"Elephant at Home"

ELEPHANT AT HOME

I love my daughter dearly, but having her home for the holidays is somewhat akin to inviting an elephant in to stay. Elephants are wonderful, talented, intelligent creatures, but they leave in their wakes concrete evidence of their passage. Nothing subtle

What Olivia lacks in elephantine bulk and grandeur, she more than compensates for with pachydermal disregard for delicate surroundings. It is amazing to me sometimes that a young woman so graceful on cross-country skis, so precise in swimming lanes, so body-aware on dance floors, and so keenly intuitive in classrooms can lumber so lummoxedly through the environs of my home without apparently noticing—or perhaps not caring to notice—her own destructive force.

Within moments of her arrival, messes were already being made. Piles of debris quickly began to form. Across the kitchen counter. In the hallway by the stairs. In the living room. In her bedroom and bathroom. In the garage. Within minutes, she had also made a cursory examination of the place and had begun determining strategies. Her future actions were buried in her many questions: “Whose ice cream is that in the freezer?” (I found the empty carton in the garbage later that day.) “Is Kelty going to be taking the Jeep to school tomorrow?” (She had somewhere to go and wanted personal transportation.) “Do you still have the movie Pleasantville?” (She later dug through my closet of films to find what she wanted.) “Are the dishes in the dishwasher clean?” (She systematically began leaving dirty dishes and food wrappers all around the house—on a desk in her bedroom, next to the sink in the bathroom, on the carpeted floor in the living room, and, of course, scattered throughout the dining room and kitchen.)

Suddenly toothpaste smears appeared on bathroom counters, yogurt smears on the knobs of kitchen cupboards, makeup smears on mirrors, dirty-hand smears on light switches. Each room she entered, she left little doubt of her presence.

I came home from town one day to find water in my coffee maker—but no filter, no grounds; she had decided to use the coffee maker to heat water for her tea, heedless of the fact that a teapot nearly full of water was sitting atop my stove. Other changes were more subtle: For instance, the pillows on my bed had been moved so that she could be more comfortable while she watched television upstairs, probably while eating. Bits of cereal crunched beneath my feet as I walked down the hallway to her bedroom to wake her in the morning. There were more spill stains in the kitchen, tiny scraps of colored paper left on the living room floor after she had finished wrapping Christmas presents, and many, many cupboards and drawers, doors and boxes, left partway open as if to advertise that someone had recently peered inside.

I’ve told Olivia many times that she should never become a thief because she has no idea how to cover her crimes.

Perhaps more than anything, however, my daughter is “guilty” of disrupting a routine I’ve established in her absence—of cleaning up after myself more regularly and promptly, of streamlining activities by using less of the house, by following the actions of one child instead of two. In this regard, Kelty helps—most of the time—by confining his movements primarily to the living room, dining room and his bedroom, where he eats and does homework, plays video games and watches television, and sleeps. He’s not the neatest child in the world, either—and neither was I, as my mother would be the first to shout—but he’s decidedly lower in decibels than his sister and spreads himself considerably less thin. Other than the inevitable wadded-up pair of socks and perhaps an empty cereal bowl—oh, and a pile of crumpled dirty clothes behind the bathroom door after he takes a shower—Kelty leaves few signs of his presence. Even his appetite is less wide-ranging. Blandly forging ahead on a diet of cereal and milk, soup and crackers, iced tea, an occasional cup of yogurt, clumps of sandwich meat, and as much fruit juice as he can find, he is a predictable eater, whereas Olivia harvests on a whim. Whatever springs to her mind, she seeks to consume or prepare. Consequently, foodstuffs disappear randomly or sporadically. Pickles the first night, for instance. Spoon-shaped gouges out of my expensive cheese the next night. Then a third of a container of fresh tortellini.

Granted, Olivia has just spent four months at college practicing her independence; I expected her to be more assertive and grown-up. Her actions at home, however, have been reversions to form. This Olivia is still the Olivia that was.

