walking down the icy dock for our 4:30AM departure
Beginning
4:00 AM. 9 degrees Farenheit. I lifted the sleeping kids out of their beds, already dressed in their outside gear, to walk down the squeaky snow of our driveway, under a full moon. Out of the streaky galley window, the glimpse of white on the crests of each wave wasn’t enough to stave off seasickness — for me or the kids. I passed the few hours trying to sleep, stretched out on the bench beneath one of Hig’s dad’s carvings. This was the fishing boat he’d worked for years when Hig was a child, going to fish cod the way it had for years. Scrambling over the icy rails into our packrafts was awkward, but doable, and we paddled to the shore of Dogfish Bay in a frigid, brightening dawn.
Ice falls graced the cliffs of Dogfish Bay
Human Scale
Our world now was Katmai, running and leaping and climbing over the boulders in his new neoprene boots. It was Lituya, still sleepy, riding on my back draped in all our extra insulation. It was a curious coyote, pausing to watch our lunch stop. It was mountain goats grazing on headlands, above spires of rock spread thickly with a frosting of rough salt ice from the recent storm. It was a packed full day that encompassed, in total, less than one percent of the journey we have planned.
Katmai clambering boulders at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula
My lists of logistics jumped from town to town, resupply spot to resupply spot, as if we might simply step from one to another: Nanwalek, Port Graham, Seldovia, China Poot, Vosnesenska, Homer… Williamsport, Douglas River, Sukoi Bay. Which things go in which box? Who do we talk to in this town or that? Where do we send the bear fence, the summer tent? How much food from A to B?
To prepare, I must tackle the whole of that 800 miles, every day of that 4 months, holding it all in my head. On the shore of Dogfish Bay, all of that fell away. The inlet seemed so vast, and the trip suddenly so much bigger than I’d imagined. At the same time, it seemed so small, and so simple — nothing more than the boulder before my feet.
The kids look out at the ocean on one of our many climbs over headlands between Dogfish Bay and Nanwalek.
Frustration and Enthusiasm
“Why do we never do anything easy?” Hig asked, trying to drive wooden stakes into the icy forest floor, in the spot we’d retreated to after abandoning a steep and icy traverse made extra-slippery by a dusting of powder snow.
Katmai runs ahead with great enthusiasm, at the beginning of our journey around Cook Inlet
Katmai expressed his frustration by asking when the tent would be up, over and over again in a whining voice. Lituya cried as she struggled to understand the new routine. Hig was right. Even this first tiny step — following the exposed and complicated coast on the tip of the Kenai Peninsula in late March with two toddlers — wasn’t easy. There was already gear broken, stuff we realized we should have done differently, and a list of things to swap out, repair, or replace in Seldovia.
Looking down at our tent on Johnson Creek Beach
But that was just the first night. By the second, Lituya had stopped asking to go back to the van, and started asking about our “tent home,” when she wasn’t asking to walk the beach or climb the rocks herself. Katmai was as pumped up from the lead up to this journey as we were, and literally hit the ground running (at least when we could convince him to pretend to be a fast 2-footed prehistoric creature, rather than a slower 4-footed one). There have been difficult scrambles over headlands and boulders, sleet squalls, and cold nights. And there have been amazing scrambles over headlands and boulders, between twisted trees and pools filled with anemones. There have been sunny afternoons hunting fossils on the beach and eating popcorn popped over the fire. We’re getting back into the swing of an alternate way of life. We do a major expedition every year and a half or so. Even our two year old has done this before.
Nanwalek store and Mount Bede
Neighbors
“She looks just like her grandma,” Mary said in Port Graham, looking at Lituya as she devoured a pile of grilled salmon bellies.
Dede spent years working with Port Graham and Nanwalek as part of the alcoholism prevention program, and it seemed that everyone we ran into in either village remembered her fondly. For all the time I’ve spent in Seldovia over the years, and all the time I’ve spent walking into villages around the state, I’d never been to either of the two villages that are our closest neighbors. The connections are there, though. We talked to people who remembered when Hig had walked there as a child with a group of local kids. A man who showed us old family photos as his brother fed us bidarkis, including pictures of our next-door neighbors in Seldovia.
Oil rig parked in Port Graham for the winter
Our children ran and played with the local kids and opened gifts of easter toys. We talked with their parents, about the aging and shrinking Port Graham, and the young and growing Nanwalek — and what might happen when a road and a shared airport bridged the four miles between them.
coralline algae in a tidepool near Nanwalek
Not-home
We are home now, and I am typing this from my yurt in Seldovia. And we are not home, still just barely beginning an expedition, camped on the beach, and not even bringing our kids back to their own toys or beds. Headed off again Thursday afternoon, after a potluck bonfire tonight.
Katmai points out a snail fossil on 4th of July Creek Beach
Lituya riding a “wood Apatosaurus”
Katmai’s shot: his own upside down face
Katmai’s shot: looking out from the trees
The Laura S. steams away after dropping us in Dogfish Bay, headed out for cod.
Katmai moves through the obstacles in the forest