Dirt Work (18 page)

The forecast was shit. Today bad, tomorrow worse. NOAA predicted heavy rain all week. But a hitch was scheduled. Across Orca Inlet, work needed doing, a landing on a beach we'd never been to, and the weather could always clear. (Ha.) In Cordova, canceling plans because of rain meant you'd never go anywhere. We all wanted out of town for a few days, craving a break from the monotony of day work, wet rides in damp trucks, the nickel-and-dime tasks that can spend a week. A hitch beckoned, and since hitches were infrequent, it was welcome, even in the rain.

So, we went. And it rained. Water dripped in tin pans under the tarp's edge so fast, it took ten minutes to collect our daily drinking water. It poured for five straight days. It never let up for even a second, not a tiny lapse before a new squall blew in, not a general lessening in the middle of the night, not a slivery break in the billowing gray above us, not one single shred of unfiltered light. It seemed as though nothing had ever mattered as much as weather. The sound of rain was a constant drone, an aural Chinese water torture. Every day I thought about quiet.

The work was bloody wet—hiking through thick brush, sometimes over our heads, we ran chainsaws all day with arms above our waists and pointing upward so the water funneled down the cuffs of our raincoats, soaking the armpits of our poly-pro tops. At dinner under the tarp, we peeled off rubber raingear and hung it from the guy lines, not to dry, impossible at 40 degrees in saturated air, but at least to air out the odor of an Italian meatball sub on a moldy bun. After scarfing down cold stew from cans, too chilly and numb to bother with real cooking and dishes, we'd take hot drinks to our tents, shucking the fly from where it was plastered to tent skin like a wet T-shirt worthy of Fort Lauderdale. Inside, we swapped wet Capilene for the drier pair, kept in a Ziploc inside the sleeping bag, somehow still damp. The wetter set went to the bottom of the bag (synthetic—a down bag would kill you) in hopes of drying it slightly before it went back on in the morning. The temptation to keep the dry pair on was great at 7 a.m., just to prolong relative comfort, but after work when there was nothing dry to change into, you'd regret it. We pulled on the damp stuff, each howling from our separate tents.

The ten-hour workdays passed in a hallucinogenic state borne from no-end-in-sight and the dreary brain of borderline hypothermia. We tried not to look at our watches, the faces too fogged to decipher anyway. On day five, our foreman motored across the inlet from Cordova, the lights of which had been mercifully obscured from us by a ridgeline between camp and the beach. As we loaded our gear to the gunnels and boarded the puddled Whaler, Steve told us this low-pressure system had dumped a record amount of rain in four days, which is saying something for a place like Cordova, whose regular rainy days would set records anywhere else. And to top that, said Steve, we were the only ones in the field all week, the only ones in the entire district who went out—the cabin restoration crew, the wildlife techs with planned oystercatcher surveys, everybody else bailed. He wasn't out here, Steve, but his crew was—
we
were—and he was proud. We'd been crabby and wet and miserable for five days, but by the time we pulled away from the beach, damn it, we were proud, too, and by the time we entered the harbor and docked the boat in its slip, by the time we heaved our sopping gear to the dock in fish-gut pools, we were high-fiving each other, stomping in puddles on the pier, arguing over what to get on our pizzas at the bakery whose warm glow beckoned across the jetty like a lighthouse calling sailors in from a storm.

Living in Cordova, I became a birder. Of course, I'd noticed birds before: admired fishing osprey on Montana lakes, listened for the call of the violet-green swallows nested in the eaves of our West Glacier house. Still, except for the obvious sightings anyone would stop for, most birds passed above my radar. But when you hunker at the confluence of Prince William Sound and the Copper River Delta, you start to notice birds. How can you help it, in May, when more than twenty million individual birds pass above your head, when you get out of your truck at a trailhead to deafening birdsong, the air full of ruckus and symphony? Some birds in Cordova are resident (crows, which I'd never seen elsewhere in Alaska); others stay for the summer (noisy passerines who sing in midnight light); many more pass through quickly, bound for feeding grounds in the Arctic. Sandhill cranes and Canada geese travel in huge flocks, while others—eagles, ravens—hover singly, or in pairs. During spring migration, that many birds in one stretch of sky make a hell of a spectacle.

