The End of the Road

I just handed in two papers and finished a huge presentation, so I am officially done. I have about two days of relaxation and then I leave this beautiful state very early on the morning of August 3. Right now it is pouring and very cold, but I think I will miss being surrounded by mountains and very tall evergreens. There are some beautiful photos in the links to the right of our last smile of Alaska sunshine--two days ago--and those will probably be the last things I post.

So, from "northward to Alaska" to southward to home.
And so... goodbye.

Pictures from Tracy Arm

Here's the glacier and a cool looking iceberg.

Tracy Arm in the Fog

22 July 2006

Sailing near the South Sawyer Glacier, alive in a sea of giant ice cubes. We cruised up Tracy Arm today and settled for a while at the base of the glacier, watching it calve and cooing at the countless seals lolling carelessly on the icebergs. The captain cut the engine and we drifted for a while, as the temperature dropped to a bracing thirty-six degrees and ice enclosed our little boat. The air smelled salty but diluted, not the thick, musty, midsummer smell of Reynolds Channel on a humid night, but something cleaner. I very much had the feeling of being in an ice bath, tinkling ice closing in around us, the air chilling, our breath fogging. That was only a few hours ago, but now, sitting inside the boat, the sun starting to peak through, my fingers thoroughly thawed, I feel like it was another place and time, removed from the present by a deep kind of quiet.
We saw this glacier from much farther away than the Mendenhall Glacier yesterday. The moonscape of the ice looked bluer and more jagged, and it roared periodically as it sent bergs splashing into the fjord. The temperature was probably colder today than yesterday but I was more invigorated by it somehow, like the pink-cheeked feeling of walking in deep snow on a sunny day. The ice bath smell, the clean air, cleared my head and did me good.
It was funny to think about all of us standing on the deck with our cameras out, clicking pictures of harbor seals, and making little baby-talk noises. Actually, it was ridiculous. Of course, seals are cute, and they seemed to be posing on their little bergs, flapping their front flippers and peering inquisitively over their shoulders. But having the reaction of “cute” to a wild animal seems completely and absurdly inappropriate. In fact, just as I was writing this, the deckhand, Adam, said that he saw a seal giving birth on the ice about a month ago. Blood all over the ice, he said. That’s not “cute.” Imagine being on a boat full of tourists, all clamoring starboard and pointing their telephoto lenses. I hope they felt fundamentally awed.
Awe is a difficult feeling for me to conjure, or perhaps not to conjure but to shape into language. I stood on the deck of the boat and held my face up to the mist and breathed the cold air deep into my lungs and felt almost normal, as if it were every day that I encountered a place like this, miles from the nearest human settlement, opaquely green water nine hundred feet deep, four thousand foot mountains looming unseen behind the dense white fog, sheer glacial cliffs leaping straight up from the ocean floor. It wasn’t until someone remarked how “amazing” this all was that I could shape that feeling into something like awe, though it felt somehow reduced to just say, “yes, this is amazing.” I guess the sensual experience of cold mist on my face and the smell of ice touches a different part of the brain than the language that I have to describe it, a language that seems profoundly insufficient and clumsy.

Glaciers are Pretty

Big weekend for glaciers--the wildness class climbed down to the Mendenhall Glacier in pouring rain. We scrambled up and down some pretty slick rocks (including a waterfall!), saw some cool striations, and touched the ice with a geologist who told us about stuff having been formed 200 million years ago. Makes last week seem pretty petty, huh? Here are the photos from the glacier hike, which was cold, miserable, and completely worth the agony of thinking you were going to fall off a cliff .

Poem after a bird walk

14 July 2006

The receding glacier breeds alder and cottonwood
leafy and optimistic around me, but I
look down to avoid tripping
over rocks or roots, and see mushrooms
in the mossy rot below, some like bing
cherries, ripe with poison.

Suddenly I am twelve, cold and bored,
trudging through wet leaves in terminal moraine
parkland, somewhere on Long Island.
My mother carries a knife and plastic bag.
She peers into the collapsed ribs of fallen trees,
innards transformed to loose brown mulch.
She identifies fungi in Russian, names raw-
eaten like primary colors. She is certain.
The toadstools are easy; even I know them
from alphabet books filled with pictures
of red-cheeked children in red neckerchiefs.
But she sees the good ones first,
spongy china saucers caps
brimming with a gloss of sweet tea,
thick white stalks fringed in fine dirt,
the shallow root clinging tenaciously.

