Kluane Lake, The Most Beautiful Place On Earth

Kluane Lake, Yukon

1

"I hate to let you off here, to tell the truth," he said.

I glanced around and then at him, quizzically. "Why?" I asked. "It’s absolutely beautiful!"

He clucked his tongue and went on as if I hadn’t spoken. "But it’s hours to a better place," he said, "and I really do need to get to work." He seemed to be speaking almost to himself.
"I promised I’d do something for someone today..." he looked at me, truly distressed.

"What’s the problem?" I asked, beginning to feel a tingle of alarm.

"Bears," he said. "This is grizzly country for sure."

I looked out the car window. I hadn’t seen a bear for hours.

Days, even.

In truth, I hadn’t seen a grizzly bear ever in my life, other than at a zoo. And even that was not recently. I wasn’t concerned, and perhaps my comfort eased his feelings.

"You can let me out," I said gently as he still hesitated. "I’ll be okay."

"Well," he said. "I’ve got a ways to go, and that will give me some time to tell you what to do just in case you run into one."

2

I was hitchhiking. I had started in Georgia, hitched to the east coast to meet a friend in Cooperstown, New York. We spent a quiet week there running and swimming every day in a place that lives outside of time. Cooperstown is the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and it is also an exceedingly wealthy resort area in foothills full of lush vegetation and large beautiful lakes. There are great paths for running everywhere, there’s camping galore, and blackberries and raspberries ripe and ready for picking everywhere.

If you’re not too concerned about individual property rights, that is.

After Cooperstown I had gone to Denver and spent a week hiking in the Rockies, nearly falling off a dramatic ledge 14,000 feet up on Long’s Peak. I’d had rides from drunken fools, general nut-cases, and outright sociopaths, but Long’s Peak was the only time I’d actually been afraid. Looking over that ledge and seeing nothing but empty space for perhaps a thousand or two feet down and realizing that my stumble had almost sent me there sent chills up and down my spine. And the fact that the rocks at the bottom were jagged and murderous looking had not helped my peace of mind at all.

But I collected myself and continued to the top. I hadn’t hiked ten miles approaching the mountain and several miles up it to stop just because I’d almost gotten killed.

After the Colorado mountains I’d gone west to meet a girlfriend in Berkeley, California. I stayed there a couple of days, camping in a clump of pine trees amongst the high-rises. Sure, people could see me, but it was Berkeley. They expected riffraff, so I added to the ambiance I figured. I played chess against strangers at outside coffee shops whenever I wasn’t with my girlfriend.
I’d have stayed there with her as long as she wanted–if she’d wanted me to, but she got busy so I decided to go to Alaska.

3

At first it didn’t look good. I went to the entrance ramp of a stretch of highway. Everybody said that was the only place the cops wouldn’t arrest you for getting on the road, so I decided it was a good time for obeying the law. When I got there, though, I had to wonder. There were three other sets of hitchhikers already standing by the entrance ramp, a 500-yard approach to the highway.

I decided to play it cool, and I sat down ten feet away from the ramp keeping my thumb to myself. An hour passed, and not only had no cars stopped for the three sets of hitch hikers who had already been there, no car had even slowed down. But two other hitchhikers had wandered up and taken their place by the road. It was a regular convention. A whole hour had passed without my getting any closer to Alaska, and I began to get impatient. For a change of pace, I joined the stationary cavalcade, putting out my thumb every time a car whizzed past.

If you don’t know how silly impatience on a hitch hiking trip from Berkeley, California to Fairbanks, Alaska is, let me provide a few details. The journey itself is perhaps two or three thousand miles or more. You go through the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., figure out how to get through customs (where Canadian officials were very friendly, but nosey, and American customs officials were extremely obnoxious and also nosey), make your way through British Columbia up to the "AlCan" highway, and then take that for days and days until you get into Alaska. You never know when someone is going to pick you up or if someone does, whether that person will be psychiatrically sound (to put it mildly) and friendly. You’re put off in desolate places where you might go for an hour without even seeing a car.

They say the "state bird" of Alaska is the mosquito, but the mosquitoes in Northern Canada were no slouches, either. I saw one carry off a squirrel, and a couple were trying to make off with a moose killed by a hunter until he wounded them with a shotgun blast.

That scared them off even if it didn’t hurt them much.

The trip to Alaska is the most beautiful trip you could ever take. I’ve never seen more wild and natural beauty than I did on that trip. Never seen anything on a grander scale than the Yukon and Alaska. It is often rainy and foggy, but sometimes the clouds and fog might dissipate suddenly and reveal a massive mountain peak stretching impossibly high above you. Only it’s really fifty miles away from you, the air’s so clear.

