North of Hope (6 page)

The river is within us.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”

S
tretching from the gentle braids of the river below us, octagonal shapes, seemingly endless, symmetrical and similar in size, textured the tundra. The pattern looked as though a crystal had multiplied out of control, spreading across the plain.

Wresting myself from my daze, I tried pushing myself toward curiosity. “What are those shapes?” I asked through my headset, pointing at the geometric forms. My voice echoed in the headset as though I were speaking into a barrel.

“They’re called polygons,” Tom said, his pilot’s crosscheck continuing seamlessly, looking into the sky, at the tundra below, at the instruments, and back out again.

“How are they formed?”

“They say they’re made out of ice. Not sure why they end up all the same like that.”

I looked at the uniformity, complexity, and scale of the tundra polygons, amazed that there could be such naturally occurring order. The structure soothed me, an architecture of earth and water, a pattern of the land promising evidence of divine intention in what I saw as chaos. I wanted to know the place I was coming to for healing, hoping that learning more might help fill in the void that had opened in my life a year ago, might answer questions still unresolved.

Despite knowing of the influx of life to the Arctic in summer, looking down at the coastal plain did not yet inspire me to awe. To marvel over precariously balanced and prodigious life requires understanding, and my untrained eyes were not adequate to the task. I felt a flash of panic that I had lived too long away from wilderness ever to be able to truly appreciate this place. Skeins of river wove loosely back and forth on the tapestry of the tundra, braids voyaging through the landscape, returning to the main channel, venturing out again. Large gravel bars separated the river’s threads. From above it looked as though someone had poured a can of paint over an angled canvas so that streams of color navigated their way over tiny inconsistencies to the end. The distance hid the details, simplified the journey.

What was I really doing here? Was I really here to finish their trip? Or was I reacting like a wild animal, facing off against a wild place that had taken my dad and Kathy? Where did I get the idea I had enough experience or aptitude to handle a trip on a river in the Arctic? What was I thinking?

I’d learned to skydive in college while reveling in the myth of immortality belonging only to the young. I most enjoyed relative work, the formations skydivers make in the sky during a jump. One of the most counterintuitive techniques in relative work is the way two skydivers dock, or connect, in the air. If the jumpers reach out to make the connection, their bodies skid across the sky away from each other. Skydivers have to fight the natural urge to reach for something, and instead pull their arms back, orienting themselves so that they move toward their partners’ grasp. You have to trust. You have to let it happen.

I wasn’t any good at applying the lessons of parachuting to life. Emotions were far more dangerous than relying on a small piece of nylon to deliver you from sky to earth. Real risk involves the heart.

Now I focused on the physical, looked at the river winding below. No matter how good our maps, they could not depict the
Hulahula River with a high degree of accuracy. In Arctic rivers, the force of water moves huge amounts of rock and sediment. Rivers begin flowing high at early melt, undercutting banks not only by their power but also because the moving water thaws the permafrost below. As the melting slows, so do the rivers, depositing their loads of sediment and glacial silt along the wide channels they cut when the rivers were higher. These deposits, from large rocks to the finest sand, form islands and change the contours of the shores. Over time, the entire path of a river can change as it crawls toward the sea. The power of water. The shifting of the earth.

When I was skydiving, I developed a ritual I observed on every plane ride in the minutes before hurling my body into the rushing wind: I said the Lord’s Prayer. I prayed for those I loved. I prayed for forgiveness. I got someone to check my equipment. This time, I whispered the Lord’s Prayer. I prayed for safety. And I remembered with a flash of pain and derision Kathy’s last journal entry on June 23, her last written words: “Lord, keep us safe.” I scowled out the window. It would be easier not to believe in God. It would be easier not to have to make sense of this. Maybe this place was too far north for prayer, too far north for hope.

“There are a couple of grizzlies,” Tom noted casually. He banked the airplane hard toward the river, and I grabbed the handle above my head as g-forces pressed me against the seat. Below us, two large brown bears ran in long, loose bounds with a grace proportionate to their vigor. As with William Faulkner’s Old Ben, they were “taintless and incorruptible.” They were the wild in its truest form.

