FIRST SLIDE: The Mountain
Robb and I flew into Anchorage, old buddies doing our guy thing, loaded down with camping gear and cameras and film most of all, wide-eyed and looking for the roof of North America; we weren't about to settle for the rafters, or a couple of chandeliers. Up in AK there're a lot of mountains over 10,000 feet, but if you're a purist there's only one true mountain up there, a 20,320 foot behemoth that prefers to work the crowds in Denali National Park and Wildlife Preserve, austerely preening for all the Mohammeds who stream up there to goggle at it. That's the folklore, anyway. We found out the hard way the damn thing doesn't even exist, at least not the way most mountains do, this prodigious brainwave of the Alaskan tourism industry.
-Psst! We got the biggest mountain on the continent. Pass it on.
-Not us, pal.
Not that our recommendation can make or break it, we're not the men from Michelin or Baedeker's. The mountain gets good press, over-the-top in fact, so many superlatives and so much breathlessness in print you think it can't possibly be hype. Unlike Everest, which rises more gradually from already-towering surroundings, this mountain soars suddenly and dramatically into the heavens from almost nowhere. Its enormous mass, great height, and extremely cold slopes disturb the air, causing storms miles away, which is how - if you believe everything you read - the mountain got nicknamed "Weathermaker." The name is a smokescreen, a little homespun fog to confuse the tourists, mess with their heads. During a given year, no one is allowed to spend more than 14 nights in the park, and the primary reason for that has nothing to do with preserving the wilderness from human encroachment; it's just a way to keep us from twigging that Weathermaker ain't nothing but a fabulation.
There's something touching about the way people gravitate to a feature of the landscape that is, after all, only a rumor. Every year thousands of people come into the Park, and most of them are there to see the Mountain. "Is it out today?" is what they're all wondering when they get up in the morning, in the hotel, the campgrounds, the valleys. "Can you see it?" they all ask when they're at Eielson Visitors' Center, deep inside the park, when the mountain should be right there in front of their eyes and they can still hope they've only overlooked the largest mountain in North America, that it could be hidden in the haze from a forest fire or obscured by your own fat head. Many, many rubes have wasted their film over the years photographing a massif of clouds and then gone back home to spend the rest of their days, like so many sleuths after the Loch Ness monster, pointing at fuzzy prints and saying, "There! See that little cloud that looks like a steam-gauge? Right below it and to the left a little, there's a dark speck? That's part of the Mountain!"
Look, nobody goes to AK wanting to be a spoilsport. The state motto is "North to the Future," and if you go as a sightseer you go because you like the sound of that: the biggest mountain, the world of tomorrow. Besides, going to AK to see the Mountain doesn't seem vain or foolish until after you've done it. You go there the same way the Spaniards went to the American southwest in search of El Dorado, expecting to change your life.
You're supposed to be able to see the Mountain from the dirt road that extends 80-odd miles into the park. It's the only road into the park, but private cars are stopped at Savage River, several hours away from any glimpse of the Mountain. The basic idea is to keep visitors from destroying the park, its rare animals and plants and pristine watersheds. The only practical way to get within viewing distance of the Mountain is to get on one of the school buses, most of which are run by the Park Service, and suffer for maybe four hours with fifty other people, every one of them Mountain-crazy. Riding the school bus is also pretty much the only way you can get into the back country, although you can drive in to some of the campgrounds as long as you have a permit.
It's got to be said, in case you were thinking of going, that nothing human in that park occurs without reference to the road. The rangers have to use it, the professional photographers have to use it, and the backpackers have to use it, just to get where they're going. Even when they walk off into the wilderness, they navigate in terms of the road. Anybody who wants to say they've seen the park has to ride the bus. And the road - and what's visible from it - is all most people see of the park.
All bus rides going in are marked by the gaiety of expectation. Even when they're still hours away from the Mountain, by the driver's estimate, everybody sits forward in their seats, hoping against hope that when the bus rounds the next turn, the Mountain will miraculously appear and stop their hearts cold. There's a kind of tedium to so much anticipation. A couple hours of it and you think your skull will crack.
When our bus finally creaked into the parking lot at Eielson Visitors' Center, Robb and I still hoped to see the Mountain, in spite of the fact that we'd seen almost no wildlife - something else we'd been promised. "Here we are, folks," the driver said, as he pulled up. "The mountain should be right over there. See that cloud that looks like a steam-gauge?"
All one could hear on the bus was the electric chirr of camera lenses sliding open, and vertebrae popping as people craned their necks. We expected to see a mountain so high we'd have to tip back our heads to spy the top even from 35 miles away; we expected a mountain bigger than anything.
