True North adventures

After being bumped off the day before to make room for some poor folks whose injuries were more severe, we arrive at the huge Vancouver hospital on October 1 to have John's leg fractures addressed with some appropriate hardware, including plates, screws and who knows what else. The sign we see  first makes us giddy with anticipation: what... if? And if "if" will be implemented, what may they cut off? In a country whose national rodent is beaver, cutting may be a popular pastime where nothing that could be chiseled off, cut, de-limbed and de-barked, and then saved for a long and frosty winter is actually sacred.

But let me backtrack a bit. The day before, we were bumped off after we waited (and waited) for John to be admitted, and had a chance to befriend his fellow sufferers, some of them victims of misadventures in their own scary wilderness. One, young Dax, was jumping a fence at night and  his lower leg did not like it all. Why should a seasoned and muscular ice hockey and football player succumb to a mere fence?  We do not know, but succumb he did. Dax’s papa, a sunburned and gentle character, brought him in. Another male sicko, handsomely attired in his sand colored turban, was working on his uncle's blueberry farm when his tractor overturned and pinned him under. As fate has it, men who ran to help him yanked him from under the machine and made sure his leg injuries were as extensive as possible. On the bright side, he was now accompanied by several family members who played with their cell phones a great deal.  Since we do not have one which works in Canada, we could be envious but decided to play nice and just nod pleasantly. A party atmosphere soon developed and I was looking for some Polish vodka but to no avail. Was it a hospital, or pub?  Later the mood sagged a bit after John and Dax were told to return the following day, and maybe again on Sunday. And on Monday. At least The Blueberry Man was admitted, which goes to show that you need to be dragged from under some heavy machinery first, just to make sure someone important will notice your dire need to have a really big surgery.

Back to October 1. While John is snoozing expectantly on his gurney (yes, they will not bump us off today! it is a go!) I am trying to get my internal GPS in order and see where we really are. As in any wilderness, we do not want to be caught not knowing our actual whereabouts, and with my husband of many moons (41 years, to be exact) somewhat incapacitated I must shoulder the GPS duties alone. Actually, we never use any GPS devices but John says it stands for Great Passionate Sex, and this we do have. And here is what I see: all kinds of wilderness landmarks, even some feeble trees and distant mountains slathered with fog, all easy to memorize and find in our still uncertain future. 

I return and find my husband flirting with the nurses. Great idea: he may get on their good side and they will rush to him whenever he winks. I like this.  And this is how he looks when he flirts with me. Yes, he does. Sweetly. Why do you think I stayed around for so long? 

As part of his flirting routine, John gives all ICU nurses a link to our website so they could entertain themselves instead of attending to patients. First thing first, beauty before the beast, nature calling, wolves howling, patients waiting. The head nurse has a bad cold, so she wraps herself in a warm hospital blankie and peeks at our pictures. Right now she focuses on my pictures of aspen trunks in the first snow near Yosemite. Maybe she will get better by looking at some fresh snow?  

In order to check the premises and make sure they are satisfactory for my fallen lover, I prowl silently and try not to wag my tail: this is, after all, an Intensive Care Until, pre-op section, and I may be incarcerated for my clearly predatory moves. 

Hey, this is good!  They have pillows galore in this joint, so if they bump us again we can just make ourselves a warm cozy nest on the floor, lined it with all these fluffy pillows, and smooch until they decide to operate on John's busted leg.

And remember: this is a true Canadian hospital, its beaver-approved western flagship with all its modern components, perched not far from the stormy Pacific and charging all Canadian residents nothing or just a mere pittance in comparison to what they charge us, proud Americans, who -- by golly -- will not agree to any national heath program in our own country, and therefore have to pay though our proud noses till they fall off or till we go broke. And besides their first-class medical care (which works great even when you get bumped off;  what's one or two days when you may emerge from this place in a much better shape than your old decrepit self?) the Canadians truly love and support their art.  I wander long corridors, jam-packed with color and imagination. There is an Inuit print from Cape Dorset, guarding the elevator and a bunch of mallard ducks exploding wetly from the second floor's wall.


An abstract study of courting feather colors of birds.. many birds. It appears this country does not only love its national rodents, but its feathery population as well. Maybe it even offers them a national health program? One pinched wing, and you can get treated by nurses who like snow and meet people who soar over fences, the way birds do, just better?  You can see me clearly communing with this lovely print. 

And please disregard the reflections which look like sneakers seen from above. They are actually sneakers seen from above: another ambitious installation put together by an artist who loves footwear. Disregard it: I tried every which way not to have this reflection in my frame but I failed.  Not the first time.