Over the past year, I had read anything I could find about bear, probing the dichotomy of my repulsion and wonder, trying to reconcile my horror and awe. The primal connection between human and bear fills volumes, most richly relayed in the oral traditions of indigenous peoples around the world who think of
the bear, despite, and in part because of, its potential for danger, as perhaps the purest representative of true wilderness, a wilderness now relegated to the geographical borders of humanity but echoing through the millennia in our psyches.

Indigenous people found physical and behavioral resemblances between humans and bears: the bear’s ability to walk upright, and his footprint, with the indentation of heel and arch, are among the clearest similarities. Bears are considered by scientists and indigenous alike to be highly intelligent and playful. Bears and humans both have omnivorous diets subject to change according to season, making the most of a fish run, a harvest of wild edibles, a deer kill, but typically consuming similar roots, berries, and plants.

Bears are also known for their maternal instincts, so much so that the medieval church used bear as symbol for the Virgin Mary. Mother bears disappear into dens to give birth to—to
bear—
blind, hairless, and helpless cubs weighing less than a pound, suckling them in the den, a second womb. Though the mother bear does not eat or drink during her winter sleep, her young grow to the point of viability before mother and young emerge in the spring. But unlike most other animals, a mother bear stays with her young for another two or three years, teaching them to forage, build dens, and avoid threats from larger bears. Like humans, each bear represents a considerable investment of maternal time and energy.

A bear carcass, killed and skinned, is purported to look eerily like a human corpse.

But how do I describe seeing a bear under my circumstances? I knew that bears generally stay clear of humans. I knew that the two bears below us had not killed Dad and Kathy, because that bear had been killed the next day, when the police went to recover their bodies. I knew that before (and after) Dad and Kathy were killed, there were no known bear killings in the Arctic Refuge. I knew that these bears were beautiful. I was riveted in wonder and in
horror. A piece of me seized inside. I strained to hear a symphony, but my music crumbled into chaos. The patterns disappeared.

A memory: waking early in the morning in my upstairs room to hear Dad’s quick, heavy footfalls on the first floor of the house moving from the bedroom to the kitchen, the sound of pouring coffee beans, the sound of coffee beans grinding, the sound of his footfalls returning to bed to wait while the coffee brewed, the smell of coffee curling through the house.

I depended on knowing. I knew facts. Facts were clean. They were neat and orderly, like the facts I’d researched and put on three-by-five cards when I debated in high school. Facts I could reference to prove a point, win an argument. I read about these bears the year after Dad and Kathy died. I continued to read about them. I knew them from the newspaper’s picture of that seven-year-old, healthy grizzly on the north end of that Arctic beach, the remnants of the wrecked campsite just to the south.

Barren-ground grizzlies are smaller and more aggressive than their southern counterparts. Food on the Arctic tundra is scarce, and grizzlies, the brown bear with the least-dense population and the lowest reproductive rate, cover hundreds of square miles of territory to feed themselves and maintain their population. The barren-ground grizzly in the photo killed my father and stepmother. These were not clean facts. They dripped with gore.

The timbre of the Arctic’s music changed. Red tooth and claw bristled on the clean lines of landscape. I knew the bears moved toward the river on the coastal plain where we would be in another week. Logically, they would have moved a distance away by the time we reached that point. And yet the existence of the grizzlies affirmed my entry into wilderness in the same inexplicable sense as seeing the polar bear in Kaktovik did; a surprising solace rested comfortably next to my abhorrence and just punctured the aridity of my spirit.

A memory: “If I die tomorrow,” said Dad, many times, “I want
you to remember that no matter how much money you make, you save at least ten percent of it, more if you can.” That’s not all I want to remember, Dad. But I remember. Ten percent.

