5
All night long I heard the trickle of the waterfall. It was a small safe sound, not like the roar of the giant surf six months a year at home on the north shore of O‘ahu. Here the quiet was intense. Most planes flew so high that I heard no sound and could not see them, only their jet trails. Others passed, the little two- and four-seater floatplanes, the workhorse vehicles of southeastern Alaska, but their sound was low and distant. Fishing boats were frequent, but often too far away to hear.
This was Prince of Wales Island, third-largest island in the United States, surpassed only by Kodiak, farther north in Alaska, and by the Big Island of Hawai‘i.
The paddle from my campsite to the ferry dock at Hollis was easy and in sheltered water; I caught a ride across the island to the small town of Craig, 30 miles on a paved road in the first car I’d seen in three weeks. Catching a ride was easy, with a rolledup boat under one arm and four bags. At the post office, I picked up the letters from home and the resupply package that I’d sent from Hawai‘i, then went out in a steady rain to buy eggs, lemons, onions, cheese, wine, and the few other fresh groceries and equipment I needed. In the meeting room of the Haida Way Inn, I sorted the piles, packed a box of gear, charts, and maps I no longer needed, and returned to the post office to mail them home.
A favorite author had lived in Craig. Ballard Hadman had sparked my interest in Alaska back in 1954, when I read her book As the Sailor Loves the Sea. Through the years I reread it, understanding it better as I learned more – about the sea, about fishing, about Alaska, and especially about the islands and waters of southeastern Alaska. The book was set in World War II; now Mr. Yates, who owned the Craig hardware store, told me about those times. Young Robbie Yates, a world traveler himself, was a volunteer at the local library, which he opened for me so I could see the old albums of the history of Craig. No pictures of the Hadman family, but another character, Shorty, was there, and some of the other people in the book.
I thanked Robbie and went through town to the Forest Service office, where they confirmed my next cabin stop and gave me an ax to replace the one they knew was missing. Their biologist, Tom Kogut, filled in information about plants and animals I’d seen. He’d been around most of this area in an open skiff, so had some understanding of what I was doing. It was a friendly office. Paddy Murphy and Cressy Wheeler gave more information and supportive comments. I liked Craig and wondered what spending a winter in a small Alaska town would be like. A lot would depend on the cabin, the people, and the library.
I packed the gear and lugged everything down through the rusty cables and trash on shore, then pumped up the boat and tied in the bags. I shoved one bottle of wine tightly into the bow and another into the stern. They fit perfectly into the triangle where inflated sides and hull came together, and were cushioned by the air-filled compartments. It was my wine cellar, my French cave, cooled by the icy water rushing by. With careful rationing I could make a bottle of wine last a week or more. That night’s dinner was already planned, spaghetti Romano with a portion of red wine. Dinner tomorrow would be fondue with some of the white wine. Somewhere along with French classes in high school had come the concept of wine as food and part of a meal. It was also part of my epicurean spoof, and I sometimes wondered if it was the actual taste of wine I liked or if it was the long history of wine going back to the myths of Bacchus, or Dionysus, the poems of Omar Khayyåm, and the wine-and-candlelight idea of romance. There was also the visual and aural appeal, as the golden or claret-colored liquid glugged and swirled into the stemmed glass.
The seven miles to Point Amargura, on San Fernando Island, took three hours, in the best paddling conditions so far: a five-knot tailwind and easy ripple seas. Remember this, Aud, when you’re swearing at headwinds in the next weeks. Once, you had it just right.
The cabin at Amargura was an A-frame with a loft. It probably got drop-in use by kids in boats, instead of hot-rod trucks, looking for a place to party. I swept it all and scrubbed the counter and table, mended the stovepipe and fitted it back together, then made a drift-log base to lift the stove so its pipe would reach the chimney outlet in the roof. I cleaned out the hardened accumulation of ashes and made a woodpile from driftwood, using my saw and the new ax.
Giant clumps of dark green fleshy staghorn seaweed had washed up on shore. In Hawai‘i we call it wawae‘iole, rat’s foot. The scientific name is Codium, but what is the Tlingit name? I mixed it with fresh onion, soy sauce, pepper, and smoked salmon from Mrs. Yates’s kitchen, and had it as a first course for dinner, before the spaghetti. No tomato sauce on this pasta, just olive oil and garlic, butter, pepper, minced parsley, and freshly grated Romano, all glistening and steaming.
