The Drowned Spork

I went ahead and re-read a few of those pre-Alaska posts, and found a whole new value in them. You know what they were good for? They gave me an excuse to tell some old stories that I never got around to telling at the time. Like the story of the four bears at my Idavain camp, or the story of the dude in his bloodied shirt outside the Anchorage flea-bag hotel -- those were stories worth telling, right? I certainly enjoyed hearing them after having lived them (and then written them), though that may not be a strictly scientific test of their worth.

I don't have any New Zealand stories. Yet.

But here's an Alaskan story from this summer that I actually started composing right after it happened, and then never got around to telling. It is the story of The Drowned Spork. At the very time that these events were unfolding, they immediately reminded me of a story from a book of cool stories, "Shadows on the Koyukuk," by Sidney Huffington. Needless to say, there is a story behind that too -- this book was given to me by George Taylor, in Ewkok, AK, on the last day of my 165-mile Epic Solo Float Trip -- but the story behind the actual original story was simply that Sidney Huffington was a badass Alaskan outdoorsman who made these "Man vs. Wild" characters look like the clowns they really are.

And before I go on, I want to point out that I am a lesser man, less than both of those classes of men. I neither have been forced into great hardship, where I was forced by Fate to confront the world with great strength and discipline (Huffington), nor have I gone out and intentionally sought contrived hardships so that I could confront them with strength and spirit (Christopher McCandless of Into the Wild), or make them into a personal suicidal psychodrama (Timothy Treadwell of Grizzy Man), or make them into a low-brow, lucrative TV show (guy in Man vs. Wild or whatever the show is called). Far from that, what I do is go out into the wild to have as fine a time as possible given the scenario, which means carrying single-malt Scotch whisky in my backpack and listening to an mp3 player all day when paddling my kayak. I bring everything I can bring to enjoy myself, and take all precautions to come back alive so that I can pack up with more whiskey and Bach and get the hell out there again for more.


Given this, it may not surprise you to hear that the greatest actual misfortune that befell me on my last trip to Alaska occurred when I dropped my plastic spork into six feet of extremely cold lake water. Sure, a few days earlier I had a hungry-looking grizzly walk by 50 feet from my bubbling oatmeal breakfast, and had another bear follow me down a narrow track, and got caught briefly in some white-out fog while paddling all the way through an arctic night; but those were only close calls. This was the real thing: in an absent moment, I turned around awkwardly on the little granite shelf where I had just finished eating grilled lake trout, and knocked the spork clattering beyond reach, deep into the cold, clear water! Without that spork, I was going to have to eat with my bare hands! Oatmeal, pasta shells, couscous, all the staples of my outdoor diet (ramen, I can tackle with twig chopsticks) -- all without the assistance of a spork!!!

I tried a few times to hook the spork on a jig, and also to drag it up with the tip of a fly rod. Useless. Obviously, if I wanted that spork, I was going to have to go down there and get it with my grubby little opposable thumb, diving or swimming into water that was a scant few degrees above freezing, on a cloudy day just below the Arctic circle. Oh boy. They didn't teach me THIS one in Webelos.

Fortunately, I remembered what Sidney Huffington had done when his dogsled team had sent him crashing through actual frozen water, actually above the Arctic circle, creating a serious hypothermia emergency: he immediately built a huge fire, and while warming next to it, built another fire to keep him warm while he stood on the site of the previous fire and dried off his naked self and clothes. Well, hey! I already had a small fire going for my fish grilling, and all I needed to do was build it up into a huge blaze, and then I could stay warm in my birthday suit in the Alaskan wilderness, just like Sydney did!


To make a long story shorter, that is just what I did: after stoking the fire up to a big wide blaze that covered half of the little granite shelf on a little granite island, I stripped down, dove in, and retrieved the goddam spork. Indeed, the fire was hot enough to dry me off and keep my shivering frame from freezing while I put back on all the layers that were critical for getting through the day up there. But all the time, I was chucking and shaking my head, thinking the following:

Huffington stoked up his fires to save himself from certain death due to an unforeseeable accident in the middle of an icy wasteland; I did it so that I could more conveniently eat pesto-flavored couscous with extra virgin olive oil and toasted pine nuts.

Do you get it? Is that story gettable? Is it even a story? I am very grateful that nothing really serious even happened to me when I was camping alone out on Naknek Lake, where serious things can certainly happen. I'm also grateful that I can laugh at myself and my precious spork. I'm grateful that I ended up reading Huffington, and that lessons from that book helped me out in a sudden plastic-cutlery emergency. I guess I should also be grateful for the big old Google server where this written-down story will live for a while and relieve the pressure on my forgetful mind. It's one of the things blogging is good for!!