"Making Contact"

MAKING CONTACT

JUNE 30, 2007

When George Pollard was 81, he called me to see if I’d be interested in “going up on the lake.” He said he’d seen brown bears feeding the previous week on spawning salmon in Clear Creek, at the far end of Tustumena Lake, and he was hoping to see them again and maybe take some photographs. Also, he said, he wanted to show me where my dad had shot his first goat back in 1967.

My father had died only a few months earlier, and George had accompanied him on that first successful goat hunt. That was just one small piece in the history of George’s family and my own that revolved around experiences on Tustumena Lake.

When my family first moved to the Kenai Peninsula in 1960, my father, Calvin Fair, set up his dental practice in Soldotna, and, by default, he became the peninsula’s primary dentist. The elderly Dr. Russell Wagner was about to retire in Seward, and Clayton “Doc” Pollard, who had been semi-retired for years in Kasilof, died the year we arrived in town. Dad went to Doc’s widow because she wanted to get rid of all of his old dental equipment, and Dad (who had an affinity for such instruments, as his own father had also been a dentist) offered to buy it. In making the purchase, Dad met Doc’s son, George, and began a long friendship with him and his wife, Ruth. Dad and George soon joined the Kenai Peninsula Conservation Society, and George, who for decades guided for big game out his home near Tustumena Lake, took Dad to Tustumena Glacier for his first goat hunt.

Several times over the next few years, George led Dad into the high country after game. George was the local expert, so the first time I planned a hike into the Tustumena benchlands, Dad recommended that I seek George’s help. George sat with me and my younger brother at his kitchen table and drew expert pencil lines on my topographic maps to show us the best routes where there were no established trails. And several years ago, George called up my dad and asked whether he and I would like to accompany him to see what might be the largest, oldest tree on the peninsula.

At the Kasilof River landing that day, George drove up in his rickety blue Ford van, pulling a small silver trailer bearing a red Zodiac inflatable, perhaps 15 feet long. The wind was blowing in our faces—meaning that it was coming down the lake toward us from the glacier—and a 26-mile trip that can take an hour on flat water took two hours on that day. After we pulled the boat into tiny Clearwater Stream, George, then in his mid-70s, fixed his sights on some distant familiar landmarks and marched us unerringly over glacial moraine and hilly patches of spruce. And there we found a mammoth cottonwood, more than 18 feet around, that may have been a sapling when Columbus landed in the New World.

When George’s wife died late in 2006, Mom and Dad wanted to attend the memorial service, but Dad was too ill to go, and Dad himself died only a few weeks later. Although my mother was worried about George’s feelings, she asked him to be one of the pallbearers at Dad’s service. George consented, and after the service he sent me a sympathy card containing a few lines from Ecclesiastes, and a personal note: “The bible verse above tells us that time will dim our hurts. But time will never erase the vision of Cal and I roasting goat ribs on a mountain above Tustumena Glacier.”

Those words were in my mind as I drove to meet George for our excursion onto the lake.

We agreed to meet at 10:30 a.m. (I would have liked starting earlier, but George likes his sleep.) I was in the parking lot at 10, organizing my backpack, pumping cold water from the campground well into a plastic bottle, and hoping the weather was going to cooperate. With the sun shining in through my windshield and the early morning breeze starting to die, George pulled in promptly at 10:30, in the same rickety blue van, towing the same inflatable boat.

For most people, putting in their boats involves first driving well away from the concrete ramp inclining into the river, then backing slowly, carefully straight, until the boat on the trailer begins to just float off its rollers. George, who refers to himself as a “terrible backer-upper,” has modified the standard method. He drives down one edge of the ramp toward the river, then angles across the ramp and back up in a large semi-circle; doing this requires that he have all or most of the wide ramp to himself, but it does place his boat and trailer as close as possible to the river before he actually does any backing. From there, he puts the van into reverse and does his best to drive the trailer straight into the water. If he succeeds, he kills the engine and then, in his hip boots, he steps out of the driver’s door into water just over his knees. He wades to the bow of the boat, unhooks the bow clip, grabs the bow line and shoves the boat out into the lazy current. Then he tows the boat by hand back to shore, where he either ties off the rope or hands it to a companion. Finally, he clambers back into the van, restarts the engine, and pulls forward to park his rig.

Despite being stooped somewhat with age, having thick glasses, and twin hearing aids, George is still strong. Although he prefers to hike with the aid of a four-foot spruce walking stick, he can still cover plenty of country, and he can still move his boat and gear around. His memory is still strong, too, as is his focus on tasks at hand. George grew up in wilderness, working hard and appreciating hard work. To paraphrase something he is fond of saying, “Some of the men who lived in the towns in those days were like wooden men from iron ships, but those who carved out their existence from the wilderness were like iron men from wooden ships.” He would not include himself among those iron men, however. Those men, he’d say, lived before his time. He simply grew up doing what he had to do, following in the footsteps of those hardier individuals.

