Okay, here's the story on Denali. I'm going to post this up here so you don't have to go back to Aug. 11-15 to read this stuff, but eventually I'll post it back on the correct dates.
Oh, and here is one of my favorite shots of ... me. It's Nature Girl! REI advert model! And it's totally going in the "hk presents: ALASKA" calendar.
AUGUST 11, 2005
Today was Co-Intern’s last day of work, so we both got to the office early, did some work, and then snuck out to get donuts for the weekly meeting where the lawyers review cases. Of course, since it was the interns’ last case review, they put out a spread of bagels and juice. It was just like the gift of the Magi! But not really. Because we interns knew that they were going to do something for us. I will say, though, that Big G was the only attorney who really made a point to thank us. Aw, Big G. What a grand guy.
I had planned to leave at noon in order to get to Denali by 5 pm and meet Roommate and her friend Dryfoot, but I had to get a motion out to the court, and didn’t end up leaving until 12:30. Me and the Mighty Subaru peeled on out of the office parking lot and onto the road under a cloudless sky, which meant that about 3 hours out, I could see Mt. McKinley rising out of the distance. Because I was worried about being late, though, I didn’t stop to take a picture of the famous behemoth, which I regret now -- it was one of those rare, rare days when every line of the mountain was stark against the sky. What I did instead was take my little digital camera out, position it on the steering wheel, and snap several photos through my bug splattered windshield. The violence with which certain bugs had hit the Sube’s windshield made for some amusing pictures. See the blur to the left? That was a mighty big bug that met its demise on the car.
As I drove, I noticed that the roadside fireweed was nearly devoid of blossoms, instead featuring cottony white fluff, and remembered Co-Intern’s observation: “It starts from the bottom, just like the flowers, and when the white stuff reaches the top, you know summer’s over.”
I got to Denali exactly on time, but in retrospect I should have stopped to admire the big mountain, both because it’s hard to get it on a good day and because the Sube would have definitely benefited from a cooldown period; it didn’t appreciate the 70-MPH pace I was setting at some points, and had a bit of a fever toward the end. But it was all right! You gotta love a car with balding tires, rusting wheel wells, and dented hood that gets you around so good.
Roommate and Dryfoot were already in the backcountry center, looking at a large topographical map of the park on the wall and trying to figure out which units were free for three people (the park restricts the number of backcountry campers every night by unit, each of which comprises at least 15 square miles). Hikers returning with bear canisters and people registering for sites were milling around, so we waited for a bit to talk to the park ranger. At last he got freed up and oh my, what a park ranger. Big, dark eyes, slender build, tanned skin, mysterious forearm tattoo, gentle, reassuring manner, nice smile – oh yes, Alonzo made that drab park ranger uniform look just fiiiiine. In short, he was hott. And no, that is not a typo.
Alonzo suggested a route that would take us through some mountains, which we rejected as too difficult, then suggested an easier path along the river, which we accepted. He explained the safety procedures we’d have to follow: cooking was to take place 100 yards upwind of our tents, and we would have to store all food and fragrant products 100 yards away from either the tents and the cooksite. “This really works, and this is why we’ve never had a death from a bear attack in Denali.” (Maulings, of course, have taken place.)
Hott Alonzo bade us farewell, and I thanked him for staying 20 minutes after the center closed to go over stuff with us. “It’s no problem – happens all the time. You’re welcome,” he smiled, while looking into my eyes.
I think we had a moment there. Oh, we definitely had a moment, baby. Yowza!
FRIDAY, August 12, 2005
We spent the night at a hostel about 15 miles south of the park, which was pretty nice. In the morning, we rented equipment from them: two packs, two sleeping bags, a stove and cookware, two tents. It took approximately forever to pack everything correctly into our packs. There’s a method to it – you put your sleeping bag at the bottom, heavy stuff int he middle closest to your back, and then your clothes and light stuff on top. Roommate was carrying the bear canister with all our food; Dryfoot and I carried a tent each and the cooking stuff. Each of us was carrying about three liters of water each. Each pack must have weighed at least 25 pounds, probably closer to 30.
