By Ryan Reynolds
We grinned at each other through the roar, fingers in our ears, eyes shining like five-year-olds on Christmas morning. Our transportation had arrived. Twenty yards out the pilot cut the engine, the plane coasting now, floats cutting the water into symmetrical waves like twin ocean liners. Fiberglass met sand as it ground to a halt where we stood waiting like gypsies, the total sum of our worldly goods encircling our group of eight intrepid explorers. Bear barrels, plastic bins, garbage bags filled to the point of bursting with clothing that deserved a restraining order of at least ten feet; these were the things we carried. Tents, sleeping bags, stoves, fuel, hundreds of pounds of pasta, potatoes, goldfish crackers, and the occasional bag of peanut M&Ms; they were all here. Now we just had to get everything somewhere else.
That was where Ranger Pilot Leon Alsworth came in. Exiting the small, cramped interior of the plane with the kind of smooth control that could only have come through years of practice, he walked along the float, and reaching the propeller, leaned lightly against it as he looked us over.
"You ready to go?"
Absolutely.
Ten minutes later I was in the air, strapped to the copilots seat with a maze of webbing and a comfortably padded, automatic noise reducing headset and microphone that had me feeling like Brittney Spears in a race car as we soared over the lake at 150 miles per hour.
"How long have you been flying?" I asked, my voice startling me as it resounded in my headphones.
"Oh, about twenty five years I guess," Leon answered.
Surprised by this number, more questions lead to the realization that Leon had started flying when he was only 15. That's life in the Alaskan bush for you.
Growing up in a small town with no paved roads and only a few vehicles, it makes sense that kids would learn to fly around the time others in more developed areas are entering the terrifyingly liberating world of having a driver's license.
Flying is how people get around in Alaska. The only way to travel in a state one-fifth the size of the lower 48, yet with only a few thousand miles of highway. Compare that to Texas, the second largest state in the county; while no proud Texan will admit it, Texas is less than half the size of Alaska, yet has an astounding 79,535 miles of roadway. Quite the tangled web compared to the big state's 5,624.
Back to the plane.
I turned in the seat, feeling my Pulaski muscles protesting this movement from between my shoulder blades, along my spine. Behind me sat Duncan and Barnet, occupying the other two of the four total seats in the small Cessna 185.
Faces glued to the windows, cameras held ready with anticipation worthy of a red carpet sideline at the Kodak Theatre, they failed to notice my sign language and accompanying facial expression for "Wahoo!!" Two months ago, while making phone calls to the crew members, I had mentioned the possibility of getting to ride in a floatplane. Today was that dream come true.
Our destination: Twin Lakes. Upper Twin near the mouth of Hope Creek to be exact.
Our crew had spent the past two weeks camped on the point of a small peninsula of Kontrashibuna Lake, a short hike from Lake Clark - the forty mile long, aquatic, salmon stuffed centerpiece of the national park where my fabulous co-leader Jillian Morrisey and I had been assigned. Each day we traveled to our work site, first by canoe, then by foot, the daily commute averaging just under 90 minutes. While this amount of time in morning rush hour would drive many crazy, there were no complaints here.
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| A Day at Upper Twin Lake |
But we had left that all behind us now in true gypsy fashion, for what lay ahead, though it hardly seemed possible, we expected to surmise our greatest adventure to date.
Thirty odd years ago, one man born in the small town of Primrose, Iowa would decide to pursue his lifelong dream of building a cabin the Alaskan wilderness. Not only would he go on to build the entire structure using only hand tools, he would film the near divine creation of his new home with an 8mm videocamera. Through the resulting footage accompanied by his daily journal entries first embodied in his now classic book "One Man's Wilderness" published in 1973, thousands of Viewers Like You would come to know and love Richard "Dick" Proenneke through watching his film "Alone in the Wilderness", the story of Dick's time at Twin Lakes which has aired consistently on PBS since its production.
Like a smooth stone skipped across the water, the plane bounced along the surface with bone jarring thuds that reminded me of Little Red Wagon races I enjoyed as a kid.
Again that pleasing crunch of sand under the floats, a sound somehow grating and satisfying at the same time. A knife slicing hard bread.
Like Conquistadores we stepped off the floats onto the cool, damp sand of the shore, although our exit was more akin to a wild mountain goat being pushed through a porthole compared to Leon's cat-like grace. At least we hadn't come with murderous intentions.
Twin Lakes was absolutely beautiful. Ringed by jagged peaks, some still in winter's coat, I found my eyes unable to focus on any one mountain. In true impressionist style, the dappled slopes allowed themselvles to be fully revealed only once they were joined with the full canvas. Looking too closely at any one part of the masterpiece refused to provide the senses with the appropriate amount of awe.
No wonder Dick moved here.
Richard Proenneke's first trip to Alaska came in the year 1950, some 18 years before he began construction on his cabin. Having worked as a sheep camp tender in the mountains of Oregon, he sought to build upon his livestock experience by starting a ranch on the small island of Shuyak, fifty miles north of Kodiak Island. After learning of the heavy toll harsh winters and hungry brown bears took on cattle, he thought better of it and left civilian life for the second time, the first being his service in the Navy as a master carpenter during WWII. The following years would find him working as a heavy equipment operator and diesel mechanic at a naval base on Kodiak Island and also for U.S. Fish and Wildlife in King Salmon, a small village along the shores of Bristol Bay. He would eventually return to his hometown to visit his family and friends before his relocation to Upper Twin.
