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Rowing to Latitude
I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness.
—Henry David Thoreau, "Walking"
Preface
FOR YEARS my husband, Doug Fesler, and I have led a double life. In the winter, we work together as avalanche specialists. Then, with the lighter days of summer, we disappear (though my mother hates that word) on three-to-five-month-long wilderness rowing and kayaking trips. Somehow, more than twenty thousand miles have slid under our blades, a function of time and repetitive motion rather than undue strength or bravery.
Once, far down the Yukon River, which begins in western Canada and cleaves Alaska, an old Athabascan subsistence fisherman hailed us from his aluminum skiff. In keeping with local custom, he was in no hurry to talk, preferring to drift in silence while his eyes appraised us through a poker mask of wrinkles. In time he asked, "Where you come from?" And a minute or two later, "Where you go?" More silence, while he digested our answers. Eventually he pronounced, "You must be plenty rich tospend the summer paddling." Doug leaned back, grinned, and replied without a trace of the awkwardness I feared was lit in neon upon my face, "If we were rich, we'd have a boat with a motor like yours."
Though we are far from rich and occasionally prey to bouts of motor envy, paddling is our preferred mode of travel, at least until our joints completely disintegrate. It allows us to tickle the shoreline, and opens our senses to the rhythms around us. We are more attuned to our surroundings when we are moving at only five miles per hour, maybe six on a good day. With hours to think, it is also a little harder to escape from ourselves.
We always travel in two boats. This gives us an extra margin of safety and allows us to carry several months' worth of supplies. More important, such separation keeps us from hating each other. It would take better people than we are to share a small boat day after day and then to crawl into the same tent night after night, for weeks on end. Until 1994, there was also the practical consideration that we propelled our boats differently. I am firmly committed to rowing, which does not allow any part of my body to ride for free. My legs, when confined by the spray skirt of a kayak, instantly begin to twitch, and my arms feel cast in bronze. Doug favored kayaking for the first thirteen thousand of the miles we journeyed together; oddly, he thought it was important to see where he was going. But at last he converted, reluctantly acknowledging the greater efficiency and speed afforded by a sliding seat and long oars.
Onlookers frequently remark that they would love to do similar trips if only they had the time, or the necessary experience. No matter how often I've heard these comments, they still give me pause. As for time, we give it a high priority; if we wait too long, we will be unable to row. And we've gained the experience by doing, stroke by stroke.
Most often, though, people question why we undertake these trips at all. They might as well ask us why we breathe or eat. Our journeys are food for our spirits, clean air for our souls. We don't care if they are firsts or farthests; we don't seek sponsors. They are neither a vacation nor an escape, they are a way of life.
On a trip down the Yukon River in 1987, we made a habit of asking Native people who lived along its shores how far up- and downriver they had traveled. Usually they had ranged less than fifty miles in either direction—some a little farther in these days of snowmachines and skiffs with hefty outboard engines. Just over halfway down the river, however, at about the twelve-hundred-mile mark, we met Uncle Al, an Athabascan elder. He was slightly stooped with age but straightened when he answered, brown eyes aglow. As a young man, he said, he had traveled by canoe all the way to the headwater lakes, and had also followed the river a thousand miles from his home to the sea. When we asked why, he looked puzzled. "I had to know where the river came from and where it was going." We give a version of the same answer. We do these trips because we need to. The world of phones, computers, and deadlines cannot compare with singing birds, breaching whales, magnificent light shows, and crackling ice.
If, on the day I took possession of my first ocean shell from the canopy of a dusty truck, someone had informed me that I would row more than enough miles to take me to the far side of the world and back, I would have marveled at the notion. As with most burgeoning ventures, this book also began innocently, as a holiday letter sent annually to friends, family, and those who had helped us along the way. The letters were evidently passed along through a maze of unseen channels. Before long, we began to receive requests from people we'd never heard of to add their names to our mailing list. If laziness or a hectic avalanche season caused us to miss a year, we'd end up fielding phone calls fromobscure corners of the world from people who were sure we had met one too many polar bears.
Still, I shared the skepticism of the round-faced Inupiaq man who, weary of passing visitors to the Arctic declaring themselves instant experts, invited us to his house for whale blubber only after I had assured him in good faith that I was not writing a book. It was not until our stories began to take on a life of their own—retold to us by people unaware of their origins and unlikely ever to find themselves experiencing the expanse of the Arctic firsthand—that the stirrings of the book within became much harder to ignore.
In the last few years, I've felt increasing urgency to give voice to the caribou that graze without fear along the Labrador shore, to the wide-shouldered brown bears of the Alaska Peninsula who depend upon the annual migration of salmon, to fjords uncut by roads or power lines. Doug and I are drawn to northern latitudes not out of sheer perversity, as our families claim, but because we seek wild country. The prevailing nasty weather of the sub-Arctic and Arctic can be a great deterrent to both dense settlement and tourism. But during our travels, we've witnessed the lengthening shadow of our civilization's influence over remote corners of the natural world. What finally galvanized me into writing, though, was an even more tangible reminder of the fragility of all that surrounds us. When my mother was diagnosed with advanced cancer, she said, "You have to write this book before I die." I responded, "All right, but you have to live a long time."
In the process of journeying, we seem to have become the journey, blurring the boundaries between the physical landscape outside of ourselves and the spiritual landscape within. Once, during a long crossing in Labrador, we found ourselves in fog so thick that it was impossible to see even the ends of our boats. Unable to distinguish gray water from gray air, I felt vertigo grabhold of my equilibrium, and the world began to spin. I needed a reference point—the sound of Doug's voice or the catch of my blades as they entered the water—to know which way was right side up. Rounding thousands of miles of ragged shoreline together, driven by the joys and fears of not knowing what lies around the next bend, has helped us to find an interior compass.
Doug and I have awoken many Alaska winter mornings inside cabins so fogged with the warm vapor of our dreams that we couldn't tell if the dark shape outside the window was a moose or a tree. To bring the object outside into clearer view, we had to start within, scraping a hole in the frost with our fingernails. This book begins much the same way.
Copyright © 2001 by Jill Fredston
