Alaska Journals
Part 5: Denali National Park -- Day 2
Date: September 14

Last Night:
I finally fell asleep last night. I had stepped out into the cold night,
unable to hold my bladder anymore, and walked barefoot a few feet
to conduct my business.
After relieving the bladder, I quickly crawled back into my bag and
had an intense snuggle session with myself. Sleep came like port
wine.
I don't know what time it was when the earthquake hit, but when it
did the wind stood still. Then the ground jiggled as if the earth were
the belly of a cop chasing a bank robber.
Naturally, Half-Ass was undisturbed.
I waited for the second, more volatile tremor - the one that would open the earth -- to take us away, but it never came.
Instead I heard the sound of an air horn bouncing off the cottonwoods, as a train rolled by. It was not an earthquake at all. It was twenty tons of freight train and I was awash with relief. I listened to the ties and rails complain as the train passed. I
wondered how I could mistake such a sound for an earthquake. I argued to myself that it was completely unacceptable to have been so foolishly duped. But then I argued back that it was not my fault because I was still in the grog of sleep, which is the equivalent of being highly, highly stoned.
It reminded me of a similar incident when I actually WAS awakened
by an earthquake. . .

I had just moved from upstate New York to San Diego. I was young and quite stupid and unaware that earthquakes were a reality in this part of the country.
When the rumble of the tremor woke me, I bolted upright and watched as the walls shook, a picture fell off the wall, some glass or ceramic object I had on my dresser crashed to the floor, and my bed actually slid about three inches.
Since this was my first earthquake, and I was awakened from a deep sleep, I thought the earthquake was something else. . .

I thought I was possessed by the Devil.

I know how strange that sounds, and please believe me, I am not a man who usually leaps to grandiose cosmic assumptions every time something freaky happens. Like, if I think of a song and it suddenly appears on the radio, I'm not about to start booking guest appearances on Montel as the house psychic.
Nor am I a man of faith. Faith is bullshit. I'm a doubter. ("Only a man who cares, doubts" says Henry Fool") Which is what makes this incident so embarrassing, I doubt Gods and devils even exist, yet all of a sudden I'm capable of believing a demon has some how entered my bedroom.
When the quake subsided, I fell right back on my pillow and immediately back to sleep. Even when I awoke, I didn't remember the incident. Not until later that day at work -- when someone asked me if I had felt the earthquake -- did it all come rushing into me.
"Oh yeah, I remember that." I thought. "Whew. Thank God I'm not possessed."
"But what kind of idiot believes he is possessed?"
It's amazing what your mind will think when lingering in the limbo between sleep and lucidity.

. . . When I became fully awake, staring at the roof of the tent wide-eyed, I simply listened as the train rolled by. It must have had over a hundred cars linked up, for it took at least twenty minutes to pass. In that time we nurtured an affair. I felt a warmth and kinship with her.
For it certainly seemed that we were the only two travelers awake in this hemisphere.

EARLIER TODAY It was daylight and the sun was out. Thin hiking convertible pants and
a T-shirt were all that I needed on this sensational day. The Alaskan
Sun greets you with such dignity, such reserve. The Alaskan Sun
doesn't put out to just anyone. Unlike the Southern California Sun, a
whore among Suns.
I was feeling so alive, I wandered off without Half -Ass and embarked
on a small 3-hour hike and another smaller 1-hour hike.
I saw this as a great opportunity to practice bear politics.
The truth is, most bears don't want anything to do with you. If you come upon one, the conventional wisdom is to speak loudly and firmly and slowly back off. Never offer it food. Never expose the back of your neck (the equivalent of a bulls-eye to a bear). and, of course,
never NEVER run.

The message is clear: If you get eaten by a bear, it's probably your fault. For most, this is great solace. Indeed, there is comfort in knowing that your fate is in your hands, or at least presents that illusion. But I don't have to stretch my imagination too far to envision myself badly bumbling through a bear encounter and waking up later to find my legs missing and carrion squabbling over my entrails.
Readiness would be the key to my survival.
So I practiced: on a 3-hour hike to Horseshoe Lake, I pretended to see bears. Usually I'd choose a large tree stump or cluster of rocks.
Then stop in my tracks and speak to the tree stump or cluster of rocks, in a (textbook) calm, firm voice, "No Bear. You will not eat me today." And then I'll step backward. When I had a good "encounter" (and yes there were some bad ones) I rewarded myself with trail mix

