Only Kayak: A Journey into the Heart of Alaska

by Kim Heacox

But no glaciers. After carving the Great Lakes ten millennia ago and pushing the Ohio River south to its present position, they disappeared from Indiana and Richard had been missing them ever since.

The word itself is a palindrome: kayak. It reads the same forward as backward, just as the boat is balanced fore and aft.

Mom reminded me that William Clark (she liked him more than Lewis) also had problems spelling. He wrote about tracking “bearfooted Indians,” and how he was proud to serve the “Untied States.”

Nowadays, he said, kids don’t play pickup games in sandlots or find grasshoppers in fields. They belong to a nation that systematizes everything, where gated communities teach seminars on how to make friends and walk your pets, and the once elegant act of spontaneous play is regimented into teams and leagues and schedules and rule books and box scores and rankings and coaches and referees paid for by parents who build résumés for their children.

“All the high-elevation features—peak, ridge, and so on—are erosional. They remain after the surrounding material has been carried away by water and ice. The low-elevation features—valley, marsh, beach—are depositional. They’re composed of the materials taken from above: rocks plucked off mountains and pounded into gravel, sand, and silt.”

while running water erodes, quiet water makes things level.

Live now. Every day with a friend is a gift. Nothing lasts forever. Even mountains wash to the sea.

Richard cooked in the intertidal zone, the area on shore between the lowest low tide and the highest high tide. The rising water would then erase any evidence of our occupation, and reduce the chances of our food attracting bears, wolves,

The first cruise ship to Glacier Bay arrived in the summer of 1883,

The cruise ship industry in Glacier Bay came to an abrupt halt in September 1899 when a powerful earthquake rattled the glaciers and filled the bay with so many icebergs that the ships couldn’t approach the tidewater ice fronts for years. Not until the 1960s did cruise ships begin to revisit Glacier Bay and grow into the industry it is today.

I saw a bumper sticker that said PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN, I thought . . . better to be grateful to be an American. Pride is a high horse to fall from.

Remember, when you pull that security blanket up to your chin, don’t pull it over your eyes.

So much ice. So many bears. I don’t think Alaska would be Alaska without ice and bears.”

In America, we love “the road” and write about it all the time. Some of our best literature and music comes from the empty highway. But they’re not empty anymore. Roads run both ways, and the greater challenge, I believe, is learning to stay rather than to leave, to stand still and listen to one elegant piece of land where the trees whisper and the light is just right after the rain, and you say, “Okay, this is it. This is where I will live, love, and die.”

“A thousand branches and no roots,” he told me, “you fall over in the first big storm.”

“All right now,” he’d mutter as he walked the warren-like maze of desks and partitions, “everybody in your little cubicles, it’s time to think outside the box.”

Be careful what you get good at—you may end up doing it for a long time.

Islands near one another may be separated by high tide but joined at low tide, their shores reaching out to one another. Yet even when the water is high they still touch. We all do at some depth. Go deep enough, we all touch.