1!

I don't know if I was planning some kind of grand finale or superpost when the Katmai countdown reached 1 . . . but I do know now that it ain't gonna happen. I'm too exhausted. After last night's wine insomnia, I went in to work and really got hammered: there are five thousand little tasks I need to do to clean up after myself and tie off the loose ends, and I got about three thousand of them done today. At a cost. In energy.

Do believe I'll sleep tonight! And I'm expecting happy dreams of cold, trouty water. Maybe I'll even have one of those nifty dreams where you're flying through the air like some happy, high-soaring osprey, searching the water below . . .


In seventeen days or so, I hope to be blogging on again with some photos and tales from ground level. Hasta luego amigos!!

2 . . .

I'll come clean and attribute the attributed quote in my last blog to John Krakaeur -- I stole it from his book Into the Wild, which has a nifty quotation or two at the beginning of every chapter and lots of good references throughout. There are great tidbits from Thoreau and John Muir and all the other tree-hugging romanticist adventurers.

And were they also -- here's the word from a quotation that resonated in my mind -- monomaniacs? Considering my seven straight days of blogging about my two-week vacation, and also considering all the time and energy I have spent preparing for the trip and dreaming about it and planning for it, this unfamiliar word certainly hit with a sudden recognition. I think it's true: I have a minor problem with monomania. Were Thoreau and Muir nature monomaniacs? That would probably be unfair to say. But I'm free to say it about myself: I am a monomaniac.

This has occurred to me before, specifically in reference to fishing. Sometimes, I am fairly quaking with urges to fish that can only be quelled by actually going fishing. This effect is particularly pronounced just prior to any new or exciting fishing outing. It also gets exaggerated when the fishing seems finite, as when dusk is getting ready to fall on a very good caddis hatch, or when the peak of a good tidal current is starting to pass, or, most definitely, when I am thousands of miles away from home fishing for fish that you can't find at home (and by "at home," I mean within a 5-6 hour driving radius that covers the Sierra Nevada and the waters East and West of Redding, plus down as far as the Owens River).

Proof of Monomania is that I have made three previous visits to Brooks Camp, each of them four days or more, and I have never, ever, gone on the very popular bus trip out to the Valley of 10,000 Smokes. This time around, I may well do so. The ghost of Flakkarin the Wanderer is still wandering around my mind, stirring up fascination with volcanic landscapes. But no sooner do I say and imagine that than I feel something inside tugging at my mind's sleeve, saying "but dude, that could take a whole day away from being near the Brooks River. You might not even get a single sockeye on the line that day!" And yeah, honestly, something about that just seems wrong. When else am I going to have thousands of salmon swimming front of me, with hungry two-foot rainbows trailing? It's a fair question to ask when I'll be near a new volcanic landscape, too, and that might have worked wonders on me ten years or so ago when my monomania was mountains, not wetlands . . . .

Strangely enough, back in those days I had one or two epiphanies about that particular monomania, specifically when reading John Muir. He was alive to the whole picture: the storms, the hundred types of trees and plants, even the Douglas squirrels, all in addition to a sharp and intense awareness of the mountains themselves. I have a terrific book full of pictures of plants he pressed and saved from his travels through California and Alaska. I was reading the Alaska chapter this morning and marvelling at how open and alive that man's mind must have been. And meanwhile, he was an insane romantic, for whom the landscape was alive with meaning. About a glacier, he said, "the mills of God grind slowly. But they grind exceedingly fine."

What I generally think about glacial flour in the water is, "how are the fish ever going to see my fly?????"

One guy who very clearly was a monomaniac was Timothy Treadwell, star of Grizzly Man. The only question is whether he obsessed on the bears, or on his grand image of himself as the savior of bears. I do think that man was real good and crazy. Yet I do have some understanding of (I think) and respect for what he was up to out there on the Katmai coast. In fact, one quote that comes to my mind in regard to Timothy Treadwell is taken from a piece of great fiction, Naipaul's A Bend in the River:

A death like that makes us question everything. But we are men; regardless of the deaths around us we continue to be flesh and blood and mind, and we cannot stay with that questioning mood for long. When the mood went away I felt -- what deep down, as a live-loving man, I had never doubted -- that he had passed his time better than most of us.

I'm going nuts with my quoting today, aren't I? But the only way to climb is to stand on the shoulders of the giants. Naipaul was a great giant, as the first line of that novel (I can't resist another) proves: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." Good God I wish I could write like that.