After the hike, and our dinner of canned Chef Boyardee ravioli, day-old bread, cheese, and hard-boiled eggs, Half-Ass was ready for sleep. However, I needed a drink. But the Princess Lodge would be closed, since tourist season is over, and H.A. didn't have any idea where a beer could be found.
So I rolled a joint, left the tent, and trekked down the railroad tracks to the evacuated train station; just as the sun was setting and the cold began to scuttle in.
There I met a young couple sitting on the bench and enjoying each other's company. I stepped on the platform, near where they were sitting, introduced myself, pulled the joint from my pocket, lit it up, pulled from it deeply, and passed it to the young, pretty girl (grading with the Alaska curve of course).
I don't remember exactly how they were dressed. Suffice to say; it was no surprise to me that their eyes lit with glee when I offered the joint.
After meaningless, yet satisfying, "Where-are-you-from-what-do-you-do-why-are-you-in-Alaska?" discourse, I popped the 20,000 dollar question:
"Where can I get a beer around here?"
"The Smoke Shack," the young man replied. "We're going there in a few minutes. They are having a benefit for a musher. You can catch a ride with us."After the joint, we piled into her pick-up and drove a couple of miles to the Smoke Shack. As we followed the road, to our destination, he pointed to a path and said, "When you come back, use that path; it will save you a couple of miles walking."Visual: The road is U-shaped. On the upper left point of the U was the train station. On the upper right of the U was the Smoke Shack. In the center of the U was a dense forest. The path he spoke of cut
through the thick of that forest. The relevance of all this will shortly become clear.

I walked in to the Smoke Shack expecting to find five toothless old
men, a 50-year old pooch-belly bartendress, and the recognizable
stench of a community that doesn't have an intimate relationship with
warm running water or proper ventilation. Instead, I found a bar, jam packed and bustling with as much energy as any night club in San
Diego on a Friday night. And, it was percolating with beautiful women
(grading on the Alaska curve of course) clamoring to be near the stage. They were here for the musher benefit and an all you can eat spaghetti feast that was filling the room with steam and the pungency of spaghetti sauce. It is a drastic understatement to say that I had come to the right place.Here, in Deepwoods, Alaska, a musher (sled dog racer), is like a rock star. This particular musher was preparing for a big-time race (not the Iditarod, but a high profile race just the same) and the benefit was to sponsor him.It was like we were in the presence of a rock star. When the musher spoke, the room erupted. He was inebriated (like a rock star) and he often said "fuck" (like a rock star), and he was swamped by women (like a rock star) and when I tried to interview him he ignored me (like a rock star).They auctioned tents and bedrolls and clothing and paintings and some guy auctioned a framed illustrated poem about the Northern Lights. To my horror, he read aloud from the ghastly ode. (There is much bad poetry in Alaska and most of it revolves around the Northern Lights).
The grand finale was the auctioning of one of the musher's extra sled dogs. The musher carried her in, supporting her by the belly. She was all sketchy (Sled dogs aren't comfortable around people and don't make good pets) and everyone who sat near me were saddened by the fact that she was probably going to be auctioned to a non-musher who wouldn't know what to do with the her.Which, from what I was told, is exactly what happened. The town lunatic was the only bidder (everyone else was bright enough to know that a sled dog was not practical) and took her home for only sixty bucks.

The dotty bastard who bought her, slipped his arms underneath the Husky's armpits -- which both the dog AND the musher AND the crowd were not happy about -- and carried her away right there.

There was a great murmur in his wake and then the crowd noisily filtered out of the room to go home.
I went to the bar and sat between an enormous, effeminate, black man named Wiley, and young, bearded fellow named Don. Wiley was the black version Ignatious J. Reilly. The flaps of cotton that hung over his ears from his cap dimly resembled the flaps of flesh that hung over his belt. They were both seasonal employees enjoying their last night in
Denali before heading down to "The lower 48" to do some traveling and whatnot of their own.

Wiley was sitting on my right side, Don on the left. The bartender was pouring tequilas and an acousti-chick was singing her recently-broken heart out on a small, inadequate stage. Wiley was singing along with her when I pulled up my stool. He was
singing with all his might. He knew every word of every song she sang (they were all covers) and he made it clear that he took his
singing seriously and that he intended to perfectly harmonize with her (which he did) and he intended for every person in the bar to know that, indeed, it should be he on that stage with her (or instead of her).The only problem was, he WASN'T on stage, and so he was little more than a fat, perspiring music geek; or worse, insane.
When he sang he shut his eyes and felt the waves of the music go through him as though he were the vessel for his art and the gods were singing through him.
He had to shut his eyes real tight in order to properly let the whole aura of the song wash over him.
When the acousti-chick took a set break he raced to the jukebox - to insure first dibs -- and played 4 songs, just long enough (as he well knew) to last through the break.

"Here comes Dancing Queen," says the bartender to nobody in particular before the juke box even accepted Wiley's dollar. Sure enough, as if on cue, "Dancing Queen," blared through the speakers.
With delight and great pride, fat, black (and seemingly gay) Wiley belted out the lyrics.

