July 26

It is hot and sunny. There is the relentless sound of the river flowing green and white as it moves north. The sunrise was pink and grey with the river shinning white and blue. The sky was filled with soft pink clouds and the mountains glowed pink in the east. Hidden within the pink horizon was a faintly glowing rainbow. I was a sleepwalker in this early morning light.

The river surprised us yesterday with a series of powerful rapids. One long rapid filled with waves and holes was a complex boulder garden that was easily Class IV. We threaded our way between big holes and boulders, alive in the warmth of the sun and the roaring sound of the river. At the bottom of the rapid, as we floated for a moment in calm water, a bull caribou stepped out of the willows and trotted along the shore before disappearing again into the thicket. It was a moment of magic.

The land here is open with long curves of green beneath the wide arch of the sky. We have become accustomed to this being in and on the land. It is a simple, solitary life with Sharon and me.  We haven’t seen another person since we began the trip nearly a month ago. Our life is spent on the river, surrounded by the rocks, the gravel, the alder, mountains and sky with our imagination filled with images of an animal world. This is a place to be quiet, it is a place to meditate on the meaning of things. It is an opportunity to find balance with the world around us. The place enters our lungs and fills our eyes.

My brain cycles through thoughts of the “other world,” of rectangles and schedules, of commerce and profit, of war and famine. I have a new and more emotional response to death and killing. Disgust for the forces, which see violence as a tool for freedom and safety. Here, miles from anyone, it is clear that you are responsible for your decisions. But in the world that we come from it is easy to believe that someone else will protect you. It is easy to lose the connection between what you have and where it came from, and to understand what it costs in dollars, resources and time.

Here in this simple world everything has a place. Less is certainly more and more is certainly less. There is no profit beyond experience. There is no commerce, there is no waste and nothing is ugly. There is nothing senseless, here, everything is exactly what it is, and there is no confusion.

July 27

I take the solitude, peace, harmony and quiet for granted.  It is just the way things are here. At times I look around and feel as though I am living in my photographs… The landscape fills every space of my being. In the past the lessons, revelations and images of the place would surprise me, having ventured into what was uncharted personal territory, I was filled with a need to share the story of my trip and the lessons I had leaned from the place. But this trip has made me quiet, wordless, but not thoughtless. The landscape has entered me, changed me.  The intensity of being here has not diminished even as it has become familiar. The wildness of the place, the visual intensity of each moment, the excitement that comes from being alone here fills me up, and for now at least it is what I am.

I am not a fool; I am a visitor to this place, at the moment a part of the place but inevitably apart from it. I know that each day here is precious, the time is difficult to come by, it is easy to squander and it is impossible to replace. The lessons of the place are intense. The volume of wilderness in sound, in size and in imagery can only be appreciated in small bites. I chew on each idea, each detail, and over time, bit by bit the place is revealed to me, my commitment to the “search” grows, my understanding moves ahead by inches.

I filmed easy images of stupidity,  a group of caribou appeared, caribou and drums…what a cliché…but there it was…a reality right in front of me…and so I filmed the caribou as they walked among the barrels and then wandered off across the tundra…This was a larger group of caribou than we have been seeing, they moved across the tundra with determination, down the hill towards the river…heading some place they know and we do not…some place they know or sense or feel, some place we can only imagine…which lives in our imagination and gives meaning to this place…We continued across mud sucking tussocks to the second group of drums…I filmed and took photographs and then we headed back to camp walking across a field of wild flowers…white, yellow, pink, blue until we reached the dark flowing river. Just above the river we found the partially eaten remains of a caribou calf…a reminder of the darker rules which govern this place…Then we were into the boat…dark mud and melting ice lines the bank leading down to the dark water…We crossed back to camp, prepared dinner as the sky filled with fast changing clouds…silver light…yellow shafts of sunlight raked the hills…and then the sky opened up with high scattered clouds lit by the low angled light of the sun…Three caribou descend the hill above us and cross the river…they disappear into the glare of light to bright to see…They leave a lone caribou on the hill, who suddenly jumps and runs…We watch as two grey wolves lope across the tundra in the direction of the lone caribou…a story to imagine, with no details to tell…There is a cold wind, there are clearing skies…

The gravel bar is a jumble of jagged clay rock; there are fossils everywhere, worms and seashells, fragments of petrified wood, fern leaves, an ancient world frozen in stone. I imagine myself walking in an ancient arctic rain forest. We climb up the cliff above our tents following game trails and eating blueberries. There are caribou antlers laying in the tundra and caribou grazing on the distant hill.

