Moby-Duck (16 page)

Bruno, about to turn two, is this summer afraid of fire engine sirens; of the skeletons at the natural history museum; of Spider-Man, whose face to his eyes resembles that of a skeleton at the natural history museum; of SpongeBob SquarePants, whom he calls “that funny snail”; of the Wild Things in
Where the Wild Things Are
. Even
Sesame Street
characters scare him (he doesn't like their “googly-eyes”). He is also, Beth told me when I called her one last time this morning from Seward just before Pallister and I shoved off, afraid of the sea. Hearing this, I thought with affectionate distress,
He is his father's son.

Although in adulthood I've learned to bluff, I am an exceptionally fearful person, ill-suited to the role of journalist, or adventurer, or errant duckie hunter. The greatest among my many fears—greater than a fear of heights that makes me faint-headed if I stand too close to a plate-glass window in a skyscraper; greater, even, than my fear of mysterious contagions, or of terrorists, or of bankruptcy, or of disgrace—is my fear of sharks and therefore of the sea. For that fear I hold neither myself nor my parents responsible.

Those whom I hold responsible are the feckless counselors of the summer camp to which my parents sent me at the impressionable age of seven or eight. Those counselors, coaches and college kids mostly, would subject us campers to a morning routine of desultory sport involving pink rubber kickballs. In the afternoon, they would gather us around a television on a wheeling cart and plunk into the boxy maw of a VHS player a film.

One afternoon the film of choice was Steven Spielberg's
Jaws.
There I sat, cross-legged on the linoleum, trying as best I could to be a well-behaved child, a
good
child, and there on the screen coeds lounged around a campfire on a beach, smoking something. And there on the screen one of the female coeds ran naked into the moonlit waves. And on the screen, as she swam, there came a sudden jerk, and a look on her face of awful yet somehow comical surprise. And there on the screen the naked coed disappeared beneath the waves. Across the water spread a slick of blood. And on the beach, the following morning, there appeared a dismembered forearm. And although I once dreamed of becoming a marine biologist, I have been afraid of the sea ever since—so afraid that even now on trips to the seashore I'll wade in waist deep but no farther.

I mentioned none of this to Beth when I spoke to her this morning. Friends of ours had invited Beth and Bruno to spend the weekend at a beach house in Delaware. The house was beautiful, she told me, and Bruno was having a grand time playing with the daughter of their hosts. All the same Beth was beginning to wish they'd stayed home, on account of Bruno's fears. Yesterday, when they went to the beach, he'd refused to go near the waves. Today, he was refusing to go to the beach at all. She'd tried coaxing him, goading him, coercing him, but the very mention of the beach sent him into screaming, sobbing paroxysms of dismay.

I told her what parents always say when trying to reassure each other or themselves—“It's just a phase.” I told her this, but in truth I wondered if my absence might be partly to blame, my absence and my genes. Perhaps, I suggested, Bruno would like to hear his father's voice? Beth summoned him to the phone, and at the mention of my name, he came running, running so excitedly he tripped. I heard it happen. The crash, the wail, Beth rushing to comfort him. Standing there on the Alaskan coast, gazing out past the marina at Resurrection Bay, listening to my son wailing inconsolably somewhere on the coast of Delaware, in a house I couldn't imagine, I felt like a truant, a deadbeat dad. Like a serial deserter who'd dressed up his restlessness in the trappings of a quest.

Still sniffling, Bruno finally took the phone, or more likely his mother held it to his ear. I could almost see them, him slumped in her cross-legged lap. “I slipped,” he said in his tiny toddler's voice, which on the phone seemed tinier still. “I fell on the floor.”

“I'm in Alaska,” I said, hoping he'd think of the picture book I'd given him, called
Alaska
, in which appear illustrated mountains, illustrated eagles, illustrated sled dogs, illustrated bears. If he was thinking of such marvels, he gave no sign, so I tried again: “Last night, I slept on a boat.”

“I slipped,” Bruno repeated.

“Are you going to be okay?”

No answer. Probably he was nodding, yes, forgetting that I couldn't see him nod. He had only just begun to learn the magic of telecommunication, the trick of speaking to a disembodied voice. Into the silence between us came the cosmic hiss of satellites, the static of the spheres. If he were nine years old instead of two, perhaps I could have brought him with me, and perhaps it would have done him some good. In
Wilderness,
as the Rockwell Kents, younger and elder, are crossing Resurrection Bay, braving a storm in their open boat, Rockwell III, showing “a little panic,” says to his father, “I want to be a sailor so I'll learn not to be afraid.”

