't raining, I wouldn't know that tiny silver bubbles are released when raindrops hit the water. I wouldn't know that when my rain hood is up and I can't see to the sides
or even turn my head around, I am in a silent, solitary world. The mist hangs over the landscape. There are no mountains, no faraway distances. Just the immediacy of this cove, this gravel bar, and nothing moving faster than a kayak, nothing moving faster than the
plonk
,
plonk
of my paddle metronome.

And then the sky clears and there are mountains and glaciers. I take off my hood, rediscover Tim, our friends Rob and Mark. We peel off rain jackets and long underwear; I'm down to my life jacket and sunglasses. Oh, rain is so good because it feels so good when it stops. A day is good when we get the tents set up before the rain. A day is bad when the rain picks up and beats down on us just as we find a campsite. A day is good when the rain starts just as we slip into our fully loaded kayaks for another paddle.

A day is really good when we manage to escape the bugs. The gnats are clouds around us, bites on our bodies, bumps everywhere. Sometimes we race for the tents at night, right on the brink of psychosis, but then I get to fill the tent walls with gnat corpses and I feel better. Mark is new to Alaska; he lives in his head net. I take the route of personal poison: I pump bug dope all over. Tim says I will smell of bug dope when I perspire, but at least I can look at the scenery without a seam down my face.

I already look like the Elephant Man when I'm bit on the lip. It swells up huge. I have Barbara Hershey collagen-stuffed lips. Suddenly I want to make big smooshy kisses with Tim. I feel like there's a berry in my lip and that if I kiss him, berry juice will run through us. If all my DEET doesn't poison us first.

So I line up at the tent, ready to race inside before the bugs follow me in. I dive in…and reel backwards from the stench inside. “Zip the door,” Tim shouts.

“It stinks in here,” I gasp. Old wool, he says, polypro long
underwear, bug dope. Personal hygiene, I say, bodily functions. GAS. With the rain and the bugs, our tents are factories of scent, cesspools of odors. Our hygiene is so bad I am eating meals prepared by fingernails dirtier than an auto mechanic's. We fish bugs out of our hot chocolates and then give up. We would never eat bug corpses from our tent walls, but we are eating them in our food.

We sleep eleven hours. The rhythm of our days is clockless, timeless. We watch for high tide, are relieved when it passes our tents by, and then sleep till whenever. We eat our meals and beg each other to eat more. Should we eat to reduce volume or weight? Why did we bring so much food?

We boil water for cooking. It's good when it rains; we just put pots under the corners of the tarp. On sunny days, we have to filter. On rainy days, it's easy, but our drinking water tastes like tarp. We eat a lot of things like cheese and crackers, chocolate chips, salami, gorp. I go out in the wilderness to be healthy and I eat things I'd never eat at home.

We see otters and seals, bears and porcupines, eagles everywhere. I collect stones, each one smoother than the last, stones that have been smoothed for eons. I am traveling with three men, and they are collecting stones for a skipping tournament, best three out of five. They gang up, say I use more than my fair share of toilet paper.

I'm paddling to the rhythm of the kayak.
Plonk
,
plonk
. I am neither fast nor slow. I am the only time of the Sound, the only time of the water. My mind is so clear, the water clear. I look at my bare arms. I have strong biceps, I think. I am the earth, the water, the rain, the air. I turn back to Tim.

“Man,” he says, “your armpits stink.”

Barbara Brown and her ten-year-old daughter, Sophie, spent the summer of 2002 crossing America by waterpark. They began at home
in Anchorage, Alaska and ended back there after 10,000 miles, 24 waterparks, 10 stitches to the head, and 3 demolished bathing suits. Husband Tim kept the home fires burning and Barbara is now at work on the book. Barbara was a weekly columnist at the
Anchorage Daily News
for the past eight years and is now the Director of Leadership Anchorage for the Alaska Humanities Forum, and a regular commentator on public radio. She is also the “Storytime Lady” for the Alaska Botanical Garden.

DANIEL HENRY

A tribe's wealth includes knowing where its food comes from.

