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.