The Midnight Ride of Kimmy the Kid
SUNDAY, a day of rest. I find an old ten-speed bicycle—did I borrow it? Steal it? I can’t remember. I begin riding west into the park, the direction of dreams. I follow the paved road and leave behind seasonal ranger housing and park headquarters in Hines Creek drainage and climb slowly uphill toward tree line and beyond. I have a daypack with food and water, nothing else. No first-aid kit, no radio.
A cell phone is science fiction in 1981.
The country beckons me.
I’m pumping hard, as alive as I’ll ever be. I’ve made no decision to do this. I’m not sensible. I just go, storm-tossed, a spore on the wind. I have no idea how far I’ll get, or when I’ll turn around. Somewhere out there a wolf stalks a caribou, a grizzly circles a moose, a lynx tracks a snowshoe hare, a pasque flower rises through late spring snow. Somewhere out there a drama plays out, older and more elemental than anything cooked up by the Romans or the Greeks. Somewhere out there—everywhere out there—is a corrective lens.
I’m riding hard with a freewheeling ferocity, my head down, lactic acid burning, when a pickup pulls alongside and a voice says, “Where you going?”
“Huh?” I’m rasping for breath.
“Where you going?”
“West.”
“I can see that. West to where?”
“Far as I can get.”
“I can take you to Toklat.”
The Toklat River, big, braided, rambunctious, northbound off the Alaska Range. I’d never seen it. I stop and throw the bike in the bed of the truck; a little voice tells me that for every mile I ride west with this guy, I’ll have to peddle back in the predawn hours, as I’m scheduled to report for duty on my first day at 8 a.m. No problem. I’ll ride all night if necessary; bivouac in a wolf den.
I say “duty” because the National Park Service (NPS) is a paramilitary organization. We rangers don’t have a main office or departments. We have a headquarters, and divisions. We’re not the private sector or free enterprise. We’re the federal government, US Department of the Interior. We wear uniforms and shiny gold badges and read Mother Jones and The Far Side. Maintenance division employees take care of the roads and trails, buildings, and utilities. Administrators administrate. Resource managers manage the resource. Law enforcement rangers follow the Code of Federal Regulations and protect the park from terrorists, litterbugs, and other wrongdoers.
I’m an interpretive ranger, an education guy—a teacher of sorts—a seasonal naturalist in the interpretive division, here to interpret for summertime visitors the park’s natural and human histories. I carry no briefcase, Day-Timer, or gun. Should somebody make trouble, I’ll fight him with words, an adjective here, an adverb there. I might even assail him with a story. Take him down with haiku.
The pickup driver is Brad Ebel, a road grader operator based at the Toklat Work Camp, at mile 53, on the Toklat River. We shake hands and introduce ourselves. He has a firm grip, an easy smile.
“You know what they say,” he says, as if I know what they say.
“No. What do they say?”
“Happiness is headquarters in the rearview mirror.”
I’m thinking about this when he adds, “Funny name for a guy . . . Kim.”
“I’m a funny guy.” Some of the time.
The road climbs. The country opens up. The forest drops below and behind. Out ahead, tundra runs in every direction, a vast quilt of willow and dwarf birch, dry, gray branches with pale green leaves—the meager hints of spring. Stands of spruce huddle in low areas, protected from the wind, where a degree or two of added warmth spells survival. Somber clouds rake the top of Healy Ridge to the north, the Alaska Range to the south. It’s not the kind of day you see in travel brochures, courtesy of the chamber of commerce. It’s edgy, raw, the real deal.
We cross the Savage River Bridge, at mile 14, where the ninety-two-mile-long park road—the only road in the park—goes from pavement to hard gravel, and makes a fetching hemline as it skirts the lower slopes of Primrose Ridge. Brad knows it well, and speaks about the road as if it were a living thing, a lovely thing, every curve and dip, every culvert and bridge. “It was built by the Alaska Road Commission [ARC] over sixteen summers,” he says, “from 1922 to 1938. Guys graded the road with horses, tractor-crawlers and motor-graders, and made five dollars a day, and lived in canvas-walled tents with wood-burning stoves, and worked late into the fall when the temperature would drop to twenty degrees below zero. They had no scheduled days off, and they were thankful for the work.”
