Embedded Files
I was never good at pretending to be a god. If others saw me as such, it is of their own fantastic construction. I do not blame my son if he had some conception of my greatness. From what I understand it is quite natural for offspring to revere their progenitors. In the case of my father, I often trace his fall from idolatry back to a time we were working on my car. I do not recall which particular part we were replacing, but I claimed that a bolt that should have been present was not, so it was decided that the head had snapped off and we were going to have to drill it out. The ultimate consequence of this decision was that there was now a hole in an engine part that according to manufacturer specifications should not have one.
It was not a resounding thud of a fall, but more of a, “oh, Dad can make mistakes” thud. It wasn’t even that a mistake was made. I had been working under the assumption that he was the Internet. Except I couldn’t have been because the Internet did not exist when I was a kid, so I guess I thought he was the complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica. He had all of the answers, until he didn’t. When I brought it up years later he attempted to shift blame to my spurious claim of the bolt's disappearance.
My pedestal was by design not too terribly high so as to attenuate the impact of my fall. When I felt that Evan was holding me in too high regard I would knock myself down to size by reminding him that I have made and will make mistakes.
This reasoned approach to parenting was not present on July 11, 2021.
We, along with the rest of the world, had been sequestered (sheltered) at home because of the Covid pandemic. Colette, Evan, and I had been vaccinated. Cricket, my mother-in-law, had been vaccinated as well. She moved in during the pandemic, but it had become obvious over the months she was with us that she was no longer capable of taking care of herself. Though the Delta variant had become the dominant strain in June, most of the research was saying that the vaccines did well against it and reports on the news had insisted that planes were not a major vector of transmission. With all of the good news and the realization that Evan would be going to college in the fall, we decided to purchase bargain plane tickets to Alaska.
“You have to promise that I get to go on one real hike.”
This was my only demand. Our previous vacations were bedazzled with aborted wilderness treks. A combination of weather, fatigue, and undiagnosed agoraphobia has led to multiple about-faces. Elevation deterred us from the ice fields in Kenai Fjords and from the peak of a mountain in the Smokys. Rain forced a retreat from the Hawaiian forest. Exhaustion and shoe failure led to our demise in the Great Sand Dunes. My desire to place one foot in front of the other to conquer the expanse can sometimes become pathological. There is always something around the bend or over the hill. I am much like the bear that went over the mountain in this respect, but the bear is better equipped to survive if he goes too far. Had I been born in the late 19th century, I like to think that I would have been an Arctic explorer, and in all likelihood a frozen corpse hand outstretched grasping at the barely perceptible warmth of a photon. As it is, I emerged into the world about one hundred years too late, so I am a high school English teacher who plays explorer on family vacations.
So it was with a couple of water bottles and a severe lack of pemmican that Evan and I set off in search of an ice cave in July. Colette and her mother stayed back in the rental car subject to moose maulings and caribou carjacking. I’m not sure if Evan wanted to go, but this was a thing that was gonna be done. I remember vaguely reading on someone’s vacation blog that the hike should occur on the South side of the bridge, or was it West? I couldn’t remember, and even if I had, it would have been meaningless because I had lost all sense of direction on the two hour drive to nowhere. Could I have gone back and consulted a map? No. I didn’t have one. Alaska has two highways. A map of Alaska has two squiggly lines and a bunch of green space. I could have consulted the car compass, but I would have had to take at least twenty steps back, and I was determined to head forward.
According to Google Maps this was a simple out and back expidition.
Forward was of course upstream, so we were at no risk of getting lost because despite my inability to determine cardinal, ordinal or any degree of direction in between we could at any point on our expedition merely head downstream to our base camp on the shoulder of the highway. At one point I spotted what I thought was an opening in a nearby cliff wall, but it is the nature of mountains to be much more distant than they appear and as the allowance for foot traffic between the bushes was quickly diminishing, I decided that we should veer back toward the riverbed in order to enhance our chances of finding an ice cave. Evan’s near constant question of my directional aptitude may have had some influence on the decision as well.
“Are you sure this is the right way?”
“I think so. Let’s just keep going a little farther.”
