OCR Text |
Show Though the landscape can seem idyllic with its open tundra, boreal forests, and a river that snakes lazily across a valley floor, the Alatna has earned its "wild and scenic designation." At the headwaters, the river is no more than a large drainage basin pooling in a barren lake named Summit Lake. With little water, rafters beginning at Summit must drag their Avons for miles, over gravel bars and sand barriers, in hopes of finding a deeper channel. But the lack of water is deceiving. A little rain or an atypically hot day can cause a dramatic rise in the water level, as much as six feet at once, due to glacial melting or the refusal of the thick layer of permafrost to absorb the rainfall. Within minutes, the river becomes a series of chutes, some as narrow as a canoe, where water rages down the mountain in search of the sea. Every guidebook, map, and website surveying the region reminds potential visitors that these rivers are ultimately unmappable. My first son was conceived the night my uncle died. Curling his body and holding fast to the slender strands of willow growing nearby, my uncle left this world on a day with no night while the collection of cells that would become my son clung to the walls of my body, defying the odds, and remaining viable. The following day, my uncle still dead and the cells still holding on and dividing, I whined in my journal about how quickly pens seem to lose their ink. My father and his brother, Jerry, had gone to the northern reaches of Alaska to run the Alatna River for many reasons, some articulated and others unplumbed: because my uncle Jerry had run it before and knew no wilder place; because my dad never had 236 |