The next morning the nearest freshwater was a half-hour paddle. On my way back to the cabin a whale went by a mile away. I landed at the cabin and brought up the boat. Ten minutes later the whale arrived, only 100 feet offshore. Did she feel the rhythm of the paddle and so come closer? She waved a fin. Humpback for sure. I waved back.
“Aloha, friend. Didn’t I see you in Hawai‘i last winter?”
On the east side of the small isthmus here at the southern end of San Fernando Island, I could look back to Craig, its clear-cuts vivid on the slopes above town. On the west side I sat with dinner and looked out toward my route tomorrow. West and southwest I could see Lulu, Baker, and Saint Ignace Islands. The brown contour lines on the flat paper topo map of Baker had leaped up into craggy peaks. The bays were deeply indented, nearly touching at their heads, a contorted coastline of cliffs and coves.
The fourth of my nine hot springs might be there, or maybe not. At least it was marked on the map of Baker Island, as Dalton Hot Spring. It was not listed in my Geological Survey thermal springs report, but it had been noted in the NOAA list of June 1980.
Why was this quest for hot springs so strong that I had built my route around them? Now that I was warm and dry and settled in, there was no urgency and the mind could drift. Perhaps it started with being born an Aquarius, then continued with having baths as a child in a galvanized washtub by the woodstove in the middle of the kitchen floor of our mountain cabin, but as I grew older, standard bathtubs were never very satisfactory. What good was a tub where you couldn’t float, your knees got cold when you lay down, and you sat in your own dirty water?
Then in the 1960s I attended a job conference in Japan and was introduced to a home-style furo, a deep tub where you could float, weightless, with your knees effortlessly tucked under your chin and with hot water up to your ears. Since wood and other fuel to heat water were scarce, the Japanese had evolved a system of scrubbing themselves and rinsing clean before stepping into the tub, so that a family or community could soak one after another or together in the same hot tub. I had seen people on the street in Tokyo in December coming home from the public bath, clad only in a thin cotton kimono, steaming and beaming.
Later, back in Hawai‘i, still gentled and tender from the courtesy of the Japanese people, I took a long weekend hike on the Big Island. There the workers on the Kohala irrigation ditch had built three shelter cabins along the 40-mile trail, and each had a simple wood-fired furo. The cabins no longer had live-in crews, but after I had hiked all day in the rain with a heavy pack, gathering wood was small payment for the sheer bliss of soaking in a deep tub, miles from the nearest other person.
At my own house I had rebuilt an old front deck and left one edge unfinished. It needed a furo, but the redwood hot tubs that had evolved from wine vats up on Mountain Drive in Santa Barbara were too expensive. A 55-gallon oil drum was too narrow. I could build a wooden tub, but outside by the sea, with frequent rain, it would always be slimy or salty.
Then one day I found it: an army mess hall aluminum cooking pot. It was lying on its side, full of dirt and leaves, in an abandoned pig farm. I asked around. No one claimed it. I went back a month later. OK. Long enough. I drove my VW van as close as possible, rolled the pot to it, lifted it in, and brought it home. It had a drain and legs, so I stood it on cement blocks, extended the deck out around it, then ran a hose from the laundry tub faucet to fill it until I could install proper plumbing. It is 27 inches in diameter and three feet deep, and filling it runs my gas water heater out of hot water. Someday I’ll make a driftwood-fired heater for it.
But now I can sit on the redwood step, scrub, dip a wooden bucket to slosh and rinse with abandon, then ease into the tub, sliding down to a half sitting, half floating squat. It is impossible not to say, “Mmmaaaahhhh.” I look out at the moonlight on the sea, watch the reflection of palms in the water under my chin, and sip from a chilled glass of white wine. Sam, the cat, comes to lap water from the tub or tuck down companionably on the step.
A pool is eroded into a cliff on Moloka‘i, but it is cool, not warm, and on the Big Island I floated one evening in a warm, pale blue pool near the sea, but too many people came and went along the trail. The history for my quest was set, but now I had a new dream of a forest pool, near the sea but miles from people, lined with smooth pebbles, steaming, waiting.
I stashed most of the supplies away from the cabin and packed for a three-day expedition, planning to return here after exploring Baker Island and before heading north. Out of the cove I had a headwind, blowing from the west and wrapping around both sides of Lulu Island. I stopped at Rana Reef, but saw none of the sea otters that Stephen Hilson notes in his great book, Exploring Alaska and British Columbia. Westerlies are supposed to die down early, but a westerly on the outside of Baker, open to the whole Pacific Ocean, could produce rough seas and crashing surf.
