HELLO OLD FRIEND. It’s been too long. The great mountain stands as I remember it, a mighty pyramid-shaped bastion born from the ages—magma, actually—deep in the earth’s crust. Slowly it cooled, giving elements ample time to come together to form the compounds, minerals, and crystals necessary to make granite. As such, the entire mass hardened and uplifted, higher and higher for more than fifty million years, all while being sculpted by tectonics and later shaped by ice.
As our little shuttle bus rumbles west, I strain for a good view through the dusty windows and many bobbing heads, seated in the back like a delinquent schoolboy with my fellow Alaskans Larry Bright, Stan Carrick, and Richard Steele. We haven’t even started hiking and already we’re dirty.
“Are we there yet?” Richard asks me.
“Patience, Grasshopper.”
BOUND FOR Wonder Lake, we’re little over halfway there, with thirty-some miles to go; two or three more hours of riding and looking, including a rest stop at Eielson Visitor Center, all before we reach what is perhaps the most photographed lake in Alaska. From there we’ll hike west into the Kantishna Hills and set up camp in the backcountry, due north of the giant mountain Richard calls “Big Mac,” and “Mount BeKindly.”
Because I’m something of a nature photographer, Richard calls me “Tonsil Adams,” after Ansel Adams, who came to Alaska on a Guggenheim Fellowship in the summer of 1947. Accompanied by his fourteen-year-old son, Michael, Adams shot an iconic black and white of the mountain from above Wonder Lake, decades before Photoshop and digital photography. “I was stunned by the vision of Mount McKinley . . . ,” Adams wrote, “Wonder Lake was pearlescent against the dark embracing arms of the shoreline. I made what I visualized as an inevitable image.” An image famous today, taken at 1:30 in the morning, with a large-format, field-view camera, shot from a location now called Ansel Adams Point, not far from Reflection Pond.
Richard carries a copy of my 1992 book of essays and photos, In Denali, that he says is too pretty and “puuuurrrfect,” to accurately represent the park: too many colorful, oversaturated, sharply focused images of flowers, rivers, and wild animals. Is he crazy? I tell Richard that many photos these days are doctored and embellished. Adams did some of his best work in the darkroom, dodging and burning.
Honestly, I have no idea what I’m talking about. I’ve never been in a dark room.
Richard shakes his head. Denali doesn’t work on a postcard, he says; it doesn’t fit in a photo book. It’s beautiful and immense, for sure. It’s also gritty and raw, predator and prey, eat or be eaten, die now or die later. He says he’ll publish his own book someday, Blurred Denali, with every image shot at a slow shutter speed from a moving bus to capture the real visitor experience. Rub a little mud on each photo as well to give it the seen-through-a-dirty-window look, make it puuuurrrfect for the visitor-on-the-go, here today, gone tomorrow, the tourist on tour, courtesy of corporate America and the cult of money, everybody moving too fast to learn anything of any substance. If this is Tuesday it must be Denali. Tomorrow, Fairbanks. And the next day? Classic Richard, he sings a ditty that swings from Johnny Cash into Clint Eastwood: “Talkeetna glad to meet ya’, Skagway whaddya’ say . . . I’ve been everywhere, man, Ketchikan to Garbage Can, Prudhoe Bay, hey, hey, hey . . . Oil Town makes me frown . . . Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ . . . don’t try to understand ’em, just rope, throw, and brand ’em . . . rawhide.”
If he takes a photo while he’s off the bus, Richard plans to shake the camera violently while snapping the shutter to get a point-of-view image as things might be seen by a caribou when taken down by wolves, or an arctic ground squirrel when snarfed by a grizzly. Blurred Denali will be the real deal, he says, a bestseller from Cantwell to Healy.
THREE HOURS LATER we stagger under heavy packs through ankle-twisting tussocks, northwest of Wonder Lake. The terrain we thought would be easy walking on dry tundra is not. Our boots are soaked; our legs, wobbly. We’re not even making one mile an hour.
Such is Interior Alaska, a landscape built for wings, a seemingly endless maze of tussocks, ponds, sedge flats, lakes, thickets, and bogs and other expressions of wetlands. While no picnic for summer travel, it’s ideal for nesting waterfowl. Here, where the mountains end, the land runs flat for hundreds of miles and boasts several national wildlife refuges. One, Yukon Delta NWR, at nineteen million acres, is nearly nine times larger than Yellowstone National Park.
