Letter from Stephens Passage

Stephens Passage is a long stretch of dark water filling the gap between mountain ranges in Southeast Alaska. The water is deadly cold and rich with sea life. Fog and low clouds usually hang in the Passage, which is an arm of the Pacific. Fiords with emerald rivers pour in and it is lined with conifers, blue stone and rocky hollows. It rains often. It is indescribably beautiful.

John Muir came here in 1879 gathering evidence demonstrating that glaciers created a host of North American landforms. I came in 1998 looking for something different. The flight from Seattle to Juneau was clear, the cordillera of British Columbia stark and sharp below. It alternated between white snowfield and gray rock, dark forest and bright green coast. Everywhere below was the hand of man, even far beyond the pale of civilization, hundreds of miles north of Vancouver or any other city. Dirt roads hung the shorelines. Powerlines angle though forests. Clearcuts leave ugly scars in the middle of endless miles of wilderness. Shocking when you think it takes almost 10,000 years to build six inches of soil on those rocky barrens, and clearcut, the ground washes away in minutes. Those scars will be there a long time.

Unlike Muir, I don't have a mystic affinity for the wilderness. I just wanted there to be a place untouched by anyone. A wild place where there were no people. But the truth of the matter is that at 38,000 feet, there are people everywhere.

Not so at 3800 feet. The next day Tonia and I hiked Mt. Roberts, 3800 feet above the Gastineau Channel and the Passage. It's a day hike out of Juneau and we did it in the best weather, clear, warm and pure. There was no one above 2000 feet and the Mt. Roberts Tram, other than a few hikers who disappeared in the vastness of the mountain. From the summit you could see hundreds of miles, into Glacier Bay National Park and the Fairweather Mountains, into Canada and the Coast Mountains, thousands of acres of green slopes and glittering fiords, glaciers smothering rock, rock thrusting through ice, alpine grass dappled with summer blooms. And in that view, with Juneau hidden beneath the ridges, no powerlines, pavement, concrete, smoke, noise, or manifestation of people. The air was crisp. I breathed deeply.

Circumstances like those on Mt. Roberts prompt some of the most lyrical passages in Muir's account of his 1879 trip, Travels in Alaska. Witnessing dawn breaking over the Fairweather Mountains, Muir wrote of the "celestial fire" reflected in the glacial ice, "glowing from the heart like molten metal fresh from a furnace":

          The white, rayless light of morning …had always seemed to me the most 
          telling of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. But here the mountains 
          themselves were made divine, and declared His glory in terms still more 
          impressive.

Science called Muir to the wilderness and he found Religion. The presence of God in nature is a constant theme in his travelogue, not surprising given the conditions then and now found in Alaska, or given Muir's background. He was raised a Campbellite, an obscure 19th century sect committed to Biblical inerrancy and the resurrection of fundamentalist Calvinism. Muir rejected his father's faith, but he could never abandon a certain Calvinist mindset, everywhere evident in the memoir: God is manifest in all things and the order of the world is divine and true faith sustains the believer against the trials of life. And Travels in Alaska, its science not withstanding, is about baptism by sunshine and sermons in stone.

My time in the Passage was not nearly as transcendent. I don't have Muir's background and I live in a time where the romanticism he espoused has become sentimental schlock. I hike because it is good exercise and I need a break from my 640-by-480-pixel work discipline. But somewhere in my experience is something of the Calvinism in which Muir was invested. I know this because in Alaska I realized what I was looking for in the wilderness: a sign.

In Calvinism not only is God's order absolute and just, but Man's wickedness despoils that order, contravenes it, turns it to evil. Because God is forgiving he warns Man away from wickedness with omens and portents, and if pride prevents Man from heeding these portents, punishment follows, swift and sure.

You'd have to be a willful fool to ignore the signs of human wickedness these days. Evil is by human hand, present now and corrupting the earth. Don't misunderstand me: I am not a Calvinist, not religious, not a practitioner of any faith. But somewhere in my background, deeply embedded, is a belief in the order of the world, and a belief that if that order is violated, punishment follows. And given the degree of cupidity and stupidity in our time, it is hard for me to imagine that a disaster of our own making is not around the corner. Worldwide depression, nuclear war, biological holocaust, ecological distaster-all are likely. The world is not a good place and we are responsible, and I believe all of this, to some extent. It was hidden from me, of course, like every unwanted truth is. In Stephens Passage I realized: Muir looked for God's grace in the wilderness; I look for his wrath.