I was three weeks into the voyage now, but it felt like more. I made it halfway through Port Real Marina passage and quit for the day, thinking about all those Spanish names. In August of 1775, the explorer Bodega y Quadra, with a crew of 43, sailed into the area on board the 36-foot schooner Sonora and took possession for Spain. It was only one of many explorations in the area by Spanish, English, Russian, and American ships. Forty-three people on a 36-foot boat! I’m only one person on nine feet.
By that night the wind had eased. I was camped, well fed, and ready for bed. I’d made a fire and sat there wondering if the organic soil burned here as it did in Hawai‘i. Later I found that it does indeed. A small gray vole worked toward me. I took a flash photo, wondering if birds, whales, mink, and mice would be the extent of my wildlife photos. Fine with me. Bears are too big and much too unpredictable. Humpback whales are gentle giants. Bears are not. It was only after 20 more years of paddling this country and 31 bears at closer than 100 yards that I came to a basic understanding of bears.
By 6:00 am I was at Pigeon Island, with rain and headwinds increasing as I paddled toward the northwest point of Baker Island. Swells were smashing on the rocks. I made a landing to check the surge, to see if I could land if need be on the outside of Baker. So far, it was still possible: wind 15 knots and choppy four-foot seas plus swells. It was four more miles to Outer Point, then three more to the ledge where I would land and go in search of Dalton Spring, or four if I paddled on into Veta Bay and walked back along the ledge.
In As the Sailor Loves the Sea, Ballard Hadman wrote:
“On we would troll off Baker Island. Next to Point Addington, Baker is my favorite. Towering contours, indented bays, lovely headlands: high, wild, uninhabited. At the base of gray stone cliffs at the head of one bay there is a mineral hot spring. It has a wooden tub sunk in it, a circumstance that intrigues me. A wooden tub sunk in a hot spring in surpassingly wild Baker Island in a bay fronting the whole western ocean. Who put it there? I should like to have a bath in it.”
I, too. Had she been writing of Dalton? It showed on the topo map as a quarter of a mile inland and not at the head of a bay. Is there another hot spring? Hadman’s description was written in 1942, and her hot spring could have ceased bubbling by now, the wooden tub long since rotted away.
I was paddling directly into the wind, an uphill fight at a three-knot rate, but making less than one knot actual forward speed: six to eight more hours paddling, if it didn’t get worse. Straight, southwest winds literally in my teeth, and rain, of course, driving into my face under the visor. Rain wasn’t the problem. Wind and seas were the problem, and they were increasing. I was paddling up the side of Everest. I spent another hour of grunting effort, watching the shore for progress, lining up a tree against a mountain peak. It stayed there, unchanging.
I can’t look at a painting of a seascape without evaluating it in terms of my kayak. Could I survive in that sea? Could I stay upright? Those foaming white crests and deep troughs delight the artist and terrify me. Would I choose to be out there? No! If I were caught out there? A hard paddle stroke might punch me through that toppling crest. The artist is elated, the paddler gut-wrenched.
I turned around, defeated, then gritted my teeth, turned back and fought it again for another half hour. Finally, defeated for good this time, I spun back again and headed for home, the cabin at Amargura. It wasn’t until I was three-quarters home that I thought of the alternative, to get into that first little hook bay after the northern point of Baker and wait it out. It was not the first time I’ve failed to look for all the alternatives, been so daunted by the moment’s events that I wasn’t thinking in all directions. I had no heart to go back and try again.
I came back to the cabin and lit the fire I’d laid yesterday. Hot tea and rolls and change out of the wet clothes. It was so good to have the cabin and the old stove. I wondered about trying again. I needed to talk to fishing boats for information and weather forecasts, but they were usually out in midchannel while I was near shore. I put off the decision. I was still moving slowly. Lack of sleep wears me down more than hours of paddling. Maybe I could leave the hot spring project for my friend Mark Rognstad from Hawai‘i, who was due to come this way in his own kayak. There were nine hot springs in my summer’s route, I had found only two out of the first four.
