Authors: Will Hobbs
L
ONG AFTER THE OTHERS HAD GONE
to their tents, I stayed by the campfire. Gradually, around midnight, the fire flickered out and the last of the sunset faded into stars.
I lingered, listening to the explosive breath of the whales feeding just offshore. Like steam bursting from pipes, the sound came every few minutes from the darkness. The whales put me in a trance that stirred my deepest undercurrents. I needed to go to Hidden Falls like I needed air, water, or food.
I stood up, stretched, and sighed. At my tent, the last one down the beach, I pulled off my tall rubber boots and crawled inside. Since it was a matter of waiting only a few hours until first light, I didn't bother to take off my thermal underwear, the heavy socks, my wool shirt, or the outer layers of synthetic fleeceâpants, vest, and jacket. I lay on the sleeping bag with my hands behind my head, and I asked myself out loud, “Are you sure about this?”
The floatplanes would arrive midmorning. By noon we would be back in Sitka. By midafternoon I'd be back in Juneau. Twenty-four hours later, I'd be back home in
Colorado, regretting. The answer to my question was an ominous “Yes.”
By two-thirty in the morning, dawn was already glowing pink and violet. The sky was mostly mare's tails. A few clouds were beginning to gather among the snow-streaked summits of Admiralty Island, the massive landmass across Chatham Strait. It looked like our group's lucky streak of blue skies was ending. Monica had kept telling us that we were getting away with murder. She was always saying that the weather could turn on a dime.
I told myself there was nothing to worry about. I was used to watching the weather in Colorado. Anything serious arrived a day or two behind high clouds.
I pulled on my rubber boots and crawled outside. My kayak was right there, safely out of reach of the high tide. I stepped into my spray skirt, cinched it around my waist, and reached for my life jacket and paddle.
Kayak at my hip, I walked around a granite boulder and down to a tiny beach that couldn't be seen from the other tents. The crunching of the gravel under my boots sounded strange, as if it wasn't me doing this.
The beach was steep; the tide was close to fully out. Careful not to slip, I eased through exposed beds of blue black mussels. Just as I had figured, I would be mostly paddling on the slackâthe last hour of low tide going out and the first hour of high tide coming in. During the slack, the current is all but done flowing one direction and barely beginning to flow back the other. Paddling is easy, pretty much like paddling on a lake.
On either side of the slack, the tides ran with huge currents in and out of the straits between these islands. The currents ran as strong as the Colorado River ran back home, close to five miles an hour. For the last six days I'd been figuring it all out, how the tides made the water behave in these crazy passages, and I was certain that I understood.
My head told me this wasn't dangerous. After all, I'd paddled Ruby and Horsethief Canyons, just downriver from home, at least a dozen times. My mother, an expert kayaker, said I was ready to take on the next canyon downstream, Westwater. The rapids down there included Skull, which was hair whitewater, real serious.
My mother had a permit for both of us to paddle Westwater in September. That was saying a lot, even if the water wasn't going to be as pushy as it would have been in June.
This morning I would see only flat water. The thing was, I was a long, long way from home, and I was going to be paddling alone.
The guard hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I stepped into six inches of water, floated the kayak, then lowered myself into the cockpit. I checked my watch. It was 2:45
A.M.
No one would know I was gone. I'd be back by five-thirty at the latest. Julia and Monica would be the first to rise, around seven. “Sleep-in day,” they'd announced at the end of the campfire. Everyone had cheered.
I secured my spray skirt around the rim of the cockpit, buckled my life jacket and cinched it tight.
Those guard hairs were still tingling, and now my head was telling me I shouldn't be doing this.
My heart was telling me otherwise. I started paddling, following a narrow opening through the forest of kelp skirting the shore. Then I dropped the rudder and headed south under the cliffs, keeping to the outer edge of the seaweed beds. For good or bad, I was committed.
I soon passed under Graystone Cliff. Gulls by the hundreds were screaming high above, no matter that day was barely beginning. A whir of wings over my left shoulder, and I turned to see a bald eagle flying by with a herring in each of its taloned fists. A tapping sound up ahead alerted me to a sea otter floating on its back and smashing a sea urchin against the stone it carried on its chest. Close by, another one was rafting a baby on its belly.
I didn't have a map, but I didn't really need one. I knew every place name and the shape of the coastline along these few miles by heart.
Staying close to the shore as possible, I hugged the outer edge of the kelp beds the way our group had done all week. The soaring cliffs and the mountainsides above rose straight out of the sea. The water below was the darkest shade of green, how deep I couldn't begin to guess. I remembered how close to shore the whales had fed the night before, and rapped my knuckles every few minutes on the kayak's hull. That was no pretty picture, forty tons of whale coming up underneath me.
