Never Say Die (17 page)

“So what can we do?”

“I think we have to run the rest of the river through the delta and hole up on Nunaluk Spit. Have you ever been there?”

“About five years ago, with Jonah. It was a really long way from Shingle Point.”

“How high above sea level is it?”

“I don't know; maybe ten, fifteen feet?”

“That's not very much. How big are your tides up here?”

“They don't amount to much—a couple of feet.”

“What does the spit look like?”

“It's an island made out of gravel and stones. I remember seeing windbreaks—quite a few—made out of driftwood. The people who raft the Firth build them while they're waiting for an airplane.”

Ryan went for his spiral-bound guidebook and turned to the maps for the delta and the shore of the Beaufort Sea. The waterproof pages were getting the supreme test. The rain was coming so heavy that I could have collected a cup of water off my brother's beard in half a minute. “It's not going to be pretty out on the coast,” Ryan said, “but what other choice do we have?”

“You're right, we have to go for the coast and hope for the best.”

“At least we've got the boat to jump into if the sea washes over the spit.”

Ryan showed me the map of the Firth running across its delta. In its last fourteen miles the Firth split into dozens and dozens of channels. My job, every time Ryan had to make a choice, was to point his way into the one carrying the most water. Make a wrong call and we would get stuck in a channel to nowhere. In the wind and the rain, with the world gone dark under heavy clouds and my eyes seared from the pepper spray, I had to find the way.

We shoved off. Almost immediately, the channel we were on branched into three. I pointed Ryan down the one on the right. This was crazy. The split-second decisions had my heart pounding. Somehow I kept making good calls. In the delta's last mile, Ryan had to row hard to keep us off a wall of ice ten or twelve feet high. Finally, the channel we were following flowed into the saltwater lagoon between the mainland and Nunaluk Spit.

Half a mile of white-capped open water lay between us and the spit. In the storm, we couldn't see that far. We wouldn't have had a prayer of making the crossing if the wind wasn't blowing north toward the spit. While the wind was with us, we had to give it a try even though the lagoon was whipped into a frenzy.

The crossing was more than ugly. Waves kept crashing over the side, a mixture of freezing sea and river water. At last the spit came into view through a heavy curtain of rain. I jumped ashore with the rope and held the raft. Ryan came off the boat, green eyes blazing. “Let's haul it out of the water, Nick, beach it as far up as we can!”

On the count of three, we jerked the raft maybe four feet onto the gravel. My brother got in my face and yelled, “You stay with the boat! I'm gonna go find one of those windbreaks for us!”

“Got it!” I yelled as a gust of wind nearly blew me off my feet. I had to brace against the raft to keep from going down.

Within seconds, Ryan disappeared in the rain and the wind and the eerie near-darkness. Evenings were normally bright as can be at the end of June, but the storm was blotting out the sun.

After about fifteen minutes alone, I wished I had told my brother not to be picky. He might get lost, or blown off the spit into the Beaufort.

Ryan materialized out of the storm a few minutes later. “Found a five-star hotel!” he hollered.

That turned out to be a five-star exaggeration. The windbreak was chest high and three-sided, made of driftwood. The whole coast is strewn with the stuff. It comes all the way down the Mackenzie from where the big trees grow.

For the time being, our windbreak was no windbreak at all. It had been built for protection against the wind off the ocean, not the mountains. It was a battle to get the tent up and secure its rain fly. We used all twenty-seven stakes and tied the corners off to heavy logs.

The spit was a couple miles long and generally about a hundred yards wide. Jonah and I had landed the motorboat here when I was ten, and had lunch behind one of the windbreaks. An hour before, we'd been on Herschel Island, where we visited the historical park with the buildings from the old whaling station. Some of the graves in the Native cemetery on Herschel had recently washed away during a storm.

Here I was in a storm worse than that one. It might even be worse than the one when I was six. Back then the coastal community of Tuktoyaktuk lost big chunks of the land that protected it from the sea.

Ryan's tent was taking a terrible beating. The storm raged on, and the wind—still out of the south—was horrendous. We lay in our sleeping bags and talked about the flood coming down the Firth River, what that must be like. We could hear the roar coming from the back of the lagoon where the river met the sea. “The canyon must be brimful,” I said. Ryan said he believed I was right.

“Do you think one or the other of the couple from Montana might still be alive, Nick?”

“I saw the bear feeding in two different places. Sure don't think so.”

Ryan had brought his precious camera box off the raft, and had it with him in the tent. He showed me the pictures of the grolar bear he had taken from the raft. The one of the bear standing up with the arm in its jaws made my blood curdle. “Will that be in
National Geographic
?”

“I'm glad you asked me that,” Ryan said. “There. I just deleted it.”

“Why'd you do that?”

“It would go viral. People would get the wrong idea. I would never want to demonize bears.”

“But that one
is
a demon.”

“I know, but maybe the grolar bears to come won't be like this one. I'll write about what this one did, and call it a man-eater, but I'll also say that the grolar bear appears to be a creature of climate change, and climate change is the beast we should be worrying about. I've even heard it put that way, by a scientist who'd been studying the increase in severe storms around the world the last ten, fifteen years.”

“What did he say?”

“That the climate has become a beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”

I thought about what Jonah had said about everything changing, and all the bad signs.
We're going to have to deal with whatever comes
, Jonah had said.
We just have to adapt
.

I put my head down and gave in to my exhaustion. The sleep I got was anything but restful. That last thing Ryan had said—about poking a beast with sticks—worked its way into my fears. I dreamed I was trying to fend off the grolar bear with a chunk of driftwood.

