Now in Their 70s, Two Friends Return to the Arctic for One More Adventure | Short Film Showcase
I was looking through my journal from our first trip here 35 years ago. One of the things that struck me as I was reading it, I had hiked up to the top of one of the peaks here and had to turn around and come down. Because you don't spend all of your time on the peaks, they're isolated parts of life. In coming down, I was starting to have tears in my eyes and feeling that I wasn't going to come back to this very place again, feeling that this is the only time in my life I will be here.
The Nortec River is a river in northern Alaska, and it starts in the Gates of the Arctic National Park. It runs east to west for about 400 miles along the north part of the Brooks Range, which is the northernmost mountain range in Alaska. The Noatak is the longest river in the United States and altered by man, and one of the most spectacular rivers in our country. In 1980, we did the Noatak from Match directly to Kotzebue. We wanted to come back into the headwaters part and maybe a little more. This is what I was talking to that the ranger. She recommended hiking up this river, the Kübra.
Somebody had told us that we were going to be coming back down this river 35 years later. We wouldn't have believed it, but we'd have been very delighted to hear that. I just like how I feel when I'm out here. When you hear people talk of a oneness with nature or unity with the world, in some ways I think it's a more natural environment for me. It's certainly a more natural environment than a city. You look at a map and you see open places on the map; that's a place I want to go. Being at a place like this, being on the rivers, it's a chance to reflect, decide what's important in life, and just to enjoy the incredible beauty of being here.
See the wildlife, learn the flowers, look at the sky when the sun rises, and says what some people find when they go to a temple, or church, or a mosque, I find when I'm on a river. I met Tip. I was traveling down the Yukon River with my girlfriend. I think this is 1975 and decided to do a river together, and one thing led to another, and we have done at least 30 trips to the north together, each at least three weeks long.
We are holed up here because the plane flying us in required two trips, and they're only able to make one trip on the day that we came in with two or three days' supply of food and basic other supplies. The other supplies were brought in the next day. The next day, it was raining hard, and the pilots won't fly where they can't see. Unfortunately, Kevin had tried to fly in, but the clouds were too dense, and he couldn't get over the pass and had to turn back.
So we've had a little more than two days here, and we're hoping they're gonna come in soon. Because I've made a lot of trips north, and I've never had to go without food. I don't mind the rain, but I do like food. Well, we first have to do is put our boat together, which is a pack boat, and it's a little laborious to put together. We have not put one together before, and we have not used a pack boat before, so this is an interesting experience for us.
For me, rivers are transfixing and spellbinding. Rivers take you places; rivers move, rivers are alive. I like the ocean a little bit, and I like lakes a little bit, but rivers, they're much more passion for me. Sunset at twenty minutes to twelve.
Have we been here a month earlier, we wouldn't have any sunset. It was a totally overcast sky with intermittent rain, light rain, drizzle. But we wanted to hike up the Coatrack River, and we started out. We hiked up tussocks, worked our way through willows, spoke loudly to alert grizzly bears that we were coming through, and had just spectacular views hiking up that river valley. We hiked about five miles until we saw what looked like was probably a hot spring, and logged down to it. It wasn't a hot spring, but it was a spring that had water warmer than the river. Just a delightful day, long day, but a delightful day.
I find all of nature just absolutely fascinating. Light travels 186,000 miles a second; it takes twenty-five thousand years to travel just from one side of our galaxy to the other. To the tiniest flower here in the Arctic, in some way they all seem to be connected, and it's not so much from a point of view of science that I'm looking at the rocks and the flowers; it's a point of view of beauty.
And I've seen so many of these flowers so many times coming back, it's like recognizing old friends again. I really like traveling; Tip is a great traveling companion. The things that we talk about, there are not many people I can have those same conversations with. He doesn't usually insist on his own way, and when we have differences, we've smoothened them over without much problem.
Sometimes we don't agree on the way to go, and particularly when we were younger, Jim would go in one direction if he thought that was the better direction, and I would go in another direction. Actually, on the Noatak, we went in different directions, and I didn't see you, and I was concerned that you'd been eaten by a bear or something, and I was tiptoeing around and didn't find you.
Later, I looked for you and climbed up some little peak and saw you on top of another little peak looking for me. He may not remember that; I don't remember that incident at all. When Jim and I were on Baffin Island, we visited a little museum, and it featured an Inuit saying which touches the Arctic and all of life, and to me struck home. There's only one great thing, and that one great thing is just to live, to open our eyes to the great light of dawn moving across the land in the beginning of the day.
Hiking in the Brooks Range, if you start north of the Arctic Circle, and in the higher, more northerly part, it's open country right away. Get up high, and you get wonderful views and see wonderful mountains, and it's just a wonderful place for hiking. It's too late for us to be explorers, but there's adventure, and there is a sense of venturing into country that is very rarely traveled.
We gained about 2,500 feet in elevation; that's not all that much, but because I'm 77, I handled it okay. There are more restrictions with aging. I can't do the same types of things I did when I was 40 or 50 or even 60. How many more times are there coming up here? We've realized how much we have left that they're gonna be able to keep doing, you know, as we get older. That's coming towards an end here.
I'm grateful I'm doing as well as I am, but I'm certainly appreciating things like today's hike more than ever. Maybe this is the last trip, but I'm not saying it's the last trip. Ritual is an enormous part of human activities, and those rituals give meaning to life. But with time, some of those rituals no longer have the same impact in someone's life.
I think by accident, by chance, Jim and I started going down rivers together. We were intrigued by them; there was the adventure, there was a friendship, there was just spectacular beauty, and in some ways, it became a ritual that helped give meaning, at least to my life. I can remember Jim calling me up in December or January and say, “Are you ready to go canoeing?”
When you look over the 40 years of trips, we have had a lot of wonderful times and hard times. The hard time is where wonderful times, pure pleasure, here unadulterated, unmixed by any negative aspect, is getting a really nice fast current and being able to see the rocks or the bees just fly by. That is such a nice feeling.
About three years ago, I was in Pakistan with a group to climb a mountain, and one night after dinner, one of the women on the trip asked me, since I was almost 70 at the time, as I look back on my life, what tends to stand out? I responded that I really didn't consider my life over yet. I have so many things I want to do that would take another whole lifetime to do them, and then that probably wouldn't be long enough.
Nice remember that poem by Denis Vincent Millay in which she says, “My candle burns at both ends; you will not last the night. But my friends and all my foes, it gives a lovely night.”