HERE I AM AGAIN, on the run from civilization, tundra underfoot, open sky above, Toklat River far below, silver in the sun. It’s nice to be back, to remember how to breathe, listen, live. Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of nowhere. And sometimes in the middle of nowhere you find yourself. This is one of those times.
The wind stills, and I calm myself high atop Divide Mountain. I can hear the Toklat singing its distant melody. Scanning north, I see the park road running east to west, dotted by shuttle buses bringing visitors into a national park that Stephen Mather said should be “readily accessible to all.” As first director of the National Park Service, Mather believed it was important to build a constituency for all the parks, to get people out there on “family vacations.” He aimed to build roads and make the parks a distinctive part of our national experience, an American tradition, something new back in the 1920s.
He succeeded.
Too much so, some said.
“Mather goes too far,” announced his own publicist, Robert Sterling Yard, a founding member of The Wilderness Society (along with Robert Marshall, Olaus Murie, and Aldo Leopold) who criticized an excess of road building. Yard lamented, “While we are fighting for the protection of the national park system from its enemies, we may also have to protect it from its friends.” He wanted national “primal” parks.
And so we have Denali, a national park the size of Massachusetts with only one road, some ninety miles long, most of it unpaved, designed by men who were engineers—and artists.
FOR REASONS I’m just beginning to understand, reasons I didn’t ponder until I hit my forties, I am drawn to the high latitudes, those hungry landscapes shaped by ice and cold. Yes, I’ve been to the tropics, face-to-face with howler monkeys and three-toed sloths, waxy-leafed figs and frisky epiphytes and all that hot photosynthetic plant sex going on day and night, ten million bazillion ants going about their business, moving single file to T. H. White’s dictum: “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.” I understand why the tropics attract ecologists and other defenders of biodiversity who’ve determined that nearly half of the world’s terrestrial species live on about two percent of the earth’s land area, and we’d better save it. Their goal is simple: preserve the heart of our planet’s genetic library, one hundred million years of evolution. It is hard, noble work.
Up here the land is rugged, rocky, and damn near roadless. A hundred-acre parcel of virgin Brazilian rainforest can boast more species of everything than can all of Denali National Park. But who’s counting? Denali matters. It teaches and inspires; it slows me down. It opens my lungs. I love the intimate distance, the raw existence, the unexpected avens, the furtive lynx, the stoic moose, the resilient birch, the poetry of water over stones; I love pulling my sleeping bag up to my chin and wondering: how far away is the nearest bear? The farthest star? I love the sunrises and sunsets, the only gold rush I care to be a part of. I love the survival amid hardship, the warm embrace of indifferent mountains, the simple but profound freedoms; I love the dream-tossed nights when, according to comedian George Carlin, “the wolves are silent and the moon howls.”
UNLIKE MANY memoirists these days, I cannot claim any addictions or mistreatment by my parents. Raised in rural North Dakota with farm dirt under their nails and no scars or resentments of their own, Mom and Dad imparted none on me. They didn’t shoot up heroin or rob banks or insist that I go to Harvard or Yale, or that I be a doctor or a lawyer. I didn’t shatter into a million little pieces or run with scissors. I might have run with a meat cleaver once, but just once.
Dad loved his Monday night Montgomery Ward Bowling League, his Saturday afternoon major league baseball and beer, and his daily Jim Beam on ice after six. As alcoholics went, he was a gentle man, always good to Mom and my brothers and me. He’d sit at the dining room table and smoke his pipe and devour Louis L’Amour novels like candy. Mom favored the one-thousand-page James Michener epics about faraway places. Tired after a long day, she’d read in the bathtub, and come out with the book soaking wet and twice its normal size, having fallen asleep and dropped it in the water. Dad would say, “Reading is supposed to expand your mind, Virgie, not the book.” She’d take the novel down to the furnace room to dry it out, separating the wet pages one by one so they didn’t stick or tear. Never would she buy the same paperback twice, or a new hardcover. We didn’t have the money.
Our first television was a magic box that cost exactly what we had and told us when to laugh and worry, what to think, what to buy and why. We loved it. “Stay right where you are,” it said. “We’ll be right back.” And back it came, faithful as a friend. It gave us our favorite movies, and Walter Cronkite, a real newsman, and regularly scheduled programming, and told us to see the USA in our Chevrolet.
