4 and Out the Door . . .

Alright, enough about the Banquet Phase of my trip. As nice as that is, I wouldn't be going to all the trouble and expense of flying all the way up there if it weren't for the Out There Phase -- the part where I take a folding kayak and put double digits of miles between me and Brooks Camp and claim a big chunk of that incredible Katmai country all for myself.


My first planned camp will be a place where I spent over a week last year and saw only one other boat the whole time, and that from a good distance. It is a very long paddling day away from Brooks, but motorboats could make the trip easily under good conditions. Fortunately, they rarely do so. My day-tripping out of that camp ranged from 5 to 10 miles out, and all that water was mine all mine. Hard to ask for more than that.

Of course, I was sharing the area with various non-humans. Every morning I saw new bear tracks on the beach, but I eventually concluded that the local grizzly was a) very shy and b) mainly a vegetarian. I conclude the first because my food cache, tent, and dining areas were never visited or interfered with in the least way, even though they lay a short walk from the beach. I conclude the second because near the tracks you would find large piles of stuff that looked like green sauerkraut -- shredded "cow parsnip" or some other grizzly salad favorite. One day I found a half-shredded salmon on the beach, and threw it way out into the water in a mild panic. I don't want that delicious-smelling shit on my beach! Later, a bald eagle (that I had been seeing regularly in the area) flew over the beach several times, frowning (or so I imagined). The fish belonged to him.



At another camp across the lake, on another year, my luck was less good that way. Not once, but twice, my tranquil midday mealtimes got interrupted by a GANG of bears. Seriously, a gang: it was a large sow with three cubs that must have been two-years old or more, because they were almost as big as her. I dined, as always, in a strategic spot that had a line of vision far up and far down the shoreline where they travel. I can still remember seeing the first bear come around the corner, which made me mildly concerned. Then the mama appeared behind it, and I became significantly more concerned. When the two remaining kids came romping into view, I was already tossing the rest of my couscous into the lake and getting ready to hustle stove, pots and all back to the food cache.

My camp was way back into the trees from the shoreline (another strategic requirement) and after sitting there for twenty highly unrelaxed minutes clutching both my bear mace cans, I made a big circle back around so that I could examine the shoreline from the direction the bears had appeared. It felt very strange and exhilirating to be moving slowly and quietly through the brush and waist-high grasses, every minute expecting to see a big old bear. It felt like some kind of exciting ambuscade. And what did I find? Nothing but a slightly chewed crotch in the wet suit that I had left drying by shore.

Later, I almost walked right into those same bears while they were quietly browsing in the bushes. They looked like four big cows, and they looked at me in a bored, languid way without pausing in their meal of leaves or berries or whatever it was. The same night, a sizeable moose walked across the lagoon right in front of me, spooking my trout and grayling, but otherwise just being cool. Chillin. The wildlife was used to me, and I to it.



Even when there aren't a bunch of other mammals around, I tend to have a fine time in camp all by myself. Fishing, eating and sipping coffee and scotch, doing camp chores or just laying around under the tarp reading and writing -- there is plenty to entertain me, and I enjoy it immensely (just like Greg Brown, a kindred spirit, in the link from my last post). The other night someone mentioned that 10 days alone would really be some intense "soul-searching." But it occurred to me that self-conscious soul-searching is what I do when I'm around people; when I'm out in the Good Country, I just plain relax and start paying attention to my senses. And what I generally find is sweetness, wonder, and a deep, near-ecstatic sense of well-being.

Why the hell else would you go to all that trouble?

This tendency to really enjoy solitude this way does not seem to me to be particularly common. Many folks seem to think it is fairly crazy, and indeed I have spent some time (and money) pondering the degree to which it might be so. What I have concluded is better stated by experts:

Avoidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioral disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships. (Anthony Storr, Solitude, a Return to the Self)

It can be taken too far, surely. But normal living -- the kind I have pretty much been doing with my city life and my full-time job ever since I came back last August from my last Alaskan travels -- takes the opposite too far. I'm not being crazy or antisocial. I'm just trying to create some balance, that's all.


So off I go to rebalance the machinery of my existence in the world, in four more days . . .