Night 24: The Fog

Night 24/25

My hands have turned. Turned into outdoor hands. Hands that have not been washed by warm water, that have almost forgotten it exists outside of my mug. Dirt under all my fingernails, pronounced lines covering my hands despite regular hand washing. Despite heavy cream and salve. Dry, old.

All the other things at home have started to fall away from my mind, as if they were not ever part of home. And I do mean things, just the things.

Here, there is the tent, the boat, the ferrying of gear back and forth from the tent to the boat to the group tent. The breathing in deeply of the arctic air, the sea air. Hearing and seeing strange birds. Or familiar birds in strange places and situations. A swan on top of Pingo Raluk waddling back to its babies. That's it. It's right now. It's everything.

Just the same, this trip is not devoid of the rest of my life. I am not just getting used to this schedule. I am not wanting to stay up until 1:00a.m. to see things, animals, birds, the strangeness of the light in very early Arctic summer morning. I have been able to let go of so many things and concepts in my life, but I need sleep. I may be getting by with less of it the way the never ending light plays with my body clock, my sense of time, my wanting to be moving or up, but I am sleeping.

At this point in my life, enough sleep might be more rare than 3:00a.m. Arctic sunshine.

Tonight, the rest of my life that I have not left behind is the wanting to be with my daughter. I want to go hug her. I want to pick her up and play float like a butterfly...sting like a bee. I want to smell her, brush her hair, and be reassured watching her chest rise and fall while she is sleeping.

But then all there will be tomorrow will be my paddle. My paddle for 7 miles. Hoping I can feel my feet the entire day, attempting to mentally prepare for what it feels like when they are wooden after only a couple of hours.

I got up to pee in the middle of the night. The first fingers of fog were getting to our camp after crossing the lagoon. It could just be fog.

Fall is Here

Fall is Here.

I live in the Bay Area, so around here, summer just started. It is close to 80 degrees today, and that's in South City.

But, this is not the end of the season. I have plans to hike in the sierras in a couple of weeks. And I have ideas about hitting up Utah for one last walk before the snow gets here.

But, it is time to start planning next season. Wright Air Service in Fairbanks starts taking charter reservations in October, that's only a few days away.

Night 38: Valley Girl

Night 38/25

I woke up in a tent cabin in Curry Village this morning. In Yosemite Valley. That one, there is only one. I am very far behind on my night out updates. But I am making headway. At least this morning. I woke up at 5:00a.m. to Javier's snoring and there was no getting back to sleep.

We are out on a 3 night vacation without our daughter. We stayed the first night camping at Grover Hot Springs and the second at Devil's Postpile, a geologic feature he has wanted to see for 20 years, a feature I saw for the first time almost 20 years ago.

Does a night in a Curry Village tent cabin count? By the standards I set out at the beginning of this season it most certainly does. By the standards of what I want now after 38 nights of sleeping on the ground (ok, Curry has summer camp style beds) it does not.

I need a walk, a long one. Maybe right now that means 4 nights and maybe it means 20, but I need a really long walk. I do not know if this is going to happen before next season. If it does not I will survive. I will get my running mileage back up, I will get my diet back on track, I will be ready for it. I will be ready so that when I hit 7,000 feet in elevation and my lungs are sucking in shallowly, but trying to deeply i will not be able to blame it on anything but the elevation. I'll be back to running all those hills, making the morning gym classes (yes, even the 6 a.m. spinning) and getting all the yoga I can make the time for.

Nothing else to be done but make this season as long as possible and keep reaching for the next one.

Night 23: The Place Where the Earth Turns Into Ice

Night 23/25

The Arctic Ocean

"Tell me what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life." Mary Oliver

Last night I slept hearing chunks of sea ice fall off each other. It's a large sound although the chunks are relatively small. The size of a refrigerator or two, the size of a dishwasher. A foreign sound. And the sea beating up against it in its tiny wake reminds me of being near boats docked. The skies are clear, there is only a light breeze. We should have gotten into the boats an hour ago instead of 90 minutes from now.

The water in the Arctic Ocean is blue, blue, blue, pure blue. And the water in the lagoon at my back is as turbid and brown as the arctic is clear and blue. I can see them both from this narrow spit of land we are camped on.

Night 22: A River in Flood

Night 22/25

Paul (our guide) kept talking about the river being in flood. I did not know what this meant, but I was apparently looking at it. And soon I would be floating in it.

The river in flood did not look as treacherous as it sounded. Sounds: scary as fuck. Looks: calm and opaque.

It is the opacity that is the problem. It makes the river difficult to read. The braids become impossible to see and running aground (can you use that term for a raft?) commonplace.

For me, standing in the waters and looking down was disorienting. Sometimes alarmingly so. And the anxiety that has kept me from innumerable unnamable dream careers (i feel like invoking some kind of Harry Potter reference here, but I'll skip it) was not helping me help us. Paul was amazing through that entire day. He either nailed it, seemed to have Superman's x-ray vision to find the deeper channels where we needed them. Or managed to push us through the groundings. And, when he needed and asked for help from us, I'm not sure he got what he was hoping for. It seemed from my perspective, a heroic day on his part.

Also the cold. We were paddling through ice. The islands in between the channels were covered in ice. Some of it was calving, like small glaciers meeting the sea. It made the sound, the ripples, small scale, miniature by Alaskan glacial standards. I could not feel my feet, Paul helped warm them. We saw a wolf. I spotted it and wasn't sure what it was it was so large, like a Dire Wolf. The landscape plays with perspective and everything looked enormous almost until you were on top of it. The ice, from far away looked 40 feet tall, but it was 10, maybe 15? The wolf looked of polar bear proportions. There were snowy geese, there were the kirklands? the landmarks? the corrigans? the birds I have forgotten the names of. But there are three types in North America, I have seen them all. And I will remember their names tonight as I am trying to fall asleep. Yaegers! They are Yaegers. I may be misspelling that, and I may not be able to get the three separate names, but whew!