I was cold and wet much of the time, with nothing dry enough to wipe the fog off my glasses. Even in July it’s never actually hot, and it cools off at night so that a campfire is always welcome. Whenever the clouds scattered a bit, the Northern lights often filled the sky with an unbelievable drama.

When you hitchhike you trade predictability for adventure.

4

Nevertheless, an hour into my journey I hadn’t moved a bit from that hot and dusty road in Northern California. Hadn’t seen any of the other hitchhikers move, either. So sticking my thumb out seemed an exercise in futility. But there wasn’t any other way I was going to move, so I stuck it out and kept my impatience in check.

An hour later, there were two more hitch hikers and still nobody had stopped. I began to think it might be a good time for walking a bit. I consulted the map and discovered that the next entrance ramp was at least five miles away down the highway. If you’ve ever tried walking beside an expressway you know that it can be very rough hiking with fences all over the place and parts so inaccessible you have to walk miles around the obstacles. So I decided to stay put.
Another hour passed. The entrance ramp was now crowded with hitch hikers, and not many of them were really pleased to be there. By and large, hitchhikers expect to talk to the drivers who pick them up–if the drivers want it, but a lot of hitchhikers are not exactly friendly with each other. Quite a few of them seem actually dangerous. The scruffy congregation began to reach crisis proportions, with too many falling into the potentially dangerous category. I began to feel uneasy about the travelers checks in my back pocket and the forty bucks of cash in my front pocket, not to mention my rough looking, but actually very expensive hiking gear. I began to consider a retreat.

Just at about the moment I decided to vacate the field for the day help came in the most surprising way. A van zoomed up and parked a few feet from me. How the driver stopped without hitting any of the other hitch hikers I don’t know. There was practically an uninterrupted line of them stretching for the first two hundred yards of the ramp, and they weren’t getting out of the way to make it easier for other hitchhikers.

But he did manage to park successfully, and he jumped out of his van and walked straight over to me.

"Here," he said, handing me a packet of papers. "God told me to give this to you."

I looked at the packet with raised eyebrows. It was my salvation in the form of an unused bus pass. A bus pass will allow the user to take a bus ride anywhere in the U.S. or Canada for a certain period of time, and this one had four days left. I looked up at the guy. He looked perfectly normal.

"Would you like me to take you to the bus stop?" he asked.

Why not? I gratefully assented while he looked around, picked another of the hitchhikers, walked over and made the same offer to him with another pass.

5

So we left all the other hitchhikers and drove to the bus station, the driver explaining that he had just returned from a trip with his brother when he received the divine directive.

I took the bus all the way into Canada, through a skeptical customs, before the pass expired. Life is full of miracles.

6

From that small Canadian village where the ‘Hound left me, I hitched for perhaps a week or ten days up through British Columbia to the AlCan and into the Yukon Territory. And that is where the driver worried about grizzlies picked me up.

"If you see a grizzly," he said, "you should stop. Don’t move a muscle."

I looked at him expectantly.

"Ninety percent of the time," he continued, it won’t do anything. But grizzlies can be jumpy, and they have terrible eyesight, so if they catch your scent they might be startled and charge after you.

"If it does, don’t move a muscle unless you are on a hill. If you’re on a hill, run DOWN the hill. Bears are built for running up hill, and sometimes they’ll fall down if they try to go downhill too fast. Might lose interest then, and you’ll be running as fast as you can go.

"But if you’re not on a hill, don’t run. Bears are as fast as horses, and much faster than you are. It’ll catch you if you run. No, stand still as you can. The bear will run right up to you, and you’ll be scared to see something so huge coming after you.

"But don’t move. Ninety percent of the time, the bear will stop and look you over, and then they’ll sometimes just leave you alone..."

I wasn’t liking the percentages even if they did seem stacked in my favor what with all those ninety percents, but I didn’t say anything to this. There was obviously more coming.

"But if the bear doesn’t leave you alone, it’s going to come up and start batting you around. Don’t move! Play dead.

"This won’t be easy because the bear will be crunching on your bones and tossing you around. Blood will be spurting everywhere. But eventually the bear will stop crunching on you. Then, ninety percent of the time it will bury you unless it’s really hungry. Hopefully you’ll still be alive.

"Bears prefer meat that’s a little ripened up, so they like to bury their food for a few days, dig it up and then eat it."

Could there be a bright spot to this advice, I wondered.

"But you’ll be long gone when it comes back, of course" he said, not elaborating on how I’d dig myself up and be gone with all my bones "crunched up" and my blood everywhere but where it should be.

"Hopefully," he added.

7

No wonder he didn’t want to leave me there, and by the end of that grisly warning I was a little ambivalent about the whole thing myself. But I couldn’t believe God had given me that bus ticket just so I could get crunched by a grizzly bear. Although of course there’s no percentage in trying to figure out what God is up to most of the time.

