North of Hope (19 page)

I
flattened the map against a rock with one hand and held my bowl of oatmeal in the other. A mug of Market Spice tea balanced on a rock next to me. It was ten o’clock. We were lagging far behind the sun’s steep ascent into the day. Dark curtains of rain still hung heavily over the mountains and in the valleys, but it was dry on the river. Looking at the markings I’d made on the map, I determined that today we would make it to the Father’s Day camp, the camp where Dad and Kathy had talked and laughed with me on the sat phone last year, the last time I heard their voices. Today was also June 25th, the day the police declared Dad and Kathy dead.

In the Jewish tradition, today would end a year of mourning. There is a time to mourn, and there is a time to rejoin life. I was supposed to be past the mourning period. It didn’t feel that simple. I suppose it never is. I’d had the Requiem. And I had this trip. I had to understand that nothing would ever be enough. The idea of a Kaddish is a prayer glorifying God. In the midst of life. In the midst of pain. All of us who believe in God are supposed to do this impossible thing: to praise in the midst of crippling sorrow.

We pushed the raft into the water, and then Sally and Ned took
their places in the bow and I took mine as captain in the stern, an arrangement we had been finding worked well. The river started to braid, but we stayed easily in the main channel. The mountains on either side began to look less dramatic, older, with softer edges. It was another warm day, and I tied the top of the dry suit around my waist, now wearing just a black tank top under my purple PFD, which had been Kathy’s.

It struck me then, as it had so many times before and since, how little I knew this place. Our childhood exposure to
Wild Kingdom
introduced us to oceans and African savannas, but this great wild space in our own state was still mostly unknown then. I’d backpacked and camped around the world. But even today, only a few extreme adventurers and hunters venture this far in Alaska’s wilderness. Now I was swallowed up by the landscape. The sweeping grandeur of Alaska’s Arctic is partly a function of scale. But more, its expansiveness is all encompassing. The root of the word nature is
nascis
, meaning “to be born.” In the Arctic, for the first time in my life, I was thrust into the beginnings of creation.

“There’s our first aufeis!” I announced. Aufeis (German for “ice on top”) was entirely new to me; I’d only read about it in Dad and Kathy’s journals and briefly in books. As we’d prepared for the trip, aufeis was a looming and unknown quantity, unfamiliar to me from other outdoor travel and adventures I’d had. As with so much in life, its greatest terror lay in its mystery. The temperatures this year were warmer than those Dad and Kathy had encountered last year, and our first aufeis had already melted to only a thin ridge of horizontal ice overhanging the water on one side of the river; the rest of it, several feet thick, sat harmlessly on a gravel bank. We pulled over to investigate.

In the sun, water drained off the ice, in some places a slow drip, and in others a steady stream, as the ice changed form to join forces with the river. Horizontal blue stripes on the ice indicated each layer of freeze, and a blue glow shone from beneath the ice
sitting resigned on the gravel bar. Now that we’d actually come upon this unknown, our apprehension drained away, and we were able to see its beauty too.

Two sandpipers on the river’s edge moved on their long legs with a desperate determination and feather-light jerkiness. Their goofy movements made me smile; the birds were so small against the backdrop of slabs of ice, the river, the mountains. They brought comic relief from the focus that was starting to take its toll, seeming to want to remind me that however grand the stage, life suggests a sense of humor.

We launched the raft back into the river. Multiple channels opened up as the valley widened. Many times it was hard to tell which was the primary channel; they all seemed similar. The way was not clear.

In a gentle section of river, the raft crunched to a stop on a gravel bar, a smooth and quiet arrest, but just as final. Ned and Sally jumped out and grabbed the rope around the top of the raft. I sat in the back, smiling at the sight of two people walking in the middle of a river, pulling a raft meant to float. By the third time that we ran aground, and all of us had to pull, it was less amusing, but there was nothing else to be done. Floating a large, heavy raft on this river, shallow even at high water, required creativity in both navigation and propulsion. I took some comfort in knowing that the guided group had similar rafts and would have to pull theirs too, and I tried to enjoy my first time walking in the middle of an Arctic river.