 

 

At his first glimpse of his hermitage on Fox Island, Kent the elder had said to himself, “It isn't possible, it isn't real!” Which just about sums up how I felt motoring across Resurrection Bay in the copilot seat of the
Opus
. So many books have been written about Alaska, and so many cruise ship commercials shot there, that the place, even when you're in the midst of it, can seem a symbolical mirage.

In his late twenties, in pursuit of that mirage, Pallister persuaded his high school sweetheart, at the time pregnant with their first child, to move with him to Anchorage because of a map—a map of Prince William Sound that he'd happened upon in the back of
Field & Stream.
Growing up in Montana, he'd fallen in love with the mountains of the American West. He and his brothers hiked in them, camped in them, hunted deer and mountain goats in them. Then, as a teenager, Pallister read Joshua Slocum's
Sailing Alone Around the World
and dreamed of going to sea. What he glimpsed in
Field & Stream
seemed to him, as Fox Island had seemed to Kent, a kind of paradise, an American wilderness that was maritime and mountainous both
.
Thirty-five years later, the spell had yet to break, though the place of Pallister's dreams has receded into the blue, nostalgic distances of remembrance. To his great dismay, there are plenty of other people in the world who want in on his paradise.

Although Pallister scorns organized religion, considering it the enemy of reason, there is something puritanical about his brand of conservationism, which is in large part a crusade against idiotic hominids. Like many conservationists in Alaska, he dates the beginning of his activism to March 24, 1989, the day the
Exxon Valdez
ran aground on Bligh Reef. What troubled Pallister the most wasn't the spilled oil, however; it was the crowds—the volunteers, the cameramen, the news anchors, the oilmen, the politicians. “All of a sudden there were literally thousands of people in places where I'd never seen people before,” he told me. “I thought to myself, ‘Holy Christ! This is on the national news. Everybody's going to see how beautiful this place is. It's going to be a tragedy for Prince William Sound.'”

What he feared had come to pass. On the eve of our embarkation, when we were towing the
Opus
over the Kenai Mountains, the traffic on the Seward Highway had been thick as on the Long Island Expressway at rush hour. So thick it felt as though we were participating in some sort of exodus or pilgrimage. It was the weekend, a weekend in the middle of July, at the height of Alaska's tourist season. The salmon were running and the creeks were crowded with fishermen scooping up silvers with dip nets, so many fishermen and so many silvers (the water in places was dark with them), you might have thought it was actual silver the fishermen were prospecting for.

All these travelers in all these cars and trucks and recreational vehicles were joining the rush, heading out with their boat trailers and tackle and kayaks and mountain bikes to worship recreationally on whatever vestiges remain of the so-called Last Frontier. To drink beer beside a campfire. To make an offering of wild salmon to some wild, American god. Pallister and I were heretics in their midst. Or maybe
heretics
isn't the right word; maybe I was an apostate in their midst, and Pallister a fanatic. In any case, we both had nonrecreational reasons for making the pilgrimage to Resurrection Bay, and Pallister's reasons were different from mine. I was on a possibly quixotic quest to get my hands on a hollow plastic duck. Pallister was on a possibly quixotic quest to regain a paradise lost.

 

 

This morning, after a night on the
Opus
, the first of several to come, after gassing up, it was thrilling to be out on the water, far more thrilling than my slow, soggy, fever-inducing ferry ride to Sitka two years ago, for much the same reason that riding a motorcycle or horse is more thrilling than riding a Greyhound bus. The
Opus
is so small, even the short, six-foot seas of Resurrection Bay made the boat indulge in nearly every one of the six degrees of freedom. The copilot's seat is so close to the water, I could put my hand out the Plexiglas port window and feel the spray. When a pair of Dall's porpoises started racing alongside us, cavorting, braiding their wakes around ours, they seemed near enough almost to touch. Beyond Fox Island we emerged from Resurrection Bay and into the Gulf of Alaska. Before us the North Pacific stretched all the way to Sitka, all the way to Hawaii, all the way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, all the way to Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

On we coasted, on a southwesterly bearing, among the forested tops of partially submerged mountains, past the point where the tour boats ventured, on and on, until there were not even any fishing boats to be seen, including the
Patriot
, only wildlife—orcas, Dall's porpoises cavorting at metabolically improbable speeds through submarine canyons, puffins dragging their football bodies over the waves as they flap-flap-flapped their little wings. White mountain goats speckled the sorrelgreen lower slopes of snowcapped granite peaks. A pair of black dorsal fins described momentary arcs then vanished, their owners, a humpback mother and calf, having slipped below the surface without breaching or turning fluke, much to my disappointment.

