“Mike, wake up, wake up!”
“Okay, okay, what’s up?”
“Steve’s at you.”
I sleepily said, “What’s going on around here?”
Steve answered, “It’s raining and I figured you guys would want to put your rain fly on.”
I muttered back, “I think we’ve already got it on. At least we’re still dry, and that’s good enough for the middle of the night.” I went back to sleep wondering why Steve had insisted on waking me when Doug was already awake.
Strange things can happen in the middle of the night when everybody is tired. I remembered a night on the Pacific Crest Trail when I awoke to hear Doug loudly clapping his hands and something rustling in the bushes. Byron sat up and asked, “What’s happening?”
“There’s something making noise,” replied Doug.
“Yeah, I heard it too. Something clapping his hands and crashing through the bush.” He grabbed his flashlight, shone it on Doug, and yelled, “I’ve got the varmint blinded. Quick, Mike, hit him over the head with a big stick so we can get some sleep.”
First thing in the morning Steve apologized. “I don’t know why I thought you guys hadn’t put the fly on the tent. And for sure I don’t know why I insisted on waking Mike.”
The day remained a cold damp trial, and for the first time I wished the trip were over. I felt like throwing the paddle overboard and catching the next jet plane to the Mojave Desert. We had been on the move for four months, and I wanted a warm, dry place for a while. But our huge driftwood fire that night helped restore my spirits. Flames leaped twenty feet into the air, and we stood twenty feet away watching the great white heart of the fire and the quivering enthusiastic flames shooting aloft.
We met several natives the next day who were out fishing with a drift net. One had been out for two hours, and when he pulled in his net, he came up empty-handed. But he cheerfully said, “Oh, I go out again this afternoon; maybe I do better.”
A friend had about twenty fish and generously said, “Here, you guys need some fish. I give you two.” We wondered if they were Eskimos or Indians but hesitated to ask having heard that calling an Eskimo an Indian or vice versa insulted them. Doug went ahead and asked, and we learned they were Eskimos.
They told us, “All the villages down near the ocean are Eskimo people.”
Our progress slowed as neared the delta, and occasional strong winds combined with a weakening current meant harder paddling I thought of my life and the something powerful within me that gives me the desire to see and experience and cram as much of what I call life into the short time I have. An inner longing to be different, to do wild and crazy things, to be unaverage, to do what other folks will not or cannot do cries out to be fulfilled.
The Eskimos seemed friendlier than those we had met in Alaska. Several teenage boys stopped, and Doug asked, “What’s the river like on the delta? Will we have some current all the way?”
“Oh, yes, lots of current,” they said, “but once past Mountain Village the winds can be very bad. There’s nothing, no mountains or hills, between the river and the ocean and the wind off the ocean. Blow those little canoes right off the water.”
As we neared Mountain Village, nothing like weather or wind could curb my rising feeling of elation. It seemed impossible that after all the long days and months of travel, we were nearing our goal. As I battled rough water getting very wet from waves splashing in and pouring down, an old Eskimo came up behind me. “Pretty rough water for canoeing,” he said, “but it will be worse once you go around the bend beyond the village.”
“We’ll make out okay,” I said. “We’ve seen some rougher water.”
Then he told me a story about a place called Fish Village. “It’s right where the channels all split in the delta. You shouldn’t even stop there but most of all don’t stay overnight. It’s not good for people like yourself to stay there.”
“Why not?”
“Two, maybe three years ago, three canoers like you stopped there, and they got sick and one died. It’s a bad place. The demons are very strong there. Don’t stop.”
My curiosity aroused, I wanted to stop just to see what would happen. When I met the others, they were all ready to camp just past Mountain Village at the invitation of two people getting their winter’s supply of firewood.
We stopped at the rather decrepit camp, not exactly ideal because of the strong smell of drying fish permeating the air and eight hungry dogs howling for food.
Our host and hostess, John and Corin, came in with their raft of logs, and I wasn’t disappointed to hear about their fascinating adventures. John had a dilapidated fifteen-foot boat with a tiny cabin, a 50 h.p. outboard, and two barrel rafts. They had built a plywood shack on one of the rafts and put all their possessions, including the dogs, on the other. They had secured the rafts to their boat and set sail on the Tanana River near Fairbanks. After spending the summer drifting down the river, they were married on an island near Ruby. Now they planned to spend the winter near Mountain Village, and their little plywood shack, moved on shore, would be home for the winter. I had peeked inside and now told them, “I hope you two are good friends because you will be seeing a lot of each other in that little cabin.”
John asked, “How long are you guys going to stay?”
Tom quickly replied, “We’d better just stay overnight. Winter’s coming, you know.”
But we slept in late and after a feast of sourdough bread, sourdough pancakes, yogurt, grilled salmon and coffee, we thought a day off a good idea. They had strung a net in an eddy trying to catch and dry enough food for their dogs over the winter. Corin told us she had written to some friends down south who planned to visit them in Fairbanks. “I told them we lived mostly on bread and yogurt, and we fed the dogs salmon,” she said. They wrote back, “We’ll eat with the dogs.”
Corin and I seemed to be on the same wavelength, and she had a wonderful knack for expressing herself. She told me of the experiences that had led her to a plywood shack beside the Yukon River. “I had a good job, doing something worthwhile, making good money, college education and all, but it wasn’t enough. Something was still missing. I spent a few years on the road—Africa, Europe, Canada, a lot like what you’ve been doing. I spent a few months in a cabin alone in Washington, got into Eastern religions a bit, but then I came to Alaska and met John. I’m glad I did the straight bit, got an education and job and all that. It put away any doubts about whether I could or would want to make it in the so-called ‘real’ world. Now I’m free of all the ‘shoulds’ in my life and can get on with the ‘wants’.”
“We’re really into the simple lifestyle. Our eventual goal is to acquire the skills to travel by dogsled across northern Alaska and Canada and end in Greenland. It’s just a dream, but dreams have a way of coming true.”
I remembered a time just a few years earlier when, faced with pressure on all sides to do things I didn’t want to do, I just had to get away from everything to find out who I was. I spent most of a year wandering across the country from one beauty spot to another, wondering at and about everything. I was a free man at the end of the year with nothing before me and nothing behind. It was more than enough to just live each day. It was a turning point in my life, and I had been wandering ever since.
My head was whirling with new ideas and forgotten memories, and I felt the need to get into the open air. I climbed the treeless hill above Mountain Village and wandered lonely as a cloud across the top of the wide-open ridge where a hawk soared. As I sat on the grass, the gentle breeze brushed across the hill and the entire Yukon Delta lay at my feet. Lakes, ponds, channels, rivers, bogs, and marshes stretched in a tangled maze to disappear in a blue haze on the horizon. I said to myself. “It is right. This is the way to live for me. I’m still a free man. The whole continent, no the whole world is my home.”
As I sat at peace with the world I hummed the John Denver tune “Sweet Surrender” and remembered the lines:
I don’t know what the future is holding in store,
I don’t know where I’m going,
I’m not sure where I’ ve been,
There’s a spirit that guides me,
A light that shines for me,
My life is worth the living,
I don’t need to see the end.