“Isn’t it strange we haven’t seen much wildlife?” Sally asked.

“I don’t think so. The wildlife here have such extensive ranges, there’s no way to tell whether you’ll see something or not,” Ned said.

“Even if we haven’t seen much, you can be sure there are animals watching us,” I said.

We pulled the raft back into the current as the river deepened
again, though never without an abundance of rocks either just submerged or protruding from the river. While their visibility varied, their threat to the raft was similar. The rocks we couldn’t see posed the biggest threat.

“Looks like a rapid ahead!” Sally said.

“Let’s get out and scout,” suggested Ned.

“Take out on the left?” I asked. “Paddle right!”

We paddled strong strokes toward the shore and I did a strong back-paddle to turn the boat upriver. Ned jumped out and pulled the raft onto the shore.

The three of us walked downriver, surveying the rapid.

“Not bad,” Sally said. “Maybe a two, two plus?”

“Probably,” Ned said. “We’re going to head straight through the rocks in the middle of the river,” he said, pointing, “and then go right. Looks like there’s a hole just in the middle.”

“Great,” I said. “Looks like fun!”

“You know, you could name this rapids after your dad,” Sally suggested. “I mean, it’s the first real rapids we’ve hit.”

“I like it. How do you do that?”

“Just write down the GPS coordinates at the top and bottom and a description, and then try to get it used commonly,” she said.

“I’ll get the top coordinates,” Ned said.

We got back in the boat and pushed off. “We’re going to want some speed,” Ned warned.

“Paddle both!” I yelled.

Ned and Sally both dug in with their paddles. I paddled from the stern, alternating sides and using my whole back to pull on the paddle. “Keep it up!”

The raft surged forward. We passed rocks on both sides of us, staying to the center of the river, and then hit a wave train. I grinned as the raft bucked up and down, wedging my feet under the back seat tube of the raft to stay secure, letting my butt bounce off the rear of the raft. The main channel pulled us to the left
around the corner, and we steered to the right of a rock fence on the left, then cut right to avoid a hole at the bottom.

“Whoo hoo!” I yelled. “Take out on the right, paddle left!” I back-paddled right and the raft swung into the eddy.

We got out to mark the ending coordinates, and I made the journal entry:

Looking back, I’m embarrassed we considered naming something wild after any person. Better to do as the Native Americans did: name something by its inspiration. Denali, “the great one”—not McKinley, the name of a president who never set eyes on its icy peaks. In New Zealand, the English names for natural features are often the names of white explorers. But the native Maori words suggest the spirit of the place. The rapids we passed should remain nameless, carrying the more substantive—and lighter—weight of the wind and rain, the snow, and the sighs of the Arctic.

This, it now seems to me, is a difference between people
of
the land, and people
on
the land, between humility and hubris. It is why a part of our Western culture looks with envy at indigenous people’s beliefs: they come from a deeper wisdom of themselves and their world than we can hope to reclaim. We envy this, while ignoring the potential of this wisdom in the name of supposed progress, even as such progress continues to erode that wisdom or the possibility of our ever recovering it.

It is too hard to try to change our inadequacies. I began to learn, from this trip, a sense of relief in the world’s largeness, that creation has the power to heal both us and itself—if we understand it as creation. The Arctic revealed itself as desert, vast and intricate with the openness of both great innocence and great wisdom. Emerson once wrote that “beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty … The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.” I still had much to learn.

Below the rapids the river coalesced into one current again, and the raft moved easily on the smooth waters. Just a few minutes downriver, on the left, a wide, inviting valley led back into the mountains. A creek spilled out of the valley. Kotuk Creek. A gentle gravel bar bordered the river.

“Should we take a breather?” I asked.

“Sure,” Sally said.

“How about the gravel bar straight ahead?” We pulled into a small take-out on the tip of an island sitting midriver. Ned and Sally got up to stretch their legs. I pulled out the map, and then I saw it. I hadn’t been paying attention. Looking across the river into the valley, the rise and fall of the hills leading to the mountains corresponded to the contour lines on the map, and the rocky beach just below it was the campsite.

