The Apocrypha of the Wild

Exploring the Sublime in Lake Clark National Park

Part Four: The Diaspora of the Flesh

From my campsite on the moraine above the north shore of Turquoise Lake the Mulchatna River, which begins where the lake ends, looks like a narrow silver ribbon receding to the horizon. The scale is deceptive. From the air the wide expanses and tall mountains fool the eye into believing that the tundra is predominately horizontal, rolling hills covered with an even lawn of gentle plant life, but on foot what was a small rough area becomes a massive copse of chest-high dwarf birch shrubs or an impenetrable thicket of alder. I am hiking today down to the lake, across the river, over the southern moraine and on towards Lower Twin Lake.

The land around Turquoise lake is generally barren and rocky, but the underbrush along the lake is thick in spots and, being in grizzly country, I prefer to remain where I can see and be seen whenever possible. I try to visualize a route around any brushy areas along the exposed ridge of the moraine where few plants grow higher than a couple inches. There are times when the Mulchatna can be difficult to cross and I've been hoping for the few days I've been here that this is not one of those times. Few hikers visit this area and with no real trail reports to alert travelers to the changing conditions you simply need to be prepared for anything. River crossings are always dangerous. A river crossing when you are alone in a rarely visited wilderness makes you reevaluate your sanity. The hike is pleasant. The air has an eerie quality that gives the impression that you can hear for miles. In the far distance I can hear the buzz of a small plane but as I get closer to the river the sound of rushing water fills the aural landscape. During the approach the river has gradually changed its appearance from this morning's delicate, winding thread to what I see standing on its bank: a wide, frigid expanse of moving water. Again, the scale here is deceptive, but I would guess the width is somewhat greater than 100 yards.

I've forded plenty of rivers, I know the routine: I change into wading sandals, secure my things and start into the river. After a few false starts and stops to reassess the easiest ford I find a route, which with the aid of my tripod as a walking stick, I can navigate without slipping too much on the larger rocks. About half way across, the river abruptly forms a deep, fast moving, channel—maybe twenty feet wide. I was told to expect this and that it is normally about four feet deep at the outlet of the lake with a sandy bottom. I was also told that its depth could vary widely with the season and weather and at times can be problematic. Because the water is direct runoff from the glacier feeding into the lake, it has that cloudy, blue color from the glacial sill suspended in the water. Any water deeper than a couple of feet is opaque making it difficult to determine if I can safely cross. So I stand here. At least the area around the channel also has a sandy bottom which feels good on my numb feet. After about five minutes of pacing upstream and down in thigh-deep, quickly moving water, hoping one area is obviously easier to cross than another, I decide to extend the legs on my tripod and probe for the bottom. As I lean forward, holding the tripod by its head, making jabbing motions into the water the current keeps pushing the legs downstream and towards the surface thwarting my efforts. Then the sand under my feet calves into the channel taking me with it. I can't tell how deep the channel is; my feet dangling underneath me don't touch the bottom. I am suddenly swimming. Because I had unbuckled the waistband of my pack the air in the lower areas of the pack caused it float and rotate away from my back with the result that the top of the pack is pushing my face into the water.

In a 1999 article for Backpacker Magazine titled Fear Walked with Me about the hike from Telaquana Lake to the shore of Turquoise Lake Jonathan Dorn described Lake Clark as a "vast, one-false-step-and-you're-dead wilderness" and wrote that "the range of real and perceived threats was almost paralyzing." And he never had to cross the Mulchatna. There is a copy of this article posted on a bulletin board at the park headquarters in Port Alsworth. Although the local people rarely come out here alone to hike, this is familiar ground for most of them and they chuckle at Dorn's terror. We don't generally fear what we know. But for tourists, paralyzing fear is not an uncommon reaction to the Lake Clark wilderness. Most of the locals have a good story or two about someone from the lower forty-eight who, upon being dropped on the shore of one these lakes is overcome and either wants to leave immediately or if their terror doesn't hit until the floatplane (and only way out) has left, spend a few uncomfortable days without leaving the relative safety of the gravel bar where they were deposited. Having flown over this area several times, I have a familiarity with the land and, though the sublime has frequently been on my mind, I have never seriously felt afraid our here, not in the way Jonathan Dorn describes. The potential for fear is a part of the sublime but there is a distinct and subtle difference between the two. Kant writes, "we can regard an object as fearful, without being afraid of it; viz. If we judge of it in such a way that we merely think a case in which we would wish to resist it, and yet in which all resistance would be altogether vain." To Kant fear is to the sublime what desire is to beauty, a visceral reaction which interferes with the purely contemplative. In the Critique of Judgment he offers several examples of natural objects (including the mighty river) that inspire the sublime, "provided only that we are in security." Friedrich Schiller, in his own work, Of the Sublime, communicates the sentiment a little more artfully, "where we ourselves are the object of a hostile power of Nature, then it is all over for the aesthetic judgment. As sublime as a tempest may be, considered from the shore, those who find themselves upon the ship, that is demolished by same, may be to the same degree little disposed to pronounce this aesthetic judgment over it."

I am definitely on Schiller's ship, but in hindsight I would prefer to imagine that I was performing my own little experiment with the sublime. Thrashing along, pulled downstream by the Mulchatna river like a piece of driftwood, fighting the awkwardness of my pack and trying not to drop my tripod (one doesn't prioritize well in these situations) I can confirm that Kant and Schiller are correct. With no security and plenty of fear the thought of the sublime is the furthest thing from my mind. It is difficult to "measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature" when bobbing up and down like a fishing float in a wild Alaskan river. After some minor panic I manage to paddle my way to the other end of the channel before getting pulled too far downstream, stumble across the other half of the river's shallow section and sit down on a rock to dry and take stock of my luck.

I feel my mind dealing with the unknown proximity of death, how it can brush up against us at any moment. Looking back over the river I imagine the alternate course my history could have followed, one involving a wider channel, less buoyant pack, or stronger currents. I wonder how far I would have floated had I suffered the Mulchatna's riparian coupe de grace. Considering my clothing (somewhat river-rock colored), my tundra-green pack and the Park Service's vague guess about my location based on my itinerary, an aerial search would have been in vain. My body would have drifted until it came to rest on some gravel or the marshy areas where the river widens and slows. The animals would have found me before the rangers and I would be scraps—another ordinary thing that fishes gnaw'd upon. I imagine the diaspora of my flesh through the ecosystem, as I become food for animals, then plants, and then again animals, the matter that was me spreading ever more thinly across the landscape. I sit wet, truly lucky to be drying under a warm sun, and again feeling the sublime, stronger than before, heightened by the sudden reminder of my smallness and by nature's gentle check against human pride. These are the moments that inspire the notion of fate. We are always balanced on the crossroads of the sublime. I remember Longfellow's Psalm of Life, which takes a stiff upper lip in the face of our old incertitude, "Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal…Let us, then, be up and doing / With a heart for any fate." I adjust my pack, and continued.

Š2005 Mark Meyer