THE VALLEY OF TEN THOUSAND SMOKES
The Elder’s visit to Kodiak Island was bookended by two stops in Kukak Bay, a mainland spot directly across the Shelikof Strait. A team of scientists had asked to be dropped off to conduct wildlife surveys while Harriman pursued his bear. The reconnaissance mission of those who went ashore in what is now Katmai National Park is a rare part of the Harriman Expedition that was not well documented in words or photographs. Burroughs, sounding like a reporter dishing secondhand information, writes that a group of men “who wished to spend a week collecting and botanizing on the mainland” pushed off from the Elder into the darkness (which at that time of year probably meant after midnight), many miles from shore, in a small boat. The unusual circumstances of departure perhaps hint at both Edward Harriman’s haste to reach Kodiak and the scientists’ desire to go anywhere but. Burroughs tallied “five or six” men in the boat; the Smithsonian Institution collections hold birds and plant fossils gathered by at least seven individuals. “Their days spent there were in every way satisfactory,” Burroughs summarizes hastily in the Harriman Alaska Series, as if he, too, was eager to move on to topics more interesting than insects of the Eocene epoch.
Burroughs could never resist musing earnestly on the splendors of nature, however, and a few pages later in his chronicle, he doubles back briefly to Kukak Bay, unable to shake the scientific party’s beguiling account of something they saw there:
They described one view that made the listener wish he had been with them: they had climbed to the top of a long green slope back of their camp and had suddenly found themselves on the brink of an almost perpendicular mountain wall with a deep notch, through which they had looked down 2,000 feet into a valley beneath them invaded by a great glacier that swept down from the snow-white peaks beyond. The spectacle was so unexpected and so tremendous that it fairly took their breaths away.
What fascinated me about this verdant alpine dreamscape was that much of it no longer existed. Thirteen years after the indeterminate number of specialists from the Elder marveled at the scenery behind Kukak Bay, everything they’d seen was obliterated by the biggest volcanic explosion of the twentieth century.
If you split Alaska into four quadrants, the lower right quarter—which includes the Inside Passage and has Fairbanks and Kodiak Island as its rough northern and western borders—would account for at least 80 percent of the state’s population. Technically, any territory in Alaska that can be reached only by plane or boat can be considered “bush,” but the sparsely populated areas in the remaining 75 percent of the state are where the bushiest bush is. Reading descriptions in the journals of the Harriman Expedition members, one can almost sense that an invisible line is being crossed once they leave Kodiak and spot the smoking peak of Mount Iliamna. No more quaint towns or breathtaking glaciers lay ahead. The mountains set back from the coast, which reach heights of six thousand to ten thousand feet, are spectacular, but less impressive if you’ve just sailed beneath eighteen-thousand-foot Mount St. Elias. These are the volcanic peaks of the Aleutian Range, formed where the Pacific Plate subducts beneath the North American Plate, causing magma to rise toward the earth’s surface. The Aleutian Range’s growth has been stunted because its mountains occasionally blow their tops off.
The specimen collectors who rowed away from the Elder in the wee hours visited what is now Katmai National Park. In 1898, according to Katmai historian John Hussey, a geologist visiting the area had “ascended the lush green valley of the Ukak River” and recorded “earthquakes and other evidences of volcanic activity” that included hot springs, tremors, and a report from local Natives that one of the mountains sometimes smoked. On June 6, 1912, a twenty-mile-high column of smoke began rising above Mount Katmai. Two hours later came an enormous explosion, heard as far away as Juneau, 750 miles to the east. A cloud of ash billowed in the sky and, carried by the wind, began to fall like snow over hundreds of square miles. Kodiak Island was paralyzed by sixty hours of darkness and a blizzard of ashfall deep enough to collapse roofs. (Harry Dodge described the dirt in his Kodiak garden as “four inches of topsoil above ten inches of ash.”) The blasts from Katmai continued for three days. By the time the violence ended, more than three cubic miles of ash and pumice had been ejected—thirty times the volume released during the Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980. When the air cleared, several hundred feet of Mount Katmai’s summit had vanished.