“This is the Father’s Day site, just across the river,” I said.

Ned walked away and up the beach without a word. Sally opened her daypack and found a granola bar. I picked out a rock to sit on and looked across the river. Dark clouds hung low in the mountain valley, resting comfortably, stable.

Last Father’s Day in Seattle, I had known Dad and Kathy would call. It was their planned call from the river, so that we could connect on Father’s Day. I had told them that I would be hiking that weekend, and asked them to call in the evening so that I wouldn’t miss the chance to say hello.

I woke up that Sunday morning on the shore of a sparkling alpine lake, one of several tucked into a craggy cirque in the Central Cascades in the Alpine Lakes area. I had hiked into Rampart Lakes with a small group of friends, including two new friends from New Zealand, Alex and Katharine, who had recently relocated to Seattle for work.

The night before, our new Kiwi friends had been nervous about the nightly ritual of hanging our food fifty yards away from our campsite, since we were in black bear country. I had laughed and said, “Anyone have anything else? Toothpaste, granola bars?” Alex and Katharine peered out of their tent, which they’d set up in the middle of our small group so they would have plenty of warning if there was an unexpected intruder. “Really,” I said, “bears don’t bother you. They want less to do with you than you want to do with them. We just hang up the food so they aren’t tempted to get too close.”

“In New Zealand, we don’t have anything like this to worry about,” Katharine said. “I like it better that way. The worst thing is the Keas stealing your bootlaces.”

“Don’t worry, really,” I said. “I’ve been backpacking my whole life, and I’ve never
seen
a bear except from the car or in a zoo. You just have to be careful.”

“Well, make sure you scream nice and loud if one comes into camp, so we have plenty of warning!” Alex said, zipping the two of them into their tent.

Peter had not come on that weekend trip. Things weren’t going well between us.

“I just don’t feel like I can make it,” he’d said. “Work’s really busy.”

“Okay, well, I’ll miss you,” I’d said, trying to hide my disappointment and the feeling that our relationship was decaying. “But I really want to go. If you’re going to be busy, we’ll make sure we’re back in plenty of time for me to help with dinner on Sunday.”

It was so much nicer to be in wilderness with him. We shared a fierce love for wild spaces, close to home or far away, desert or mountains, arctic or tropical. As long as the space was natural, it nourished our souls.

Peter and I met in business school at Dartmouth. He had taken two years off to work for a start-up between his first and second year, an atypical academic path, so he returned to a cohort he had not met. Our class size was among the smallest among business schools, so classes could be tight, even cliquish. While at an internship in Minneapolis over the summer, a woman from his first-year class and I met at a party in the heavy summer air. “Watch for Peter Polson,” she said. “He’s joining your class this year and won’t know anybody. He’s really outdoorsy—loves hiking and skiing. He’s a really good person too. You can’t miss him. He’s six and a half feet tall and has a huge smile.”

We met early on. Both of us were dating other people, but I could not get him out of my mind. He seemed to be the serious type. I figured he was as good as married. Peter joined our small group of avid hikers, backpackers, and skiers. Our first hike together was up Franconia Ridge in northern New Hampshire. The weather forecast deteriorated to rain and slush, even at lower altitudes in Hanover, and all but the German exchange student begged out of the hike.

The three of us hiked up a steep, forested trail, breaking out onto a bare ridgeline. Rain turned to whiteout conditions. The wind howled. I cinched my hood around my freezing chin, squinting into the gale, and carefully extracted the map from my pack, trying to keep the wind from ripping it from my gloved hands.

“Which way?” I yelled through the wind. Peter pulled out a compass.

“Looks like we are here,” he said, pointing at the map, “and the trail will go …” The compass needle vibrated tremulously. “Back just behind us and to the right.” We snapped a picture in
the howling gale and, with the help of Peter’s compass, picked our way back to the trail descending the ridge. It was the first of many times we would work together to find the way.