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?