The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (49 page)

There's green water in the distance. We head toward it instinctively, kicking up ash like postapocalyptic pilgrims.

After the 1931 eruption, the Glacier Priest had damned Aniakchak as the pit of Hades. The intervening years have softened the place slightly, rinsing off the heaviest soot and endowing it with a flinty beauty. Call it desolation sublime. We hike past walls candy-striped in sherbet pinks and reds. A caribou prances by, a sole welcoming host. In the middle of the crater, we tramp past the huge cone of 3,350-foot Vent Mountain—“a volcano within a volcano!” Hubbard had exclaimed upon first seeing it—looking sullen with its burned top. In the distance, glaciers cling to the shadier walls.

Then there's Surprise Lake, the crater's psychedelic gem, which glows the unreal green of Imodium A-D, thanks to suspended volcanic particles in the water. The specially evolved sockeye salmon that spawn here are essentially raised on soda water. “It's like nothing I've ever seen in Alaska, that's for sure,” Dan says that evening after we make camp in a sheltered elbow along the lake and tuck into his company's reindeer rotini.

The next morning, wearing only daypacks, we explore the crater's oddness. It's like taking a walking tour of our dyspeptic planet. We cross electric green moss and dunes of black sand so full of iron it sticks to the magnet on the chest strap of Gabe's CamelBak. We hoof across otherworldly plains of dust staged with small rocks, where I'm pretty sure NASA faked the Mars rover landing. We peer into springs bubbling with a witchy brew of ferric browns and pumpkin oranges. I keep thinking of how one early geologist described Aniakchak: a “pleasing weirdness,” he wrote. And all the more pleasing for our aloneness.

Or at least we seemed alone. “Now that's a big bear right there. That's a coastal brown. That's huge,” Dan says, looking down at muddy paw prints along the lake near our campsite. The claws on the front paw print are as long as Swiss Army blades. The rear print swallows my XL hand with inches to spare. “Definitely a ten-footer,” Dan says.

“So, uh, how old do you think those are?” I ask, second-guessing our solitude. I search to see if Pepe is still strapped to Dan's hip.

“At least a few days.” I exhale.

That afternoon, as the guys nap in warm 70-degree sunshine, I tie a fly to the end of my line. Standing atop some of those bear tracks, I'm soon yanking in Dolly Varden trout, their polka dots pink in the yellow sun, from where the Aniakchak River exits the lake. Every few casts, I swivel around to make sure my fly hasn't foul-hooked the 10-footer. Some people prefer meditation to make them feel present; for me, nothing focuses the mind quite like knowing I'm a potential crudité.

From the moment it tumbles out of the crater, the 38-mile Aniakchak River runs south toward the Pacific as if it's late for dinner. It will be our escape route. We'll use our packable Alpacka rafts to float right out of the caldera. At one time the inside of the crater had been filled with a 600-foot-deep lake. That changed about 2,000 years ago, when an earthquake or eruption or massive rock-slide cracked the crater wall. A biblical flood gushed through the gap, with a flow close to the Mississippi's, overwhelming the landscape downstream. Today the designated Wild and Scenic Aniakchak River still charges through that 1,000-plus-foot cleft, called the Gates, as it carries Surprise Lake to the sea.

Yesterday we'd climbed high onto the crater rim to scout our departure.

“Not a lot of volume,” Gabe had said, watching the small river squeeze through the Gates before uncoiling on distant green plains. “Looks like it might be hard to get in a lot of trouble.”

More careful inspection showed garage-sized boulders frothing the green waters. I knew the river dropped 75 feet per mile through here—honest rapids. I also knew that my entire whitewater experience consisted of Mom letting me ride the log flume, twice, at Virginia's Kings Dominion amusement park.

The next morning we wisely portage past the chewing rocks and Class III-plus rapids of the Gates. Downstream, we suit up in ultralight drysuits for a practice run. Dan gives us whitewater kayaking 101. “They're super-agile,” he says of our micro rafts. “They'll bounce off rocks. You'll spin around,” he adds. “You'll be fine.”

For its first third, the Aniakchak is as wide and shallow as a sluice box. This late in summer, it's a fun-house ride of mostly Class II rapids. We bounce downstream for 13 miles of unbroken whitewater, hooting and hollering.

