The High Canning
By: Edd Jennings
Tags: Memoir, Travel, This Happened To Me, Memories, Alaska

Brooks Range, what it’s like flying in, Flickr, Larry Scott

Saturday, August 18th, 10:35 P.M. — Weathered in by wind and snow at the Waldo Arms, the little hotel in Barter Island, which is really no more structurally than a modular/mobile home conglomerate. This entry is as much to keep from losing track of the day as it is from having anything to say. I talk to people, those who live here, tour operators, other travelers, always with the hope of picking up information about this country I can use. I’ve been at this kind of thing for a while now, and I expect little. It’s curious, the more eager a person seems to give you something, the less likely it is to be useful.

Unearned truth too often holds little value. I equate it with the riddles of the Fae. It can be understood, but too often the truth is only appreciated far too late to either turn back or do me any real good. It’s only a goad, a glimmer in the night to tease me.

People want to ask how I plan to deal with the bears, but when I listen closely to what they don’t quite say they’re happier to hear me state I’m clueless. There’re too many useless tourists in this world, not enough bears. Guess which they’d rather see die?

Sunday, August 19th, 5:09 P.M. — Yesterday, this part of the Arctic coast was too fogged in to fly into the Canning River. Walt Audi, the pilot, couldn’t drop off a party in the foothills. Walt and Meryln Audi’s little hotel in Barter is a charmed place. The food is good and the company better. Except of course for Walt and Meryln, they’ve dealt with too many tourists for too many years. They have information I could use. I’m sure of it, but the greatest kindness I could do them is just to leave them the hell alone. Speak, when I’m spoken to.

I’ve fallen in with a pair of internationally traveled long bow hunters. Their talk is of Siberia, Africa, the far flung reaches of the world. They wouldn’t have spoken to me, but at airport security in Fairbanks when I had to uncase my rifle for inspection, and they saw the Model 1886 40–65 made in 1887, they took notice. Had it been a modern bolt action .300 magnum with a telescope, they would have pointedly ignored me.

They don’t quite understand my reason for the massive old Winchester lever. I have nothing in particular against the .300 magnums. It’s the rifle for the man who is going to make the shot he should by rights have passed. It’s not the rifle I would choose for an encounter with a bear in the dark. That’s not the best use of the small thirty caliber bullets. The ’86 points with an almost mystical rightness when there’s neither the time nor the light to acquire the sights. Three times with the old Winchester levers in hand, I’ve forgotten in the excitement of the moment that I didn’t carry a shotgun and plucked a wild turkey out of the air. This worn white ’86 has a memory of the men who carried it before. When it’s my life, I’ll draw on those memories I feel but cannot quite touch.

The long bow hunters believe I share a kind of commonality with them by intentionally eschewing the best in modern technology to handicap myself. They’re wrong. I use the old because I don’t trust the new.

One of them had a Nalgene jar full of rare old Scotch. Last night I convinced him he didn’t need the extra weight in his backpack and that a ridge over the Kongakut River in grizzly country was no place to be drunk. In a backroom in this dry village, we traded stories about our travels, and drank it all. It was a heady time.

4:22 P.M., Finally in the Brooks Range on the Canning River — The sky has clouded over; the wind has picked up, and it’s colder. I’ve been organizing gear all afternoon, and except for the coaming, the raised border made of aluminum that fits around the hatch and works to keep the water out, I have the Folbot together. I’ve quit for the day and gone inside the tent. I still have gear I can’t find.

My gear wasn’t organized for a quick start. Some of it was in the two bags I mailed to Barter Island in July — winter gear I didn’t need in Virginia. I’ve unpacked the food from the Barter Island store: the coffee, the sugar, and fifteen pounds of flour still unpacked in the unusable containers or paper sacks straight from the store.

The guides from the group of sheep hunters, who are also using this airstrip, came down to visit. They said I shouldn’t encounter anyone on the trip out to the coast on the Canning.

These weren’t the first guides I’d met, and anyone who has read in the outdoor literature is familiar with how it romanticizes the guide. In the rich tradition of hunting guides, as recorded by Hemingway, Ruark, and years of Outdoor Life stories, this ear-ringed kid didn’t stack up to much.

He assessed me just as hard — a thing a man feels on his skin, doesn’t like it much but feels it — before he said, “None of them back up there would have the balls to do what you’re doing.”

If I suspected he was right, I was just as confident he didn’t know, a kid’s judgment of men, meant nothing to me, the traditional Alaskan contempt of the outsider.