And then we zoomed off to the park.
You have to take a shuttle into the park, so we put the Sube in the overflow parking lot and hopped on the camper shuttle. We had chosen a unit close to the middle of the park; about five minutes past the Polychrome Pass rest stop, the driver stopped the bus and said, “Here’s the stop for you guys in Unit 31.” It was a bit of a shock for me, and definitely a surprise for others on the bus – they looked around, bewildered, because there was a sheer drop on one side of the shuttle and what appeared to be impassible brush all to the other side.
“It’s weird when the bus drives away,” Roommate had mentioned, and I took a picture of the shuttle leaving us behind as she and Dryfoot made last minute adjustments to their packs. Finally, at about 1:30 pm on Friday, with Roommate leading, we clambered up off the road and into the brush.
There are no trails in Denali, unless you count the animal trails. The first hour or so, we were wading through brush with spiny, reaching branches that sometimes extended over our heads, calling out “Hey bear! Hey bear!” every minute or so. Our Alonzo-suggested route started at a pond, so shortly after leaving the road, we found our selves mucking through boggy, marshy stuff.
We left the tussocks and wet ground behind pretty quickly, though, and soon found ourselves following a stream through a rocky, brushy valley. We flushed out a couple ptarmigan, the state bird of Alaska, and universally agreed-upon as the stupidest bird in Alaska. Sometimes called the prairie chicken, they are good eating (so I hear). They turn snowy white in the winter; the ones we saw were just getting their white feathers under the wings, a sharp contrast to their mottled soft brown bodies.
The stream grew bigger as we went along, and diverged into several channels at times. About 5:30, we exited our small river valley into an enormous river valley. ENORmous. Our clear little stream emptied into one of several channels of dirty brown, silt-filled glacial river. Wide expanses of gravel and dirt separated the braids of water.
Whoo hoo!
Since we had only been hiking for four hours, we decided to push on. After horsing around and enjoying the vastness of our river valley, we continued. But after an hour or so, we encountered a largish channel of rushing, muddy water. Until that point, Dryfoot and I had reluctantly splashed through some ankle-deep channels of water, but hadn’t yet resigned ourselves to wet feet for the rest of our trip. Looking out at the brown gray water, we decided to put off the inevitable for the morning, when we would be fresh.
We set up camp about 8 pm on a large gravel bar not far from land and separated only by two small creek-like channels. I think the first thing we did was to take off our wet shoes and switch to flipflops we had brought for that purpose. We staked down our tents, walked out to what we thought was about 100 yards, and had couscous and chicken for dinner, heated up on our tiny propane stove. There’s nothing better than warm food after hours of hiking. The hostel pack included a can of 6 different spices, too, so we flavored our meal with salt, pepper, garlic, and cayenne pepper.
We were in bed by 9, I think, but I couldn’t fall asleep for a while, for fear (irrationally) that during the night at some point a great rush of water might sweep over our gravel bar and swamp us or drag us into the cold river. I alternated between this fear and the fear that we’d be set upon and eaten by bears. Oh, and that we’d fall into the river and drown the next morning.
It was a fun night.
I did eventually fall asleep and stayed in my sleeping bag for almost 12 hours, as I could not bear to get out into the frigid air at 5 am, when I first awoke. Besides, I reasoned, it would be better to cross the river when we could be sure of drying off in the warm sunshine.
SATURDAY, August 13, 2005
We woke up knowing that we had several water crossings in front of us, a prospect that made me a little anxious, but that really filled Roommate with trepidation. The last time she had gone to Denali, she had fallen in the glacial river while crossing it and was unable to get out for a good 5 minutes, as her pack was dragging her down.
We made oatmeal and flavored it in our own ways (mine: salt, pepper and garlic), and repacked our packs so that everything was waterproofed. And then we began crossing.
