Travelers' Tales Alaska (3 page)

“You're kidding,” I said.

She was not, and scribbled down a description of my rig. By ten
P.M.
I had parked by the lodge and was feeling around the grille for my electrical cord. A woman appeared at the door.

“I have a block heater,” I explained.

“Congratulations,” she said. “Everyone else just lets their motor run.” Something about the modern plastic belts that turn brittle at forty below and shatter to pieces at morning ignition.

I let the dogs out and locked the doors with the engine idling. My companions marched in place as they relieved themselves, unable to tolerate the touch of the subfrozen ice for more than a second at a time. Dance of the deep freeze.

Next morning at breakfast I inquired about the temperature. “Forty-eight centigrade,” the cook said. Meaning
minus
forty-eight. Below-zero temperatures out here this time of year are referred to by numerics alone.

We rolled out into a world of bold, naked, granitic peaks, blanketed in snow and the orange glow of dawn. Warm at first, the truck began to exhibit a noticeable sluggishness, particularly on the uphill grades. Cold bearings, I figured, and
a colder engine (forgot the cardboard for the radiator again). Another problem arose: panting like marathoners in the dry air, the dogs were frosting the inside of the windshield. When I diverted heat from the heater to the defroster, my feet began to freeze. Couldn't keep up with both. This, along with a coarse whine in the gearbox, stole from the peaceful joy of my morning. I couldn't shake the nagging thought of some malignancy in the transfer case which had denied me access to low range for several months. Should've had that looked at back in Maine.

At Muncho Lake we hit a surprise curve (I was steering with my knee at the time, scraping a rime of dog breath off the inside of the windshield with a credit card), requiring emergency maneuvers to avoid sliding down the bank. However, what had been a loose clutch first thing this morning had tightened up in the cold wind, requiring great pressure to disengage, and then a toe-pry off the floor to re-engage. The brake behaved similarly. We made it, barely, and then paused to allow the pedal linkages to warm up.

A few miles later, on the downward side of a long hill, I eased off the gas, but we continued to accelerate, speeding nearly out of control. In a panic I shut off the key, forfeiting power assistance to brakes and steering, and barely got us stopped upright and on the road. Gas pedal frozen down. I pried it up, restarted the engine, and drove on, careful to slip the edge of my boot under the accelerator and lift it any time I wished to decelerate.

Our road was wider now, but a bit rougher. We struck an unexpected mogul, took a small leap, and lurched about on frozen shocks, shaking loose the tail of a snowshoe lashed to the canoe, which rotated rather slowly down to touch the windshield, brittle at fifty below, decorating it with a scrim of cracks. One more badge of travel, another rite of passage.

We limped across the border into the Yukon (the Yukon!), and pulled up at the Contact Creek roadhouse for the ceremonial dog dance, fuel, and advice.

“Get a belly tarp,” the owner suggested.

I inquired about the current temperature.

“Sixty-five.”

“Centigrade or Fahrenheit?” I asked.

He smiled. “Don't matter,” he said.

At Watson Lake I purchased a belly tarp, a swath of brown canvas that covered the front of the radiator and lapped halfway back beneath the engine, maintaining a bubble of engine heat under the hood, warming the heater and pedal linkages.

The next day, after 4,800 miles of hard and happy driving, I crawled out of the cab into the gelid air of Alaska, to celebrate my passage. I stared at the high peaks of the Wrangells a hundred miles off to the south, and westward along the Tanana flowage, out over the infinite frozen silent timeless beatific landscape. But what I drank to was the surest confirmation of my latitude: the wild, beautiful, penetrating cold.

Author and independent field biologist Jeff Fair follows loons and other wild spirits, including his own, across the North to study and write about them. A wildlife biologist by formal training, he had, prior to his emancipation, trapped and radio-collared grizzly bears in Yellowstone, worn the badge and uniform of a Utah game warden (one career arrest), and introduced snakes to tourists as a USFS naturalist in Oklahoma. He now lives in Alaska and spends a considerable amount of time hitchhiking by bush plane around the hinterlands with his notebook, bedroll, and the stub of a No. 2 pencil. The pay is lean, but it's a good living.

ED RE AD ICKER-HENDERS ON

Why bother with humans, when there are so many salmon to eat?

T
HIS IS MY JOB:
I
REASSURE PEOPLE.
I
TELL THEM
, “H
EY
, don't worry. Bears don't like the taste of
GORE-TEX.”

Nobody looks reassured. Maybe it's the t-shirt I'm wearing, the one that says, “Tourists: The Other Red Meat.”

