Travelers' Tales Alaska (39 page)

I climb to the top of a boulder and spread myself over its sun-warmed surface. It pleases me to think that I may be the first person ever to climb up and sit on top of that particular rock. The Nunamiut who roamed these valleys probably didn't do a lot of frivolous rock-sitting, and few other people have entered here—to my knowledge only one previous group of recreationalists. Everything about the entire valley and surrounding peaks, sky, and last, lost, never-never land
pleases me; if I had to construct an image of paradise, this would be it.

From the distance comes the clear, clean ringing sound of a piton being pounded into rock. Others of my party have availed themselves of the practice cliffs close to camp, to test the rock and their own climbing skills. We are here, after all, as climbers—ten of us from a new little college in Massachusetts: two who teach in the school's Outdoors Program, the wife of one, and seven students who have just completed their own and the college's first year. Our leader, David Roberts, a veteran of numerous Alaska climbing expeditions, had taught us, back in the smoothed-over Berkshires, the rudimentary arts of negotiating rock walls and had, now, brought us to a place of Olympian proportion. David was, at the time, only twenty-seven years old. When I think back from middle-age—an age when anyone
under
thirty seems suspect, at the least frighteningly short on maturity—I'm astonished. Who allowed us all to go off and do something so grand?

Lest you think some disaster befell us, let me assure you that it did not. For five weeks the ten of us climbed, hiked, camped among bears, and swirled downriver in plastic rafts, and we suffered nothing worse than blisters, mosquito bites, and the occasional storm of irritation with one another.

We were, still, in wilderness, in a time before global positioning systems and personal rescue beacons that reported via satellite. We carried a substantial rifle—a 30.06—for bear protection, but no radio. Had any of us fallen sick or been injured, the closest help lay two days distant. There was not, in those days, even much plane traffic; in our weeks in the Arrigetch, the only plane we saw was the one that made our airdrop onto a rock field, bursting our boxes and spraying our one bag of sugar into oblivion.

David, when I last saw him, reminded me that, of everyone on that trip, I was the only one who approached Alaska as something more than an attractive summer playground. He remembered me going on, like someone immodestly in love, about how fabulous the country was, how paradisiacal, how there could be no other place on earth so exactly what I considered ideal and idyllic. I reminded David that, when I packed up and moved to Alaska two years later, he warned me against doing so. What he'd said was,
living in Alaska will rot your brain
.

See me there, on top of that never-touched-by-humanhands boulder, filling my whole self with that pure Alaska spring air, my heart so big in my chest it might push right through my ribs. See me leap down and nearly weep at the flutter of bell-shaped flowers. I drink of the running water, gaze at the lofty peaks, dream of remaining forever in that perfect valley.

Am I over the top in my enthusiasms? Absolutely. Even as I fantasize staying in the Arrigetch for all time, I must know that the brief summer interlude is just that, and that arctic winters are interminably long, sunlessly dark, and spit-freezingly cold. Still, I hold an image of myself curled up in an earthen house under caribou blankets, savoring moonlight and sculpted snowdrifts.

I was not, really, a climber. I had learned to enjoy attacking rock like a puzzle, trusting my body to find handholds and fist-jamming cracks, to stand on my feet. I was reasonably fearless when belayed from above, willing to try any move, capable of finding my way up easy routes. I liked the teamwork, the coaching and coaxing, the feel of rope at my waist and, while belaying another, feeding assuredly through my hands. I liked simply being on rock, pressing palm and fingertips to the
grainy surface, admiring the way plants worked tenacious roots into the smallest cracks on the tiniest ledges; I loved, in the Arrigetch, being surprised by an exquisitely white snow bunting that shot out of its nest near the top of a cliff. But I was not ambitious when it came to climbing, and not particularly competitive. I had no great desires to reach the tops of those granite fingers—except, perhaps, to see over the other side, to gaze upon more of my beloved land.

I did climb some, there in the Arrigetch. I practiced on the cliffs and on boulders, and I partook of the one climb we all did together—up to the col between two peaks named the East and West Maidens, where we split into four groups, two for each peak. I summited the East Maiden, not much of a technical feat. We might have simply walked the ridge, but we were cautious; we roped up and protected the route. At the top we found the cairn and bottled note of the only previous ascenders, from 1964. The view of the vertical back side made me hold my breath—that deep dive to another green and river-braided valley and, beyond, more rows of blue mountains fading gradually to pale and paler, turning under with the earth's very curve. We ate our candy bars and retreated. Clouds moved in, and snow flurried down on us. We retraced our chopped steps down a long snow couloir and picked our way back over a longer and shifty boulderfield.

Other days, with various combinations of companions, I explored our valley, hiked to another col between two peaks, hiked to the pass at the head of the valley. The day that David and Ed Ward, our other climbing instructor, made a first ascent of a monolith called Shot Tower, I hiked to its base to watch them negotiate its difficult midsection. Back at camp, near midnight, I watched with binoculars as they, tiny as flies in the dome of a cathedral, finally stood on top and waved. In my innocence, I had never doubted that they would.

Four of us organized a five-day trek, from our valley over the pass, through the next valley and back to camp, about a twenty-five-mile circuit. We saw small numbers of caribou and traveled, at times, on their grooved trails lined with discarded antlers and dry bones, bits of caribou hair blowing in the breeze. Aside from another cairn and note at the top of the pass, left by the same party that had climbed The Maidens in '64, we saw no other sign of humans, not so much as a jet's contrail overhead. Laboring under my pack through heat, thunderstorm, and mosquitoes, I lost myself in the idea of valley after splendorous valley. We forded creeks and bathed in pools, studied our map and located the right pass to complete our circle. The last day we found ourselves deep in bushwhacking country, with no animal trails through the tangles and mosquitoes so thick we could kill forty with a swat. I thought I might die. But then we climbed out of the brush and the bugs, back to base camp, that place that still looked a lot like heaven.