Then we unceremoniously were out in the lagoon making good time. The day was sunny and beautiful and warm by Arctic Coast standards. Once we had camp set up just getting out of the wind was comfortable. We all touched the Arctic Ocean. We had made it this far. The harder paddling days were to come and it seemed impossible that the weather would hold.

Night 21: Rising Waters

Night 21/25

We were at the end of the world.

It looked so much like the end of the world to me. Known land. Looking out north was the delta of the Kongakut. Beyond that was a lagoon and even further the Icy Reef. A literal spit of land without fresh water we were to arrive at after a paddle through what I would learn would be an icy delta. We would sleep there for a night. Hopefully only a night. Sometimes you can find water there. So maybe two?

There was a peak we wanted to hike. So we had our usual morning and set out. It looked pretty simple, walk from the river to the tundra, the slope gets steeper, keep going until the going up stops. However, the river was rising. And it seemed like it was rising pretty quickly. I have heard stories of hikers being stuck on one side of a river, the rest of their party, their gear, everything to keep them warm and fed and comfortable on the other side. Sometimes the situation gets bad if you are in a canyon. We of course had the luxury of space, but we did not have the luxury of knowing how high the water would get. Then there was the question of camp. There wasn't that much elevation between our tents and the river. A few feet? I have also heard stories of hikers trying to cross raging streams and not being successful. I have done my share/a few river crossings. Sometimes it seemed like we were constantly in streams when hiking in Alaska. But there is hiking in a drainage and there is trying to cross a river in flood.

So we turned back.

Went back to camp, packed it up and loaded the boat. And floated, but not for very long, to a camp with higher ground.

It was July 4, our Independence Day. We could see Canada and we built a fire and made brownies.

Night 20: Into the Unknown

Night20/25

After two nights at Caribou Pass it was time to move on. I had only been as far as the new airstrip just beyond CP. Which isn't exactly accurate, when I was picked up there we flew to Kaktovik on Barter Island. It's across the coastal plain at the end of nowhere. However, I had not floated or paddled anywhere past that point on the Kongakut. I had never seen the delta.

On the way I learned a new bird, the Arctic Tern. Its wings are narrow and they flap up and down and up and down like all the birds, but its body does a terrible dip with every flap. The way it flaps it seems like it is about to fall out of the air with each release of its wings. I have learned other birds on this trip, but this is my favorite. It seems to rescue itself with each movement, it is in constant recovery. The energy expenditure seems immense and it knows no better and it never stops and it makes its way.

Night 19: Demarcation Point

Night 19/25

There was a hike I did last time I was at Caribou Pass that I call Demarcation Point. I don't think that is the name of the peak, but you can see Demarcation Bay from the top of it, so I have referred to it as that ever since. I'm not sure what it is about that peak, why I so much wanted to hike it again. Maybe because it's a place you just can't get to. When is anyone ever just In ANWR, on that river? It's not a lot of people.

We made it. But the mosquitoes were so bad I could barely unzip my bug shirt. They were biting me through the shirt, and as I was hiking I vowed to buy a larger one so as to have keep the mesh further from my skin. They were biting through my clothes so I didn't dare remove any even though it was muggy, and I was sweaty and creating my own weather system.

Maybe because I did that hike on my first trip to Alaska and I wanted to relive a little bit of that fantastic, amazing, inspiring trip? Part of it was that I just wanted the exercise, because there just wasn't much of that on this year's trip. At least not by my standards. Fitnes negative Paul referred to some trips as. And for me, that trip felt very fitness negative. Even the really tough paddling days. And there were those.

The Longest Shortest Time

Yes, I know that is a podcast that NPR produces. No, I don't listen to it. I am a parent, I do not deal well with other parents. I feel alone as a parent, in the way I want to parent, in the things I care about, I do not want to deal with your parenting shit.

My longest shortest time, in terms of backpacking, are the outings themselves. Sometimes in the middle of a trip I feel like I have been gone for so long. So long that I forget things. I forget the things I own. The things I am surrounded with in my house. I forget the way my hundreds of threaded from Bloomingdales cotton sheets feel when i lay down in bed and the firmness of the mattress. The nylon of my sleeping bag and sleeping pad become all I know when I am trying to sleep. At the beginning of the trip the nights stretch out before me like some infinite opportunity to breath deeply and suck the marrow out of life. As the days go on sometimes it just sucks, there is no marrow of life feeling. But there can be a lot of feeling. Feeling cold, feeling tired, feeling like I want to chavasana in the tundra and breath.

By the time the trip ends, it usually feels short. So...fucking....short. Especially if the trip was good. I often have the feeling of needing to be pulled from the tundra by my boots. Finger nails clawing at the short shrubs, face buried deeply into the damp moss, nose filling with plant material as i am dragged onto the plane.

I want to not leave. I want to stay. I want to be there still. Marrow sucking or no.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

Thank you Thoreau.

It is not the end of the season

I spent a minute or two last night standing on my deck in the backyard feeling the breeze on my face. I imagined I was smelling the way it smells (pine, thin air full of pine smell) as you climb out of the foothills into the grano-diorite on Highway 50, and the way that smell intensifies as you push deeper into the Sierras. I imagined the air felt as thin as it does at 6500’, which when you live at sea level, is much thinner. The first day or so it can feel harder to breath.

But it is Labor Day weekend and I am home, in the Bay Area. Not in the Sierras on the hike that was meant to be the other slice of bread for the Alaska sandwich that was my summer, my season. And if I recall the trip that is the first slice of bread, the bread of this sandwich is officially shitty. But the filling was worth the trouble.