In winter, when the ducks and geese have gone, the country “opens up,” as Alaskans say. It freezes over and makes for inviting travel by dog team and snowmachine. We hike now at its southern margin, where the Alaska Range—a province of rocky verticality—abruptly surrenders to a horizontal domain of standing water. The best we can do is aim high for dry ground atop the Kantishna Hills.
By evening we’re there, alone, with our tents pitched and socks drying and dinner hot and the great mountain bathed in pink pastels playing on the Wickersham Wall. Out comes the whiskey and jokes. The more we drink the funnier we become. By the time the bottle is empty, we’re hilarious.
Two hours later, long after all direct light has left the mountain, it continues to glow, luminous, alive, a white diamond against the indigo sky. The stars make faint appearances and dance into the night. We four friends tell stories and laugh and turn silent, mindful perhaps of something greater than ourselves: the mountain, the rivers, the little flowers all about, blue harebells, arctic bell heather, whitish gentian that have their own cosmic quality and stories to tell.
I find myself thinking about the mighty purple mountain saxifrage that grows to 7,000 feet elevation in rocky outcroppings in the Alaska Range; the highest flowering species in Alaska is also the northernmost flower in the world, found against all odds on the north coast of Greenland. And let us not forget the heliotropic arctic poppy that like a little radar dish tracks the sun throughout the day, warming itself to attract pollinating insects. Or the seeds of a ten-thousand-year-old tundra lupine found frozen in permafrost that germinated within forty-eight hours of being planted. Is this not astounding? A miracle? The greatest show on earth isn’t the circus, it’s wild nature, where every participant, large and small, deserves our deepest regard. In a time when we never have enough time, and our gadgets hoodwink us into thinking we are many places at once, it’s nice to fully inhabit one place at one moment, right here and now, off-grid and off-line, hyperconnected to the present. That’s why it’s called a “present.” That’s why we have national parks and open spaces.
Does an hour go by? Two? Do hours exist anymore?
Slowly my companions rise and trundle off to bed. Larry and Stan occupy one tent; Richard and I share another.
UP EARLY, I find Richard on the tundra, a wool hat on his disheveled head. He’s sitting cross-legged, sock-footed and bootless, like a monk, facing Mount BeKindly. A small stove purrs nearby. Water boils in a metal pot.
“Tea?” he asks.
“Sure. Thanks.”
The sun, having set in the northwest, will soon rise in the northeast, its first light anointing high peaks along the range. Richard and I talk about the big mountain, the summit fever that infects many men and women who climb it, men unlike ourselves. Richard doesn’t take risks like he used to. He’s a father now. Between him, Larry, and Stan, they have five daughters. I’m the only one who’s childless. And still, I have no desire to climb. I honestly doubt it would kill me, just as the more than one hundred people who have died up there honestly doubted it would kill them.
Jonathan Waterman, who climbed Denali for ten years as a mountaineering ranger, wrote, “I would be lying if I claimed never to have considered my own death on Denali. On every climb, climbers wonder if this is the time they’ll ‘get the chop.’”
R. Bruce Duncan wrote of Denali, “Climbers such as I are powerless before it, unable to control where it will throw down avalanches, open crevasses, spread unseen cold or buckle us to our knees in high wind and blizzards. We are completely at its mercy.”
Vern Tejas, who first successfully climbed Denali solo in winter, ascended the glaciers while pulling a long aluminum ladder that he straddled in the middle. If he fell into a hidden crevasse the ladder would theoretically land on both sides and suspend him safely above the chasm. He called the ladder “Bridget.”
Climbing Denali by the most popular route, the West Buttress (pioneered by photographer/cartographer Bradford Washburn in 1951), amounts to a long walk made relatively heavenly or hellish by the weather. Get a good stretch of windless sunshine and you’ll likely make the summit. Hit a storm and you could be pinned down for days, tent-bound at high elevation, sleeping fitfully, drinking thin soup and melting snow for water, all followed by a quick retreat back down to base camp at 7,200 feet on the Kahiltna Glacier. From there you’ll fly out as you flew in, by ski plane to the town of Talkeetna, on the Susitna River.
In 1968, forty people attempted the prized summit; ten made it. Today, more than one thousand climbers try each year, many from foreign countries. Typically forty to sixty percent are successful, if you measure success by getting on top. Lowell Thomas Jr., a high-elevation bush pilot and former lieutenant governor of Alaska, and son of the famous radio personality, dropped off and picked up hundreds of Denali climbers over the years. “I never asked them if they made it to the top,” he once told me. “I asked them if they had a good climb.”