“During the Great Depression.”
“Yep.”
“How many guys?”
“Some summers as many as one hundred, other years only a dozen or so.” Brad adds that the original Mount McKinley National Park, established in 1917, didn’t get its first funding and first employee until 1921. The ARC spent five hundred dollars that summer doing preliminary reconnaissance. The next summer, 1922, the ARC spent two thousand dollars brushing the road route and erecting surveying tripods. “You know how many visitors the park had that summer?”
“A million?”
“Seven.”
“Seven million?”
“No. Seven. Just seven.”
TODAY it has hundreds of thousands.
The original Mount McKinley National Park was the vision of a few dedicated people who encountered resistance at every turn, and never gave up. Consider Charles Sheldon. A Yale graduate who made his fortune in the railroad industry, he retired in 1903 at age thirty-five to pursue his fascination with—and studies of—the mysterious lives of wild animals, especially wild mountain sheep. Teddy Roosevelt said of him, “Charles Sheldon is not only a first-class hunter and naturalist but passionately devoted to all that is beautiful in nature.” A member of the influential Boone and Crockett Club, Sheldon spent a month in the Denali area in the summer of 1906. Entrusted by the US Biological Survey to study and collect Dall sheep, he returned for ten months in 1907–1908 and hunkered down for the long cold winter. He rode it out and loved it, thanks in no small part to his capable twenty-nine-year-old guide, Harry Karstens, who’d come to Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush. Everything intrigued Sheldon: the silence of the snow, the voices of rivers, the family dynamics of wolves, the power and beauty of grizzly bears, the hibernations of marmots and arctic ground squirrels, the feeding and breeding strategies of ptarmigan, the migrations of golden eagles and arctic terns.
On a cold January day in 1908, Sheldon stood on a rise in the Kantishna Hills and pulled out his field glasses—more important to him than his hunting rifle—and looked around. Everything his eyes feasted on could one day be a premier national park, he told himself, the Yellowstone of Alaska, preserved and protected for one reason above all others: to celebrate restraint as an expression of our freedom, our rare ability to leave a place as we found it. Sheldon studied the ocean of land, the waves of rolling tundra, vast, intact, winter white, the blue-green earth holding its breath, so still yet dynamic, epic and epoch in its dimensions. Such an ambition. More than a dream, it was a spark of idealism. Could he do it? Could one man—with help from a few committed colleagues and friends—successfully campaign for the creation of a national park?
I’m thinking about this when Brad tells me, “Watch for bears.”
“Bears? Where?”
“Everywhere. Riding your bike on this road at night, in low light. Be careful, that’s all I’m saying.”
“I thought it stayed light all night, this far north, in summertime.”
“You thought wrong. It doesn’t get pitch dark, but it gets pretty damn dusky. We’re still a month shy of summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and we’re two hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle.”
“And bears use the road?”
“Sometimes, late at night. You don’t want to come upon them suddenly and frighten them, especially a mother with her cubs. She’ll charge you.”
I feel my voice constrict. “Right,” I say. “A charging mother bear. Not good.” But my fear makes it come out as, “Rigghh, a charring mudda beh, na goo.”
THOMAS JEFFERSON, mastermind of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, said it would take one thousand years for enterprising Americans to civilize their emerging continental nation and build cities on the Pacific as they had on the Atlantic. It took fifty. Throughout the nineteenth century, the so-called myth of superabundance—that we would never run out of fish, bison, and bears—was rapidly becoming just that: a myth. One hundred years after Jefferson, Charles Sheldon headed west, as hungry for discovery as Lewis and Clark had been. But he had another vision, and a different president. Cut from the same cloth as Teddy Roosevelt, Sheldon was a keen student of zoology and natural history, a hunter/conservationist who was already rich. Gold didn’t interest him. He arrived in Alaska when the young US territory had no roads and only eighty thousand people (fewer than twelve percent of what it has today), and found his way to the mountains.