Powered by George’s 40-horse Mariner, the Zodiac zoomed out of the river and into the lake at about 11 a.m. Our bulky float coats pushed up around our cheeks, and the sun shined warmly in our faces as George headed straight for the outer tip of Caribou Island. Partway there, he throttled back the engine and explained that he planned to stop just past the island because he had a little ceremony he wanted to perform. His wife’s sister, Mary Hawkins, had also lived in Kasilof and had died four months before Ruth. Mary’s ashes had been dropped onto the lake from a plane earlier in the year, and now George himself wanted to pay tribute. Mary, he explained, had loved gardening, and had been particularly enamored of her pink yarrow—a wild flower that typically produces only white blooms. So George had picked and dried a sprig of pink yarrow from Mary’s garden and planned to drop it into the lake near where he believed that her ashes had been deposited.

When we reached the site, he killed the engine. The boat bobbed gently as he extracted a clear plastic bag from beneath my seat. Inside the bag was the dried yarrow stem and flower, about a foot long, mostly brown but with just a hint of the pink still in the tips of its tiny blooms. He held the flower staidly out in front of himself and said, “Here’s hoping you have plenty more pink yarrow to tend, in whatever garden you find yourself.” He then lightly tossed the plant onto the water beside the boat, where it floated, slowly drifting away from our stern. After a few more moments of silence, George pulled the cord to restart the engine, and we were under way, blasting straight up the lake, more than two miles of open, frigid water on either side of us.

As we motored along, I mostly kept quiet. Questions I hollered back to George required him to throttle down and then turn up his hearing aid and ask me to repeat myself. So I stuck to mainly yes-or-no questions, so he could just read my lips and either nod or shake his head. “Is that the Caribou Hills fire?” I hollered when I spotted large tendrils of smoke along the distant southern horizon. George nodded. “Is that the Indian Creek drainage?” I pointed to a wide cleft far ahead and along the northern shore. George nodded. “Is there any trail over there that goes over to the Fox River and Kachemak Bay?” I hollered and pointed again. George had to stop the boat for that one. “Joe Secora,” he said, “used to have a trail that took off over that low ground.” George pointed. “But I doubt there’s much left except for a few old blazes.” George revved the engine and we moved ahead over water that had settled, on this now windless morning, to a mirror-like surface. I kept my eyes upon our destination and my mouth shut the rest of the way. I was looking for brown bears.

About a half-mile out, George brought us to another stop and then pulled binoculars from inside his plaid shirt. I retrieved my own from the top compartment of my daypack, and we surveyed the creek mouth. “See ‘em?” George asked. “Yes,” I said, “but I can’t tell how many there are. Looks like three, maybe four.” “Should be four,” George said. “Sow and three cubs.” More quietly then, George motored ahead and beached his boat on a stretch of black-grey rocks and sand about a quarter-mile from the feeding bears.

This was the site of the Cliff House, an old lake home that had stood for decades at the head of the lake, until it burned to the ground in 1978. Behind the site is the partially overgrown human trail to Tustumena Glacier. Only a few dozen yards from that path, however, is a well-traveled bear trail that leads from Clear Creek over to other salmon-rich streams. (A friend of George’s, who had camped here for three nights the week before, had counted 11 different brown bears from this site.) We hunched on a pair of weathered logs and focused our attention and binoculars on the bears. The cubs were two-year-olds, growing fat on salmon and nearly as large as their mother. All were active near the stream mouth, pouncing on salmon amid a flurry of aggressive sea gulls eager for scraps. In addition to 50 or more gulls were 20 to 30 bald eagles—a mixture of adults and juveniles—some standing stoically among the chattering gulls, some on large pieces of driftwood, but most perched high in surrounding trees and snags, awaiting their turn.

After George set up his 30-power spotting scope, we could more clearly witness the action. The more practiced sow was best at fishing, stabbing expertly at the stream bed with her mouth or forepaw, and she usually had a salmon drooping from her jaws, either carrying it away from the fracas to lie with it contentedly in the grass or else shredding and consuming the fish there on the gravel by placing one heavy paw upon its head and then tearing off skin and flesh with her teeth. The cubs captured fish, too, but with less success. Two of the cubs, probably hot in the early afternoon sun, went swimming in the lake, perhaps hoping to catch salmon before they could penetrate the stream mouth. Their efforts were futile, however, as they rose up in the water to pounce, only to push the salmon away from themselves. They swam and they played, too, sometimes floating on their backs, sometimes rising halfway out of the water to shake their upper torsos like dogs.

While we watched, George and I conversed moderately, both of us content just to observe the bears and to enjoy the warmth. The relative quiet was luxuriating, and neither of us felt the need to fill the empty spaces. There, among the thin patches of sedge grass, bothered only by an occasional mosquito or gnat, we simply enjoyed the moment as people do when they feel at ease and when they understand that such moments don’t last forever.

