The Divine is not Separate from the Beast -Lenore Kandel
Vol. 1; Issue 3: Feb. 2004
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The Divine is not Separate from the Beast -Lenore Kandel Vol. 1; Issue 3: Feb. 2004 |
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Fiction
To navigate a small boat in Kotzebue Sound, you have to come to understand the fickle and sometimes damnable dance of wind, river currents and mud. The Sound is nine miles across from the mostly Eskimo town of Kotzebue to the village of Sisaulik to the north. It is about the same distance to the mouth of the glacial Noatak River to the northeast, to the entrance to the open waters of the Chukchi Sea to the west, and to the gateway to the vast brackish expanse of Kobuk Lake to the east. You won’t find Kobuk Lake on any map, as the mapmakers call it Hotham Inlet. This discrepancy between local and official names illustrates another thing that you must understand in order to navigate Kotzebue Sound: standard points of reference are quite useless in this vast Arctic region of mirages and illusions. To find out how to go somewhere, you must ask around until you find someone who has been there. If you find someone who knows, prepare to encounter a fatalistic shrug and a vague gesture of the arm to someplace out there across the waters, for the wise traveler in this region knows that things change, constantly change, and that nothing is quite like it seemed yesterday. In the local language, any destination across the waters is simply called, "across." One says, "I am going across today," and the mind creates the emotional imagery of the River Styx. Most of all, the traveler here must come to learn that disasters are inevitable and only rarely fatal, and that most, in memory, become mere comic mishaps that can be joked about with fatalistic shrugs and vague gestures.
To understand the interplay of wind, river currents and mud in Kotzebue Sound, you must learn that nothing you see is the way it appears. Standing on the gravel beach at Kotzebue, the Sound almost always looks placid. Sometimes it is. Other times, when not a gust of wind ripples the waters in front of the town, you can strain your eyes into the circling summer sun and see broken water a few miles offshore. Or there may be a light breeze and a bracing chop at Kotzebue, but by the time you’re halfway across you know that you will be battling three-foot waves, or worse. Sometimes, much worse.
The illusion is caused by the long peninsula upon which Kotzebue sits, which most often blocks the prevailing winds. Farther out, however, the winds blow unimpeded from the Chukchi Sea icepack, and from Siberia a hundred miles beyond. Understanding this phenomenon does not rob it of its mystery, as one is never quite certain exactly how much wind is being blocked onshore, or not blocked farther out, or how the particular direction and velocity of the wind will, at any given moment, combine with the great and powerful currents of the Kobuk and Noatak river systems, which form almost all of the navigable water in Kotzebue Sound. The rest of the seemingly benign nine-mile-square expanse of apparently open water consists of mudflats that are too shallow to allow even the smallest boat to pass, and which are in constant flux and flow. You must then temper your knowledge (but not the mystery) with the inviolable axiom that all things here are constantly changing, and nothing ever is as it seems.
It was in the midst of such contemplation that I met her.
I was standing on the beach in front of Hansen’s Store, thinking about whether or not I should try to make it across with a boatload of supplies. My destination was my summer camp on the Little Noatak River, which is a five-mile-long slough connecting the broad and powerful flow of the Noatak’s main channel with the upper reaches of Kobuk Lake. There was a fairly stiff breeze alongshore at Kotzebue, and I knew it would be a rough trip across. The question was, how rough? Common sense, or fear, told me that I should wait another day for the winds to subside, but I was sick of the town and wanted to get back to the solitude of my camp as soon as possible. Impatience does not mix well with vast expanses of water, but it is a combination all too common with humans and provides the grist of many stories that are told and retold around many campfires. The story that my impatience led me to on this July day was not, however, one that I would tell until now, at least not in its entirety.
