Authors: Will Hobbs
I
KEPT THE BOW POINTED TOWARD LAND,
kept paddling hard, but the wind was pushing more and more waves up between me and the shore. Big rollers with windblown crests were running right at me.
I had to get through them, that's all there was to it. If I could reach the kelp beds, the seaweed would hold me. Julia had described sea otters wrapping themselves in seaweed to ride out a storm.
The wind was howling, just howling. Foam blew off the crests of the waves right into my eyes. The salt stung and I tried blinking my eyes clear. I kept the bow pointed into the waves and paddled as hard as I possibly could.
With my head down to avoid the spray, I broke through the top of one roller and then a second and then a third.
Was I getting anywhere? Or were the waves just passing under me? Was I any closer to shore?
I took a quick look. I didn't think so.
Head down, I paddled even harder, but the waves were relentless.
My eyes went to the shoreline again. It had to be
closer by now, but it just wasn't. I was shocked by what I saw. The shore was farther away, quite a bit farther.
Every few seconds, farther yet.
In no time at all, I'd been pushed back a hundred yards, maybe two hundred, from where I'd started. Panic nearly overwhelmed me. I pushed it back by concentrating on what I had to do.
I wasn't going to be able to keep this up. Nobody could get to shore against this wind. Nobody. How could it have struck so fast?
Now the wind was pushing the tops of the rollers so hard, they were breaking right at me and on me. I met them squarely, paddling and bracing my way through the turbulence. This was more than scary; this was going to get worse than I could handle.
I'll be all right, I told myself. As long as I keep meeting them straight on, and with some speed, I'll be all right.
If one of them turned me over, I knew there would be no righting myself. Not in a sea kayak.
My arms were starting to cramp, but I kept paddling into the waves and the wind. Getting blown into the strait was too horrendous to think about.
All the same, Baranof Island shrank even farther away.
My strength was nearly spent when it came, a wave I thought I might not be able to climb over.
This could be it,
I thought as I paddled into the wave with all the speed I could muster.
The wave was just too tall. I couldn't climb high
enough. I felt the kayak sliding backward on the wave, and then I felt it slipping sideways. I began to feel off balance.
There was no other choice, nothing else that might save my life: I leaned into the wave, dug my paddle in deep, and held a brace long enough to recover my balance. Yet I was still sideways to the wave and in immediate danger of going over.
I knew what I had to do, and there was only the slightest moment to do it before I capsized. With a hard push on the left pedal, I dug deep with my right paddle blade and spun the rest of the way around until I was pointed toward the open strait.
I'd lost any chance of getting back to Baranof Island, but I was upright, and now I was running with the wind.
With a glance over my shoulder I saw a following roller about to catch me. I paddled with the wind and felt myself harmlessly lifted as it passed underneath me.
Now what? The wind was still blowing a gale.
There wasn't any choice. There just wasn't any choice. With the wind pushing me, all I could do was race headlong into open water.
That's where I went. Before long, I was out in the very middle of the strait, miles from either shore.
All I could do was react as fast as possible to what the water was doing. My only strategy was to stay upright, to ride with the waves in exactly the direction the wind was pushing them, and hope that the wind would blow itself out.
From out of nowhere I was surrounded by dolphins, dozens and dozens of black-and-white dolphins. They were barely off my paddle blades, under my bow and all around me, their dorsal fins knifing through the water. Some were breaching, leaping wildly out of the turbulent seas and taking a look at me before smacking on their sides into the waves. For a while they kept me company and then they disappeared.
I lost all sense of time. I was being blown down the strait between Baranof and Admiralty. On both islands, the shapes of the mountains kept changing, which meant I was moving very fast. Some time later I was much closer to Admiralty than I was to Baranof. Admiralty Island's shoreline changed by the minute. If the wind didn't let up, I would end up a long, long way from where I started.
On and on I flew. The waves kept lifting me higher and higher. In between them I ran down their faces paddling as fast as I could. In the troughs, looking up, sometimes I wondered if I could get over the top, but my kayak had so much momentum I sailed over one after the next. The wind was pushing me so hard, sometimes I hurtled over the crests off balance and had to grab a stiff brace to keep from spilling.
With all the adrenaline coursing through me, I never thought how cold the water would be if I capsized. I knew full well that I wouldn't last more than a few minutes if I spilled. As it was, I was soaked to the skin and my fingers were metal claws.
I never thought of home, never thought of the group
waking up and finding me gone. All I knew was that I was being pushed closer and closer to Admiralty's shore. Before long I would be in danger of being crushed against the rocks. For as far as I could see there were no beaches, only surf pounding the rocks and flying right up against the trees.
Ahead, the island appeared to be ending. A forested cape stuck out from the land and ended in a falling ridge, a bare, bony finger of land that was being hammered by exploding waves.
If I could stay off the shore ahead of that cape, then clear its tip, there had to be calmer water behind it. The cape should make a barrier to the wind. There should be safe water right around the corner.
