GUSTAVUS
The official website for Gustavus advises visitors that, while it is possible to rent a car or call a taxi to meet one’s transportation needs, “most guests just prefer to borrow a bike to get around town . . . or put out your thumb.” Things are a little more informal and spread out in the northern half of the Inside Passage, including the ferry schedule. Sitka-to-Gustavus ran only once a week and took twenty-seven hours on two boats, but I could fly the same route any day I wanted. The flight from Sitka to Juneau took twenty-five minutes. The one from Juneau to Gustavus lasted twelve.
The tiny airport parking lot doubled as the informal baggage claim. A guy from Alaska Airlines carried out everyone’s belongings by hand, much of it fishing gear. The mood among the few dozen people gathered felt more like a block party than an arrivals area. Neighbors stood chatting in small groups, trading funny stories and bits of gossip and asking about mundane details related to family members. I happily would have hitchhiked into town, except there really isn’t a “town” part of Gustavus in the same way there is in Juneau or Skagway. Also, Kim Heacox had come to pick me up.
Heacox was easy to recognize—slight build, glasses, collar-length hair. We’d met a couple of months earlier in Anchorage, a city where he’d once lived but which he said now sometimes overwhelmed him with its crush of traffic and people. He was one of Alaska’s best-known writers, an acclaimed photographer, an expert on John Muir, a former park ranger, and a serious national parks enthusiast. (I’d first heard his soft voice waxing poetically about the great outdoors in a Ken Burns documentary.) He’d channeled his passions into several books, including one that argued convincingly that Muir’s six visits to Glacier Bay were the cornerstone of the American conservation movement.
Due to the town’s proximity to Glacier Bay, Gustavus is growing. Not so much in ways the Chamber of Commerce might promote, though the population did see a bump from 429 to 434 between 2000 and 2015. It’s the size of the landmass on which Gustavus sits, rather, that is increasing. Just as climate change has brought more rain to Southeast Alaska (because a warming ocean sends more moisture into the atmosphere through evaporation), the melting of billions of tons of ice in Glacier Bay is causing land that was depressed under the massive weight of glaciers to rise as much as two inches per year. This process is called isostatic rebound. One waterfront property owner in Gustavus unexpectedly found himself with so much bonus acreage that he built a rudimentary nine-hole golf course on land that had been underwater during the Harriman Expedition.
Heacox drove us out to the tidal flats near the town’s ferry dock and pointed at the acres of new land that had emerged since he first visited Glacier Bay, in 1979. “Look at that,” he said. “This is a land that is in the process of creation. This is land being born, man. That still amazes me.”
Heacox had been another of those young men who wander the West as a circuitous route to Alaska. A geology professor had planted the seed with a talk about a bay near Juneau where ice was withdrawing, revealing nature’s secret recipe for transforming rock into soil, grassland into forest. Down in the deserts of the Four Corners area, he searched for his hero, Edward Abbey, the radical environmentalist and author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel about eco-saboteurs who gleefully break the law to preserve threatened wilderness. Instead of Abbey, Heacox found a nine-fingered blues guitarist who told him, “Alaska: There’s nothing like it. It makes all these other parks down here look like boutique wildernesses.”
Kim had met his wife, Melanie, while they were both wearing “the old green and gray” as seasonal park rangers at Glacier Bay National Park. Ninety percent of visitors to Glacier Bay arrive on cruise ships that never stop in Gustavus, and couldn’t even if they wanted to, because the dock can’t accommodate them. Instead, the Park Service dispatches rangers who climb aboard the various Princess Somethings and Whatever of the Seas that sail through and give lectures to guests.
As we followed the dirt road that led to his house, Kim told me that he and Melanie had Frank Lloyd Wright’s philosophy of organic agriculture in mind when designing a place to live; the winding driveway alone took him a year to map in order to avoid chopping down big trees. Its seamless integration of two connected buildings with the surrounding woods did remind me of Wright’s Taliesin. I didn’t, however, remember seeing cans of bear spray strategically placed on the front porch at Wright’s home. (The Heacoxes purchased the land on which they’d built their house from the estate of a photographer friend who’d been killed by a brown bear.) The scene’s Enchanted Forest effect was magnified when we arrived to find Melanie outside in a colorful headscarf, watering the flowers in her hummingbird garden.