You might think that river crossing takes some skill, but common sense went a long way in helping us successfully ford each channel – and there were many. We had had to watch a safety video at the backcountry center on Thursday, so we knew that we should face the current, hold on to each other, and step slowly and in line with each other. Following the video, we threw rocks into channels where we could not determine the depth of the water, listening for the clink of it hitting bottom. This method was good for determining that a channel was shallow, but not so good when we couldn’t hear anything. In those cases, we had no idea if the water would come up to our knees or our chests.
Dryfoot, being the tallest (by a scant 2 inches) and perhaps the heaviest, took the front position. She took the brunt of the current, breaking it for Roommate and me, who braced her from behind. We lockstepped sideways through at least 5 or 7 channels where the water came up to mid-thigh, slowly feeling our way along the rocky river bed, invisible beneath the water.
Somewhere in the midst of fording these channels, it happened. Roommate was in front of me, charging along a gravel bed close to the water’s edge. It looked like any other sand-and-rock bank, but all of a sudden, she let out a little shriek. Her legs, up to the knee, had disappeared into the ground. She turned around with a terrified, astonished expression on her face. “I can’t get my legs out!”
Startled, I began moving toward her, but my next step broke through the surface of the ground and I was up to my knees in the slurry of mud, sand, and water. Dryfoot, following only a few steps behind me, sank in a second or two later.
“Oh, shit,” I said. I tried lifting my foot out of the quicksand, but succeeded only in sinking deeper. There must be a bottom to this, I thought, but I was up to above my knees and could feel nothing. My pack felt heavy. I fought an uncontrollable urge to laugh.
“I’m stuck,” Roommate gasped.
“Get down flat!” said Dryfoot. She dropped to her stomach, and I dropped to my hands and knees. We stayed like that for a few seconds, and we didn’t sink.
“Okay, let’s try to get to dry ground,” Dryfoot suggested. I started crawling back in the direction we had come from, pulling my feet out of the quicksand. The dark brown mud covered with gray and brown pebbles ground rippled beneath my hands and knees and I was reminded, oddly, of nut-covered chocolate frosting.
“So, uh, I’m reminded of a story that I think I’ll tell you later,” Dryfoot said as we crawled. Roommate made it to dry ground first, despite being sunk into the sludge up to her thigh. On my hands and knees, I crawled over to where she was standing, Dryfoot soon after me.
Standing on firm ground, our lower halves covered in mud, we looked at each other. After the first wave of hysterical laughter ended, Dryfoot said, “Okay, so the story that Roommate told me was that there was a woman stuck in the mudflats in Turnagain Arm, and they couldn’t get her out in time, so she died of hypothermia. They sent a helicopter to get her out, but when they pulled her out, only half of her body came out of the mud!”
“That is NOT a true story,” I laughed. “That’s totally apocryphal!”
“It’s true!” Roommate insisted.
“There’s no way mud would exert that much pressure on the human body!” I protested.
“No, I want to believe it’s true,” Roommate said, and I said, “Okay, okay, believe what you want.”
The mud washed off of us in the next channel crossing. But we were leery of wet-looking gravel banks for the rest of the trip.
Around 2 p.m., we found the tributary that would lead us westward and then eventually south back to the road. After cheering our successful find, we started trekking up the rocky sides of this valley, following the stream. The going was a bit rough, especially on the ankles; the loose rocks made each step a balancing game. After about two hours of this, we took a break, and then continued on. The walls of the mountains on either side of us began closing in.
Around 4 pm or so, we hit the first fork of the river. Which was bad because – where was the fork on the map? We pored over our topo map for a good 5 minutes, wondering where the fork was. “I don’t see a fork on here,” I said. “Unless it’s this one.” I pointed to a stream that joined the correct one a mile up from the huge river valley and branched off into the northern mountains. “But I don’t remember seeing the water branch off there!”
Were we totally off course? Shit, shit, shit.
