DENALI PARK JOURNAL, PART 2
NOTES FROM A RESIDENCY (2009)
Day 6. Woke up to heavy rain, low clouds and not much prospect for change, but hey—this is the park! So Nancy, Ben, and I drove west, hoping for something different, and we got it—snow. Heading over Polychrome Pass, rain turned to sleet and we could see the snow-level on the mountains dropping. The road wasn’t bad, though, and we continued out to Eielson Visitors’ Center, seeing along the way a mother grizzly playing in the snow with her single cub. They wrestled and rolled around in the frosty white stuff, delighted with each other, and excited by the snow.
At Eielson we walked into a snowball fight involving some visiting kids and the bus dispatcher. He took shelter in his office fort, making gleeful forays out to return fire. Fog and snow shifted around us on our walk and we had only scattered glimpses of the massive peaks nearby. On the way back, snow having let up, we hiked near Stoney Creek and came on a fresh-looking pile of bear scat and, nearby, a stretch of ripped up ground where the grizzly apparently went after a ground squirrel. Seeing a few square yards of earth gouged and torn apart, big rocks tossed aside like ping-pong balls—a thorough thrashing of the region—gave a very different perspective from the playful wrestling of that mother and cub of the power and menace of a bear. We headed quickly back to the car.
Day 7. We hiked at Tattler Creek, noting wildflowers and ringing our bear-bells. The creek gets its name from the wandering tattler, a rare bird that breeds here. We saw no bears, but unfortunately, we saw no tattlers either. I hiked into a rugged side-canyon, looking for dinosaur footprints, and saw many possible ‘maybes,’ but no definite prints.
We crossed the stream and climbed to an open spot where we could see lots of Dall sheep. A film-maker was carrying his camera and tripod up-slope to get into position to shoot them. Hunters of this sort are common in the park, but no guns are permitted, not till this November when, thanks to the NRA, the rules will change. At that point the park will become less wild and more dangerous.*
We ate lunch on a flowery hill with excellent views of sheep hanging out where the high tundra meets the rockface. On the way back, we had to make another crossing of Tattler Creek. Following Nancy, I noticed that one of the rocks she stepped on had shifted slightly, so I was careful in placing a foot on it, but it shifted again, throwing me off balance. I’ve asked her if I could write that I “fell gracefully into the stream.” She replied: “You can say that if you like, but it would be a lie.”
On my hands and knees in three inches of icy water, I took stock.
A few minor scrapes, I thought, nothing big. But something was wrong with my left pinky. The middle section was out of line and it hurt quite a bit. I figured I might have to drive to the clinic in Healy, outside the park, to have it set, but as we were hiking out, I fiddled with the joint, and it slipped back into place. The pain quickly subsided.
Driving back to the cabin, at the far end of Sable Pass, Mt. McKinley was beautifully out, both summits sharp and clear, towering over the nearby hills. Though we’d been to the park many times, this impressive view was new to us.
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* Early in 2010, for the first time in park history, a visitor shot and killed a grizzly bear, claiming self-defense. The shooting took place near Tattler Creek.
Day 8. Nancy and Ben packed up to go and we drove to the Teklanika campground and hiked alternately through the woods and along the gravel bars of the river. Moose sign and the tracks of (possibly) a wolf. We ate our lunch sandwiches out on a bar, then headed for the park entrance. On the way we saw a big moose cross the road. I stopped just as another even bigger male jogged across and moved off into the trees.
I dropped Nancy and Ben at their car, gassed up and drove back to the cabin.
Day 9. Today I was schedule to drive out to North Fork Lodge in Kantishna at the far end of the park to give a reading.
An elderly fox meandered ahead of me on the road as I headed up toward Polychrome Pass. Red smudged, with black along its sides and with ribs showing it wasn’t the handsomest of foxes. Pausing, it rubbed its muzzle on a scrap of something—perhaps some former meal—at the side of the road, not paying any attention to the car that followed impatiently on its tail.
Then, approaching the overlook, something amazing. The philosopher William James has written that one of the basic qualities of a mystical experience is that it cannot be captured in words. He may be right, but I felt I had to try.
With sun shearing through low clouds suddenly the view was transformed into glitter—everything golden, scintillant, and as the road crested over its top reality shifted toward vision. I felt transformed myself and checked my shaky hands on the steering wheel. But in my euphoria it seemed that if I went over the cliff’s edge nothing bad would happen. Physical and temporal boundaries dissolved. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced and felt like a culmination not just of this residency, but of everything in my life leading up to it. That intense, magical feeling lasted for about fifteen minutes, but it continued to reverberate through the day.
At Thoroughfare Pass, where I expected the grizzly family (brown cubs, blond mother) that I’d seen a few days earlier, instead—to my astonishment—a caribou herd, well over 100 of them, grazed and moved gradually west toward Eielson. Lots of young ones, with four of them lined up in a game of “follow the leader,” their herd instinct already at work.
After a brief visit to Camp Denali, where we’d stayed for a couple of days in 1977, when Jeff was one year old (now he’s a poet too, living in Brooklyn), I showered at North Face Lodge and then met up with a poet who was working on the staff. At 69, Jill Carter had come out from Massachusetts for the summer to experience Alaska. She was delighted to have another poet on the premises and talked up my reading to the other staff members. I had dinner with the guests and told them about my residency, after which the reading went very well. Lots of smart questions afterwards.
Driving back to the cabin late, I gave an involuntary shout of surprise at a stunning double rainbow flowing upward from the base of Mt. McKinley. Brilliant colors, with the muscular shoulders of the mountain behind it, topped by thick dark clouds.
Toward midnight nearing Eielson, I ran into the Wards again. Since there’s only one road through the park, these meetings are fated rather than coincidental. They told me that earlier in the day they’d seen some wolves take a caribou calf from the herd I’d been watching. After their meal, the pack had divided up the remaining parts and carried them back to the den-site.
Day 10. At an early hour, before I was properly into the day, I heard a car door slam, then another, and two voices speaking in a foreign tongue approached the cabin. I hurried to the door.
“Hello?” There stood two men in slacks and turtleneck sweaters, glancing at each other, apparently unsure how to respond. One of them grinned sheepishly and the other muttered, “Murie…Murie…”
Finally, a third person, white bearded and bespectacled, stepped forward and raised an arm in greeting. “These are two wolf specialists from Spain,” he said. “I thought they should see the cabin.”
“Oh, sure,” I said, stepping aside, and at that the two Spaniards rushed past me and scurried about, excitedly taking note of my papers, books, and clothes scattered about and exclaiming, “Murie! Murie!” And when they soon departed, I felt I had served the cause of international wolf studies, though, sad to say, I haven’t seen a single wolf myself during this particular stay in the park.
Day 11. My last morning in the cabin, I went down to the river to have a last look around and while I was casually staring at the thick gray fast-flowing channel, a head poked up mid-stream. What kind of head? I couldn’t tell. It was gone too quickly. Had it been a fish, trying to get its bearings? A river otter? Maybe it was just a trick of light on the riffles. Had I really seen anything at all?
But then in almost the exact same place, the head poked up again, this time followed by the long neck and mottled body of a duck—I couldn’t tell what kind. And at once it was paddling desperately toward the bank, and seemed about to make it, when it disappeared again under the silty current. I scrambled over to the spot where it would have come out if it had reached the shore, but there was no duck there.
P.S. Several of these journal entries were later turned into poems. I’ll give examples and discuss them in a future Substack.