"Friday night and the lights are low. Looking out for the place to go"

"Nobody fucks with my Abba," he said to me as Dancing Queens last notes drifted away. "My dream is to have ABBA play here. The marquee will read, 'Presented by Wiley.'"

Wiley frequently threw entertaining, when not terrifying, tirades, about how he has been on nearly every prescribed drug and that Prozac is for pussies and he knows a real pharmaceutical when he sees one and so on.

Anyway, tequila and beer had done their usual damage so I bid everyone good-bye. Wiley asked me what route I was taking back to camp.
I told him, "The shortcut."

He shook his jowls and announced for everyone to hear (everything Wiley did was for everyone to hear), "You can't go in there; unh-uh!" and snapped his fingers, exactly as a stereotypical gay character in a movie about drag queens on busses.Speaking of movies, I had the distinct sensation that I might actually be inside of one. Like I was in a horror flick at this very moment; and that Wiley was one of these deus ex machina characters of premonition: like a Cajun grunt saying "stay clear of the bog" or a an cackling gypsy warning me not to get on the plane. Don on the other hand, said Wiley was a chicken and that the chances of being eaten by a bear was low and that I should just go home.

There you have it: Two Denali veterans were giving me opposite words of advice on the plausibility of my becoming bear-chum and I couldn't figure which one to heed. Granted, one of them was a sweating, shut-eye-singing, pharmacomaniacal, vat of fat. But he was also the most persistent. He started saying things like, he had a "feeling" about this, and that he expected to read about me in the papers the next day. He kept referring to me as, "Dead Man Walking."
I took another shot of tequila (for strength), donned my coat and told everyone I intended to use the trail. We bid farewellsand Wiley made it clear that he intended to read about me in the morning paper. I walked into the night and headed down the road imagining the moment when the mouth of the path was before me. I imagined that it looked like the mouth of the Bat Cave. In that instant I came up with a name for the path:

DEAD MAN WALKING WAY
(A Coward's Tale)
The moon is dull tonight as I approach the bridge over the Nenana River. Just on the other side, I am told, is the infamous path: Dead
Man Walking Way.
The bridge is a mutiny plank, I think, as I cross, looking down at the river. It is too dark to see anything beyond white-headed waves and
the silver boulders they collide with in the river below. I dismount the bridge, walk about 50 paces, and address the mouth of the ominous
path.
It doesn't look like the Bat Cave, but more like the opening of one of the paths on Gilligan's Island. Only it's dark now. And the groaning, creaking of branches, and the demon-like cackle of Alaskan squirrels, do nothing to ease my throbbing senses.
Nor does the sudden memory of something that I saw yesterday....

We were en route to Denali and H.A. suggested we should stop and
make lunch at Troublesome Creek and afterward, show me where it
was that he and H.B. camped over the Summer.
On the bulletin board by the parking lot, there was a "bear siting"
notice. It said to be careful, that a bear was recently seen cruising the
creek.
We ate tuna and crackers for lunch and, lacking napkins, I wiped my
hands thoroughly on my already grimy jacket. H.A. mentioned that it was a bad idea to wipe my hands on my clothes. He said -- casually, as though he was talking about the merits of laser printers and not that he was sharing a piece of life-saving of information -- that the smell of food smeared on clothing makes you that much more attractive to hungry grizzlies.
Great.

Here we are, hiking into the bear infested bush and I smell like a tuna fish Popsicle.
Here we are, hiking into the shores of Troublesome Creek (NOT "Pleasant River," mind you; not "Happy Stream"; not "Nothing-bad will-happen Lake") and I've got a FRICKIN CAN OF TUNA smeared all over my jacket.

We followed the creek into the woods. At an elbow in the stream,
H.A. pointed out where, earlier, he and H.B. came upon a grizzly
fishing on some fallen logs. The bear saw them and paused. They
three had a momentary visual stand off, until the griz put his nose
back in the water to resume fishing. They passed him slowly.
Anyway, H.A. and I continued on.
"Look," says H.A., pointing to the muddy path. "There's a bear print."
Incidentally, H.A. applies himself to gathering knowledge. He does it so gracefully, that knowledge just WANTS to leap into his brain. H.A. spent the summer truly absorbing the state. He learned about Alaska politically, ecologically, historically, financially and socially. And now he's discovering bear tracks in the mud and sniffing caribou dung like an Eskimo tracker.
Then he took me over to Bear Paw Island.

Bear Paw Island (coined by Half Ass himself) is an Olympic-pool-sized, gravel and mud and log-littered island surrounded by the shallow, tributaries of Troublesome Creek.

Though he named it Bear Paw Island because it's covered with
almost a hundred grizzly paw prints, he could have easily named it
Bear Turd Island since, for every print, there was a bear mound the
size of a large, small dog.