We had an old Buick with whitewall tires and a dinosaur engine that drank gas like water. About the best we could do to see the USA was a trip west to Seattle. For a bumpkin kid from Spokane, Seattle was Paris. It had the ocean and Pike Place and the Public Market where fishmongers threw salmon across selling stalls and bantered with buyers. Best of all, Seattle had the Space Needle, Washington State’s Eiffel Tower, with a restaurant on top. I could see everything from up there—Mount Rainier, Mount Olympus, the entire Emerald City spread out below, perfect in its proportions, humming, thrumming, and growing, always growing.
En route back home, Dad sometimes got off the interstate to drive the back roads, as he put it, “to see what we might see.” I sat up front—with Max the dog—to sing with the radio and watch every curve in the road and what new places it might reveal. That’s how it was: the road, like television, revealed new worlds. It took us places. One time we followed the mighty Columbia River as it coursed its ancient way east of the Cascades, a great artery framed by bone-dry scablands and imposing black walls of basalt colonnade: so much water running through brown, thirsty country. I wondered: Where does all the water come from?
Nothing prepared me for Grand Coulee Dam, a tall, graceful, imposing concrete plug set into a bedrock gorge as if by aliens, a divine hand, an extraordinary power. Behind it was a large lake where a river used to be, Lake Roosevelt, named for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I stared. Even little Max was without words.
Dad lit his pipe and spoke solemnly about the men who built the great dam back in the 1930s, how some fell into the concrete and remained there, entombed, sacrificed to progress. He talked about turbine power and kilowatt hours, more in numbers than in words. Big numbers. No salmon swam past that dam, he said. The Bureau of Reclamation built fish ladders to assist salmon on all the other dams, but not Grand Coulee. It was so big, so tall, they didn’t bother. It was the new geography, the new beginning, the new end.
I had no reason to question it. Everything we did in America we did for good reason, to make us stronger, bigger, better. Deep in the basement of the local library, books told me stories about people who belonged to the land once, Indians and all that. But TV said that romance was just that, a romance, a silly nostalgia. The land belonged to us now, you and me and John Wayne on his big horse as Woody Guthrie sang “This land was made for you and me” and we all sang along. The land, having been made for you and me, should be harnessed and put to work. Nature wasn’t a community we belonged to. It was a commodity we owned. And like all commodities, it was here to be consumed.
I stood beside my dad a bit bewildered, a happy twelve-year-old kid who didn’t know what he didn’t know. Grand Coulee Dam didn’t charm or impress me like the Space Needle. It made me sad, and that sadness embarrassed me.
Everybody else admired Grand Coulee Dam. Why didn’t I?
BACK HOME, I pulled out a map of Washington State and found Hangman Creek where it flowed into the Spokane River, which flowed into the Columbia, which flowed into the Pacific Ocean. Not like it once did, though. What would Huck Finn say? And Lewis and Clark, who crossed the Rocky Mountains and followed the time-honored, free-flowing Columbia to the Pacific?
Progress, they’d say. There’s no stopping it.
One morning in school as I stood at attention and faced the flag and recited the “Pledge of Allegiance” with my hand over my heart, I felt my mind forced narrowly upwards. A good citizen, I was enthralled with America and American exceptionalism, the shining ideals of liberty and justice for all, the powers of creativity, innovation, and higher learning; summertime apple pies, hot dogs, and baseball, the crisp originality of rock ’n’ roll, bluegrass, and the twelve-bar blues. I was also enthralled with the girl down the street, Felicity, whose father would sit in his dark basement and insist that I sit with him while he played stirring military anthems on his scratchy old record player. And I did as he commanded because he had authority and I could stare at his daughter’s soft curls and deep brown eyes as she coyly winked and drove me crazy.