Another super spaghetti was served that evening, this one with a sauce of reconstituted home-dried tomato sauce, oregano, wine, and diced Romano cheese. These slurpy homemade pasta dishes are very satisfying, and I’ve never yet found one of the prefab freeze-dried packs that is as good. I saved some of the sauce for a breakfast omelet, then mixed up a chocolate-chip cake from half a box of mix. There were two foil pie pans here, one for the lid and one for the bottom of an oven. I put the pan of cake batter inside and clipped the edges together. I shoveled coals up on top of the stove and set three rocks to hold the “oven” above them, then scooped more coals onto the oven lid, adding glowing ones as they faded.
In 20 minutes the cabin was filled with the aroma of warm chocolate cake. It worked! I wouldn’t need to wait for a cabin with an oven to do baking. So far, out of six cabins, only one had had a cookstove with a real oven. Two others had old sheepherder-style stoves, two more the small, cylindrical Fire View brand, and the cabin at Helm Bay had a big Earth Stove – no oven there either.
Journal, Day 26: Made a fire and climbed back to bed in the loft hearing the comforting crackle. Hawai‘i residents don’t hear that sound, except those few with stoves and fireplaces up at the higher elevations, or those of us with a passion for an open fire even at sea level. The compressed logs supplied for the woodstoves in the National Park cabins in Haleakala on Maui neither crackle nor smell like real wood. You need to carry in a few cedar shakes or driftwood pieces from the beach, as the salt content of driftwood helps the crackle factor.
I sat on the doorstep in the brief sun with coffee and a New York Times crossword puzzle. As the song said, there was nowhere else on earth that I would rather be. Yes, there were a few moments of contentment along with the grousing about wind and rain. I figured that a ratio of one good day to five hard ones was acceptable.
I wondered about paddling to Yeats’s Lake Isle of Innisfree, in Ireland. Here, too, the water was lapping at the shore, and hummingbirds, not bees, were loud in the glade. In 1987, I would go to Ireland and paddle my new, 13-foot boat on Lake Gill and around tiny Innisfree. Islet is more accurate than isle. It’s only about one acre in size and about two-tenths of a mile from Gill’s south shore. A redheaded Irish boy, about 16, was rowing tourists around the isle in a big skiff. I loaned him my boat and he handled it as if he’d been kayaking for years. Church Isle or Cottage Isle, a mile away across the lake, were more of a size to have Yeats’s “bee-loud glade,” but Innisfree, meaning “Heather Isle,” has more of an Irish lilt. I checked the latitudes. At Amargura, I’d been north of all of Ireland, at about the same latitude as Edinburgh, as Hamlet’s castle in Denmark, as Moscow, and as Kamchatka in the northwest corner of the Pacific. In the southern hemisphere I’d have been below all of New Zealand and Australia, below the Falklands, on a latitude only with South Georgia and the southern tip of Chile, just above Cape Horn. I should be carrying an inflatable globe of the world.
Hmm, five places in the world with fjords: this British Columbia-Alaska coast, Norway, New Zealand, Greenland, and Chile. I’d hiked, not paddled, up Lyse Fjord in Norway. Only this coast and Chile’s have an inside passage. In the others, you have to go out into a rough open sea to get from one fjord to another. Chile has hot springs, too.
What would the present day here in Alaska bring? Chocolate cake and Italian omelet for breakfast. Then the walk of 50 yards of mossy trail to the west cove: more surge on the shore today and water moving up from the south, with low dark clouds over Baker Island. An exploration of the peninsula’s tip, where I found a crabapple tree among the tall spruce and hemlock, and patches of beach asparagus, Salicornia. Euell Gibbons called it glasswort in his Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop, the most useful food book for this whole coast.
Small trails through the woods were marked with abalone shells. With only 13 species of Haliotis in the world, it is an easy genus to learn. In California I had dived for three species, all larger than this small beauty, aptly named for its latitude, kamchatkensis. Did mink or otters pry them off the rocks and bring them back into the shelter of the woods to eat? Were there both sea and river otters here?
The wind still hadn’t come up strong, but 10 to 15 knots here might be 20 to 25 outside Baker. I deflated and cleaned the boat, wiping out the slime of three weeks from the hidden bilge between sides and bottom, then repumped it. All was holding well. When a friend referred to it as a “rubber ducky,” I’d bristled. Certainly the boat did look like a child’s toy, but I had voyaged close to 1,000 miles in these Sevylor Tahitis, had paddled one in 15-foot seas and 30-knot winds, and I knew what they could do. They needed a lower profile in the wind and a foot-controlled rudder, but loaded evenly through their full length, they tracked adequately. They were a better whitewater river boat than a sea kayak. Sevylor soon stopped making this tough little Sport model and made other changes, which were not acceptable, but for now my $125 boat was doing fine. Of course you can get soggily sentimental about anything that gives you comfort or efficient performance every day. I’ve been known to hug a mug.
