Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart by Lynn Schooler

Author:Lynn Schooler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Travel
ISBN: 9781608194643
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2010-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Boulder Hell. It was a good description. It seems like it took hours of stepping carefully from stone to stone, with the metal tips of my hiking poles clicking against the smooth, hard surface of each boulder as I braced and balanced, leaned and reached, and swung myself across the up-and-down obstacle course, feeling carefully for the stone that would roll or shift beneath my foot before I committed my weight. A fine mist drifted across the beach from the booming surf, and gulls chanted above the sound of the waves. It is a defining characteristic of the mammal class that all of its members have a total of 206 bones, which in humans includes 26 in each foot, or 52 in both, for a quarter of all the bones in an adult’s body. Then there are 3 bones in each knee—the patella, the tibia, and the femur, the last of which also knobs into the fused ilium, ischium, and pubis of the pelvis at the hip joint, from where the twenty-nine vertebrae of the spine ladder up to the shoulders (clavicle, scapula, and humerus) and the skull, which I began to think I must have been out of when I decided to trade the slight inconvenience of going toe-to-toe with a few grizzlies for the start-and-stop mixture of mincing steps and heavy leaps required to work my way across the boulder field. No two steps were alike, no course across the jumble preferable to any other, and before the boulders finally petered into gravel and the gravel into sand, I could feel the effect of the combined weight of my 180 pounds and the 50 or so pounds of the pack and kayak in every one of those 206 bones. It could not possibly have taken as long or been as far across the moraine as I remember it, but when I finally walked out on the other side onto level ground, it was a huge relief.

I unbuckled the hip belt, let the pack slide off my aching shoulders, and sat on a drift log to look around. While crossing the boulder field, all I could look at was my feet. Now a long run of beach stretched away before me between a dark forest and the sea. A stiff wind cut through my clothes, and a flock of gulls drifted sideways overhead in the breeze. In the distance the blue-green hump of Cape Fairweather pushed into the sea.

A dozen western sandpipers fluttered to a stop at the edge of the surf and took off again. High overhead, a thin, wavering line of dots broke apart, coalescing again as I watched and reshaping itself into a lopsided V. A rusty, musical trumpeting, barely discernible above the thump of the surf, identified it as a flock of cranes.

Half a million sandhill cranes migrate to Alaska from wintering grounds in Texas and Mexico every year, flowing north up the middle of the continent to spread across the Arctic and into Siberia.

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