Four Quarters of Light (49 page)

Another incident confirmed for me the need to move on. During one of the frequent rainy spells we crashed our buggies into the state capital building for shelter. On the first floor there is an almost life-sized photo/mural of the representatives of Alaska's first territorial legislature in 1913. The all-male representatives looked exactly like what they were – ragged pioneers and frontiersmen whose life experience was about doing and surviving in the great outdoors rather than sitting and talking about legislative regulation. I studied their bearded faces and staring eyes. They looked distinctly uncomfortable, even lost. In their
starched collars, tight ties and dress suits that looked two sizes too small, they looked more like people who had had the life wrung out of them. Behind the bravado smiles and the puffed-out chests I had a sense that some of them looked more like condemned men than committed legislators. I sympathized with them. Civilized society is about more than signatures on policy documents or the codification of laws. It is also about the loss of individual freedom, for something as vague as the greater good. There were no native names or faces among the legislators. I remembered reading somewhere that the native peoples should not set up as native corporations or be given special ownership of vast tracts of Alaskan territory but should rather be as ‘the minds over the land', for they alone knew the land and the natural laws that emanated from it. I looked again at the photo and felt once more a shared discomfort passing between me and these pictures of the dead. Finally, the rain ceased and we departed.

Of all the places I had been to in Alaska, Sitka appeared to be the loveliest. There was a serene kind of beauty about the town and its location that was almost oriental. The town sits facing the Pacific and is overshadowed by the Mount Fuji-like features of Mount Edgecombe, an extinct volcano. The waters offshore are broken up by an amazing archipelago of small islands, all with their own growths of pine and hemlock. When you look out on the silhouette that forms at sunset, you can almost feel the tranquillity rising up from them. Sitka is the only town in all of south-east Alaska that fronts on to the ocean, and with the backdrop of snowy peaks behind you can believe that you are actually standing in the most exquisite Japanese landscape etching.

I was far away from the Arctic with its Eskimos and Athabascan bush, and, I suppose, far away from all the awkward questions my travels in the Big Lonely had thrown up. But Sitka was idyllic, maybe because I knew it was the end of a long journey and I was unconsciously reacting to it. Still, there was a distinct ambience about Sitka that was restful and quiet. There was a
palpable sense of harmony and easygoing good humour, and I wallowed in it. I had spent so long in the bush or on the harsh Arctic coast that I had forgotten how consoling a nearness to the sea could be. I had also forgotten about the ‘real' trees. For months I had seen only the eerie, spindly trunks of black spruce or gangly silver white birch. But here, the trees were magnificent. Western hemlock, Sitka spruce and red and yellow cedar added a sense of muscular vitality to the landscape. They were huge and lushly green, and inside their forests you felt small and humble but at the same time safe and reassured. The summer was ending with glorious haste, and under the green canopy of the evergreen forest autumn colours were setting the hillsides ablaze. It was a time for recollection, and Sitka was perfect for it.

For the first few days we stayed in an old, comfortable, rundown hotel. I could imagine it in an earlier life being the grand home of some whaling captain. Its rooms and layout were not that of a hotel. The bar was tiny, and it was the meeting place for many skippers from the fleet of working boats that lay out on the sound.

I thought of our days spent in the
Pequod
. In my own way I too, like Captain Ahab, had been chasing a metaphorical white whale. An article by Chris Bernard in the free summer visitor guide published by the local newspaper, the
Daily Sitka Sentinel
, made me think about my journey:

When Ward Eldridge kayaked back to his beloved schooner
Merlin
, he found the boat resting quietly, exactly where he had left it in Still harbour, about 35 miles south of Sitka. But only the top of the mast was showing; the keel was sitting on the ocean bottom. The 73-foot
Merlin
, said to be the oldest working American-built vessel on the West Coast, had weathered a lot of storms in her 111 years. But something had brought her down.

