Wilderness; A Journal Of Quiet Adventure In Alaska

MP3 Audio CD. Wilderness; A Journal Of Quiet Adventure In Alaska

CHAPTER I

DISCOVERY


We must have been rowing for an hour across that seeming mile-wide
stretch of water.

The air is so clear in the North that one new to it is lost in the
crowding of great heights and spaces. Distant peaks had risen over the
lower mountains of the shore astern. Steep spruce-clad slopes
confronted us. All around was the wilderness, a no-man's-land of
mountains or of cragged islands, and southward the wide, the
limitless, Pacific Ocean.

A calm, blue summer's day,--and on we rowed upon our search. Somewhere
there must stand awaiting us, as we had pictured it, a little
forgotten cabin, one that some prospector or fisherman had built; the
cabin, the grove, the sheltered beach, the spring or stream of fresh,
cold water,--we could have drawn it even to the view that it must
overlook, the sea, and mountains, and the glorious West. We came to
this new land, a boy and a man, entirely on a dreamer's search; having
had vision of a Northern Paradise, we came to find it.

With less faith it might have seemed to us a hopeless thing exploring
the unknown for what you've only dreamed was there. Doubt never
crossed our minds. To sail uncharted waters and follow virgin
shores--what a life for men! As the new coast unfolds itself the
imagination leaps into full vision of the human drama that there is
immanent. The grandeur of the ocean cliff is terrible with threat of
shipwreck. To that high ledge the wave may lift you; there, where that
storm-dwarfed spruce has found a hold for half a century, you perhaps
could cling. A hundred times a day you think of death or of escaping
it by might and courage. Then at the first softening of the coast
toward a cove or inlet you imagine all the mild beau