Open Writing

My daughter took me to the airport, shaking her head in disbelief. “Try not to get lost, Mum,” she said. “It’s a long way.”

I had decided to go somewhere that had always been a far-off dream. I was going to Alaska, and although I would be joining a small group of likeminded travellers, I travelled alone, changing planes in Seattle and lugging my far too heavy suitcase, so that by the time I reached Anchorage airport and looked across at the Chugach mountains, I was ready to cry with relief, with tiredness, and with exultation. Mostly with exultation. I am definitely a “lift thine eyes to the hills” person, and the feeling of homecoming as I saw the outline of the mountains for the first time was overwhelming. My taxi driver to the hotel told me he had gone to Anchorage for a holiday and never left, and I could understand why.

I left the hotel the next morning to explore. I walked alone all day, right along Turnagain Arm, just looking and standing still and staring hard. (My son tells me staring is not acceptable, but I have to disagree. You need to stare if you are not going to miss anything.) So I walked for miles: I could see the planes coming in to land, swinging low over the Arm. The hanging baskets outside the odd house, but mostly hanging below the street lamps, were the biggest and most abundant I had ever seen.

They were overflowing, voluptuous, because they grew in almost permanent daylight. The water was on one side of the road, and on the other was the railroad, and slow, clunking lines of trucks came along from time to time, pulled by dark green and yellow engines with ‘Alaska’ on the side.

White daisies and pink fireweed grew everywhere, and it was summertime, warm, beautiful, not quite the way I had expected Alaska to be.

The next day I joined up with the rest of the group, and with Steve, our guide, and the adventure really began. We flew down to King Salmon and on to Katmai, where every summer brown bears come to feed on the salmon as they journey up the rivers to spawn. The old grizzlies, the males, do not tolerate females and cubs too near, and if they trespass and try to catch fish in a patch of river where a male is watching and waiting, trouble will probably come. A cub can even be killed by an adult male. To stand and watch for a day, to see the huge salmon leap and leap again, and then fail because the bear has won, is an experience that bears no comparison to seeing a documentary about it. There isn’t even the satisfaction of seeing the bear have a good meal, for the delicacy he really wants is the eggs! The salmon, once caught, will be carried to a rocky outcrop or the river bank and chewed a bit, torn open, eaten some, and then delicately deprived of its eggs. The mangled remains will be left to the seabirds waiting on the water or in the shallows, so the disposal of dozens of salmon will be efficient and complete. The bears may wait in silence, the fish are simply programmed to go up river, but the noise made by the hundreds of seabirds beggars description.

My stay in Alaska was wonderful and enriching, but something that I managed to do had an unexpected epilogue.

We left Anchorage and the Chugach mountains, and travelled north towards Denali National Park.

“Denali” means ‘the high one’ or ‘the great one’, and is the name that was first given to the great mountain long ago by Athapaskan Indians of the Yukon and Tamana rivers. In more recent times it was given the name Mt. McKinley, in honour of a Governor of Ohio who was running as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. All this I learned later. No unauthorised vehicles are allowed in the park, only special shuttle buses; campers and back-packers need to apply for a permit. Our visit was pre-arranged, so we got on a yellow bus and drove into the wilderness, for this is what Denali is: a spectrum of tundra wildlife and plants living in an ecosystem in its original condition, with Denali, vast and mystical, dominating the surrounding land.

As we drove on towards the Lodge where we were to stay, stopping from time to time to get out and survey the land, we could see the mountains of the Alaska range, clear and sharp on the far side of the Toklat river. There were clouds piled up behind them, and blue skies above, but which one was ‘the high one’? They all seemed to be giants, but not one peak seemed to be worthy of the Athapaskan name. It was a bit disappointing, so we drove on, looking both ways through the windows, straining to see moose and Dall sheep, lakes and glacial moraines - and somewhere, we hoped, Mt. Denali.

We came at last to Wonder Lake. It must be so called because you wonder how any piece of water could be so beautiful, so perfect: the hill slopes on both sides glow with the colour of the tundra flowers, and behind the carpets of fireweed come the black and white spruce of the taiga forest, then so many layers of mountain slopes that you cannot begin to imagine how far away they are. And finally, there are the snow covered mountain peaks, real mountains - and at last, wonder of wonders, a wind blows the clouds away and there she is! You can not believe a mountain that huge, that magnificent, could be hidden so completely by clouds. The size, the grandeur, is beyond description. The solid granite core of Denali has prevented her from being worn down as quickly as the sedimentary rocks of her neighbours, and she rises, she towers, no, she rules over the land. Once you have seen Denali, you never forget her.

You will be wondering what the “unexpected epilogue” might be.

After our time in the Park, we travelled in the yellow bus back to the world of hotels and traffic and other people, but there was one last magical chance to be with Denali. Several times a day there were flights in little planes, six or eight seater I believe, an hour’s trip round the back of the mountain. As we arrived at our overnight hotel I heard that the last flight of the day was about to go and there was one seat left. Of course, I was on it, and within seconds I was looking at the place I had just left from a different angle. Now I really could see the Muldrow glacier, the miles of moraines, the tiny speck of a shuttle bus parked at Polychrome Pass - and all the time we were getting closer to “the great one”. It was a long, slow approach, and we crept round the back, along the shoulders of Denali, like a noisy bee moving along a row of flowers. It was only a little plane and it seemed ages before we had almost brushed the summit and turned our backs on her. There were blue and mauve shadows in the snow as we changed direction and turned for home.

And what is the epilogue?

Some weeks after my return from this very special holiday, I was back at work teaching English to a group of foreign students. This particular group had quite a few Japanese among them, and they wanted to know where I had been, what I had seen. I began to enthuse, as I always do, and my memory of the flight round the highest mountain in America carried me on to even greater heights of description. This was one opportunity for a variety of adjectives to be used, I thought, but I was puzzled by the dead eyes, the complete lack of response on the faces of the Japanese. Their faces are not normally quick to show emotional response, but this was unusual, especially as I knew them well.

I finished what I had to say. I stopped talking; I looked at them somewhat quizzically.

“What is it?” I said.

“I think you have a problem. One of our friends went on that trip,” came the answer. “He was on his honeymoon, but the plane crashed. Everybody was killed.”