The 1912 explosion coincided with a heyday of exploration funded by the National Geographic Society, which had recently sponsored Robert Peary’s race to the North Pole and was funding Hiram Bingham’s excavations at Machu Picchu. In 1916, the Society dispatched botanist Robert Griggs, who had made previous trips to the area to study its revegetation, to have a closer look at Mount Katmai’s truncated peak and the formerly lush Ukak River valley. Atop the mountain he found a deep crater, two miles wide and filled with water. Griggs was pursuing the source of a mysterious steam cloud when he climbed a hill and caught a glimpse of what had been, until four years earlier, the thickly forested valley.
The sight that flashed into view as we surmounted the hillock was one of the most amazing visions ever beheld by mortal eye. The whole valley as far as the eye could reach was full of hundreds, no thousands—literally tens of thousands—of smokes curling up from its fissured floor. . . . It was as though all the steam engines in the world, assembled together, had popped their safety valves at once and were letting off steam in concert. . . . We had accidentally discovered one of the great wonders of the world.
The vents from which the fumes escaped were fumaroles, hissing up through hundreds of feet of volcanic ash. Griggs would return three more times to explore the area, but his first impression gave this wonderland its name: the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.
Approximately one hundred years and two weeks after Griggs made his life-altering discovery, Kyle McDowell visited me at a condo I’d rented for a few nights in Anchorage. Kyle was going to guide me on a trip to Ten Thousand Smokes, the preservation of which had been the primary reason for establishing Katmai National Park. The slow-motion catastrophe of Alaska’s melting glaciers was too slow to observe except in photos; I was too timid to try to visit the scene of Lituya Bay’s seventeen-hundred-foot mega-tsunami; and the effects of the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake have faded over time. But the evidence of the biggest recorded cataclysm in America’s most natural-disaster-prone state is still very much on display.
The fumaroles had died out by the 1930s as the valley’s floor cooled, but their extinction had left behind a haunting moonscape of ash and painted rocks. There are no roads or rangers in Ten Thousand Smokes, nor any enforceable restrictions; if you want to hike up and touch the massive volcanic dome of Novarupta, site of the 1912 blast, no one is likely to be there to stop you. “There’s so much ash, it looks like the explosion happened last week,” Alaska state seismologist Mike West had told me excitedly when I asked him about Ten Thousand Smokes. “It’ll take a little bit of logistics work to get there, but if you can? Go! Absolutely.”
Logistics were Kyle’s specialty. He’d booked our flight to King Salmon and hired a bush pilot to fly us into Ten Thousand Smokes, and had asked to stop by the condo to review our itinerary and triple-check that I had all the gear we’d need for our four-day excursion. He had a crew cut, taught firearm safety, and liked to talk about “contingencies.” As we knelt on the floor going through my rain gear and examining the soles of my boots, he said, “I always like to have a preliminary agenda for the day, with A, B, and C contingencies based on what we see out there.”
Kyle collected me in his pickup truck the next morning at five sharp and we drove off to the Anchorage airport. Kyle was a relative newcomer to Alaska. He’d grown up in Michigan, spent time building houses in Arizona, and had moved his family north four years earlier looking for a sense of community that he’d never been able to find in the Lower 48. He loved the state’s ethos of pioneer self-reliance; he and his wife homeschooled their kids, and their freezer was filled with meat Kyle had hunted. At the airport, we gave our tightly packed gear one more pass—“I didn’t give you a giant summer sausage, did I? Oh, wait, there it is”—Kyle checked his .45 at the reservations desk, and we flew off to King Salmon.