"Too bad," said the bus driver, airily, "looks like it's not out today."
Over the next couple days we kept going to Eielson in hopes the Mountain would be on display, but it never was. We weren't the only ones who were disappointed, either. There was a rumor going around that the Park Service had taken the Mountain away for its summer cleaning.
Robb and I were plunged into gloom. Go home, Yanqui, go home.
Bus rides out of the park are characteristically depressing. Passengers who were lively on the way in, tourists who were only that morning thrown into transports of intoxication by the gorgeous land slipping past their bus windows now sleep through it. And all because the Mountain has eluded them.
The Mountain! That fabled snow-capped peak, the hulking shoulders of something ancient, that indifferent leviathan pre-dating human inhabitants of the continent and impervious to our short-sighted schemes. What might pass across its face - whatever thought might slowly bloom beneath its glacial capes and sweaters of snow is forever inaccessible to those of us cursed to walk the bottomlands beneath it. A formidable peak indeed, a veritable magnet for the curious, the bold, and those susceptible to natural splendor.
How crushing, then, to find that Denali National Park isn't what the Mountain dominates. How could it be? If it really existed outside of our minds, our hearts, it would be disappointing, and nobody would go out of their way to see it, even if it were twice as high.
NEXT SLIDE: The Bear
Unless you live in a certain kind of city, you don't often get the opportunity, anymore, to move through a landscape in fear for your life, and even then it's not the same, it's only your own kind you're afraid of. Wilderness - in those rare places where it exists - threatens you constantly. Witness Chris McCandless, the 24-year old hiker who starved to death just seven miles outside of Denali National Park in the summer of 1992, stuck on the wrong side of the Teklanika River. He starved in the height of summer, when the land was green, the twilights long, the game plentiful. McCandless was a little wild himself, more reckless than most of us, but in Denali it doesn't take much more than poor planning or plain bad luck to kill you. For one thing, the park is larger than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which may sound enormous if you want solitude (or puny if you're from Montana); but it's the sort of thing you'd start to brood on if you were out of food, your partner had broken three bones, and you were waiting on a search party. During the summer months the weather in Denali is at its mildest - about like the Colorado high country then, shorts and T-shirt weather most of the time - but even then you can wake up one morning to find your camp buried under "trace" amounts of snow, which in Denali is anywhere from 12 to 20 inches.
Then there are the grizzlies.
Now I grew up in Colorado, where they still have black bears and even an occasional mauling, but encounters are rare enough that hikers don't worry about bears much, they worry more about giardia, or getting snowed in. I didn't think twice about camping in Alaska's bear country until I found out you're supposed to stash everything related to food 100 yards from your tent at night - everything, right down to the clothes you cooked in. Bears will even come after toothpaste and deodorant; they're warier if they get a whiff of the real, stinky old you. In his book Coming into the Country, John McPhee relates an old saying: if a pine needle drops in the forest, a deer will hear it, an eagle will see it, but a grizzly will smell it. In other words, they've got olfactory capabilities right off the scale of believability, and a hunger so omnivorous it competes with that of polar bears, who've been known to get into food caches up in the Arctic Circle and eat tinned food, can and all.
In the airport gift shop in Anchorage, I found postcards of grizzlies skritching their backs on a road sign, which made me think of them as sort of like cows only cuter, dumb and slow and I thought if I met one, why, I'd just walk away. I knew better, everyone does, but in Denali you have to leave the safety of the bus before you realize you've been half-expecting the bears to care about your good intentions, or to have any themselves. The first bear I saw in Alaska was sitting by a stream, happily slapping trout out of the water, a photo op along the highway. The second one was headed straight for a hiker in Denali, and that was when it finally got through to me that bears were large and deadly predators.
If you've taken the trouble to learn about the bears - and the Park Service gives you plenty of chances to know what you're up against - you know there's an entire etiquette for walking through a countryside full of animals that are bigger and hungrier than you are. What they tell you to do, and they say this in all the guidebooks also, is to shout and holler when you're out walking, to frighten off any bears who might be lurking over the next rise, or in the blueberry patch you're stumbling through. The theory is that once a bear knows you're human, it'll leave without bothering to get a look at you. But sometimes bears are curious, or you'll run across one that's really into dominance, and instead of going away, it will charge.
Stand your ground, the rangers tell you. Stand your ground (waving your arms and shouting the while) when an 800-lb bear traveling 30 mph is only 20 yards away, ten, even five?
It's not as stupid as it sounds. Because most of the time, when a grizzly charges it'll stop short before it reaches you, and one sure way to get yourself mauled is to run away.