Whenever it was possible, I pushed on the right pedal and pulled extra hard with my right paddle blade. I had to keep working to the right.
The shore was coming up too fast, a nightmare of rocks and white water.
I kept working. I might reach the cape. I might just reach it.
Or I might be crushed against it. A few minutes would tell. It was going to be close.
Now I was struggling with a few last strokes to clear the rocks below the tip of the cape. The recoil of a wave that had exploded against the rocks nearly tipped me. I dug a deep brace and rode it out.
Then I saw my opening, and I raced down the length of a trough between two waves. At the last moment I spun the kayak to avoid being struck sideways. I found
myself in safe water. A few strokes and I was out of the brunt of the wind.
As I gasped for breath I took a quick look around. Despite the calmer water, only moderate chop, there wasn't a place to land on the inside of the cape. The shore was much too rugged. I paddled half a mile or more toward the back of a cove between the cape and another rocky peninsula.
The cove itself was studded with boulders, but it had a gravel beach at its back where I could land. That was all that counted, getting off the water and onto land.
I stopped paddling, just for a moment. There was nothing left. I closed my eyes and blew out my breath and took new air back in.
When I opened my eyes I saw heads bobbing, the huge heads of Steller's sea lions that also had taken refuge in the cove.
I saw them, and they saw me.
I started to paddle to shore. If I don't annoy them, I thought, don't even look at them, they'll leave me alone.
Ignoring them wasn't working. I heard them snorting their challenges, and from the corner of my eye I saw them plowing in my direction.
When they get close, I thought, they'll dive under me. They'll swim under the kayak.
Twenty feet away, as I was expecting, they slipped under the water. Eyes on the shore, I paddled fast. The shore was within reach.
It came as a sudden surpriseâa jolt, a solid, powerful jolt under my legs. Barely able to believe it was
happening, I felt myself and the kayak rising up above the water and tipping. I tried to lean, tried to use my paddle to keep my balance, but I had passed the sickening point of no return. I was going over.
Suddenly it was dark, and so cold that the sea water felt like an electric shock. I couldn't breathe and I was fighting five-alarm panic. For a split second I saw the hindquarters of the sea lion as it swam away. My hands went to the release on the spray skirt, and I began to kick my way out of the kayak.
O
N MY HANDS AND KNEES,
I clawed my way out of the water and collapsed. The beach was black gravel and small rounded stones, driftwood sticks and seaweed and tiny beach flies buzzing in my ears. Inches from my face, a wide glassy frond of seaweed was dancing with little darts of water that splashed into my eyes. It took some grinding of my mental gears to realize it was raining.
I forced myself off my belly and sat up. I was shaking violently. The sky was dark and gray. I stared at my bare feet. My rubber boots and my socks were gone. The spray skirt was no longer around my waist. I looked at my hands, torn up from clawing at the rocks in the shallows. They didn't seem to belong to me. I could barely feel them.
As if it might help, I folded my arms across my life jacket. The shaking was getting worse. I couldn't recall the name of it, but I knew there was a name for what happened when your body got too cold. A fancy name for freezing to death.
From across the cove, a solid sheet of rain was coming right at me. All I did was stare at it.
Something came back, something from the class my mother made me take before I started kayaking. If you're still shaking and the cold is still extremely painful, there's time. It's when you aren't shaking anymore and can't feel the cold that your systems are shutting down.
The rain lashed my face. Get up, my mind screamed at my body. Do something or you're dead. Get off the beach and get out of the rain. Get in the trees. Your only chance is in the trees.
I staggered off the beach and through some grass, but driftwood logs jumbled at the back of the beach stopped me. I clambered over them and banged my leg and fell twice and picked myself up and kept going until I reached the strip of bright green alder trees and the dense bushes that grew between the beach and the forest.
The thicket of bright green might as well have been a wall. Most of it was the man-high bushes with leaves the size of small umbrellas, like on Baranof. They were wicked, I remembered, but I couldn't remember their name and couldn't remember why they were wicked.
My teeth chattered loud in my ears and the skin over my skull was so tight it felt like it was ripping. I stumbled along the front of the thicket until I found a path that led through it. The slope was slippery with the rain, and I had little control over my body. Frankenstein, I thought. I'm Frankenstein. I was shaking from head to toe. About to fall, I reached for whatever was nearest and grabbed a stalk of the bushes. My right hand came
back on fire. I stopped and stared stupidly at my palm and fingers all full of tiny quills.
Then I remembered. Devil's club, that's what it was called.
My eyes returned to the trail and I saw a bizarre sight, a large bright red blob of something like jelly in the middle of the path. There were hundreds of black dots in it and I couldn't make any sense of it. I stepped over the blob and kept going.
Once in the forest, I couldn't feel the rain anymore. There wasn't much light. I was under trees as big around and tall as redwoods, a forest on an immense scale compared to what I'd seen on Baranof.