And while I am gallery hopping, John is flirting 

with his anesthesiologist, a lovely and attentive woman. She is also patient as John explains to her everything she needs to know about his body. I am sure this is also an integral part of the national health plan: listen to all these folks and reassure them with your undivided attention, even if you forget everything a few minutes later. They both agree on epidural instead of general. If only they would let me in with my camera while the surgery is in progress! I could distract them sufficiently to make an error, and then we could sue the hospital for all kinds of big bucks. But this is Canada: no suing. Stay this moment and  enjoy the lovely doc and her gentle ways. Amen. 

And... off we go to the OR, to meet a cold sharp knife. The patient is still smiling. Remember our GPS, darling

Minutes pass. I walk. Go to the Starbucks across the street to plug into its free W-Fi to get some messages of warm support from our friends. I see some rain. I check my watch. I think about the exploding mallards, Inuit ookpiks, and courting colors of birds. And of the many years stretching back all the way to our chance meeting in Wyoming, under the Grand Tetons, and a hitchhiking young man with a pack, who opened my Landrover's door and, seeing my cameras, said: another photographer? Yep. That's me. Now, in Vancouver, pacing. Then I am back on the second floor, past the mallards and all the rest of them.  

And -- yes! John is all done, smiling and wanting something he never eats: potato chips, now! Hey, you are not pregnant... But today all is possible. I have no choice in a small store nearby and get some nasty non-band chips, the low of the low, but he is happy. And wants to read all notes from our friends. And this is what he is doing. After his epidural he is not even sleepy. Spark. Smile. Good.

And because John is so happy with his nasty potato chips and all is well, his ICU nurse beams. 

I now see there is some flare in this frame but never mind.... who will even notice a stupid flare? This is Canada, a flare-less huge tract of land of swooshing trees and soaring mountains and hockey crazed people. How could anything go wrong here?

And poor Dax, 

The Fence Jumper?  There he is, next gurney over, before his surgery, all smiles, our future Wayne Gretzky. Dax came alone this time, so where is Papa? Well, Papa just had emergency stents put into his heart artery and he may come later... or so we all hope. And Mama is out of town. Boy alone. He wants a hug and I administer it as part of the Canadian national health programs.

  

But after his op, young Dax is not bouncy at all:  general anesthetic can be such a moo cow. At least Papa is back with us, his right wrist taped but alive. Good.

  Back to my hero but he is again busy with his clearly enchanted nurses. Here in Canada the only patients seem to be men. John, Dax, The Blueberry Man, Papa... And their attending physicians, including John's surgeon, epidural doc and almost all nurses are women. Nice, warm, sweet women. One nurse is checking John's Big Foot to see if he is getting any sensations back. He is not but seems to like the banana I kidnapped at Starbucks (for extra 5 cents, in addition to my coffee bill.)

  And then things get really serious before John is discharged.This is not exactly a riot act the nurse is reading but all the NOs and NEVERs and SHOULDNTs he and I need to memorize, implement and not question.  We try not to interrupt, which is one of our many bad habits.

And then it is time to go. Jacek, our wonderful new friend, will meet us downstairs. The Big Foot is truly impressive and John, artfully disheveled with his gown sliding off and the banana almost finished, is tired.

And so am I. But all will be well until John steps on another mossy old log resembling the one on Haida Gwaii he encountered two days ago, and his foot falls into another hidden hole armed with sharp teeth like a bear trap. Or I slip on the ice and shatter my lower leg bones again. Yes, we have done it all, and may do it again. You never know. For now, we are very lucky. So many good things happen to bring us safely here, have the surgery, and count on our friends in this part of the world. 

It could have been different.  John may have broken his leg during any of the forest walks we took this year, while being much further from any ER or an airport. 

The weather was not cold: if it were cold, he may have gone into shock and our friend Leiv who went ashore with John to do a spot of fishing, would have a hard time finding him in the thick old forest. 

If John were disabled by shock, Leiv would also have a hell of a time to bring him back to his Zodiac, and then load him onto a much taller sailboat, even with my help.  

But John, who told me he meditated to prevent shock after he fell and was swamped by pain, was able to crawl/walk back to the beach, so getting him to Queen Charlotte City and its small ER was done with relative ease. The diagnosis there was correct. The splint held his leg immobilized overnight, and pain pills helped him sleep at least some hours. 

Then a flight to Vancouver, a taxi to Vancouver General's ER, 5 hrs there, and a set of better X-rays and a more specific diagnosis which indicated he needed surgery.

