birthday animals

I am walking on an old logging trail which branches off Lower Cache Road, a tributary to Alaska Highway in British Columbia. Thin strands of morning fog soften scraggly black spruce and float among white aspen trunks. A long time ago, during his trek to the South Pole, Roald Amundsen used to order his men to get up before sunrise, get out of their tent, and breathe in polar air and the morning light in to make the rest of the day meaningful. I am doing my Amundsen thing now, and this is August 18, my birthday. I am 70 years old. When did it happen, and how?

The question is unnecessary because I know the answer: I lived that long. And possibly much longer, cramming life in, at times heedlessly: take much, climb that, try what beckons. The family legend has it that ever since I could walk, I refused to hold anyone's hand and just bolted off to find what would surely remain out of reach if I just walked nicely next to some protective grownup.

Even after many years, Marynia, my old nanny who died recently just short of her 100th birthday, remembered with dread her chases after the disappearing child who never looked back, just ran. Eventually Pecia -- my father -- refused to take me anywhere, because he could never relax and just enjoy a stroll with his little daughter, the way many parents in Warsaw walked with their small but already mannerly children. He hated to imagine I would get run over by a streetcar, and deeply feared my mother's wrath should he allow that to happen. 

My mother --called Mek by me and my brother -- was probably somewhat concerned but must have pretended to be upset when Marynia and Pecia reported my escapades. For her, I was a small chip of her own large spirit. Raised in Russia, she came to Poland at 14, after her father, a white general, was murdered in the turmoil of the Revolution, and her mother, who lost everything and melted into the countryside like many other landed gentry at that time, kept her two young daughters alive by running a small orphanage full of starving children and digging out potatoes left behind by farmers who already finished their harvest.

They eventually came to Poland on a cattle train, which took 6 weeks to reach the border. My mother was wearing old rags, her head was shaved to prevent lice, and she did not speak any Polish. Twelve years later, she was a young lawyer with two degrees, one from Warsaw University and another from Sorbonne, which used to have its extension program in Poland.  She was well versed in several foreign languages, married, living and working in Warsaw, and helping to support her mother and her older sister, who "lost her way," never finished high school, and became a cabaret dancer and a mother of two sons out of wedlock whose fathers disappeared. Then the war came, and before six million Poles and Polish Jews died and the war ended, Mek went ahead and had her two children, first me, and then my brother Jeremi. When I asked her later why she decided to have kids right in the middle of these terrifying and deadly times, she told me it was her affirmation of life. 

Was my mother a survivalist by nature, or the events of her early life left her no other choice? I do not know. But I know she was an ardent feminist -- even though she did not know the term -- and did not want me to be still, which later translated into her well articulated life lessons designed to prevent me from getting hooked on any womanly activity which may, in her understanding of freedom, clip my stride: an excessive attention to my appearance ("good looks don't need any artificial help")  an early marriage ("first, get your university degree, then travel, and then, and only if you really want to, get married") and even cooking ("I hope you never have to do it.")

We fought throughout all our lives together. She was a severe critic, a relentless judge, and she needed more overt and cozy love than I, busy to escape her guiding hand, had time or inclination to deliver.  As she grew older, she became less of the crazy and flamboyant Russian I loved, and more of the demanding, angry and disappointed German Frau I feared. I knew I did not want to be like her, but I did get my university degree, traveled, married late, avoided cooking as much as I could, and had my first pedicure ever -- courtesy of our daughter Tara, one of her birthday gifts -- last week in Colorado. 

And today the sunlight licks the trees on the logging road and a grouse rises noisily from the ditch, flapping madly away. I gather wild raspberries, tasty but small and misshapen: not enough rain?  and see that John is already awake. I return to the camper and he asks me what I want for my birthday. Animals, I say, many animals. He reminds me I already had two pre-birthday moose crossing the road last night, and a family of deer in a ravine, and many ravens soaring over the forest. I want more.