What is alien to the birch forests of her childhood
halts her with a brown cap, clean white gills,
looking empty of vomitous poison. She argues with my father.
Cantharellaceae or Omphalotus olearius?
Poison Pax or Blewit?
A white mushroom, I tell you.
She touches the tip of her tongue
to prove it, testing for bitterness.

Avoiding little brown mushrooms
that I know will send me into hallucinogenic sweats
for half a day, I examine the ground, searching
for something recognizable from a sauté pan
heavy with butter and sweet onions, salty potato chunks.
Suspicion sprouts in clusters under the bushes,
a shadowy band of assassins, a KGB unit.
I do not know their coded language,
so I leave them alone, snug against
the forest floor brown and fertile at their feet.

Chilkoot Lake

Bear Sightings: Four Haikus

I.
Look, a bear!
Mark says,
and keeps driving.

II.
Across the river
a lone cub wanders in reeds,
grazing the shoreline.

III.
We leave the cabin
after dinner, just to see
brown ears in tall weeds.

IV.
Thirty feet away,
the bushes shake. In twilight,
the sound of ripping grass.

Lani Weaves a Blanket and Other Thoughts at Klukwan

8 July 2006
We drive our behemoth SUV to Raven House first, a clan house thrice relocated due to acts of God and the highway department, hoping that Mark will actually stop today if he sees a brown bear in the distant reeds. I don’t know what I was expecting at Raven House, but I wasn’t expecting a house that was lived in, a house with wood paneling and fading couches and a living room piled with children’s DVDs and aging photographs. Nora points to the photographs and gives names to faces, but I’m not sure where we are despite having done even the supplemental reading. There’s something about this trip that approaches Tlingit history sideways, from all sides, at once. I listen patiently, trying to mentally assemble a family tree of clans and moieties, connect the sound of Tlingit spoken by Nora, her mouth full of hard Ks and sudden stops, to the long strings of consonants and doubled vowels I had seen in print.
We move on to Klukwan, where Muir “had found a lot of human bones scattered on the surface of the ground or partly covered” and people “in apparent good faith” to receive missionaries. At that time, we were told, the population of the village numbered 1800 people. Now, it is 140. I rode with Nora on the drive up, hoping to ask her a little about the Tlingit language and the process by which she translated and transliterated it. She looked out the windows and chatted with our travel companion: Someone hit a moose on this road. It went right through her windshield. She’s paralyzed from the ribs down. Did you know Mr. Stevens? He died two weeks ago. Wild irises grow up this way. I’d like to plant some of those wild roses in my yard. Boy, the river’s swollen. When I asked my question, Nora told me it would take two semesters of linguistics to answer it. I expected as much, but I wanted to know how to hear an exclamation point or a period in the middle of a word, or a line drawn under a K. She said it took her a month to translate her first speech, a process through which she lost sleep, and got drunk, and cried.
Klukwan was just around the next bend, and the car was silent, save for a Dolly Parton tape quietly playing in the background. Nora said, Boy, this is pretty. Oh man, is it pretty up here. Her awe surprised me. I had been gazing in silence at the jagged mountains, tremendous pinnacles of rock, topped with snow and white cloud. In the valleys, I could see the tell-tale U shape of glacial action, but rocky prominences reached above, hostile and breathtaking and inaccessible. I thought about yesterday’s hike and about John Muir racing up his glaciers and how I would only see those mountains this one time, know them from the back seat of a spacious and comfortable car that smelled like children and vanilla lotion. Even my pictures (of course, the pictures, first the pictures) blend one peak into another, into a homogenous chain of rock and river and snow. But Nora knew this place and its beauty surprised her, even when it wore overcast skies, even as we drove through it talking about death and wildflowers.
Klukwan is a gravel road lined with houses in various states of decline. Lani’s is neat and pretty, wooden-shingled and framed with flowers. There are also trailers adjacent to decaying Victorians, weathered to a uniform grey, with intricately carved cornices in dire need of nourishment and paint and cracked bay windows whose glass had turned the color of overgrown toenails. Nora says these houses are beautiful, and they were, once, in the way of houses, but now in the way of fallen trees in a bog.