Then two nights with Jacek and Sylvia, who offered their place and their bed without hesitation.

And since we needed to get our camper send to us via two ocean ferries, we were also lucky to have Gracie Flanagan from Haida Gwaii who, unafraid of all the hustle, offered to send it south for us.

And lucky to have our old friend Peter Moosbrugger from Vancouver Island, who will soon get us under his wing in Comox until John is better.  We met Peter in Newfoundland 15 years ago, and we fell into a deep friendship with him -- and his wife Karen -- right away. 

Luck, luck, luck....

This morning I found a note by our door in a small hostel we moved into after the surgery. It came from a young couple from San Diego, who lived in another room and gave me a lift to a grocery store. It said:

Just wanted to say

it was nice to

meet you both

good luck with the leg!

Tom and Katie

And among many wishes, encouragements and recommendations we found these from our caring home docs:

Tell John to wiggle his toes. It will assist with circulation. Watch him within arms' length when he stands up. Orthostatic Hypotension can cause fainting. 

and:

So happy to hear John is feeling better and on the mend.  That's why I love orthopedics.  Brief illness (usually), pain that passes rapidly and hopefully good results.

and:

The pain from the surgery is expected to taper off quickly and John should have minimal or no pain at all in a few days.  In fact, if the ankle starts hurting again next week for no obvious reason, it may suggest that the cast has become too tight due to swelling around the ankle, and that J needs to keep the leg elevated more.

and this, from Mary Oliver, a poem John found by searching under "pain poem"

I want to write something

so simply

about love

or about pain

that even

as you are reading

you feel it

and as you read

you keep feeling it

and though it be my story

it will be common,

though it be singular

it will be known to you

so that by the end

you will think—

no, you will realize—

that it was all the while

yourself arranging the words,

that it was all the time

words that you yourself,

out of your heart

had been saying.

Hey, we may not do better next time when we fall into bear trap-like holes or slip on the ice, but the support poured all over us felt like the best melted dark chocolate (studded with sour cherries) and could not be improved. 

Love and thanks to Leiv and Gracie,  Jacek and Sylwia,  Peter, David and Gayle, and John and Gerry, our first responders near and far.

©Yva Momatiuk

Yukon/BC border

It is already mid-September, and our current playing field is a bit muddled. The usually brilliant fall colors of Arctic tundra and yellowing aspen groves further south have been exceptionally dull this year, knocking out our rainbow-colored hopes and making landscape photography difficult. And since big furry animals and hunting raptors appear only rarely, we just travel on.  Still, our photographic pickings seem erratic and if not for many years of honing the demanding art of dashed expectations we may have become pretty despondent.

Most of the time, however, we turn the other cheek and do not despair. Nature does what nature needs to do, and these regions had more rain last summer than they had for years. This, and too much warm weather, may have turned our colors into their current Dijon mustard mess. It is hard, though. After all, these failed expectations have been created by bright memories of our fruit-bearing images imbedded in our minds: the golds and the reds and the oranges and the sky blues of the falls past. We remember the photographs we have already chased and owned, the ones we published, exhibited and memorized. I realize that these expectations, far more than the flatness of colors, now get in my way of looking at the seemingly dull vistas. Is it possible I harbor a subconscious streak -- not apparent to me -- which clings to the familiar rather than the unexplored?  Never mind my hidden underpinnings: I need to turn away from the world I memorized and look for the one I seem reluctant to enter. 

So John and I go and search. Noses to the ground, eyes blinking, ears flapping in the breeze. I know that John is more comfortable with trying anything new, and am not surprised when he attempts to photograph the way moss grows and mushrooms rot. Much of the time, he is crawling on his hands and knees or pausing near something which draws him in: a fallen conifer studded with brown cones or a pale layer of caribou lichen. I find fireweed leaves which, hit by first frost, convulsed into shapes only fire scorched metal sculptures could replicate, and muck along cold lakes and twisted narrow streams. Sometimes we walk away from each other and enter separate worlds of trees, rocks, streams and slapping branches. 

I suddenly remember that strong sense of separation from all I knew. Years ago, I crawled under an ancient fallen trunk of a Douglass fir half buried in yellow umbrellas of Devil's clubs in Southeastern Alaska. I stayed there for a long time -- a forest animal, unseen -- with my body sinking into the deep wet moss and my nose smelling the slightly acidic stench of forest decay. I sensed the hundreds of years since that tree matured in the relentless rush of its sticky sap and multiplying cells, with branches spreading under the cool Alaskan sky. Then one day -- was it a dark night? a grey dusk? it was hit by an enormous force, a bolt of fiery lightening or a hard fist of great wind. It came down like a tumbling mountain, tearing its heart apart and crashing through tree canopies left and right, with the cracking sound which reverberated in the old growth forest for a long time.