If I had paid his outfit for a week’s sheep hunt, nothing I could have done in that week would have been enough to win his respect. Respect of the guide, and the winning of it, has always figured as a cornerstone in the outdoor literature. Which is kind of the reverse, I suspect, of the way it really is.

People who drop that kind of money don’t lose sleep over the opinions of temporary employees. Guide, as owner-operator, is all but gone. These cats were employees, paid on a shoestring. Anything extra they came away with was going to be from tips. Any attitude they had about their clients was going to be carefully concealed. I would have never heard it if they thought I was apt to spend time in their camp, and they pointedly didn’t invite me.

I didn’t invite them either, but more than likely they were down here to find out if I was here to hunt sheep and explain that this was their territory, and when they learned I intended to leave as soon as I could, they relaxed.

My initial impulse to leave this place quickly when I discovered this campsite was tainted by the presence of others would have never worked. I’m still not ready.

Monday, August 20, 5:37 A.M., The landing strip camp — The coffee is on. Outside, under a low cloud ceiling, a light rain mists. The wind is up somewhat from last night, and it’s cool, but there’s no ice in the pot of water I brought in the vestibule last night for this morning’s coffee and oatmeal. If conditions hold, I should be able to move.

I’m always quiet in campsite, especially so this morning. Noise might be taken to suggest I’m open to visitors and conversation.

5:58 A.M. — Reorganization is a priority. I need to pack my gear to protect it, protection of the matches being a major priority. With the fire striker, they’re no longer needed for the stove, but to rely on a fire striker entirely would be to have fewer fires. There’s no way around it, the fire striker requires more skill and drier tinder than an actual match, When used to light anything other than the stove, the kind of dry tinder required too often takes forever to make, if it’s available at all. In favor of the striker, it’s waterproof, and the matches aren’t.

Scrub willows grow thick at this airstrip, but the area close in to camp appears picked clean of easily used dry sticks. People have camped here before because of the airstrip, and they’ve used the easy wood. It should be better further down.

6:18 A.M. — The quality of these strike-on-anything matches is poor. Some already have blackened heads, and others were manufactured without the white phosphorus part that strikes. I thought shipping them in the unopened box was the thing to do. I was wrong. Trust nothing.

8:40 A.M. — The merlin made a pass by my campsite. It has been many years since I’ve seen one. According to the range map in Peterson’s, I’m pushing the northern edge of their range and lucky to see this tiny falcon.

Snow has blown hard all morning. With the Folbot together, I can consider moving today. Fog blankets the upper elevations.

I relocate gear. By the time I found the filet knife, I had accepted that I didn’t have it. Tension mars the moment. I try to tell myself there are mistakes I can’t make, that I will not make, but I know better. Between what I packed on the flight up, mailed from home, and bought quickly in a supermarket in Fairbanks, and in the little store in Barter Island, I’m perfectly capable of making any kind of mistake. I made exhaustive lists of every item in every bag, but I long ago learned that just because an item appears on a list doesn’t constitute proof it’s really in the bag. The mind is given to strange lapses, a thing to accept and expect.

The filet knife is something I could have done without. If I were down to one or two knives, it would never be included. The thin, flexible blade lacks backbone for heavy cutting and is too vulnerable to breakage. I can prepare a fish for the pan without it, although it wouldn’t be as neat or as quick. I do the vast majority of my actual cutting with the filet knife. If I try never to be out of reach of a knife, I keep the actual cutting to a minimum. I don’t want a dull blade when I need one because I’ve been whittling on something I didn’t need to cut, and every slice or chop with a blade is a potential accident. More telling, a cut with a tool is an unnatural thing in nature, and it leaves behind a signature to the world, or to anyone capable of reading, of the man who made the cut.

More important than the filet knife is wondering what else I either forgot or didn’t know about that I’ll need.

10:07 A.M. — An attempt to move against this driving snow strikes me as foolish. It’s going to stick at the higher elevations. I’ll feel better when I see how this gear packs up in the boat, and after I feed myself for the first time off the country.

10:40 A.M. — I started one of Lorrie’s books, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa. She made a special visit to leave this book with me. She said she didn’t need it back, that I could use it for fire starter if I needed.

I know little of her beyond the obvious, that she’s a stunning beauty. We met in the weeks running up to this attempt on the Canning. She writes a column for the local paper, self-publishes books of poetry, and she’s in every environmental group I’ve ever heard of and plenty more I haven’t.