Reaching the top of the cliff I can look across the river and see a distant oil rig. It is hard to know just how big it is, but it must be big, it fills a distant ridge. The rig unsettles me; I am looking at the last thing I want to see, like looking at a cancer cell under a microscope…there it is, real, solid, not a vision, or an idea…a reality, as real as the caribou or the fossils at my feet.

Later, with the sun low on the horizon, the hills are streaked with yellow and in the distance I can see the vertical tower of the oil rig…It is vertical in a horizontal landscape…it sits there alone…a sentinel that defines the looming threat of more towers, pipelines, roads, gravel pits…all of it representing millions of dollars of investment…money spent to pour oil into the sky.

There are caribou on the gravel bar, there are caribou on the surrounding hills…the river shines blue, the air has gotten colder, there is a light wind…I can barely hear the hum of the land

by Richard Kahn

The owl flies silently over my head, white and brown wings making no sound…over the river into the tundra, the owl drops out of sight and then emerges from a fold in the land a small creature tucked in its talons…Screeching peregrine chicks hidden somewhere on the cliff face, strident calls, chaotic screaming…pleading, hidden from view. The adult falcon, invisible, screeches a warning…

A group of silent black and white geese run across the gravel bar…Gulls watch, their incessant call not so much the call of the wilderness, but more like a reminder that the familiar lives in the most exotic places…or, perhaps, a reminder that the exotic is merely a perspective shift of the familiar.

Loons call, they are distant silhouettes on the water, sometimes sounding like ducks or geese…sometimes laughing…they run across the surface of the river beating their wings as their feet stir up white wakes…They leave the surface, turn and head upstream, heads down, necks extended, wings beating the air, they fight to fly unlike the hawks, eagles, falcons and owls who float effortlessly on the air…hovering, soaring, hurtling towards the ground, blasting straight into the sky.

And then there is the raven, dark shape, calls like a gull, flies like a hawk, soars with the eagles…In the middle of the night the raven’s call wakes me up…it is close, and unlike anything else I have heard here…sound like wind passing through a long pipe…a bird flute…it is unique and unlike the mimicking cries I hear from the raven during the day…If the caribou are the magician animals, dancing across the tundra, appearing and disappearing mysteriously in their own way, then the raven is the magician bird…dark like a shadow…silent or noisy at will, a mimic or a unique individual…secure, curious, nomadic…

NPR-A by Richard Kahn

Rain all night…the clouds are down on the lake…It is a cold grey morning…Patches of blue sky breaking through until the days changes in character…Bright sun, light wind, blue sky…the grasses glowing yellow…Pools of water gathered in the folds of the dunes…the hum of the land is loud in my ears…There are no caribou to be seen… their tracks in the sand have been eroded by the rain…The wind blows sand into the ridges…but the day is dry…We walk up though the dunes, past the loon pond and head south in the direction of the vanished caribou. Ground squirrels watch as we cross the tundra. We stop for lunch finding shelter behind an outcrop of blowing grass above a break in the dunes. A highway of tracks marks the passing of caribou. I set up the video camera pointing out across the sand looking east across the lake. We eat lunch and wait. There are several caribou in the distance…We wait…the caribou graze moving slowly in our direction…We wait…a young bull, a cow and her calf, the ground squirrels run across the dunes, they stand, they flick their tails, they chatter and then run for their holes in the side of the dune… The caribou graze and move closer, until the young bull is just below us. He looks directly at me, pauses, and then goes back to grazing…the cow and the calf move closer and then trot off to the east. The bull walks past us up the highway of tracks and disappears over the hill. In the distance more caribou graze and move closer…we wait…the bull returns…he takes another long look at me and then begins to graze. Caribou walk along the lake. A bull walks into the lake until the water reaches his chest…he stands there, brown body, blue water, his antlers silhouetted in the bright sunlight…the caribou graze around us. The ground squirrels chase each other through the tundra. We spend the day in the dunes, sheltered in this one spot, in the shadow of blowing grass, watching the caribou come and go…A day spent on caribou time…watching them meander from plant to plant, walk, sit, trot, graze and then disappear…We pack up, no caribou in sight, ground squirrels in their holes, a gull calls imitating a loon a loon answers. There is not a cloud in the impossibly blue sky…low angled yellow light has the grasses shinning and the dunes glowing…The lake is a deep blue rippled by the wind and shining bright in the evening light…there is a slight chill in the air…It is quiet, there are no animals to be seen…no birds singing, no bugs…just silence…peaceful serene…