Over the course of its nearly 1,600 miles from Dawson Creek to Fairbanks, Alaska Highway parallels some of the largest and most rugged tracts of land in North America, scarred by mineral exploration and logging but also unfenced, heavily forested, and largely devoid of human presence, with large rivers, Peace, Liard,Teslin, Hyland, Rancheria and Yukon, creating abundant animal corridors full of nutrients.  As the day unfolds and we drive North, I get the following:

-- an immature Golden eagle, flying low
-- a squirrel crossing the road suddenly right in front of us and surviving
-- a Snowshoe hare, whose round eyes remind me of my father Pecia who I am sure reincarnated into a hare
-- ravens and more ravens
-- a young coyote, loping toward us for a while
-- Stone sheep -- bighorns' cousins -- licking dry mineral deposits along the highway in the Northern Rockies
-- a young caribou bull with very dark fur and loudly clicking leg tendons
-- large groups of bison, also feeding in a ditch and resting

And then it rains black bears. A mother bear bending small trees to browse on their leaves. Her cub, suddenly startled, climbing a tall aspen trunk with determination and speed, and perching there for a while only to descend just as fast. Another velvety cub with brown cheeks and big round ears following his mother. Another bear grazing steadily not far away.

My birthday animals. All of them.


©Yva Momatiuk

stars and crows

We wake up in dense fog with eucalyptus trees leaning close, their branches shedding long tendrils of bark. It is a surprising warm morning, fragrant with their scent. Ah, and here is some soft daylight, too, so sweet after long dark hours spent in our small van. These are the shortest days of the year, racing toward the austral winter solstice not many days away. In the last week or so, dusk comes on the heels of dawn with almost no time in between, so we grab this brief daylight and try to fill it with what we want to do.

The soil here is sandy, as if the Southern Ocean was just beyond the eucalyptus grove instead a hundred miles away. We love these sandy farm fields we sometimes select for our camping spots, usually after much bumping around on unpaved country roads well after dark. Even after torrential rains which come in the middle of the night out of nowhere as far as our weather maps are concerned, our van does not get bogged down in a Wyoming-type gumbo, but drives out smoothly as if gliding on silk.

This morning we glide toward the sea, but the fog is beautiful and we spend hours trying to find our different objects of desire. I am chasing pale trees which pop out of the milky light, and John is after large spider webs, luminescent with dew and draped on farm fences like drying diapers. Whose diapers, though? We did read a mile long list of Australian snakes, ranging from some non-venomous giants to their smaller but highly poisonous kin whose fangs could lay us low in 5 minutes, but are there also "5-minute spiders" lurking in tall grass underfoot, ready to defend their lacy webs. These concerns bring me back to my python.

Some days ago, frustrated by elusive wild animals we manage to find only to watch them hop or fly away, I dragged John to a place which specialized in a rehab of reptiles, and persuaded the snakeman in charge to let me handle a beautiful olive python, whose high scale count made it iridescent as the animal moved. It was a mere 6-foot baby, with gloriously smooth, mother-of-pearl skin with a hint of green and an undulating, lively body of a bored youngster. When fully grown, this non-venomous constrictor may measure 12 feet and weight up to 50 pounds.

I allowed the python to glide along my arms and shoulders, and she (for I was sure it was a she) soon draped her muscular coil comfortably around my neck, investigated my ears and resting her head on top of my head as if it were the most comfortable rock in northern deserts of Kimberly or Arnheim Land, her ancestral home. I thought about the way she would hunt in the wild, secreted among hot rocks near a game trail, or submerged in a water hole and waiting for an unwary animal to come for a drink. Once fully grown, she could grab, slowly strangle and devour a whole rock wallaby, enough to sustain her for several months. She would deal death to animals large and small, but she would be vulnerable, too: unless the temperature was warm enough for her to digest her prey, the meat she swallowed may decompose in her stomach and poison her.

But this morning there are no snakes or spiders around. The fog burns off, and we drive to the sea near a small town of Denmark, where a collection of enormous boulders, called Elephant Rocks, crowds a cove. John gathers his equipment and descends down a narrow passage between the rocks to work with their large reddish bodies at close quarters, while I photograph aquamarine sea and red lichens decorating the Elephants.

Later the shadows deepen, and we head for the hills and their dense cover of eucalyptus to find another camping spot. We do not like commercial campgrounds for many reasons, but traditionally all trees drive us nuts, too. They obscure our views, cut off the light, and hide all animals. In many countries we know, there are forests, groves and single trees, but there are also many open clean places of light and possibilities. But not in southern Australia, where trees line most highways, obscure rural roadlets and even walking trails. And between many adult trunks grow young trees with their spindly clusters of branches, effectively sealing off all vistas and forcing us to drive or walk in endless leafy and twiggy tunnels.

