The River Has Been Here for Ten Thousand Years
I AWAKEN, and for an instant, socked deep in my sleeping bag, I have no idea where I am. Then it comes to me . . . and I smile.
Melanie sits up and zips open the tent.
“Kimmy, Kimmy, Kimmy,” she says, “it’s here. Look. It’s out.”
I rise onto my elbow and there it is, blushed pink above the clouds, floating, as if it arrived only minutes ago, late for its own show. The summit of Denali, eighteen thousand feet above our campsite, the highest mountain in North America.
I pull out my journal and write . . . nothing.
“There it is,” Melanie says again, trying to convince herself of its improbable size and beauty and height. Always higher than expected. Right there. Right here.
All morning we stand outside our tent and sip tea and watch the great mountain undress, cloud by cloud, playful one moment, shy the next. I shiver against the September chill. Camping is not as easy at age sixty as it was at age six, back in Spokane. But I’m not complaining. It’s good to be here; it’s great to be here.
Melanie and I have a site at Wonder Lake Campground, in the middle of Denali National Park, near the end of the park road. Other campers stand in admiration, their tents sprinkled across the autumn-burnished tundra. They speak in English, German, French, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese; their voices animated, sweetened with laughter, old people and young, grateful in this place we call Nature. Not a bad deal, this Denali. Wild country in every direction, a university of the far north, a holy place, of sorts, a cathedral without walls, made of the earth itself, no improvements needed. Sky blue and black; spokes of silver light. Who needs stained glass when you have a clearing storm? Who needs flying buttresses when you have sandhill cranes?
After a week of hard rain, this is our reward.
I hear a guitar, somebody fingerpicking. A Beatles tune? Bob Dylan? Fleetwood Mac? I can’t tell. What I can tell is this: the guitar fits. The notes float like leaves on water, as if Denali National Park were a work in progress, an unfinished symphony waiting for our most delicate gestures of accompaniment.
Later, when sandhill cranes fly overhead once more, fluting their ancient music, the guitar stops. Everybody stops. And once the cranes are gone, the guitar resumes, softly. This time I recognize it. A John Lennon song: “Across the Universe.”
YEARS AGO in a cowboy cafe in Moab, Utah, I met a nine-fingered guitarist who poured Tabasco on his scrambled eggs and told me matter-of-factly that Utah was nice, Montana too. And of course, Colorado. But any serious student of spirituality and the American landscape must one day address his relationship with Alaska, and once in Alaska, he must confront Denali, the heart of the state, the state of the heart.
Spirituality and landscape, I thought. What kind of double major is that?
By Denali he meant both the mountain and the national park. Each complements the other. One is the highest mountain in North America; more massif than solitary peak, a granitic seductress white with snow and ice, so high and imposing that it veils itself in weather of its own making, and by slow degrees or sudden boldness, it appears. And when it does, people fall silent, lost in deep regard.
The other Denali is a six-million-acre national park and preserve, the world’s most accessible subarctic sanctuary, nearly three times the size of Yellowstone, more than twice as close to the North Pole as it is to the Equator, a vast ice age stage of glaciers, rivers, tundra, and taiga. From its mountain centerpiece the park runs in every direction as an ocean of land, storm-tossed yet still, silent yet alive. It is fetching in all seasons, in every dress, where winter sets down cold as iron, spring is a brittle wind, summer a short, exuberant breath, and autumn a splash of crimson and gold.
Add to that the wildlife. Gyrfalcons and grizzly bears, Lapland longspurs and lynx. Marmots, merlins, and moose. Great braided rivers, blizzards of blueberries, and constellations of wildflowers, Dall sheep and wolves, things near and far, seen and unseen, as if we had witnessed—or dreamed of witnessing—the making of something wondrous, wild, and profound, a reinvention of the beginning, and ourselves in that beginning.
Nine Fingers was right. I see that now as I consider the chiseled mountains and rounded hills, the tendrils of willow among dwarf birch, the glacial-fed rivers shining in the sun, the clouds dashing about the ever-changing sky, the trees solemn and serene, keeping their opinions to themselves yet offering wise counsel whenever we listen.