Tomorrow we will leave this place, we’ll fly back to the Colville, back to moving water, cliffs, and tundra…This place is unique…A threshold…an entryway into another world, another arctic, another way to think about the land…There are no mountains here…There are no rocks…the only stone we’ve found in ten days is an obsidian spear point…Josh picked it out of the sand and blew away the dust…it shone deep black in the sunlight…We passed the point back and forth, touching the hand of a man extended backwards and forwards through time…and then Josh dropped the point back into the sand where he had found it…This is not iconic Alaska…but it is true wilderness…fragile…intricate…vulnerable. Filled with the change of the weather and the light…wind, silence, blowing sand, harsh cold, dark clouds, rain…migrating caribou…grasses and willows…intense in it’s simplicity…filled with poetry…powerful in it’s simplicity…spare in it’s grammar…It has taught me a simple notion…It is not what you take from the land that has meaning…It is what the land gives you…a concept so simple that it has eluded me until I walked across the dunes and sand of this place…This place is fragile, the caribou mark the land and the wind and weather erase their passing. The only sign of caribou are the deep trails they have worn over time into the tundra high above the lake.

Our presence is intrusive here. If we had met just two other people here we would have been crowding the space. This is a place which should be left alone…rarely visited but widely understood…the elements of wilderness distilled to their most basic ingredients. Sky, water, plant, bird, animal…mixed together they provide the flavor of wilderness. The willows are the caribou…the caribou are the willows.

Nothing wasted here, I reached down to pick up a handful of dried grass to scatter over the spot where I had pitched my tent and find a bird’s nest.

Time passes, one thing becomes another …the caribou tracks which had been a river flowing across the sandy plain have been erased by the rain and scattered by the blowing wind…the tracks become grains of sand the grains mark the passing of the wind forming ripples and eddies around the grasses that dance beside the lake…the sky unfolds around me clouds form and shred…the horizon encircles me…the sun on one horizon the moon on the other…the cloudless sky fills with darkness…fog descends over the dunes…the world turns grey…caribou drift through the mist…silence…only the hum of the land remains constant…ripples

The National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska, by Richard Kahn

by Richard Kahn

There are no geese on the Colville…But, there are loons, and rough legged hawks, and peregrine falcons. We sat beneath a cliff as the peregrine screeched at us from above. A second falcon joined the first and together they screamed at us, warning us away from their nest. As the second falcon landed on her nest I could hear the excited calls of her chicks anxious to be fed.

Hot sun, wind, deep green water, tall cliffs. I watched a rough legged hawk soar on the thermals, hang motionless above the cliff, then the hawk tucked one wing and dropped like a stone, tucking both wings close to its body. Just above the dense alders covering the cliff the hawk opened its wings, thrust out its legs, extended its talons and disappeared silently into the trees…a moment later it exploded from the dense brush and shot straight up into the deep blue sky…silhouetted against the clouds it hung motionless, tucked a wing, turned towards the earth and with both wings tight against its body it once again dropped like a stone…just above the alders it opened its wings, extended its legs, spread its talons and disappeared into the darkness of the alders. Out of the green into the blue…motionless against the clouds…the hawk fell again…disappeared into the dark brush…All the while a second falcon cried as it rode the thermals over the cliff…soaring in circles…screeching…the cliffs shone silver in the early evening light, glistening rock, green hills…

The gravel bar turned yellow, the river reflects the yellow glow of the low angled sun… three loons float by…quacking…swimming back and forth in the current…they are silhouettes against the bright water…an annoyed gull flew at me. I could hear the rush of it’s wings as it swooped above my head…the loons swam peacefully in front of me…the gull flapped in crazed circles diving at my head…circling and diving again and again until he tired of his game and soared off into the pink, yellow, grey blue sky…

Pink sky, blue river turning slate grey as the sun slides behind a distant hill. The constant ceaseless hum of the land in my ears…The pink sky…the hum of the land…the calling falcons…soaring hawks…angry gull…meandering loons…no geese, no geese at all…

A hot day on the river, no caribou, only the falcons and hawks …the bright water…We are camped at the confluence of the Killik and the Colville, the Killik running fast and blue…the Colville slow and green…they merge in front of our campsite…the river doubles in size and flows away from us…A strong wind comes up, the temperature plummets…the hum of the place fills my head…There can’t be enough time here…each moment…ordinary or extraordinary is precious…My mind tires at trying to absorb all the details of the place…my eyes ache from the looking…my spirit is alive from the just being here…Time to wrap myself in my sleeping bag…but I don’t want to give up the day…I don’t want to surrender to sleep…to dreams…to the sound of the flapping tent in the wind…