Dawn was in full display by now, with a blanket of red cirrus flaming orange and red across the sky. “Red
sky at morning,” I said aloud. “Sailor, take warning.”
Keep your nerve, I told myself. You're on a very brief mission.
I'd reached North Point. I could see the rocks offshore that had been indicated on the map. Once I rounded those rocks, I'd be paddling into Kasnyku Bay. I'd been making good time, incredibly good time. It was 3:15
A.M.
With firm pressure on the left pedal, I began to steer away from the safety of the kelp beds. The pedal for each foot was connected by a loop of cord to the rudder at the stern. With a river kayak, you did all the steering with your paddle, but after six days in the sea kayak I'd come to appreciate steering with my feet. It was already second nature.
In the early morning light, the glistening boulders that heaved out of the sea off North Point looked like a pod of petrified whales. We had rounded many of these rocky points during the trip. The water was always choppy out there. Clearing the rocks forced you to go a little way out into the strait, which is where you didn't want to be.
Hyperalert, I started into the open water. As I rounded the point, there was only the slightest wind and the slightest chop. Still, my breath was coming faster and my adrenaline was up. No reason to get excitedâin a few minutes I had cleared the point and was gliding into the calm waters of Kasnyku Bay.
Immediately I could see the creek at the back of the bay. At the foot of a steep mountainside, it plunged out
of the forest onto a strip of grassy tidal flats. I strained to spot Hidden Falls in the timber beyond, but all I could see through the trees was a hint of sheer gray cliffs.
As I paddled toward the rear of the bay, I let my mind drift across the years. My father had been hiking down from Hidden Lake with a geologist when it happened. They were making their way down the cliffs by the side of Hidden Falls.
My father had a geologist along because he was looking for a certain kind of limestone terrain called karst. Karst is known for ravines, sinkholes, underground streams, and especially for caves. My father was hoping to find caves on Baranof Island.
Their search had taken them from tidewater on the west side of the island, across its volcano-studded backbone, to tidewater on the east side. We found out later that they didn't find any caves; they didn't even find karst. Now that I'd seen for myself how the forests on these islands blanketed the bedrock underneath them, I could understand what they'd been up against.
My father, Alex Galloway, was an archeologist, a paleontologist, and a flintknapper. He was crazy about the past, especially about the migrations of human beings long before recorded history. He'd been to Africa and worked with the Leakeys, but his big passion in life was the Americas. Even when he was in college, my father had a hunch that people had been in North and South America for a whole lot longer than the experts thought.
I beached the kayak and dragged it across the flats
and up above the high tide line. I drank from my water bottle and checked the time. It was 3:31
A.M.
and broad daylight. It had taken me only forty-six minutes so far. I touched the tiny cedar paddle at my neck. There was time, but I had better hurry if I was going to make it back to camp before the changing of the tide.
T
HE ROAR WAS IN MY EARS
as I bounded up the bedrock alongside the creek. I turned a corner into cold wind and spray. There was Hidden Falls, making a spectacular plunge over the full height of the cliffs.
Two thirds of the way up, there was the narrow ledge he must have crossed so he could stand next to the plummeting water. I could picture my father resting his backpack against a tree and starting across the face of the cliff.
One little slip. One fatal mistake. His world ended, and mine and my mother's was changed forever.
Why did you have to do that? Why couldn't you play it safe, like the geologist?
My mother always said that my father was adventurous, curious, full of the joy of life: “a man whose equal comes along rarely.”
Through the rainbow mist, I could see him falling. All that I really have of his voice and his eyes and the rest of him are the old home videos, not that I can bear to watch them.
For me, he never quit falling.
Falling right there at my feet. Right there.
I started crying, just weeping and bawling. Fourteen years old and crying like a baby. It hurt. It just hurt so bad. It was like the world was wringing out every organ in my body and stomping on what was left.
My eyes fell to the bedrock. There was a large dark stain on the smooth rock at my feet. I let myself imagine that it was his blood, that nine years of drenching rain hadn't washed it away.
I knelt and put my hand on the stain. I said, “I'm here.”
“Who is it?
” I could hear him asking.
“It's your son, Andy.”
“That's good,”
came his answer.
“I'm glad you came. Is your mother there too?”
I was so emotional, it didn't really feel like I was supplying his end of the conversation.
“I thought she would be, until a few months ago. Too many bills to pay. I saved up for this by sacking groceries and working at the museum.”
“Museum?”
“There's a dinosaur museum outside of Grand Junction, just off the interstate. I'm just as interested in the past as you. I've been hanging out with the paleontologists. I've been on some digs and found a lot of fossils. At first I helped out for free. Now I get paid for giving tours on weekends, believe it or not. I got interested in paleontology because of you.”
“I'll picture you as a dinosaur hunter, then.”
“No, I'm more interested in human history. What I
want to do most is finish what you started. Find the very first Americans.”
