Crossing The Gates of Alaska:. Dave Metz
to take my dog Jonny with me when I hiked there, and we moved through the verdurous shadows like we were as light as feathers; it seemed nothing could hold us back.
I miss Jonny. He died on my shoulders while I was carrying him out of Drift Creek two years ago. Many of my memories of him have faded now like many memories do with the passing of time. But there is one memory I fight to keep so I won’t forget him. We were taking our daily hike in the wooded hills behind home like we did most every day. He was ten years old and we had been almost inseparable since he was a pup. He was trotting beside me with his lanky, powerful legs while staring at me with his sharp brown eyes, not off to the side like so many dogs do. Jonny would look at your eyes without wavering and without an ounce of insecurity, like he wanted to examine your mind. Knowing dogs don’t live long, I made sure to imprint that vision of him forever into my brain. It encompassed his nature, still fit at his age with that intense stare. He appeared almost to smile with that half-gaping jaw and wagging Airedale tail. I knew I had to remember him. This kind of dog comes along only once in a lifetime. There was no way I could let myself forget him.
Jonny was with me during all the years when I lived in Portland. Jonny and I were often hiking and running together in the mountains and forests. Sometimes I would ride the first couple miles of my bike workouts with him trotting beside me, before sticking him back in the yard so I could go on. We went on weeklong hikes, to local areas mainly, but we also went on a few extended journeys. We hiked for a month in western Alaska when he was two and kayaked down the Yukon River when he was three. I let him ride in a hole I hacked out of the front of my kayak with a wood saw. We took several backpacking trips to Idaho, driving across the dry country of eastern Oregon in August on our way when the nights were warm and starry. I always thought we would do the big trek together across the Gates of the Arctic National Park before he grew too old. It’s a huge region that spans much of western Alaska in the Brooks Range and requires some fortitude and time to cross. We did manage to drive around Alaska for two months when he was eight. We were going to go up and live in the woods for the summer and maybe set up a base camp for future explorations. We were never able to do the big trek together, though. I was considering dropping everything that year when he was ten, to hike across the Gates of the Arctic, but then he became sick. He got better for a month, but he had an attack of pancreatic bleeding while we were hiking in Drift Creek. I think he bled internally, dying two hours later when we reached the crest of the final ridge leading out to the trailhead.
I was in shock for three days, the same way someone would be if they had lost a human companion. I couldn’t eat, and I would sit staring out the window making soft sighing noises each time I took a deep breath. Jonny was with me through lonely times when I didn’t have any close friends or family around me, like when I was living in a stuffy apartment working a boring, assembly-line job making computer wafers for a Korean company that treated its employees like second-class citizens. I hated going there every day because the work seemed pointless and didn’t contribute to bettering the condition of wilderness or wild animals on any level, and it took up all my time, so I couldn’t go hiking whenever I wanted. The big, drab building didn’t have windows to look out while I worked, preventing my dreaming of far-away forests and unexplored peaks. There was just the fluorescent hissing of bright, artificial lights hanging over my head twelve hours a day. It made me feel like a forgotten slave, locked away to live out my days in the humdrum misery of an anthropocentric society. And every day I walked up a long concrete walkway with cold steel railings, like I was marching to my ill-fated doom under the hand of a draconian ruler. I marched in slowly—head slumped down, feet shuffling, almost mentally beaten—knowing this kind of life would mean certain death for me. I began experiencing panic attacks while working there. I went to work under my own free will, though, because I couldn’t figure out another way to make a living.
Jonny waited inside my dreary apartment for me all day until I returned home after work. He was always happy. I don’t think he knew any other way to be. His zeal and physical fervor set a significant example. I wanted to act more like Jonny: happy, carefree, and willing to jump the largest gullies in a single leap. I thought I could be like that if I went to see the remotest corners of the earth.
After a year working at the computer factory, I quit just like that. Then I moved out of my apartment to drive up to Alaska with Jonny. My coworkers all asked me what I planned to do. I made up some conventional reason like I was going back to college or that I had a new job lined up in Corvallis, but really I wanted to just tell them that I planned on living, man, living.
Jonny and I never got to make that trip to Alaska, and I was lost for a couple of months after Jonny’s death. But I had friends around me this time and soon afterward I decided to get two puppies, both from the same litter so they wouldn’t be lonely. I wrote a letter to the woman I got Jonny from ten years earlier, but it came back in the mail with childlike handwriting on the front that read, “This lady is dead.” This made me think even more about the frailty of life: human life, animal life, and my own life. It was urgent I get on with the things that made me happy and discard most of the rest, no matter what the cost. I had to get the puppies from a different breeder. My girlfriend Julie and I drove to Doyle, California, to pick them up. I named them Jimmy and Will. They are the same type of large-bodied Airedales that Jonny was, not the shorter American Kennel Club standard type, bred down to look like a cute, shrunken knockoff of the real deal. These are tall old-style hunting dogs that are strong and exuberant, and they do not take it easy on you when they wrestle just because you are wearing your nicest clothes. You have to be ready to play with them when you step into their enclosure because they will bull into you with their entire bodies and knock you around with their heads. They think it’s fun.
I walked Jimmy and Will every day, and on weekends we hiked in the mountains. I taught them to pull me on my bicycle so they could get accustomed to pulling a sled. We drove to Drift Creek and oft en hiked where Jonny died. And as they grew, soon I was thinking about Alaska again. Jimmy and Will would go in Jonny’s place.
As a young boy I roamed the hills outside of Roseburg, Oregon. I was drawn to the cover of the oak forests and secluded little valleys of Ramp Canyon. I probably spent a third of my life there. It was an enthralling place when I was young. It had many types of animals I could watch and learn about, such as gray squirrels, deer, raccoons, gopher snakes, and tree frogs. And I always had two dogs. Wilderness and dogs seem to go together, even though dogs are not quite the same as their wild ancestor anymore, the wolf. I’m not quite the same as my wild ancestors anymore, either. It’s hard for me to imagine being in wilderness without dogs; I’m never lonely with a dog.
I left Oregon heading for Alaska in late March 2007 with Jimmy and Will riding in the cargo hold of a Boeing 737. From Anchorage heading north, I gazed out the window and watched the great, white emptiness slide by, piece by piece, past my window. Alaska was still gripped in the clutches of ice and snow. It was a crystal white land to every horizon and beyond, and I was just barely beginning to grasp what I had stirred up. In Nome as the plane sat idle on the tarmac to wait out bad weather before heading up to Kotzebue, one of the pilots broadcasted that we might have to return to Anchorage. All the passengers could hear Jimmy and Will howling as if the dogs’ lives depended on it. I’ve never been able to hear dogs howling from the plane’s cargo hold before, and I was a little impressed by their voices, ratcheted up several decibels above the range of a normal domesticated mutt. Their piercing voices were one of the features bred into them over the ages for hunting, and no one can stop them when they decide to howl. Their howls are penetrating, yet deep, and will travel great distances through the woods. And their voices can pry through the metal walls of a Boeing jet with ease. I knew Jimmy and Will howled at home sometimes just to say hello, but I wondered how cold it was for them down below. I hoped the pilots could hear them so they would remember that dogs were on board. I worried for Jimmy and Will, and I did not want to return to Anchorage only to make the same flight the next day and expose them to the cold all over again. They were out of my care while I was on the plane, but once on the ground in Kotzebue, I could monitor them carefully. I could always make sure they were playful and warm. Despite their howling, I figured they would pull through with fine spirits, but it was cold outside and they made it quite clear to everyone on board that they wanted out. A half hour later we were in the air again flying for Kotzebue, just a hundred miles away where we would begin our journey across Alaska.