Then all of a sudden, Roommate pointed out a spot on the map. “There’s the fork!” she cried out in relief. It was hidden by the yellow highlighter with which we had outlined the boundaries of the unit, and we’d missed it.
We metaphorically smacked ourselves on the forehead and folded up the map. Whew!
The valley kept narrowing, and we kept ascending. The valley floor was littered with rocks that had broken off the mountains. About 20 minutes later, I stopped the group again. “I just feel like we’re heading in the wrong direction,” I said. Roommate and Dryfoot looked at me. “I mean – what direction is this, anyway?” Dryfoot and I looked at the sun. According to its position, we were heading northwest. We were supposed to be heading southwest.
Shit, shit, shit. “But the sun can look different in the mountains,” Roommate said, and we agreed. “And we’re really north in Alaska – you’ve got to think that 5 pm is more like 2 pm anywhere else. Besides, this valley could turn around just around the next bend.”
“But we aren’t supposed to be going up in elevation according to the map,” Dryfoot pointed out. “And we’ve been climbing up pretty steadily for a while.”
“Maybe it just seems like more of a climb than it really is,” suggested Roommate.
We stood around for several minutes, debating the position of the sun and whether the mountains around us seemed like the ones on the topo map. “Does anyone have a compass?” I asked. No one did.
We finally decided to backtrack. If this was the right channel that we were following, we’d be able to find a place where the river forked off and up into those northern mountains. Then we’d be able to figure out if we were on the right track or not.
After about 40 minutes of backtracking, we found a stream of water coming down from an entirely different source. “God! This must be the fork that’s on the map, the one that’s leading to those northern mountains. And since we came down from the other side, we must have been on the right path,” we reasoned.
Back up. By this time, it was probably about 6 pm. But the seed of doubt was growing. We were on the right path? The water seemed to diverge in many places. How would we know if we were following the right channel? We stopped again to confer and look at the map. Dryfoot suggested that we follow the path we’d been on until 8 pm, and see if we thought it was right.
It was around 8 pm that we hit yet another fork. The stream had turned white by then, probably a product of some strange mineral or moss in the water. It was joined on the left by an utterly clear stream. A Dall sheep poked his head curiously over the ridge, and then scampered away.
Roommate took out the map yet again. This fork wasn’t reflected anywhere on the map, if it was indeed the third fork in the river – neither on the main water route we were supposed to be following nor the tributary that we feared we might be mistakenly following. Once again, we debated the position of the sun and the elevation.
“Okay, I guess we don’t know what direction we’re headed in,” I said. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. It seems like we’re headed into the mountains, and I don’t think we should be, but maybe – I don’t know.”
Dryfoot suggested we continue on, as we had planned, until 8 pm. “If we’re not the right path, we can just trace our steps and return the way we came.”
“Look, let’s just take 5 minutes and really figure out where we are,” Roommate suggested. “Okay?”
By this time, we all three were uneasy. It was going to be dark in two hours, and if we were going to backtrack, we’d be covering what we covered in two days in half that time. We were terribly weary, not having eaten a proper lunch and instead snacking on Clif bars and granola.
We stood around, looking at the map for a while.
“I think,” I said slowly, “that we’re lost.”
Roommate suggested that she go ahead of Dryfoot and me, without her pack, for about 300 yards, to see what was beyond the next bend. If it looked like it was headed north, we could turn back.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I objected. “You could slip and fall, and we wouldn’t be able to see you or hear you. I think we should go together.”
“Okay, what if we all three go without our packs?”
None of us liked that suggestion very much. So we decided that Roommate should just go ahead to reconnoiter.
Dryfoot and I watched as Roommate got smaller and smaller up the valley, and disappeared around the bend. She was out of sight for about 5 minutes before she popped back into view and came back toward us again.
“We’re not on the right track,” she said, surely and grimly, pulling out the map. “As far as I can guess, we’re here.” She pointed to a spot on the map that was near the end of the northerly tributary – the one we weren’t supposed to be on. “The valley just keeps going up, and the stream disappears into the mountains.”