“Ah, wouldn't that be something, Andy. But not for my sake. That wouldn't be right.”
“For both of us,” I said. “For both of us.”
The
tok-tok-tok
of a raven brought me out of the spell. I began to scan the niches in the granite all around the base of the falls. Where would my mother have left the carving?
I'd heard her describe the spot; if only I could remember. There's a tree right above it, she'd said. She'd set the boat effigy on a tiny ledge she could barely reach on her tiptoes.
On the right-hand side of the falls, about fifteen feet above the bedrock, a tree had somehow taken root in the cracks. A stunted hemlock no more than eight feet tall had a foothold in the merest bit of dirt. Could that be the one?
At five foot nine, I was three inches taller than my mother. The ledge below the tree was within easy reach. I raised my hand and felt along it. Within seconds I felt the smooth touch of soapstone in my fingers.
My father's soapstone boat fit easily in one palm. It was just a simple carving of an open boat, an ancient skinboat. He had a theory that the first Americans didn't walk from Siberia, they paddled boats of sea mammal hides stretched over wooden frames.
I freed the tiny cedar canoe paddle from the rawhide loop around my neck and placed it inside the carving. I touched the little boat to my heart, then put it back on its ledge. “Good-bye,” I said.
I listened for his voice but heard only the roar of the falls. I turned and ran.
At the kayak, I checked my watch. It was 4:35. I had stayed longer than I should have. The slack was over, the tide had turned. I'd have to paddle back against the current.
The first mile, in the bay, wouldn't be a problem. The second mile, along the edge of the strait, would just take me longer. Monica and Julia might even be up when I got back. I could live with that if I had to.
I began to paddle across the bay. I looked around, wondering what was different. Everything, not just the time of day, had changed a little from before.
I couldn't put my finger on it.
I felt a chill go down my spine. Halfway across the bay, the spooky tingling at the back of my neck still wasn't going away.
“You're just scaring yourself,” I said aloud. The sound of the fear in my voice scared me a little more.
As I headed out of Kasnyku Bay, three harbor seals popped up and looked at me with their shy, gentle eyes. “Gotta jet,” I told them as I paddled swiftly by. They slipped back under water.
I'd just left the bay and was set to round North Point when it dawned on me how still the strait was. The bay had been the same way. Eerily still. That's what was different.
I looked around. There wasn't the slightest breath of wind in the trees, not a seabird to be seen. When had there been no birds, not even gulls? No raven croaking, no eagle screaming?
It was calm, uncannily calm. This was too much of a good thing.
Outside the bay there was a strong current. It was running against me but I was making progress. I paddled on, more and more eager to get back to the group and on my way home.
Home to Colorado, I thought. Mom waiting at the airport in Grand Junction. Tell her I visited Hidden Falls. Give her the humpback whale T-shirt I'm going to buy at one of the tourist traps in Sitka or Juneau. Talk her into burgers and fries on the way to the casa. Check in with the grandparents and see if the peaches are ripe. Check my e-mail. Call Derek and find out when soccer starts. See if he wants to do a piece of the Kokopelli Trail on our mountain bikes. Call Darcy and see if she still remembers me. Ask her how she did at the horse show in Durango. Listen to the new CD I burned just before I left home. Then crash in my own bed back in good old Orchard Mesa.
All I had to do was round the long string of granite boulders that stuck out in the strait. I had to clear the point before I could get back to hugging the seaweed beds along the shore.
I pushed on my right foot pedal; the rudder at the stern responded instantly. The nose of the kayak moved right, and now I was pointed toward the farthest rock.
Once I got around that rock and could dash back to the shore, I would feel a whole lot better. The thing is, it was taking much longer than it should have because I
was fighting the tide. It was just like paddling upriver, but I was strong. I could do it.
As I rounded the point, at my farthest from the shore, it struck.
Nothing I had ever seen before, not even in the canyonlands of Utah, had prepared me for wind that came on this strong and this suddenly.
One second I'd been paddling in that dead calm. Two heartbeats later I was fighting wind that was producing big swells right before my eyes.
My left foot pressed hard on the rudder pedal and I pointed the kayak toward the land. Toward safety.
Head down, I paddled hard. But now the wind was blowing violently, off Baranof Island and directly at me. Rollers were rising up right in front of me and the wind was blowing white water off their crests.
The waves were all coming toward me, sweeping away from the land. Ocean waves weren't supposed to do this. Ocean waves were supposed to come
in
to the shore.
So they aren't doing what you think they should, I told myself. Get over it.
Somehow I had to get through them.
I took a look and found the shore farther away than when I had rounded the point. I could fight the tide, but how was I going to fight this wind? No matter that I'd been paddling full bore, the land was slipping away, the wind was howling, and I was in a world of trouble.