Denali is what America was; it’s the old and new, the real and ideal, the wild earth working itself into us on days stormy and calm, brutal and beautiful, unforgiving and blessed. It’s where we came from, long before television and designer coffee, even agriculture itself. Before we lost our way and granted ourselves dominion over all living things, before our modern, paradoxical definitions of progress and prosperity, and too much stuff; it’s the lean, mean, primal place buried in our bones no matter how much we might deny it, no matter how fancy our homes, how busy our routines, how cherished our myths. Denali resides in each of us as the deep quiet, the profound moment, the essence of discovery. It offers a chance to find our proper size in this world.
Anything can happen. During a 2005 field trip in the park, a geology professor rested his hand on an outcropping of the Cantwell Formation along Igloo Creek and said this kind of Cretaceous sedimentary rock has all the characteristics to preserve dinosaur tracks. Be on alert. A student pointed beyond his gesturing hand and said, “Like this one?” And there was the track of a three-toed meat-eater called a theropod, a small cousin of Tyrannosaurus Rex, roughly seventy million years old, the first evidence of dinosaurs found in Denali and Interior Alaska.
OTHER IMAGES don’t come so easily.
I know a painter from Fairbanks, a gracious man named Kes Woodward, who says this of the mountain, “It took me fifteen years of visiting the park to work up the courage to take on the image of Denali itself, as it is the most daunting icon in Alaska art.” Another artist, Steve Gordon, describes it as the Mona Lisa. “Unless you can approach it in a fresh way, it’s been done.” And another artist, Diane Canfield Bywaters, admits, “The landscape continues to delight, challenge and amaze me. It could be a lifetime goal to paint this successfully.”
When Garrison Keillor, host of the popular radio program A Prairie Home Companion, visited Anchorage and accepted a bush pilot’s offer to fly him into the heart of the Alaska Range, Keillor said he “ran out of adjectives in the foothills.”
Many generous people have given their lives to this place; they’ve settled here, and reset their clocks, reset their conscience. They stand for what they stand upon. In so doing they make their lives extraordinary. They get visitors to slow down and shake the city tinsel from their eyes.
“The train’s late by an hour.”
Relax. The river has been here for ten thousand years.
“The bus is full; the dust is bad.”
It’s okay. The river has been here for ten thousand years.
“I’ve come all the way from Mexico. Where’s the sun?”
Tranquilo. The American golden plover flies here from Argentina, the Wilson’s warbler from Costa Rica, the wandering tattler from Hawaii, or as far away as Australia, the wheatear from sub-Sahara Africa. This is the place to be. You’re fine.
“It’s cold.”
Imagine January at fifty below, and dark. The Dall sheep do not complain. The ptarmigan do not complain. The ravens do not complain; they somersault as they fly.
“When will the mountain come out?”
Any day now. Any week. Next month maybe, or the month after that. Breathe deep the northern air. The river has been here for ten thousand years.
BUT LET ME BEGIN with my first summer, as good a beginning as any. How this affair got started is not reasonable, painless, or altogether wise. Love never is. But it’s honest.
It’s May 1981. Ronald Reagan has just completed his first one hundred days in the White House. He means business; he loves business. Soon he’ll deregulate Wall Street, beef up the Pentagon, triple our national debt, and make us believe we can grow our economy forever.
On a Saturday afternoon, thousands of miles west-northwest of Reagan’s sunny fantasy in Washington, DC, I and twenty other new ranger recruits board a bus in Anchorage, Alaska. Dour clouds roll in from Cook Inlet and spill rain against the Chugach Mountains. A sharp wind blows. We don’t care. We’re guys with beards and gals with bandanas, northbound to Denali, dimly aware that outside of Reagan’s nation, another America awaits.
Of course we’re naive. We’re university graduates with liberal arts degrees, versed in critical thinking and deep time, but not venture capitalism. Most of us fall between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, making a nice bell curve, with me in the middle, one month shy of thirty. I have fifty dollars in the bank and no health insurance, home, mortgage, wife, kids, debt, or pets, and no plans to acquire them. I’ve traveled around the world on tramp steamers and the Trans-Siberian Railway, sung in Arabic with Turks on the Bosporus, walked across London’s Abbey Road, hitchhiked through Utah in search of a different Abbey (a writer, not a road); ridden my bike off the Sand Cliffs of Spokane’s Hangman Creek, been arrested in Spain for setting caged birds free, and been seduced by an Italian girl in Venice who drank more wine than me, never got drunk, complimented my guitar playing, and disappeared with my money belt. I’ve never been to Interior Alaska, or heard of Adolph Murie, Joe and Fannie Quigley, the Sourdough Party, or the Honorable Judge James Wickersham, Charles Sheldon, or Belmore Browne.