Luckily those were not famous last words, though I am sure they eventually will be.
I must have intentionally stopped to get this picture because Evan was rarely in the lead.
Early on there was a discernible trail amongst the shrubbery, but we soon encountered rockier ground that left little trace of previous passings by hominids. Reruns of 1950s western themed television shows and movies have imbued me with a profound respect, near worship, of the mythical tracker. Before my introduction to the X-Men, these trackers were my superheroes. A half-formed footprint in ground so hard-baked that most of us would see no trace would tell the tracker the direction, speed, time of passing, height, weight, gender and astrological sign of his quarry. A bent blade of grass, a snapped twig, an epithelial cell scraped on the needle of a saguaro are just another step closer to the rapidly improvised gallows of frontier justice. Trackers have been replaced by Zeusian computer hackers with access to CCTV on every street corner and capable of tasking NSA satellites to peer at the license plate of a late model Ford Focus that recently passed through the toll gate on the freeway, but I will take my chances in today's modern day surveillance state rather than trying to evade the Native American tracker.
Since I did not possess these preternatural skills myself, satellite aided navigation would have been much appreciated on our trek. Lacking the requisite technology, I attempted to allay Evan’s trepidation by pointing out every zig-zag line in a footprint left in a patch of damp sand by a tennis shoe or the wedge shaped tread of a hiking boot left by a fellow traveler.
“Look. Here. Someone else has come this way.”
“So.”
“So, we are probably not going to die.”
As I desperately hunted for the next sign of human activity, I began to worry. What if I was wrong? I don’t like being wrong. More importantly, was I ruining what could possibly be the last attempt at father/son bonding before Evan went off to college? Would his main memory of me be stumbling around The Alaskan interior slightly dehydrated and desperate? All of the parenting theory of open and honest communication fades under the near 24 hour sun of Alaska. I needed to project confidence and maybe a tad of omnipotence to ensure that Evan kept placing one foot in front of the other in pursuit of our ultimate goal, a mostly melted ice cave. Seriously, what was the likelihood of a bear attack and eventual airlift to a hospital hundreds of miles away?
The thing with trails is that there is always a bend, as in just around the. Or a rise, as in just over the next. If not for my wife and son, I fear (fantasize) that I would just keep walking. If I just peer over that ridge, I will glimpse elysian fields of caribou grazing on wildflowers. Take a step past the last shoe print in the sand and tread where few have trodden before. At various times the distant voice of Evan, Colette, or both have called me to their position some one hundred yards behind to inform me that we are hungry, or thirsty, or its raining, or there is a flash flood warning, or that bison seems awfully close, or this hike is kinda stupid.
This time it was the fear of abandoning Colette with her mother along the Alaskan highway. I began imagining scenarios both bloody and benign. I knew the chances of a Yukon serial killer were slim, but the odds of Cricket getting tired of sitting in the car and wandering into the tundra despite the pleadings of Colette were much higher. Even if all physical harm was avoided the, the psychological scarring of just a few minutes alone with Cricket when she was in a feisty mood could be enough to, much like the mighty peak Denali, create its own weather system that would create disturbances in the upper atmosphere precipitating heated conversations and temporal throbbing.
The dueling urges of discovery and recovery laden my feet as if my boots had been dipped in lead. Evan’s displeasure, or at least ambivalence was tipping the scales back to the car. Knowing that each step I took toward El Hielo, the city of ice, was another tick of the clock further from my return. The solution? I decided to bound ahead over boulders and slippery inclines while assuring Evan that I would be right back. The riverbed that we had been following had dried up, but between the clomps of my boots I could distinctly hear the irregular plinks of water drops.
And there it was. Well not really. It was more of a dingy ice shelf fleck with bits of black and gray stone and soil dripping into a pool. If I were to stretch my imagination and the accepted definition for cave, then I could and did declare that we had arrived at our destination. I did not have a flag to plant in order to claim this spot in the name of the Holden clan, and as I had been frequently pointing out to Evan that I had merely gone where others had indeed gone before. This enterprise had no star log to document the rather mundane world, and as for new life, that would not be discovered until the tail end of our journey.