“Okay,” Dryfoot said. “Well, we’ll just backtrack, right? We’re committed now to going back the way we came.”
“Yeah,” I said, and Roommate agreed. We felt relieved that a decision had been made.
Going down is always faster than going up, and we made good time heading back to the huge river valley. We passed one fork, and then another, and then it seemed that there were tributaries coming in every 500 frickin’ yards or so. Roommate, apropos of nothing, said, “I HATE Alonzo.”
Dryfoot and I burst out laughing. “Yeah,” I gasped, “he’s FIRED from being my boyfriend!”
Up in the rocky upper valley, we’d stopped singing out “hey bear!” but as we descended, the brush on the sides of the river channels thickened, and we picked up the chant again. We each had our own way of singing out the warning. I was short and business-like: “Hey, bear!” Roommate almost sang it out like a breathy greeting: “Heeeeey, beaaaar!” And Dryfoot would bellow, “hey BE-AAAR!”
I was in the lead this time when I heard a rustling sound in the bushes to our right. Turning my head, I saw nothing. Must have been my hair brushing against my pack, I thought, and walked on. But a few steps later, I heard it again, and turned. There, up about 200 yards from us, was a large furry brown animal running up the side of the hill, a smaller animal behind it.
“Oh shit,” I breathed out. “Look, you guys, a bear.” We froze and stared.
The mother grizzly turned around and stared at us.
“Holy mother of – let’s keep moving, guys. And talk! To let it know that we’re humans! Not anything to eat! And certainly nothing that would threaten you, mama grizzly! No sirree! We’re just moving along here! Nothing to see here, folks!”
After that, we stepped up the calling out to about once every 5 seconds.
“Well,” Roommate said to Dryfoot, “you got to see your bear.”
It was about 10 pm when we got back to the Toklat, and we were glad to see that huge, brown river with its many braids. Before heading into the huge valley, we filled up our water bottles with the clear river water, for boiling for dinner. Roommate thought we should press on, past the point where we had had to go up into the brush, but Dryfoot and I overruled her, and we decided to save that and the river crossings for early the next day.
We set up camp on a gravel bed again, nervous about bears, quicksand, tomorrow’s crossings, and the possibility that we might not make it out to the road the next day. Someone suggested that we might not want to eat the second couscous and chicken dinner that Roommate had prepared, just in case we had to be in the park for a third night. I strongly opposed the idea though, since we’d had a hard day and were in for another hard day tomorrow. No one was too wedded to the idea, anyway, so Roommate cooked up the meal while Dryfoot and I put up our tents, and we wolfed it down.
We went to sleep uneasy, around midnight.
SUNDAY, August 14, 2005
I woke up around 5 am, chilled. It was light outside, but the sun had not yet made it over the mountains to the east of us, and the air was bitingly cold. Wearing long underwear and my fleece, I huddled in my sleeping bag, perversely and unreasonably unwilling to get up until I heard movement from the other tent.
Around 6, Roommate called out, but I wasn’t sure it was a wake-up call until Dryfoot bellowed out in the same tone she used for calling out to bears. “Okay, okay,” I groaned, and reluctantly started getting dressed. We decided not to eat our oatmeal breakfast until later, and to instead just share a Clif bar until we reached the place where we’d camped the first night.
The river crossings seemed, somehow, more difficult this time. There were several where we all stood around and looked anxiously at the rushing water, searching for some place where the water was tellingly disturbed and running shallow. Once or twice we paused in the middle, unsure whether to continue on, as the water was hitting the tops of our legs.
