“Wilderness Music” an excerpt from Bill Sherwonit’s new book
Changing Paths, by Bill Sherwonit
Wilderness Music, excerpted from
Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness
©2010 by Bill Sherwonit
At age 50, nature writer and wilderness advocate Bill Sherwonit went on the longest backpack of his life: fifty miles in two weeks, across mostly untrailed wilderness in America’s remotest and arguably wildest parkland, Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Traveling alone, he explored parts of the Central Brooks Range first made famous by Robert Marshall’s Alaska Wilderness. America’s “ultimate mountains” are also where Sherwonit first got his taste of Alaska’s wilderness, while working as a geologist in the mid-1970s; in a very real way, the Brooks Range transformed his life.
The following excerpt is taken from Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness (published in fall 2009 by the University of Alaska Press), which describes Sherwonit’s solo trek and also moves across space and time while reflecting upon his days as a geologist, his Connecticut roots, the importance of wilderness to humans as a life-affirming, life-changing, and life-enriching presence, and, just as importantly, the inherent value of wild nature, in and of itself.
Camped alone deep in Alaska’s Brooks Range wilderness, I find a comfortable spot along the North Fork of the Koyukuk. Then, placing my head beside the river’s churning aqua waters, I listen closely to its fluid play of sounds. I’ve heard beautiful Celtic-like chanting, off and on, for the past few days. The songs seem to come from outside me, from the forest and tundra and especially the river, but I suppose it could all be in my head. I’ve even put words to some of the music: “Holy, ho-o-o-ly, holy . . . ”
As the melodies and words play through my head, I’m left wondering what combination of landscape and wind sounds mix with my memories and thought processes – and several days of solitude—to produce these voices, this music.
My musings are interrupted by an unmistakably “real” voice that has nothing to do with my imagination: a howling comes from the forest, behind my tent. It is a loud, clear, resonant wail that rolls across the valley, of alto key. The howl triggers an immediate physical and emotional response: heart races, pulse quickens, spirit lifts. Instinctively I turn from the river, binoculars in hand, and face the wooded hills above camp. With all the tracks and scat on this riverbar and across the North Fork, I’ve anticipated – and sometimes imagined – wolf howls throughout my three-day campout here. Each morning and night I’ve swept the hillsides with binoculars, hopeful of a miracle. Now one has come to me.
I peer at two tundra knobs a few hundred feet above camp, then scan the spruce forest below. Even as I do, the howling resumes. The first baleful voice is joined by a second, higher pitched. This one is more of a soprano. The trembling howls blend and shift key. Are there more than two wolves? Hard to tell. Wolves are known to mix their voices in a way that produces a magnified sense of numbers.
The rain is falling harder now, but I barely notice. The wolf songs last a minute or two, but resonate much longer. This is what I dream about, to share the wilderness with howling wolves.
I ask myself which is more desirable, to see wolves or hear them sing? There’s no simple answer, but there is this fact: over the years I’ve seen wolves a half-dozen times, yet heard them howling only once. Those songs came from a distance in these very mountains, though in another valley, miles to the west. More than a quarter century has passed since that rainy autumn afternoon, but the haunting cries still ring out sharply in my memory.
I don’t think the wolves would disturb anything in camp, but to ease any nagging doubts I walk across the gravel bar and check my tarp and tent. Then back to the water’s edge for more searching. Even before I reach my “lookout,” I spot a wolf, upstream from camp and halfway across the braided North Fork, not far from where I crossed the river three days ago. Maybe 200 yards away. I can’t be fully certain from this distance, but the wolf strikes me as female and that’s what the animal becomes.
If I had to name her color, I’d say white wolf. But that ignores the subtleties of her coat. Bringing her into focus with my glasses, I see she has a mostly white face, with some gray atop her head and on her neck. Her flanks are light gray, legs are white, tail the color of gathering clouds, becoming darker, like storm clouds, at the tip. In her wettened coat, the wolf appears lean but not skinny, and I assume, for no sure reason, that she’s in good health.
The wolf crouches low as she crosses the mid-river sand and gravel bars, as if to avoid detection. She glances now and then in my direction and I’m sure she sees me. Moving slowly, she reaches the final, deepest channel. She steps gingerly at first, splashing across the milky green river. Then, for the final few feet, she plunges and swims across. The wolf stops at the forest’s edge and looks back intently – but this time not toward me. I’ve swung the binoculars back and forth across the river two or three times, expecting another wolf to appear, but none follows.
The she-wolf moves into the forest and I assume our encounter’s over, but the wolf reappears, walking slowly along the woods’ margin. Once she steps into the open, smells something on the bar. Then back under the trees. She takes one last look across the North Fork and turns away. Her walk becomes a trot and she’s gone, melted into the forest’s shadows.
Minutes later, there’s more howling – from my side of the river, though farther downstream. Perhaps the second wolf was unwilling to cross the stream within sight of me or the camp. The white wolf sings back, briefly. Then silence returns to the valley, except for the rushing, rattling, humming North Fork and tapping of rain. In a growing downpour I stand still another 30 minutes, maybe even an hour.