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE rescue rangers do what they can in severe emergencies, but they don’t jeopardize themselves and don’t attend to minor injuries and such. Many climbers have a “big game” attitude and want a trophy. Fine, the rangers say. We expect you to take care of yourselves; exercise a high degree of self-sufficiency. The mountain comes first, the climbers second. We keep it clean. If not, Denali could quickly end up like too many of the world’s prized peaks, littered by all manner of abandoned gear and paraphernalia.
After one particularly deadly season, defined by a terrible weeklong storm (winds to 110 mph, 60 inches of snow at base camp), Melanie saw two climbing rangers in the park, near Eielson Visitor Center, keeping to themselves, drinking in the solace. She told me later they had grief-stricken eyes from seeing too much tragedy. A high percentage of the fatalities and required rescues belonged to Korean climbers. That November the National Park Service (NPS) sent a team of mountaineering rangers to South Korea to give programs on climbing safety and risk aversion. Since then, fatalities have been rare.
Surrounded by snow and high granite walls, with clouds racing overhead, and avalanches never far away, conditions on Denali can be freezing one moment and hot the next, baking you in a solar array with intense sunlight bouncing off everything. At 14,000 feet, the ultraviolet index is nearly three hundred percent higher than at sea level, given the thin atmosphere. You take one step upslope and gasp for air, another, and gasp, one step after another, one day after another. You get frostbite, sunburn, headaches, and perhaps pulmonary or cerebral edema—your lungs fill with fluid, or your brain swells—or none of the above. It’s a crazy, vexing game. Should you get edema, even hints of it, the only sure cure is to get down—fast. If not, you die.
Waterman wrote that Denali
. . . has caused me every conceivable exultation and anguish: I have shamelessly wept on its slopes, crapped my pants, fallen to my knees in prayer, and wished I had been anywhere but up on that cold mountain. But every time I got off, the small beauties returned: a flock of sandhill cranes in migratory formation below our plane at seventeen thousand feet, the very tip of the summit blushing in a midnight sunset, and the memory of friends laughing through cold and storm. The miseries all vanished. And now, more than any other mountain, Denali is the fulcrum upon which my life turns.
As his climbing days matured, Waterman turned to the dubious profession of writing. In his climbing memoir, In the Shadow of Denali, he lamented the end of the golden age of mountaineering on Denali, how “many modern climbers are ‘bagging the summit’—as if it is another bird to be checked off the list—oblivious to the surrounding wilderness and the passage of our predecessors.”
“THIS IS how we find ourselves,” Richard says as we drink our tea and watch sunrise define the range. “Some guys climb tall mountains. Other guys sit on the tundra and look at tall mountains.”
“Is that what we’re doing now, finding ourselves?”
Richard shrugs.
I tell him I went high into the Alaska Range a few years back. My guide, a European-born guy named Krigi, called those mountains heaven, “a place of deep peace and creation, nearer to God than you’ll ever be in any church.” Six of us landed by ski plane in the Don Sheldon Amphitheater, east of Denali base camp, and skied up the northwest arm of the Ruth Glacier past a fin-backed ridge of rock, Rooster’s Comb, and beyond to the base of Mount Huntington, a spectacular peak brought into chilling detail in David Roberts’s first (and some say his best) book, The Mountain of My Fear.
Up the glacier we traversed, probing for crevasses, traveling in two teams of three, each team tied to a 165-foot-long climbing rope. We tied prussic lines to the rope so we could self-rescue if we plunged into a crevasse. Every so often Krigi would cut loose with long sweeping telemark turns, a master of his own snowy ballet. At 10,000 feet elevation we set up camp and cut blocks of hard-packed snow to create a kitchen and latrine. Day and night, avalanches thundered off the high walls with great billowing plumes of snow, our own Yosemite Valley being sculpted in front of us.