Looking down to the coastal plain from the Cessna, I felt momentarily protected, and yet uncomfortably separate, from the wild world below. I was cocooned in the limits of my understanding, trying to squirm through what bound me, though my wings were yet unformed. I considered that when Faulkner’s Ike went into the wild to see Old Ben, he left his weapon behind. Even that was not enough. He hung his compass and his watch on a tree. He left the trappings and security of his world behind to join the concert of wildness. I could not hang up my compass yet. “Be scared. You can’t help that,” Ike’s mentor, Sam Fathers, said. “But don’t be afraid.” I was scared. And I was still afraid.

Along the west side of the river, we flew over two Inupiat fishing camps, shacks falling apart and old oil barrels askew on the tundra.

“See that hole?” Tom pointed out a gaping blackness in the side of one of the shacks. “That’s where a grizzly forced its way in.” I stared at the grotesque collision of ancient wisdom and ways of life, the violence of the wild, the violence of modernity, until it fell behind the plane’s progress. Continuing south, the green coastal plain grew into foothills and the river disappeared into small canyons. Held in by the high and narrow banks, the river leapt and churned.

“Those are the rapids?” I asked Tom through the headset. “They don’t look too bad.”

“They’re not—from up here,” he said, smiling.

A memory: running with Dad over his lunchtimes the summer I was ten years old and entering my first 10k races with him. “See that guy ahead of you in the red shorts?” Dad asked, as we started up a hill. “He’s slowing down where it gets steep. Let’s pass him!”

Despite my Alaskan upbringing, I’d never seen this landscape
over which we flew, a landscape unknown even to most Alaskans because of its inaccessibility. Westerners are new to this land, but people have lived in the northernmost reaches of Alaska for more than ten thousand years. The Inupiat populate the coastal areas. The Gwich’in Indians live south of the Brooks Range in a region stretching from central Alaska into Canada. Both depend on the land and the sea to sustain their communities, even today. For the Gwich’in, reliant on the Porcupine Caribou Herd, the Arctic Coastal Plain is known as “the place where life begins” and as “the sacred calving grounds.” Neither people is constrained by state or country borders, a reminder that the wilderness is bigger than any more recent attempts to define it.

Russians and Europeans were the first Westerners to explore Arctic Alaska, beginning with Captain Cook mapping its coastline in 1778. The search for the Northwest Passage brought back news of whales, beginning decades of aggressive whale hunting. Most whaling expeditions lasted two years, sailing around the coast of South America, whaling and offloading the oil and baleen in the Hawaiian Islands (and frequently picking up Hawaiians to help crew), then continuing north to the Arctic until winter forced the ships south again.

The name Hulahula is first noted in correspondence between S. J. Marsh, a prospector at the turn of the twentieth century, and Alfred H. Brooks, chief geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey in the same period in a paper dated 1919. The river was referred to as “Hoolahoola,” a word of Kanaka, or Hawaiian, origin, meaning “the dance.” The paper notes that there was no ancient name for the river, and that “Hoolahoola” was bestowed in the past twenty years (since 1900) after natives of Herschel Island, a tiny island in the Beaufort Sea just off the coast of Canada’s Yukon Territory, killed a number of caribou and celebrated with a dance by the river. It is not known how the name was given or why a name of Hawaiian origin was chosen. Perhaps a crew member from the islands suggested it. But the name stuck. The dance. A celebration.

Whaling continued until several factors brought it to a halt, among which were the last shots of the Civil War, fired by the Confederate ship
Shenandoah
in the Bering Strait on June 22, 1865. Though it was two months after Lee’s surrender, the
Shenandoah
hadn’t got the word. It burned twenty-one Arctic whalers in this two-month period, decimating the whaling fleet. The
Shenandoah
learned the war was over in August when it arrived on the California coast. Whaling gave way to walrus hunting, which continued until restrictions were imposed in the midtwentieth century.

The Cold War military buildup increased the number of visitors to the Arctic, along with the establishment of the Distant Early Warning Line, a series of communications stations intended to provide warning of Soviet attack. The subsequent discovery of oil led to increased development and debate, with worldwide interest from oil companies looking for extraction opportunities and environmentalists defending the uniqueness and fragility of the Arctic ecosystem.