But despite these complaints about my daughter, I am delighted to have her home. Despite her galumphing around my house, and her bull-in- china-shop movements, there are nice touches, too: more-adult conversations; face-to-face updates (versus Skype, texting, emails, and telephone calls) about her life and interests and plans; a more-willing companion for physical exercise (such as boot camp or skiing) and spur-of-the-moment activities (such as movies or shopping or making snow angels).

First-born Olivia is a big presence—like an elephant—and when she’s gone, it’s difficult not to notice.

 

 

"Beyond the End of the Trail"

One-year-old Clark in the arms of his father watches his mother battle a grayling at Crescent Lake.
 

BEYOND THE END OF THE TRAIL

For a long time, I believed that Crescent Lake was the end of the trail. And for a long time, literally, it was.

My parents fished for grayling there with me when I was only a year old. My father escorted our whole family up there when I was in my surly teens to camp along the upper creek and cast flies for hungry fish. In my 20s, when I was working for the Peninsula Clarion newspaper, I tramped up there with colleagues, again for fishy purposes. In my 30s, I more than once rode my mountain bike to the lake and back for exercise.

But then the year I turned 40 I was surprised to hear that I could travel beyond the creek outlet, that the route had been extended, that a primitive trail had been added around the lake’s southern shore to connect with a branch of the Carter Lake Trail. The traverse, I was told, comprised about 18 miles. Immediately I was interested.



Clark and his brother, Lowell, above upper Crescent Lake
in the late 1990s. They are on LV Ray Peak, with Madson
Mountain to their left.

Crescent Lake curls like the blade of a scimitar in a nest of mountains. Imagine a big smile of a lake, with the corners of the mouth at west and east; the bottom edge of the smile is the southern shore, the top edge the northern shore. According to the Chugach National Forest website, the Crescent Lake Trail runs 6.5 miles along Crescent Creek (and between Right and Wrong mountains) to the stream outlet on the lake’s western end. The primitive trail then travels the southern shore for 4.2 miles to the Saddle Cabin, and then another 3.54 miles (along Madson Mountain) to the eastern end of the lake. From there, a better-maintained trail takes hikers 3.4 miles past Carter Lake and LV Ray Peak to the Carter Lake trailhead. Altogether, says the website, the hiking totals 17.64 miles without any detours, so the foresters call it an 18-mile hike. (My best-guess estimate before reading this information was 18.5 miles, so I feel pretty good about my accuracy in tracing all those squiggly lines on my battered topographic maps.)

In June 1998, Kent Peterson and I decided to check out the route by making an exploratory mission. On a day that constantly threatened rain but only occasionally delivered it, we hiked to the bridge at the lake outlet to find a new sign denoting a primitive trail and began to follow the damp, grassy, uneven path, uncertain at times what we’d find. In the end, we traveled about half of the full 18 miles before deciding to turn around because (a) the weather looked bad, and (b) we had no vehicle parked at the other end of the trail.

So we came back the next year.

In July 1999, Kent, Adam Tressler and I completed a leisurely traverse on an overgrown trail in warm, mostly sunny weather in approximately nine and a half hours. On that trip, we figured out the trail basics: Stage One took us from the Crescent Lake trailhead to the lake itself in about two hours of steady walking; the trail in this section was solid and easy, and none of the hills were particularly taxing. Stage Two took us from the bridge to the Saddle Cabin; this was all primitive trail and involved stretches that were easy going but also places peppered with stinging nettles and half-hidden rocks. There was also one stream that was difficult to cross without wading; if the water was low enough, a jump completely across was possible, but usually crossing the creek meant temporarily shedding one’s shoes. Stage Three was the rest of the trip—nearly seven miles of moderate ups and downs, across a few avalanche chutes, and a definite shoe-shedding creek crossing at the upper end of Crescent Lake. After hiking past Carter Lake, the rapidly descending path to the trailhead was a hard-packed, gravelly old mining road that usually pained the knees and feet after all the previous travel.