“Get your clothes off, fool,” I heard myself saying. “They're wringing wet.”
I sat down on a mossy log. With my trembling left hand I managed to unzip my life jacket, the fleece jacket, and the vest, then tried to make my frozen fingers undo the buttons on my wool shirt. In frustration and fear I ripped the shirt open at my neck and at the cuffs, and pulled it over my head.
With the rest of my clothes off, I sat purple-naked, shaking so hard it felt like my skinny ribs would crack, and squeezed every drop of water I could out of my clothes. I had to ignore the stinging of the spines in my fingers.
Starting with my thermal underwear, I began to put everything back on. The thermals, pants, vest, and jacket were all synthetics that weighed almost nothing and dried fast. My shirt was wool but I knew from backpacking at
high altitude that wool can keep you warm even when it's wet.
Rain was dripping through the canopy of the forest, but not that much. The problem now was, the air was so cold.
Shivering and shaking, I put my life jacket back on and zipped it up, grateful for the additional layer around my chest. At least I'd had the sense, I thought, to put it on when I went paddling on flat water this morning.
It all came rushing back. It hit me full force: how totally, absolutely, monumentally stupid I had been.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
You're a fool, I told myself. I can't believe what you did. So sure of yourself, and you knew nothing. Nothing.
I heard myself laughing out loud. My voice was herky-jerky and out of control, like my limbs. I didn't know why I was laughing. It was crazy to be laughing.
The eerie stillness of the forest immediately absorbed the sound, swallowed it up.
I tried to get warm by jogging in place. Before long I could tell it wasn't working, not nearly enough. My insides were deadly cold. Without a fire I couldn't last. I had to get some body heat back somehow. If not fire, what else? My eyes cast wildly around for possibilities. How, how?
I couldn't see an answer. I lost precious time stumbling around looking for one. All I could see was trees. The trees better be the answer, I thought. There is nothing else.
A hole in a tree? Find a tree with a hole in it and crawl into the hole?
Not warm enough. Not warm enough to pull me back.
My eyes fell on a gigantic spruce that had fallen over long ago. Its bark was gone and it was nothing but a spongy, decaying mass with ferns growing along its mossy length, farther than my eye could see.
Get inside that thing, I told myself. Somehow, get in it, or get under it, or something.
What I had in mind sounded crazy. I needed a digging tool. What? What?
A digging stick, a jabbing stick, any sort of stick.
I tore at a branch from a small downed tree. The trunk was so rotten, the branch pulled right out of its socket and I fell over backward. The branch was still sound. It had come out with a thick knot at the end that tapered down like a spearpoint. I could dig with it just the way it was.
I ran along the length of the giant spruce and found a place where it had fallen across a dip in the ground. Daylight was showing under the tree. I attacked the underside and it shredded easily. The wood was so punky it really wasn't wood anymore, just pulp. The pulp was dry, which was good, and it weighed nothing.
Insulation, I thought. Insulation might be my only chance.
I speared and dug and hacked until I had made a burrow in the underside of the rotten log. Like an animal going into hibernation, I crawled in and pulled
the pulp up against myself until only my face was open to the air. I had a thick layer of dry shreds under me, and I felt like I was packed inside a cocoon. Now I could only hope that my skinny body was still producing some amount of heat. If it was, my cocoon might keep me from losing it.
If I was lucky.
It took awhile, but at last I wasn't vibrating like a power sander. Maybe the rotting tree was generating a little heat. Whatever the reason, gradually, very gradually, the shaking turned to shivering and at last even the shivering quit.
That was when I turned to worrying about what came next.
I pulled my left arm free and looked at the bombproof sports watch my mother had given me at the airport in Grand Junction. It was still spitting out numbers just fine. 3:15
P.M.
, July 26. What were Monica and the others doing? Were they back in Sitka, or had the windstorm and the rain kept them in Cosmos Cove? Had the floatplanes been able to pick them up?
Monica, the group, the floatplane pilotsâ¦it was so embarrassing to think about, I couldn't stand it. What did Monica think when she first discovered me and the kayak gone? When the windstorm struck, what did she think then?
Monica must have been sick, just sick about it. Julia too. What were the people in the group saying? My motherâ¦what would she hear, and what would she think?
I couldn't believe I had done this to her. Of course she would find out, and before very long. Maybe even tonight. It would kill her, just kill her.
Maybe the floatplanes had been delayed, I thought. Maybe nobody but the group knows, even now.
There had to be a way to erase all of this, like it never happened.
The kayak! Maybe I could recover the kayak, and the paddle too. When the tides changed, the current would run in the other direction. I could paddle all the way back to Cosmos Cove, maybe even get there before a search even gets started.
I was about to start back to the beach, to look for the kayak, when a bit of motion caught my eye. Something was coming down through the forest.
It was a bear as big as a haystack, with a wide face and a prominent hump behind its shoulders.