As I was looking across the water, a friend and a young woman approached me. He said the woman, whose name was Jo, had just returned home after living in Anchorage for a couple of years, and needed a ride across the water to her parents’ summer salmon fishing camp on Kobuk Lake. It took no more than a glance at Jo to understand that her life in Anchorage had been rougher than any trip across Kotzebue Sound. Although she looked no older than 24, her face was ravaged. Her eyes were bloodshot from alcohol and her flesh looked swollen and bruised. The clothes she wore were faded and stained. I saw a young woman who once was quite beautiful and who should have been in the glowing bloom of her youth, but whom life had chewed up and spit out as a hollow and defeated shell. She would not look at me or speak. I agreed to take her across the water, and Jo placed her one small and tattered suitcase atop my already heavy load.
The decision thus made, I tossed in the stern anchor and hopped aboard, then reeled in the bow anchor as the small boat swung into the wind. I kicked the motor into gear and we were underway, uncertain of what might lie in wait before us.
It was a pleasant ride at first up the river channel that runs alongside the Kotzebue waterfront, with a moderate quartering breeze that was lovely and warm in the bright summer sun. Yet I found myself unable to stop watching the chop form far out across the Sound, and knew it would not be an easy trip. There was nothing to stop me from turning back, except myself, and we went on.
I stood at the steering console, and Jo sat facing me on the center seat. She still would not look at me, but I saw that her eyes were taking in everything that we passed. Gesturing to me, her fingers traced the patterns of floats on salmon nets that obstructed the channel, so that I might steer around them. My gestures drew her eyes to a seal floating quietly on the water, and to groups of children playing along the narrow spit of beach past the far end of the town. Not too many years before, she had been one of these children, laughing and happy at the edge of the water and impatiently imagining the day she would follow her parents out to their remote camp to fish, hunt and gather sweet, juicy berries. For many people in this region of Alaska, summer is a joyful season of living with the land, being close to people they love, savoring the round-the-clock daylight and keeping something very important alive within themselves.
After passing by the end of the narrow gravel spit far beyond the edge of the town, the channel swings north along a long peninsula that ends at Lockhart Point, where a small boat is exposed to the winds that blow without barrier or surcease from the open sea, and to whatever they might hold. It is here, at this point, that the winds and the powerful currents of both rivers come together in an always unpredictable combination.
The winds grew more forceful as we motored along the peninsula, and the waves rose to three feet, and then to four. What had started as a warm and pleasant day was driven by the winds and spray into a bitter chill. We both donned heavy winter parkas.
The way to pilot a small boat through a heavy following sea is to take each wave as it comes. You try to maintain enough speed so that the waves do not break over the boat’s stern, while going slowly enough that the boat doesn’t crash through the waves that rise before it and take solid water over the bow. At best, this juggling act makes for a slow trip. It is a slow and wet and – even when it’s not too bad – frightening trip. Under the relentless glare of cold sunlight streaming from a cloudless chromium sky, with icy spray flying from the bow, the howl of the freezing wind and the hiss of the driven spume along the top of each crest appear frightfully ominous and hostile in their indifference to human will and intent. It’s sometimes a matter of appearances rather than reality. Even when there is no real danger, one’s instinct is to turn and run. That instinct can consume every thought, every emotion, every perception and every action with the ravenous hunger of a winter wolf.
In that state of total possession, I made the kind of mistake that sometimes leads to one of the inevitable small or large disasters inherent in navigating the Sound. I tried to turn the boat around and flee back to Kotzebue and safety. Turning broadside to heavy seas always is dangerous, though usually possible. The burdened boat wallowed and pitched in the troughs like a bucking horse, and wave after wave broke over the gunwale before I could complete the turn and swing the bow into the oncoming seas. Unfortunately, I had failed to consider the effect of my heavy load and the way the weight was distributed. I had placed most of the weight near the bow in anticipation of running through a following sea, so that the stern would rise a little higher above the waves. When turned into the waves, however, the lowered bow plowed into solid water, nearly swamping us. The bow smashed into each wave with a force that shook every timber in its frame – the kind of force that shatters beams and loosens nails in the hull.
"Get some weight out of the bow," I yelled at Jo, but my words were flung back at me by the screams of the wind and the angry hiss of the spray.