But the eucalyptus trees have grown on us by now. There are more than 700 species of them in Australia, from a lemon-scented eucalyptus, to a broad-leaved peppermint kind and a blue gum. The eucalyptus range from rough stringybarks to red shiny Henry Moore sculptures and white-skinned "ghost gums" with iron-hard wood so smooth I sometimes rest my cheek on their glowing trunks and close my eyes: here is a tree I know I love. There are also giant karri trees, the second tallest in the world, whose wood -- this we learned from a karri forester we once met -- paved many London sidewalks.

Tonight we have a camping choice: it is either a patch of red earth encircled by trees, or a wheat field with its bright ceiling of stars and night calls of birds. We walk to meet the farmer who just finished his planting for the day, and ask his permission to spend the night in his field. We mention the stars we cannot see in the forest, and the birds.

"I know what you mean," he says. "Once they planted all these road strips of trees everywhere, I cannot see anything, either.

I drive, I want to look out and see what's out there, so I crook my neck and all I see is these trees. Then I find myself on the wrong side of the road. This is crazy."

The darkness is coming fast, and the birds are everywhere now, flying under the stars and calling into the night. "There are these two crows who have lived here for years," the farmer says. "I hear them every day, and always wonder: what are they saying to each other? I would just love to know."

©Yva Momatiuk

beach

This morning the ocean is almost still, with small whitecaps rising here and there in lazy intervals, as if reminding itself of its sleeping power. Last night, every southern star basked in a faint moonlight glow and the mountains stood dark and blue-hazy. But today a strong weather front came fast: a thick stratus with its leading edge painted crimson by the ascending daylight silently slid over the sea and crept slowly east until it covered the sun.

It may rain.

The west coast of the Southern Island of New Zealand should be dripping wet, with its millions of tea-colored rivulets racing down the steep slopes of the Southern Alps and many powder-blue glacial rivers roaring like lions and rolling heavy boulders on its way to Tasman Sea. Yet the coastal bush, all tangled pungas and ratas and rimus and giant ferns, looks dry and strangely brown: we have learned there was precious little rain here since February, and even now in the fall, when the clouds should be dropping its daily loads of moisture collected all over the Pacific, it just may rain today. Not: surely. Not: again, but: may, and: perhaps.

We drove to the beach last night and caught the very tail of another ruby red sunset. The cabin of two gold miners we used to know, Mark and John, is still here -- tidy, weathered and quiet. Mary, an Australian woman who helped the men during their last years when age and sickness sapped their ability to cope, inherited the place and now walks her dog along the beach every day, passing an old wooden bench half hidden by encroaching gorse bushes, with a hand painted sign: MARK'S PERCH.

Mark was the more assertive younger brother, who mined opals in Australia and gold everywhere, but later settled here on Gillespie's Beach, waiting for big storms to bring shiny gold flakes and deposit them on the black sand. He and his quiet brother John never married. The brothers -- or so the legend goes --had a nice fat account in a bank in Hokitika which they used to lend money to some less enterprising and perhaps less frugal souls. They lived in a boat shed converted into a one-room dwelling, with all their tools and other necessities tucked neatly away.

We were just married when we first came here together, and Mark -- who liked visitors -- fed us some mutton and let us have Pink Pussy, a guest hut sitting in the grassy yard and facing Mt. Cook. We stayed for days and photographed along the beach, bordered by heavy canopies of native bush and tall snowy peaks of the Southern Alps. Come evening, we visited the brothers who, looking like old seals in their dark wrinkly clothes, sprawled on their narrow beds close to the sea-facing window, John on the right and Mark on the left. We used to perch sideways by their big feet clad in thick woolen socks and talk, mostly with Mark, with his brother resting with a sleepy expression of a man who did not need to talk in order to enjoy the evening.

There was a common tone to our talks and maybe our keen desire to learn, too, because we also wanted a life with few outside bounds and with the rules we would make ourselves. But in these early days 33 years ago we still could not quite imagine how to make it work, while the brothers had already managed just this kind of life. They could now rest easy on their single beds, talk about the well- remembered uncertainty of prospecting in distant lands and the hard toil which strained their bodies, and be just where they wanted to be.

Then one day a real storm came, hurrying across the ocean on the wings of thundering waves and pounding the beach for hours. And after many lean months -- or so Mark told us -- the gold finally came in, its yellow flakes shinning like crazy cat's eyes against black grains of sand. Out came the old sluice box lined with red carpeting, and the hoses, and a small pump, and several shovels. Oh, did we shovel hard, piling the sand on top of the box and watching it slosh down the carpet while the gold flecks, trapped, yellowed the carpet with its rich glow.