Because so much of Alaska is hundreds of miles from the road system, the state has six times as many pilots per capita as the rest of the United States. Bush pilots are essential to keeping the remote parts of the state functioning. Much in the way you’d hail a taxi or call an Uber in a big city, if you need to move people or supplies into or out of the Alaska backcountry, you call up a bush pilot, fix a price, and go. Equipped with the right landing gear, bush pilots are willing to touch down on almost any flattish surface—glaciers, tundra, lakes, riverbeds, valleys coated in volcanic ash. Unpredictable weather and unconventional landing conditions require Alaska’s bush pilots to rely on instinct and experience as well as instruments. Alaska also leads the nation in plane crashes, averaging close to a hundred per year, and in per capita aviation deaths (by a wide margin). Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport was named after Alaska’s most famous politician, who died when the floatplane he was riding in collided with the side of a mountain. In 1972, a plane carrying two U.S. congressmen vanished while flying from Anchorage to Juneau; it has never been found. In Alaska, the old maxim about flight safety is simply a statement of fact: There are old pilots, and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots.
Our bush pilot, Dave, gathered us at the King Salmon airport and drove us over to his company’s hangar, which was filled with airplane parts, ramshackle furniture, and a couple of desks with computers. His flying uniform included a long-sleeved camouflage T-shirt, rubber boots, and wraparound shades. The plane was an old Cessna 206 with plywood covering the floor in the back. Dave pointed out the exit doors for use in case of emergency, the seven days’ worth of provisions in case of an emergency touchdown in a remote area and the Mossberg .540 shotgun “in case we need to walk anywhere” after an unscheduled landing. The plane was loud, and we talked through headsets. Kyle ran through the now familiar list of dos and don’ts with regard to bear encounters—do make noise, don’t run—and I have to admit I zoned out a bit, as one tends to do while hearing safety instructions prior to takeoff for the thousandth time. Kyle’s enhanced bear safety techniques left me more concerned about any animal’s potential welfare than my own anyway. “Obviously, I do have a firearm and I’ll fire a warning shot,” he said. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll use deadly force.”
The skies were clear in King Salmon, and our destination was less than fifty miles away. That told us little about what to expect on the ground, since Katmai’s weather was legendarily unpredictable. “Yesterday was sort of a mess with the wind and the rain,” Dave said. “I was flying about five hundred feet off the deck all day.” He promised to text Kyle on his satellite phone if conditions started to turn ugly. “It’d have to be pretty bad for me not to make it back out to get you guys.”
For the first part of the trip, the scenery below was the opposite of scorched earth. Enormous blue lakes met a sidewinding river that sliced through greenery as thick as anything in the Mekong Delta. This was Brooks Camp, a spot so rich in salmon that its brown bears were frequently too busy fishing or too full to pay the slightest mind to the humans who flew in to observe them. Kyle pointed out a road used once a day by a Park Service tour bus that shuttled visitors out from the lodge at Brooks Camp to an overlook at the lip of Ten Thousand Smokes—our plan B for returning to civilization if a flight out became impossible. (Kyle had packed his own reserve of extra food, so the hypothetical plan C was walking all the way back.) John Muir once wrote that “between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.” Here, we flew between two low mountains and might well have slipped through a wormhole. We entered a wide plain, a wasteland from which all signs of life had been scrubbed. The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.
Dave brought the plane down in the middle of the bleak vastness. As we stepped out, the ground underfoot felt like a graham cracker crust. We were ringed by what looked like extremely tall and steep sand dunes, decapitated halfway up by foamy cloud cover. In all directions, everything appeared charred, forty square miles of emptiness.
“Planet Katmai!” Kyle shouted. “No trails! We can go wherever we want. There’s places here that the USGS and park rangers haven’t even been.” Fewer than two hundred people had applied for backcountry permits in Ten Thousand Smokes the previous year, and that included the volcanologists. After Dave flew off, a pair of hikers appeared briefly on the distant horizon, then vanished. They were the last people we would see for three days.
“What don’t you hear?” Kyle asked. “Birds! Where else can you go in Alaska where you don’t even hear birds?” He took in the 360-degree view. “I don’t think I’ve ever been out here when it’s so calm.” Katmai is infamous for its williwaws, a type of violent windstorm that kicks up suddenly in places where the mountains meet the sea. When geologist Josiah Spurr came through the area in 1898, he reported that “gusts are so powerful that stones of considerable size are carried along by them.” Robert Griggs had doubted reports of such winds until he was scooped up by one and flown into a mudbank. Kyle pointed out some USGS cabins on top of a mountain. “The wind can get up to a hundred miles per hour down here,” he said. “We can go up there if we really need to.”