We're on a path, a mile or so long, full of blind corners. This walk into Anan Bear Observatory, near Wrangell in Southeast Alaska, is every Tarzan jungle walk you ever watched on a Saturday matinee, the blue screen of the TV opening up the impossible world beyond. Each time the boardwalk gives way to mud, there are fresh bear tracks on the trail. Some of the tracks are the size of your head. Beside the path, there are tree trunks that bears have clawed just for the fun of it. Some of the claw marks are ten feet up.

Something has been eating the bridge.

“Shouldn't we have brought pepper spray?” Jean, the woman behind me, asks. She's here bravely trying to overcome a lifelong fear of bears, but her husband stayed back in town, and behind her, the other three clients look like they might
turn and run any minute.

But I'm here to reassure. It's part of my summer job. I'm here to keep the tourists happy, keep them safe. These people are paying my bills, so reassuringly, I say, “Pepper spray doesn't work on wet bears. The capsaicin molecules don't bond well with water. In rain like today, we'd just be spraying air freshener in the bear's face. Besides, every single person I know who has ever gone out with bear spray has ended up on the ground after blasting themselves in panic while the bear wandered off into the woods. The screaming is never pretty.”

At each blind corner—I'm not afraid of bears, right? That's why I'm the guide—I call out, “Hey, bear,” just in case the bears are listening. Rule one: Never surprise animals with mouths bigger than your face. A startled bear is an unhappy bear.

The bears are here because each July and August Anan Creek is so jammed with returning pink and chum salmon that the eddies look like one solid fin. For those two months, over a half-million fish beat themselves again and again against a waterfall eight feet high and twenty feet wide. In the turbulence of the falls, the leaping fish are dark slashes that disappear, tossed back by the force of the water, faster than you can blink. The falls themselves almost glow because the treetops lace together so closely that directly over the stream is the only place you can see sky.

The place smells like somebody opened a thousand cans of tuna and then forgot all about them. There are fish carcasses—partial and whole—lining the stream's banks, where the bears wait. The fish start dying the instant they hit fresh water; their bodies are able to process it only long enough to get upstream, spawn, and die gasping. But the bears get an awful lot of them first.

Jean reaches the viewing platform with a sigh of relief, as
if she's safe now. Proving that the man who hired me to help him schlep tourists out here should have thought about it longer, I tell her that a week or two ago, a bear came up onto the platform, chasing a photographer around. Nobody seriously thought the bear wanted to eat the guy. It was a game, a break between meals. Really, for all our atavistic fears of being eaten alive, from the bears' point of view, with this many fish in the river, it's just too much work to try and eat a person. Hiking boots don't digest well, and no self-respecting bear wants to spend a week spitting up Nike logos.

We're on the platform only five minutes before a black bear wades into the stream, grabs a fish on the first stab—there are so many it's hard to miss—and walks back up, perching on a log to eat. He's less than ten yards away.

After the first few days of the salmon run, once they've had their post-hibernation fill, the bears
only eat the fattiest parts of the fish—the skin and the roe, the brains and stomach—letting the rest fall for the scavengers that move in as soon as the bear shuffles off to get another fish. There are gulls, terns, kingfishers. River otters move like oil slicks, and thirty bald eagles perch on the banks and in the trees. Far above us, ravens call, sounding like drippy faucets. There's so much life here. There were a dozen seals at the river's mouth, and we'd passed harbor porpoise on the boat ride in, their black fins cutting the gray water, chasing leaping fish ahead of them. Everybody is eating somebody else. Even the plant life within a half-mile of the stream banks depends on the nutrients of fish bits the animals drop.

So the odds are, if the bears think of us at all, they just think we are incredibly stupid. We're the only ones not fishing, not eating. Each and every other animal in sight—except, of course, for the dying fish themselves—is acting like it's the final night's buffet on a cruise ship. We humans are just standing around like morons, staring, eyes and mouths wide open.

Six or seven more bears come and go. Meanwhile, the fish keep hurling themselves against the waterfall. Not a single one seems to make it. Some must—I can see fish in eddies above the falls, waiting while they gather strength to move into the calm water upstream—but below the falls, all I see is failure after failure, thousands of fish not making the cut. It's Nature throwing an infinity of solutions at a small problem. In order to get one fish, you need ten thousand fish.

A black bear comes down the opposite side of the stream. She sits, sniffing the air for a moment, and her caution is rewarded: a brown bear comes out of the brush. The black bear turns into a blur, running away, picking a course that takes her through the thickest brush and up a nearly vertical rock face. She has completely disappeared in seconds.

Anan is one of the very few places in the world where
black and brown bears share a river, but it's obvious the brown bears, the grizzlies, are at the top of the pecking order here. This brown is a full-grown female. She's close enough for us to see that she's lactating, but there are no cubs. They must have died recently, taken by a wolf or by disease, or even by another bear. Like the fish hurling themselves at the waterfall, this bear hurled herself, her progeny, into the world. And like the fish she's chewing on, her progeny fell short.