The weather improved very slightly as the morning went on, and I decided today was as good as any for a hike in the Park. Since my arrival in Port Alsworth, most of my activities have only been marginally recreational. I’ve done more maintenance than I apply to my own house, and certainly J and I have been occupied with subsistences winter-squirrel-chores up until the moment he left. So today was my first solitary day in Lake Clark.
I stopped at the visitor’s center to pick up a trail map. While there, the Park Historian invited me to go on a walk with him. I hesitated only a little; I had full intentions of going on a hike, but I had already heard of this sixty-year-old Historian's legendary hiking skills. Still, it was not an offer to be refused.
When we met up later as agreed, he was wearing rubber boots, three reflective plastic triangles stuck onto the small of his back with Velcro (if not the sign of a hard-core pedestrian, I don’t know what is), and with his hoodie and sunglasses, looked a bit like a retired Unabomber. It turns out that the legends are true. The Historian turned sixty this year, but believe me, you wouldn’t know it from his hiking. The Historian is a true billy goat. We came up on steep path fairly early in the hike, and as he launched upward, I followed dragging behind, heaving. At some point all you could hear was the sound of my heavy breathing. The Historian was not making a similar noise.
We eventually made our way to the Tanalian Falls and then further to the lake. I had a few breaks during the hike, once to tie my shoelaces, and then a few more times to take photos. While scrambling up rock from the falls to the lake, I noted that not only do the Historian’s speed and stamina outclass me, he also is the most sure-footed person I’ve ever seen. His rubber boots seemed magical as he quickly scampered up crumbling rock. I wondered if this was some kind of divine agility or if he had climbed these rocks so many times so that he knew them like the back of his hand. Regardless, I was ashamed how miserably this 31-year-old body matched to his.
After the falls and the lake, I think fatigue started to take on a tinge of delirium, and I found myself being more relaxed around him. As his detachable hazard signals imply, the Historian walks everywhere. He does not have a truck or an ATV like most people here. Most days, I see him walking home with his backpack. His house has a few rooms, but the main one when you open the door has a bunk bed (in which he sleeps in the bottom bunk), a wood stove, and a plasma TV. The wood stove looks as if it was ordered out of a Sears Roebuck catalog from 1910. The plasma looks like it was purchased from Costco. The bed looks like a man sleeps there alone.
We talked of many things. This Historian said I was idealistic because I am young and had yet to admit that human beings are far from perfect. He has the view that human existence is a difficult time, punctuated with only moments of euphoria. My father, seven years senior to the Historian, regularly refers to life as “misery” with a few moments of happiness.
My standard response to this kind of talk is that the “pursuit of happiness” is written into the Declaration of Independence, but in talking to the Historian, I started to wonder if “pursuit of happiness” (as opposed to plain “happiness”) is actually a euphemism for my father’s frequently cited “misery.” The Historian said that as human beings, we were probably happiest as hunter-gatherers. This statement was particularly interesting to me because many of my happiest moments here in Alaska have been when I’ve been engaged in hunter-gatherer activities. He said hunter-gatherers did not have to worry about destroying the world the way we are in the modern age. (This is where I suggested that we were discussing modern man’s idea of unhappiness.) I told him the hunter-gatherers had their own relative miseries to contend with – starvation, freezing through winter, warfare, dying in childbirth….
It was at this point that I asked him if he were a solitary man because instinctively I knew him to be so, but it was interesting to me that the solitary man appeared to have the angst of the world on his shoulders. I find it interesting that this hermit sits in his cabin eating dinner he cooked on his woodstove, watching baseball on his plasma, thinking about the angst of the world thanks to CNN brought to him by satellite TV.
We hiked up past the Tanalian falls to Kontrashibuna Lake. The weather from town appeared to be foul but up by the lake, the grey mist took on another feeling of quiet soft gentleness. The lake glistened not in the way it would on a sunny day but in a manner far less showy -- a silvery shyness affording us a glimpse intended for us and no one else to see. Mother Nature had manage to turn our full color skies into black and white.
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