The only sound other than the wind was the low roar of the River Lethe, named by Griggs for the river of forgetfulness in Hades. Over the years, water originating as glacial runoff had carved a slot canyon through the ash and rock. The ravine was sixty feet deep, with boulders and raging whitewater—actually, sort of pinkish brown water—at the bottom. “People say, ‘We could jump over that,’” Kyle said as we peered over the side. “And we could, but we’re not going to. Because if you fall, no one’s coming after you. Five people have disappeared down there, and none were ever found.”
We walked with poles to keep our balance on the unstable ash, following the Lethe toward an enormous blue hanging glacier high on the mountainside ahead, which roughly marked our destination for the day. Kyle pointed out a mountain that had never been climbed, one of thousands of such peaks in Alaska. The next valley over was green, he said, completely regrown since the 1912 blast. “It looks like Hawaii.” On the floor of Ten Thousand Smokes, the only visible flora was small clumps of grass, maybe one per every few acres. The old forest that once grew along the Ukak River was seven hundred feet below us, buried in ash.
In some spots, the pumice appeared to have melted into stone. These were the fumaroles that had enchanted Griggs in 1916, so hot at the time that his team had cooked corn bread in them. Now they were ghosts, deep holes encircled by small piles of red, orange, and yellow rocks, like crumbled and melted crayons.
The River Lethe’s canyon leveled as we advanced, the water forking off in one direction as a swift-running blue stream, which we followed. Twice Kyle stopped to probe the depth of the water with his walking pole, edged toward the center of the stream, and retreated when he couldn’t find the bottom. When he finally located a suitable spot to cross, I rolled up my pants and followed. Not long before—hours? days?—the water had been glacial ice. Its temperature hadn’t changed much.
We stopped for a late lunch, and Kyle pulled out the summer sausage, which was the size of a tennis ball can. A crack in the clouds created a shaft of light that bounced around the valley like a spotlight. Finally the beam settled on Mount Katmai. Griggs believed that this mountain was the source of the 1912 eruption, and pointed to the missing cubic mile of rock from its summit as evidence. “There’s an eight-hundred-foot-deep lake at the top in the caldera,” Kyle said as we polished off the last few inches of the sausage. Griggs was baffled by Mount Katmai’s near-total lack of rock debris, which he hypothesized should lie sixteen feet deep for miles around. It was not until decades later that volcanologists determined why: The mountain hadn’t exploded; it had collapsed when the magma at its core was drained and ejected through a new vent located six miles away. This newborn volcano was christened Novarupta, a name that means “new eruption” in Latin. In photographs, it looked less like a stereotypical volcanic cone than the woofer in a high-end car stereo; it was low and circular, its crater plugged with an enormous black Superdome of lava rock more than two hundred feet high and a quarter mile across. Supposedly you could still find live fumaroles steaming in its fissures. I was dying to see it up close.
Our campsite was a pumice beach on a turquoise meltwater lake, tucked behind a wall of rocks and fed by a cascade that poured down from the glacier far above. It may have been the most secluded spot I’d ever seen. Aside from the vanishing hikers and some scattered animal tracks and plants, we hadn’t seen any signs of life since we arrived. Kyle was just starting to set up the stove when I noticed something crossing the far shore. A bear. Why he was wandering a foodless wasteland when, thirty miles away, his brethren at Brooks Camp were gorging themselves insensate on salmon, I don’t know. The bear turned and went over the mountain, perhaps to see what he could see. Kyle fetched his gun and holstered it.
Over dinner, we chatted a little bit about Chris McCandless, the twenty-four-year-old whose disappearance and death in the Alaskan wilderness was the basis of the book and movie Into the Wild.