However, the other quote I'd give in reference to Treadwell is far less romantic. It is the passage spoken by Herzog in the soundtrack where he basically says this: while Treadwell looked at the bears and saw kindred spirits, Herzog looked into their beady eyes and saw absolutely nothing except a wild creature with a half-bored interest in food. After watching hundreds of bears around Katmai, I agree with Herzog. And yet, that wildness, that blank and complete lack of kindred or caring between my human thoughts and feelings and the motivations that move the bear, or move the trout, or move the trees in the wind -- that is enough for me. I think I can build a powerful edifice of romantic and transcendental thinking/feeling on that alone.

Maybe I too am decieved. I'll make some inquiries and get back to you. Meanwhile, just two days separate me from departure to the place that stirs up all this monomania in the first place. Getting close!!!!!

3 . . .

There are two sides to every story, and both should be told. I have been writing about backcountry camping in Alaska as though it were all sweetness and light. It is not.

On the Alaska peninsula, it rains a lot. It rains in a way some Californians can probably not imagine: steadily, relentlessly, and daily. Once, on the Tikchik and Nuyakuk rivers, I had 12 straight days that were mostly rainy. When it wasn't pouring, it was steadily raining. And when you got a good break, it was still drizzling. I was just lucky that the sun came out on the last couple of days so that I could dry out all my stuff -- otherwise my sodden gear would have been so heavy it would have prevented the bush plane from taking off.

In Katmai, where fairly windy low-pressure systems blow in regularly, this is a more likely scenario: I'm laying down in my tent, nice and tired and ready for some rest, and a steady rain is falling. However, both the rain and wind get a little more intense, and now the trees are swinging around (and howling a bit) and letting big blasts of rain intermittently down on my tent's tarp. Have you sat in a tent and heard that abrupt, rattling sound, my friends? It is not conducive to peaceful sleeping.

"BRAAAPP!!!!" (Pause, wind howls). "BRAAAAAAAAPPPP!!!!" (More howling).


Tent discomforts in Alaska are legendary. If you get up in the middle of the night needing to relieve your bladder, you don't just saunter out in your birthday suit and let it rip. If it's raining, you are talking about getting soaked. Unless there's a real good wind, you're talking about getting twenty to a hundred mosquito bites before your bladder empties. If there IS a good wind, you'll be chilled and possibly shivering before you get back in the tent door. So, inevitably, you have to put on clammy rain gear, or your shell layer, and don't forget about pasting some bug dope onto your hands and face, because god knows they will get you in those places.

You do get used to it, but that does not mean it isn't annoying.

Mornings can be tough. My idea of heaven is waking up to already-brewed coffee, being handed to me in a mug, preferably in bed, most preferably of all, by a congenial member of the fairer sex. Obviously, this is not part of the plan in Alaska. And it's worse than you think: I not only have to get dressed, and put on boots, and heat water, and all that predictable shit -- I also have to carefully and slowly approach my food cache, which will be located a decent distance from the tent, calling out softly to let any possible bears know that I am coming. I have to look over my shoulder during the vulnerable moments in which the top of the bear can (and/or kevlar bear sack) is open, and then haul all the morning's eatables, plus the stove and fuel can that also live in the food cache (along with anything else smelly, like handkerchiefs, toothpaste, and pans) another 100 yards or so away from the food cache just in order to get STARTED with the water-boiling and oatmeal-stirring tasks that I wish to god someone else were doing for me while I slept.

On the other hand, it is about the only way I wake up properly without caffeine already in my veins. And when the caffeine starts to flow, it doesn't matter much if there's rain or sun -- I'll start getting very very excited about a day ahead that holds big fish or a paddling challenge or new territory to explore.



That's just a few of the annoyances I'm going to be living with next week, and it feels good to talk about them. They just remind me of the rest of the picture, and they sure as hell aren't going to stop me from heading up there in three days now . . . .

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 . . .

5 . . .

Last night in the middle of a conversation about everyone's favorite topic, my buddy threw in this comment: "for Gillie, sex is actually fishing." I wonder if he says such things to try and psychologically eliminate me from the competition, which is of course useless. I may do a lot of catch and release, but that don't mean I ain't fishing . . . . Anyway, I hastened to correct him: the two activities exist on parallel courses, and do not necessarily replace one another. It's a Both-And situation, not an Either-Or.

I do not like Either-Ors.

Wieirdly enough, one of the best dates I had all last year was at Brooks Camp. Yes, this says something about the intensity of my social life here at home. But it is also a compliment to Sophia, who was one HECK of a cute and outgoing Chinese girl from Seattle. Brooks Camp is a social scene, and Sophia was a big player in it, palling around with the cool young folk who work there and also befriending some of the approachable other tourists, like myself. Sophia had the thing wired -- she knew everyone's name, and she knew which night the cool bar guy was working, the one who would pour free beers and mix very strong drinks. So she and I got mildly drunk one night and hiked off to sit on a log and enjoy a magical midnight dusk together.