It is a disconcerting feeling walking around Bear Paw

Island. The paw prints and feces of monsters are visible with every step. It felt how one feels inside a horror movie,
traipsing around in vampire's lair, in the nighttime, when all the vampires are away, but the open lids of their vacant coffins are a constant reminder that at any moment, they
might return, find you in their den, and rip out your jugular.

And that, basically, is what I'm thinking at the ominous mouth of Dead Man Walking Way. If bear prints are everywhere, so too must be the bears.
I step into the path, which is dark as a purse compartment, and immediately begin to sing.
See, earlier that day I had a conversation with an attractive park ranger (during which, I imagined that she fell in love with me because she was sick of rugged Krakauer types who obsessively conquered mountains, yet ignored the health of their romance) who said singing helps notify bears of your approach and they will probably stay clear
of you. "The last thing you want to do is startle a bear," she said.)
The problem is, the only song I can think of is, "If I Fell" by the Beatles. Christ. Here I need something truly agro to deter bears; something like Motorhead or Rage Against the Machine, or Gwar and
I can only come up with: "If I fell in love with you would you promise to be true and help meeeee understand."
Are you kidding?I scour my so-called music critic's mindlibrary for the perfect anti-griz song and nothing better comes to memory.
How can this be? I spent a lifetime loving and learning music; spent countless hours scrutinizing and memorizing the lyrics to countless songs.
-- I was always the first kid on my block to translate or decipher song meanings or themes.
-- I was always the one to translate entire rock-operas like The Wall, and Schoolboy's in Disgrace, 2112 and Joe's Garage (the latter two are virtually the same story: a futuristic society where music is considered evil, thus outlawed).
-- I was the one who pointed out to my friends all the great hidden profanities that fell through radio censor's cracks. (For instance, In the Blondie song, "Rapture," there is a profane line in the chorus that is so well obscured, the radio censor pricks never even knew it was there: "And it's finger fucking, twenty-four hour sucking, raaaapture.")
Yes, I am a lyrics nerd.
But what's really pathetic is, now -- here in the bowels of the evil Bear Empire, with a chance to put my heretofore useless information to good use (by coming up with a long, (if not epic) angry, rock song -- I can't think of a goddamn thing!
--I try that Who song, the one that goes, "There ain't no bears in there," but that's the only line I remember.
-- I try corrupting songs with lyrics of my own. Like "Go away little bear, before I beg you to stay." But that's as far as I get.
-- I try creating poetry, but my head is not in a creative place and I come up with a poem so bad I had to laugh at myself despite the fact that the entire grizzly army was probably marching toward me at this very moment.
The best I could conjure was "Paradise by the Dashboard light." It's a long song (eight minutes), but hardly a hardy bear repellant.
Nevertheless, I sing it eight times before getting through the forest:
Eight times!
"It was cold and Lonely in the deep dark night,"

The joy I feel -- as I emerge from Dead Man Walking Way and back onto the opposite pontoon of the U-shaped road -- washes over me and lasts for, oh, about 30 seconds. I have yet to walk along the train tracks to get to camp.
For the most part, walking along the train tracks is significantly less frightening than walking through Dead Man Walking Way. But something happens that sends a bolt of fear through me so violently both my knees give and I almost slump to the ground. . .
Two rabbits are foraging the area, keeping their distance, but not particularly worried about my presence. For a few moments, the rabbits are trotting slowly in the same direction as I am. Suddenly they stick their noses into the air, then frantically dart up the embankment that shoulders the tracks.
What got them so scared? I think.
BEAAAAR!!!
Then I hear the bluster of the air horn -- just as I had that morning -- of the oncoming train. I feel the rumbling of the tracks and the agitation of the air. The rabbits sensed the train just before I did.
The Alaska Railway has duped me again.
A few minutes later, the headlights appear on the bend and I step off the track and put my back against the embankment. My fear of bears outweighs my fear of dismemberment by train, so I stay closer to the tracks than the forest. Besides, I want to be close to the train. This is, after all, only my second date with the train and we are still getting to know each other.
It is a surreal, sedate moment as the train -- which is close enough to touch - clacks slowly by. The tequila and adrenaline and the thrill of this crazy Alaskan night all come together and I make a mental note to remember to remember how grand this moment truly is for the rest of my life.
Finally the caboose appears and a series of floodlights detonate around me. It is immediately as bright as daylight and the
Cabooseman shines a flood directly on me and shouts down, "Are you ok?"
I holler back that I am and hope that he is still in earshot when I add, "Thanks for asking!"
Fifteen minutes later, I crawl into my glorious sleeping bag and fall immediately to sleep. I have no bear dreams. And when the train makes yet another appearance, which wakes me, I think, even in my sleep-addled state, that the train is a good thing.