Kyle had recently gone hunting with some buddies near Healy, the closest town to the spot where McCandless died. Park Service rangers in the area complain about the naïve visitors who come from around the world hoping to re-create the famous photo McCandless snapped of himself, seated and grinning outside the Magic Bus. For many, that picture encapsulated the escape-to-Alaska fantasy. Unfortunately, a lot of tourists seek to commune with their rebel hero’s unfettered spirit without taking into account the dangers of the bush. They turn their backs on Alaska. Every year, at least one ends up needing to be rescued. In 2010, a Swiss hiker drowned.
“I see stories about people who get lost—the trail ends and they’re not prepared,” Kyle said as we ate. Every few minutes, one of us walked up to the ridge to scan for the bear. “They should just turn around, but they go on. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t. I admire the spirit of a guy like McCandless, I understand the DIY idea—that’s why a lot of us come here. But there are situations where you’re not ready for the what-ifs and the unknowns in the wilderness.”*
Kyle had a low tolerance for such ambiguities, and woke up every two hours through the night to patrol the beach. I was proud to have more or less conquered my bearanoia, though the presence of a trained marksman likely contributed to my peace of mind. The morning was rainy and cold, but Kyle downed water as if a heat wave were approaching. He liked to overhydrate when water was plentiful, and I tried to match him ounce for ounce. “Always good to keep an extra liter in your belly,” he said. We each put away three liters before departing. “I got a message overnight from Dave, the pilot. The weather today is anyone’s guess, same tomorrow. Wednesday could get a little hairy. I’ve got a couple contingency plans.”
We crossed the stream again—still beer-cooler cold—and faced a decision whether to hike uphill in the direction of Mount Katmai on crumbly dirt or hard-packed snow that hadn’t melted over the summer. “The dirt’s a little soft,” Kyle said. “The snow is faster, but you can’t fall. No, really, you can not fall. Once you get going, your momentum can take you into those rocks headfirst.”
We ascended slowly and carefully toward a ceiling of angry, dark clouds. Once again the sun broke through for a few minutes, and I looked back to see our beachfront campsite far below, disappearing in an encroaching fog. The snow eventually petered out, revealing a gorge filled with ash and boulders. Near the top of our ascent, one lone purple flower whipped in the wind. A rotten-egg whiff of sulfur blew by. We were high enough to look out onto an undulating valley spread out before us like the sands of Arabia. Kyle pointed north with a walking pole, identifying the ash-coated mountains of Ten Thousand Smokes.
“From left to right, that’s Cerberus, Katmai Peak, and Trident,” he said. “Trident was the most recent eruption. That’s where the sulfur smell comes from. That black patch”—a wrinkled charcoal-colored tumor stuck on the side of the mountain—“that’s all lava.”
As we continued upward, the veneer of ash and stones began to fall away, revealing frozen chunks buried beneath. It was quickly becoming clear that we were hiking up a single massive slab of ice. “You know what this is?” Kyle asked excitedly. “It’s an ancient buried glacier. No one ever comes up this way—I’ve certainly never come up this way. We might be the first people to see this.” The glacier probably hadn’t been visible since 1912, and had reappeared only when a century of williwaws had skimmed off enough ash. Kyle pondered the possibility that we’d made a genuine discovery. “How many explorers are finding new things nowadays?” he asked, poking a pole into a frozen crevice.
“Well, Harriman already has his glacier,” I said. “Maybe we can call this McDowell Glacier in your honor until someone tells us otherwise.” Kyle liked that idea.
The wind was intensifying again, so we camped next to a stream in a boulder-filled gorge just above McDowell Glacier. In several places where we stepped, we immediately fell into sinkholes up to our knees, a possible sign of subterranean thawing. The night was quiet, but when I woke in the morning, the valley below had disappeared behind a veil of fog. Rain poured down, and the air was cold and clammy. I felt a chill coming on and passed the time trying to remember the names of Victorian maladies exacerbated by damp conditions: catarrh, croup, consumption.