Near the long house, carpenters carve decorative columns with handmade adzes, smoothly polished handles to which the heavy head is tethered. Once, the blades were made of stone or metal washed ashore or meteorite. So it was a tool from beyond the clouds. The long house was hand hewn, the planks planed by hand. Kimberly says it is “a house like a mirror,” a reflection of history coming back alive, and she tells us about bentwood boxes bound with sinew (dried and stretched out intestines) and filled with dried soapberries, or the spirit of the long house stretching its arms out to protect the house and its winter stores. Sally sings us her haunting version of “Amazing Grace” in Tlingit, in a voice that sounds like it came from another world, high but not tinny, rich but not overpowering, in every way impossible to describe or apprehend. Her Tlingit names are “The Best Part of the Land” and “Little Sea Otter,” one of which her husband caught in his fishing nets and which she was happy to have for the fur.
We move outside to where Valentino—Sally’s wiry husband, a white-bearded Tlingit adopted from Italy whose name means “The Calm Water Behind the Dorsal Fin of an Orca”—hacks a 30 lb. king salmon into thick steaks, first slicing off each fin and tossing it back into the river, then carving a clean slice down the belly, ripping out a bloated swim bladder and drippy, clotted guts, which splash heavily as he tosses them in too. He cuts off the head with a thick crunch and sets it aside, the gills an accordion of deep deep crimson. All the while, he jests as with customers in a corner butcher shop on a winding cobblestone street somewhere in Tuscany.
We follow to Lani’s house, where she opens the door to twelve strangers, welcomes us around her country kitchen table, feeds us smoked salmon and salmon salad on pilot crackers, rounds of hardtack the size of coasters. The salmon salad is sweet with chopped onion. An enormous yellow lab plays fetch with a board in the backyard. Lani shows us her weaving, a blanket in the Raven’s Tail style, made with distinctive geometric patterns and worn ceremonially, draped over the back of the wearer as he dances, telling a story with his body and clothing. The blanket is trimmed at the top with sea otter fur and at the bottom with long fringe dangling metal tubes that jingle when the blanket twirls. The wefts were once made of yellow cedar bark and goat hair, but now she uses merino wool, coarser in texture than the downy mountain goat skein her grandmother had spun and which she passes around for us to touch. Her grandmother and great-grandmother were renowned weavers of Chilkat blankets, blankets with representations of animals and spirits in complex ovoid shapes, including the Sockeye Robe, a famous blanket about two square yards with a foot of fringe at the bottom, that tells the story of a twenty foot sockeye that swallowed a boy. Lani’s blanket represents the Chilkat River, the mountains that surround it, the geothermal springs that seep at its bottom, the flow of its current. She dons another blanket and spins once, shyly, and says that wearing it embarrasses her, that it is too ostentatious. She says the Raven’s Tail style is meditative while the Chilkat style requires deep concentration, that each day of weaving is a battle that, often, the blanket wins. The weaving is remarkable, and I am too embarrassed to ask exactly how the stitches are done, hoping that the museum will provide a helpful diorama.
Kimberly had explained to us that the Cultural Center at Klukwan was not supposed to be a museum, that it was a living site where traditional knowledge was being implemented by people in their daily lives, and that’s how it felt being there, that we were welcomed as guests and allowed to stand by as the butcher cut salmon for that day’s dinner. He would be cutting regardless of our presence, eternally cutting, while we peered in through a window onto his place. I was so grateful to our hosts for opening that window, more grateful than I could fully express as we parted ways, and I was happy at the distance I felt, not only because Alaska, Klukwan, traditional Tlingit knowledge is so far from my home and my way of knowing, but also because I didn’t want to feel like I would at the Disney version of Klukwan, the museum version, where my sense of Tlingit culture and language would be packaged into a neat little t-shirt slogan, one that I could tote away with me and feel like I owned. I liked the sense of not nearly scratching the surface of understanding, of knowing that Nora would answer my question in a few sentences and then remain silent because there was infinitely more to know. Even when our hosts asked us who we were and we explained that we were “Searching for Wildness” (as both verb and adjective phrase), I was happy that we hadn’t found it here. Nora’s poem “Museum” says more simply and smartly what I am trying to put my finger on but can’t: “Alaska Native youth / flickering / in strobelight: disco diorama.”

