Cloud Busting

      I had never heard of Haida Gwaii until the night I first went there at age twenty-three, but in my childhood dreams there always was such a magical place—lost in the Pacific, green and misty and more than a little mysterious. Call it geographical convergence, serendipity or mere coincidence, but somehow that first encounter touched a subconscious wellspring of my earliest memories. Why was it, I wondered, that my childhood crayon drawings never depicted the place of my birth, the cornfields, woodlots and big red barns of the flat Michigan countryside? They depicted instead deep blue seas, towering snow-capped mountains, waves crashing on rocky headlands and tall conifer forests. Haida Gwaii was a world apart from the landscape I grew up in, and it wasn’t even part of the country of my birth, but somehow my unexpected arrival there felt like coming home, truly coming home, for the first time.

      It was a long journey to get there, in both the physical and psychological sense. In May of 1970, I left Michigan State University in my third year and decided to hitchhike to Alaska to go backpacking in Mt. McKinley National Park. It was meant to be a summer sojourn from my studies in cultural anthropology and psychology, but it turned into a long-term exile and a radically new direction in my life.

      As a student, I had been active in the antiwar movement and had made the conscientious decision to deliberately give up my student deferment status, get reclassified 1-A and refuse induction should the draft board call me to serve in Vietnam. It was an impassioned more than a reasoned decision, as I had never carefully considered the consequences. In my mind, the real draft dodgers were university kids privileged enough to get student deferments while less fortunate Afro-American, Chicano and Indigenous Americans went in their place.

      It took weeks to hitchhike the thousands of kilometres from Lansing, Michigan, to Anchorage, Alaska. A great youthful Klondike spirit was burning in my soul as I rode the dusty Alaska Highway in the back of pickup trucks and marvelled at the eternal summer daylight in this Land of the Midnight Sun. With each passing kilometre the land seemed more and more sublime. I watched wolves darting across the road in the dust of the pickup, bull moose with mouths full of water lilies standing chest deep in idyllic little lakes, and sunsets merging seamlessly into sunrises. This was the epic landscape I’d always dreamed of, immortalized in my mind through Jack London novels and the poetry of Robert Service, whose books I had read repeatedly, curled up in a couch in a home too small to contain my spirit and wanderlust. For the first time I felt fully alive, fulfilling both dreams and destiny, at least until I reached Anchorage—a great anticlimax if ever there was one. Looking up and down the busy, car-congested streets with their 1950s faceless buildings, I felt I was back where I’d started—another Lansing plopped down ignobly in the Great Land.

      As if to confirm that first negative impression, my first night in Anchorage I was robbed of everything I had. The brand-new Kelty backpack, tent and sleeping bag I had worked so hard to acquire in Michigan were stolen at a youth hostel, along with the gear of everyone else staying there that night. It was an inside job. A few days later I spotted some of my equipment in the window of a Fourth Avenue pawnshop brazenly displaying a sign: “Hock it to me!” The Anchorage police would do nothing to help me reclaim my gear, but as it turned out, it was the most fortunate misfortune ever to befall me.

      Still angry and depressed from being ripped off, I was moping around the Anchorage railway station when an old “sourdough” challenged me.

      “Why the long face, fella? Looks like you got a dark cloud hanging over ya.” He showed no sympathy for my pitiful tale. “Hell, you don’t need all that fancy camping stuff,” he scolded. “Take this army surplus blanket—I can get me another one at the shelter.” The blanket was dirty, tattered and crawling with enough critters to keep a taxonomist busy for days, but I didn’t want to offend the homeless old coot so I took it.

      “Now git yer ass on that freight car there.” He pointed down the tracks. “And don’t hop off ’til ya see McKinley. It’s the biggest mountain in North America,” he hollered after me when I was some distance down the tracks. “Ya sure as hell can’t miss it!”

      I sure as hell did.

      At that point in my life I wasn’t much of a freight-train hopper, and my jumping-off point turned out to be the tiny interior community of Talkeetna. Denali (the Great One), as I was told the Athabaskan Indigenous peoples had long ago named what later became Mt. McKinley, was clearly visible from Talkeetna,