One night in our large cooking tent, Krigi spread out a map of the six-hundred-mile-long Alaska Range and explained in his melodic voice that it’s not an extension of the Rocky Mountains and the Continental Divide. That distinction belongs to the ancient and deeply weathered Brooks Range, the northernmost mountain range in the world. The Alaska Range—higher and more youthful and tectonic—is a crescent-shaped realm riddled with faults, folds, earthquakes, rock-ribbed gorges, snowy peaks, and huge glaciers. Denali National Park embraces the highest mountains and spills north to encompass the wildlife-rich area between the Alaska Range and the Outer Range, the core of the park, from Riley Creek to Wonder Lake, that Krigi described enigmatically as “one degree north of heaven.” Meaning what? I didn’t know and still don’t. One degree latitude?
He showed pictures of some of his epic climbs all over the world. In one, he appeared so small and alone atop a corniced ridge, backdropped only by sky, that we stared like awestruck children. Finally somebody asked, “Where’d you climb from there?”
“Oh,” Krigi said, “I turned left at that cloud.”
Back to the map, I traced my finger over the northwest and southwest corners of the park, near Lake Minchumina and the Cathedral Spires, that delineated Denali National Preserve, two distinct areas established in counterpoint to the park to provide for subsistence hunting and trapping.
Many of Alaska’s national parks have attendant national preserves, established during the great lands act of 1980. The NPS says this designation “allows for uses not typical in national parks or national monuments in the continental United States. Within these preserves, sport hunting and trapping are permitted subject to state fish and game laws, seasons, and bag limits; and to federal laws and regulations. Subsistence hunting, fishing and gathering by rural Alaskans continues on many park lands here. These customary and traditional uses of wild renewable resources are for direct personal or family consumption.” This helps to keep alive the most ancient and fundamental skills of procuring one’s own food. I understand this. So does Richard. I caught my first fish at age eight and shot my first deer at age ten. I believed my Aunt Elda when she said my family was directly descended from Daniel Boone, until every other kid in grade school had the same story—or Davy Crockett, or Kit Carson. Everybody was descended from a famous pathfinder, trailblazer, Indian fighter. Such were the fables told to us by proud mothers, fathers, uncles, and aunts.
The National Park Service patrols these national preserves to make certain nobody—especially commercial trophy hunters—operates illegally inside the adjoining national park. I once flew hunting patrols in a Piper Super Cub with pilot Ray Bane, a former schoolteacher and NPS cultural resource specialist in arctic Alaska and superintendent of Katmai National Park. “We’re dropping off our Phantom Ranger,” Ray would say after buzzing a hunting camp and throttling back as he flew over a small rise to give the impression we were landing nearby. “Yessirree, the Phantom Ranger is the best ranger we got. He’s everywhere and he’s nowhere. We should give him a raise.”
Ray made a name for himself by leaning hard on lodge owners and other in-park capitalists who rationalized everything to their own financial benefit, and for telling author Joe McGinniss that while summer is nice, “All this is a lie. A beautiful lie. Winter is the truth about Alaska.”
Years later, Ray retired to Hawaii. He liked to windsurf.
“AND KRIGI?” Richard asks me.
“He disappeared in the Himalaya.”
“Really?”
“He turned left at the cloud . . . I never knew his last name.”
“Maybe he didn’t have one.”
“Maybe he didn’t need one.”
“Like Bono and Sting.”
“More like Rumi.” The Persian mystic from eight hundred years ago.
We share a small laugh, Richard and me, but inside I feel something break.
My heart.
YES, we used to laugh hard and take crazy risks and consider ourselves brilliant, charming, invincible, even handsome on some days, never mind what the women said; we’d show them. Huddled in a wet tent in Glacier Bay as new rangers in Alaska (two years before I arrived in Denali), Richard and I were Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the dreamy knight and his peasant companion out tilting at windmills and wrestling bears and sharing passages from Charles Bukowski: “We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.”
That was before we’d lived in Alaska for twenty-five years, and had friends die; friends killed by bears and big seas, in small boats and planes, swallowed by bad weather. Friends who turned left at the cloud; who were just as funny and alive as we’d been back then and paid dearly for a single mistake, a wrong choice.
We thought a lot about bears back then, in Glacier Bay, counting coup on an animal that could kill and eat us, because counting coup on anything less wasn’t counting coup; it was just counting. Richard would leave the tent at absurd times, in wind and cold rain, and say, “I won’t be long,” and be gone either too long or not long enough, I couldn’t decide, and finally return with big news, his wool hat askew on his muddy head, pulled down to his sparkling eyes. His thick blond mustache filled with droplets of rain; his face radiant, teeth shining in a scurrilous grin. The Mad Hatter. I’d tell him to shake off before entering the tent . . . too late, as he’d throw himself through the door and land inside, sopping wet.