She couldn’t hear my words but she knew exactly what to do, and she did it. Her eyes were no longer wounded and vacant, her body no longer passive and constrained. She staggered forward against the boat’s crippled pitching and heaving, and began to wrestle each heavy box toward the center of the boat. I had to stay with the wheel near the stern to maintain some semblance of steerage, trying desperately to angle the boat through each wave, and could not help her. Watching her terrible struggles, I found that I had forgotten about the danger we were in, had forgotten my own terror, and was wholly captivated by a frail and solitary human figure battling the fury of wind and wave with competence and resolve. Somewhere within her was the memory of the strong and capable child she had left behind in Kotzebue when she succumbed to the temptations of the big city and began to follow a path of despair and destruction, and I watched as that memory came to life again before my eyes.
Gradually the bow became lighter and began to ride through the crests instead of plunging into them. I watched quietly, transfixed, as Jo began the long and cold task of bailing out the flooded boat, returning bucket after bucket of icy water back to the sea from whence it came.
The immediate danger had passed, but we found ourselves frozen in place. We could maintain our position in the face of the waves but could make no forward progress toward Kotzebue and safety, toward escape from the howl of wind and wave. Speeding up the motor caused the bow to dive into the waves, and slowing it down allowed us to be blown backwards toward Lockhart Point and the seas beyond. We were trapped in a state of suspended animation amidst the swirling, howling turmoil of wind and water. There were two choices. We could jettison cargo, which might – or might not – have allowed us to make forward progress against the wind and waves and toward Kotzebue. Or, we could turn around again and run with the seas toward Lockhart Point, where we might find shelter in its lee – if, that is, we were able to make it into the lee behind the point. I couldn’t bring myself to make that decision, and my voice couldn’t carry to Jo. I finally caught her eyes, pointed in both directions and shrugged. She looked down for a moment and then her eyes rose to meet mine for the first time. She pointed toward Lockhart Point and the mad waters beyond.
Slowly and cautiously I brought the boat about, turning first broadside to the running sea, fighting my fear and fighting to keep the boat from taking on a dangerous amount of water, and then completing the turn and running freefall with the wind and the waves toward Lockhart Point. Jo alternately bailed and moved the heavy boxes back toward the bow. She knew what needed to be done.
The waves grew still larger as we neared the point, which lies naked and exposed to the vast reaches of the open sea. More ominously, as the waves increased in height, the space between them also increased until each crest rose from its trough like a mountain driven skyward by a burst of volcanic ash. Wind-driven spume and spray swirled in an angry, hissing cloud for several feet above the waves as we plunged into the heart of a whirlwind of water and air.
We took the point close in, and I was able – somehow – to cut the bow sharply behind its lee. At last, we were out of the crashing waves, out of the screaming wind and stinging spray. At last, safety. At last, we could feel the comforting warmth of the bright sun on our chilled bodies. At last, we could look at each other and smile.
Jo cast out the bow anchor, and I swung the stern toward the beach and struggled over the side, fighting cramped and shaking hands to make the boat fast to the shore. Jo gathered wood and started a fire. We took off our soaked clothes and spread them out to dry in the sun and wind, and sat close to the flames until the warmth had driven the deathly chill from our bodies. We did not talk. There was nothing to say that words could convey, and that had not been said far more forcibly by the elements that had embraced us and shook us and finally spewed us from their cold and fearsome womb. Warmed at last by the fire and a benevolent sun, we began to smile and even laugh at our morning’s follies. The day had once again become fine and kind and full of hope. We joked. We talked of Anchorage, of her childhood in the bush, and of the free and proud life her parents had tried to bestow upon their children, and we talked of her deep longing to live that life once again. Although she had been battered and weakened by her life in Anchorage, that longing was the reason why she had come home. In her eyes I could see that she really had come home. She was home. We did not speak of the wind and waves, but both of us often allowed our vision to drift toward the exposed end of the point and the rush of the sea. We knew that our voyage was not finished, but we did not know where it might lead.