On Monday, June 26, 2000, Kent and I returned for a third attempt, and we found the trail in good shape, the weather mostly sunny again, and the traveling much swifter. We arrived at the Carter Lake trailhead after only seven and a half hours. It was at this point that I became determined to complete the traverse in under seven hours. I didn’t know that it would take me two more attempts to achieve that goal … and that it would be another decade before I bettered it.

As a matter of course, it became routine to make only two major stops on the entire hike—for a quick lunch at the bridge over the Crescent Creek outlet, and for a long snack at the Saddle Cabin. Factoring in those stops (at 20-30 minutes each), I decided that it was possible to arrive at Crescent Lake in less than two hours, eat and be on the way to the Saddle Cabin. Two more hours, I hoped, would see us already done with our snack at the cabin and on our way toward Carter Lake. The rest was all up to the determination and endurance of the hikers.

Or so I thought.

It turned out that nature had a say in this as well.

Kent was tired of doing the same hike, so I took Karen Brewer on the first of what would be five consecutive years of completing the traverse together. After I regaled her with stories of good trail conditions and the possibilities for a record travel time, she and I made the attempt on Thursday, June 14, 2001. The weather started out partly cloudy but very warm. We arrived at Crescent Lake in two hours and took a 30-minute break at the bridge. Two hours later we reached the Saddle Cabin, where we spent another 30 minutes relaxing. With five hours already in, I thought it might still be possible to complete the traverse in just two more hours. Instead, it took three hours and 15 minutes, and I’m still surprised that it took only that long.



Clark leaps over a creek in 2003.

By the time we reached the far end of Madson Mountain, we had gone backwards in time. The upper end of Crescent Lake was still frozen. An avalanche from the previous winter had poured debris over the ice, and all those trees and rocks and branches and dirt were still there. The Carter Lake valley itself was filled with wet snow ranging from one to four feet deep; the trail there was impossible to find. And the descent from the far end of frozen Carter Lake was a trough of mud and running water. We slogged in the snow. We post-holed in it. We splashed down the creek-filled final stretch of trail. But we did finish, exhausted, in eight hours and 15 minutes.

I told Karen it couldn’t be that bad two years in a row.

On July 10, 2002, in warm, sunny weather and on a dry, somewhat overgrown trail, we completed the traverse in six hours and 55 minutes.

On June 21, 2003, we took friends with us and decided to just relax. Under overcast skies that occasionally spit rain, we finished in nine and a half hours. On June 21, 2004, Karen and I were cruising toward another record-breaking performance when the temperature climbed to at least 80 degrees in the valley and sapped our energy; in the heat, we finished in seven hours and 40 minutes. And on my last traverse with Karen—on Oct. 11, 2005, in temperatures that never rose above freezing—we finished in approximately eight hours.

Karen Brewer on the Crescent Lake primitive trail in 2004.

After that, injuries and other plans kept me from the traverse until 2009, when Curt Shuey and I made the attempt on July 1, 2009. I was using the traverse as a training hike to prepare myself for a six-day, 60-plus-mile journey with buddies in the Banff area of Canada, and I was babying an ankle that was still weak from a sprain months earlier. During the first mile of the traverse, I re-sprained the same ankle. Despite Curt’s protests, I resolutely refused to turn around and go home. We pressed on under partly sunny skies and finished the traverse. I failed to record the time, but I know it was in the eight- to nine-hour range.

Joe Charbonnet crosses a chilly creek in 2010.

On June 26, 2010, I led a Kenai Peninsula Outdoor Club hike of the traverse, making no pretense about setting any records. It was overcast, breezy and occasionally rainy, and the four of us finished in about nine hours.

But this year, on Nov. 3, Yvonne Leutwyler and I broke my old record, despite partly to mostly cloudy conditions, temperatures that ranged from 20 to 35 degrees, and up to four inches of fresh powdered snow on the last third of the traverse. We jogged and walked (resting about 20 minutes at both of the usual places) and finished in six hours and 43 minutes.

Yvonne and I early on the trail during our 2012 traverse.