Jackson Browne and the Cleveland Browns, yes, but not Belmore Browne. That will change. Everything’s about to change. All my possessions fit in my VW hatchback. But I’ve left my rusty, trusty car down south for the summer, maybe forever.
Wasilla flashes by. Big signs announce: “Guns,” “Ammo,” “Tobacco,” “Liquor,” “Fireworks,” “Freedom,” and “Reagan for President.”
John Muir was one month shy of thirty when he hiked across California’s Central Valley (then filled with knee-high wildflowers) to the Sierra Nevada, his “Range of Light,” to find the writer and activist within. It does not occur to me. Lesser thoughts fill my head. Does it occur to me that Keats was dead at twenty-five, Hendrix at twenty-seven, Percy Shelley and Hank Williams at twenty-nine? No. I watch south-central Alaska roll by, waves of forested land. Melville comes to mind, his feeling, like mine, of a profound “unfolding within myself.” I listen to the Beatles, Stones, Doors, and the Who, and speak with false authority on the writings of Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, and Roderick Nash. All to impress the gals with bandanas.
They fall asleep.
LOOKING BACK, I see now that Denali did more than charm me that first summer; it saved me. The whole damn place beguiled me and believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. Call me crazy or blessed or crazy blessed. But I swear that again and again Denali has done this—made me buckle down and find inspiration and become the free man I am today.
Yes, I think about life and death and all that; I think about impermanence, but not for long. As for tomorrow, I’m not enthused about our hypertechnological, genetically engineered future, unless I can be programmed to think otherwise.
As I sit now in the historic East Fork Cabin on the Toklat River, on my final night as the park’s writer-in-residence, thirty-one years after that first summer, my career is stalled. Two beloved book manuscripts—my unborn children, one ten years in the making, the other five—earn me only publishers’ rejections, little missives that say, “No thanks.” Yet it’s a small travail compared to the September crescent moon sliding over Polychrome Mountain, or the bear on the porch, or the river with its own story to tell.
Do rivers ever despair in not getting published?
Just keep writing.
If at first you don’t succeed, find another definition of success. Money, like the sun, offers great warmth and light. It also burns and blinds.
What you hold, dear reader, is a story of love and hope, equal parts natural history, human history, personal narrative, and conservation polemic. I make no attempt to be a neutral journalist, a rare bird in today’s corporate culture. I’m a storyteller. And I’m not alone. The same strength, clarity, and inspiration given to me by this place I’ve seen given to others. Many others. Many times.
That’s not to say Denali is what it used to be. It is not. Visitation grows. Traffic increases. There will always be a good economic argument to overcrowd an experience until we redefine what a good economy is. Law enforcement rangers wear Kevlar vests and big guns that would, I think, dismay Olaus and Adolph Murie, the pioneering wildlife biologists who first came here in the early 1920s. The park is warmer, brushier, and more forested than it used to be. And sadly, for the first time in the park’s history, a bear killed a visitor; the National Park Service responded by killing the bear. The visitor had a camera, and perhaps got too close. I find myself wondering if an innocence has been lost.
But let us remember that the land rolls, the rivers run. Denali can make the world a better place. It already has. All we have to do is slow down and listen, look, and love, and every so often sing like angels, howl like wolves.
Patient persistence.
The river has been here for ten thousand years.
IT’S 1981. The bus rumbles north, past the Chulitna River, over Broad Pass, into the Nenana River Canyon. Everything is so big, so Alaska. I stare like a starving man. Up ahead is a national park that belongs to everyone and no one, a place to practice freedom but also restraint, a world to explore deeply but also lightly. Up ahead is the heart of the state, the state of the heart, an oracle of some kind, the promise of a wilder, wiser life.
Up ahead is Denali.