Finally I give up my watch, grab shelter under the tarp. I notice I’m shivering; from the wet chill, yes, but also from the song of Canis lupus.
I love grizzly bears. They are one of my primary totem animals, maybe my most important. To share the landscape with grizzlies is always an honor and delight (and occasionally worrisome). But to be with howling wolves in the arctic wilds; well, there is no greater magic. Beneath the tarp and later in the tent, I imagine distant, intermittent howling throughout the afternoon and evening. It’s amazing how much a river or the wind can sound like wolves.
I’ve had a feeling about this place since first seeing the many wolf tracks along the river. I’m convinced there’s a den not far away and have wished I might stumble upon it, or even see wolf pups from a distance while scanning the landscape. But I’m satisfied now. I’ve had my communion. Both body and soul have been stirred by songs that tell, without words, of mountains and rivers, of mysteries as ancient as music itself.
Throughout this trip, my most memorable times have come as moments of surprise: sudden (even if anticipated) encounters with the Valley of Precipices, Doonerak, grizzlies, a bear skull, now wolves. Animals have been the best example of this. For all the looking and “hunting” I’ve done, the wildlife I’ll remember most have come to me. It seems I’m being given new opportunities to let go of expectations and, at the same time, be open to possibilities. Both ideas, and the practice of them, have become important guideposts in my middle years.
After spending much of my life trying to keep things under control, I’m learning to surrender to life’s experiences, while also embracing the opportunities that come my way. It’s not easy, as demonstrated on this trip by my worrying, my off-and-on watch monitoring, and my efforts to stay dry and cozy in my overly large and weather-resistant tent. Yet I’ve remained flexible and taken some risks, both here and generally. It still sometimes seems amazing to me that a person so drawn to comfort and predictability would take the leaps of faith I’ve made, from geology to journalism and then to freelancing. And settling in Alaska, of all places! Not many of my childhood friends – or family members – would ever have guessed that the small, shy, sensitive boy of long ago would become an author, wilderness lover, and activist, or that he’d some day ascend the continent’s highest peak or trek alone across miles of untrailed Arctic wilderness.
The sun briefly returns in the evening and I hike to a rocky knob above camp. From here I get a better sense of how the landscape sweeps out and away from the Ernie Creek-North Fork confluence and the two streams’ large gravel bars, first to lowland forest and then upland tundra meadows and willow thickets, and even higher to encircling tundra-topped foothills and mountains with bare, jagged ridgetops. Beyond those hills and mountains are more waves of peaks and hidden valleys.
I feel so lucky, so happy, to be in the heart of this vast wilderness, where wild places still mostly free of human influence span dozens of miles in any direction. I need these trips for so many reasons: to refresh my spirit, test my limits and stretch my horizons, embrace solitude, expand my sense of what’s possible, encounter “the other,” renew my bonds with wildness in its many forms, and see more clearly what’s important, both here in the wild and back at home. Still, I can’t imagine making a home here (if it were allowed), so far from other people and the conveniences of modern living. I don’t try to fool myself: this northern wilderness is a harsh, demanding place, and to live here year-round would require skills I haven’t acquired.
Thinking about the trials and perils of Arctic homesteading, I again recall Ernie Johnson, “the most famous trapper of the North Fork,” for whom Bob Marshall named Ernie Creek. According to Marshall, “Although [Johnson] had come north on a gold rush, he had also been drawn by his love of the woods in this greatest wilderness on the continent. Here he spent all but about two weeks in the year out in the hills, away from the ‘cities’ of Wiseman (population 103) and Bettles (population 24). . . . He trapped and hunted, averaging a yearly income of about twenty-five hundred dollars. ‘I can make better money as a carpenter,’ he said, ‘but I am staying out here because I like it among these ruggedy mountains better than anywhere else in the world.’ ”
Here was someone who’d chosen the hermit’s life I once talked about pursuing while fed up with people and relationships during my grad school days; someone who actually chose to spend most of his adult years in seclusion. What revelations and understandings did Ernie find here among the sheep and grizzlies? As much as I desire and seek out solitude, I can’t imagine a life so empty of people.
From the perch above camp I trace much of the route I’ve followed along Ernie Creek, from the Precipices to the North Fork. Then I look downstream, where I’ll be walking tomorrow. It appears I’m bound for “the dark forest.” Thick stands of spruce press close against the meandering river. I will likely cut through the woods in places, either to shorten my route or where pushed into the trees by steep, river-eroded cutbanks. I hope it’s not too dense or brushy for easy path finding.
While plotting my route, I hear more howling, downriver. The wolf song is loud and clear, but brief. I wish for more, but instead hear only the rush of river. And gradually, more chanting voices. These are less pleasing, more eerie. My mind imagines a chorus of “sorry . . . sorry” sung in a mocking, almost malevolent tone. Is the darkness in this chant tied to my worries about tomorrow’s route? The chant unnerves me and I’m unable to get the words out of the head as I descend back to camp. Can such things come from too much solitude? Again I wonder how much I’m “hearing” and how much imagining. The presence of these landscape sounds and voices has been among the stranger aspects of this trek.
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