We were aided by low water at both major creek crossings, but we were hindered at the biggest avalanche chute by dangerously thin ice over rapidly moving water, so we were forced to descend closer to the lake to find a safe way across.

Challenges exist in every attempt at the traverse. Sometimes it’s the heat, sometimes the cold. Sometimes it’s the mud, sometimes the snow. Sometimes it’s a trail so overgrown that tripping becomes the norm. Sometimes it’s the wind or the rain … or injuries … or waiting for a black bear to leave the trail. It’s best to be prepared for anything.

But a lot of the success in completing the traverse has nothing to do with personal records, and much more to do with personal goals. Sometimes it’s simply more fun to just take one’s time and revel in the beauty of that amazing place than it is to race against the hands of the clock. So I’ll be back.

 

"No Less of a Man"

NO LESS OF A MAN

Given the vastness and remoteness of Alaska, it is understandable that most Alaskans have traveled so little of it. Given the comparative smallness of the Kenai Peninsula—and its proximity to the population center of Anchorage—it might seem strange that most Alaskans have trod on so little of it, too. After all, the peninsula makes up only about 2-3 percent of Alaska’s 663,300 square miles, but a closer examination clarifies the situation. The peninsula, comprising some four million acres, contains few transportation corridors, most of them north-south passages on the western side, plus a west-east crossing or two over to the communities of Seward and Whittier. Much of the rest is mountains, lakes, streams, swamps, and mammoth masses of ice and snow. To travel these areas without roads, one must have certain tools—airplanes, boats, perhaps a bicycle or a pair of skis, or a good pair of boots—and certain characteristics—determination, fortitude, and a willingness to be uncomfortable in beautiful surroundings. The Kenai Peninsula can treat its travelers severely at times.

I have lived in this place for more than 50 years—I grew up here—and yet it seems that I have traveled so damned little of it. Perhaps that is because I have never owned an airplane, a boat with an engine, a four-wheeler, an all-terrain vehicle, or even a snowmachine. Consequently, what I have been unable to cover in the confines of an automobile, I have covered mainly in watercrafts I could paddle, on mountain bikes, or on my own two feet. And although I have seen plenty in my travels, I am reminded almost daily of how much more I have yet to see.

Most people who know me may have the impression that I am constantly afoot and on the move. For instance, I have climbed nearly every roadside mountain from the northern edge of the Sterling flats to the junction of the Seward and Sterling highways, and yet each time I have ascended to the top of one of those peaks, I have spied another valley that I have never worked my way along, or a sea of other mountains beyond those I’ve climbed. The peninsula contains hundreds, if not thousands, of lakes and ponds on which I have never floated when they were in a liquid state or strolled across when they were frozen. I have never traversed the Harding Icefield, never summited the peninsula’s highest peaks, never walked the slate-strewn east-side beaches outside of Resurrection Bay and Passage Canal, never hiked more than a few miles of the myriad trails across Kachemak Bay. On and on. I’ve seen so much, but there’s so much more to see.

And again, the Kenai Peninsula is just a fragment of the entire state—a state in which I’ve barely and rarely strayed far from the few asphalt ribbons that connect many of its major communities. I haven’t even traveled all of its roadways.

Is this a lament? Perhaps somewhat, but not entirely.

Is this a manifesto of my intent to mend my ways and expand the field of my Alaskan experiences? Not exactly, but the notion of change is refreshing. I’m growing ever more ready to open my eyes wider to the rest of the world.

Do I plan to purchase an airplane and take flying lessons? Learn to navigate a power boat and maintain the intricacies of its engine? Not likely, but I also have no wish to be limited by a dearth of machines in my life.

I’ll get by somehow.

Besides, as Shakespeare said in Romeo & Juliet, the world is broad and wide—and my desire to travel more of my birth state is endemic of my desire to travel more of the whole planet if I can.

I am not less of a man for having seen so little thus far, nor will I be more of a man once I have seen more, but the limitations of the past (self-imposed or not) do not have to be the limitations of tomorrow.