I didn't become a birder because of any special inclination to notice. I am missing that innate watcher's sense that my birding friends have. I don't have a life list or an Audubon membership. I can't identify many songs or wing profiles, I have no fancy binoculars, I know only a handful of Latin names. I became a birder because to not be a birder would have taken far more effort. Professionals or dedicated amateurs would scoff at my use of their label. But I don't know what else to call it. I'm a person who has learned, taught by birds themselves, to notice winged creatures. I am a birder because once I started watching—preening crossbill, sandpiper's leggy steps—I could no longer quickly look away.

In Cordova, trail crews carry guns. Pepper spray is fine and good, but Forest Service regulations require that, in salmon and bear country districts, you also pack heat. This seemed absurd, since I'd worked among bears in the mountains for years unarmed, and never felt vulnerable to impending death by tooth and claw. But, rules were rules. Extensive post-9/11 security paperwork granted us firearms clearance and our crew spent a day in the ranger station learning safety measures, how to clean the barrel, the difference between a rifle and shotgun. (We'd use both.) Our training culminated in target shooting at the firing range, for me the first time since grade school summer camp that I'd shouldered a weapon. The kick of the twelve-gauge beat the pants off my preteen rifle.

In spite of my sneer at the silly requirement, I had to admit that the shooting range was . . . fun. Gunpowdered air, rifled slugs in my pocket, the satisfaction of a hit target while
boom
echoed through the lot. Six of us lined up, all firing, emptying, loading, round after round, a racket I'd heard only in Hollywood wars. We logged a few hours at the range each month, and Trent, our cowboy ranch kid, laughed at Randy and me as we overcame our tendency to handle the weapon at arm's length like a venomous snake. At first, Randy took the gun tentatively, but by the second week he cocked it like a bandit and hooted with a fist in the air at a bull's-eye. Though Randy would've liked to be immune to the gun's charms, it seemed no one, not even a diffident “granola,” could resist the allure of firing off a shot.

Fun and games aside, even Trent in his NRA hat agreed that packing a shotgun on the trail—another eight-pound load to lug, awkward over pack straps, a shovel in the other hand, a chainsaw on the shoulder—was plain old ridiculous. Only certain wage grades could legally carry it, but Randy and I conceded it was even stupider for one of us to tote the gun when Trent, though a minor and the lowest on the totem pole, was the only one who could use it effectively in a pinch. We took the saws and Trent took the gun.

It wasn't clear exactly when that pinch would be. Not when we passed by the bears feeding on stream banks, oblivious to us, intoxicated by salmon. Not when we approached a beach for landing to find a bear on it; then we'd wait it out or moor elsewhere, not shoot. Certainly not if I was being bluff-charged by a bear I'd surprised. The prospect of dropping backpack and chainsaw, chambering a round, shouldering the butt, and finding any kind of accuracy with wet, cold fingers while a bear was charging seemed daft. In this situation a shotgun was a shortcut to confidence, a false one at that, side-swiping senses and alertness and notice. Gun strapped to your back, you moved faster, head down. It was easy to stop paying attention.

In the Tlingit's complex relationship with the grizzly, bear is cousin and the best way to head off conflict is to acknowledge him, speak to him with respect, and request co-existence. Such graciousness appealed to me, as did the advice, traced to several American Native lineages, that a woman lift her shirt to a charging bear because her breasts will indicate her sex and, since bears and humans have intermarried, remind him of their kinship. It sounds naïve to modern ears, tuned as they are to the realism of science and the pragmatism of food chain, but the tenor of these old ways of being with animals indicates a critical understanding about interconnection: vulnerability need not always trigger fear.

I wasn't offering to strip my shirt to save my crew, but if charged, I knew I would wield pepper spray with more confidence, and if that didn't work, could curl into a ball and take my chances easier than I could fire an efficient shot under duress. No part of me wants to die in a bear attack, a martyr to wilderness. A co-worker in Montana had been badly mauled by a grizzly and his scars and stories would have knocked the romance out of Alexander Supertramp and Timmy Treadwell at once. Still. If it came down to it, I'd rather exit this world made humble, not fumbling with a violence I don't fully comprehend. Maybe if I were a marksman, I'd feel differently. An old coot in a bar mocks me; he'd bring a pistol to a high school graduation. “Wait till yer charged, honey,” he drawls. I guess I'll have to.