After two days of camping, my tent looked as if someone had emptied an ashtray inside, and it was starting to smell like a locker room, body funk mixing with the scent of baby wipes and Purell. Kyle slept in a sort of tepee whose immaculate interior resembled a Bedouin sheikh’s lodgings. He made me a cup of coffee and some surprisingly good freeze-dried eggs while he tried to get a sense of where the weather was heading. The closest weather station was back at King Salmon, which, considering the meteorological idiosyncrasies of Ten Thousand Smokes, might as well have been in Anchorage. Kyle was forecasting the weather using methods George Vancouver would have used in 1794, monitoring the barometric pressure and checking the sky. Neither seemed promising. Kyle said we’d stay put for a while, since, if we broke the tents down in the rain, everything would get wet and stay wet until our scheduled pickup the following evening.
“I like to say there’s three types of fun,” he said as we settled in for a second cup of coffee and a second liter of water. “Type 1 fun is stuff that’s fun to do and fun to talk about later.” Hiking through the smoldering fissures of Novarupta on a clear day would be classic Type 1 fun. “Type 2 fun is stuff that’s not fun to do, but it’s fun to talk about later because you survived it.” Walking through ice-cold rivers was Type 2 fun. “Type 3 fun is stuff that’s not fun to do and not fun to talk about later.” Sleeping in a wet tent as a cold front approached was archetypal Type 3 fun.
The wind and rain slacked off a bit late morning, and we decided to take our chances descending into the badlands below to get a closer look at Novarupta before any storm came. As we rounded the base of Mount Cerberus, a tremendous gust flung ash into our faces. We took a quick stab at a shortcut up an ice field even steeper than the prior day’s—Kyle warned that we were in “a serious, I mean a serious, no-fall zone”—but after a couple of nervous minutes he turned and said, “I’m sorry, let’s backtrack, this is just too dangerous.” For the first time, Kyle seemed to be rushing, and had to pause every few minutes to allow me to catch up. We scrambled over a field of deep crevasses that unfurled ahead of us like corduroy, an activity that might have been enjoyable if we hadn’t been in a hurry, and traced the crumbly edge of Falling Mountain, named by Robert Griggs “on account of the frequent rock avalanches.” Boulders were perched at the top like bowling balls. We were the pins. “Yell ‘Rock!’ if you see a rock coming,” Kyle said.
We stopped for a break and sipped the last of the water we’d brought. “How badly do you want to see Novarupta?” Kyle asked. “You think you can climb Baked Mountain to those cabins if we have to?”
I very much did want to see Novarupta and very much did not want to climb Baked Mountain. “Why?”
“Look behind you,” Kyle said. The sky toward the Gulf of Alaska looked like it was psyching itself up for a fight.
“I guess it depends on how long until we’re in a serious situation.”
“Mark, I would say this is already a serious situation,” he said. Kyle was not a stranger to dramatic pronouncements, but a tempest was definitely brewing on the horizon, and we hadn’t seen any water sources since leaving camp. With a little prompting, Kyle conceded that the squall might have stalled temporarily. We pushed on around Falling Mountain and located a tiny pool of meltwater, which Kyle dammed with rocks to slowly fill our bottles as he sought places to shelter in place.
As Kyle monitored his waterworks, I walked up to the top of a small ridge and saw the black bulge of Novarupta. It looked close enough to hit with a rock—which, come to mention it, there seemed to be a lot more of, now that we’d gotten close to the epicenter of the 1912 blast. Kyle estimated we were twenty minutes’ walk away.
“You really want to go over there, don’t you?” Kyle asked, and already knew the answer. “All right, let me check the sat phone to see if there are any messages from Dave, and if things get hairy we can either make our way to the cabins, which should take a few hours, or hunker down somewhere.”
The sat phone took a couple of minutes to find a signal. There was a message from Dave. “Low pressure coming up east side of Aleutians,” he’d written. “Problems all around!” By the time of our scheduled pickup the next day, Katmai, Kodiak, and everywhere else on the southern coast of Alaska was likely to get slammed. A storm like that might trap us in Ten Thousand Smokes for four days. Or more.