Perhaps this is some sort of declaration. Perhaps this old dog is ready for some new tricks.

 

 

"More Than a Pleasant Surprise"

MORE THAN A PLEASANT SURPRISE

The possibilities are endless: A splash of unexpected color in autumn foliage. An architectural improbability in nature or a cityscape. A nearly perfect blend of clothing style and human form. An evocative odor that forms a link to some distant past. A stretch of sudden syncopation that defines a musical sensation. A person whose personal vision alters our perception of the everyday world.

Occasionally in our travels through life we stumble upon something or someone special.

Sometimes the impact of that discovery lasts mere moments, other times a day or a week, a month or a year, or perhaps even forever.

We may notice the beauty in a mountain ridge that we’ve taken for granted before.

We may hearken to the silence of a calm winter morning.

We may detect an arresting aroma, relish a new taste, heed an unfamiliar texture, feel an unaccustomed warmth upon our flesh.

Or we may notice the difference that a kindness makes, the uplift we feel at helping someone else.

We may also sense a void left by people we have lost and more fully appreciate the good fortune we had when they were present in our lives.

Sometimes the significance of our discovery dawns upon us slowly, while other times the importance registers with lightning speed.

And sometimes the best discoveries are the ones we were never looking for. They may knock us temporarily off our stride, but on occasion our strides may require disruption.

For me, the best discovery I have made in a long, long while caught me unawares, and it took a few months for its significance to fully sink in. Now, however, it is difficult for me to imagine my life any other way.

About a year ago, I took my golden retriever and met up with a woman named Yvonne for a bushwhacking snowshoe trip along a series of lakes in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. Yvonne and I had hiked before—once previously in roughly the same area, once up a mountain in Seward, once to an old mining area near Hope. We’d also performed chainsaw-powered trail maintenance together on a little-known trail. But on this particular excursion, I noticed something different. What I noticed was the way I was beginning to feel.

I had insulated myself socially in recent years—after my father’s death, my retirement from teaching high school, my failing marriage which ended in divorce—and I was only beginning to find my way back into some sort of social mainstream as a single father who was beyond middle age and just starting to rebuild himself into some semblance of physical fitness after too long a sedentary spell.

Truthfully, I barely knew Yvonne at the time. She was somewhat reticent and protective of her past, while on the other hand I was nervous and acting like a virtual Chatty Kathy. But as I calmed down, I began to see what I had in this new friend and outdoor companion. I began to appreciate her determination and her toughness, her creativity and her perspective on life, her enthusiasm and her smile. I began to really like it when she smiled at me, and I loved the peal of her laughter.

At the end of that trek, I stayed behind with my dog and our snowshoes while she hitchhiked in the semi-darkness back to retrieve my Jeep, but she was undeterred. In later outings I annoyed her by taking dozens of photographs, but still she seemed to enjoy my presence. At times I rambled almost non-stop through a litany of observations and old stories, but she never rolled her eyes or asked me to be quiet. In fact, we continued engaging in adventures—and with greater frequency. By early 2012 we were meeting semi-regularly—a walk down to the river, snowshoeing treks into the hills, doing trail-prep work for a winter challenge race, staggering through a blizzard on a glacial lake, watching the aurora from a hayfield near my house, ice-fishing for Arctic char, meeting every Tuesday for a mountain-trail climb.

And on and on.

Both of us could feel our relationship changing, but it didn’t change rapidly. Progressing in baby-steps, we edged forward, and along the way we cast aside shadows of the past to enjoy the sunshine of future possibilities.

It’s hard to say that I “stumbled upon” Yvonne, but—whether our union is pure chance, a mystical confluence of personal pathways, or something else entirely—I consider myself blessed every day by her presence.