Sometimes, it's true, the bear doesn't stop. The only way to be sure it won't is to wait until the bear's only two yards away. Then you drop like a pineapple, face-down on the ground, fetal position. Chances are - notice how conditional all these rules of thumb are? - the bear will be satisfied you're not a threat and leave you alone. I'm not saying it won't stick its cold snout in your stomach, slash open your backpack, or even bang you up, but you'll live. (Incidentally, these instructions hold for black bears too, except you never drop. Park Service information posted near the Harding Icefield trailhead on the Kenai Peninsula advises hikers to "fight back vigorously" if attacked by a black bear. Well, sure. Are we talking Queensbury rules here?)
Grizzlies are the only thing in the park that can compete with the Mountain. You can be hundreds of miles away, eating at a restaurant in Anchorage, and sure enough the proprietor will be playing a nature video about grizzlies. Or you'll see a fierce bear in a glass case that'll make you nervous even though it's stuffed. Like the Mountain, the bears are what people come to see. They're totems of Alaska too, and nearly as elusive.
Your first week in country, you're likely to scorn the bear-safety instructions the rangers give you, the guidebooks give you. You're out in the middle of nowhere (maybe on tundra, where you can see for miles), silence roaring past you like some ghostly Peterbilt truck, and the idea of wearing warning bells (which is a fairly common precaution) or chattering for the bears' benefit strikes you as a bit ridiculous, like some huge practical joke played on tourists by the natives. Alaskans are very touchy about rubberneckers from the lower forty-eight, and when you've been there awhile it doesn't seem unlikely that some guy from up the Yukon could have stood up in the legislature and moved that the state put bells on all tourists entering Alaska. Besides, shouting as you hike through the countryside makes you feel ridiculous. If you're in the forest talking loudly to scare off bears, it's possible to walk past any number of 60-foot trees with the bark scratched right off their bases by something that can reach 15 feet in the air, and still be tempted to think that all you're doing is scaring the birds.
And why should you feel any different? You hear about the bears, sure, but you don't see any bears yourself, and pretty soon you start thinking you're charmed, you should start renting yourself out to fearful hikers as a one-man bear repellent. Every second you're awake you'll scan the horizon for brown furry animals; every time you ride the bus into the park you'll be hoping that some grizzly will decide to amble up to the road so you can take a picture of it . but you'll be lucky if you get a shot of a ground squirrel, count on it.
It would be endurable except for the fact that bears are on everyone's lips, and everyone else sees them except you. At the campground on the Teklanika River, the young pharmacist camped next to you will nonchalantly mention the grizzly she saw walking along the road near Polychrome Pass the day before; and if in your despondency you decide to walk out to the road, you'll always run into a couple of hale retirees who've just walked the river bed and spotted a sow and two cubs. Head for the river bed and sure enough some bear will choose that moment to cut through the campground on his way to somewhere else. Robb and I nearly went crazy with it, trying to be in three places at once. Always the bears were spotted yesterday or the day before, any time we weren't around, hadn't been looking. It got so we didn't believe in bears any more than we did in the Mountain.
But that didn't stop us from sidling up to anybody who was in the middle of a bear story, as if the magic might rub off on us. I'm sure it was obvious to the rangers how needy we were, both of us the butt of their private jokes because they knew the only way to see the Mountain or the bears was to stop wanting to. It could have been part of their job or maybe they pitied us, but every now and then they'd get a circle of people around them, develop a thousand-yard stare, and oblige all the disappointed hopefuls with a bear story.
Like this one: about a week before we got to Eielson, a bear came up from the Toklat River valley and plonked himself down in the parking lot at the Visitors' Center. The buses were forced to pull right up to the door of the Visitors' Center to let people off. None of the passengers went inside - this was what they'd come for, after all - and after a couple hundred people piled up outside the Visitors' Center to watch the bear, a squirrel appeared in the parking lot and things got interesting. This particular squirrel didn't see the bear until it was a little too late, and when it did, so the ranger told us, it jumped up in the air with an audible shriek. (Squirrels are the linchpin of the food chain there, but it doesn't mean they're sold on the system.) The squirrel hit the ground running - straight for the crowd, with the bear right on its heels.
A Kodak moment.
At the last possible second, the squirrel veered off, taking the bear away with it, away from tragedy. (There could have been a stampede, but maybe nobody's reflexes worked that fast. The ranger who told the story was vague on that point.)
An incident like that, you'd think we'd be glad we missed it, but no, we felt unlucky. Because we wanted to see a bear up close, even if we didn't actually want to be in the path of its headlong charge. And the Park Service's information campaign had instilled in us the false confidence that we could feel quite safe. In fact, we were given the distinct impression that bear psychology had been thoroughly doped out.