It is now many years later and I am no longer under that log. The evening comes and it is getting too dark to try anything hidden or unexpected. Our old camper sits at the end of an abandoned air strip which used to serve the Cassiar asbestos mine and the town with its 3,700 inhabitants. Defunct since 1993 due to carcinogenic properties of its long-exploited and lucrative product, the old mine with its collection of rusting monster trucks and greenish mounds of tailings is still scarring this wild, mountainous land. We eat our potato soup from Anchorage with some roasted chicken from Whitehorse, nibble on rich brownies baked by our Alaskan friends Tom and Mary, slurp some red wine to elevate the evening, and are now listening to the whirr of a hard drive as John downloads a few new pictures. We look at some forest floor images he took while crawling around, at my small creek making its way to Kluane Lake, and we see they are new to us.

It may rain or even snow soon, so John just reads aloud another chapter - the one about chickadees -- from Bernd Heinrich's book "One Wild Bird at the Time" before we turn in. The night is here and soon some black bears and perhaps their brown cousins may circle the camper and smell our soup and chicken. And the brownies. Should one of them try to get too close, I will sing "you are my sunshine, my only sunshine" at the top of my lungs, which will surely discourage the visitor. 

They may come in our dreams, though. Moving in the dark outside. Scouting the nearby forest, its rainy ravines, fallen logs and mossy hillocks. Swimming across cold rivers and climbing precipitous slopes studded with massive rocks. Covering the rough terrain with their long strides and searching for yet another food source: a berry here, a root there, a small mammal running downslope. They are relentless in their pursuit but the growing layer of fat under their rippling fall fur is the only life insurance they will have during the long dark months of the coming winter.

And dreaming about the bears as they move in the dark outside will be really, really good.

©Yva Momatiuk

Grizzly sandwich

Three days, one picture. One picture, three days. There are no great fireworks of animals throwing their muscular bodies into action. And if there was a recent drama associated with a chase, an attack and a collapse of a struggling ungulate -- we did not see it. 

In fact, what we see now is a nagging mystery because nothing makes much sense to us. And yet there are three grizzly bears, a sow and her two spring cubs, who were definitely not in this patch of tundra the day before yesterday. And there is something which looks like a long mound of dark vegetation which they sporadically paw and eat, then lie right on it to rest and snooze. Then the cubs wake, nurse, and they all paw the mound again and eat some morsels of food. But eat --what? 

This tableau continues for three days and never changes much. Sometimes the sow walks a dozen steps away and defecates. Or one cub ventures aside, nibbles on something we also cannot make out, and returns. And so does the status quo: three bears, an animal protein so hidden we cannot see it, and an occasional puff of the Arctic wind blowing from the east and heralding more of this drizzly Arctic fall weather. 

We know it must be a fresh kill but we are not sure what animal it is, for the bears are too far and the tundra's grassy fold raises and obscures what we are trying to see. We also know we cannot leave the road and come closer for several good reasons. A mama grizzly with cubs is dangerous. A mama grizzly with cubs and the source of food she is guarding is significantly more dangerous. And provoking her attack could (and quite certainly would) end badly not just for us but for her and her cubs, for most human casualties in this kind of situation tend to be followed by the destruction of the bear who seems, however vaguely, guilty of the homicide. Never mind the stupid and pointless provocations created by humans, or the fact the grizzly would have only followed her hardwired instinct to protect her food and her family. 

So we stay put. We use binoculars and long lenses, walk along the road to gain a different angle, and still have no idea what we are looking at. There seem to be some silvery strands of fur peeking out here and there from the mound: a caribou? but then one cub pulls up a lower leg with a hoof which is visible against the grey sky for a brief moment and -- John is sure of it -- appears very dark. A moose? It cannot be, because the fur we see is pale and not brown. And where are the antlers, certainly well developed in late August? OK, so there are no antlers because it may be only a pile of guts and lower legs and a hide some hunters left behind after they killed whatever it is, butchered the carcass, and carried the meat and the antlers with them.  

The meat we understand, but the antlers? This is a subsistence hunting region of the northern Yukon, so anyone hunting here, from Inuvik to Dawson City, already has enough piles of antlers gathering mold behind his cabin. The antlers would help us identify the prey but there are none. And one cub is now gnawing on what looks like a curvy rib bone. So, no hunters were involved, for the ribs would have departed with the meat they packed out. An antlerless baby caribou or a moose? Not likely, because the mysterious quasi-vegetarian mound is too long and too tall to contain a small ungulate. A female moose, then? 