Melanie was finishing up her annual stint training the interpretive rangers who explained Glacier Bay to visitors. Like many gifted teachers, she combined infectious enthusiasm with rigorous organizational discipline; the Heacox home was filled with to-do lists, encouraging messages written on Post-its, and neat stacks of reading material to be devoured. She was preparing to spend a day on a cruise ship offering support to her last interpretive trainee for the season, who would be giving her first solo presentation before a crowd. “I’ll step off that ship, file the payroll paperwork I’ve got filled out, press SEND on the thank-you e-mails I have queued up on my computer, and I’ll be done for the year!” Melanie said. When she finished watering the flowers, she took five minutes to show me how to set up a tent, a skill that had eluded me for three decades.
The Heacox home phone number was a good one for a contestant to have on hand if the subject of John Muir or Glacier Bay came up on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I’d asked them to help me find locations that Muir had visited. Melanie had picked Russell Island, the spot where Muir had climbed a small mountain to catch his first glimpse of the vast Grand Pacific Glacier. “They put up the tents on October 27, 1879—I just looked that up the other day,” she said. “You’ll be camping where John Muir camped! Of course, the island was half under ice at that time.”
The years 1879 and 1899 appear frequently on maps of Glacier Bay, marking the positions of glaciers as witnessed by Muir during his first visit and his last with the Elder team twenty years later. Most of these were now in what Melanie called “catastrophic retreat.” Unlike the glaciers that covered much of the American Midwest twenty thousand years ago and created the Bering Land Bridge, Glacier Bay’s ice is the product of a rather recent phenomenon, the Little Ice Age. This period of unusually cool temperatures lasted roughly from 1300 to 1850 and is known primarily for its effects in Europe. The River Thames frequently froze over solid enough that London winter carnivals were held atop its ice. In 1644, the French alpine village of Les Bois summoned the bishop of Geneva to combat an ice river that was advancing at a rate of “over a musket shot every day.”
Similar effects were felt in Alaska. The graphics on the detailed NPS Glacier Bay map that Melanie unfolded for me on her kitchen table told an incredible story. In 1680, Glacier Bay—today more than ten miles wide in some parts and more than a thousand feet deep—does not exist. Its upper two-thirds are covered by ice, and its lower third is a green valley bisected by a stream. By 1750, at the peak of the Little Ice Age’s effects in Glacier Bay, the ice has marched all the way down to the mouth of today’s bay and beyond, extending into Icy Strait. According to Tlingit oral history, Kim told me, the ice had advanced “as fast as a limping dog could run.” (Similar, more scientific, observations were also recorded in 1950 for the Muldrow Glacier, on Denali, which surged more than a thousand feet in a single day.)
When Vancouver arrived, in 1794, the ice had retreated a few miles back inside the mouth of the bay. In 1879, Muir found Vancouver’s charts no longer accurate, because the glacier had pulled back another forty miles, leaving behind the thousand-foot-deep bay it had gouged out of the valley. Today the ice is sixty-five miles back from where it was 250 years ago. A visitor who stops at the pile of rocks that remain from Muir’s cabin at the foot of his namesake glacier now has to travel thirty miles up an inlet to see the remnants of the ice that once discharged bergs so large they threatened to capsize Harriman Expedition canoes.
Melanie compared the conditions necessary to maintain a healthy glacier to balancing a checkbook. If the amount of snow that falls during the winter and gets compacted into glacial ice is greater than the ice that calves off or melts during the summer, everything is okay. There is no deficit, and sometimes there is a surplus. Glaciers are finicky beasts, though. When snowfall declines or temperatures rise too high to maintain that equilibrium, they retreat. Usually. In Glacier Bay, the Johns Hopkins Glacier retreated catastrophically for the first three decades of the twentieth century, then reversed course and began growing. It extends farther now than it did in 1929.