In any event, there was no real choice involved, so when he dropped me off at around noon I got out as bravely as I could.

Kluane Lake on a summer afternoon and evening! Is there a more beautiful spot in the whole wide world? If so, I’ve never seen it.

The lake itself was a sheet of silver in the distance, surrounded by lofty mountains covered in forests. You could see birds–herons or cranes I guessed–in and around the lake, and the air was filled with the sounds of primeval life. I’d heard there were bighorn sheep in the mountain peaks, but I was too far away to see anything. The air was warm, but with a hint of the chill to come that night. I was a hundred miles away from anything like a city, the AlCan practically an unpaved road stretching into the distance.

Kluane Lake! Ahead of me lay more highway, endless miles of muskeag (foot-deep moss atop the clay and tundra), and the splendor of Alaska. Beyond that, more school, a career, love, and children, among other things. But if there ever was one moment in my life when I encountered perfection–wild beauty unmatched and unlimited–that was it. Kluane Lake. The most beautiful place in the world. To be there, to be young, healthy and strong on that day.

That, I believe, is why God sent me that ticket. And how do you repay such a debt?

Camping

1

I’ve been hiking in places where you could go for weeks without seeing another person. Of course places and hikes like that pose their own logistics problems–packing two weeks of food is no small thing, plus a tent and sleeping gear, and it all adds up to fifty pounds very quickly. Such a hike is not for everyone, and the people you do see are a sort of clan. Usually young fit and solitary.

"Car camping" is a different sort of experience. What we did was snag the camping gear (or most of it), zip to the grocery store for hot dogs and other high-bulk, low-value foods, and hit the road. Total packed weight: about 400 pounds!

Our chosen camping place is about seventy miles away from the city, and we drive it in slightly over an hour. Halfway there and I remember what I forgot to bring. It’s always something, and always something important. This time it’s sleeping bags or any other sleeping gear. This could seem like a problem considering that our tent is made entirely of mosquito netting with a plastic floor. But it’s okay because it’s hot, and it’s not going to get cool tonight. Still, a disappointing oversight from the purist’s point of view. The memory of our first use of the tent under slightly different circumstances lingers–-that time was in autumn, and we did not know that the tent was lacking nylon siding. It frosted that night, and we woke with ice on our noses. We won't have that problem tonight.

And at least I’ve got everything I need to make coffee.

2

Upon our arrival, we sign up for our camping space and drive over to it. I set up the tent and send the boys off for firewood. I am not a fan of campfires, marshmallows, or any of the rest of it, but the boys consider "camping" and "toasted marshmallows" synonymous. So we must have a fire, and this, in the opinion of the boys, will require no more than about ten, five-foot long sticks of about thumb thickness. I send them back for more, and twice again, reminding them each time to avoid poison ivy. Since our campsite is surrounded by poison ivy, it’s easy to show them what to avoid.

I finish putting up the tent. We go off ostensibly for more wood, and we do get some, but I bring my camera and take about fifty shots on the way. We find some very interesting bugs and a couple of armsful of wood. If I were alone, this would be a good time for that cup of coffee. Instead, we’re off to swim. Two brings his soccer ball to play volleyball in the pool, and it turns out he does get the ball in the water for a few minutes, much to my surprise. Most of the time One practices kicking the ball against the pool fence. But he allows himself to be persuaded to enter the water every so often. He’s really a nice boy, a lovely character. Despite himself sometimes.

After swimming I finally get that cup of coffee and settle into cooking our supper. I wrap the corn on the cob in aluminum foil and put it into the campfire, open the can of beans with my pocket knife (the can opener being the second forgotten item). No sweat. I put them in the frying pan and onto the stove. After the beans are started I put the hotdogs in the beans and let them cook together. I know nutritious food, and this ain’t it, but we’re eating like kings. I so-inform the boys.

"Does the emperor of China eat like this?" Two wants to know. (One quietly rolls his eyes at the question, but it delights me.)

"Actually, China doesn’t have an emperor any more, honey."

"Well, do they have a king then?"

"No..."

"Well, what do they have?" he asks, interrupting my answer.

"I think they call him a ‘Premier’ these days, but he might as well be called a king or emperor" I admit.

"I’d feel more like a king if someone else was eating some of my food, too." [This is the point of his line of questioning, none of it accidental.]

"You mean a poison-tester?" I ask, knowing.

"Ummmm-hmmmm."

That’s life with Two. He questions and assimilates with astonishing speed.

3

After dinner we go back to the pool for a while. Two has made some friends and loves the water. One seizes the opportunity to practice kicking a little more against the fence. It’s what he likes best in the world, and it’s good to see him enjoy himself. He’s intense, but this is light-hearted play.