Obviously, hanging out at Brooks Camp is not the wilderness portion of my trip. I think of it as the banquet portion: breakfast buffet, endless coffee refills around a big fireplace, and all the sockeye and trout you can fish for. The catch is that you are surrounded by people at the food buffet, and surrounded by bears at the fish buffet. Alaskan locals sometimes disdainfully call Brooks "Camp Hey Bear" because all the tourists, many of them flown in just for a day trip, constantly call out that phrase as the park rangers instruct. Nobody wants a run-in, and as far as I know, there never has been one.

But still, the scene is a fairly crazy one. I find it a miracle that all those bears and all those people can coexist in such a small space. The rangers and their training helps. An electric fence around the campground helps. Elevated trails with railings and gates help. And for me, it helps a whole lot that most of the tourists never go off those trails, and I am generally free and alone when I wade into the marshy ground around "The Oxbow" -- a super prime fishing spot where I back off and make a large circle around each bear that wants to fish in the same spot as me. It helps, again, that the bears are very itinerant fishers, and the move constantly from spot to spot, letting me fish in between. With so many fish around, the bears tolerate each other at much closer distances than they normally would (and so they also tolerate the people, to whom they are highly "habituated"). I feel the same way: with all those fish, and all those bears, I just relax and go with the flow for a few days.

It helps a great deal to know that after a few days I'll paddle away and be the only naked ape in a territory the size of Alameda county.

This year I'm going to try and sleep during the day, like the more bashful bears, and fish and be active during the dim light of the night. Ideally, I'll wake up around the cocktail hour, eat a big buffet dinner, and then fish until breakfast, at which point I will retreat to my tent and hibernate. This may put a crimp in my Brooks social life, so we'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll give up that plan and just hang. I have met and talked with a lot of interesting people around the fireplace there, and not just Sophia. I remember an older lady who was a dignified member of the safari set (read, very wealthy) but was also extremely friendly and a great conversationalist. Also there was a really smart middle-age guy who, oddly enough, really did turn out to be a rocket scientist in his day job. I told him about using my mp3 player to listen to a book-on-tape
of Thus Spake Zarathustra whenever the water was calm enough to paddle safely that way, and he understood: "My God, that must be a rapture!"

Bach and Meshuggah are also rapturous to listen to while paddling, I add.

Another thing that may eat into my Brooks time is a plan to try and get my kayak and gear up the rough road to Brooks Lake and try those waters as well as Naknek Lake's. The river is the thing that has diverted me from such efforts in the past. Maybe it will again. But I just loaded up some helpful waypoints for Brooks Lake, and I just bet there are some fatties swimming around in those vicinities . . . but crap, there are still several long-ass days to kill before I can even start trying to find out. Now that I have blogged my -5 blog, I may have to drive up and fish the shad for the last time in 2009. That, or have some great sex.

I believe I will go fishing. :)

6 . . . and Warming Up

My eyes opened themselves around six a. m. on the sixth day I need to kill before going up to Katmai, and I was instantly thankful for that. Yesterday there were 30-40 knot afternoon winds and a gale warning on the bay, and I feel sure that today there will at least be a small craft advisory, probably starting at 1:00 and lasting through midnight.

(Stops to check).

There is!

So, if you want to take a bay paddle, you'd best get started early; and if you want to go up around to Aquatic Park or Crissy Field because you are bored with crossings to Alameda, you'll do best to get going before the forecasted 3.7 knot incoming current starts to peak around 9:00 or so. That is, unless you really, really relish paddling against current (which, to be honest, I do not).

My paddling trip is a vacation, and I expect to have a whole lot of fun, and relaxation, and great times. At the same time, I know from experience that paddling a kayak around places like Prince William Sound or Naknek Lake is no game. The water is all very cold, and the weather is occasionally very ugly, and generally, after you paddle into the wilderness, there is nobody at all around to help. So, in preparation for a trip like this, I do my homework with GPS and maps, buy and get familiar with all the necessary gear for safe camping and travel, and -- like this morning and many days recently -- I get out and make sure that me and my foldable boat are in good paddling shape:



A few weeks ago I took a morning paddle from Crissy Field out to Pt. Bonita. I didn't pay proper attention to the marine and tide forecasts, and so I got what I deserved: the ocean swell was coming in big from a direction that ran it all the way up to Points Bonita and Diablo, creating really wierd reflected "clapotis" waves a full half-mile out from shore; at the same time, a really strong ebb current of 5+ knots was gushing out the gate, creating mean spilling waves as it ran right against the west wind. I ended up doing a little dance of trying to stay as far as I could out of that current without going too far into the chaotic clapotis zone, and it took all my attention and energy to make forward progress (on the home run) while staying upright. Often, a steep swell wanted to surf me, and in happier conditions I would want to surf it. Not that day.

That was some good practice.