I woke up hours later, with a start, to lightning and thunder. Wind was buffeting the tent so bad, Ryan was bracing the poles with his outstretched arms.

“This is unreal,” I said.

“The wind's coming from both directions now, north as well as south.”

“Those two storms are colliding, like Ken said?”

“Yep, the storm off the Beaufort is on us now, too.”

Before long, the wind blew only from the north. The storm off the ocean was more powerful than the one that had crossed Alaska. The rain wasn't so loud on the tent anymore. I peeked outside and found out why. The rain had turned to wet snow, blowing horizontal off the sea.

“Don't worry,” Ryan said. “We're in the best four-season tent money can buy.”

Suddenly I realized that the sound of the surf on the ocean side of the spit was much louder than before. “Hear those waves crashing, Ryan?”

Ryan reached for his rain gear. “Sounds bad. I'm going out for a look.”

My brother was gone for about ten minutes. Before he came back inside, he shook the snow off the tent fly. He didn't say anything as he crawled through the vestibule, shucking his rain gear along the way.

“What's up, Ryan?”

“The waves are. The Beaufort Sea is surging against the spit. Let's hope the wind doesn't get worse, or we'll be swimming.”

After he said that, there was no going back to sleep. Time slowed down. I kept checking my watch, and that didn't help a bit. Ryan looked grim. Twenty minutes later—half past three in the morning—I said, “Is it getting worse, or is it my imagination?”

Big brother pulled on his beard. “It's not your imagination. I'll take another look.”

“I'll do it this time.”

“You stay put.”

“No, I want to see for myself.”

“Okay, we'll both go.”

We pulled on our rain gear, crawled out of the tent, and staggered into the teeth of the storm. By this time of day we should have had no end of light to see by, but the clouds were too thick. We had to lean forward into the wind and snow to keep from being blown over. The crashing of the surf boomed louder as we got closer, and the salt spray stung our faces.

Closer yet, enormous white waves appeared in the murk. The wind-driven seas were up like I couldn't believe. A towering breaker was about to crash on the shore. It was awful to look at, by far the biggest surf I'd ever laid eyes on.

That wave broke across the top of the spit. We turned tail and ran hard to get out of its reach. Looking east down the spit, I saw the same wave race clear across it. When the surf hit a big windbreak, it broke those timbers down like they were matchsticks.

Luckily, our tent was on higher ground, but not by much. We had a few minutes, and we needed them to stuff our sleeping bags and strike the tent. With our river bags over our shoulders, we hustled toward the raft. I looked back and saw a wave demolish the windbreak that had sheltered our tent.

The storm surge swept over that whole stretch of the spit as Ryan rowed us into the lagoon.

R
yan had to heave on the oars to keep from being blown across the lagoon and onto the mainland shore, where the flooding Firth was dumping into saltwater. We heard the river but couldn't see it. We couldn't see more than a hundred yards.

Where to now? The wind was howling, and the storm showed no sign of letting up. The snow was coming hard as ever, wind-whipped and salty.

“We need someplace to go,” Ryan said. “You were here once before, Nick. Any ideas?”

“I was on the ocean side of the spit, not in the lagoon.”

Ryan gritted his teeth and kept rowing. All kinds of driftwood had swept over the spit, and he had to work hard to avoid it.

I said, “What if we just let the wind take us to the shore? Maybe we can find a place where the Firth isn't flooding.”

“We might get pinned by the driftwood, and not be able to get back on the lagoon. If the tubes get punctured, we're sunk.”

There had to be an answer. Rowing with all his might, Ryan was losing ground against the wind. I couldn't see the mainland shore yet, but the lagoon was only half a mile wide. We would be there soon, willing or not.

I racked my brain, trying to remember what I had seen when I was with Jonah. Like I told Ryan, we'd been on the ocean side of the spit.

Even so, had I seen anything that might help?

I closed my eyes and tried to bring it back. I remembered the blue sky, the calm seas, and us heading farther west along Nunaluk Spit. Jonah had pointed out something for me to look at.

What was it?

Now I remembered: a cabin, close to the end of the spit, that was named after a white explorer. Jonah motored closer so I could get a better look. The cabin was made of driftwood logs, ax-hewn and squared into timbers. The rise it was perched on didn't look raw and stony like the rest of the spit. It was carpeted with tundra. The greenery, now that I thought of it, explained why the cabin was still standing after a hundred years. It was built on ground high enough above sea level to be out of reach of even the worst storm waves.

“Stefansson's cabin!” I shouted, like I'd been underwater and was coming up for air.

“Who's Stefansson?”

“An explorer!”

“But where is it?”

“Near the west end of the spit! It's on high ground! Row west!”

“Got it!” Ryan cried as he pivoted the raft. With his eye on the breakers washing over the spit, he began to quarter against the wind and snow. After twenty minutes of hard labor Ryan sang out, “Has it got a roof on it?”

“Yep,” I shouted into the wind, “with a stovepipe sticking out!”

“Dry firewood stacked by the stove?”

“We didn't land there, just passed by.”

“Stefansson's B and B, here we come! Tell me more about this guy!”

“I have no idea what he was exploring. Bet he didn't discover anything we didn't already know about!”

Our B and B was only a mile down the spit from where we had pitched our tent. That was the most difficult mile I ever hope to travel. We had more than the wind and the snow to contend with. Surging over the spit, the angry sea kept throwing driftwood in our path. I fended it off with a long stick as Ryan gave his all on the oars.