In the end, though, we finally made it back to Friday night’s campsite, or close enough that we felt comfortable stopping and making oatmeal. We also boiled the remaining river water for drinking (unboiled, you run the risk of imbibing a parasite called giardia, which causes severe diarrhea, among other things). Because the water took some time to boil, we were there for about an hour, which we all needed, I think. The sun had made it past the mountains, and it was about 30 degrees warmer than the morning. Roommate said I looked very butch in this outfit, cooking our oatmeal:
We left our brunch stop at about 11 am. Before noon, we found the stream that we’d originally followed from the road, and exited the Toklat valley for the smaller valley. We stopped around noon to admire a caribou skull with antlers still attached.
About 1:30 pm, though, I started feeling uneasy again. Was this the right path? Why did I not remember the stream being so yellow? Wouldn’t I have remembered that? And hadn’t the valley been more rocky? I didn’t remember so much brush. And the shape of the mountains to our left and right – hadn’t they been more rounded, less steep? Shouldn’t the ground be getting marshier, boggier? Shouldn’t the stream be getting smaller and smaller?
I expressed my fears to Dryfoot and Roommate. Dryfoot said, no, she wasn’t sure if this was the right way, but there was no other way to go, so we may as well go forward; besides, there were plenty of footsteps going the opposite way from us, so this must be a well-traveled path by hikers. Roommate was more optimistic. “You guys are making me paranoid,” she complained. “This has got to be the right way.”
Although logically it seemed that we could not have gone wrong, I could not help but think that we had reasoned our way similarly yesterday. My unease continued until about 2:30 pm, when – thank the lord – I recognized a patch of trees turning yellow. It was the same patch of trees I’d admired Friday, and I’d even taken a picture of it. I got out my camera and compared the shot with the trees before me. A match.
My spirits took a turn upward then. They took an even bigger leap up when we came upon a family with two young children coming into the unit. Hurrah!
Soon after we saw that family, the stream disappeared into bog on our left, and continued on our right. We took the right fork, and found ourselves climbing up again, walking on extremely peculiar ground. I have never seen that kind of ground before, and hope not to see it again. It had clearly been the site of some running water in the past, but was now dry. Yet despite its arid quality, we sank into it an inch or two every step.
After walking on it for 15 minutes or so, I started thinking, oh shit, what if we’re walking on some huge sinkhole that’s going to collapse? And in any case, I did not remember walking on this ground when we came in, so I knew we were not going the same way we came in. I called a halt, and asked if we could cut over directly to our left, up a steep hill. If we could get to the top, we might be able to see the road from there.
We agreed to go up the hill, which meant going through some thick brush taller than us. Calling out “hey bear! Hey bear!” we pushed out way past the thin, flexible branches that scratched our bare skin and whipped back into place after we passed. Roommate was first, and called out after a few minutes that the steep part of the hill was brush-free. It was instead covered in remarkable springy arctic tundra tussocks. Someone had described it to me before (I think it was The Ringleted One, who heard it from someone else) as “like walking on basketballs,” which is a pretty fair description.
Up on the hill, we all sighed in relief. The pond at which we started our journey was in sight, and close by. But we would have to go down the hill, which was very steep, and through possibly quite boggy parts, to get to it.
Ever the explorer, Roommate went down first, then Dryfoot, then me. It was quite steep, but at least brush-free. At one point, it was so steep that it was easier to simply slide down on our bottoms rather than try to balance with our packs.
“Hey, are these blueberries?” Dryfoot called out halfway down.
“I don’t know,” Roommate called back. “Ask hk, she’ll be able to recognize them – we ate them before on Flattop.”
Dryfoot pointed to the berries that were surrounding us. Sure enough, blueberries! Small, close to the ground to catch the reflected heat, and yummy after three days of starchy foods. I literally grabbed and ate as I slid down:
After the hill, it was relatively easy to trek across the open space to the pond. Boggy in some places because of the melted layer of permafrost below, we got our boots muddy, but we didn’t sink. A duck was floating on the pond when we reached it. “Hi duck!” we called out. It turned its back on us.
Twenty minutes through the brush that we had started our journey through, and Roommate called out, “The road! The road!” We were back:
We waited for a camper shuttle for about 30 minutes, earning the stares and waves of tourists in tour shuttles as they passed the other way. “Yeah,” we told each other, “we are hard core.”