The real sea kayaking holy grail, to my mind, is to travel the actual ocean coast of Katmai and further down the Alaska peninsula, ducking into bays to camp but otherwise braving big open sea swells and super-fickle weather. I'm not there yet, and I know it. But wouldn't it be cool?

I once had a good friend give me a wee bit of shit about "commitment." At the time he was needling me about refusing to wait in a line for food, but I understand the larger context: I'm not married, I don't own a house, and I am not "committed" to the usual committed way of life you find among folks. But since that day, it has occurred to me a few times that there are other kinds of commitment that I am pretty good at. He should have been there, and felt what I felt, when I was setting off in to a box canyon with class III rapids on the Kukaklek branch in a 10-foot inflatable boat carrying all my possessions, 50 miles away from anything even remotely resembling help. Once you're in the canyon, you are committed in a unique and powerful way. In a similar vein, I got deeply committed last year at Katmai by paddling 15 miles ahead of a bad weather forecast, knowing that I need to get out early if I was going to get out at all -- and that, once out, I wasn't going to be getting back until the storm had blown itself out. Isn't that commitment? It felt like it.

At any rate, trips like this give me something to focus on and commit to, and they definitely get me motivated to crank up my paddling game. That can't be all bad. In fact, sitting around on an early Saturday morning in Aquatic Park watching cute joggers and drinking thermos coffee after a five mile counter-current paddle is a decidedly good thing.



And this kind of goodness is just a small harbinger of good, good things to come, when I paddle away from all cuties (carrying coffee though, of course) and focus on the beauties of big fish, open wilderness, and real freedom and adventure.

Putting it in those hyperbolic terms just makes me more impatient. A dinner party and a keg of Blue Heron pale ale are going to help me forget about it tonight, for a while. And then the countdown will continue!

Katmai Countdown 7 . . .

A week from now I will herding onto a plane bound from SFO to Anchorage. I'll wait until the last possible minute to board, and will probably end up shuffling through the corridor-on-wheels and bumping into grumpy people in their seats and having to hunt around for a place to put my carry-on, which will be extremely heavy with a bunch of gear like reels and batteries and a PLB that I tried to keep out of my checked bags, which will require an overweight fee anyway.

Like Paul Theroux said, travel largely consists of the boredom of WAITING. It is what I am doing right now, filling this evening with future-forward blogging and the reverie it runs on.

I'm actually going to spend next Friday in an overpriced hotel in Anchorage. ALL hotels in Anchorage are overpriced, but most especially the one where I stayed a few years ago -- the one where a drunk was stumbling through the lobby in a blood-spattered shirt when I was checking in, and where a very agitated, shrieking prostitute was being forcibly ejected when I went back to complain that my room door would not lock. That was a real winner. I learned later from some locals that the Carr's supermarket right next to that hotel is referred to generally as "Scary Carr's," and it is considered Ground Zero of Anchorage's worst neighborhood.

For a few dollars more, I hope to get a decent night's sleep next Friday, or at least an interval where I can stretch out and not be crammed into an airline seat. In younger days I would "sleep" in the airport and catch the first plane out to King Salmon. Now, I figure a) day-trippers get priority on Katmai Air to Brooks, so me and my 150 pounds of gear and food (pre-shipped and waiting) will probably not get out until the afternoon anyway, b) I'm 42 years old, for Christ's sake. After I get there around 11:00, I can use the time to walk down the store in King Salmon and order up a bag of deep-fried chicken gizzards. Those go well with a breakfast beer, and where else are you going to dependably find them?

This morning I read some choice quotes about Anchorage in John McPhee's "Coming Into the Country:"

Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders.

"You can taste the greed in the air."

A large cookie cutter brought down on El Paso could lift something like Anchorage into the air. It is condensed, instant Albequerque.

When I explain it to Bay Area people, I say it is like Concord squared, or several Walnut Creeks that seem to have spilled off the Chugach mountains.



I'll sleep there, and wander over to the convenience store to pick up a couple of butane lighters, brightly colored so that I'll have a harder time losing them in camp (yes, I do also take along storm matches for emergencies like lost butane lighters). The flight out to King Salmon doesn't do security, which is strangely comforting to people who want to carry lighters, stove fuel, bear mace. It leaves at the civilized hour of 9:30, and if I can't manage to sleep in long enough there is a Denny's nearby (I know the 'hood round ANC quite well by now) where I can gorge on a greasy American breakfast and start feeling like I'm on vacation. Before night falls on Saturday I'll be needing those calories, because there is no way I'm going to resist a long fishing session into the wee hours, dodging bears and yanking against furious ten and fifteen-pound sockeyes and trout amplified by 50 pounds of current . . .

But I'm getting ahead of myself. That is tomorrow's blog.