Two Poems from Haines

Contemplating a Raven with Nora Dauenhauer

He’s not a god,
she says,

and I wonder how he could be,
this mangy raven hopping
amid the gravel and weeds
outside the ferry terminal,
beak and feathers matted with grey
gasoline mist floating in from the channel.

He’s not a nice guy,
she says,
and it’s true.
He ushers in daybreak at four
with screams of insane laughter,
neighborhood gossip in the high
spruce limbs above sleepy windows.

Perhaps he has learned a thing or two
about mischief from Stellar’s jays—
those inkblots, raiders—
the Rorschach tests of ornitho-psychology;
birds of theft and conquest
and pure blue-black id.

At Raven House, he is barely present,
crowded out by a plastic rockinghorse
nesting in the garden weeds,
piles of mismatched dishes cluttering
a dilapidated sideboard, the paraphernalia
of a suburban garage in 1973 welcoming
visitors from the porch. I do not hear
his crackling caw there.

But I see him, looming, totemic,
huge with turquoise eyes.
He steals a mug inscribed in memory
of a boat that sank on its maiden voyage,
caught fire and sank, for which they gave a potlatch
on the beach. From the mug, Raven
pecks coffeeseednettles or spruce tip
ale and salmon roe in transparent membranous sacks,
pours a gluey line of seal oil across
the threshold and says,
My ancestors welcome you to this place.

Chilkoot

The river flashes
its jade green teeth
at humorless spruce
standing with arms crossed
like dour parents on the shore.

It spits foamy meringue peaks
over boulders and licks its tongue
across glassy flats.

On the banks,
fishermen brave ankle-twisting cobbles
slickened with moss,
stand close, but not too close,
take their morning coffee
and dream of last
night’s sockeyes, still uncaught.

Over the Misty Mountains Cold

7 July 2006
I climbed Mt. Ripinsky today, or almost did. Not being a mountain goat, I had trouble keeping the pace of my alpinist classmates and professor, so I wound up hiking by myself most of the way. First, I puffed and panted, trying to keep up. Then, I realized I was alone. I stopped several times to wait for the pair behind me, knowing I wouldn’t catch up to the group about twenty steep minutes ahead. Of course, that only put me farther behind them. I thought about turning around and going back, feeling a little foolish and incompetent about not being able to climb up a little hill without having a cardiac episode. I had run four miles outside the other day, after all, and except for having to pop my knees and hips back into their sockets every once in a while, I was fine. So why was I having so much trouble slogging up this hill? My lunch of turkey on seven grain with cheese product and mayo was weighing heavily in my gut. I would stop periodically on an incline, look up, and decide it wasn’t really worth the aggravation…not because I am weak, but because I felt weak, resentful, especially, of the kayaking, mountaineering, polypro-wearing, geared-out wildeors above me and out of sight. Like I needed a prerequisite in high tech clothing to take this course, or at least avoid the dreaded Bread Loaf B-. Wasn’t the special course fee enough?
I’m not sure why I kept walking. Perhaps it was the fear of turning around and heading to the car without knowing anyone, or the fear of standing in the woods, still and silent, with nothing but a half-empty Nalgene with which to defend myself. Every shadow in the brush started to turn into a bear waiting to pounce on my quietly climbing figure. I started to wonder how my lime green t-shirt would look shredded and covered with blood and entrails (mine). I figured I’d better keep climbing; then at least the bears would hear me panting and sniffling. I trudged up the trail, up a natural staircase of roots and dried pine needles and humus, and cursed the well-outfitted wild in my head.
Then, a fork in the road. Disaster! To the left, what looked like a clearing. To the right, I guessed, the trail. I walked on.
Eventually, I passed a marker that said I was 2.1 miles from the summit (a little more than what I had already done). I paused again, deliberated for an unnecessarily long time, and decided that I must, at one point or another, cross paths with the rest of my group on their way down. I wasn’t so much tired as confused about the best course of action, pondering, again, my Nalgene and digital camera as the pathetic trappings of civilization. I might have also had a driver’s license, you know, in case I wanted to rent a car. I trudged on, and thought some more about bears.
Somewhere after a painted sign indicating an elevation of 2000 feet, the trees started to thin. Almost suddenly, I was in alpine meadow, walking up rocks flanked by low-lying shrubs—mountain heather dotted with lupine and blueberry bushes, shrouded in mist. It was like something out of Kurosawa’s Dreams or Norse mythology. I stopped periodically, thinking about how my knees would feel on the way down, to hear blood pounding in my ears and the faint crackle of mist, and nothing else. Every once in a while, the trees below would whoosh in a gust of wind, the sound like a distant highway. I climbed farther up, deeper into the cloud. I couldn’t see the summit, I couldn’t see my cohort, I couldn’t even see beyond the top of the hump I was climbing. Each thirty foot incline looked like the last stretch, but still nothing except silence and mist.
This story has a happy ending: my classmates did appear out of the clouds, wearing all the clothes they had brought up, fingers numb and hair soaking. Charles’ beard looked like sphagnum moss, droplets of cold cloud water clinging to his face. They had stayed four minutes at the summit—about twenty minutes above where I was when we crossed paths—but lacking a view and worried about hypothermia in the snow up top, they turned quickly back down toward the tree line. I held up half the group with my skittishness on the way down, but we made it home, sticking to our three-hour schedule, more or less, legs achy but feeling invigorated by mountain air. Palmer and I prepped dinner, then we all warmed our bellies and our hands by the fire.