We also want to know how this animal -- because there must be an animal somewhere in this messy dark mound -- died. Why? Perhaps because in our attempts to understand nature's doings we try to tie what we can observe into a cohesive narrative arc. It may not matter to anyone else but it seems profoundly important to us.  For instance: did the grizzly sow take it down? Or is it a wolf kill, and the wolf was later chased away by the bear like so many other wolves who kill and often get badly battered in the process but never get to eat a single morsel?  There are many ravens flapping and hopping around while trying to snatch a scrap of meat, and they may have followed the wolf as he tracked his prey. But this is not certain, either. The ravens, forever alert to predators who do the killing and tear open tough hides of dead animals making them accessible to the birds' beaks, could have arrived well after the deed was done. But - by whom? The riddle bothers us but we are none the wiser.

Time after time, we try to photograph as soon as the the bear family starts to move around. Time after time, the choreography sucks: a raven sticks up his head and obscures two bear faces, both cubs present us with their warmly furred behinds and nothing else, the mama griz collapses on top of the mound again and falls asleep for another hour or two. And it is still so damn far and dark anyway. So on the third day I give up.  But John, a champion of persistence, is still kneeling on the roof of our camper and huddling over his camera with a long lens and several teleconverters. It gets really blustery and he finally climbs down: let's stop, we say. No more of this too far too dark who knows what they are eating nonsense. In this day and age, such vague and imperfect pictures are worthless anyway: the market is already clogged by well exposed, bright, fully visible bear kills being devoured and dripping with picturesque gore.

Remembering we got nothing so far, we try to review John's latest images. And we find the one picture he hoped he nailed-- just one, with no similar previous frames and no good frames to follow -- which sums up all we were looking at in the last three days. A layer of the still not identified flesh partly covered by roots and earth, the mama griz looking straight into the lens with a somewhat bemused expression, her two fat cubs playfully biting each other, and an unperturbed raven, a sentry to it all. A classic grizzly sandwich, descriptive and yet not revealing what we want to know. 

And this is, as it must be, just good enough.

©Yva Momatiuk

Sarcodon imbricatus

The tangled northern forest opens up and I am hunting wild food again. This is a good day, with clouds all low and no deep shadows to distract me, but I see no berries: a wrong place, a wrong time, or both. If there are any large hemlock trees nearby I may find some pine mushrooms, the golden fruit of the Western Canada's old growth, but this is unlikely. These ancient groves, decimated by chainsaws growling all over British Columbia year after year, have been already reduced to a miserable one or two percent of their former range. How about boletes? They are more likely: these are deep-moss woods, moist but not boggy, with plenty of conifers, pillows of fallen needles and sufficient light and shade. 

A surprise: my looking for mushrooms in this forest brings a flashback from the still distant tundra. It was 1976, and we were stuck for 13 rainy and mind-chilling days in a leaky pup tent in the Canadian Arctic with not a scrap of food left, trying to consider our next move. Our options were terribly limited. Much earlier, after John and I first met, we read "Alive!" -- a harrowing account of a plane crash high in the snowy Andes. There were the dead and the wounded, and the long weeks of sharing food remnants by a bunch of freezing survivors, and finally their last effort to keep alive that must have made many readers recoil in horror. Not us: we were young, in love and ready to take death by its spiky horns by any means necessary, including our mutual promise not to hesitate should one of us die in similarly dire circumstances. It seemed so simple: if you are starving and it is going to give you a chance to survive, eat my flesh. And enjoy it while you are at it.

But we were not starving yet, just very hungry, wet, cold and feeling trapped. Yet we also noticed we were still good to each other and not snappy or resentful. We even joked and teased our husky Mis, who smelled like hell of some rancid seal blubber he just rolled in but insisted on sleeping in our tent: "Hey, how about if we cook some Mis Tail Soup?" But he paid no attention to our stupid jokes. So when one hopelessly dark and drizzly morning John wondered if we should get married, I agreed. If we could carry these long days of stress reasonably well, maybe tackling a life together made quite a bit of sense?

So committed, we went to check on our neighbors, an Inuit family living in a canvass tent on the other side of a large boulder. We had been working on our first National Geographic story during the last five months, living with the last semi-nomadic Umingmaktormiut hunters whose existence few people in North America could even imagine. But now all we could do was wait the way they did. For the Inuit, such dearth of food was not some unusually hairy incident they may dwell on for years -- the way extreme adventurers do for other people -- but something that happened and could not be changed. They were calm and never complained: bitching would mean wasting energy on just flapping your tongue and achieving nothing at all.