 

"No Longer Pretty, I Guess"

NO LONGER PRETTY, I GUESS

REVISED FROM A DECEMBER 2000 PERSONAL WRITING

Almost every day when I was teaching at Skyview High School, I ate lunch with Dave, one of my colleagues, in his classroom. Sometimes, when we weren’t planning outdoor adventures, pining for freedom from paperwork, or bitching about something that had upset us that morning, we’d get kinda philosophical. And one of our biggest topics back in the middle of the 2000-2001 school year was the aging process. One day, Dave was saying that one of the most disconcerting things he had noticed about growing older—he was 43 then, a year older than me—was that the visual effect he had on people (especially those of the opposite sex) had changed. He was a pretty handsome guy, accustomed over the years to attracting a certain amount of female attention, even among women much younger than himself. In 2000, however, he said he felt sometimes as if he was invisible, as if younger women who once might have “checked him out” were looking right through him, as if he had reached a stage in life at which he simply had ceased to matter to them. He could have been a piece of old furniture or part of the wall, as far as they were concerned.

Of course, this led him to the realization that many times he himself had done the same thing to older women—women who may still have appeared vitally attractive to older men. And this realization led the two of us to a discussion of the many people (men and women) whom we daily passed by and gave no second thought—perhaps not even a “first thought”—because they were older, fatter or uglier (or different in myriad other ways) than the people to whom we preferred to direct our attention.

How many people, we wondered, were living vital, rich lives but somehow had seemingly fallen beneath our notice? And how would it feel to live most of one’s life that way? And wasn’t it a shame that we didn’t give some people even a ghost of a chance to influence our lives simply because we “dismissed” them before they ever had that opportunity? And just how much of life were we missing out on because of such preconceptions and actions, whether they were conscious or subconscious?

Our talk that day reminded me of a master-teacher with whom I had  student-taught back at Soldotna High School in 1986. She had been a teacher of mine back in the early 1970s, and by 1986 she was just a couple of years away from retirement and probably somewhere between 40 and 45 years old. In fact, she was likely about the same age I was during the discussion Dave and I were having in 2000. In 1986, she was an attractive, athletic woman entering middle age, and she had noticed the way that a few of the young girls at the high school attempted to flirt with me. (I was then in my late 20s.) Almost wistfully, she said one day, “Enjoy the attention now. It doesn’t last long. I can remember when many of the young boys used to flock around….” And I knew that her nostalgia wasn’t prompted by any sexual desire for those boys of those bygone days, but more by a desire for the acknowledgement of her own vitality, and what she perceived in 1986 as her own fading physical desirability.

I understood intellectually what she was talking about back then, but 2000 I had internalized her message personally. I’ve never been a “pretty boy” or the object of considerable female interest, but by the turn of the century I had certainly noticed that I was dropping beneath the horizon line. The important thing, I know, is to be happy with one’s self.

Aging men and women don’t need the attention of attractive younger men and women to make their lives worthwhile or meaningful, but having a little of that attention is better than seeming invisible, and it even feels good sometimes.

 

"This Memory Stinks"

THIS MEMORY STINKS

For eight years, until I retired from the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, I told this story to my students, making many of them queasy in the process. Now I offer it to a more general audience:

On Wednesday, June 28, 2000, at approximately 1 p.m., I picked up my children at Ridgeway Preschool, where they’d just finished another day of a summer-fun session set up by Susan Larned, the school’s owner and main instructor. Olivia, at age six, was actually too old for the program, but she was eager (like Kelty, who would turn five in mid-August, and just loved Mrs. Larned) to go and play with some other kids, to make some art, to work with plants in the preschool greenhouse, et cetera. The day was partly sunny, with just a hint of a breeze, and the air was warm by Alaska standards. I had to run an errand in Kenai, and the kids were hungry, so we worked out a compromise: If they followed directions and behaved appropriately while I ran my errands, we’d stop at Burger King (which had a playland for kids) and grab a bite to eat. All in all, this describes the makings of a pretty ordinary afternoon.

And it stayed that way … for a while.