Haines

“We are turtles and lobsters in civilization”
--Kathleen McNamara,
“The Ghost of Robert Service Defends Himself in the Court of Poets”

I steam up the shower before getting in, conscious of the waste but happy about the prospect of scouring my face with hot water and soap. When I step in, the steam immediately takes on the sweet smell of wood smoke, and I stick my nose into the crook of my elbow to suck in the aroma. It’s funny—the body wash I bought on sale purports to be made with real “glacier water” (from Switzerland!), but I would rather smell of wood smoke than fake glacier and wonder if the shower was such a great idea after all. Two days in the woods with a change of shirt and underwear, with deodorant and a bandana…big deal.
On the ferry ride home from Haines, I ponder Muir’s comment about being “almost comfortable.” I had spent the weekend being comfortable. There were too many conveniences to feel otherwise—too much food, too many people who knew how to split wood, too many pairs of dry wool socks. Even now, with the ferry spewing up water around me and my fingernails turning blue, I know that warmth (even excessive warmth) is just ten feet away behind a steel door, designed to keep passengers tightly sealed from the elements.
The previous evening, we had walked in the gloaming from the still, sour milk water of Chilkoot Lake, and Mark asked me, “Could you imagine yourself living in a place like this?” My immediate, unhesitating answer was “no”—but I’m not sure why. I cannot imagine that a place of such dramatic beauty would not vanish back into the fog or the sea after my departure, as if its beauty were an enchantment that would wear off at the stroke of midnight, as if the spell were cast without full knowledge of its potency and thus could not be sustained. I cannot imagine myself on the three blocks of Haines’ Main Street, dwarfed by sawtooth peaks, driving a rusted out truck (I don’t drive stick!) or huffing through the alpine meadows in summer; a life short of fresh fruit or sunshine or indie movies or window shopping. I cannot imagine a place not crisscrossed with strip malls and gated communities and Robert Moses parkways, a place where the other side of a ridge is simply another ridge, or a river or a tract of ancient spruce, rather than a humming highway. That world is so far beyond my imagining, even as I stand in it or especially from the comfortable lobster shell of a high speed catamaran cruising the icy waters that John Muir had paddled one hundred years ago. Surely, even Muir huddled close to land, hugged the glacier scraped coast—terra firma, no matter how wild, how forbidding, seems ever safer than the sea.
I’ve not shed my exoskeleton of civilized life—my rubber boots and flush toilets and Gore-tex pants and at least some food that came from a store—and I don’t want to. Nor do I want to live my life entrapped by tidy lawns and paved driveways. I love mountain air more than bus exhaust, hot baths more than outhouses, the sound of a bear grazing more than the gut-shaking blare of the Long Island Railroad trains at crossings. Do I love museums more than glaciers? Searching for an answer, I stepped onto the ferry deck to watch the engines churn up spume that rose also in ghostly vapors against the white sky filled with cloud water and the green sea filled with jade. I got a face full of sea and cold, rusty dribbles on my shoulders, then the gasoline smell, then the fumes of a cigarette. In 1879, did tobacco and whiskey break the slow plash of Toyatte’s paddles?

