LONG AFTER THE OTHERS HAD GONE to their tents, I stayed by the campfire. Gradually, around midnight, the fire flickered out and the last of the sunset faded into stars.
I lingered, listening to the explosive breath of the whales feeding just offshore. Like steam bursting from pipes, the sound came every few minutes from the darkness. The whales put me in a trance that stirred my deepest undercurrents. I needed to go to Hidden Falls like I needed air, water, or food.
I stood up, stretched, and sighed. At my tent, the last one down the beach, I pulled off my tall rubber boots and crawled inside. Since it was a matter of waiting only a few hours until first light, I didn’t bother to take off my thermal underwear, the heavy socks, my wool shirt, or the outer layers of synthetic fleece—pants, vest, and jacket. I lay on the sleeping bag with my hands behind my head, and I asked myself out loud, “Are you sure about this?”
The floatplanes would arrive midmorning. By noon we would be back in Sitka. By midafternoon I’d be back in Juneau. Twenty-four hours later, I’d be back home in Colorado, regretting. The answer to my question was an ominous “Yes.”
By two-thirty in the morning, dawn was already glowing pink and violet. The sky was mostly mare’s tails. A few clouds were beginning to gather among the snow-streaked summits of Admiralty Island, the massive landmass across Chatham Strait. It looked like our group’s lucky streak of blue skies was ending. Monica had kept telling us that we were getting away with murder. She was always saying that the weather could turn on a dime.
I told myself there was nothing to worry about. I was used to watching the weather in Colorado. Anything serious arrived a day or two behind high clouds.
I pulled on my rubber boots and crawled outside. My kayak was right there, safely out of reach of the high tide. I stepped into my spray skirt, cinched it around my waist, and reached for my life jacket and paddle.
Kayak at my hip, I walked around a granite boulder and down to a tiny beach that couldn’t be seen from the other tents. The crunching of the gravel under my boots sounded strange, as if it wasn’t me doing this.
The beach was steep; the tide was close to fully out. Careful not to slip, I eased through exposed beds of blue black mussels. Just as I had figured, I would be mostly paddling on the slack—the last hour of low tide going out and the first hour of high tide coming in. During the slack, the current is all but done flowing one direction and barely beginning to flow back the other. Paddling is easy, pretty much like paddling on a lake.
On either side of the slack, the tides ran with huge currents in and out of the straits between these islands. The currents ran as strong as the Colorado River ran back home, close to five miles an hour. For the last six days I’d been figuring it all out, how the tides made the water behave in these crazy passages, and I was certain that I understood.
My head told me this wasn’t dangerous. After all, I’d paddled Ruby and Horsethief Canyons, just downriver from home, at least a dozen times. My mother, an expert kayaker, said I was ready to take on the next canyon downstream, Westwater. The rapids down there included Skull, which was hair whitewater, real serious.
My mother had a permit for both of us to paddle Westwater in September. That was saying a lot, even if the water wasn’t going to be as pushy as it would have been in June.
This morning I would see only flat water. The thing was, I was a long, long way from home, and I was going to be paddling alone.
The guard hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I stepped into six inches of water, floated the kayak, then lowered myself into the cockpit. I checked my watch. It was 2:45 A.M.
No one would know I was gone. I’d be back by five-thirty at the latest. Julia and Monica would be the first to rise, around seven. “Sleep-in day,” they’d announced at the end of the campfire. Everyone had cheered.
I secured my spray skirt around the rim of the cockpit, buckled my life jacket and cinched it tight.
Those guard hairs were still tingling, and now my head was telling me I shouldn’t be doing this.
My heart was telling me otherwise. I started paddling, following a narrow opening through the forest of kelp skirting the shore. Then I dropped the rudder and headed south under the cliffs, keeping to the outer edge of the seaweed beds. For good or bad, I was committed.
I soon passed under Graystone Cliff. Gulls by the hundreds were screaming high above, no matter that day was barely beginning. A whir of wings over my left shoulder, and I turned to see a bald eagle flying by with a herring in each of its taloned fists. A tapping sound up ahead alerted me to a sea otter floating on its back and smashing a sea urchin against the stone it carried on its chest. Close by, another one was rafting a baby on its belly.
I didn’t have a map, but I didn’t really need one. I knew every place name and the shape of the coastline along these few miles by heart.
Staying close to the shore as possible, I hugged the outer edge of the kelp beds the way our group had done all week. The soaring cliffs and the mountainsides above rose straight out of the sea. The water below was the darkest shade of green, how deep I couldn’t begin to guess. I remembered how close to shore the whales had fed the night before, and rapped my knuckles every few minutes on the kayak’s hull. That was no pretty picture, forty tons of whale coming up underneath me.
Dawn was in full display by now, with a blanket of red cirrus flaming orange and red across the sky. “Red sky at morning,” I said aloud. “Sailor, take warning.”
Keep your nerve, I told myself. You’re on a very brief mission.
I’d reached North Point. I could see the rocks offshore that had been indicated on the map. Once I rounded those rocks, I’d be paddling into Kasnyku Bay. I’d been making good time, incredibly good time. It was 3:15 A.M.
With firm pressure on the left pedal, I began to steer away from the safety of the kelp beds. The pedal for each foot was connected by a loop of cord to the rudder at the stern. With a river kayak, you did all the steering with your paddle, but after six days in the sea kayak I’d come to appreciate steering with my feet. It was already second nature.
In the early morning light, the glistening boulders that heaved out of the sea off North Point looked like a pod of petrified whales. We had rounded many of these rocky points during the trip. The water was always choppy out there. Clearing the rocks forced you to go a little way out into the strait, which is where you didn’t want to be.
Hyperalert, I started into the open water. As I rounded the point, there was only the slightest wind and the slightest chop. Still, my breath was coming faster and my adrenaline was up. No reason to get excited—in a few minutes I had cleared the point and was gliding into the calm waters of Kasnyku Bay.
Immediately I could see the creek at the back of the bay. At the foot of a steep mountainside, it plunged out of the forest onto a strip of grassy tidal flats. I strained to spot Hidden Falls in the timber beyond, but all I could see through the trees was a hint of sheer gray cliffs.
As I paddled toward the rear of the bay, I let my mind drift across the years. My father had been hiking down from Hidden Lake with a geologist when it happened. They were making their way down the cliffs by the side of Hidden Falls.
My father had a geologist along because he was looking for a certain kind of limestone terrain called karst. Karst is known for ravines, sinkholes, underground streams, and especially for caves. My father was hoping to find caves on Baranof Island.
Their search had taken them from tidewater on the west side of the island, across its volcano-studded backbone, to tidewater on the east side. We found out later that they didn’t find any caves; they didn’t even find karst. Now that I’d seen for myself how the forests on these islands blanketed the bedrock underneath them, I could understand what they’d been up against.
My father, Alex Galloway, was an archeologist, a paleontologist, and a flintknapper. He was crazy about the past, especially about the migrations of human beings long before recorded history. He’d been to Africa and worked with the Leakeys, but his big passion in life was the Americas. Even when he was in college, my father had a hunch that people had been in North and South America for a whole lot longer than the experts thought.
I beached the kayak and dragged it across the flats and up above the high tide line. I drank from my water bottle and checked the time. It was 3:31 A.M. and broad daylight. It had taken me only forty-six minutes so far. I touched the tiny cedar paddle at my neck. There was time, but I had better hurry if I was going to make it back to camp before the changing of the tide.