I say I’m only going to let them stay at the pool half an hour, but really we stay over an hour. We frequently bend time in this way, in either direction. The important thing is the warning. My kids require a warning, however arbitrary. Forget the warning and they’ll be off-balanced and sad; apply the warning however whimsically and they will adjust. We leave the pool only with extreme reluctance this time. One might say "resistence". But we finally make our way back to the tent.

It's bed time.

4

The night air is alive with sounds, and it has indeed gotten cold. So now my oversight regarding the bed clothes could be a problem.

Luckily, we have a spare tent. I bring this second tent, which is perfect for when it is raining, because our main tent is nothing but mosquito netting and thus cannot keep out the rain or cold. But ripstock nylon makes a fairly comfortable blanket, and I put it over the boys as we set up the bed. Then I lay the woolen blanket that I always carry in the car on top of that. It’s not much for three of us, but it should probably do.

At first the boys carefully demarcate each side of the bed and insist that each stay on his own half, but within minutes they have snuggled together under the makeshift covers, all rigors of division forgotten.

This coming together fills me with unbounded joy. After the day’s struggles, after the playing with, wrestling, arguing is all over, they settle into a heap of family. How do you give your children this bond? How do you instill it into them? Just because it is natural, as I believe it is, does that make it in any way inevitable?

My sense is that it is not inevitable, but that it is actually rather fragile and too easily lost. At least in children who are not together constantly, as mine are not. I often feel a conflict between my desires and duties in this respect, but it is not the conflict you might expect. My desire is to coddle and comfort, expressing only my powerful feelings of love and affection, and smoothing over every conflict. My duty is to make them into effective and happy adults, and this requires a certain amount of discipline and stern words.

Number One asks whether it’s okay to look out the tent at the stars as they go to sleep. Going them one better than mere permission, I open up the top flaps, which are the only part of the tent that are not mosquito netting (other than the floor). Now the stars are open to their sight, although mostly what they see are trees.

I’d forgotten this was the fifth of July, and everybody with left over fireworks is using them now. It feels like we're in the middle of a gunfight with all the flashes and bangs. Between the various explosions, which are even more numerous than they were last night, we can hear tree frogs, crickets, a distant train. And now a sound from my childhood, the deep booming croaking of large bullfrogs. How I loved that sound as a boy! For my city-dwelling sons, some of these sounds are alien. Nevertheless, I require them to go to bed and try to sleep. It’s late now, and they’ll be too tired tomorrow if they can’t get to sleep.

5

I repeatedly have to tell the boys to stop talking to each other and go to sleep, but I am not harsh about it. I. am deeply mindful of the comfort they derive from each other as they drift off to sleep amidst the strange sounds of the country night. I remember how much comfort I felt from the proximity of my brothers in similar circumstances. No matter where we were, the knowledge that one or more of my brothers was there with me made everything okay.

I’ve been reading Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain lately. I’ve read most of the works of Clemens, from Connecticut Yankee to the Literary Essays and loved them all. In many ways, though, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are the best in my opinion. They are great stories of their times, but they reverberate a century after being written because they capture the timeless essence of boyhood so well. Of childhood.

I have been quite surprised to think that my children are so Tom Sawyeresque, in fact. My life has in many ways been so unconventional that it’s surprising to find that so much of my children’s lives could have been taken from Tom Sawyer or painted by Norman Rockwell. They are boys. American boys. Clemens got the archetype without the schlock, Rockwell got it too in his way.

Number One was telling me about how much he enjoyed riding in a pickup truck the other day.

"You know how to do it, dad?" he asked.

"What, ride in a pickup?"

"Yeah." he said. "It isn’t so great inside the driver’s part, but it’s really cool to be in the back."

6

That brought back memories of my own childhood. We rode in my uncle’s pickup truck, about seven or ten of us in the back. And yes, riding with the wind blowing through our hair and in our face was about the coolest thing there was. It was hot–-it was always summer back then–- and the coolest thing was to ride the pickup from my cousin’s house over to my grandparents (or vice versa). Somehow it was always a special thing. I don’t think anyone worried then, as I do now, that riding in the back of a pickup might actually be dangerous.

It seems to us that our own lives move more or less in a straight line, and it can feel as though the world is changing with us in the same ways. That the world is "growing old." But this is not so. Our children remind us that some things are cyclical. They never really get old or stop happening, at least not in the human scale of time. Like certain rites of passage of childhood. Bullfrogs croaking in the summer nights, stars filling the night sky, children chasing lightning bugs. Fathers and sons looking into each other’s eyes with adoration, brothers giving each other comfort as they drift off to sleep. These are things that never really go away, and if the world is old with us adults at least it’s renewed with our children.

And so I sit outside the tent, now listening to the night sounds alone. And to the night sounds has been added the sweetest sound of all. The deep, slow, regular breathing of my children. Asleep, and safe.