In the Company of Whales

As we enter Red Bluff Bay, a great humpback dives below Rapport. The tail rises above the water and the scale of the mammal astonishes me. We pass by each other, boat by whale, tail by bow, as if this is all normal, that we just went left-hand to left-hand to a whale as easily as I pass another horse in the warmup ring before the show jumping round. Have a good round! And we pass through a narrow and go deeper into the length of the bay. We are the only boat, the only ones here, as if this was how the land was encountered when expeditions met Alaska hundreds of years ago. Is this how presumption begins?
 
We motor along: enter a cove, leave a strait, cross the sound, thwarted in the arm, anchor in a chuck, travel the narrows, sail the channel. The landscape etymology may impart a velocity, a depth, a current. These names involve the distinctions that mark the land. As indigenous named places for their qualities, explorers named them for themselves. And a balance tipped from partnering with the land, to place the self before all else. Red Bluff is one of the few places on the map we have visited thus far that is named for features and not a person. Red cliff walls rise. We pass the remains of an old cannery on the shore.
 
At the head of this bay, we see the terminus of river, and a low marshy area. The estuary, where river meets sea, is where we meet bears. It’s too early for the salmon to run, but bears graze the saltwater grasses. We drop anchor near shore, and a movement catches the eye, and two small cubs scamper up the rocks and disappear behind the thick veil of pine boughs. Where is their mother? Further in the distance, upon the grassy shore, a large mama grizzly grazes with her two year-old cubs.
 
Kent and I get in the kayaks and head over to watch. Mountains thick with pines rise around us. We paddle towards the bears. At the mouth of the river is a log jam of entire pines tangled with smaller deciduous trees, and branches. The river, engorged with spring melt and rainstorms, carried these trees, roots and all, down the river to collect at the terminus.
 
Loud and steep streams run down the mountains and surge into the sea. We paddle in close and can’t hear each other over the sound. They have the power to scour an entire pine tree off the mountain, propel it off the land, and plant it in the sea. I kayak over trees and approach one lone pine standing, an upright ghostly figure, the bark rotted off, branches gleaned, but the roots have been ballast and it stands with just a few feet of top protruding from the surface. I paddle around this standing pine as if there might be a whole forest subsumed below me, but it’s only a lone tree, revealing the power of the forces that shape the landscape.
 
I have been reading Unchartered about a woman’s passage from empty nest to sailor, as she travels the Canadian inland passage in search of the spirit bear. I too am an empty-nester traveling the inland passage. What am I searching for as we go? To investigate this question, I interviewed my mother over the winter months. She has made many trips to Alaska. Each trip led to another destination. First a sailing trip in Prince William Sound before the spill. Then a land conservation conference in Anchorage. Then the Arctic Circle where she was picked up at the “airport” by a Gwich’in elder on her ATV with a rain barrel strapped behind her. Later, she met an Eyak warrior working to heal the waters, revive the fisheries, and save the forests south of the Prince William Sound. She rafted the Copper River and each night they ate the salmon from the river. She met a former bush pilot who staked a claim in 1952 at Denali and started a tourist camp which prompted her to start a conservation group to save that wilderness. (In June, we will visit Denali and the Copper River in the company of my mother.) My mother’s work took her to sit on a porch in Moose, WY with Mardy Murie, the naturalist, author, and conservationist who led the work to pass the Wilderness Act.  My mother lives her life in the patriarchy of New England, but in Alaska, she fell into the company of elder women.
 
“They are there for the place to live a lifestyle they can’t live elsewhere.” Standing with these famous women changed her. “And they don’t forget you.”
 
My mother didn’t have a plan when she encountered Alaska. And unlike the unchartered woman, I am not seeking a seldom seen bear. As part of her quest, she struggled to be an equal partner to her husband aboard their sailboat.
 
I tell Kent, “I am not going to be a partner to you sailing.” I haven’t filled my time practicing knots or reading charts or perusing the manual on docking strategies. “I am a passenger.” As if that’s not obvious.
 
“Good,” he replies, “there’s room for only one captain.”
 
But I don’t want to be a passenger simply sailing through this landscape. I do want a mission without presumption. I want to make a difference. And to learn from those that have missioned and travelled before me. For what are we without a mission, without humanity, without each other?
 
As we move through this landscape, I gather more questions than answers, but maybe there is a lesson in the not knowing. As I see more and question more (there’s a quest in that word), I get to know the stories of people I meet here. I learn how their mission evolved through experiences.
 
During those early months of the pandemic, Kent and I walked in the woods with our dogs. He asked: where do you see yourself in five years, then three years. He asked me for a vision of myself. Clearly, he saw himself on a sailboat, and he wanted to know when. “Now,” I had told him, because my staff was trapped, I could be free to leave and join him on a sailboat in Alaska. It was not a vision, but timing.
 
And now we are anchored in Red Bluff Bay. A whale dove below our vessel. Bears stand on the beach. I watch these animals on their mission for their survival. Without other boats, without other passengers, and without cell service, without distractions, I am present. And I am diminutive. The great humpback tail, the mama bear on her hind legs sniffing the air, the cliff walls climbing 2000 feet, the ocean depths greater than the aged pine tree, the rush and power of waterfall, the mountains: all dwarf me. They reduce my scale and right-size me within this environment.
 
Barry Lopez tells us, To speak with such intimacy of the features of a place is to belong to that place. To know the difference between the chuck and the cove, between the strait and the narrow, I can begin to know this place by studying her features. The whale and the bear restore my calm and my curiosity. To note the three-beat rhythm of the movement of the whale—spout, back, tail—settles me in a pace. To sniff the air like the mama bear heightens my senses. To feel the mist of the waterfall is to understand its power to shift a landscape.
 
A small motor boat arrives in the mid-morning, and anchors beside us. They lower their kayak to the sea, and the couple climbs into their tandem kayak. “Thank goodness we don’t have that,” I say to Kent.  He nods. It’s good to be able to paddle away from each other. They sidle up to our hull and ask about bears. The bears have moved invisibly into the land. We laze in the mid-day sun drinking coffee, reading books. In the late afternoon, we pull up anchor. They inquire why we leave so late in the day. We are moving with the tide, and there is after all, hours of daylight. We head to out of the bay, catching sight again of the two small cubs scrambling the rocks, and furthering my concern they are motherless, and set a course to Warm Springs Bay. This is Alaska and the sun won’t set for several hours.

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