I was just trying to calculate how much gold we were getting with every shovelful, and how much it would bring the brothers in some very real money, when Mark suddenly called it quits. The gold was all around us, shining, beckoning, there were four of us and we were not tired, but no -- the brothers folded the hoses, packed the pump, and rolled the sluicing box back to its corner in a shed. Then Mark settled down to pluck a fat Northern Canada goose he shot the day before and planned to roast for our supper, and John first checked his possum traps (they were empty) and then sat in the grass by the Gillespie's Lagoon with a sheep trapped between his knees and proceeded to shear its long scraggly wool. Slowly.

I looked again at the golden flakes scattered all over the beach, and could not stand it anymore. I walked straight to Mark and asked him why they stopped sluicing their gold, since this was the first good, fruitful storm in so many months. He looked up at me with his merry brown eyes and replied: "I don't want to start hating it" and went back to work on his dinner bird, with sea breeze stirring goose down clinging to his hands.

I thought about Mark this morning after I stopped photographing the crimson edge of the front, put my camera away, and walked down the beach in search of bright round rocks and bits of sea-polished driftwood. I knew there were still images out there, but there was also the moist air, and the warm wind, and the surf pounding the black and shinning sand.

©Yva Momatiuk

bears

So, what is it going to be?  The Pacific Ocean, lapping dark beaches of British Columbia with its cool tongue? Or the remaining giant Douglas and Sitka spruce trees, fluted Western red cedars and feathery hemlocks, which somehow survived the assault of chainsaws whirring just over the hills?

An Aussie volunteer at the visitors' center of the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on Vancouver Island tells us about a small fish hatchery on a nearby creek: a big run of Coho and Chinook salmon is about to begin, trailed closely by hungry black bears. We grab a tides' tables booklet and head toward Ukluelet, a small coastal village tucked among mossy trees, then turn into a rough gravel road and follow it down to the sea.

A few rough sheds, a cyclone fence, and a narrow boardwalk crowd the dark stream, but the other side of the estuary presents a beautiful multi-hued tapestry of thick rainforest, and further up the creek a circle of black volcanic rocks shelters two meager waterfalls, foaming and spluttering as if someone had turned the upstream taps off and left them dripping.  The mouth of the river, swollen with high tide, ripples with big fish, already stacked up to swim upstream and spawn but held back by the drought: there is not enough water for them to attempt to jump the falls.

We hunker down and wait. After the hatchery crew leaves for the night, we watch first bears appear in the gathering darkness, black animal cutouts patrolling the banks. Suddenly there are many bears: females with small cubs, a big boar, and several youngsters no longer protected by their fierce moms, yet not strong enough to rule the river.  All are hungry: we see how quickly they move and search for scraps of fish.  They pay scant attention to salmon circling a pool gouged by the current: prior to spawning, the fish are still strong and fast, and any bear who jumps in and tries to catch them in deep water would waste his precious energy.

The night comes and we can no longer walk around safely, so we scoot inside our camper and try to sleep.  But the dark outside is vibrating with sounds, and soon a strangled roar a few yards from our truck wakes us up: it is as if the whole forest growled and could not stop.  John whispers: "Do you think someone got a fishbone stuck in his throat?" and we listen for a long time, mesmerized.  Morning comes with heavy mists and more growls, so I stick my head outside and watch one of the mums dragging a big squid up the tree next to us, with her small cub following.

All day long, we watch the tapestry of woods across the stream, a diorama alive with bears.  One pokes his nose out of the green foliage, takes a deep sniff, and disappears.  Another enters the creek, a fuzzy black shape parting shimmering reflections. A small but aggressive mum feeds on a huge Chinook she catches in the shallows, and then leads her spring cub into the creek.  The baby catches another salmon by the tail and looks perplexed: what do I do now?

The mother does not assist, and the cub loses the slippery fish, lunges to grab it -- again by the tail --  and then drags it up a steep slippery chute all bears use to walk above the falls. The big fish slams against the cub's chest and short legs, the little bear loses his balance, and the salmon slides to the bottom of the chute. The cub tumbles down and grabs it again by the tail, but this time he figures it out: he climbs backwards up the steep slope, dragging his pray.

Toward evening, I see the pair again: the female climbs the boardwalk and strides toward me, while the cub waits. She is bold and not afraid, not predatory but definitely preemptive, and seems to consider the boardwalk her space and not mine.  I am alone -- John is on the beach, watching small waves in many shades of gray -- and realize I cannot climb the cyclone fence on my left, slide down huge mossy boulders to the creek on my right, or ignore the fact that a quick retreat to the falls -- and then, what? -- is not possible.  So I walk toward her, growling in a low voice: get back, get back, NO! NO! NO! and she gives me a look of disapproval and retreats.