“I saw a bear,” he’d say excitedly.
“You did? Where?”
“Out there.”
“Out there where?”
“Out there everywhere. They’re everywhere out there. All over the damn place. I have to tell you.”
“Tell me.”
“They aren’t like those Jellystone bears you see on TV, the ones that eat tourists and Twinkies and picnic baskets from the backseat of a Plymouth or a Ford, or garbage from the local dump. These guys are big coastal brownies that walk the shore and turn over rocks.”
“Turn over rocks? Why turn over rocks?”
“To eat stuff.”
“Alaska coastal brownies eat salmon.”
“They eat other stuff, too.”
“Stuff under rocks?”
“Small fish maybe, and barnacles.”
“Barnacles? I don’t think so.”
“No, it’s barnacles. They’re eating barnacles.”
“What kind of a bear eats a barnacle?”
“A hungry bear.”
“I’ve been hungry before and I’ve never eaten a barnacle.”
“You’ve never been a bear.”
IN DENALI, we face another bear: the grizzly.
When found along the coast, Ursus arctos is a coastal brown bear, what some Alaskans call a “brownie.” When found inland, in Denali, far from the ocean, the same species is called a “grizzly.” Brownies are often larger due to a higher protein diet, mostly from salmon. In the heart of Denali National Park, grizzlies tend to have striking blond coats set off handsomely by dark ears and legs, and are called “Toklat grizzlies.” These are the bears Richard, Larry, Stan, and I want to see, not too close, not too far. We’ve already seen a few from the bus, at a distance, on the journey to Wonder Lake. But we’d like to see more, maybe have one or two give us a thrill, walk through our camp and stay awhile, tell a story.
The Kantishna Hills is not ideal bear habitat, but it’s the best we can do. The park is partitioned into eighty-seven backcountry units (the most popular forty or so abutting the road), with many accommodating a limited number of backpackers per night, all to avoid crowding, to give each camper a sense of being alone. Unable to get a unit in the park’s more popular hiking areas—and prime bear habitat—my friends and I have settled here, in the hinterlands. Our food is packed in smooth-sided, black plastic bear-resistant canisters, designed, as the name implies, to thwart bears, despite their long teeth and claws. We clever humans can open them easily with a coin.
“Do bears carry nickels?” Richard asks.
“Nope.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
LARRY AND STAN take off hiking. Richard and I stay in camp to guard the tents and chocolate, and to eat Top Ramen while sitting on the tundra watching the clouds and mountains reshape each other. Sparrows chatter up the day. I see a noodle disappear into Richard’s mouth. “If Top Ramen tastes like this,” I say, “what do you suppose Bottom Ramen tastes like?”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Suppose there was.”
“It’d taste bad.”
“Yeah.”
“Better than barnacles, though.”
“What kind of bear eats barnacles?”
“What kind of man eats Top Ramen?”
“You think it’s going to rain?”
“Eventually, yeah.”
“Snow?”
“Eventually.”
“I gotta’ tell you something.”
“Tell me.”
“I could get used to this.”
“Top Ramen?”
“No, the birds, the tundra, the rivers, mountains and glaciers, the beauty and wildness and immensity, the bears and wolves, the way everything jives with everything else and resets our clocks back to the way the world used to be. You ever been more alive than you are right now?”
“No. Well . . . maybe once, in Paris, with a French girl.”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I.”
“You ever think we got it all backwards?”
“Got what backwards?”
“Progress. Happiness. Fulfillment. Where they come from. Little things like that.”
“You think too much.”
“I was just thinking that.”
“Answer me this. How long could a guy survive out here without all this plastic-wrapped processed food and fancy equipment?”
“You mean as a hunter-gatherer Koyukon dude from long ago?”
“Spears or rifles?”
“One spear.”
“Sharp or dull?”
“Sharp spear, dull mind.”
“Not long. Better to have a dull spear and a sharp mind. The first thing you’d do is sharpen your spear.”
“Oh, yeah . . . right.”
“Look at our lives,” Richard says with that same grin, “our lives are hell.” Which means we are two lucky guys out on the tundra. He enjoys saying the opposite of what he means. Better to be here than stuck in city traffic, rats in cubicles and cars, analyzing synergies, synergizing analogies, anesthetized by indoor living and push-button friendships. Such a price we pay in the pressure cooker we call the path to success, everybody trying to be somebody. Road rage does not make kind men of mankind. And what is mankind? Break the word down: mank and ind. It makes no sense. But these are trivial matters. What matters is food.