Let us imagine him in the Kantishna Hills on that January day, the sun demure below the horizon, the air brittle, the night falling, the stars cold and watchful, beginning to take their places in the winter sky. To the south rises the icy granite massif gold miners in Fairbanks called Mount McKinley, but Sheldon called “the mountain,” or “Denali,” the Athabascan name meaning “the high one.” (Both names are used today.) Certainly a mountain like that could take care of itself, being the highest in North America. But what of the magnificent wild animals that embroidered it, the grizzly bears, caribou, wolves, moose, Dall sheep, and others that moved about with ancient mystery and grace? Market hunters were coming into the country to kill wild game to feed gold miners and railroad workers. It had to stop. Sheldon made detailed notes of everything and headed back east with one purpose: to make a national park. No easy task.
“This is fine,” I tell Brad as we cross the Teklanika River Bridge. “I’ll get out here.”
“Yep.” Nope. Is there anything I’m sure of, other than my own mortality?
“Toklat is another twenty-three miles west,” Brad says. “I can take you there.”
“This is good.”
“Okay then, have fun. Don’t kill yourself.”
I stare at him.
“I’m just saying it’s a lot of paperwork when somebody dies in a national park. That’s all. I gave you this ride. If you died, I’d be the last guy to have seen you alive, so I’d have to do all the paperwork.”
“And stay in headquarters?”
“Yep.”
“Not good?”
“No, not good.”
“Okay, I’ll stay alive.” Promises, promises. The things I do for other people.
NO ENTRY. ROAD CLOSED BEYOND THIS POINT reads a sign on a gate on the far side of Teklanika River Bridge. Brad unlocks it. I open the gate so he can go through and close it behind him—the courteous thing to do—and watch him drive away, his big truck receding down the road. I hoist my bike and walk around the gate. The river rumbles, the mountains stare. Back in the saddle, I ride through Igloo Forest. It must get cold in here, I tell myself. The dark spruce press in, trees with little to say, a place of shadows, black on gray. I hear the murmur of my tires on the road, the occasional pebble striking a spoke. I ride hard, as if trying to escape something I cannot see.
I pass over Igloo Creek Bridge and begin a gradual ascent, the road wet from a recent rain, a patina of new snow on the soft shoulders. Mud grinds through the bike chain and gears, spatters up my legs and back, onto my face, into my mouth. I spit and stop to wash down the chain. I ride on, always on. Igloo Mountain rises to starboard, Cathedral Mountain to port. The entire place feels oceanic, deep in fathoms but also time, shaped by gales and storms and the workings of millennia that render alluvial terraces and misfit streams, braided rivers and kettle ponds. The tundra, streaked with fingers of snow, awakens from the last spell of winter.
Back at headquarters, rangers told me that Dall sheep inhabited Igloo Mountain. I see none. The sky is gunmetal gray and darkening. I estimate the temperature at forty degrees Fahrenheit, ten degrees lower with the wind chill. Already muddy and wet, I pull on a wool hat, a windbreaker, a thin pair of gloves and rain pants. The only thing that keeps me warm is the furnace of my own exertion.
Over Sable Pass, the bicycle troops on. I stop to drink and eat, to absorb the presence of the absence, stone upon stone, the land working its way into me as both storytelling and translation. Back on the bike, I coast down to the East Fork of the Toklat River, passing the spur road that drops down to the historic cabin where wildlife biologist Adolph Murie did his famous predator/prey research that—from what I’m beginning to learn—changed the young science of ecology. Wolves aren’t evil, Murie concluded. They’re four-legged echoes of the wise and cunning hunters we used to be; the sharp edge of natural selection that benefit prey populations by winnowing out the old, sick, and infirm.
This was heresy back in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s—and is still today, among some.
