A Buildup of Days

Tuesday Night, June 29th, 2010. A decent dinner in my belly, a cigarette and a glass of cheap bourbon on ice. "Ambulance Blues" playing in the living room. About time this space was brought up to date on some happenings.

Sunday, June 20th. We accidentally went to Whittier, Alaska.

I went to church. A bike ride was planned. Plans were scuttled in favor of hiking. Dan, Julia, Sophie, Amy and I headed south along Turnagain Arm and promptly missed the trailhead. The weather was nice, so we kept on driving. Eventually, 12 dollars down and a 10 minute drive through the center of a mountain behind us, we were in Whittier. Whittier is a tiny town presided over by a massive abandoned apartment complex. Driving up past the building, with its empty breezeways and overgrown cornices, you reach the trailhead leading to Shotgun Cove. Or you reach a shallow stream with a sign next to it that claims the stream is a trailhead. This is how it is during the early summer, when snows are melting.

A moderate walk through rocks blanketed with shallow, clear running water. You come to a river with a submerged plank bridge. At this point, we turned right and bushwacked up a steep incline along the rim of a stream that led to a hidden waterfall. The prickly, fleshy plant called devil's club snapped at our heels. Trying for higher and wider views of the bay, we vaulted over downed trees swaddled in wet moss and tiny pink flower-like fungi on cream-colored stalks. A few spills and legs full of prickles and we returned to the inundated way. As Dan said, "Sometimes you just have to man it", and so we let our feet get drenched in stream rather than risk falling in part and parcel. Realizing a way down to the cove to the left, we stomped and careened through marshy, muddy fields, eventually emerging on the rocky shore of a small, protected inlet. The water was so cold and clear that the waving kelp played Technicolor.

On the shores of these coves, regularly subsumed by tides, all the rocks are flat and chipped, and they lie in tightly bunched whorls perpendicular to the surface of the earth. The tide moves them and rearranges their relations, so that at low tide the beach is a contour map of the water's path. Dan and I set about collecting dry-enough wood for a fire. The girls swam in the frigid water. They emerged to take over our meager efforts at fire and we swam - awake in the sun - and dove off sharp rocks into forests of seaweed. The water was so salty that your face felt cured when you came up for air. The fire eventually behaved. We made s'mores and laughed in the shadow of white-capped, somnolent peaks and the swishing reflection of the wide open bay. For souvenirs, I found a broken moose's rib and shoved it into my pack. Trudging back through wet shoes and rocks that seemed more jagged when mystery didn't lie at the trails end, sunshowers dappled our way. A car ride, a gas station, a bag of Bugles, and a shower - day's end.

Friday, June 25th, Afternoon. My dad and I, after some confusion, head up Bird Ridge. Various down-bound hikers warn us of the oncoming toil. Though the hike is steep, every turn develops in new colors of the alpine palette: deep purples, milk whites, butter yellows, Aegean blues and a spectrum of greens as wide as any outstretched arms. The hike, while arduous, is not much to speak about. But eventually, after inching out into a vegetated bowl near the summit, eating apples and cereal in the bright, wet sun, we had a strange opportunity - we watched the tide come into Turnagain Arm. At first it is hard to understand, because the water is nearly the same color as the muddy bottom and so you think the inlet is already full. But then a creeping wall of water begins to move in. In the span of five minutes, it has eaten its way across everything you can see. Where there was earth, there is now water. The salt water glides to meet glacial streams flowing out at Girdwood and McHugh Creek. Like the clouds at Mt. Eklutna, the water's travel evoked time-lapse footage. But it was in real time, and we were transfixed.

On the way down, we saw a grouse leap into a tree and be joined by one, two, three, four, five! young on the branches surrounding her. From a short distance she was nearly leopard-spotted. Her children fluttered spastically, drying their wings from the recent drizzle. She was imperious as ever.