It's comforting to see Pepe riding high on Dan's life jacket. Which reminds me—what should I do if I see a bear standing in the river?

“Enjoy the experience,” Dan says. Then, after a short pause, he flashes a wide grin. “And paddle to the deepest water.”

Later that afternoon, we finally see our first: a honey-colored beauty who quickly bolts deeper into the nearby willows after spotting our odd armada.

The river slows dramatically the second day, as the land palms open into perfect bruin country. The terrain even looks bearlike—humped, alder-furred hills that seem to root around in the underbrush. We find the calm pace of this new land, sometimes dozing off while seated upright in our kayaks, other times tossing pumice stones at one another and watching them float.

As we drift languidly, I remember something Dan told me over lunch before we left Anchorage. “I could grow my business and do stupid touristy shit,” he said, making a sour face. “But the soul of my business is in the wilderness.” He's led 50-some trips in Alaska since founding his company, but these days he personally guides only those, like Aniakchak, that he hasn't done yet. Alaska is too big and too cool, he said, to not keep exploring.

That afternoon, the Pacific Ocean welcomes us with a stiff-arm breeze and an incoming tide. After a short struggle against both, we spy an old cannery cabin refitted by the Park Service above the beach. After five days of so much expansiveness, the confines of four walls and a small space is a relief. Inside, the cabin's logbook records many wild things: Trips of 30-bear sightings. Parties pinned down for days by hurricane winds. Savaged boats. I turn to the most recent entry and count backward. Just 11 visitors so far this year, not including us—and three of them were here for work.

Most visitors to Aniakchak get picked up by floatplane at the cabin after their paddle to the sea. The reason that Dan suggested we keep going on foot is simple: he'd never hiked the rarely trammeled, four-day, 80-mile route along the Pacific to Chignik Lagoon and wanted to do some recon for a possible client trip. Gabe and I were game.

Our trek along the beach is no Tahiti vacation. We spend long days bent under our still-heavy packs. We make decent time cruising never-ending stretches of firm sand and sneaking around barnacled headlands at low tide. Sometimes, though, we're forced upland into thickets of alder that grow as tight as prison bars and slow progress to a heartbreaking quarter-mile per hour. Whenever possible, Dan sniffs out bear trails, centuries-old bruin interstates that are the path of least resistance through the tangle. One is so disturbingly popular that it's trenched 3 feet deeper than the abutting alders.

The miles blur in a fever dream of suffering and spectacle. I remember bald eagles posing atop sea stacks like hood ornaments for the continent. I remember inflating the pack rafts nervously for a 13-mile paddle around a headland on the rolling Pacific, only to be pleasantly distracted by orange-beaked puffins and curious sea lions. I remember Pepe, drawn and ready to shout, after we surprise a chuffing brownie on a kill. And how that bear is the last of 19 we see in 24 hours as we leave the preserve and enter the Alaska Peninsula National Wildlife Refuge.

Mostly what I remember, though, is the feeling of a different rhythm taking hold, not of the wristwatch but of natural places. Each day as we hike, the sun sets a little sooner. We see salmon gather in the bays, sniffing for their home rivers—and see bears come down to the shore, ready to flick their sushi onto the sand. My fancy GPS watch dies; I don't much care. I go days without thinking of e-mail or my iPhone. This is what we want from our Aniakchaks, isn't it? Places that help us shake off the dross and find a surer and more ancient pulse.

Four days after leaving the cabin, on the puddle jumper out of Chignik Lagoon, a familiar green ramp comes into view. From 15,000 feet, it appears as smooth as pool felt. I press my forehead to the window and stare for a long time as the ramp finally climbs higher and higher, until it vanishes in a smother of white clouds. I look up. Gabe and Dan are smiling. For a moment we grin like idiots at one another. Then we press our foreheads against the cold of the Cessna's tiny portholes. Seeing all this, some of our fellow passengers look out their windows, perplexed. If you hadn't been there, it would be easy to think there was nothing worth seeing at all.

PATRICK SYMMES

FROM
Outside

P
EOPLE DRESS LIKE
kings and queens in the capital of Mali, even in the dirt streets on the far side of the river. The women walk down mud lanes wearing immaculate gowns with puffed shoulders, gold detailing, and beadwork. The dudes are natty, too, in safari suits, crisp office-boy outfits, or the grand boubou, the national robing that makes any man walk like a giant. Only the heroic boys everywhere—young teens carrying loads, pushing groceries, directing trucks—go around in recycled jeans and T-shirts. In squalor the people must be regal.