After a brief reconnaissance of our campsite and a flurry of rod and reel which produced three fine lake trout, the rest of the crew had arrived. A state of organized chaos was achieved as we set about constructing our base camp, and over a dinner of fish whose ancestors had quite likely made cameo appearances in Dick's films, we began planning for the days ahead.
Our goal: to practice a form of extremely low impact brushing on the trails which traced their way up the mountain steps behind Dick's cabin. One leading to Teetering Rock, the other serving as the path of least frustration, and the one our crew would eventually follow, into the majestic collection of steep sided canyons that formed the drainage of Hope Creek.
Beautiful, soulful places attract like people. Example: K and Monroe, volunteers for the park, who along with Monroe's talented artist of a daughter, were occupying a cabin a short walk from Dick's as they had for the past six summers.
If you stay in one place long enough, it will soak you in as parched skin to the ocean mist. For some this may consist of a lingering presence in a home, a workshop, or even a vehicle, which is something to consider if you're thinking of buying Used.
Dick managed to fill an entire valley.
Living there, close to his cabin, walking the trails he blazed through alder and spruce, it was impossible not to feel him.
K and Monroe, though they may be surprised to hear it, have tuned in beautifully to Dick's quiet symphony of peaceful coexistence with the valley.
After a day of brushing so successful it looked as if nothing had been done to the untrained eye, Monroe met us on the trail with good news. We would be having fresh salmon for dinner that night.
Sockeye don't often take lures, their bodies having given up food, choosing to exert all the energy gained from its years in the ocean to the push homeward to the spawning grounds, which made Monroe's catch, 250 river miles from the beginning of the freshwater odyssey at Bristol Bay unusual. Add to that the fact that Monroe had just that morning returned from an eleven day trek through the mountains north of Twin Lakes, a trip on which he had lived off a protein poor diet of pasta and oatmeal hydrated cold in ziplocks stuffed into a bulging pack to save the weight of stove and fuel, and the salmon's choice to take the lure took on a mystical quality.
With the two bulging foil rectangles resting uncomfortably in the small Coleman camp oven, I thought about the salmon that steamed quietly beside me. Natives of Alaska would interpret the salmon's choice that afternoon as an example of a commitment to providing life to others, a proud legacy stretching back thousands of years into the past. I couldn't help but form a fragile relationship between Monroe's firm connection to this place, his need for sustenance, and the salmon's timely gift.
As if their bodies projected millions of dancing strings of luminous energy, it seemed that K and Monroe were connected to this land in the kind of supernatural way associated with indigenous cultures; a relationship longed for and admired by many. A connection I can only imagine Dick shared with an even greater intensity.
Sitting at water's edge, I realized in a manner more potent than ever before that the land has a voice. A soft low hum. A melody the wild things dance to. An esoteric rhythm of wind and water, fire and sky that keeps the world in balance.
This is what I had come for, the reason for bringing six high school kids from across the country deep into the Alaskan bush.
Somewhere along the path of modern human civilization, those that came before us stopped dancing to the rhythm. Falling out of place with closed ears, they began to create a new song to drown out the one, and in doing so cut the ties that held them to the Earth as the scalpel cuts our last connection the womb.
Free from the constraints experienced by the so called "lesser beasts", people began to harm the earth. Softly at first, but with a gradual intensity that has brought us dancing awkwardly forth into a world where clean air, pure water, and a necessary amount of biodiversity are increasingly scarce.
This is our mission as crew leaders for the Student Conservation Association. With the hope of reawakening the delicate laces of our minds drugged to sleep from a false rhythm, thousands of students are led into the field each summer to listen for the voice humming soft in the hollow of a Mountain Harebell, intertwined amid the roar of water's fall, notes placed in melody as dewdrops along a spider's web.
We are, with an earnest intensity amplified through the beat of summer's breeze through spring's flowering buds, changing lives through service to nature.
Above the mantle in his cabin, Dick had placed a small message, scripted onto a sheet of paper that read, "Is it proper that the wilderness and its creatures should suffer because we came?" I thought about these words as I walked back to camp, the chorus of laughter punctuated by the shouts of converstation that inevitably accompany a merry group guiding me truer than any compass.
In a few days we would be moving on again, only this time to Port Alsworth, then Anchorage, and finally home through tearful goodbyes and parting words that would fail to express the depth of friendships we had created through our adventure together.
But there was still tonight, and as the darkness that was so poignantly missing from the bedtime hours of crew's beginning took on ever increasing shades of gray, I looked around to my circle of friends and took comfort in the fact that here at this moment, and in a hundred other wild places holding crews across the country, scattered as seeds of hope, that even though it had been generations since our ancestors had listened closely to the rhythm of the world, there among the spruce with fire's jeweled embers glowing in our eyes, this band of gypsies had remembered how to dance.
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