In any case, such nuance was outside the agency's purview, and in the Forest Service, rules are made to be kept, not argued over. The shotgun came along, deadweight, a John Wayne prop that failed to convey what was very clear to me and my crew: peaceful passage in bear country is far more dependent on the individual bear and how you meet it than the weapon of the day.

Wild is noise in a quiet space, a whoop in a churchyard, and wild is silence amid bustle, a hush to the burble of small talk, barrage muted. Wild is giddy and weeping, kicked up heels, and also a monastic pacing, back and forth, tempo unvaried, destination in. There is wild in storm, and in the eye of storm, and also, in the steady beat of rain.

Sea otters witnessed our daily commute. On bucket-dump days and limpid still mornings, otters floated behind the Whaler on their backs, tails poked out of the water like a whale's fluke, poised in what resembled nothing so much as a friendly wave. Luxuriously thick, otter fur can have up to a million hairs per square inch. It's spiky when wet, but despite constant immersion, otters never look soaked. A sea otter seems complex, its whiskered face dear enough to inspire children's plush toys, yet inquisitive, as if it doesn't miss a trick. An otter isn't all cuddles. On the hunt, it smashes the exoskeletons of crabs and urchins, and rips apart a sea lion carcass with ferocity. Two young males were observed having “rough sex” with a dead baby seal, eating it when finished. (Such natural history rarely makes it into the toy store.)

Notwithstanding the sex, as with most animals we're drawn to, the qualities we love best in otters remind us of ourselves. For one, they are highly individual, showing dietary preferences from animal to animal, and they are a somewhat rare example of a mammal that uses and hoards tools, in their case, rocks to bash open the shells of their prey. Some otters even save a particular rock for regular use, tucking it into a skin pouch under the armpit, as handy as my favorite pen slid into pocket.

Although they also exhibit solitary behavior, sea otters are social animals, grouping in rafts of a hundred on a stormy sea, eating off each others' bodies like a floating dinner table, dozing on their backs with pups asleep on their chests. Otters make remarkable eye contact. I passed one in a boat that watched me, so dispassionate yet intent, it seemed to discern something that I could not. Was my paddling awkward? My fly unzipped? Had I dropped my sunglasses in the water? It drifted out of view, taking the friendly smirk. If it's true, as Emerson said, that every word was once an animal, for their complexity, sea otters must be the root of many words.

The northern reach of the Pacific Coastal rainforest extends into the southern end of the Chugach National Forest, and its trees are the biggest ones on Alaska's main peninsula: Sitka spruce, hemlock, the occasional yellow cedar. Log work had always been an integral part of trailwork, and the tools and techniques were the same, but with trees of that size, the possibilities were new. On forest projects, we dropped trees for bridge stringers and milled them into decking for puncheon and running plank. To cross a narrow span, we could use a single log, snapping a chalk line up the middle and ripping it with a saw to make a Gadbury-style bridge, or adze a planed walking surface easily wide enough for a hiker, perhaps two children abreast. Imagine a tree this large—like the stumps in Northwest lore, big enough to build a house in—sufficient, not a component, not a material. A structure in and of itself. Which, of course, is also what it was before we cut it down.

Fifty miles down the Copper River from the Chitina Bridge, Gabe's crew had been out for four days on a work patrol, most of them wet. One afternoon, the sun gave a timid showing through clouds, warming the gravel bar where the rafts pulled out, shining in stripes on camp setup chores. One boat was still in the water when the sound of a plane droned overhead, a fixed-wing circling low, then lower, until a beach landing seemed imminent. Everyone looked up and a small package hurtled from the sky, landed on the beach with a bounce, and popped into the water. No one knew what it was, but delivered that way, as if chucked by the gods, it seemed important. A raft guide jumped into a boat, flipped the bowline off the mooring log, and rowed out to the package in one motion, before any one else had even thought to move. He scooped up the parcel—a brown-papered brick swathed in duct tape—and caught the tail end of the eddy that dumped him back into camp. His was a truly graceful feat, the motions instinctive and precise, but it was glossed over quickly in the excitement. The crew huddled around while Steve tore the package open. He thought maybe it was his wife, Donna, with their pilot friend. Her gift? A half-gallon container of softening chocolate ice cream. The rafter who made the quick grab became the day's hero. The thought of that carton carried downstream by the current, never tasted, was almost unbearable. Steve tore the cardboard flaps open and Gabe brought spoons from the kitchen kit and they thoroughly chilled themselves, inhaling ice cream in the 45-degree mist.