It was hard to carry on a conversation over the rebuilt outboard's roar. That Pallister is slightly deaf—or as he puts it, “deaf as a stump”—made it harder still. Mostly he shouted and I listened. He shouted about the metric system, how crazy it was we hadn't adopted it. He shouted about overpopulation, how it was the root of all environmental evils. He shouted about exercise, to which he objected almost as strenuously as he did to overpopulation. “People go walking out in the road with weights in their hands!” he exclaimed in disbelief. “Why don't you build a wall or dig a hole in the ground?” That's one reason he likes cleaning up beaches: “It makes me feel like I'm doing something that's real important! It gives me a reason for being alive!”

Between these bursts of opinion, we stared in silence at the horizon, Pallister gnawing on jerky, I popping ginger candies, the outboard sucking down boat diesel—$200 worth. Pallister would aim the
Opus
at some speck of land in the distance, and for what seemed like hours we'd watch the speck grow into the forested top of a partially submerged mountain, until finally we were alongside it, and then, suddenly, beyond it, where yet another expanse of ocean would open up before us, and far ahead there would be a new speck of land to aim for.

Sometimes Pallister steered us into narrow passes where the shallow currents ran riotous as river rapids over hidden rocks that sent our electronic depth finder into a beeping tizzy of alarm. “That's one thing about this boat!” he shouted as we were transiting one narrow pass. “I've been driving it around for so damn long that I can take it places that I wouldn't take a big boat! I can go in damn shallow water! Cliff doesn't want to go through these smaller passes!”

Overhead on the cabin roof, ten white tubes—scrolled up NOAA charts with place names scrawled on them in marker—kept working their way out of their wooden rack. Every so often, Pallister would shoot a glance in their direction, curse under his breath, and, with a flick of his left hand, swat them back into place, where they would immediately begin working loose again. And every so often, the half of the windshield with the broken wiper would get so scummy with salt spray that I, the solitary deckhand, would fill an empty Gatorade bottle from our five-gallon bladder of fresh water, stick my hand out the port window, and douse the windshield clean.

At last, the speck of land on the horizon was Gore Point, which, even more than Kruzof Island, resembled the edge of some new world. While Pallister was rhapsodizing about the radial musculature of dolphins, I peered through the starboard Plexiglas at Gore Point's windward shore, searching the jackstraw for the abundance of color Pallister's descriptions had led me to expect. All I could make out at that impressionistic distance were the white hem of the breaking surf, a gray stripe of rocky beach, a bone-white stripe of driftwood, a green band of trees. Then the tide rips reared up and we slammed into the first of many steep, choppy, ten-foot waves. Then the second. Then the third.

“There are some hellacious forces in nature, aren't there?” Pallister shouted.

In the lee of Gore Point, the ten-foot whitecaps subside as abruptly as they arose. Pallister pilots the
Opus
into the tranquil lagoon he's told me about, our wake unzipping widening V's behind us. The landscape that now reveals itself: a gray crescent beach that stretches between the mainland and Gore Peak, the tip of which, according to the
United States Coast Pilot,
“can easily be mistaken for an island” when viewed from sea.
⁸
At its northern end, the gray crescent of pebbles terminates at the foot of a great cliff five hundred feet tall, an insurmountable granite palisade that has at this late hour cast a third of the lagoon into bottle-green shadow. Behind the pebbles stretches the forested isthmus. The vertiginous geography of the Kenai Fjords—cliffs plunging into underwater canyons—is the work of two geological forces: tectonics and glaciation. Sixty-five million years ago, colliding plates crumpled the land into valleys and peaks. Two million years ago, in the Pleistocene, advancing glaciers buried the Kenai Peninsula under an ice sheet that extended all the way to the continental shelf, gouging valleys in the land above water, trenches on the seafloor below, all the while grinding mountains down into boulders, boulders into rocks, rocks into pebbles and gravel, which—around twelve thousand years ago, as the Ice Age ended and the ice sheets (by then four thousand feet thick) went into retreat—sedimented into moraines, providing the tides and currents with the raw material for a pebble beach. Geologically as well as historically, this is indeed a comparatively new world, a work still very much in progress—or at least very much in flux.