We ran out of words and our eyes met in silent understanding. She came to me and lowered her body onto my lap, and we joined together. We clung tightly to each other and did not move, and both of us began to weep. I do not fully understand why we wept or what it meant, but our tears flowed freely and our arms held each other as tightly as we could. What I felt was a seeming contradiction of utter aloneness and total embrace. Our sobs finally subsided and we began to move slowly and softly with each other, slowly and very, very softly, and our fingers gently traced the outlines of each other’s eyes, nose and lips. Our eyes met again, and again we held each other very tightly and moved as one until both of us dissolved into each other and something far beyond knowing flowed deep within ourselves.
When finally we pulled apart, both of us stood up and stared toward the roaring seas beyond Lockhart Point. We looked toward the point, and then at each other, and then back toward the direction we both knew we must travel.
To get from where we stood to the mouth of the Little Noatak while avoiding the treacherous maze of mudflats that line the north side of Kotzebue Sound, you must pilot your boat across a large bay along the edge of the Kobuk River channel, in a straight line between the tip of Lockhart Point and a narrow band of exposed gravel known as Pipe Spit, the next headland to the east, and then turn sharply to the north and run straight across a mile of exposed water and – in heavy seas – surf your boat through breaking waves and into the mouth of the slough. The bay offers some shelter from the worst of the storm until your boat shoots out past the spit and into the open water which, when the winds blow hard from the southwest, you must cross by quartering through a galloping sea.
The damnable temptation is that the distance is, after all, only a mile, and a mile doesn’t seem very far when you are warmed by an open fire and a lover’s body, and when you are lulled by the sun and know that a good camp lies just beyond. Perhaps prudence should have dictated that we wait for the winds to moderate before making the crossing, but it is only a mile and of what force is prudence when you weigh your fears and assess your courage through the hours that have passed, and you conclude that your luck seems to be holding and that your inner core of strength hasn’t deserted you. Ah, how we humans so often fail to remember oceanic forces of a magnitude that can render even our bravest resolve into just one more speck of foam blowing on the wind.
"What the hell," I said. "Let’s do it."
"Lets," she replied.
We doused our warming fire, put on dry clothing and cast off, bravely motoring across the calm bay that is so carefully hidden from the furies of the open sea. We drew closer, ever closer, to the wind-torn open water as we neared Pipe Spit. What lay before us could be described as two sides of a triangle closing to its apex at the edge of the hurling waves, or, perhaps, as a zoom lens on a camera sliding out to a higher and higher magnification of the madness beyond. When you find yourself drawing ever closer to a storm-wracked sea, toward a swirling hell of wind and waves and spray, it has a way of unraveling and flinging aside even the most staunch vow of courage.
We neared the tip of Pipe Spit and found ourselves being drawn, inch by inch, into the heart of the maelstrom. We discovered that, once again, we were in too far to turn back. I fought hard to keep the boat from being blown aground at the tip of the spit, clearing it in a fury of blinding spray as we cut into the roaring waves and headed toward the breaking surf a mile away at the entrance to the slough. We couldn’t run with the wind without being blown into and across the 20-mile-wide expanse of Kobuk Lake and toward what certainly would have been a deadly crash of a furious surf where water meets land. We had borne ourselves irrevocably into the tempest, and our only choice was to fight our way across the waves and wind to reach the mouth of the slough.
Only a mile to go. Just a mile. But, in those seas, a mile was more than an hour away at the snail’s pace required to quarter across the screaming crests, to ride out the waves without being run over by them and swamped or smashed into a thousand pieces. In quartering across big waves, a small boat plunges and dips, charges and retreats, surges ahead or wallows in a trough, or surfs wildly across the top of a crest until an inch is gained. And another inch. And another.
At each plunge and crash, sheets of spray rolled over the bow and gunwales. We were soaked. We were freezing, and we were terrified.
In the midst of our battle, Jo staggered and lurched toward me at the wheel.
"I’ve got to pee," she screamed above the wind. "I can’t hold it any longer."