Dinner was a rehydrated Portuguese bean soup and lightly steamed beach asparagus with fresh hollandaise. I was eating 3,000 to 4,000 calories a day and losing weight. Two reasons: cold and work. Certainly I was burning more calories to keep warm here than I did at home. Sometimes I’d go swimming here, a fast naked crawl stroke out 10 yards and back, rather in the style and screaming speed of a hydrofoil. Does a dip a day keep hypothermia away?
As for work, I figured it out with pencil and paper the first week. If my cruising pace was 20 strokes per minute, and I was moving five pounds of water per stroke, then I was pressing 6,000 pounds of water per hour, and at the end of an eight-hour day would have moved 48,000 pounds, or 24 tons. Five pounds might be a low estimate, but my shoulders were hardening and my belly flattening.
In the afternoon I took some mail out to a boat that had been trolling back and forth in front of the cabin. I paddled almost into her path, just outside the trolling lines. A pretty blond girl in boots and watch cap was rinsing a bucket. I asked if they’d had any weather reports.
“Not for the past few days.”
“Where are you headed tonight?”
“Craig.”
“Could you tell me something about the west side of Baker Island?”
“Haven’t been out there.”
There was no smile, no friendliness, no slowing down. The man at the wheel was grim-faced. I didn’t ask them to mail the letters I had on my lap in a plastic sack, but wished them well and paddled away. I suspected that fishing had been poor, that they thought I was some rich dilettante paddler off a yacht, and that I had no comprehension of their hard work. I could understand how they felt. I fished commercially back when the sardines and the tuna disappeared from California waters, and I know what a hard, nasty, and sleepless – but satisfying – life it can be. We averaged $40 a month fishing income over three years. But I’d worked many more years to save enough money to get here now, in my own boat, alone, and in my own style.
Back on the beach, and only 10 minutes later Mark Rognstad came ashore in his inflatable Semperit Dolphin, and 10 minutes after that, two men came in from the west cove, where they’d beached their open skiff. They fished and trapped out past Noyes Island, out in the elements with no warm cabin on their boat or on shore. They were friendly and knowledgeable and moved with the quiet assurance of men who live close to the earth. They said they were getting lottery land in Edna Bay to the north.
This was a sudden shift from solitude, but the two fishermen left, and over dinner Mark gave me an account of his voyage from Ketchikan, including a long portage from Twelvemile Arm to Trocadero Bay, and then the paddle here to Amargura as we’d scheduled back in Hawai‘i. As we talked, Mark’s engineering training kept him sifting through mutual problems of boat and gear to ingenious solutions. He planned to search for the hot spring the next day while I went north toward Sea Otter Sound. By six o’clock the next morning he was paddling out of the west cove. With a sleeker, tougher boat and far more muscle power, he made an average three knots to my two, and was out of sight in half an hour.
Alone again.
½ lb spaghetti or linguine or other pasta
10 cloves minced or mashed garlic
3 tablespoon olive oil
3 teaspoon minced parsley
1 cube (¼ lb) butter. (Get the best butter, preferably Anchor butter from New Zealand)
Pepper (Carry your own small pepper grinder)
Grated Romano cheese
Cook pasta in salted water, or use ½ seawater, until as done as you like it. Drain. While cooking, simmer garlic in olive oil. Do not brown. Sprinkle parsley onto drained pasta. Melt butter on top of pasta. Pour on the garlic and olive oil. Mix. Season with pepper and top with Romano. Serve with a good red wine, preferably a shiraz.
1 quart water
1 8-oz. can tomato souce
1 large onion, cubed
2 potatoes, cubed
1 carrot, cubed
1 ½ teaspoons salt
½ teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon paprika
2 15-oz. cans kidney beans
1 hot Portuguese sausage, approx. 12 oz, sliced
Prepare at home: Combine all ingredients except sausage in a pot, bring to a boil and cook until tender. Put half of soup into blender and purée. Return to pot. Dry finished soup in a food dryer until dry and crumbly. Dry slices of hot Portuguese sausage and pack separately, or take along a fresh sausage, or a 5-oz. can of ham.
In camp: Add soup mix to 3 cups water. Add ham or dried sausage. Bring to a boil and simmer 5 minutes. If using fresh sausage, slice and add after simmering.
