Rhythm of the Wild: A Life Inspired by Alaska's Denali National Park by Kim Heacox

Author:Kim Heacox [Heacox, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Nature, Ecosystems & Habitats, History, United States
ISBN: 9781493003891
Google: rmQlCQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1493003895
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2015-05-06T23:00:00+00:00

“AND KRIGI?” Richard asks me.

“He disappeared in the Himalaya.”

“Really?”

“He turned left at the cloud . . . I never knew his last name.”

“Maybe he didn’t have one.”

“Maybe he didn’t need one.”

“Like Bono and Sting.”

“More like Rumi.” The Persian mystic from eight hundred years ago.

We share a small laugh, Richard and me, but inside I feel something break.

My heart.

YES, we used to laugh hard and take crazy risks and consider ourselves brilliant, charming, invincible, even handsome on some days, never mind what the women said; we’d show them. Huddled in a wet tent in Glacier Bay as new rangers in Alaska (two years before I arrived in Denali), Richard and I were Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the dreamy knight and his peasant companion out tilting at windmills and wrestling bears and sharing passages from Charles Bukowski: “We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.”

That was before we’d lived in Alaska for twenty-five years, and had friends die; friends killed by bears and big seas, in small boats and planes, swallowed by bad weather. Friends who turned left at the cloud; who were just as funny and alive as we’d been back then and paid dearly for a single mistake, a wrong choice.

We thought a lot about bears back then, in Glacier Bay, counting coup on an animal that could kill and eat us, because counting coup on anything less wasn’t counting coup; it was just counting. Richard would leave the tent at absurd times, in wind and cold rain, and say, “I won’t be long,” and be gone either too long or not long enough, I couldn’t decide, and finally return with big news, his wool hat askew on his muddy head, pulled down to his sparkling eyes. His thick blond mustache filled with droplets of rain; his face radiant, teeth shining in a scurrilous grin. The Mad Hatter. I’d tell him to shake off before entering the tent . . . too late, as he’d throw himself through the door and land inside, sopping wet.

“I saw a bear,” he’d say excitedly.

“You did? Where?”

“Out there.”

“Out there where?”

“Out there everywhere. They’re everywhere out there. All over the damn place. I have to tell you.”

“Tell me.”

“They aren’t like those Jellystone bears you see on TV, the ones that eat tourists and Twinkies and picnic baskets from the backseat of a Plymouth or a Ford, or garbage from the local dump. These guys are big coastal brownies that walk the shore and turn over rocks.”

“Turn over rocks? Why turn over rocks?”

“To eat stuff.”

“Alaska coastal brownies eat salmon.”

“They eat other stuff, too.”

“Stuff under rocks?”

“Small fish maybe, and barnacles.”

“Barnacles? I don’t think so.”

“No, it’s barnacles. They’re eating barnacles.”

“What kind of a bear eats a barnacle?”

“A hungry bear.”

“I’ve been hungry before and I’ve never eaten a barnacle.”

“You’ve never been a bear.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.