"Use the can," I yelled.
"Won’t make it."
I looked at her and she looked at me. Then the boat lunged forward and crashed into a trough, throwing her to the deck. She wet her pants and began to sob. For some reason, I couldn’t stop myself from laughing – the laugh of a madman, the laugh of a crazed beast in the face of hopeless terror.
The boat plunged again, soaking us with spray. Jo couldn’t stop crying, and I couldn’t stop laughing. I took one hand off the wheel and reached for her, pulling her to her feet, holding her close into me and stroking her hair. Our eyes met and she grinned. She began to laugh, too, and our laughter rang of hysteria and met the hysteria of the raging sea. A wave broke over the stern and drenched us in a solid sheet of water.
The power of suggestion being what it is, I soon had the same problem and could not wait until we reached calm water to piss. Over the centuries, Eskimos have developed a well-defined etiquette for pissing in a boat. A woman uses a can, and a man pisses over a gunwale. Companions pretend not to look, or, if looking is unavoidable, not to see. Obviously, for a man, the trick is to avoid pissing into the wind. It is not an easy thing to arrange when you’re quartering downwind through a following sea, with the lee gunwale driven low toward the water. Trying to preserve a vestige of dignity (an obvious absurdity under these circumstances), I asked Jo to take over the wheel. With one hand I grasped the edge of the console and held on with all of my strength. I took my penis in my other hand for aim and inched cautiously on a downhill slope toward the gunwale. At just the wrong moment, of course, the boat crested a seething wave and twisted the wheel from Jo’s hands, swinging the stern into the wind. My small stream of warm piss was met by a solid sheet of wind-hurled icy water, and I was soaked.
Laughing – laughing maniacally – I careened back to the wheel, and Jo was laughing, too. We were soaked with near-freezing water and nearing hypothermia and madness. Our limbs convulsed and our muscles began to cramp, and who is to say if what happened next stemmed from human intention, or simply was the result of hypothermic disorientation. Perhaps it was neither.
"We have to get out of these wet clothes," I yelled above the steady roar of the sea. "Undress me and then get undressed, and we both can fit into my winter parka." The parka, which was greatly oversized and made of smoke-tanned moosehide, was able to shed water, and the fur lining its inside held in human warmth against the most bitter arctic conditions. Jo took off our clothes, helped me into my parka and snuggled up into my body. Her head appeared just under my chin, and gradually our bodies began to warm each other.
Together we faced the angry and violent sea, and we faced it with mad laughter on our lips and volcanic eyes. The sea roared and raged, and the crests of the waves plunged down from above our heads. We still had a half-mile to go.
On an impulse born more of madness than mind, I gunned the engine and careened the boat over the top of a wave and, twisting and weaving from the brute force of wind and water, we surfed down its face. The boat plunged into the trough and smacked hard, then reared up and cut across the face of the next wave and over the curl. No longer were we passive recipients of the fury of the sea. No longer were we paralyzed into reaction, rather than action.
I found myself screaming at the top of my lungs. Screaming and screaming and screaming. Jo’s body was pressed against mine, and my penis became erect. She turned around in my parka and pulled her legs around my waist, and we would live or die as one being.
We decided to live. Laughing and screaming and howling like wolves, we joined together in an insane passion. We attacked each wave and finally surfed down the long crest of a breaking roller and into the mouth of the slough.
I cut the boat around the back of the gravel bar and beached it. Jo wiggled out of my parka, and I took it off. Holding hands, we ran across the bar to the raging surf and plunged into the waves.
Laughing and laughing.
Screaming and screaming.
We threw our bodies into the curl of a breaking wave and surfed back toward the beach, and the wind was howling and the wave exploded over us with a deafening crash.
Laughing. Screaming. Howling. Wolf.
Our bodies met and our lips hungrily sought out each other, and we made love – made laughing and howling and screaming and hysterical love – as wave after roaring wave crashed over us and the winds screamed out a mad song of life.
Of life!
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