Then I happened to overhear one ranger talking to another in the men's room at Eielson, and I learned that rangers had bear stories they kept to themselves. Seems an hour earlier this particular ranger had been looking out over the Toklat River valley and spotted a grizzly about a 1/2 mile away, rooting around for food. On the other side of an outcropping, where the bear couldn't see him or smell him, was a young man working his way up the hillside toward the Visitors' Center. They happened to be traveling at more or less the same pace, and their paths were on the verge of crossing. Someone was going to get a nasty surprise.
The ranger yelled and waved his hat, but the hiker couldn't hear him. The bear took no notice and kept snuffling his way up his side of the outcropping. Then the hiker looked up and spotted the gesticulating ranger. He took off his own hat and waved it, before replacing it cheerfully on his head and continuing up the hillside toward the bear. He was first to reach the ridge, right in the bear's line of vision. By that point he was only 60 feet away from the bear - nothing by bear standards - and it was way too late for him to start thinking of something else to do with his time. But he still didn't see the bear. He topped the ridge and there he paused - like any fool in a horror movie - to drink some water and look back over the way he'd come.
Now the ranger telling this story was extraordinarily calm. I know he thought he was alone with the other ranger, that he was speaking for the ears of professionals only, but his attitude toward the hiker's fate was unnervingly laissez-faire. What concerned him was not the hiker's life, but what the bear was doing. The bear caught wind of the hiker and stood up on his hind legs, front paws dangling, nose testing the air, assessing the threat.
The hiker didn't notice.
The bear took a step toward the hiker, poised to charge - then turned and bounded away in the opposite direction, looking like a big, clumsy greyhound running away from a rabbit. Which was, it turned out, the point of the story. Not the hiker's reprieve, but the bear's inexplicable nature, the unpredictability of animals in the wilderness. "Never seen a bear do that before," said the ranger. If there'd been bear bells available at the Visitors' Center, I would've bought the lot.
It's really the same as waiting for the Mountain to come out, deciphering the bears' habits I mean, it's characteristic of Denali, you spend more time talking about bears than you do dealing with them in person, as it were (which supports the bus drivers' contention that people don't own the park, the animals do). It shouldn't be surprising, then, that anybody who claims to have actually encountered a bear is automatically an authority, a shaman in touch with the true essence of the land.
Before we got into the back country ourselves, we rode the bus with some young hikers who'd just come in from several days' camping near Wonder Lake, and one of them said to his pal, casually, "Hey Dan, how many griz you think we saw?" as if he didn't already know the answer, as if he didn't know we were listening. Robb and I agreed that we needed a formula, some one-that-got-away variable in order to come up with a true number: e.g., take the estimate of bears seen and divide by two-thirds. In Denali it's a status thing, how many bears you've seen, and how human to count them.
LAST SLIDE: La Boca
It's just the way it is in Denali, to get around you have to ride a bus, and that means listening to somebody talking, most often the bus driver. You might say that the rangers are the priests in Denali, the holy ones responsible for intermediating between the hoi polloi and the wilderness, and if so then the drivers are the choir, for they sing the sacred music.
Our first driver in Denali never stopped talking, he had a story for every stretch of that road, which is to say at least eight hours' worth of tall tales, bits of history, and horrible jokes with which to keep us all entertained. To listen to him was to suffer an affliction, at least for those of us who were in more danger of becoming unhinged by incessant talking than by silence, but I think he understood that most of his riders needed him, that they'd never get any closer to the park than they were at that moment. In a sense, they'd never get off the bus at all, and he saw it as his job to bring them closer, to carry them into the wilds on his voice, and I would call that service.
He talked a lot about the early history of the park, and the bare-knuckled politics of its early warden, Harry Karstens, and he told us how he'd seen wolves take a bear cub away from its mother. He'd throw in a pun about the name "Teklanika," define the difference between caribou and reindeer ("dead caribou"), and then describe how he'd once let everyone off the bus to photograph a sleeping bear, and just as they were finishing up, a fox snuck up and bit the bear on the ass.
He had one story I didn't think much of at the time, it was so secondhand and apocryphal it almost didn't register, though I think now it was maybe the only one close to the truth. It hadn't happened to him - and I wondered about that at the time, why didn't he just say it had, we wouldn't have known the difference - it had happened to a driver he'd known, who picked up a woman at Savage River in a linen dress and sneakers and carrying a suitcase. She rode the bus without a word all the way out to Wonder Lake, end of the line where the bus turns around and goes back, and then she got off. The driver protested, his was the last bus of the day and she obviously wasn't prepared for camping, but she just hefted her suitcase and walked off into the scrub, back straight and shoulders square, her white sneakers scuffing along the stony ground.