A couple people asked us about our trip. I basically ignored them and tried to sleep. Woke up for the caribou and the sheep. Then we were back in the overflow parking lot and the shuttle driver was telling us that a good band was going to be at the Clambake tonight. Back to the Mighty Subaru. Back to the Crow’s Nest, where we’d had our final dinner before the trip. Back to the hostel, where we cooled our heels for 45 minutes in order to return our equipment. By the time we left there, it was nearly 10:30 pm, and darkness was falling.
Exhausted, I nevertheless felt all right the first hour. Dryfoot sat up front with me, chatting about this and that. Then the rain started to fall.
The Mighty, Mighty Subaru is good and mighty, but it does not like the rain.
And with the rain came a peculiar mist. Having been so dry and hot for over a week, the road appeared to be steaming. I could barely see 10 feet past the front end of the car, and I was crawling along at 35 miles per hour, coming to a stop when a big rig would pass in the other direction and splatter rain violently on the windshield.
The combination of the rain and the mist defeated me. “I don’t think I can drive through this,” I told my compatriots, who were now both awake. “I think it’s too dangerous in this car.”
Roommate busied herself with finding a campsite to stop in, in the Alaska bible, the Milepost. “There’s one in 5 miles,” she said. “You could pull over there and we could just sleep in the car.”
I almost missed the turn, coming up as it did out of the mist. And we could barely see within the campsite, for that matter, because of the mist. I parked next to a truck with a camper, and we settled in for the night, which meant squishing Roommate, the shortest one, in the back seat, as Dryfoot and I leaned our seats back as far as we could.
“I need to open the window,” Roommate said. “But just a crack, because what if an axe murderer pokes his fingers in there and pulls out the window?”
“What?” I said, laughing. “No one is strong enough to pull out a car window with just his fingers! You’d need a crowbar or something!”
“Okay, so we need to not open it far enough for a crowbar to get in!” Roommate laughed, getting her grammar as well as her reasoning jumbled. Punchy with fatigue, Roommate and I laughed our heads off, while Dryfoot brushed her teeth, looking pained.
“Okay, if an axe murderer comes along, I’ll blind him with Junebug’s headlamp and then stab him with her Leatherman, okay?”
I did, in fact, go to sleep with the headlamp and Leatherman in my hand. Reason, it seems, doesn’t like sticking around on a dark and rainy night in the mountains.
MONDAY, August 15, 2005
After a very uncomfortable and chilly night, I woke up around 5 am. The rain had stopped. It was lighter. Although the mist was still hanging around, it seemed doable.
“Let’s try it,” I said. And indeed, the road was manageable.
We got into Anchorage around 8:30 am. A mile or so away from the house, I casually said, “I think I’m going to jump into the shower and drive to work right away.”
“What?” “You’re crazy!” Dryfoot and Roommate cried at the same time. “Just call in and say you were stuck in bad weather in the mountains! They have to understand that!”
“Yeah, they totally would, but it’s my next to last day, and I don’t feel good about not going in.”
I hit work with wet hair and tired eyes at 9:15 am. After checking messages and scheduling a client intake for the next morning, Supe came in to check in with me. Because fatigue is like alcohol, my usual laconic style with him gave way to a gush of words about the trip, ending in “And so I got in to Anchorage at 8:30 and now I’m here.”
Supe listened attentively, as he usually does, interjecting comments like “Dude, I fucking HATE being lost, I was hunting once and being really smart and leaving tape to mark my path, and then I got freaked out and couldn’t find my way back and walked around for 8 hours until I saw someone had taped up some marks and I thought ‘Thank god, I’m found!’ and it totally turned out to be MY tape and I just about fuckin’ cried,” and at the end he said, “Wow, you’re hard core, coming into work today.”
Yes, if I do say so myself.
He also objected that there’s been no documented quicksand in Denali, and I was just like, “Whatever. Talk to the hand, cuz I was IN that quicksand.”