After the
Merlin
was raised, the cause of its sinking became clear: a collision with a humpback whale. Although such seemed unlikely – the last documented case of a whale sinking a boat in the area occurred at the turn of the century – proof
was found. Several strips of baleen were wedged in the planks at the edge of the 5-foot hole in the boat.

I thought of my own
Pequod
, finally beached in Fairbanks. At first I had been enchanted with the idea of ‘sailing' across Alaska, stopping wherever we chose to explore and live in the wilderness. But it wasn't long before the cramped confines and the lack of navigable road made the ‘Dreamboat' irksome, and often an encumbrance. But that's the way it goes with dreams. Sometimes pursuing them distorts reality and often causes us to shipwreck our lives on the subject of such dreams. The obsessions of Captain Ahab and Chris McCandless had ultimately destroyed them.

I read another article in the
Anchorage Daily News
I had picked up somewhere along my travels, a scientific report about whales written by Ned Rozell. It pointed out that ‘Scientists previously thought that bowheads had a lifespan similar to other whales, but the old harpoon points hint that some of the whales alive today were swimming in the cold waters of the circumpolar oceans more than 100 years ago . . . One whale was 91, one was 135, one 159, one 172, and the oldest whale was 211 years old at the time of death . . . That whale, alive during the term of President Clinton, was also gliding slowly and gracefully through the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas when Thomas Jefferson was president.'

My fascination with Alaska was not quite as old as these ancient fish, but in a way it had been following me around all my life, like Moby Dick. For a moment I thought of Debra wrenching the scales from my back, as old as dinosaurs or ancient whales. Alaska had revealed much to me, and it was time to cast off old obsessions along with that ancient armour that had protected and defended me. Rid of its cumbersome weight, I could let the heart breathe and live more fully, nurturing my inner life and creativity. I may have many miles more to go, but the road was opening up before me.

That evening Audrey and I sat on the balcony of the small
seafront motel we had moved to. The sunsets were divine. Sometimes we sat for hours, hardly speaking. Often we watched the salmon carried in on the sea tides as they thrashed and splashed over the rock-strewn foreshore where a tiny river entered the sea. From here they would swim up to the mountain lakes where they were born, give birth themselves, then die. It seemed an impossible task to battle their way up through water my flattened hand would not submerge in. When they had entered the sea from this same river maybe four years ago they would only have been a matter of inches long; now they could be up to two feet long with the bulk to match. Often I wanted to go and lift them and carry them to the river they so desperately sought. So we sat and watched, humbled by the salmon and the sunset.

It is said that the Clan House of the Tlingit people is a representation of the cosmos, and it always faces the water. The fire pit in its centre symbolizes the centre of the universe and is the intersection to the middle world dominated by man, the under world, the upper world, the sea world and the sky world. I had never been in a Clan House, but I felt I understood it. Looking out on the scene before me I was already in the Clan House, or at least my spirit was, and I too was at a great intersection in my life, like the season, the sunset and the struggling salmon.

For the next few days we spent our time wandering around the National Historical Park. Often I was sure I could hear black bears grunting in the undergrowth of the foliage rustling and moving several yards from us. There were fifteen amazing native totem poles to be seen, and we chose to see them all. I was amazed at their height and girth, but more drawn to their naive simplicity, their stoic forbearance and their reduction of a complex world into a collection of intimate symbols. You know just by standing and looking at them in the vast silence of the forest that these things are powerful beyond their sheer bulk. But they were never frightening. They were comforting and welcoming, like a family you have been too long away from.

Standing underneath the giant Sitka spruce and great western
hemlock was like being in another world. I thought of Debra and her childhood belief in that other world. Lewis Carroll would have loved this place, and the Grimm brothers knew it well. Inside the forest you left life and the real world behind. It was as if you had passed through an invisible veil. Here the air felt different, and it was full of smells. We had to shelter at the foot of one of the forest's great giants as a squall of rain sheeted down. The downpour was somehow orchestral and had a diamond brightness that brought the forest closer to you, the way a magnifying glass does. Through the invisible swelter of vegetation, birds and animals called out in the green silence. After the rain had gone and we looked up to be sure, the trees exploded in a blizzard of foliage against the bright sky; for a few seconds it looked like fairy lights strung across the tree tops. Inside the forest, time, too, had been blown away.