Flash Cut to: Saturday, June 26th. I'm in a car eating salmon jerky as a small roadhouse that takes 20 minutes to sell a bottle of Jameson and reeks of home sweet home (in the abstract: wood and frying bacon and medium-attractive women and men in flannel halibut-stalker hats and the World Cup on TV) disappears into the distance called "Talkeetna". I'm on State Highway 3. My dad is driving.

On either side of us, the spruce and birch rose actively to meet the low-hanging rainclouds. The weather was such that the trees did not have to stretch much. The entire highway gave one the feeling of being very, very alone. Not because there was no one else driving, but because there was no visible landscape other than a black-and-yellow rode and a stern line of waltzing foliage. I couldn't get "Angel from Montgomery" out of my head. As we neared the park, some of the clouds parted to reveal the risings and peaks of the surrounding mountains, glinting the pure sunlight that hits high things before it gets diluted for human use. The drive was long, but beyond all odds we arrived at the Crow's Nest Lodge in the early afternoon. Gaggles of whitewater rafters were piling into the Nenana River to put themselves at the shallow canyon's mercy. My dad bought some boots, I learned how to use bear-spray, and we headed out for Mount Healy. We were in Denali National Park.

The bottom of the mountain is easy and steep. A fine trail has been cut by the National Park Service, and sun and light shower chaperoned us nearly to the summit. Then we came to a clearing. To our left was the vast expanse of the Alaska Range, and to our right was a jagged moraine of rocks leading up to the craggy peak. After a long stare-down with a golden-furred marmot, we headed up the rocks. Then the rain. We struggled like marooned mountaineers across the face to find the path again, and by the time we reached the ridge it was hailing. A speeding gout of icy rain broke the skin on my neck - though I didn't notice until later. The entire valley was invisible beneath the dense clouds. I have never been in a wilder place. The weather cleared as we descended. Dinner and a soak in the lodge's hot tub. Sleep.

The next day was not exciting enough to warrant a date heading. Plans of a helicopter ride to the glacier were stuffed by the low-hanging, smokey green fog, so we drove into the park. At one point, behind Savage Cabin, I sat 3 feet away from a feeding rabbit and neither of us dared to move. On the pinnacle of Savage Rock, which overlooks Savage River, a wide vista of scrubby tundra and ghostly mist was rewarding. We drove home. We never actually saw Denali for the haze of weather patterns, but driving south along the highway I could feel my right side pressed imperceptibly by the presence of something old and immense. The fact of the highest peak in North America is simply that great - it exerts its own gravity. Though all you see are dark trees and opaque gray machinations, the feeling portions of your body shiver with the specter of the huge rock.

Monday, June 28th. Sophie, Sam Sterling, Masha, Nora and I saw a screening of "Welcome" at the Bear's Tooth. The film is devastating and simple, about a Kurdish boy determined to swim the Channel from Calais to Dover to be with his girlfriend. We left downcast and dour, and the only solution was beer and snacks and ride down the coast.

By the time we got to the secluded beach south of Woronzof Point, the sun was bright and falling in the Western sky. We drank our beers. We swatted mosquitoes. We ate pretzels and grapes. We skipped stones and spoke about the World Stone-Skipping Championships in Seward. By now we had dwindled to four: myself, Sophie, Nora, and Sam. The sun played brilliantly on the water and the tide edged subtly towards us. The buzzing of insects and plant growth hummed in the woods behind us. There wasn't another soul in sight. On the trail, we had seen a massive porcupine waddling aimlessly down the asphalt thru-way. He didn't care at all. Eventually, as if the water had been tugging at our dress-hems the entire time, we conceded and swam. The water was cold and black and penetrated to the sleeping centers of the body. Wide awake, sandy, on fire with the intersection of slate-gray Cook Inlet sunlight and moss-green forest shadow, we passed grazing moose and returned home. Today, I woke up rejuvenated and new.

I can still feel Denali's imminent presence, as if at any moment I will turn around and the city will be gone, and it will be me and the mountain, alone on a blasted plain, silent. It will hail, and I will climb. The world will get wilder still.