in biology feeling more distant than ever from the natural world. Our trips were shrinking, our commitments growing. Increasingly, though, time in the outdoors was taking a backseat to more mundane endeavors. Since our first summer together, when we spent two months camped on the bank of a remote Arctic river, we had dreamed about another grand adventure.
That our love was strongest among rocks and rivers, trees and tundra. Shortly after Pat and I met in 2001, we discovered that we were most fully ourselves in wild places. We were simply trying to find our way home. We weren’t trying to set a record or achieve a first. I tried to explain that escapism wasn’t our goal-neither of us was running from a broken marriage or drug addiction or academic failure.
Photo courtesy of Caroline Van Hemert.īefore we left, people asked us why we were taking this trip they wondered what compelled us to want to “disappear” for a while. Our bodies know what is essential and what is not.Ĭamp in the Arrigetch Peaks, Brooks Range. Something we must see through to the end.Īnd so crossing this river has become necessary, in the way that it’s necessary to kiss a lover before leaving, to pause and look up when the moon is rising. Only now am I beginning to see this trip for what it is. But the stakes quietly grew, shape-shifting from a tally of miles into something much more. We were consumed by each day, distracted by aching muscles and whales and the simple act of moving. A place on the map as arbitrary as any other. A small village on the shores of the Chukchi Sea. In the first months of the journey, our destination was so distant that it seemed almost peripheral. From our elevated vantage, the water’s opaque surface appears smooth, but when Pat throws a spruce bough from the bank, it bobs in the small waves, spins once, then vanishes quickly downriver. As I stare down at it now, it’s the color of mud. On the map it looked harmless, squiggly and blue. We have a thousand miles ahead of us, but for now all that matters is this river. I had forgotten what it meant, not only in my mind, but in my heart, to be a scientist. Before leaving, I had lost my way on the path that carried me from biology to natural wonder. For me, this trip is also a journey back to trees and birdsong, to lichen and hoof prints. We’re here because we need wilderness like we need water or air. We’re here because we’re attempting to travel entirely under our own power from the Pacific Northwest to a remote corner of the Alaskan Arctic. I push away the voice in my head that echoes a single question. The only sound is the steady rush of moving water. I grip the straps of my pack, my fingers raw from the chill, and lean against Pat as we look down at the river that flows in a wide channel sixty feet below us. The temperature hovers just above freezing and the air is damp after a night of rain.
The sky is a depthless sort of overcast, no definition in the clouds, no glimmer of sunshine. We’re alone, as we have been for most of the past five months. I’m standing on the bank of the swift Chandalar River in the Brooks Range of northern Alaska, trying to gather the courage to swim across. The below is from the book’s opening chapter. For more about Caroline and the book, visit her website, or find her at Instagram or Facebook. Her recent book, The Sun is a Compass: A 4,000-Mile Journey into the Alaska Wilds, is available at your local bookseller or online. Caroline Van Hemert is an Alaskan adventurer, wildlife biologist, and writer.
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