Dingy ice cave.
Closer
Closest. If you squint you can see the dripping water.
After pondering the somewhat less than crystalline ice, we began our return journey. I again reassured Evan that we merely had to follow the riverbed bag to the bridge at which our car was parked.
“Chirp,” or was it a “squeak,” maybe a “pip,” or a “pip-squeak.”
My inability to land upon the correct onomatopoeic descriptor did not preclude me from identifying the sound as biological, and most likely coming from an animal of diminutive size. (Sidebar: BioSciFi Novel Idea, What if grizzly bears evolved the ability to make cute high pitched sounds that lured us to take a peek?) We slowed our pace to keep from dislodging noisome rocks and minimize the chance of frightening the creature. Using our finely tuned sense of sound localization and a little bit of luck we spotted the arctic ground squirrel squatting in the shade of an overhanging rock. We paused momentarily to wonder at the majesty of such a noble beast and then continued our trudge back to the rental car.
The noble artic ground squirrel
At some point we realized that we were not on the same path which had taken us to our destination. Gravity’s inexorable tug had impelled us to the bottom of the riverbed that was now joining a more hydraulically tumultuous river ahead, so we scrambled up to the ridge a few feet about our heads and recognized some familiar shrubbery. In the distance we could just make out the bridge, and while the car was not visible, we knew it was just on the other side of the road. As we assessed the journey ahead, I heard voices. The sound localization that had so readily revealed the location of the squirrel was not failing me due to the roar of the river and a slight echo effect, but I eventually pinpointed the source of the human vocalization. It was an older couple jauntily strolling along what was a much more well defined path on the other side of the river.
As the new data entered my mind, it created what is known in the English teacher biz as an internal conflict. Had I headed off on the wrong side of the river? I think I had. I pondered keeping this information from Evan in order to maintain my status of at least being an intrepid explorer, if not deity. In a moment of weakness, I decided that dishonesty was the best policy. I mean, it wasn’t a lie. I merely had my doubts.
We finally made it back to the car and the ladies were no worse for wear. I did find out later that Cricket had indeed tried to leave the car, but was somewhat easily persuaded to come back. Evan I recounted our tails of ice and wildlife assuring Colette that she did not miss anything spectacular.
I was happy though. Even though there was no cave or any other sight of note, the time I spent with Evan on the trail, or lack thereof, was a memory that I would be able to keep at least until I succumb to the inevitable mental decline of age.
An element of my mind that I’m sure will persist is the constant nagging of a little voice that must justify and rectify all factual information. I was not bothered too much by it on the trip, but once I had some time in the airport and the flight back, and my living room, and my bed just before I fell asleep I kept wondering if we had taken the path less traveled and it had made all the difference. The difference being that I did not see an ice cave.
“What are you doing?” Colette would ask as she stared at my face washed in the glow of my phone screen well after I should have been asleep.
“Nothing.” I considered saying that I was looking at porn because that would be less shameful than admitting that I had taken the wrong path and that I was obsessed with it so much that I was zooming in on Google satellite images to determine if I had indeed made an error.
Instead, I told the truth. Colette assured me that it was no big deal, but she has said that before about times I made mistakes. Like the time I convinced the entire Trivia team that the answer could not be Venice and the canals must be somewhere in Bruge because my slightly inebriated mind reasoned that the geniuses of the church men’s club would never write such a simplistic question. It was Venice, and as time passed I became more and more convinced that I had taken the wrong path. I also convinced myself, well not completely convinced, based on images posted on the Internet from others that have sought the ice caves in July that, at that time of year all I would have seen is rapidly moving water coming through a dingy ice arch.
I eventually came clean to Evan and he did not seem concerned. How could he not despise me at the same level of my self-hatred? Clearly, I am an inferior father. How does he not see this? If not for the rather balmy temperature of Alaska in July we could have easily been found frozen months later by yet another father and son team of explorers that had chosen the wrong path.
Colette and Cricket saw a ground squirrel as well.
Cricket on her wanderings across the highway.
What was thankfully not the cover photo of the book about our tragic demise.
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