And the rain? There is Richard, the manager of the hatchery, and Larry, a photographer who just retired from CBC, and Jean, who works with the fish as well. They assure me a real deluge of several inches is coming any time now, and then I will be in true bear heaven. The rains come one evening in wet sheets and drumming waves which last for three days, and all the Chinooks and Cohos finally swim up to the falls.  The hatchery workers come out in force, fill their dipnets with wiggling fish, and after removing their eggs and milk drop the bodies on the grass, a great smorgasboard of protein and fat. But the bears are no longer hungry: they could not wait, and in the last few days found enough fish in the shallow creek. 

They take trial runs toward thrashing salmon still entering the current but soon stop and walk away.  I watch their warmly furred bodies disappearing in the forest and see they need to rest. We need a change of pace, too.  Our camper is leaking, staining sleeping bags with wet rivulets.  It is time to start our trek south, to some warmer and drier places. Yet after days spent in the green light of the stream reflecting dark animals, boiling clouds and the shimmering salmon, something changes, and Pablo Neruda's words come:

I walked around as you do, investigating
the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

©Yva Momatiuk

lynx

We are back in Alaska, falling silly in love with animals we meet.

First, there are red foxes, three kits as bright as new flames, tumbling across the road on Denali's Polychrome Pass at daybreak.  It turns out the things you can do with a roadside boulder are many. You can jump on it and play the king of the castle, while another two foxes try to pull you down.  You can all hide your heads behind it, so only three butts and three enormously bushy tails stick out, and stand like this for a while.  You can run around the boulder one way, and then the other way, very fast.  You can stop near it and pant, and then you can jump back and forth.  Forgetting the boulder, you can run up the trail and stand together with shoulders touching and turn your heads in the same direction, so the bunched up faces look like a big red artichoke with fox ears for petals.

Not even a quarter of a mile down the road from the fox artichoke, there are four wolves, both parents and their two big pups, sitting on top of a small hill.  As we watch, they occasionally produce a gentle communal howl, nothing serious, just a little morning song with dark noses lifted high and furry throats vibrating. After the last song they sneak away so smoothly we hardly notice their departure.

There are also freshly fledged golden eagle chicks playing high in the wind, and northern harrier hawks flying and diving in search of Denali's voles and mice and other tasty snacks, and a trumpeter swan taking off from a small tundra pond, his huge snowy wings doing the heavy lifting.

There are partridgeberries and blueberries and a long afternoon sleep in the tundra under the warm sun, with our arms entwined.

Last night we arrived at the campground in Denali after sleeping in the high country gravel pit, and learned there was a family of lynx hunting in the nearby woods.

John thought we should just go and see them. I insisted we needed at least one camera. He maintained that walking camera-free guaranteed a good sighting. After some to and fro and many associated and not always helpful remarks, I grabbed my camera from the truck and off we went. It was getting dark, the time when every river corridor in Alaska becomes a natural animal highway, so we kept our eyes peeled for grizzlies and anything else that moved.

It did not take long before John whispered: there is a lynx!  but later told me that at first he thought it was a big snowshoe hare with enormous hunches: same color, same stillness in the woods. The big cat sat on his rump in a mossy patch, straight and tall like a Great Dane, ignoring us. Then he bounded silently on his huge soft paws into the thicket, flushing out several jays which scattered loudly: it looked more like a "here I go" kind of romp than a real hunt.  I looked through the viewfinder but my camera was defunct: I forgot I already took my digital card out, and this is like pulling all books out of a library -- there was nothing to read.

Miraculously, the lynx took a beeline back to the campground.  We followed at the respectful distance, grabbed my card and another camera, and just as well since another lynx appeared.  John and his lynx went to a meadow, while I tried to keep up with my cat who preferred the thickest of thickets, and after some scrambling among the trees we photographed our moving felines until they disappeared like fuzzy ghosts into the night. After we looked at the images later that evening we felt the joy again: two graceful, big-footed, black-ear-tipped cats, melting into the black spruce forest.  I do not know how my freshly mended leg carried me over ravines, mossy brooks and lumpy forest floor in semi-darkness, but it did. And I am not sure if I ended up dreaming about lynx, but it was a dream of quiet alertness, full of bouncy and exuberant life.  

©Yva Momatiuk