My sixth-grade teacher reminded my classmates and me (Felicity to my left, hand over her heart) that we had good reason to be proud. We were civilized Americans who lived in the greatest nation on earth, in modern homes with soft beds, electricity, ovens, radio, and television. Grand Coulee Dam gave us that comfort, that convenience. It turned night into day. It lit our future. Yes, it was an end of some things. But it was the beginning of so much more. Every dam on the Columbia River was a great engineering feat and conservation project, she said, a tribute to human ingenuity, a bold step forward that improved our daily lives. Foxy Felicity nodded her pretty head. All the kids nodded. Think about it, the teacher added. All that water that once ran to the ocean unused as a river, going to waste, now turned turbines to make the desert green with alfalfa, to make our homes glow blue with television.
Maybe it was something loose in my head. I told nobody about how weird I felt upon first seeing Grand Coulee Dam, or my adventure with Super Max the Wonder Dog, flying off the sand cliffs of Hangman Creek. Like a make-believe hero in my own secret movie, I alone carried the knowledge of my achievements as I struggled to fit in. The only thing otherworldly in my life was my imagination.
THEY CROSSED the North Atlantic and landed in New York City in early February 1964 with America still in shock less than three months after the assassination of President Kennedy. “Please join me in welcoming these fine youngsters from Liverpool,” said Ed Sullivan, the host of his own variety show. He waved his hand and the music began, “All My Loving,” “Till There Was You,” “She Loves You, yeah, yeah, yeah . . .” I sat transfixed by the mop-top hair, knife-sharp suits, black boots, and youthful, easy smiles. Mom tapped her foot. It was the first time I’d seen her come alive since Kennedy’s killing. Max cocked his head. Dad said they looked funny and didn’t sing like Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra; Mom said they didn’t sing like Roy Orbison. I thought, Nobody sings like Roy Orbison. They had their own sound, a tight, bright beat that juiced things up ten degrees into—what? I didn’t know. Did anybody? Such vitality and originality. Such compelling melodies and harmonies. Never mind the lollipop lyrics. The music seemed to render everything that came before it obsolete. It would take one night for America to know their names (and soon, their traits): John Lennon (clever), Paul McCartney (cute), George Harrison (quiet), and Ringo Starr (funny).
“How do you find America?” a reporter asked John.
“Turn left at Greenland.”
“What do you think of Beethoven?”
“He’s great, especially his poems.”
Seventy-three million Americans watched that performance and stepped from darkness into the light, a national epiphany that acknowledged music heals, it transforms. It makes us feel and think in ways we never have. It’s not a luxury; it’s a necessity, a profound way to express our humanity, the deepest part of ourselves. To some, the Beatles were a simple pop band, all sugar, no salt. But many critics quickly grasped that what ran below the playful lyrics was a musical sophistication to rival Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. Bob Dylan would observe, “They were doing things nobody else was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. . . . They had staying power. I knew they were pointed in the direction of where music had to go.”
All that winter I listened to Mom hum their songs.
When they returned to America for a concert tour the next year, Paul soloed with “Yesterday,” the song that had come to him in his sleep, and John belted out “Twist and Shout” with a voice one observer said came from “leather tonsils in a steel throat.” Later, American television aired the 1963 Royal Command Performance, attended by Queen Elizabeth II, when John invited the people in the “cheap seats” to clap their hands. “And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.”
MY DREAMS changed after that. My school essays too. A small wolf took up residence in my heart. Call it rapid cognition or the adaptive unconscious or the crazy ability to know a thing without thought or explanation. I’m not sure what it was, but something was born in me the day I heard John Lennon stand before the world and challenge a queen. I began to question things and feel more alive than I did when flying off a cliff.
I started to sing, quietly at first, then with more gusto while riding my bike or mowing the Manito Golf Course, my summer job. On perfect putting greens I’d jam my heel into the soft earth to make divots, fulfilling my apprenticeship into the School of Civil Disobedience, inspired not so much by the soft-spoken Henry David Thoreau—who went into the woods to “live deliberately” and later spent a night in jail to protest a war—as by John Lennon, the tough, cynical, crude, creative, funny, brilliant, vulnerable son of an absent sailor and a loving mother who like John was insecure and would die too young. Stepping from a hedgerow into a street, she was struck and killed by a speeding off-duty policeman who paid no fine and served no jail time.