I ran my errand, the kids were good, and we soon found ourselves in the Burger King, where I made my children wait with me in line until I’d confirmed their orders. Then I sent them to the playland section while I ordered my own food and wrote out my check. While the kids played, I gathered up the cups I’d been given and ambled over to the serve-yourself drink station to dispense our liquid refreshments. A couple minutes later, I was shuffling to the playland area at the back of the restaurant when Kelty came racing past me. “Gotta go potty?” I astutely asked. “Gotta poop,” he confirmed without stopping. He zipped on through the restaurant and whisked himself through the door of the men’s restroom. I placed our drinks on a table near the tubes and nets and ladders comprising the playland equipment, where Olivia was still busily and obliviously scrambling, and then I headed back out into the main part of the restaurant to wait for my order number (#44) to be called.

Suddenly Kelty was back, shuffling sheepishly from the bathroom and stopping directly in front of me. Suspicious, I asked, “Done already? Did you wipe? Did you wash your hands?”

“Daddy,” he said, “I pooped in my pants.”

Just then, my order was called.

Almost immediately afterward, Olivia strolled out from playland to see what Kelty and I were talking about.

I ignored Olivia. I turned to Kelty. “Very much?” I asked. He nodded sorrowfully. “A lot,” he confirmed.

“Let me look,” I said.

He was wearing a long white t-shirt and summer shorts with Batman underpants underneath. I lifted his t-shirt and started to pull out the waistband of his shorts when I noticed with some trace of horror a soft brown, egg-sized turd stuck to the top of the waistband, sort of teetering there like a gooey boulder in Feces National Park.

“Number 44, your order is ready!” a worker called again.

“Oh, gross!” said Olivia.

I went into action: I made Kelty hold up his t-shirt but stand so that no one else could see his “surprise.” I told him to stand perfectly still. I told Olivia to calm down, and walked up to grab our food. I put our food on our table and told Olivia to sit and eat by herself (and play with her Kid’s Pack prizes) until I returned from the bathroom with her brother. Then I hurried back to Kelty and scurried gently with him back to the men’s room and into the only (and, thank God, unoccupied) stall, where I found another soft brown, egg-sized turd on the tiled floor, about two feet away from the toilet.

Now it needs to be said at this point that I have an excellent and active gag reflex, and it began to kick into high gear when I bent down with a handful of toilet paper to scoop up the turd from the floor and then the one from Kelty’s waistband. Both turds were barely more substantial than whipped cream, and it was a scientific wonder that they held together at all….

Next, I helped Kelty drop his shorts down to his ankles and his underpants down to his knees, and I was gagging a bit, and trying semi-successfully to say encouraging things to him because I didn’t want this to be for him any more traumatic than it already was. “Don’t worry, buddy. It’s gonna be okay…. (cough, cough) Man, that’s a lot of poop. Are you feeling okay? Does your tummy hurt?” (He said it didn’t.) “It’s gonna be all right…. Hey, can you bend over a little more? You’ve got some down your leg…. There, that’s better. I wish this bathroom had some paper towels.” (It had an air-blower for drying hands.) “We’re sure using a lot of toilet paper. Good thing there’s a lot here…. Hey, good job of coming out and telling Daddy you needed help. You’re being a big boy about this…. Wow, that’s a lot of poop in your underwear. I don’t think I can get all of that (cough, cough)…. Okay, bend over some more. I’ve gotta get as much as I can out of your crack, buddy.” (It was packed in there so brown and tight that it appeared like mortar in need of excavation.)

Then finally Kelty himself had something to say: “Dad?”

“Yes?”

“This sucks!”

Bent over him, examining his butt cheeks, I began to laugh, not only because what he said was so true, but also because I’d never heard him use that phrase before, and it sounded funny coming from him.

“You know what, Kelt,” I said, “you’re right. This DOES suck. That’s usually not a very nice thing to say, but THIS time you’re right.”

I got him cleaned up enough (including a thorough scrubbing of our hands) so that he could go eat and play, and when we returned home his mother helped him out of his poopy clothes and into the shower.

And a perfectly ordinary afternoon became an event that I may never forget.

 

"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.