“Listen to this.” I read the ingredients on a drink packet: “malic acid, tricalcium phosphate, maltodextrin, sodium citrate, monopotassium phosphate, calcium silicate, yellow five, monoglutanamalawhatever?”
“If you can’t read it,” Richard says, “don’t drink it.”
We drink it. It’s hot. It’s tasty.
THAT NIGHT we four talk and laugh and wear the friendship of each other like comfortable old clothes, with everything made better in the fresh cool air. We receive no visitors. Of the three hundred or so grizzly bears that live in the central core of Denali National Park, not one drops by. That’s okay. Bear or no bear, it’s not the bear itself but the possibility of seeing one that makes us see everything else in greater detail.
Richard, Larry, and I know each other from our ranger days in Glacier Bay. Stan and I grew up together in Spokane, rode our bicycles like Batman and Robin, and traded baseball cards and Beatles trivia. It nurtured us well, that lovely, inland city that was something of a younger, less worldly sister to its older sibling, Seattle. Whereas Seattle had Jimi Hendrix and “Purple Haze,” Spokane had Bing Crosby and “White Christmas.” Did we care? No. We’d ride our bikes everywhere unafraid, partake in mischief but never crime, and come home happy and exhausted.
We loved those carefree days being Lewis and Clark to discover America all over again. Any place without rows of homes and commercial development was a new frontier for collecting butterflies and bugs. No vacant lot escaped us; each was rich with a million little things other people might find useless but we knew as treasures. He among us who discovered a kestrel feather or a grasshopper longer than his thumb was king for a day.
“Where’ve you been?” Mom would ask Max and me as evening fell and we arrived home famished, me on my Red Schwinn, Max on his tired paws.
“Just around,” I’d say.
Mom would smile as if we reminded her of her own unbridled youth in North Dakota where kids played in barns and hay wagons and everything ran to the horizon and you could walk forever toward it and never get there and not really care, where nights were as quiet as the outer rim of the universe. Was it still that way? Must everything change?
STAN TELLS ME that Spokane developers finally got their way and built a bunch of homes on the bluff, above Hangman Creek, by terracing one above another in the soft sand. Insane. And it’s not called Hangman Creek anymore. It’s Latah Creek, a more appealing name to the chamber of commerce.
We reminisce about our high school buddy, Tim Carlberg, soused on beer on New Year’s Eve 1969 when a bunch of us gathered in Steve Dunlap’s basement to listen to Casey Kasem’s countdown of the top one hundred songs of the 1960s. We sang along and waited all night for the number one song. Tim was so excited to hear “Hey Jude” that the minute Paul McCartney’s voice lit up the room, Tim jumped, hit his head on a rafter, knocked himself out, and didn’t come to until the end of the song.
All during our senior year, Tim would play “Hey Jude” at full volume as he drove around the South Hill in his dad’s pink Cadillac, elbow folded out the open window, the Cadillac careening down residential streets. On garbage day when bright new plastic cans lined the streets like Christmas ornaments, Tim would wait until after the garbage truck had made its run, then drive with two wheels on the sidewalk to hit one empty can after another, sending them bouncing across people’s lawns and into the street. Some were so light they flew up and over the Caddie.
Then one day he hit Big Mama, a beast filled with rotten fruit that the garbage truck had missed. It dented the bumper and lifted ponderously over the hood to spill its entire guts onto the windshield, banana peels on the grill, soup cans striking the side-view mirrors. Slime everywhere. “Shit,” Tim yelled. We laughed so hard our spleens hurt, and sang “Hey Jude” like maniacs. And still none of us could hit the high notes like Paul, lifting the coda into a stunning finale that climbed a full octave. We marveled at how a seven and a half minute song could seem too short; how the end should have imparted feelings of loss yet did the opposite. Back home, we’d flip “Hey Jude” over to the B side and listen to “Revolution,” the guitars screaming the opening measures as John put gravel in his voice and said we all wanted to change the world.
Yes, but how? As author/musician Jonathan Gould would one day observe, “‘Hey Jude’ asks us to open our hearts. ‘Revolution’ asks us to free our minds.”