Life presented itself then as something infinitely wondrous, beautiful and unfair. A defiant little seed took root, watered with images of insurrection. I decided it wasn’t the divots in putting greens that were wrong. It was the golf course itself, a big lawn where a forest used to be. And a dam? Could an entire dam be wrong? I listened to Bob Dylan sing about becoming a “suck-cess,” and wondered, Is he talking to me?
When my stern sixth-grade teacher told me to stop humming and start writing my assigned exercise, I wrote the music in my head. “Write an essay about one of your heroes,” she told my classmates and me. I chose Paul McCartney and John Lennon, unaware that television had clouded my ability to differentiate between a hero and a celebrity. “Your hero should be one person,” the teacher announced. “And an American.”
“Bob Dylan?” I inquired.
“A patriot,” she added. “Somebody with wisdom.”
I wrote about Pete Seeger with his banjo and guitar, out there inspiring people to sing. Felicity wrote about Jesus Christ and smiled smugly when she got an A and I got a C. Jesus of Nazareth? Wait a minute. What instrument did he play? When did he get his US citizenship?
I responded by writing more. It appealed to me, pulling a pencil across paper to give birth to words, ideas, a story, a voice, maybe even a truth, whatever a truth might be.
CLOUDS. RAIN. WIND. Weather moving in.
Time to go. I hoist my pack. It must weigh fifty pounds. Again, too much stuff.
I hike north along the spine of Divide Mountain and begin to drop down its nose, a steep descent. Ahead and directly below, veiled in wisps of cloud, is Melanie, my wife of five years. A bandana swings off her waist belt as she picks her route, measuring each step, careful not to turn an ankle and take a fall. There are no emergency rooms out here. No designated trails. No warning signs. You find a route, or make one, and go. In places the slope feels so steep that if I were to jump—or better, sail away on a bike—I’d feel as though I could fly. For an instant a shaft of light dances off the Toklat River and I’m a kid again, studying Hangman Creek before I push off with Super Max the Wonder Dog.
“Howya doin’, Sweetie?” I yell down to Melanie.
“Good.”
She’s humming, making her own music, like the river. I can’t make it out; a John Denver song maybe, or Peter, Paul and Mary. Melanie’s more of a folk gal while I’m a rock ’n’ roll guy. Friends tease me that I can’t go a day without talking about or singing the Beatles. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I tell them.
My pack digs into my back. I sit for a spell and watch Melanie descend, getting smaller in the immensity. At one point she stops and looks back, raises her arm and waves, then makes a sign with her fingers: You okay? She’s fluent in American Sign Language. I signal back: I’m okay. She smiles, turns and continues down, arms swinging, legs pumping. Stephen Mather once noted that this is a good way—not the only way, certainly—but one good way to make better citizens. Cool their fevered minds. Get them outdoors. Set them free in their national parks.
All around me is a harmony of motion and sound, the land and sky, river and clouds, songbirds and deep silence. I’m thrilled by what’s here and what’s not, the presence of absence: no phones or malls, no ten-minute parking, thirty-year mortgages, or ninety-nine-cent bargains. Nothing I see is for sale, yet it’s all mine. All I have to do is leave it as I found it, for those who will follow.
How ironic. We spend thousands of hours tidying our houses and tending our lawns while in the wilderness everything is right where it belongs: no raptor is too high or flower too low, no river is out of place or mountain ill-designed, no stone is too angular or round. Nobody complains of leaves unraked, trees unpruned, grasses uncut. Everything is in order, and not always convenient. I like that.
Nobody ever discovered himself through convenience.
Melanie recedes into the distance. She’s almost to the river, where she’ll wait for me so we can cross together, our arms interlocked and pants rolled to our thighs, our boots tied together and hanging off our backpacks as we brace against the strong current. The cold, silt-laden water will roil up to our knees, pounding us as we work our way across, one step at a time, one channel at a time.
“Are we almost there?” she’ll ask, her teeth clenched against the cold.
“Where?”
“The other side.”
“No.”
“I think we are.”
“Okay, we’re almost there.”
HIGH SCHOOL, senior year. John and Bobby Kennedy gone. Martin Luther King Jr. gone. Vietnam bombed and burning. Richard Nixon lying. Thousands of sleepless mothers crying in the middle of the night, angry and scared, one of them mine.
