The Sun Is a Compass: A 4,000-Mile Journey Into the Alaskan Wilds by Caroline van Hemert

Author:Caroline van Hemert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2019-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Wind River

For the first time in a thousand miles, I’ve returned to a place I know. It’s summer solstice, almost ten years to the day since we first laid eyes on the Wind River. Ask me to draw a picture of this riverbank and I wouldn’t know where to begin, but plop me down here from anywhere in the world and I can tell you with certainty that yes, I have been here before. We are camped at the swirling confluence of two rivers—the Wind and its junior tributary, the Little Wind. Twenty minutes ago, paddling toward this confluence, I might have been twenty-three again, each detail newly etched in my mind. The steep canyon walls, the murky river, the peculiar tan-colored shoreline with sand like finely ground pepper. And Pat’s eager, childlike grin as he bounced down the wave train where the two rivers join.

We’re less than a hundred miles from the Arctic Circle, and the sun sits stubbornly above the adjacent red and brown cliffs, following a shallow arc across the sky. We won’t see darkness for another two months. Canada’s northern Yukon is a land of extremes, bruisingly cold one moment and unbearably hot the next. For most of the afternoon we paddled our rafts down the Little Wind River, gazing at a kaleidoscope of orange and slate-colored pebbles as they swirled beneath us. Just before the confluence of the two rivers, we drifted past a seven-foot-tall shelf of ice, a carryover from the winter’s deep freeze, and I shivered as we passed through the refrigerated air. When we reached the larger river, we were flushed abruptly into its muddied flow, cold clear water twisting into whirlpools and disappearing beneath a silt-laden skin. We arrived at our island campsite to find hordes of mosquitoes gathered onshore, where the air hangs still and heavy. We sweat in the evening heat and I imagine pressing my palms against the river ice.

As we set up camp, I think about our earlier canoe-building trip. Back then, we were two kids on this river shaping a boat from spruce bark. Living in a wilderness to ourselves. For a time, this was all that mattered.

Now, a decade later, we have found our way back. We are no longer kids, no longer tentative about a future together, but our need for adventure is every bit as intense. I wake up each morning with Pat by my side, wondering less about where our relationship might take us than about what we will find around the next bend. On the first trip, when everything between us was new and fragile, the river seemed more a backdrop for our relationship than a necessity. Now I can see that it’s so much more. Wilderness has become the silent third partner in our marriage, and here is where it all began.

After a meal of bland pasta doused in oil and salt, we lie naked in the tent, too hot for sleep, and help each other remember. Pat falls back on his sleeping pad laughing as I prod him about the horse.

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