Free Travelers' Tales Alaska by Bill Sherwonit

Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World, from which is story was excerpted, won the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. Her essays have appeared in a wide variety of magazines and journals.

SUSAN BEEMAN

From Scratch
    The trek to her parents’ old homestead is a ritual return to the bush.
    E VERY A UGUST , I LOAD UP THE CAR WITH SLEEPING BAG , cook stove, food, and tubs for picking blueberries. As I pack, I remember the sound, the tink, tink, tink the first fat berries make when they hit the bottom of the tub and how that sound becomes muffled the fuller it gets, until all the city chatter inside my mind is muffled too, and I’m just there on the mountainside picking quietly.
    Headed north from Anchorage on the Parks Highway, I tune the radio to NPR for Saturday morning’s “Savvy Traveler” and pretend I’m a savvy traveler. Where will I stop? Will I meet locals when I take a break from the wheel, and talk to them about the weather or the fishing or this year’s berry crop? Or will I keep silent and eavesdrop on the old men who wear baseball caps with hunting lodge logos and drink coffee from thick white mugs? What new stories will I bring home? I relax into the road. No need to hurry. The blueberries are getting sweeter every hour, since nights are almost freezing.
    I sing along to Mary Black and Natalie Merchant and Deep Forest through the long stretch of dull road between Willow and the Talkeetna junction, then settle into the silence of the road, the rhythm of driving. Birch trees, still hanging on to green leaves, line the roadside and wave me gently north toward an old family treasure at Byers Lake.
    My parents’ decaying cabin hunkers on one of the hidden knolls above the lake. It’s been falling into itself for years now. At the trailhead, I study the piece of weathered paper taped to the Alaska State Parks sign to find out about the most recent bear sightings. Every year, the paper is taped here, with comments scrawled in pencil or pen. The most recent ones are these:
    8/15, grizzly sow with two cubs by inlet;
    8/17, small blackie in campground;
    8/18, black bear hanging around outhouse, Alder Loop;
    8/20, fresh tracks by old cabin.
    But nothing for the last two days.
    I follow the muddy trail over tree roots into the cool forest of birch and spruce, where mushrooms and mosses grow underfoot and high bush cranberries reach up to glint red in the dappled light, and I think of my parents living here forty-odd years ago, before the highway was punched through. I picture them snowshoeing these woods, Dad wearing wool pants that Mom hemmed to fit him; she setting a failed loaf of brick-heavy bread outside the cabin window for the gray jays and black-capped chickadees to peck. My parents launched their married life here in 1959, snuggled together in a bed frame made of sturdy spruce poles hammered together with spikes and a mattress of pungent boughs laid beneath sleeping bags.
    Trumpeter swans chortle and loons lament on the lake to my right as I walk deeper into the forest. Voices echo acrossthe water from a couple paddling a canoe or someone fishing from the walk-in campground on the far side of the lake, but I can’t hear what they say. Were those high-pitched noises really people, or just gulls crying? I glance behind me. Maybe it was a bear cub.
    A three-hour drive north of Anchorage, Denali State Park is among the most accessible of all Alaskan park-lands, bisected by the Parks Highway (which connects Anchorage and Fairbanks) and bordered on its eastern edge by the Alaska Railroad. Yet many travelers headed north to bigger and better-known Denali National Park speed through “Little Denali” without even realizing the gems it holds. Just off the highway at Mile 147 is Byers Lake, rimmed with spruce-birch forest. Visitors may boat, fish, hike, picnic, or stay in one of two public-use cabins. Loons, beavers, swans, bears, and moose inhabit the lake or its edges and salmon