"An Ancient Behemoth"

AN ANCIENT BEHEMOTH

REVISED FROM A LETTER WRITTEN ORIGINALLY IN JULY 1998

When George Pollard offers to reveal something that very few people have seen, it’s best to take him up on the offer. George doesn’t lightly make such gestures.

Consequently, when George told my father and me in late May 1998 that he’d like us to accompany him for a brief adventure on the far end of Tustumena Lake, we readily agreed.

Tustumena Lake is an unpredictable mass of watery silt that sits like a giant turquoise gemstone in the heart of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. George Pollard is a family friend who at the time was in his early 70s; he is one of the few old-timers actually born in Alaska, a claim rare among white men with no Russian or Native Alaskan bloodlines. George was born in Anchorage in the mid-1920s, when Anchorage was little more than a squalid town along Ship Creek, and when his own father (like mine, nearly four decades later) was a pioneering Alaska dentist. Formerly one of the longest-serving hunting guides in this part of the country, George now lives alone in Kasilof, in the same home he has occupied since the 1930s, not far from the big lake.

George invited me and Dad to cross the length of the lake in his red-and-black, 15-and-a-half-foot inflatable Zodiac on a blustery Saturday afternoon to see one of his treasures, something that had been shown to him back 35 years earlier by a long-time area gold miner named Joe Secora. The treasure was an ancient cottonwood tree, thought to be the oldest tree in Southcentral Alaska, perhaps even in the entire state. The tree once was aged (by an amateur named Von Phillips who took a core sample while volunteering for the state Division of Forestry or the U.S. Forest Service one summer) at no less than 900 years old. A decade or so later, after the base of the tree had begun to hollow itself out, a professional forester named (I think) Borg arrived to take an official sample, but it was incomplete and inconclusive because of the hollowing. The forester determined, however, that the tree was at least 600 years old and could be much older. (That more conservative measurement means that the tree was alive and at least a century old when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.)

I was very eager to see it.

The three of us motored out of the landing on the Kasilof River and began the mile-long run up to the lake at about 1 or 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Typically, it takes about an hour to run the 26-mile length of the lake. Today was not to be the case. We encountered small rollers after just a few minutes on the lake, indicating the possibility of a strong wind blowing off Tustumena Glacier and the Harding Icefield at the far end of the lake. Soon the rollers were growing larger and arriving closer together. Occasionally the front of the boat went airborne and crashed down. The wind lashed at our faces. Windblown water splashed us, saturating our rain gear. Sometimes the sun broke out from the clouds; sometimes the sky hinted at rain. Halfway there, we encountered white caps, but George kept plugging ahead, zigzagging doggedly forward, find the proper angles to safely cut the waves. Dad and I eyeballed each other; with anyone else at the helm, we would have asked to turn around and go home.

The trip up the lake took an exhausting two and a half hours—the calmer return trip later that evening would take only 90 minutes—and we beached the boat near a clear-water stream pouring its dark blue payload into the light turquoise of Tustumena. Dad and I then followed George’s slow, methodical walk of nearly two miles toward the cliffs he used as a landmark to guide him through the spruce- and alder-infested moraine that contained small streams and ponds only fragmentary game trails. He arrived about 50 minutes later within a few dozen yards of our target--a moist, secluded grove of cottonwoods, which at first appeared very normal in size because they were all so large that they skewed our perspective. All of the cottonwoods there were ensconced in a tangled, prickly bed of Devil’s club, all in a declivity of rolling hills, kissed only lightly by the winds that battered the trees beyond the grove.

“That’s it,” George announced, when we were about 40-50 yards away, and then he pointed to one tree obviously stouter than the rest. At first I was disappointed. It didn’t seem so big. But as I walked closer, I realized that this specimen dwarfed every Alaska cottonwood I’d ever seen. Eighteen and a half feet in circumference at the base, it would take more than three men with my six-foot wingspan touching fingertips to reach all the way around it. The cave-like hole in its trunk had bear hairs stuck in the bark near its entrance.

I crawled inside and could almost stand up in there. This behemoth, like some of its younger, smaller cousins nearby, stood straight as a flagpole, nearly all of its branches and leaves at the top 60 to 80 (perhaps 100, who knows?) feet in the air. The gnarled bark of the average large cottonwood contains innumerable grooves, usually an inch or two deep near the base of the tree; the grooves on this giant may have been three to four inches deep.

The cottonwood grove, in obvious black bear country and protruding from mossy ground laden with large ferns and spiky plants, had a primeval, almost spiritual quality, enhanced by the shafts of sunlight spearing through the leafy canopy overhead, by the burbling creek about 20 yards from the big tree, by the alder-draped cliff of shale we could glimpse rising high above us, and by the windy turmoil we knew existed elsewhere.

It was, after all, just a tree. But the experience of that tree was more than that, and the journey to that tree was also something more.