B
ROWN FACES ARE THE ONLY SKIN SHOWING ON PEOPLE
with dip nets by the side of the highway. Early May breeze leaves a winterish afterbite, so everyone is bundled up. A pickup bed sags with eulachon, the local smelt treasured for its sweet grease. You swerve onto the gravel shoulder and lean against your rental car, a black techno-shaman soul-stealer dangling from your neck. As a reformed representative of the conquering nation, you are titillated by your presumed guilt, so saunter over. Conscious of a photo op with aboriginal flame-keepers, you wait for acknowledgement. A man with long raven hair chews on a strip of red fish jerky. He offers it to the man next to him, who hands it to his brother or uncle. Emboldened by ancient ritual, you ask for a bite. Time passes.

They are amicable, quiet. Syllables gurgle and splash within the river's rushing discourse. David, you think you hear the oldest man say by way of introduction. He meets your gaze, ducks a greeting with the bill of his ball cap, returns his sentinel stare to blue-black streaks in frothwater. Feebly: How's the
fishing? Spring flood swallows your words. You stare, too, unwilling to intrude further into the eyes of men in prayerful duty.

The river answers your question with each netload bent to strobe-balls wrangled from glacial milk in the flat, slobbering light. Like these men, you are transfixed by thousands of fish muscling through current the color of wet cement. You focus your shaman's eye at the rain-slickered row of backs bowing to this river called Chilkat, or “salmon storehouse,” by people whose surroundings speak to them constantly in dialects of water. Flash. Flashes of fish in silvery death dance, flashes in faces looking away. Somewhere before your thoughts circle around the pictures' monetary value, the ancient images tiptoe past the closed door of your ethics. Maybe the door is ajar enough for you to wonder if this story is really yours to tell. You seek comfort in knowing that six or seven generations of photographers have already opened the door, captured their prizes, and slammed it shut.

Did frontier photographer Edward Curtis feel this way when he appropriated hundreds of Native American faces a century ago? The question threatens to kick open your shadowy door as you return to the safety of your white coupe. You see them everywhere: sepia-tone images staring back proudly from posters, book jackets, the flickering campfires of cyberspace. Surely Curtis yearned to span the same unbridgeable separateness from his subjects, and you want to know how he did it. How did he know when it was time to squeeze the bulb on his hulking Kodak?

Something primal and awkward pulls a grin across your face as you drive on. Like Curtis, you've crossed through time and have the pictures to prove it. You may even convince yourself in stories told back home that these men were, in a
way, your friends, or at least companions along the river. But you know better. Friends invite friends to the table. Only intimates or intruders barge in. Strangers are fed by grace.

It's likely that you are not the type to stop and bother Native fishers, but it happens. In my twenty years of knocking around a North known by its disconnection with all things Southerly, I've often driven my rusting Subaru hatchback past curious non-Natives along the sides of roads as they earnestly invested their ten minutes to bridge the gap between Burger King and subsistence people. Those tableaus may be frozen in your memory as well. Voyeurs with high-optic cameras distance themselves from the threat of an actual encounter. Drive-by shootings flash from braking SUVs. Without the shield of cultural ambiguity, Edward Curtis was compelled to listen at length to the stories of his subjects. He may have grasped the forearms of men in welcome, or lifted a small child to his shoulders. Names were exchanged. Meals were dished up. Through his images, Curtis transformed the magical events of photographic portraiture into commerce, sold to the conquerors' spawn so we may at any moment meet the eyes of the vanquished.

But this is not about blame or guilt. It is about sharing. The gap that some contend exists between ancient and contemporary peoples is an interface, really. As Tlingit poet-linguist Nora Dauenhauer suggests in her poem, “How to Cook Fresh Salmon from the River,” perceived cultural chasms may be bridged by the contents of a paper plate: “Serve to all relatives and friends/You have invited to the bar-b-q/And those who love it./ And think how good it is/That we have good spirits/That still bring salmon and oil.” Like wolves and hounds, teachers and students, parents and offspring, the
blood that courses under our deceptive skins defines our commonalities. And long before prejudice or love, the pulse within our bodies burns with the heat of food.