Ten years ago, Melanie said, rangers in Glacier Bay would often find themselves cornered by climate change deniers. Now visitors were uncertain what to think. The effects of climate change were becoming harder to ignore, but half of the country’s politicians (and most of Alaska’s) were insisting it didn’t exist. Not everyone was conflicted. When I accompanied Kim down to the boat dock at Bartlett Cove to watch him give a short presentation about Glacier Bay to the passengers of a high-end eco-tour boat visiting the bay, one red-faced guest was screaming to the expedition leader that climate change was a liberal conspiracy in which scientists were being paid off. After the tirade ended, I asked the trip leader how he’d responded. “I told him that if I had a lump on my neck and went to a hundred doctors, if ninety-five of them told me to get it removed and five told me to treat it with herbs and roots, I’d get it removed,” he said.
The next morning Kim made fruit smoothies with vanilla ice cream and we discussed the Harriman Expedition’s legacy. His take was that the real value of the trip wasn’t in the research conducted but in the “cross-pollination of ideas.”
“These guys spent two months together,” Kim said. “You can’t measure the importance of something like the growing friendship between George Bird Grinnell and John Muir.”
Muir’s self-identification as “author and student of glaciers” in the Elder’s logbook may have been Scottish modesty, or it may have been a realistic acknowledgment of how his status had changed since his first visit to Alaska. While few equaled his expertise in glaciology, it was his writing on behalf of safeguarding wilderness that had catapulted him to national fame. No person played a more important role in that development than Robert Underwood Johnson, the associate editor of the prestigious Century Magazine. There is no record of Muir and Grinnell’s having communicated with each other prior to the Harriman Expedition, but they definitely shared ideas with Johnson as the intermediary.
Johnson traveled to California from New York City in 1889 looking to assign stories. Among his goals was to get work out of Muir, who spent most of the 1880s running the fruit farm he had taken over when he had married Louie Strentzel in 1880. “I am degenerating into a machine for making money,” he lamented to Hall Young during a visit from the minister. Johnson’s timing was excellent. Muir was eager to start writing again and had a general subject in mind: the horrible state of affairs in Yosemite Valley. Amid one of the most iconic landscapes in America, virtually unregulated entrepreneurs were raising livestock (“hoofed locusts” was Muir’s term for the wildflower-munching sheep), operating sawmills, and luring tourists to seedy hostels. “Perhaps we may yet hear of an appropriation to whitewash the face of El Capitan or correct the curves of the Domes,” Muir wrote. Johnson joined Muir on a camping trip to the valley and was struck by its beauty and its abuse. “Obviously the thing to do is make Yosemite National Park around the Valley on the plan of Yellowstone,” Johnson told Muir.
Johnson likely had in mind a conservation strategy pioneered by Grinnell. Yellowstone had been named America’s first national park in 1872, but more as a cabinet of wild curiosities for tourists to gawk at than as a nature sanctuary. Almost no federal funds had been set aside for its care. Poachers killed Yellowstone’s trophy animals with impunity, including some of the last remaining buffalo; tourists carved their names into rocks; residents of towns outside the park’s boundaries treated its forests as a ready source of firewood. The greatest threats to Yellowstone were the railroads and developers who wanted to maximize the park’s commercial potential. Grinnell was the first major figure to combine publicity and politics in the name of defending public wilderness, using the pulpit of Forest and Stream and his connections in Washington to convince congressmen that Yellowstone belonged to all of the American people. The formation of the Boone and Crockett Club with Theodore Roosevelt was the logical next step, creating the first organization with “the explicit purpose of affecting national legislation on the environment,” as historian Michael Punke writes.
With much pleading and cajoling, Muir produced two articles he had promised Johnson for The Century, which appeared in the magazine’s August and September 1890 issues. His message was explicit: Yosemite was one of America’s natural crown jewels and deserved to be protected. Johnson, meanwhile, lobbied legislators in Washington. On October 1, 1890, Congress named Yosemite America’s newest national park. In a somewhat awkward arrangement, the state of California maintained ownership of Yosemite Valley, which, along with the Mariposa Big Tree Grove, had been granted to the state for safekeeping by President Abraham Lincoln in 1864.
