Jumat, 17 April 2015
tanana river
On July 4th, a friend and I canoed down the Tanana River from Fairbanks to Nenana. We left at 3 in the afternoon and paddled into the village at midnight. It was almost dark. The air smelled like fireworks smoke and fish guts. People were hanging out on a little sand beach, and a woman was throwing a stick to a dog who bounded into the river after it like a deer, which cracked me and Ian up after nine hours of paddling and not much food. A few guys were moving around long wooden poles they were using to make a fish wheel, and across the bank across from town, people were lighting off fireworks.
The trip is about 60 river miles. Our hours in the boat drifted by without much sense of time or place, especially for me, a first-timer on the river. The water was big and tan, completely saturated with glacial silt, the grains of which we could here like sandpaper against the side of my plastic boat. Where channels came together, currents swept under us and threatened to spin the boat around. At one side cut, where a near-cliff of light brown dirt calved into the river, there were veritable whirlpools.
The river banks are a mix of low shrubs, willow, aspen, birch, balsam poplar, and white and black spruce, depending on how recently the land was burned or carved into by the river. The river bends and widens, breaks into channels, and nearly loops back on itself at times, constantly changing.
Toward Fairbanks, there were river boats and picnickers camped on sandbars. Further downriver, we watched an airboat crank its giant fan and launch off a mudflat and up the river with mind-boggling inefficiency, bending branches and willows like a hurricane. After that, we saw few boats and few people until we neared Nenana, when a race boat and one or two others passed going upstream.
Theres signs of life, like little marks on trees for fish camps, Im guessing, and a sign for Skinny Dicks, but mostly the river is wild. Ian likened it to a highway -- its fairly well traveled, and you cant really get lost -- but I mostly saw it like a big, remote river. Yeah, we were never more than 10 miles from the road, but thats a days hike through thick brush and swamps, and we were a good 30 river miles from anything at one point.
So maybe thats the lesson -- what would be wilderness anywhere else is a highway in Alaska.
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