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Katherine Smith, a local from Pinebluff, is an Alaskan greenhorn and accidental poet. She’s currently working in Chugach National Forest, living to make life that is art. THROUGH THE MUSCADINE continued THROUGH THE MUSCADINE continued How to Go by Katherine Smith Not until the fourth day of our cross-country trip through Denali did the hoods of fog, cloud and rain relieve “The High One.” Denali’s geisha face casts a fearful spell of size. The biggest thing in the country, taller from base to crown than Mount Everest, was invisible until chance. Two million acres huge, Denali National Park and Preserve cradles less than 36 miles of walking trails. Personal vehicles are prohibited on the park’s 92 miles of rutted highway, so tourists buy tour bus tickets to ride, and campers buy camper bus tickets to get in and out wherever they choose. The reason: freedom, autonomy and exploration of our birthright, the wilderness. And I had cold feet. The hundreds of trail miles etched in my boots did nothing to soften the fear. I have never backpacked off-trail, never used a compass or topographical map, and never fully clutched responsibility for my own path. When Daniel Wake and I stepped off the camper bus for our first day on the Savage River, my adrenaline deafened every thought but “lost,” “injured,” “mauled by a defensive grizzly sow,” “giardia due to a defective water filter,” “starvation due to a defective stove,” “hypothermia due to guaranteed downpours” and most of all, that my exaggerated fear of all these possibilities would occult joy. Invention broke the first cleavage from my fear in crossing the Savage River. After Daniel and I tested the below-freezing water with bare feet and found that even wide, braided shallows would top our boots, we imitated gaiters by lashing our rain pants around our ankles with Paracord. It worked, and we collected wild berries and river rocks beneath Fang Peak, suited up against the rain and slept deep. I felt exhumed. Awareness rifted my fear on the second day, four hours further down the road to Stony Hill. We followed Big Stony Creek to its convergence with Little Stony Creek, which we would follow back to the highway the next morning. Atop Stony Hill, I saw predictability in the land: water in the low spaces, cutting or convenient between mountains, turning into glacial pass. Predictability’s counter, wild, rose in relief of water. Water’s counter, land, rose relieved. Each living thing necessarily balanced another, like natural law and free will; like a dance. Partnership met me between Mount Elision and the vegetated Muldrow Glacier. Daniel and I began the third day marching through the Copper Mountain Bar until we came to Glacier Crystal Creek, running fast and over-the-knee deep. After improvising our gaiters, I stepped into the water first, Daniel holding my hand to stabilize me and, if the water’s speed or false footing should knock me down, to catch me. The current dizzied my stomp. “Good footing,” Daniel said. I stepped into a hole, and my heartbeat ricocheted. “Keep going,” he said. My first step back on dry land swaddled me with an acute understanding that I had, for the first time, truly partnered with my partner, the antithesis of fear. Minutes after waking on the last morning, thick fog filled every visibility, seeming even to obscure sound past a dozen feet. We ate our oatmeal, packed the last four days of life into our packs and followed both the river and compass North East. After an hour of walking blind, I turned around again to look for the mountains we had come from, and stopped, weakly calling Daniel’s name. Profound moments exhaust commentary. Denali silently boomed four times higher than the intimidating mountains we had come from. White on white, it was covered in ice, but like heat, it blinded, purified and exhaled. Color portages what meaning I glean of Denali’s memories. Moose and caribou rubbed their gray velvet off on sticky willow brush and became muscles of blood red antler and rut. Spent burgundy fireweed, bearberry and dwarfed blueberry bushes turned red, all bleeding an equinox atop the green and gray lichen and THROUGH THE MUSCADINE con't. next column THROUGH THE MUSCADINE con't. next column tundra, which neutralize in this season. Tiny bird bones and huge caribou racks harken the death cycle in winter, while the living and mating begin spring while it is too far away to see. The color of fall is its very spirit. The spirit of change; running with abandon then quietly apologizing. It turns my spirit bright with nostalgia, the Greek combination of nostos, “return home,” and algos, “pain.” My home feels like no place of earth, but a space of time during child mind and body. Every repetition of fall, I ache again for near family, familiar haunts and the perfume of brown oak leaf and green pine cracking on a bright blue wind. I ache for the insulation of our pre-digital era, when life was felt instead of posted. Denali forced me back into the innocent, exploratory childhood I so ache for. Four days off-grid in spite of a frighteningly wired world cloaked me with blessing and command. Be human instead of avatar, disconnect the artificial wires and sew true ones of willow and web, learn how to think instead of what to think, and live wild, knowing that how to go is far more important than where. �� Daniel and Kate, Denali. Hands and Bear Paws. No. 124 The Pinehurst Gazette, Inc. p.33


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