“I hate this war,” Mom told me. “When they come for you, I’m taking you to Canada.”
Maple leaf flag, great national anthem, hockey crazy. Pizza with bacon on it. Gordon Lightfoot and his twelve-string guitar. Joni Mitchell and her long hair. Neil Young and his long hair. I could live in Canada, I thought.
Mom already had two sons in ’Nam: Mick, an army first lieutenant in the napalmed jungle, his M-16 at his side day and night. And Bill, a navy flight navigator based in Japan, logging missions over North Vietnam, his plane designed to detect communist SAMs—surface to air missiles. His objective: get the commies to shoot at him, dodge the missile, plot its firing site, and call it into the B-52s so they could bomb it to hell.
So began Mom’s disillusionment. And mine.
Where to find escape?
IN MUSIC. The Beatles defined my youth. I loved their free spirits and daring style, their catchy melodies and clever, sometimes nonsensical lyrics, their foreignness and wild creativity, how John and Paul competed with each other but also complemented each other. Song after ingenious song born from collaboration and bold experimentation. A string octet on “Eleanor Rigby.” A French horn on “For No One.” A sitar—George’s idea—on “Norwegian Wood.” Separate call-and-answer voices, one belonging to a runaway girl, the other to her heartbroken parents, in “She’s Leaving Home.” A dozen chords in “Sexy Sadie” when most songs don’t have half that many. Alternating measures of reflection and angst in “Michelle” and “A Day in the Life.” A brooding overtone in “I Am the Walrus” while using not a single minor chord. An alter ego group, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, filling an album and reminding me—reminding us all—that we get by with a little help from our friends.
When John sang the opening line of “Girl” on Rubber Soul and asked if anybody out there would listen to his story, his pain was my pain; it was everybody’s pain.
In senior English we wrote essays on the Beatles, what they said and how they said it, the power of paradox, innuendo, and love, always love; the importance of critical thinking and reflective self-expression. Near the end of spring semester, with graduation nearly upon us, our teacher, Mrs. Jovanovich, said, “If only our political leaders were as open-minded and creative in solving world problems as these four young men are in making music, we’d save ourselves a lot of trouble.”
Creative young men. Open-mindedness.
I would never forget that.
Could creativity and open-mindedness save the world? Not a world left in tatters and table scraps after a careless, oily, money-fevered feast, but a world rich in beauty, bounty, and diversity, where we learned to live more simply so others might simply live; where we found a deep connection to nature, and sang together as if it were a moral and ethical action, no longer beguiled by illusions of dominion. Was this achievable?
Five months earlier, during the Christmas holiday, 1968, Apollo 8 had whipped around the dark side of the moon and sent back photographs of Earthrise in space, something we’d never seen before: our little blue planet afloat in infinite blackness, white clouds like ribbons around the continents, as if we lived in a gift-wrapped place, the whole thing ascending over the sterile, gray, lifeless surface of our nearest heavenly neighbor. The photos spoke volumes: Look at our beautiful home. It’s precious, priceless, the ultimate real estate deal, no interest, nothing down, a hustler’s paradise. A scientist on the radio said NASA was created to win the space race against the Soviets and was doing just that. But also—and more important—NASA was created to preserve humanity, which was “too restless and destructive to survive as a one-planet species.”
His warning: We’d better learn how to leave Earth now while it’s still inhabitable because one day, given who we are, we’ll make it otherwise. We’ll use it up. We’ll trash it.
Of course I turned a deaf ear. Why listen to NASA when I could listen to the Beatles? I was in high school, after all, a slave to my hormones, heartbroken that Foxy Felicity showed interest in every boy in Spokane except me. Her father had died from a heart attack. The terrible loss filled her eyes with tears that made her all the more beautiful. I imagined him down in his dark basement marching to cadence songs (left, right . . . left, right . . .) when he collapsed. Crazy guy. He smoked like a chimney, but nobody said it killed him. It was heresy back then to say cigarette smoking caused lung cancer and heart attacks. Better to say he marched into the afterlife, a good soldier to the end.