For centuries folklore flooded us with images of the Big Bad Wolf. Then along comes a soft-spoken man, small in stature but large in commitment. Adolph Murie was the younger half brother of Olaus Murie, a wildlife biologist and artist who’d already made a name for himself. The two half brothers married half sisters and devoted much of their lives to the study and defense of wild animals, and the defense of the vast tracts of wilderness lands those animals needed to survive. They spoke for the voiceless and helped to make wilderness conservation a social justice issue on par with civil rights. Standing before the false idols of industrial progress, they asked for a new environmental ethos, a new land ethic. To this day, Adolph Murie, who spent nearly fifty years in the park, coming and going and raising his daughters on the tundra, is remembered as the conscience of Denali.
ACROSS THE EAST FORK BRIDGE, I begin the climb up Polychrome Mountain, and stop and look back. There at the bottom of the spur road, on the other side of the river, tucked into the topography is the East Fork Cabin, resolute, alone, built by the Alaska Road Commission in 1928. Barely visible in the dimming light of the deepening night, it calls to me. I could turn around, recross the bridge, ride down to the cabin and have a better look, bivouac for a few hours, pay my quiet respects to Adolph Murie, or Ade, as his friends called him. It strikes me as a shrine, that little cabin, impossibly small yet bigger than its actual size, a place I might deserve to visit someday. Not today.
I ride on. Up and up. My heart jackhammers. The terrain falls away as the road cuts deep into beds of basalt and rhyolite, extrusive igneous rocks colored buff, orange, yellow, black, and gray, signatures of a fiery, superheated past. To my right, talus slopes climb skyward, poised on the angle of repose; to my left, everything plunges down to the Plains of Murie, river bars and tundra-scapes veiled in mist far below. I stop and wipe the mud from my cheeks and catch my hand on my chest, taking my pulse. Life, death, beauty, despair, anger, sorrow, trouble, joy, grace, rocks, rivers, the mountains, the sky. Nothing matters. Everything matters.
Is it madness that brings me here? A divine hand? Confusion or clarity? Knowledge or mystery? That which I know, or wish to know? Or simply that which I imagine? As if the imagination were simple. The night overtakes me. Back on the bike, I’m pumping hard when a wildcat wind nearly knocks me over. In the distance, approaching from the west, I see headlights. Somebody is out driving the road. I stare as the truck winds its way toward me, lonely lights poised above the void, negotiating the cliff like an alien ship out of The Twilight Zone, a celestial being. An angel, come to rescue me. It draws near. I know what to do. I’ll do the sensible thing. I’ll flag it down and get a ride back to a warm bed, a hot shower, a cold beer, a good laugh with new friends. I’ll bring this crazy experiment to an end. Turn around. Go back. Be safe.
At the last minute, insanity strikes; I hide. Headlights wash over the cliff as I flatten myself against a shadowed face and pull in my bike to let the government truck go by, its diesel engine shattering the immense quiet. A minute passes, two, three, five. I stand dumbfounded as the twin red taillights recede down the road, eastbound. How quickly the night resumes, darker than before. Colder. Wetter. It begins to snow.
I shiver.
Time to pedal like hell, ride through my own discomfort and fear. If it’s this cold in May, what’s it like in January?
The road drops gently, rising and falling but mostly falling for seven miles from Polychrome Pass to the Toklat River. It’s after midnight, I’m sure. The witching hour. I can’t see a thing. The snow turns to rain. I should slow down. I should go fast and faster, as fast as I can. And turn around where? How to end this crazy ordeal? Whose idea was this? I’m a fool on the hill with a ticket to ride on the long and winding road.
Have I ever been more alive? More aware than I am right now on the rim of my own existence? The stoics were right. When unafraid to die we can truly live, though it might not be for long. Everybody dies; we just don’t want to be there when it happens.
From the Toklat River Bridge I can see dim lights to my right, downriver, a spur road leading to the Toklat Work Camp where Brad lives with other NPS employees. Kind people, no doubt. At this hour nobody will be awake. No matter. I’ll take shelter on an empty porch, in a broom closet, under a truck.