It was a rich and terrifying time to be seventeen, defiant with war, music, and a pink Cadillac that slayed plastic garbage cans.
“YOU GUYS are still in high school,” Larry says to Stan and me.
“Everybody is still in high school.”
“Some more than others.”
“The Beatles sang about changing the world and ended up arguing with each other and living in mansions.”
“Pete Seeger doesn’t live in a mansion. He lives in a cabin above the Hudson River that he built himself with hand tools.”
“Pete Seeger isn’t a Beatle.”
“A lot of people aren’t Beatles.”
“Enough with the Beatles.”
“And now George Harrison is dead,” I say softly, “from lung cancer. He was only fifty-eight.”
“John Lennon died at forty.”
“People don’t die anymore, they pass away.”
“And the World Trade Center Towers are down, and we’re at war. Again.”
Nobody responds.
We watch clouds spiral off Denali and layer themselves below, how everything around us appears as a refrain, a break from the crowded, modern world. A chance to get back.
And what is the purpose of the mighty mountain? To collect the tender snowflake.
And the purpose of the snowflake? To build a glacier.
And the purpose of the glacier? To carve the mountain and melt into a river that rounds the stone that sharpens the mind of the hand that holds it.
Mountains, like revolutions and freshly baked bread and the best music, rise up from the bottom.
All things must pass, said George. All things must fade away. Nothing lasts forever. Everything ends.
“John had his bitter wit,” wrote Richard Lacayo in Time magazine. “Ringo Starr had his affability. Paul McCartney his winking charm. What Harrison possessed was something more unexpected in a rock star: the air of a man in search of mature understandings. He may have been the youngest Beatle, but from early on he struggled toward the melancholy wisdom of later life. . . . We listen to [All Things Must Pass] differently now, cherishing it as a warning against old complacencies and a promise that the darkness of this moment too shall pass.”
George was the first Beatle to say “no more live concerts,” no more madness, with thousands of screaming fans throwing jelly babies (similar to jelly beans) that bounced off their faces and guitars as they tried to sing (but couldn’t hear themselves above the racket). How ironic, he noted, after all their hard work, to end up like “performing fleas.” He took his bandmates to India to search for other states of mind, to slow down and listen. We’re not human doings, after all; we’re human beings.
After the breakup, George fronted the 1971 “Concert for Bangladesh” to pioneer rock philanthropy, setting the model for other celebrity musicians for decades. Most remarkable, George showed no animosity—and offered best wishes—when his former wife Pattie Boyd married his good friend Eric Clapton.
People said he excelled at forgiveness; he was at peace, unafraid to die. His wife Olivia said that when it came his time, and he let go, the entire room filled with light.
ALL THOSE YEARS AGO, sitting on that rock in the middle of Hangman Creek with Super Max the Wonder Dog, sun-splashed after flying off the sand cliffs above, I thought it was my dog that gave me my greatest joy. It was not, though he came close, being one cool mutt. I know now, among friends in Denali, embraced by wild country, that love and companionship bring me my greatest joy, while open space and music make anything seem possible.
A national park this big and wild helps me to acknowledge that in the midst of this little global experiment called civilization, we still have the wisdom to restrain ourselves, to preserve things as we inherited them, to leave the apple unpicked. We can make room for others, discover our highest ideals, give the black man his freedom, the woman her vote, the gay couple a license to marry. Of course, one could go to prison for holding such things dear. Many have. “It always seems impossible until it is done,” wrote Nelson Mandela from his South Africa cell. Money subverts democracy until the big guy builds his glass palace and the little guy throws a rock.
Or sings a song.
You can’t buy happiness. But you can beat a drum. You can buy a guitar.
Kentucky farmer, essayist, novelist, and poet Wendell Berry observes that there are no sacred and unsacred places, only sacred and desecrated places.
Has Hangman Creek been desecrated? I leave that for others to answer.
It isn’t the boy with his bicycle and his beloved dog who turns the meadow into a mall. It isn’t the boy who closes the frontier. It’s who he becomes—who he chooses to become. We all grow up to taste the bitter fruits of change. Everything ends, I know. Even the Beatles. I’ll get over it one day. Maybe.
But for now, for this simple, profound moment, sitting on the tundra with good friends, embraced by the landscape of Denali—by institutions, values, and laws designed to honor and protect it—I feel something wonderful swell inside, opening to the future. Something heavenly, sacred and free, with room to run to every horizon.
My imagination.