Some time ago the family -- Peter Avalak and his wife Mary -- got hired by mine operators as caretakers after the miners flew South before the long Arctic winter. The operators assured Peter and Mary that all they had to do was camp near the mine and not budge to prevent airborne entrepreneurs scouring the Arctic for easy profits from stealing mining equipment and everything they could put their thieving hands on. Which, considering the promised salary which would buy the family a lot of store food in Cambridge Bay's store 100 miles away, sounded like a plum job. The money never arrived but the Avalaks have stayed put: they promised to guard the mine. 

And they were still here. Even though their provisions -- and ours, since we shared all food-- were all gone by now. Even though they could not follow the annual caribou migration which would require leaving the mine. Even though the autumn storms tangled and tore their fishing nets out in the bay and they could no longer fish. And even though they had seven children, including the baby they adopted, and they were hungry. And so were their sled dogs, howling at the end of their chains or dozing until -- who knew how long? If things did not improve, they could be shot.

Still, we all tried to find anything we could eat. The older kids tried to kill seagulls with rocks and had no luck. Peter, his face grim and closed, scouted the tundra looking for sik-sik -- ground squirrels -- but the furry buggers seemed to have vanished. John and I walked the hills, hoping to collect enough berries to calm the growling hole in our bellies. And suddenly we saw mushrooms. Scores, no, hundreds of them, standing tall on their thick pale stems in the carpet of silvery caribou moss and topped with their smooth brown caps. I am from Poland, the country where wild mushroom gathering used to be a skill people learned in their childhood, and I knew them right away. King boletes, the very best kind. 

We gathered all the 'shrooms we could find. Hollered for the Avalak kids to come and help. Filled caribou skin bags with the smooth brown caps and fat pale stems. Carried the loot back and cooked it in the largest camp pot, with some wild berries and the rest of the seal fat Mary discovered somewhere. We feasted. We slept. We lived. 

Many week later we delivered our Inuit article to the editors and a scrupulous National Geographic researcher contacted the mine's officials in California to verify our account.  "I hate to admit it, and hate even more to see it in print," the mine's administrator wrote back. "But I see we did not pay these people. We will, I promise." And much much later, during our visit to the newly created Nunavut Territory, we learned from Peter's and Mary's daughter Palvik the mine people never did pay her parents.

This all happened a very long time ago, but looking for the boletes hauled our survival mushroom feast right back to me. Still, looking does not mean finding anything: after much poking around and using my mushroom nose I come up empty. Then I spot a huge brown and undulating cap with an array of raised dark spots, so dramatic in its shape and size I sit down to consider what I found. Being Polish does not help me one bit, for I do not know this kind at all. I later have a chance to ID this specimen -- it is most likely Sarcodon imbricatus, with no common name that I could find -- and it is "reported to be edible," a lovely euphemism for not being entirely sure yet guardedly optimistic.

But had I found this giant during our memorable stint of shared hunger, growing in the windy hills above the Northwest Passage where the border between surviving and dying could be gossamer thin, would I just cook it, bite hungrily into its great dense flesh, and pass it around as well? Or would I eat just one tiny bit, wait a few hours, and only if I felt no poison roiling my body offer it to John and the Avalaks? 

I cannot answer it today because I am no longer hungry. And this changes a hell of a lot of other things as well. 

©Yva Momatiuk

our daily bears

In late August

north of the Arctic Circle on the Dempster Highway

a really serious dusk comes soon after midnight

but a hint of a daybreak a few hours later

is already dimmer than yesterday

we watch

and soon a grizzly family

a mother and her two spring cubs 

appears, out on its daily quest for food 

and whatever else bears need

like us, the family is using the road

so much more convenient than tripping on stumps, willow bushes and fallen logs

we think so, too,

and follow the bears for a bit

hanging back and trying not to crunch on the gravel too loudly

we look

and John says the smaller cub, now crossing the ditch and running into the tundra

has a damaged paw

(a wound? a congenital defect?)

and he is thinner

we think he may not make this winter 

which is coming long and white and cold

but who knows?

so we watch some more

and things happen

as they often do when bears travel in the back country

they stop when it is a good time to stop

they play

nibble on berries

cross a shiny pond 

and move again

while their autumn fur is growing thick 

just like that!

and follows no other commands

but that of the dimming light

©Yva Momatiuk

praire skies

"A long way from home, aren't you?"