Love American Style

Get out your red, white, and blue bajas and your stars-and-stripes skidz, it’s July 4th in Juneau. Last night at 11:59 p.m., fireworks illuminated crowds of drunken revelers staggering harborside, some even belligerently so! But the fireworks were spectacular, not for magnitude or pyrotechnic prowess, but because each explosion echoed against the sheer cliffs that dwarf downtown and reverberated for several seconds. Pardon the cliché, but it really did sound like a thunderstorm rolling in from over the ridge. The best part was that the behemoth cruise ships (several city blocks long, seriously, and at least six stories high) had to vacate the harbor. Take that, tourists. Of course, there is a very small window of opportunity for fireworks; by the time we got home at around 1:30, dawn was already starting to peak through over the mountains. Well, perhaps not quite dawn, but a lightening, a glimmer of bluing sky.
Today at the parade, volunteer firemen tossed generic taffy to children lining the streets. It was a perfect small town parade, complete with Shriners, bagpipers, camo-wearing troops, and pug owners association members. Though the Filipino-American float had the best music—including a phat glockenspiel beat—I noticed that the guilded breast plates of their “native” costumes were made of thickly spray painted plastic and that most of the dancers wore Nikes or black sweatpants or Harley t-shirts under their gaudily hot-glued feathers. So the volunteer marching band, with its rusty instruments and self-aware campiness (c.f. umbrella hat, 70 year old bleached blonde majorette in sequined suspenders and red spandex) took a special little place in my heart. This is why America is great. Happy Fourth!

Mendenhall Glacier photos

some more photos from today's hike. look how happy i am that the sun is shining!

Let the Sunshine In

First nice day in two weeks, and I mean nice. Blue sky, sun, no clouds anywhere, not even a wisp. I woke up at about 4:30 and saw the sun shining in, full blast, as if it were nine in the morning. I kept dozing and waking up, each time looking out of the half-opened window at the head of my bed, gleeful at the sunshine, finally, after two long weeks of overcast, bleached out skies.
We hiked up the Nugget Creek Trail on the east side of Mendenhall Glacier. One member of our group who is a local said he does the trail in two and a half hours. We got back to Banfield about six hours after we started. It wasn’t a particularly strenuous hike, but I didn’t feel like running and there were some mucky, sloggy patches (and I had little desire to relive my experience in the bog). We had some phenomenal views of the glacier, and the glacial lake, which is greyish green, full of suspended silt. The bottom is a soft, slimy clay, and the water felt refreshing on my feet after four hours in wool socks, but soon enough my ankles began to numb. Chunks of bluish ice were floating in the lake at a distance, still coated with the grey detritus of the glacier. Our hike led us parallel to the lake and then up a ridge, at the bottom of which gushed Nugget "Creek," a torrent of white water at least thirty feet wide.
The trail—despite how my legs feel now and the time it took us to do it—was not particularly strenuous, and it felt even less like "wilderness" every time six or seven Bread Loafers took out their digital cameras to snap pictures of the same vista. We did see a porcupine, waddling in a hurried panic down the trail, surprised, no doubt, by our conversation. He was smallish and trotted up a hill, wiggling his quilly bottom in an attempt to clamber away from whatever danger he thought we posed. We also saw a mouse in three pieces on a stump, missing some innards and looking very much like a moldy earthworm. So things do eat here.
And when we got back down to the Glacier Visitor Center, at about 2:00 pm, the area was flooded with tourists and the parking lot crowded with luxury coach buses. At 2:00 pm! What a waste of a gorgeous day. Having just gotten off the trail, I was sweaty and tired, and my boots were caked with muck. I felt good compared to those retirees and foreigners in designer casual wear and sun visors, with their expensive cameras and their jokes about taking the elevator, good about tromping around in sunshine and clean air, all glacier ice and spruce and chalky wet silt.
Of course, I still don’t know what kind of forest I was in, or what event triggered the stages of succession, and I think that’s fine.