But my bike has other plans. It takes me on, past the spur road, deeper into the park. Again we climb, my bike and me. Five miles up ahead is the high point of the road, Highway Pass, at 3,980 feet elevation. I’m tired, wet, cold. I might be hypothermic. But I’m not dead. I have free will. I could dismount the bike and let it go on by itself. We talk it over, the bike and me, and stop a few miles shy of Highway Pass. The snow is deep in places, with tall cut-banks rising on both sides where the graders have plowed. Their job—Brad’s job—is to open the road as soon as possible for the tour buses and shuttle buses that will carry thousands of visitors in and out of their national park each day of summer.
I eat crackers and chocolate and stand numb-legged, half dazed from exhaustion. Up ahead, the road rises into a cold dawn that appears lighter than it did half an hour ago. Somewhere behind me, far to the northeast, a new day comes my way. Still, I face west. Bleary-eyed I see a bear come over the rise, profiled against the sky, right in the middle of the road, as if he owns it, walking my way. I step back, stumble over my bike, and fall. The bear comes nearer, moving toward me, head down, his exact size difficult to tell in the dimness of everything, above me now, coming over the rise. He looks small but big, determined in his movements. He could be a cub, followed soon by his aggressive, overprotective mother.
I gain my footing and scramble up a snowbank, my breathing hard and ragged. Heart pounding. From my low position on the road, half a minute ago, the bear appeared exaggerated. Now from an upper viewpoint, I see it for what it is: no bear at all, but an imposter, a porcupine. A ferocious, killer porcupine. Ursus porcus. Maybe sixteen inches tall, it weighs twenty-five pounds with rows of little teeth evolved to eat tree bark. It waddles by, stops to sniff my bike, and moves on, mumbling to itself.
What the hell? What am I doing? Where does it come from, this love of wild country? This affair with risk? Childhood. It comes from childhood.
SPOKANE, 1963.
Every kid should have a Wonder Dog that runs like the wind. A short little mutt blasting forth with his tongue out and ears back, his stubby legs moving so fast they’re a blur.
I’d ride my Schwinn Red Racer with everything I had. Hot on my heels would be Max, the family pooch, a terrier of some kind running with all his might. We weren’t fooling ourselves, Max and me. He was a mutt, a distant wolf. And I was a mutt too, an unremarkable kid from middle-class America, free-ranging, bike-zooming, as unmindful of my limitations as Max was of his.
Weaving past cars one summer day, we headed up Bernard Street to the end of Spokane’s South Hill, where we crossed High Drive and stopped atop the bluff. I lifted my bike over the guardrail, then little Max, and turned my back to the traffic. Before me, the world fell away in a breathtaking slope of dry summer grasses and ponderosa pine that ended far below at a cliff. And below the cliff, another couple hundred feet down, a long sandy slope ran into Hangman Creek. I studied the clean, free-flowing waters that sparkled in the sun, and looked at Max; he looked at me, vaguely aware that I’d volunteered him for this dangerous mission. What a team we made: two buddies who’d never do alone what we were about to do together.
It was the summer of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, the Beach Boys and muscle cars, Martin Luther King Jr. and “I have a dream.” The summer before John Kennedy visited Dallas, and death grew a face. It was the summer after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the great Soviet threat and the much-talked-about eyeball-to-eyeball standoff that put Khrushchev in retreat and everybody on edge. The summer before the Beatles arrived.
I straddled my bike and faced down the bluff. Behind me, clawing the pavement was a river of Detroit metal and glass—mainstream America—going places that didn’t interest me. I was a kid, after all. A nuthead goofball. Fear made a small fist in my throat as I fought it back and focused on the task at hand, something I’d thought about for months, years. How would it feel to race down the bluff and fly off the sand cliffs of Hangman Creek?
I felt the bike pulling, impatient, ready to go.
“Come home in one piece,” Mom had said that morning. It’s what she said every morning before she headed off to work. She knew me better than I knew myself.