Under that dappled canopy, myth and legend awaited us. When we entered it, it was as if we had shrugged off the gaudy raiments of civilization and tattooed ourselves with primitive and carnal images – our camouflage and acceptance of belonging in this natural refuge. For now we were in the land of talking beasts and changeling creatures – Distant Time land. It was as if the oldest and most basic part of ourselves leapt out to meet us.

I am convinced you need the mind of a child to live in the wilderness. A child's imagination is untamed and unafraid. My first responses to the vast wilderness were like those of a caged animal – anxious, watchful, even afraid. I still remembered how my nervous system had been charged into high alert. As I wandered alone into the bush my skin was tingling from the heat of unseen eyes watching me, and perhaps there was cause.

Native tradition unfolds many stories about animals with human characteristics, and vice versa. This same folklore also speaks of an enigmatic human creature that inhabits the forest as a person who has crossed over from the world of men to the world of nature. This ‘woodsman', as he is called, is like a kind of missing link, the final affirmation that the view of man as a separate and superior being is an illusion. This wild man is like the raven,
who mocks and jeers our human endeavour but is never malign. It is only our civilized conditioning in fear that makes him threatening. I was sure we all needed to find the ‘woodsman' in ourselves. A being who was utterly free, who could understand the wild and commune with it.

When I looked at the magnificent totem posts, I knew they were telling a story about a people and the incidents that made up their history. But the arresting blend of animal and human imagery hints at another story. They speak of another part of ourselves that the forest sets free, perhaps those half-crazed, half-unlived parts of ourselves that have been ‘civilized' for too long. Anyway, I thought to myself, who doesn't want to go mad sometimes? Maybe madness is the end of fear, and of prohibition, and of the sanctions we impose on ourselves. Madness is not about losing oneself, but reclaiming for a moment what has been lost and hidden away within us. The psychic cleavage between things of the flesh and matters of the spirit is healed and restored.

Alaska demands much of the person who comes here to understand it. Maybe you never really can. Like the extreme landscape that it is, the Final Frontier remains impregnable. But it reveals itself to you in momentary flashes, like the wolf in Denali, the moose in McCarthy, the night on the frozen lake, the healing on Oneson's hill. I was happy for it to remain so. It was there to question and confuse us, and to humiliate and humble us, just like the mythological trickster Raven. To come to any sense of what it could mean you had first to prostrate yourself before it. I was convinced it would hear your petitions and prayers. I was also sure that spiritual, psychological and physical well-being could be found here. Maybe you have to find the changeling in yourself and live by rules that are more than human. You have to scent it like the bear and the wolf, scan it like the sea eagle and falcon, be prepared to live as lonely as the moose and with the resilience of the caribou. Like the whales, you have to echo-locate yourself without maps or guidebooks. The imperatives of survival and shelter must be your first compass bearings.

We stayed in Sitka longer than we had planned. I was sure that
my sudden decision to come here had been directed to me by the land itself. I was sitting once more on our motel balcony watching the magical transformation of earth, sky and sea. It was like the high point of the mass where that which is sacred is revealed to you and you know for sure that there is another reality out there, invisible yet accessible.

As I trawled through my memories of these past months, I thought how the land itself and that profound sense of ‘the other' that emanates from it is like a colossal haiku, obscure yet profoundly coherent, and transcendent with a kind of power that elevates all of life. That's the real power of Alaska. It's hallucinogenic. It heightens perceptual experience to sometimes fearful dimensions, before you crawl back into your human skin for a sheltering place. The problem with trying to write coherently about my experience from all the haiku-like word pictures that laced the pages of my diary together was that it was like trying to construct a linguistic quadratic equation that would solve the riddle of this metaphysical environment.