Into the Muskeg

We tromped into the muck this afternoon and I finally found out what muskeg is (though having read the less recent edition of Nature of Southeast Alaska, I did not know that the term had gone out of vogue). Sphagnum is very wet. Richard grabbed a handful and squished the water out of it like one would when drying one’s car with a chamois. Anyway, my socks knew it. My boots reached a threshold of saturation up on the snowmobile trail where blackish mud sucked them nearly off my feet. They’re drying on the radiator in my bedroom now, so the whole room smells like upturned earth. Everywhere we went today, the ground was spongy; in the peatbogs and the fens, water oozed up around our shoes with each step, and in the forest, gaping holes opened if we misstepped on a rotten log or branch. Devil’s Club grew thorny and broad in the path. The forest had overindulged in its own wet rot, the excessive, green, cucumbery smell and the fur of mosses on every surface that turned the branches of a three hundred year old spruce into velvety deer antlers.
I have to laugh at my own overcautiousness as we forded a small creek or descended down a slick incline of tufty moss. My boots and the bottoms of my pants were caked with mud anyway, and I couldn’t even begin to hypothesize about the age of the forest or whether half of it had been destroyed in a windstorm in 1884. I felt silly there, walking on a bear trail, dwarfed by trees three, four, twenty times my age, forcing myself to think about a “wilderness” experience. Sure, it was old growth spruces all the way down, and I wouldn’t want to be out there alone, but we were twenty minutes from a gravel road and even fewer from a rickety hut covered with a blue plastic tarp. I should’ve just sprung for a pair of sixteen dollar boots at the Nugget Mall the previous day and I would’ve traipsed out of the wild looking clean and fresh-faced, just like in the L.L. Bean catalogue. Wilderness, indeed.
Before I close, a few meditations on goshawks and wolf poop. Both can kill you, or at least lay you out pretty good. It’s worth schlepping through the peat for three hours to get a good sense of your place in the food chain.