Remember Esetuk
A ROCK FROM ESETUK sits on my desk. Because places matter.
1977. Once the Prudhoe oil fields were developed, greedy eyes turned east toward the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. My wife Sheryl and I wanted to see it before it was gone.
God, we were young.
Our prior experience amounted to one 10-day backpack in the Sierras.
Right up to the last minute we actually planned to take our two golden retrievers with us.
We wore wool because polypropylene hadn’t been invented yet. We carried prototype rainwear called Gore-Tex.
When the Eskimo dropped us off on the shore that afternoon we experienced a novel sensation—the sound of a motor fading into the distance, leaving us alone in the quiet. The finality of that silence—cut off now from the mechanical world. Just a light breeze on a warm, sunny day and country in every direction.
And that sudden, oppressive silence.
Forty years later we’ve come to know and even anticipate the finality of that moment of new silence. Just us, for better or worse.
Our plan was to hike up the Okpilak and Hulahula Rivers over the crest of the Brooks Range to Arctic Village. To see it all.
We passed an Inuit hunting camp littered with caribou bones, empty cartridges, and a lost pair of sealskin mittens.
We passed the burnt-out wreckage of a Cessna.
Our packs weighed 80 pounds. Food was minimal and basic. Treats were rationed: Every third day we got a candy bar; every fourth a bacon bar; every sixth day a package of Kool-Aid.
Every 12th day all three fell on the same day and it felt like Christmas.
I lost 22 pounds I couldn’t afford.
We suffered—cold, wet, heat, hunger, mosquitoes beyond counting.
Our boots fell apart.
We staggered across sedge tussocks. We tried to kill ptarmigan with rocks.
We spent days trying to find a place to wade the Okpilak.
We were stopped by Esetuk Creek as it spilled off the glaciers surrounding Mt. Michelson and barred our path south. We waited for the water to drop.
It didn’t.
We got up at 3 a.m. to try to cross in the cold of night when glacial melt was at its minimum. I crossed without a pack, terrified in white water up to my waist, and staggered back convinced we could never make it with packs. When hypothermia made me babble incoherently, Sheryl hugged me in a sleeping bag until I stopped shivering.
It rained more and the creek rose. We turned around to head out.
We waited on the shore of the Arctic Ocean for a boat to carry us to Barter Island and the village of Kaktovic. After three days we watched from the shore as the once-a-week flight left for Fairbanks. We changed our driftwood sign from “BOAT” to “HELP.”
Our food was down to one cup of brown sugar. Sheryl advocated eating it all; I wanted to test Zeno’s Paradox of Cutting in Two. That difference cemented our marriage.
An Air Force helicopter finally landed to pick us up. We talked them into illegally carrying the caribou rack we’d packed for 50 miles over to the island.
Waiting for the plane in Kaktovic we stayed with a newly minted caribou biologist named Ken Whitten who, four decades later, is the world’s expert on the Porcupine Caribou Herd. We talked late into the night about the country, about oil, and about caribou. We watched distant mountains shift from green to brown to white in a week—knowing what we would have suffered if we’d been able to cross Esetuk.
On the commercial flight to Fairbanks the stewardess put the micro-package of peanuts in front of me, looked me in the eye, and dumped the rest of the basket onto my tray.
The train from Fairbanks dropped us at Denali National Park. We picked up aluminum cans for the five-cent deposit and bought macaroni and cheese. We saw “the mountain” every day and knew we would climb it someday. We saved our last cash for a steak and the baked potato we’d been fantasizing about on the train to Anchorage.
WE HAD LACKED the mountaineering skill to circumvent Esetuk at the glacier—a failure of skill and nerve. The next summer we were in Yosemite learning to climb rock and snow. The next summer we climbed Mt. Rainier, where we met Chris and Dennis, the kindred spirits we’ve entrusted to choose the place for our ashes if Sheryl and I go together. We climbed Athabasca and Resplendent in the Canadian Rockies. Then Denali.
From there the list of expeditions gets long and the modes of travel get varied—kayak, backpack, canoe, mountain bike, ski. Patagonia. Sierras. Cascades. Tetons. Olympics. San Juans. North Cascades. Andes. Greenland. Quetico. Antarctica. Tierra del Fuego. Alaska. Africa.
Eventually we returned to Esetuk. We made the symbolic crossing at the glacier and climbed Mt. Michelson.
“You cannot step into the same river twice.” Very clever but irrelevant—the uninteresting part of the relationship. Water is the power, the force, the independent variable.
We never mattered to Esetuk. But Esetuk mattered to us. It was there we learned how to suffer—and that suffering of that kind just doesn’t matter.
What beauty and what peace have we known by suffering?
But we learned at Esetuk what the edge looks like. That saved our lives on Mt. Huascaran, on the Noatak, on Mt. Michelson and probably in places we weren’t even aware of.
The bitter taste of failure at Esetuk pushed us to summits we should not have reached.
A ROCK FROM ESETUK sits on my desk. Like our lives together, it was shaped by the waters of Esetuk. It is my reminder of the power of place. I’m not sure where Chris and Dennis will put our ashes when the time comes. But wherever they choose for us, the journey to that place began at Esetuk.
David Krohne is professor emeritus of biology at Wabash. His book Ecology: Evolution, Application, Integration was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. He and Sheryl live outside of Spokane, WA: krohnedave@gmail.com