Mudflats & Fish Camps by Erin McKittrick

Author:Erin McKittrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tidal rapids slice through the mudflats near the Susitna Delta.

THE OCEAN’S FEATHERED EDGE

MAY 22–27: ANCHORAGE TO TYONEK

On Knik Arm, on the shore of Anchorage, low tide doesn’t smell like the fizzing waves of drying seaweed and rotting snails. This far up Cook’s “River,” tides of silt bury anything that dares to live on the bottom. Here, low tide smells like mud and exhaust. Shipping containers and loading cranes rise behind the metal sea walls. Skyscrapers loom and bicycles whiz by on the Coastal Trail’s ribbon of pavement. The trail is a bright-line boundary between urban and wild.

I don’t usually enter into battles with inanimate geography, but Knik Arm and I had some unfinished business to resolve. On an expedition five years earlier, Knik Arm had fended Hig and me off with a crushing mass of ice floes, smashed and scrambled in the same tidal currents that had halted Captain Cook’s ships. It was minus twenty degrees then. Today was just cold enough for a jacket and hat, and Knik Arm led with its fortification of mud. It stretched before us, a slick gray expanse rippled and cracked and pocked by bird tracks. There can be quicksand here too. Also gooey mud and gloppy mud, quivering mud and hardened mud, slippery mud and sinking mud. One step leaves a gorgeously clear sneaker print. And the next?

“Mommmm!” Katmai stood like a teetering crane in a puffy down coat—one foot in the mud, the other, held up with a bent knee, displaying a sock that once was blue. I plunged my hands into the muck, fished out the tiny “water shoe” we’d just bought him, and smeared it back onto his foot. A couple of minutes later, I did the same for Lituya.

Anchorage friends stood by on slightly more solid ground, while I bent over, puffing the last breaths of air into the packraft, distractedly pushing my hair out of my eyes. A bell rang. I waved back at the cyclist, my face a war-paint of mud and sunblock. Then we entered Knik Arm in a slippery rush, the weight of Lituya and the backpack almost sending my packraft to sea before I could jump in. I pulled my foot out of calf-deep mud to slide down several feet of mud bank and into a low-tide canyon. The current pulsed through a narrowing rush of muddy walls. Anchorage was behind us, invisible now. The packrafts fit, just barely, our paddles scraping the channel walls, sending minilandslides of mud into the water.

I couldn’t see Hig and Katmai ahead of us. Lituya and I bounced around each corner of the winding canyon, our boat following the rapids that poured down layer after layer of mud. I followed the tide that sliced these Vs through the mudflats until I caught up to Hig, bumping into the back of his raft. He was levering his paddle blades against the channel walls, trying to shove the raft forward. We came to a standstill, a packraft logjam. Water built up behind our boats, funneling over Hig’s stern in a rush to join the ocean.

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