We all laughed and shook our heads at the woman: we might be stupid, but we weren't crazy. Only much later did I wonder if the story wasn't really a talisman of the stupidity of anyone venturing out of her element, something to give the tourists a frisson at the thought of being at the mercy of the elements and the wildlife. Or was it really a story celebrating the mysteriousness of human motivation, or even our survival on a hostile planet in spite of our stubbornness and pride?
But all that came later. I wrote her off at the time, that woman with the suitcase.
That night, a ranger gave a talk at our campground, and she started right off with a bear story. The previous weekend, it seemed, she'd accidentally run into a bear cub, and the mother bear came after her. The ranger tried backing away before the mother saw her, but the cub had already spotted her and, curious, followed. The sow clued in, and then the ranger had to stand her ground, shouting and waving. How this was resolved wasn't clear, but she was obviously unharmed and she didn't waste any time on the finer points of her narrative; instead she made sure we all knew what to do if we were ever in the same situation.
It didn't occur to me not to believe this story, not even when she proceeded to relate a yarn about the trickster Raven, and how one of his exploits caused the formation of the Alaska Range. She also told us about an early ascent of the Mountain made by notorious braggarts who were later proved to have been telling the truth, and she finished with a Robert W. Service poem about the burial of Blasphemous Bill.
The following night, Robb and I attended our second ranger talk, given this time by a tall, condescending fellow with glasses. The guy started off right away with a tale about his most recent run-in with a grizzly, which was when we figured out that the rangers didn't give the talks every night for their health: whatever their ostensible subject, the real point of the talks was to remind park visitors how to survive a bear encounter.
"What's the one thing you don't do if a bear charges you?" the ranger asked us.
"Ruuunnnnnn," came the chorus from the audience.
"That's right," he said. "But today I did the wrong thing and I ran." He described the scene, and how he'd tripped and fallen in his wild flight. "So I was lying there . just like I'm lying to you tonight."
We all groaned dutifully. And then I thought, What?
After that I couldn't listen to a ranger say anything without wondering if he was telling the truth. Rangers, of course, are there to show us around our own country; what I hadn't realized was that they are primarily storytellers, and that stories are as necessary to our experience of the wilderness as the wilderness itself.
On our third night at Teklanika, a ranger named Zeke told us that up in the Savage River Canyon we could find the skeletons of two moose who had gotten their racks locked together and starved that way. We were fascinated, but Robb and I didn't bother going up to look. Because we'd finally learned that wasn't the point. The skeletons might have been there all right, but there was a good chance they were as rooted in fancy as the woman with the suitcase.
But so what? What did it matter if the Savage River Canyon had never echoed with the pitiful bellows of two bull moose who'd locked their racks together? Who cared whether or not the woman with the suitcase ever faced the wilderness with resolve and undiscoverable purpose? The land itself compelled us to invent them. Like the Mountain, the woman should have existed, and the deadly struggle of the moose was something that should have happened. Stories like these satisfy our sense of the fitness of things; allow us to believe that the wild lands are not vanishing; to kid ourselves that it's the animals who own the park.
When it came time for Robb and I to tell our own bear stories - because that's what you do in Denali, you stick your toe in the river and then run back to where everybody else is looking on and you tell them how cold the water was, how violent and untamed - we told our stories almost as shamelessly as everyone else - though not, it must be said, until we were asked.
But we always were asked, that's the beauty of Denali, nobody's seen anything for themselves or if they have they don't trust it, they're always asking other people what they've seen, what they've heard, as if the evidence of their own senses were not enough. Denali isn't about what you actually see or witness, it's about what you hear, it's about what other people tell you they witnessed, or what their friends saw.
So next time you go into the woods, don't go seeking solitude. Don't run from other visitors. Seek out the rangers, the bus drivers, the talkative folks in the motor home who belong to the Good Sam Club. Listen closely to them. You'll hear tales of mountains larger than anything, of predators bigger and faster than you are. You'll hear stories of the past, of the wilderness as we want it be . . . about the wilderness you came to see.
About the author:
Benjamin Chambers has had fiction published in Foreign Service Journal, Mississippi Review, MANOA, William & Mary Review, Madison Review, Willow Review, and Portland Review, an essay on rape in Cream City Review, and a poem in the August 2003 issue of Stirring. Educated at the University of Chicago, he holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and has served as fiction editor of The Chicago Review. He will shortly be launching an online literary journal specializing in novellas and personal essays. The King's English can be found at www.thekingsenglish.org.
© 2009 Word Riot
