Group Death
After we made it through the Nizina canyon, a narrow water way with cliffs towering a hundred feet above us, swift grey-brown water with whiplash eddies, we entered an expansive valley filled with the braided pleats of melting glaciers. Waters colored with compressed age collided, shaping the miles. We put paddles together and grasped hands and went from individuals to one, a flotilla bound by fingers and injuries. We sang, shared food, rebounded from the occasional tree floating in our path. And after, teeth chattering, we let go, each of us going a different direction, cresting different waves, taking on our own water.
The next day we laid over where the Nizina and the Tebay rivers conjoin. We built a fire as the sun awoke, tossing in rocks, building it high, sending out in fours to collect a massive mound of wood.
The sun never truly leaves during the Alaskan summer; dusk gets smeared thin, its purple lasting until morning. We dug deep in shifts and hoisted a rain-fly cover. As the light changed and the rain began, we transferred the rocks and sat in our sauna, steaming, sweating, contemplating endings. And then the purple lightened and our stiff fingers pushed our sleeping bags down our bodies. We struck the tents. Pulled down our tarps. Packed our bags. Strapped them to our boats. And finally, before we paddled away, we reversed yesterday’s labor, replacing sand and stone until the sauna and fire were erased from the land, leaving trace only in our palimpsest memory.
For as long as my felt-sense remembers, we’ve been an us, traversing the world’s largest national park: the Wrangell-St Elias range. 4 weeks, 300 miles, no showers. We wake in conversation and sleep in shared struggle. We started as nine, pared to seven, bush-planes with bloated tundra tires twice landing on non runways, joyously back up to eight at an unexpected reunion.
Alaska is just as big without an us, but echoes take longer to return.
There is a certain kind of lackluster rain in Anchorage that spreads the melancholy of group death through the medians and gutters and up the soles to linger in the socks. Waist deep glacial stream crossings are substituted for littered puddle jumps. Group song with cell phones. Bear calls with silence. I am surrounded by sounds and smells and most of all things I do not want, but that want me.
The great modern allure of wilderness is perhaps its indifference.
Civilization is insecure, and everything in it is needy, always demanding: The mark of a modern object is its nagging measurement of my attention to it. I am hunted here, tiny hooks of convenience catching at my mind. The lines are strong, and soon I’m caught: the physical world receding along with the people in it.
Nature’s self confidence is the uncluttered clarity of mind I feel when in it.
Group death came quietly, without sound, without recognition. It had already happened by the time we were on the bus to the airport, by the time we shared a final meal at expedition headquarters. As soon as our phones touched our hands, elsewhere and what won. Post-reality dissolved the chrysalis we had built over bog and pass, and so we went by the solvent of convenience.