I pushed off. In seconds my bike was a rocket. I tried both brakes. Nothing. It was all gravity and acceleration. Holy shit. Pines whipped past me. Grasses raked my ankles. A fleeting image of my own sensational death flashed before me, how my story would read: KID RIDES BIKE OFF CLIFF. In a split second I saw my funeral, everybody in black. And there was Foxy Felicity from down the street, the daughter of a retired Navy commander, her face wet with tears and regret for having never kissed me. A red rose in her hand. It was a perfect fantasy for a self-absorbed kid who like every other kid occupied the center of his own universe.
Whoosh . . . I sailed off the cliff and felt the earth fall away, my bike too, flying, falling, my heart in my throat, my skinny body twisting. Was I weightless? Everything was happening quickly yet slowly. Beside me I saw little Max, his legs pinwheeling against the blue sky, his tongue out, ears and tail high. He’d done it, the crazy mutt. He’d run down the slope and launched himself off the cliff with me. He was the coolest, stupidest dog in the world. Falling now with his cool, stupid master, twisting, spiraling, plummeting. Max and I hit the sand and tumbled down, down, down, coughing, spitting.
I stood up, laughing, a jester, a fool, a king. Max jumped into my arms and licked my face and we tumbled more. My bike was half buried in sand. The sun rode high, shining magnificently on us. I ran across the railroad tracks, stripped naked and jumped into the creek. Max joined me, splashing, frolicking. We dried ourselves on a big rock in the middle of the gentle current. I scratched his belly and he pulled back his lips in a cartoonish dog-grin. I laughed at him and he laughed at me and we laughed at ourselves. Damn, we were funny. We were hilarious. Look at us—rascals in paradise, ramblers and gamblers on the best day of summer, the best day ever. Had a freight train come by with Woody Guthrie in an open boxcar we’d have jumped aboard and gone wherever it was hoboes went. Had Huck Finn and Jim floated by on their raft, looking for America while hiding from the law, we’d have given them our last Snickers bar. Had Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart chugged by on the African Queen, the old riverboat belching black smoke, we’d have cheered them on. Had a Soviet sub slipped by, its sinister scope spying on Spokane, a city of strategic Cold War significance, we’d have stoned it and saved America and gotten medals for our bravery.
Had you asked me that day, sunstruck in the middle of Hangman Creek, what was the greatest source of my joy, I’d have said Super Max the Wonder Dog. I didn’t know then—it would take me years to understand—that it was something much bigger, much deeper.
And fears? What were my fears back in the summer of 1963? Aside from global thermonuclear war and the annihilation of all life on earth, I had none. I was fearless. I was happy.
ENOUGH OF THIS. I have responsibilities. I have interpretive ranger training to attend, fifty-some miles to the east, at park headquarters, at eight sharp. So what am I doing out here? Yes, the road less traveled makes all the difference, and in wildness is the preservation of the world. But I’m tired of wildness, tired of roads less traveled and the preservation of the world. I want a warm bed.
Back across the Toklat River Bridge, over Polychrome Pass, over the East Fork River Bridge and Sable Pass, I ride, ride, ride. Tides of weather roll over me and bring the day, a beautiful day. Pockets of blue sky open and close and open again. Shafts of sunlight play like God’s fingers on the Sistine Chapel, though out here it’s the pristine chapel, the land shaped and colored with impossible grace. I have the entire place to myself. I laugh and cry and sing and ride, head down, mouth open, eating mud. Always mud. I’m covered in mud. My bike, somebody’s bike, is covered in mud.
At Igloo Creek I stop and take shelter on the small wooden porch of Igloo Cabin, a ranger post. Too tired to shiver, I curl up and fall asleep. For three minutes? Thirty? It doesn’t matter. Once awake, I feel refreshed and ride on. Nothing’s going to stop me, except maybe a bear, a moose, a pack of wolves, a pride of lions. I can’t be late for the first morning of training in this summer of 1981, the first summer that Denali National Park and Preserve is what it is, not Mount McKinley National Park, its previous name.
