Traveler’s Journal – A Christmas Rose on a Summertime Trail

This story is only very loosely connected to the holiday season. It takes place in the middle of the summer, and there’s only one phrase in the piece that tangentially connects subject to theme. There’s neither eggnog nor mulled wine, and the only pines in sight were standing dead by the millions in the beetle-killed Chugach National Forest on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska. There are no Christmas trees, carols or roasting chestnuts. But there is a Rose and she did give me a rare and beautiful gift, even though the entirety of our relationship transpired through the rear view mirror of her late 1970s Chevy Malibu over the course of a twenty minute ride she gave my partner and me   about 10 years ago.

The friend I was traveling with, Patricia, was a beautiful girl from Adelaide who I’d met a few weeks before in Anchorage. The first day at the hostel I saw her across the day room and overheard her chatting with someone about how much she wanted to go kayaking – which led me to grab Lonely Planet and a telephone, and to proceed to have a series of unnecessarily loud conversations with various guides in the area about the virtues of fiberglass boats over plastic. Obvious or not, the play worked and that evening we were sharing a halibut dinner and planning our hitchhike down to Resurrection Bay the following morning for a week at a remote hostel and kayak camp.

That summer Patricia and I would log thousands of miles on the side of the road, about one hundred hiking in the mountains, and dozens and dozens in our kayaks. There a particular sense of one’s humanity in the Alaskan bush and also on the side of an Alaskan road. Being out in the big mountains, looking over ice fields with black basalt peaks shooting skyward through glaciers thousands of years old brings up feelings of both humble insignificance and universal connectedness. Seeing an 80,000 pound humpback breech to your right and watching his bubble trail pass beneath your 12 foot boat only to surface on your left does much the same. And somehow, hitchhiking in the north does so, too. In each scenario, at every moment, you’re number could be up. And yet – just as you trust that the next grizzly won’t eat you, and you won’t be flipped from your kayak by an aggressive orca, you trust that on the highway north of Seward, your next ride won’t kill you either. You have faith that that next ride won’t be  any more than half-drunk and he’ll still be taking his anti-psychotics – or at least you hope that his gun will jam at  the last minute if everything goes horribly wrong.

Patricia and I, touched by that good fortune and sense of humble connectedness, had had the best possible run of hitchhiking luck that summer. We never had to wait for more than an hour for a ride. We’d been invited to camp on people’s property, we’d been offered a free gun (which we declined), we’d been picked up by an elderly couple named Earl and Mavis in an RV because we looked like “a couple of nice kids,” which I decidedly did not. And once we’d even made it from Homer to Denali National Park in a single day – a hitch of almost 700 miles for which we’d figured two days minimum, with one likely spent on the side of the road.

As a last hurrah for the season, Patricia and I decided to do one more trek outside of Seward before we had to catch separate flights back to our own corners of the world. The trail we chose was only about 20 miles long, the first leg following the Lost Lake Trail and the second on the Primrose.  The Lost Lake trailhead was about 10 miles north of town. It’s a pretty steady climb the first few hours, up through the devastated spruce forest, but once you clear the timberline the vistas became overwhelmingly beautiful with high alpine lakes set like cold sapphires in seas of lupine and fireweed. Ringing the horizon in every direction were the snow-covered and glaciated Kenai Mountains.

The skies were clear and the days so long that had we wanted to speed the journey we could have finished it in two days, but that’s just not the point. Rather than racing, we would lounge on our Therm-a-Rests after coffee and oatmeal in the morning or freeze-dried lasagna at the end of the day. In the low-angled light of an Alaskan midnight we’d sip hot chocolate spiked with bourbon and listen to the wind, or to the wolves howling in the distance, before making a small fire and bedding down for the night.

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