She is short, broad, clad in a tired T-shirt decorated with logos we do not recognize. Behind her, the noon heat is getting on its hind legs and replacing the morning cool of Minnesota with the prairie noon scorcher. John and I just crossed the Red River and stand by our truck, with its New York license plates giving us away.

She comes close.

"If another storm comes, drive north out of here, turn around and look at all these dark clouds coming really fast. The sky may turn purple and the sun will still shine at the fields, all golden. I just love it."

She does not suggests: she commands. And wants us to pay attention to what she wants.

"I see. And who are you?" I ask, intrigued by her attempt to share the beauty she seems to see even now, in a cookie cutter strip mall in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

"Eh, I am just a nerd," she answers. "But I am telling you this because you came here all this way at the right time, and you may want to see it."

There is something exceptional about remembering magic when none is present. You need to do a great mind split to get away from what is crowding all three of us at this moment: Thrifty White Drug Pharmacy next door, Grease Monkey to our left, Panera Bread and Papa Murphy's Take N Bake Pizza to our right. And she does it all in one smooth Olympic champion leap, right in front of my eyes. 

But once her commanding time is over -- it passes in a blink -- she loses herself and seems uncertain. So we tell her we watch such storm clouds and grain fields whenever we can, and the sun spreading gold on them as well. We want her to know we belong to the same visual junkie lineup and, like her, we have no other choice. 

This seems to settle many things all at once but also opens another trail she wants us to walk together. Little by little, we learn she is trying to pass her bar exams she already failed four times. I am not sure if I heard her correctly, so I ask if she is a paralegal. 

"No, no, no," she shakes her head.  "I am a lawyer. But I need to pass my bar exams. First time I failed, I was too nervous. Second time, I got my first migraine ever and I could not think. Third time, my father just died. Fourth time, my husband just had a stroke."

I ask her if she is clearing her mental plate before she tries again. She thinks she is, but after four failures she is not sure she can. She only failed by very little, a couple of points, but still. 

We suggest she may want to look at some great clouds before she attempts her exams for the fifth time and remember they will not change even if she does poorly again. So maybe her results are not as bone-crushing important, and she could loosen up and just fly above the bar because she would no longer be so damn tense and terrified?  She says this is a really great idea and we enthusiastically agree it may work. There is a sense of relief, even some hope.

Yet I suddenly realize it may require an insurmountable mind split to bury her past defeats and stomp on their grave while still wearing her tired T-shirt with logos we know nothing about. Sticking her head in the sky, triumphant.

©Yva Momatiuk

penguin

One day we follow the windy edge of ultramarine waters of Estrecho de Magallanes near Punta Arenas in Chile and come upon a King penguin grooming his black tail feathers on a narrow beach. A large bird of the sea, alone, not reproducing in some huge clamoring colony of other Kings on a windswept sub-Antarctic island? What is he doing here?

Calmly, with cars swooshing by on a nearby road and a chorus of village mongrels over the hill making themselves known to other dogs, he is cleaning and smoothing his feathers to keep them fluffy and his body warm. Perhaps he lost his mate and, unable to breed this year, went on a swimabout? Or maybe he entered the Strait of Magellan because it still harbors enough fish, so depleted elsewhere by overfishing? There is a hidden story about his solo presence here but we are not sure what it means.

John vaults over a sea wall and slowly approaches the bird. The King, hard-wired for not fearing land predators since they do not look like leopard seals or killer whales, is undisturbed and relaxed. He does all the familiar things we observed while watching his kin on South Georgia Island. He scratches his head. Checks both long flippers with his bill. Grooms his chest feathers. Rests on his heels, with black toes gently upturned.

And then he quietly settles among beautiful round rocks of the beach and simply falls asleep. John stretches alongside the bird and admires his fine feathers, black, silver and white. He studies tangerine hues of the bold swoosh marking the small head and the lemony yellow bib on the chest. And it is all unpredictable and lovely.

©Yva Momatiuk

fences

I stand in the middle of a mountain gale and my feet constantly shift to keep my body from falling. The morning light show here in the southern Andes is on, and the rising sun blasts rosy flanks of the Cerro Fitz Roy emerging from layers of fog. Spiky cushions of neneo plants blossom deep crimson but I want to get beyond a distant rock bump where a pale thatch of fur just moved and quickly vanished.

A guanaco, once described by Darwin as "an elegant animal, with long slender neck and fine legs." Its blood carries more oxygen than that of other mammals and allows the graceful Andean cameloid to thrive in this truly high country of South America. But graceful does not mean mild. During the short Austral spring love-struck guanaco bulls chase rival males and sink teeth in their long necks, trying to break the extra thick skin protecting vital blood vessels from such assaults.