So we start going over my cases, and I note that today is the day when one of my favorite clients has an important meeting, one that will determine whether she’s eligible for a fairly important benefit.
Supe: “Dude, I’ve got a feeling about this, and you know, when I get those feelings, I’m usually right. This was the meeting I wanted you to go to, but you were going to be gone, remember? But this is my feeling: there’s a reason why you’re here today, when you thought you weren’t going to be, and I think you should go to that meeting.”
“Uh, seriously?”
“Yeah, dude! I think it’s important we be there. Is that okay with you?”
“Sure –“
“No, really, is it okay?”
“Uh, yeah, it’s fine.”
It was noon. The meeting was at 1 pm.
I got in the Sube and drove to the meeting, which was at our client’s house.
I explained that Supe had wanted me to be there, and then I waited with our client and her kids, two of whom interpreted for her.
The agency rep arrived, did her thing, and our client was cleared for the benefit. I explained what that meant, and told them I wouldn’t be seeing them again. One of the kids, with whom I’ve been in the most contact, translated his mother’s words: “She says thank you so much, she really appreciate it.”
“It’s been a pleasure working with you,” I said, “You have a great family,” and I felt a real pang leaving them, because I liked them so much, and because I’d gone to a hearing for them my second week of the summer, and now I was seeing them get a benefit my second to last day of the summer, and it all seemed to make sense, somehow. Supe was right, I thought in my dazed state as I drove away, there was a reason why I was at work today, why I was there on the day of this meeting.
Of course, that feeling couldn’t last. Supe picked the agency decision apart when I got back. “Do what you need to do and then go to bed,” he advised after we talked about the meeting.
“I have all these phone calls to make, though.”
“Yeah, but that’ll take 5 minutes.”
I spent the rest of the day on the phone with various agencies and contractors, trying to ensure our client would get what she needed.
TUESDAY, August 16, 2005
The last day of work.
I did a client intake in the morning, a good one in that our prospective client was articulate and presented well and was credible and had a credible claim. “I’m going to fuck these fuckers over,” mused Supe about the prospective opponent.
I purged my files of extraneous papers, organized them, cleaned up my desktop, and made some last phone calls. Then I went to lunch. With Supe.
Okay, a word about Supe. Remember that whole long entry I did about Destroyers, way back when I was the unexpected recipient of a confidence by the Destroyer in my subsection at school? Well, Supe is a Destroyer, through and through. Charming, unconsciously and constantly flirtatious with both men and women, magnetic, hyper-conscious of relationships and what other people are feeling.
So we go to lunch at a place I suggested, a steak place, and we have cheap steak-y things and a martini each (Supe insisted) and exchange criticisms of each other (I’m not aggressive or critical enough, he doesn’t give enough feedback and should let interns work with other attorneys). He reassures me that I did a fine job this summer, and I reply, “That would be a lot more convincing if you weren’t smirking as you said it,” and he returns: “You have to smirk when you say something like that.”
There’s something about Destroyers that invites that kind of casual interaction! It wasn’t my fault. (Although I don’t really care for hierarchy either, and would be likely to say that to a lot of people, probably.) He comments on my anger at Crimson College Law School and its outdated pedagogy, suggesting that I somehow divert that anger toward The Man and work the rest of my days for The Common Man. Ah … right.
Okay, so we have this semi-personal conversation, and then he’s very sentimental, for him, when I say goodbye, sticking out his hand to shake mine and then pulling me into a hug, and telling me he will be very hurt if I don’t email and keep him up to date on my doings. I pull a Supe and ask, “Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“No… really?”
Heh.
Big G stopped in about something else and Supe asked him, “Would you say hk’s done an acceptable job here this summer?” Big G looked at me humorously and answered, “Yeah, she’s been serviceable.” Supe snickered.
They wouldn’t tease me like that if they thought I’d done a shitty job, right?
Duuuude!