Not long after, Johnson inquired of Grinnell whether the Boone and Crockett Club might be interested in establishing “a Yosemite and Yellowstone defense association.” Both Grinnell and Muir agreed it was a good idea, but Grinnell’s fellow Boone and Crockett members disagreed.* Muir instead joined forces with a group of Bay Area professors who had discussed a similar plan to preserve land in California. On June 4, 1892, twenty-seven men met in San Francisco to form the Sierra Club. Muir was chosen as president, a title he would hold until his death.
When they set foot on the Elder, Muir and Grinnell were leaders of a crusade that had not yet found its way. In the years following the Harriman Expedition, the two branches of American conservation—the spiritual children of Henry Thoreau and the practical sportsmen of the Boone and Crockett Club—would rub together to ignite the modern environmental movement. When he died, in 1938, the New York Times obituary called Grinnell “the father of American conservation.” Environmental history has since largely overlooked the practical Grinnell’s contributions, though. The mystical Muir is the figurehead who has appeared on postage stamps and coins.
“He came along at the exact right time,” Kim said of Muir’s prominence. “He’s got a catchy name and a great image. Thin, long beard, hat, walking stick. He knew his Bible front to back, so he could use spiritual language that caught a lot of people. He could come up with these catchy little phrases, beautiful one- or two-sentence summations of the value of nature. ‘Climb the mountains and get their glad tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.’ Or, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.’ That is ecology before there was the science of ecology.”
By 1899, Muir had also become a major irritant to businessmen who made their fortunes from exploiting natural resources. “The outcries we hear against forest reservations come mostly from thieves who are wealthy and steal timber by wholesale,” he wrote shortly before receiving Harriman’s invitation. Muir’s ability to mix dreaminess with feistiness reminded me a little of Kim. He loved to wander off in the woods and to walk around the house shirtless, strumming Beatles tunes on his guitar, but as president of the Friends of Glacier Bay, he had fought successfully to phase out commercial fishing in the park, much to the annoyance of some neighbors and powerful political foes, such as Senator Frank Murkowski. (Murkowski later became governor and appointed his daughter Lisa to his vacant Senate seat, an unpopular move that helped open the door for a little-known candidate named Sarah Palin to take his new job.) As Alaska’s ecology mutated in unpredictable ways and its economy suffered from the collapse of oil prices, the state’s two senators and its lone congressman, Don Young, had committed to a clear path for the future: to push for new oil drilling in places like ANWR.
“Alaska isn’t the last frontier when it comes to climate change,” Kim said. “It’s the first frontier.” Having just completed the warmest spring on record, the state was well on its way to its hottest year ever. “When someone like Don Young wants to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that’s the exact wrong thing to do. It’s morally bankrupt. That’s the equivalent of saying in 1859, ‘Bring over more slaves.’”
It occurred to me, as I rode one of Kim’s rusty old mountain bikes a mile up the two-lane road, over the Salmon River, past purple fields of lupine in which a moose ambled gawkily like a preschooler trying on her mother’s high heels, that one of the nicest things about Gustavus is that while it feels about a million miles from the rest of America, it’s a hard place to get lost. A game of Chutes and Ladders promises more potential twists than the roadways of Gustavus. Once I’d hung a left out of Kim’s driveway, even the wildest of wrong turns could dead-end only at the ferry dock, the airport, or the national park headquarters. The closest thing to a business district was the intersection where the coffee shop and café sat kitty corner from a refurbished 1930s gas station. A couple of times I pedaled straight toward the mountains to the one-room library, where I could check e-mail. Gustavus has been wired for electricity only since the 1980s, and I got the sense that if the power went out for a few weeks, people would carry on just fine; some might not even notice. At the tiny post office, people conducted epistolary correspondences through messages scribbled on notices taped to the wall. To an Outsider, each was a short story that raised more questions than it answered.
Does anyone know how Alice is doing now? I haven’t seen her since she moved away.
I saw her recently in Florida and she looked a lot better, considering.