Six months earlier, in December 1980, in the eleventh hour of his presidency, after losing the November election to Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter did something Reagan would never have done: he signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), establishing more than one hundred million acres of new national parks, preserves, monuments, and wildlife refuges, more than doubling the acreage in the US National Park System.
Two-million-acre Mount McKinley National Park became six-million-acre Denali National Park and Preserve, its boundaries expanded to encompass Adolph Murie’s vision of entire ecosystems, watersheds, and the home ranges of wildlife populations, specifically the summering and wintering grounds of caribou and wolves.
This is how it goes. The torch is passed from one visionary to another. Charles Sheldon had a dream. For nearly ten years he lobbied for the creation of a new national park. One week after Congress passed the bill, early in 1917, he hand-delivered it to President Wilson to be signed into law. Twenty years later, Adolph Murie had a theory: wolves were essential, even beneficial, to the park’s ecosystem. Like grizzlies, they gave it vitality. To better protect them, the park needed enlarging. Forty years later, Jimmy Carter had a final act: he signed ANILCA and created a conservation legacy on par with Teddy Roosevelt. Don’t-Tread-On-Me Alaskans hung him in effigy in the town of Eagle, on the Yukon River. They excoriated him in Seward, on Resurrection Bay. They burned a Park Service airplane in Glennallen. Carter didn’t blink. He had the long view. He saved Alaska from those who would develop it to death, as they had so many places down south, caught in their own paradox, crowing platitudes about freedom and access while building another road here, a lodge there, a gold mine, coal mine, neon sign. It all began hundreds of years ago when we Americans learned our environmental stewardship from the conquistadors.
In the final weeks of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the gig was up.
PAST TEKLANIKA, only thirty miles to go. The rain stops. The road widens. I ride uphill and down, uphill and down. Who designed this thing? Over Sanctuary River. My legs are lead. An arctic ground squirrel stands at attention as I pass. “At ease,” I tell him. A male willow ptarmigan calls from atop a spruce tree, its plumage half white, half brown. A truck comes alongside and paces me; the driver inquires with hand signals if I’d like a ride. I wave him on. Five minutes later another truck, another show of courtesy, another wave. Thanks guys, I’ll finish this myself. If I’m late for training, I’ll get a job next year at Tuzigoot National Monument, or Big Cypress National Preserve, or Delaware Water Gap—whatever that is.
At the Savage River Bridge, where the road turns from gravel to pavement. I hoist the bike, walk down to the river, and dunk it. I remove my windbreaker and rain pants, and dunk them too, washing them mud-free. My fingers ache in the cold water.
A clock in the Savage River Check Station tells me it’s seven-twenty. I’ve got forty minutes to ride twelve miles, most of it downhill on pavement. I fly. Dropping into Hines Creek, I must be going thirty. I’m invincible as shafts of sunlight chase me; the sky dances with wind and great weather. I pull into headquarters with no time to shower or eat breakfast. I enter training looking like a scarecrow.
“Whoa?” asks Chuck Lennox, my cabinmate. Next to him stands Bruce Talbot, my other cabinmate, a cup of coffee in his hand. Both wear strange, inquiring smiles.
“Where you been?” asks Bruce.
“Out,” I say. By going out we’re really going in, said John Muir. Or was it Dylan? Or Thoreau? So many philosophers. I take my seat and remember Yoda’s advice to Luke Skywalker, “Adventure, excitement, a Jedi craves not these things.”
If I’m not a Jedi, who am I?
Jill Johnson, a pretty ranger, sits next to me and slips me notepaper, a pencil, and a hot cup of cocoa. She hands me her bandana and motions with her delicate finger toward my cheek. “Mud,” she says.
I wipe it off, hand her back the bandana, and pull the cocoa to my lips. It tastes perfect.
Bill Truesdale, chief of interpretation, stands before us in his National Park Service uniform, US Department of the Interior. “Good morning, everybody,” he says. “Welcome to Denali. I think it’s safe to say that you’re all lucky to be here, and that you’re about to have the best summer of your lives.”