Her marginal notes interest me more than the book. In certain circles, there is a deep belief in the hidden wisdom of the East. I can’t say it isn’t there, but I can’t help thinking of Private Ken McCoy, Killer McCoy, a China Marine, a character in W.E.B. Griffith’s Marine series. Killer called this “The thousand years of culture crap.” I’m not about to say there isn’t wisdom in the East, ancient wisdom if you must, but it doesn’t particularly show up in their governments. This western fascination with the trappings of the East, aside from the true Orientalists, and their years of research, strikes me as insipid New Age Wu-Wu imitation.

An entry I find myself looking at again and again reads: “Coltsfoot out, February 29.” No reasonable person would make anything out of that one cryptic line, except perhaps in passing to wonder why she thought such a common occurrence, a thing that is going to happen anyway, whether it’s noted or not, was worth recording. Yet, I find myself wondering how much she knows about coltsfoot. It’s widely enough distributed. I’ve found it in the Yukon and in the Territories, as I wandered valleys that no one else wanted that year, and I’ve found it all over Southwest Virginia. Technical botany, though, is not my interest: coltsfoot has its dark side. For centuries it has been associated with witches.

I ask myself, if Lorrie possessed that arcane fragment of knowledge. I have no way of knowing. Nor does it much matter. Possession of trivia tells less than a person’s intuitive response to the world around them. Had she lived in the 17th century, would have been labeled a witch?

It’s for damn sure, she’s going to be judging my reactions to her marginalia. She drops tidbits to test my understanding. She couldn’t have missed that I’ve read a book or so, here and there, but so far as I’ve told her, I’m another high school dropout, something of a recluse, socially backward. Mentoring appeals to her.

Will I ever see her again?

In the past, when I have done these trips, my appreciation of what I faced was reduced to the brown and blue lines on a topographical map. This time I don’t face a complete unknown. When I flew up here from Barter with Walt Audi, he traced the coastline for a time. Flat unprotected country of little vegetation, its most obvious wealth the massive mounds of driftwood from the great Mackenzie.

But back to the question that really interests me, whether I will die tomorrow or next week isn’t a particularly new way for me to live. The more interesting question is, if I do survive my immediate future, will I see her again? I think I shouldn’t count on that. There is an elusiveness to her, a fear. She searches for a man of sensitivity who may not be real. She sees herself as deeply spiritual, a quality I’m completely devoid of, and she looks for her like. A wandering rifleman, past his best years, hardly fills the bill.

Meeting her a few weeks before this trip couldn’t have been worse timing. I would have preferred to have the possibility of any budding relationship resolved and put behind me.

2:52 P.M. — The snow for the moment has stopped, and the cloud ceiling has raised, but the wind if anything has picked up. Out of the wind it is pleasant.

This is the trap: the season closes; the weather worsens. I’m unfamiliar with this country. Do I dare wait for better weather that might not come?

2:58 P.M. — I dreamed last night of becoming a better man. A man of substance, valued by those around him for the work his wealth represents, or for the scholarship of years, that lay behind his words. I no longer hope. I know myself better. There is the next hill, the next river, and there is no caution in my heart. Neither is there much give. The rigidity is dangerously brittle.

6:05 P.M — I’ve been out walking in the wind. I released Lorrie’s little white feather. I almost didn’t. I made sure not to let it slip out of my hand, as I placed it firmly in the current of the Canning. I watched it for a few minutes before turning to scramble back up the bank. When I looked back it was gone.

I could go back to the moment when she handed me the white feather and asked me to release it an Arctic river and do it better. I might have shown a reaction beyond stunned silence.

So historical imagery is not her forte. When a woman hands a man a white feather it is a judgment and an accusation of cowardice. It’s beyond challenge. The man will never be offered a chance to respond. She slips out of his life. Symbolism, even unintentional, weighs too hard with me.

She didn’t know.

Was I a coward? That’s always a view from the outside. In the wilderness I understood how to calculate odds and advantage and act in my interest. I’m as happy to sidestep any opportunity to prove myself.

She meant to impress her poetic soul on me, if she had already judged me and found me wanting.

When she showed me her poetry, I muttered, “Nice.”

She paused for me to try to tell her what it meant. At the very least I might have latched onto a stray image, elucidated it, offered some bone, some sense of feeling.

I didn’t.

Too much MFA, too little reading. I mouthed to myself if not loud enough for her to hear, “September 1939. Yeats is dead. Poetry is over.” That wasn’t fair. Poets lived, but that meant nothing to me. Were I to meet one, I had nothing to offer in return. It could be that I had too little education to understand what I read, but with the real thing, it was possible to feel something first. Hers made no syntactical sense. And she had no sense of the difference between the insight and the cliché. The image of the released feather in the stream was too painfully common.

The image of those long, toned legs in motion wasn’t.

Some images were timeless. They haunt long after the moment is passed.