I didn’t even need to wear a bike helmet, since the only safety risk was losing one’s balance when waving back at the drivers who passed every few minutes. Kim and Melanie insisted that the interminable October rains kept the population down, but I wondered if the indoor time enforced by that gray weather came with a productivity bonus. Three of the first five people I met in town had written novels, including one homeschooled twelve-year-old neighbor who could field-dress a black-tailed deer and whose expertise on edible spruce tips was widely sought.
When I first contacted him, Kim had insisted that in order to understand the excitement Muir had experienced on his trips to Glacier Bay, I really needed to do so from the vantage point of a kayak. “You might want to get out on the water alone; it could really be a life-changing experience,” he said. Since I’d never paddled a kayak, or even a canoe, it seemed more likely to be a life-ending experience. Kim said he knew someone who’d keep me from drowning.
My second day in town, David Cannamore picked me up in a borrowed van belonging to the kayak rental company he worked for. David was twenty-seven, a former prep basketball star who’d grown up outside Anchorage. He was six foot four and blond and had a scruffy beard; when he walked, he had the tall man’s habit of ducking slightly, as if he’d banged his head on one too many doorframes. He was a man given to epiphanies. He knew he wanted to marry his wife, Brittney, the moment he’d laid eyes on her. (“She took a little longer to come around,” he recalled.) On a kayak trip he’d taken with his dad the summer after he graduated from high school, he’d spotted an orca and knew instantly that his basketball career was doomed.
“You know how people say, ‘I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was a moment that changed my life’? Not me. I knew at that moment I wanted to work with orcas. Something had changed chemically.” He and Brittney now spent their winters as caretakers at a remote marine biology institute on the British Columbia coast, where they tracked whales all day and night, got a lot of reading done, and looked forward to weekly baths heated by firewood.
Gustavus wasn’t a place where you ran in to the store to grab milk while someone waited in the car with the engine running. At each of our three stops, the shopkeeper inquired about how the kayak business was shaping up for summer, how David and Brittney were doing on their search for a piece of property in town, and how Brittney’s side business making and selling botanical lotions and sprays was doing. At two of those stops we lingered long enough that Brittney herself showed up. Pickings were a little slim at Toshco, a market that resold stuff that the owner purchased at the Costco in Juneau, because the ferry was a day behind schedule. We had better luck at the natural foods market (where David sometimes worked part-time) and at Pep’s Packing, a shop that sold large plastic packages of smoked wild salmon that cost less per pound than some of the lunch meats at Toshco and tasted better than any sashimi I could recall having eaten.
Before venturing into Glacier Bay, I attended a mandatory orientation at the Bartlett Cove ranger station. Perhaps because it was relatively early in the season, I was the only attendee and received what amounted to a private tutorial in a dark room filled with folding chairs. I watched a video that for several minutes expressed what makes Glacier Bay special: whales, sea lions, puffins, icebergs, tall mountains, solitude.
The second part of the video was devoted to bears. The theme was “what not to do” and was broken down into easily digestible chunks. I learned the signs of bear activity that I should watch for: fresh footprints, large-diameter droppings, and claw marks on trees. I learned the three primary types of bear encounters.
Passing bear: Stay out of its way and it will likely miss or ignore you.
Defensive bear: Talk calmly to the animal, get away when you can.
Curious bear: Group together and yell to intimidate the animal and prevent it from getting too close.
Above all, I was told, do not let the bear near any food, because once it gets a taste of human grub it will never go away. Even if you run away from your sandwich or bag of Funyuns screaming in terror, the bear is likely to start making Pavlovian connections between shrieking humans and easy sources of nourishment. Once a bear makes that cognitive leap, it will pester any humans it comes into contact with long after you have returned to civilization, aggressively if necessary. Therefore, any food needed to be kept in bear-proof screw-top canisters.
The video ended and the ranger handed me my official pin to signify I was ready for Glacier Bay. She asked if I had any questions.
“Will a bear bother you if you’re asleep in your tent?”
“They leave you alone as long as you don’t have any food,” she said, smiling.