I look for God's wrath in the brown horizon I see almost always now in airplanes, and in the dull haze that drapes our cities. I look for it in the disappearance of frogs. In the advancing ranks of cancer. In famines in Africa, and wars on the Asian subcontinent. In the diminished stocks of salmon and the rarity of birds. In floods of spring, the scorching winds of summer, the wildfires of a dry fall, and the warm winter, marked by El Nino and storms. In our reckless depredation of the environment and the subsidized lies of corporate intellectuals rationalizing it away.

Our grotesque embrace of global capitalism has delivered us a world where every human value is commoditized and emptied of meaning and we cannot judge the worth of a thing enough to cherish it. Where all things are obsolete and all people disposable and we have taken the ugly, vicious core of our historic experience and made it the centerpiece of our ambitions. It is madness and loathsome and at 38,000 feet over Alaska I was looking for a place without people because that would convince me there was still balance in the world, that technology and ignorant pride had not penetrated every secret place on the map. But it has. Mankind owns the globe now, and we are ruining it. And God, don't forgive us.

I went down the Stephens Passage in a chartered boat preoccupied with these opposites: God and nature who had made the world's ecology pristine and savage, a thing of worth in and of itself; and Mankind and technology who had made of the world's ecology, valuable and undiscovered, a thing to be used and exploited. I was sure the payback would be a wilderness packed with mines and tailings and powerlines and streaks of cyanide in the rivers, empty of life and sullen. I knew full well that such progress over the raw and rugged places in the world was a harbinger of an ecological holocaust, and that death climbs up the foodchain, and that in the empty Alaska wilderness, devoid of the sound of birds, I would hear God's vengeance and the trumpets of the Apocalypse.

Still, God made humanity in his image and despite our astonishing stupidity, he granted us reason, the capacity to see the error of our ways, the ingenuity to admit our failings and the creativity to correct them. This fact has plagued Calvinism and the Calvinist mindset since the days of the Geneva synods and Christian Institutes. Reconciling the abject depravity of people to their capacity for good works was impossible for historic Calvinism, and the history of American religion is story of the resolution of that tension in favor of a view that embraces the essential reasonableness of people, and downplays our capacity for ignorance and evil. In Muir's writings that tension is evident in his ambivalence towards the Indians, at once the most reasonable and divine of God's people because the closest to nature, and at the same time the most savage and evil, at least in the judgment of a "civilized" Christian gentleman.

And in truth, while I was expect Alaska to be degraded, stripped by people of pure and wild things, I was hoping that it wasn't so; that the land was still pristine, that people had come to their good senses and embraced the beauty and balance of the land that was, and had devoted themselves to leaving it that way. As though if the wilderness remains, we on this delicate planet remain somehow in balance, just good enough to avoid God's wrath via an environmental holocaust.

This was my secret resolution: If Alaska were degraded and emptied of life that would be another sign of our impending doom; if in full bloom and fulsome with fauna, a sign of our capacity to transcend our greed and lust and embrace the better angels of our nature.

This, in Stephens Passage, on a chilly day, with low-hanging fog, is what I saw: pods of Orca knifing through brackish inlets; humpback whales, their flukes high, plunging towards the ocean floor; clear water gushing from crevasses; a brown bear with three cubs scouring the beaches for salmon remains; blue glaciers calving into bays with rifle-shot thunder; harbor seal; bald eagles; hundreds of birds, their calls filling the air. The wilderness almost inviolate.

Of course, it could mean nothing, and they will dredge Stephens Passage next year, and set a Zinc mines upon the glaciers, and every portent that trends away from the apocalypse is a distraction, signifying nothing. My Alaskan experience may mean that nothing, regardless, can save us. But in the world of omens, this is my read:

There are still wild places on the planet. Thank God.