I kept a journal that summer, a journal I didn't look at again until I decided to try this essay—only to discover that the pages were filled with overwrought teenage emotion rather than useful detail. I did not record the name of a single plant (except the fabulous fireweed) or bird (not even the snow bunting) or any other bit of natural history smaller than caribou. I also did not take any photos that summer—or even own a camera. The life of the moment was all I wanted, and I was sure that such moments would be mine forever—because I would never forget, and because I would return to the Arrigetch many more times. I would become, I wrote in my journal, a park ranger or an archaeologist or a camp cook.

My one concession to naming things lies at the heart of my journal—a map I drew of our valley, showing the circling of peaks, each with the name bestowed by climbers before us and known to David—Citadel, the Camel, Disneyland, Badile, Battleship, Pyramid, the Prong, sixteen altogether on my map. I show the creek running down the center of the valley, the pass at the head, and our four tents pitched on the bench below the Maidens. It's a fair representation, I think, and in my head today stands for the place itself, which otherwise would be far vaguer, shrouded in forgetful mist.

After three weeks in the mountains, we packed up our tents, sleeping bags, and climbing equipment, hoisted our loads, and hiked out, three days to a lake where we traded our climbing gear for plastic rafts with wimpy toy paddles. For ten days a slow current carried us down 180 miles of winding river. Fireweed blazed along the banks, we napped, we swam, we watched two young wolves playing. It rained, and we gathered around a driftwood fire and got smoke in our eyes while we ate more noodles with tuna and described for one another the tastes of fresh apples, peaches, asparagus. We reached an Athabascan village with a volleyball court and an airstrip, and we got on a scheduled plane and flew to Fairbanks and drove back to Massachusetts.

Two years later, with my fisherman-wannabe sweetie, I moved to Alaska. We chose a home nowhere near my perfect and implausible Arrigetch, but a town on the south coast; its dot on a map, at the end of a road, looked of a size that seemed “right” if you expected to find some kind of existing shelter, someone to pay you for doing something, and a post office where you might have an address. We've lived there ever after,
and I've never returned to the Arrigetch or anywhere at all in the Brooks Range.

If you'd told me, in 1971, that I wouldn't see the Arrigetch again, I would not have believed you. What, short of death, would keep me away?

Well, the reality of living in Alaska impressed itself upon me rather quickly. In our seasonal economy, summer is the frantic period in which to work and earn money; one doesn't go off and scamper in the mountains. I also learned something about the rest of the year. Winter has its pleasures, but huddling in the cold and dark are not among them. Somehow, I did not become a mountain-mama outdoorswoman, and I did not build my own little log cabin in the Arctic, or even in the sub-Arctic. I did, for a summer, become a camp cook at a remote salmon hatchery, where I filled my spare time fishing for Dolly Varden and picking blueberries by the bucket. I
did
take up commercial salmon fishing, and I
have
seen some of Alaska's magnificent coastline and I
have
fallen in love with landscapes all over the state, from southeast forests to Alaska Peninsula volcanoes to barrier islands along the Arctic coast. Everyday, when I look out my Homer window at ocean, mountains, and sky, I marvel at the beauty I live within.

These days, my knees are rickety, and I doubt I'll punish them with any more voluntary backpacking, never mind technical climbing. I know that, although I could, I probably never will see the Arrigetch again. But I'm all right with that. I know something that I didn't know when I was nineteen, and it has to do with the limits of one life. I also know better some things I may have known even at nineteen, having to do with seizing opportunities and letting ourselves dream. The power of the Arrigetch, for me, lay not only in its splendor, its scale, and the possibilities it suggested. The Arrigetch taught me about the potency of place and why we need large landscapes
that will forever be
more
than what we humans want to make of them.

I'm an Alaskan now, without delusion or much sentiment. Each new summer I meet young people backpacking through town, turning their ruddy faces to the hills. I overhear their plans for scaling this or running that and how, later, they'll find some old cabin to make-over for winter. They talk about Lake Clark and Katmai, about Denali, the Wrangells, and Kenai Fjords. They get out their maps and find the big spaces that still exist. At the end of the road and beyond, far off in the roomy reaches of our public lands, the newly arrived lie down in fields of fireweed or walk barefoot on smooth sand beaches, and they think they've found the places that will forever set the standards for what's loveliest and most necessary in the world. Each new summer I shake my smarter, graying head, but I can't keep back the smile that admits memory
and
moment, now joyfully joined.

Nancy Lord settled in Homer, Alaska thirty years ago and has only recently begun to explore Alaska again as she once thought she routinely would. Recent stops have included the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutians, Bering Sea islands including Pribilofs, and the Arctic Coast. She is the author of three short story collections and three nonfiction books, including
Green Alaska: Dreams from the Far Coast,
which retraces and reimagines the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899.

Admiralty Island
111

Anan Bear Observatory
7

Anchorage
77
,
105

Arrigetch
269

Attu
232

backpacking
96
,
182

Bartlett Cove
112

bear watching
8

Bering Sea
227

boat tours
109

Brooks Range
269

Byers Lake
57
,
62

Chandalar River
178

Chilkat River
32

Chilkoot Pass
94

Curtis, Edward
32

Dalton Highway
166

Deadhorse
180

Denali
14

Denali State Park
57

Denali National Park
243

dogsledding
142

Exit Glacier
87

Fairbanks
141
,
244

fishing
161
,
173

Gates of the Arctic National Park
147
,
172