AS ALWAYS, I retreated into my sanctuaries of music and secret wild places. Not that I wanted somebody to eradicate death, sadness, or pain. They were here to stay, I knew. What I wanted was somebody to explain them. Some kids might hear what they want to hear from a parent or teacher. They might find comfort in their faith and church: revelations of convenience that promised eternal life, angels in the clouds, dessert before dinner. For me it was music, the earthbound magic of lyrics and melody, timbre and tone, flower and stone, river and stream, inflection and syncopation, how folk music blended into rock ’n’ roll that blended into the blues and back into folk.
I listened with my friend Kelly Bogan, who played Chopin etudes and Beethoven sonatas and showed me how it worked on the blacks and whites, the sharps and flats, minor thirds and major thirds, fourths and fifths, dominants and subdominants, sevenths and major sevenths, full octaves and ninths, a geography of music waiting to be explored, a place to improvise and create in a million clever ways. He explained how a major chord was a sunny day, a minor chord a cloudy day. How a seventh was Ray Charles; a major seventh, Stevie Wonder. He introduced me to Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, Schubert and Brahms, the great left-handed American bluesman, Art Tatum, and the ragtime king, Scott Joplin.
Like millions of other high school kids, Kelly and I faced the prospect of being lambs to the slaughter, drafted and killed in the next two years in Vietnam. If the bad guys had been Nazis marching across France and bombing London we’d have signed up at age fourteen, eager to fight like our fathers in 1942. But commies in the rice paddies of their own country? What had they done to us? What had they done to our allies, our friends? Were they the invaders, or were we?
Mom said the Pentagon generals were mighty stupid getting us into a land war in Asia and were too proud and pigheaded to get us out. They too, it seemed, were still in high school.
In the locker room, football kids a few years older than Kelly and me read Leatherneck and Soldier of Fortune and boasted about going to ’Nam to kick commie butt, and got their own butts kicked instead and came home in coffins. Once a month we students would gather in the courtyard of Ferris High School and hold hands as the principal lowered the flag and offered a prayer.
“Our Father who art in Heaven . . .”
I REMEMBER it all, the geologic epoch called high school, voices in the hall, the mischief and laughter, the music and sports, the algebra exam I barely passed thanks to the quadratic equation that made no sense back then and makes none today. I can still see the one-page career questionnaire that landed on my desk in spring semester of my senior year, how it took my stare and turned it back on me. Three columns of thirty-three professions each, ninety-nine total. All I had to do was mark the one I wanted, the title I would wear the rest of my life, once I became a grown-up, an adult, a real person. A suckcess.
How hard could it be?
“Choose carefully,” the career counselor said. “Everything is there to make you a productive citizen.” Doctor, lawyer, banker, accountant, teacher, secretary, salesman, policeman, fireman, minister, nurse, carpenter, armed services . . .
But wait. What about rock star? Could I be a Beatle? A minstrel, a hobo, a writer, a traveler, a tramp? Did Huckleberry Finn have to fill out one of these? Tom Sawyer? Mark Twain, Pete Seeger, John Steinbeck, John Lennon, John Muir? And what’s this? In the lower right-hand corner at the bottom of column three, the last profession, number ninety-nine, was marked “other.” Next to it a blank line invited a short description, a space to be filled in with—what? My imagination? An essay, a novella, a manifesto? Such temptation. What to say? Who was I to become—who were any of us to become?—on this journey where the beginning so profoundly shapes the end?
I hesitated.
What did it mean to be number ninety-nine, other? To stride into new ways of seeing and being? What did it mean to stand at the edge of the known world and be something you’ve never been?
WITH THE RIVER behind us, our legs numb with cold, we sit on rocks and massage each other’s bare feet to get the blood running. It takes a while. Melanie’s toes are kernels of ice. Mine too. Our hands, cold as they are, feel warm on each other’s feet. The rain has stopped. A steady wind blows. We roll down our pants, pull on our socks and boots, and hike hob-footed to the park road, nearly a mile away. From there it’s fifteen minutes into Toklat Work Camp, where Melanie, as the new West District supervisory naturalist in charge of Eielson Visitor Center, has a small A-frame cabin, our summer home, three hundred square feet of joy.