Dave gave us a drop-dead cutoff of 9:00 P.M. to make it back to the spot where we’d landed near the River Lethe. If we blew that, our best hope was a long, steep hike up Baked Mountain in the wind and rain, after which we could look forward to several damp days in an empty one-room plywood hut. Type 3 Alaska fun in excelsis. Also, I had a boat to catch to the Aleutians; they weren’t going to hold the Tustumena for me.
“Your call, buddy,” Kyle said. “I’m still game for Novarupta if that’s what you’d like.”
“Let’s bail,” I said.
I took a last, longing look at Novarupta’s black dome and we hoisted our packs to speed-walk back to the rendezvous point. We made it in just over two hours. Kyle called Dave on the sat phone to let him know we were ahead of schedule, which was a good thing, because storm clouds were advancing quickly from the east. A fierce wind was whipping through the valley and we had to shout to hear each other. “As long as he’s here in fifteen to twenty minutes, we should make it!” Kyle yelled at seven thirty.
A few minutes after eight, when I’d just about given up hope, a glint appeared on the horizon. Five minutes later, Dave was on the ground. “Woo, that doesn’t look good,” he said, facing the direction of the storm. (It was almost dark, but he still had his shades on.) We tossed our bags into the Cessna and sped off. Dave pressed PLAY on a Third Eye Blind cassette. The first song had just finished when we broke through into sunlight, the brown ash below alchemizing into greenery. By nine we were at the King Salmon airport, warm and dry. I wanted to kiss the ground.
We did have one small problem: It was the height of the fishing season and, as might be expected in a town named after the most prized species of salmon, no hotel rooms were available. Dave offered to let us sleep on the floor of his apartment. We begged off and he suggested that if we were going to pitch tents, we might do so behind the hotel next to the airport that had closed suddenly at the start of summer—so suddenly, according to Dave, that people had been arriving with suitcases all season, unaware that their reservations would not be honored. As we waded through the uncut grass behind the main building, something about the place gave me a bad feeling. Perhaps it was the empty liquor bottles on the picnic tables or the papered-over windows of cabins whose doors appeared to have been kicked in. Kyle didn’t seem especially concerned, but then, he was packing heat. We crossed the street with our packs to Eddie’s Fireplace Inn to discuss our options.
We sat down at the bar and ordered beers. Kyle struck up a conversation with the guy next to him, who heard about our escape and nodded his head. “Alaska will kill you quick enough if you don’t pay attention,” he said.
“That’s so Alaska!” Kyle said, and bought the guy a beer. Then he bought beers for the couple at the end of the bar and bought me another, though I’d taken only two sips of my first.
I would have asked the patron on the other side of us his thoughts on the subject, but the seat was occupied by a Labrador who was drinking beer out of a highball glass. I offered to buy him another, to preempt Kyle’s generosity, but his owner said his limit was one because he had a tendency to overindulge. Kyle asked the bartender, whose name was Mike, if he knew any place we could camp out for the night.
“Just set up in the grass in back of the parking lot,” Mike said, turning to look out the window behind him. “You see that old boat? Go behind there and no one will bother you.”
I couldn’t help but notice that Kyle’s beer consumption habits mirrored his morning hydration, and in spite of my own thirst, he was putting down two pints for each of mine. He’d made friends with the cook at Eddie’s and was trying hard to cajole him into grilling a steak, but his new drinking buddy had punched out at nine and wouldn’t budge. So, we had beer for dinner. After four or five pints had flushed any lingering adrenaline out of my system, I walked a little unsteadily out to the parking lot and tried to set up my tent in the grass behind the boat, which was up on blocks and hadn’t seen the water in a long while. In my compromised state, I couldn’t remember a key step, and kept assembling and disassembling it for twenty minutes. I had curled up on the ground, using the tent as a blanket, when Kyle came out, shook his head disbelievingly at my ineptitude, and set it up for me. In the morning, I found him fast asleep under the boat.