I follow the guanaco but run into a fence. And unlike many livestock-holding devices I know, the Patagonian variety is as well made as it is infuriating. Here water faucets may fall off when you try to turn them on, poorly anchored toilet bowls march across rooms, and custom officers along the border between Chile and Argentina use wooden rulers and pencils to divide their plain ledgers into organized columns of handwritten bureaucratese. But when it comes to fences, excellence soars. The posts are solid, the wire strands taut and closely spaced, and the whole obstacle too high to stride over. There are some cases of poor maintenance when a sheep farmer moves to a distant town or dies of a wind-saddened heart, but what I behold this morning is no such exception. This fence has been made to keep me out.

Really? I walk and sniff along its length, a keen animal looking for a way in. And here it is, a small eroded gully where the lowest strand rides just high enough. I swing my camera over, drop down, and slither under the wire, my nose close to the moist soil and emerging dandelions. Still on my belly, I pick and chew a few leaves with their bitter tang of spring: they taste just like the hard dandelion roots, dug out years ago from under the melting snow on South Georgia Island. Dressed with olive oil and garlic, they were the only fresh salad during our long sails on Golden Fleece. The leaves smell of our trips to the sub-Antarctic islands and the frozen continent beyond which sends icy gales and lofty iridescent clouds across Patagonia.

Alert to my presence, the guanaco moves away just enough to have plenty of room to escape: a wise herbivore of the steppe does not waste precious energy on silly gallops. I look at the miraculous stage set painted across the bottomless blue of the Patagonian sky, the granite towers of Cerro Fitz Roy and other slender peaks, less famous but as daunting and soul-arresting in their vertical beauty. There is a glistening patch of snow at their base, and the guanaco stands square against it with its Darwinian fine neck elegantly erected until I click my shutter. As long as wild animals are still  present, the Andes appear real and not just a flash of my imagination.

But the fences are everywhere, even though we seldom see any sheep. This hard, hard country, blindingly light in summer and blotted dark in winter, has been terribly overgrazed and stripped of much of its vegetation cover. Ancient trees were cut and burned, tall grasses snipped off by domestic stock, and the resulting erosion kicks its dusty heels every time the wind blows, which is pretty much all the time.

In the past, Patagonia's arid but productive grasslands used to feed large populations of wild herbivores but intensive sheep ranching introduced in the early 20th century soon altered the face of the steppe. The stock carrying capacity of the land was often greatly exceeded and the sheep, famous for their close and selective grazing, soon turned the grasslands into nearly bare expanses of overtaxed land. And not unlike in some parts of Africa, this relentless man-made desertification created dead zones for both domestic and wild animals. Today much of the extensive ranching ceased but we are still trapped by miles of fences dissecting the steppe and are forever trying to find our way to their other side.

The other side may mean another country. One cloud-studded evening we move from the smooth columns of Fitz Roy in Argentina to the granite spires of Torres del Paine in Chile, which appear carved by a giant ice cream scoop. The next morning comes roaring with wind and exploding with condors. The birds tumble down like broken black umbrellas toward a smelly sheep carcass we never noticed but they, all keen eyes and barely twitching tips of their long flight feathers, do not miss.

Loaded with his heavy tripod and camera, John tries to reach a higher ground but another perfectly executed fence forces him to slide under its strands. As he disappears behind some rocky hills, several large tour buses arrive and disgorge scores of Patagonia-mad travelers who line up side by side along the fence and point their cameras at the flying condors. I do not see anyone without some picture taking device: it is as if you do not photograph, you do not earn your keep on Digital Earth.

I think this must be a part of some grand design. First, you carve and fence the land to keep your livestock in and other people out. Then you build a few roads, followed by campgrounds and hotels, which you advertise. And then you get a predictable and seldom varying scenario. The diesel spewing tour buses with their motors idling, no matter how long their passengers roam around to admire wild landscapes. The expectant rows of onlookers with cameras, cell phones and tablets, standing arm to arm and trying to capture what is often the same picture. You even get condors, who may well be on retainer. After that, there is still room for great improvements: rough gravel roads get paved, food stores in towns begin to stock German wild boar marinates and guanaco jerky, and scores of new cafes sprouting behind corrugated tin walls offer free Wi-Fi services and tasty local beer. And all of this means you can go and see what you are supposed to see, but the fences make damn sure you do not stray.

©Yva Momatiuk