We make a taco dinner and join Brad and the maintenance gang at the new recreation center for a big night. Melanie and the naturalists have agreed to watch the new James Cameron film, Terminator 2, and pretend to enjoy it only if Brad and his gang will watch Beauty and the Beast and pretend to be equally charmed. Brad wants to know if he has to sing all the sappy songs. Melanie says he doesn’t.
Still, Brad falls asleep. He tells Melanie the next day that if Disney wants to keep his attention they should use more motorcycles, machine guns, and tanks. And explosions. Lots of explosions.
It worked for television the previous year when Bush the Elder sent General Norman Schwarzkopf into Kuwait to kick out Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. Hunkered inside our Healy house, hiding from the cold, we watched him do it on the steady news feed. The general could have run all the way into Baghdad, he said, moving his tanks through Iraqi sand at sixty miles per hour; he could have taken Saddam hostage, easy. Bush stopped him, though, against the protests of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, the “Crazies,” as Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security advisor, called them. Twelve years later, with Bush the Younger in the White House, the Crazies would be in charge.
The beat goes on. In every war is an element of sport, and in every sport an element of war.
UNABLE TO SLEEP, I leave Melanie warm in bed in the A-frame and walk down to the Toklat River, always there, northbound and free, timeless yet timely, never early but never late. On the slope opposite, pale in the early morning light, twenty Dall sheep ewes and lambs move like white confetti on the green tundra. Tendrils of clouds race over them, carried by a strong wind. Even at this hour they are up grazing. The highest ewe, stationary on a rocky promontory, might be on lookout duty for wolves or bears, her manner more circumspect than the others. I cannot say. Can anyone?
Such mystery and grace, the elegant beauty of the unknown.
So focused am I on the Dall sheep, I fail to see a bull caribou coming straight at me, off my right shoulder. Sitting motionless on river rocks, I hear him before I see him. Turning my head slowly is all it takes. He stops, stone still. We stare. He’s maybe thirty feet away, trying to decide if I warrant a quick getaway. And quick he is, for good reason.
An hour after birth, a caribou calf can follow its mother. In one day it can outrun a human. If still alive and in good condition after one month, it’s considered safe from wolves. In its first two weeks it will double its birth weight and be ready to swim powerful rivers. This fellow near me is a barren-ground caribou, agile, sleek, almost regal in his posture compared to the larger, stockier woodland caribou found in the boreal forests of Canada. Biologists recognize fourteen major caribou herds in Alaska. The largest, the western arctic herd, oscillates between roughly 200,000 and 500,000 animals over thirty to forty years, though the herd can boom and bust on much faster timelines.
Why caribou herds fluctuate so dramatically nobody knows. There’s no shortage of theories, ranging from food to predation to climate. The Denali herd is so small that some biologists don’t even regard it as a herd, though it offers an important baseline, being the only herd in Alaska that’s not hunted. In the 1920s and 1930s the park had around twenty thousand caribou. By the 1970s, the number had dropped to as few as one thousand. It began to increase by ten percent per year and had nearly tripled in size before a couple hard winters of heavy snowfall knocked it back.
All in all, it’s not easy being a caribou. Predation, winter, and disease sharpen their edge and make them strong. They must forever move to find adequate food. Still, in summer I’ve seen them stand under the Toklat Bridge where strong winds relieve them of bothersome mosquitoes, bot flies, and other insects. That’s probably where this guy came from.
When he walks, I can hear the castanet-like sounds of tendons rubbing over the bones in his feet. Suddenly he runs right past me, continuing north. And like a dream, he’s gone. Silence.
No traffic. No heavy machinery up and moving. Only the river, clouds, rocks, and wind; the sky blushing with the approach of another day. Dall sheep on high. Caribou on the move. Wolves and bears out of sight but never out of mind.
Two ravens wing by, calling in conversation. How much do they know that I do not? If this isn’t music, an ancient rhythm of some kind, I don’t know what is. If this isn’t number ninety-nine, “other,” I don’t know what is. If this isn’t primal and purifying, a window into our deepest selves, the best thing we got going, then please show me what is.