Raven Walks Around the World. Thom Henley
dog, Moosejaw. I was a vegetarian at the time, riding the Moose Gooser to and from Anchorage once a month, where I would stock up on grains, nuts and veggie burgers shipped up from California. When the ecological and moral absurdity of what I was doing finally struck me, I started feeding myself, as well as my dog, from frozen, train-killed moose carcasses. Talk about a radical dietary change; I didn’t use the outhouse for days.
The Alaska Railway ran along the Susitna River close to my cabin and was also known as the Moose Gooser. In the winter months the railway tracks provided a snow-free animal corridor. The engine car’s “cowcatcher” delivered a steady supply of frozen moose carcasses, which at first I fed only to my dog, Moosejaw, but eventually I ate such meat myself. Dmfoss photo, Thinkstock
With cabin fever setting in, I once joined neighbours Denny Dougherty and Steve Rorick on an extended winter pack trip. The −45° Celsius temperatures made this one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. The darkness proved a great challenge. December is altogether the wrong month for winter expeditions. From the time the tent was dropped, the dog team harnessed and the sled loaded and secured, we had only an hour or so of twilight to travel in before total darkness set in and we had to set up camp again and sit out another twenty-two hours. Lighting a fire was a do-or-die predicament, for once the thick mitts came off, one strike of a match was all the time nature allowed before the fingers went too stiff to strike a second one.
Soon after I set off on a week-long winter pack trip with Alaska bush neighbours Denny Dougherty and Steve Rorick and our combined sled dogs, we came to realize that the long December darkness was absolutely the wrong time for such an adventure.
In the end, it was winter darkness, not the cold, that drove me out of Alaska. I’m a bird; I need to fly where there’s light.
In the summer of 1972, I worked the herring spawn fishery in Prince William Sound and saved enough money to purchase a seventeen-foot collapsible Klepper kayak. It was the perfect craft to give me the freedom to explore some of the Yukon and Alaska’s wildest places: the great river systems of the Yukon and Mackenzie, the Porcupine, the Stewart, the Hess, the Ogilvie and Peel. I also built up a bit of a grubstake from firefighting and working the potato harvest in Alaska’s Matanuska Valley. I could now afford a six-month trip “outside,” as Alaskans refer to the rest of the world.
While kayaking alone for months in the Haida Gwaii and Southeast Alaska wilderness, I relied on a camera timer to get a picture of myself coming ashore in my Klepper kayak.
It was already November and bitterly cold when I started hitchhiking south from Fairbanks with my impractical cargo—a large backpack and the collapsible kayak broken down into two big travel bags. Mine was no idle endeavour. I was setting off to kayak the headwaters of the Amazon from Pucallpa to Iquitos, Peru. Standing along the barren highway with tears freezing to my cheeks, I began to wonder if some of Denny Dougherty’s “climbing mountains on Mars” madness hadn’t rubbed off on me. This would be an eleven-thousand-kilometre hitchhiking journey, and only pickup trucks or empty hauling vans could possibly accommodate my load. Dreams die hard and tropical sun beckoned. I pressed on.
After days of being stranded at Haines Junction in the Yukon, unable to get a ride south down the Alaska Highway, I opted for a lift to the seaside community of Haines and stowed away on the ferry to Ketchikan. An island set in the wilderness with no bridges or roads connecting out of town, Ketchikan is not exactly a hitchhiker’s paradise either. Stranded on the dock, I was pondering my predicament when a burly logger walked up to me. “Want some work?” he asked bluntly, with no introductions.
“Sure, why not,” I answered. Before I could ask him exactly what work he had in mind, I was boarded on a Cessna float plane at dockside with all my gear and flown out to Gildersleeve Logging Camp on Prince of Wales Island.
“Here’s yer hard hat, caulk boots and yer bill,” a no-nonsense foreman said when I landed. “You owe us $85 for the flight,” he added when he saw me staring in disbelief at the billing. “Now get to work.” I’d been shanghaied!
It was late November, the first snow had fallen and loggers were walking out in droves to avoid the dangerous conditions, heading instead to warmer pastures—hooker parlours in Seattle. I was to be a “choker man”—the lowest-level job in the camp. Wrapping freezing-cold steel cable around logs buried under a foot of snow was not the tropical holiday I’d had in mind when I left Fairbanks. To make matters worse, the “rigging slinger” was a madman who was consistently blowing the whistle to the “yarder” to start hauling the logs before I was in the clear. The yarder couldn’t see below the steep hill we were working on, so all he had to go on was the rigging slinger’s whistle and singularly sick sense of humour. If it was time for me to die at age twenty-two, then I wanted it to be kayaking whitewater at the headwaters of the Amazon or lost in the Andes, not crushed in an Alaskan clear-cut by a log destined to become toilet paper.
I loathed the logging camp. It was a prison with dollars supplanting guards, providing pizza, pie and pin-ups as perks until payday. Driving in the smoke-filled “crummy” in the first light of dawn, I would look out at the tortured landscape and back at the tortured souls swearing their way to the work site. Rather than gag on cigarette smoke in the crummy where the crew ate their lunches and cussed out every living critter on God’s green earth, I would work my way through the logging slash and take my lunch in the peace of the forest, the only piece we had left. “Hell, he’s probably down there eating huckleberries,” the crew would joke to one another, and before long they nicknamed me Huckleberry. It was weird to get the same nickname from both ends of the spectrum—hippies and rednecks, but then those stereotype labels are just titles too.
December 10 was my last day of work. “What the hell do you mean, you’re not working today?” the foreman growled when he came to find me after I hadn’t responded to the wake-up call.
“Sorry,” I said. “I never work on my birthday.”
“Like hell you don’t,” he raged. “You work, or you’re fired!”
I have my principles. So I was fired. I had completed twenty-three successful revolutions around the sun, and that alone was cause for celebration. Having been born on the exact hour, day and year that all the countries of the world gathered to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris, I wasn’t about to compromise on my right to have the day off. As luck would have it, I had made just enough money by December 10 to pay the company back for my air transport to and from their camp, as well as to buy a ferry ticket from Ketchikan to Seattle. I was Amazon-bound again.
The journey south was anything but easy. I can vividly recall the hitchhiking ordeals, like struggling to move my three large packs through downtown LA while trying to locate an on-ramp to an expressway. I could carry only two bags half a block at a time before returning for the third bag, all the time keeping all bags in sight lest they be stolen.
Mexico and Guatemala proved even more challenging. By the time I reached the border of Honduras I was so sick and dehydrated from amoebic dysentery that I became unconscious on the roadside. I regained consciousness a few days later in an old woman’s adobe hut, and I recollect vigil lights burning all around me, fresh flowers, copal incense wafting its sweet perfume into the air of the mud-walled room and a statue of the Immaculate Heart of Mary looking down on me. A gathering of the devout were reciting the rosary in their native tongue over my lifeless body and the scene had the air of a wake. Like Tom Sawyer witnessing his own funeral, I was sure I had died, was on my way to heaven and witnessing my death in spirit form. Recovering Catholics never quite shed the illusions.
Good health has never been one of my strong points. I’d had polio when I was seven, spinal meningitis at age fourteen and an acute appendicitis attack a few years later, so the odds of even making it into my twenties were squarely against me. This was the fourth big strike, and I should have