Later, as we ate our lunch, George told me stories—about the lake, about some of the characters in Kasilof, about my father. At one point, he asked me if I knew what time it was. “Sorry, George,” I said, “I don’t wear a watch.” He smiled. “I just don’t want to get home too early,” he said. “If I get home too early, I’ll have to mow my lawn … and it’s pretty bad, halfway to my knees.”

About the time we’d finished eating, we noticed that the bears were gone. Briefly we bemoaned the fact that we should have gotten in closer to the stream mouth right away in order to get some pictures. With the wind beginning to pick up—as it is wont to do in the afternoons—and cumulus beginning to pile up on the horizon, we loaded back into the Zodiac and cruised quietly up to Clear Creek. The bears were still there. They had all moved farther up the stream to the edge of the woods, and were still actively pursuing salmon. We watched with binoculars and fretted that the bouncier water and greater distance were spoiling our opportunity for great bear photos.

Our next stop was a stretch of gravely moraine about half to three-quarters of a mile from Clear Creek. We again beached the boat, mooring it to a large stump imbedded in the rocks and sand. Then we packed up our binoculars, cameras and George’s spotting scope and tripod, and headed out. The mix of sand, smooth gravel and broken rock was splashed with vegetation--dwarf fireweed, clumps of sedge, lupines, buttercups and miniature violets, and swaths of alder and willow. And dotting this landscape were the tracks of gulls and smaller birds such as juncos or jays; moose and possibly caribou; occasionally a bear, or a smaller predator such as a coyote.

George had an approximate stopping-point in mind, and brought up short our little march after only about 15 minutes. “Let’s set up the scope here,” he said, gesturing at a small spread of dark sand. I erected the tripod for him as he peeled off his daypack and oriented himself with binoculars. “You see that last patch of snow up there?” he asked, pointing across the expanse of moraine to a rocky set of cliffs plastered in willows and alders. The snow patch, looking small and round from this distance, sat at an elevation of about 2,000 feet. “To the best of my recollection,” George said, “that’s where your dad got his goat.” He trained the spotting scope on that location and adjusted the focus. Then he stepped aside for me. I pressed my right eye to the eyepiece and looked. Not much to see, really—the snow, grey slabs of rock, some bushes—but I understood the significance, and I was grateful both to see it and to have George be the one to show it to me. Squinting through the eyepiece a few moments later, he said, “Too bad we don’t see any goats up there today. Probably too warm for them. Probably holed up in the alders.” He moved away to paw through some more of his gear, so I took another look—and saw a single goat emerge from the shadows to move ghost-like and white along the cliffs and brush.

By the time we returned to the boat, the wind was steady at about 10 miles per hour. George motored out away from shore a bit, and then stopped. I glanced back at him. He appeared to be listening, or pondering something deep and philosophical. “What’re you thinking, George?” I asked after a few moments. “I’m trying to figure out this wind,” he said. “It was supposed to blow in here southwest, but this is more westerly. Straight up the lake. Southwest means we can have a smoother ride back over on that shore. He pointed across the occasional white caps to the southern shore. “I’m not real fond of heading across Devil’s Bay,” he said. “I think it’s going to be rough no matter which way we go.”

“Whatever you think is best, George,” I said. “Let’s try it over here,” he said, meaning the northern shore.

Starting out was rough. George quartered into the waves. After every third or fourth wave, the bow would go airborne and drop into the next trough between crests. No drop was exactly the same, but each was shuddering. Sometimes I was girded for the impact; other times I felt my spine compress, or felt winded as if I’d just been struck in the abdomen. But after 10 to 15 minutes of such travel, George stopped again. “No use beating ourselves up here,” he said. “Maybe we’ll catch a bit of a break over there.” I shrugged, knowing that he meant reversing our direction and heading south.

I have no idea how long it took us to reach the southern shoreline, but I felt immense relief being closer to land. George then turned down-lake, and a less severe pounding resumed. Probably halfway back to the landing, I became aware that I had to pee, and every bump emphasized my discomfort. George’s hat blew off once, and I had to spear it with his walking stick as he cruised in a small circle. In the end, the return trip took more than twice as long as the trip out, including navigating around Caribou Island to stay closer to shore.

On the lee side of the island, we relished the smoother seas and breathed a little easier. I did not pee my pants, and I learned that, if the western horizon is clear, a person can see two volcanoes—Mount Redoubt and Mount Iliamna—from the middle of the lake. If a boater sets his bow directly for Iliamna, he will be aiming straight for the river entrance. The mountain will shrink beneath the shoreline as he approaches it, and, just as it disappears, he’ll be there.

Safely at the landing in the late afternoon, George said, “That’s about as bad as I like to be out there any more.”

The bad backer-upper had a hell of a time getting his trailer straight into the water, but finally we managed after I twice picked up the back end of his trailer and straightened it myself to keep him from jackknifing the whole rig. Later, with the boat strapped securely to the trailer and all our gear stowed in respective vehicles—and after I had peed in the bushes—I thanked George for the opportunities he’d given me on that day. Then I wished him safe travel, and I reminded him that he wouldn’t have to mow his lawn.