We'd been circling the outskirts of Bamako for an hour, driving in a taxi from street to street, block to block, the confusion more effective than any blindfold. Out here, far from the government compounds and hotel towers of downtown, was the striving Africa, endless rows of two-story cement houses, barbershops, and mobile-phone kiosks. Finally a boy on a motorcycle was sent to fetch us, and we followed him back through the sprawling neighborhood and into a courtyard, where the gate was quickly locked behind us.

Here a man in a red fez escorted me through the cool, dark house to an iron door painted red and freshly reinforced with cement and a strong padlock. It took a while for my eyes to adjust. Boxes. Boxes and boxes. There were 2,400 footlockers in this room.

The air reeked of decaying paper, the acid tang of the back stacks at a forgotten university. The trunks were brightly painted in the Malian style: black, green, and silver, with waving lines and diagonals and dots. They shone even in the deep shade of this cavernous room. Some were as small as suitcases, others large enough to hold a body. They climbed to the ceiling on three sides, with only a narrow passage down the middle.

The man who opened the door to this trove was Abdel Kader Haidara, 44, a round-bellied scholar from the Sahara, with a cloudy left eye and a simple white robe.

“Here,” said Haidara, gesturing for me to advance.

Before me was a vast cache of knowledge pulled literally from the fires of war. These were the famed manuscripts of Timbuktu, the legendary caravan town that had thrived here between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Relics of a sophisticated African trading culture that stretched from Mauritania to Zanzibar, they had emerged in the past decade as one of the great archaeological discoveries of our time, a hidden-in-plain-sight secret. Inside wrappings of rag paper or gazelle leather, scribed onto camel- and goatskin parchments, written on Italian Renaissance paper and even stones, the Timbuktu books were a mountain of literature in a supposedly illiterate part of Africa, the secret history of a continent before Europeans arrived.

And then, in January 2013, they were burned. Jihadi rebels occupying Timbuktu entered the town's great library and set the manuscripts ablaze. The world condemned it as the most despicable act of vandalism since the Taliban dynamited the monumental Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001.

So how could this room exist?

I was having an Indiana Jones moment. I opened a trunk and gently swept my fingers over the tooled-leather bindings and the soft edges of rag paper. I picked out a book and opened it, the pages crackling, the calligraphy stunning after some 500 years of sitting in dark rooms. I found myself stroking the books, inhaling their smell.

I opened cases at random, discovering treasures that I would never be allowed to touch in a museum. The pages were caverned out by millimeter-wide bookworms, some more tunnel than text. I opened another metal trunk and a cloud of dust emerged, the books inside more confetti than pages.

I won't look good in 500 years, either.

The bonfire was the last act in a war that has simmered for decades in the Sahara desert, pitting the nomads who have traditionally controlled northern Mali against its weak national government. It's no wonder you don't know where Mali is: one of the world's 25 poorest countries, this landlocked nation has 7 neighbors and no luck, more than 30 languages, including the French of its colonizers, and its feet in wet West Africa and its head in the arid Arab north; it lies where the Sahara yields to the Sahel, the grassy promise of the tropics. The northerners are mostly Tuareg, the blue-clad tribesmen who've roamed across borders for centuries, recognizing no governments unless paid to do so. (They've rebelled against Mali three times just since the 1990s.) Their version of Islam has long been relaxed and idiosyncratic, allowing relative freedom to women and embracing music, especially the electric guitar. In the 1990s, before things took a harder turn, Tuareg leader Iyad Ag Ghali wrote a song for the biggest rock band in the Sahara.

Timbuktu was known for tolerance as well, and for its love of sensual pleasures like music and tobacco. Founded around
A.D
. 1100 where the Sahara meets the Niger River, it became a trade hub fed by caravans that crossed the desert with salt and books, connected by camel to Córdoba and Constantinople. By the fifteenth century, Timbuktu was home to 100,000 people, with as many as 25,000 scholars crowding its dirt lanes. One urban quarter served as a medieval Xerox machine, lined with scriptoriums where calligraphers churned out handmade copies. Only the rise of European sailing ships pushed it into obscurity.