Paddle 'Til Dark: A Yukon River Journey

by Raimonds Zvirbulis

Overview

This solo wilderness, kayaking journey began many years ago, years before I even knew anything about kayaks and paddling down remote, legendary rivers. Poring over maps of those places revealed very little. The blank spaces spread far and wide. At last, after decades of dreaming, I stood on the shore of Lake Atlin in British Columbia, where the headwaters of the Yukon River are. I stood there and thought about all those hope-filled years and was thrilled at the anticipation of leaving that morning in mid-June. Crossing the expanse of Lake Atlin in a fine mist, I guided the kayak toward Graham Channel, which would take me to Tagish Lake. There I met Jim and Marion Brook at their cabin. After hot coffee and freshly baked cookies, they sent me on my way. They were the first of many people who helped me on my journey. That evening, having found the “perfect” campsite, I inspected the area for bear tracks. Finding none, I started a large campfire before setting up the tent. Supper had been eaten at a previous stop, so there was no cooking where I stayed for the night. This was the procedure I followed every night. It kept animals bigger and hungrier than me from visiting my campsites. As I paddled down the lakes, I stopped at villages such as Tagish, I paddled down Marsh Lake and down dangerous Lake Laberge, and I stopped in historic towns such as Whitehorse and Dawson City. I passed by wrecked and beached steamboats from the gold rush days and finally crossed the US/Canadian line into Alaska. I had paddled through a forest fire so immense that it took a day to pass the flames. The current carried me past Eagle, Circle City, though the Yukon flats (where the river was ten to twenty miles wide); and I crossed the Arctic Circle at Fort Yukon. Then came the small villages of Beaver, Stevens Village, and then the oil pipeline. I paddled on to Rampart, where the fierce head wind nearly drove me back upstream. Next, I passed through Tanana, where I met Emmet Peter, who won the Iditarod long ago, then on to Ruby, Galena, Nulato, and Holy Cross, where Bergie Demientieff served me coffee and gave good advice. Finally, I arrived at Russian Mission, where I ran out of time after fifty-one days and two thousand miles of paddling my kayak. There Harvey Pitka and his wife, Ester, fed me a wonderful dinner before I flew out. As the plane climbed and banked toward Bethel, I knew that I would return one day to finish my kayak trip to the Bering Sea.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781490790794
Publisher:	Trafford Publishing
Publication date:	09/21/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

I was born on September 8, 1942 on a small farm in the south of small country called Latvia. Two years later, shortly after the birth of my younger brother, my parents hitched horses to a wagon, loaded a few possessions, my older brother, my younger brother and myself and fled their homeland, never to return, as the Russian troops descended on Latvia. For the next six years we were moved form one refugee camp to the next. It was at one such camp that my father died in a truck accident leaving my mother to care for the three of us. In 1951 we were sponsored by the members of the Methodist Church in Beatrice, Nebraska. It was in that little town that my older brother saved enough money to buy a small, white plastic radio; the very same one to which I pressed my ear late at night to listen to the adventures of Sgt. Preston and Yukon King, his dog. That is where the dream began, the dream to paddle the Yukon River. And it happened many years later, after I married and had three sons of my own. When they were grown, they couldn't take the trip with me and my wife refused to saying she had no intention of becoming bear bait. Working as a principal at a middle school in Mascoutah, Illinois, I had saved enough vacation days to finally take my kayak trip down the Yukon River. The superintendent agreed to cut me loose for the one summer. That was all I needed and I was on my way.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

IN THE BEGINNING ... (Beatrice)

Alaska and the Yukon!

Listening to Sgt. Preston and to his stout-hearted husky, Yukon King; listening to the radio as they fought the cold and fought the evil-hearted villains to make Dawson and the Yukon Territory safe for those brave men of the untamed north, who toiled and scrabbled to pry the precious yellow metal from the breast of the tundra and the belly of the permafrost; from the rivers and streams that flowed through that dark and ominous land (where only the fit survive); listening, I was transported from my lonely, little town of Beatrice, Nebraska to the Yukon and beyond. Listening, I desperately hoped that someday fantasy would fade into the fog of time and re-emerge as fact and tenuous fiction become rock-hard reality.

That's when I, as a twelve-year old boy, led by my heart, plunged headlong into the allure of the unknown; into the nearly blank places and spaces on maps where the siren names of streams, rivers, and villages called, pleading to be known, to be recognized, intensifying my craving to fill the blank places of my mind. Seeking, seeking first with my mind, knowing that my body would follow someday.

Listening to Sgt. Preston.

Listening, lying on the floor late at night with my ear pressed to the white plastic radio, the wall behind it dimly illuminated by the light of the tubes' faint glow leaking through the perforations of the cardboard back; the Yukon River flowed silently into my consciousness and remained there, dark and cold and far away, murmuring tales of mystery. Running through my mind, the tales flitted and drifted as if they were thoughts of my own creation. Those tales kindled a flame that fed my boyhood late night dreams and fantasies, becoming daydreams that lay dormant but alive. The tiny flame of hope flickered and burned through the storm-buffeted years of my adolescence and through my adulthood. The dormant images lay, waiting, like the spring breakup of the ice-bound Yukon River, until awakened twenty years later by a simple, short advertisement in the National Geographic for a folding kayak.

CHAPTER 2

ICE BOUND (The Kayak)

CURIOSITY, and the sudden crunching sound of thought-bound river-ice breakup, impelled me to grab a pen and send off the completed coupon just to satisfy my curiosity about the kayak. Nothing more you understand; nothing more.

A couple of weeks later, the mailman brought a packet of the most awfully written literature with the goofiest photos I had seen in a long time. One photo that is still etched sharply in my memory showed a ruggedly handsome man carrying two large bags containing the dismantled kayak. He had a grin on his face that looked a lot like a grimace. Slightly in front of him was a girl, prancing along, on the portage or at the put-in, with a real grin on her face. The guy probably had a hernia and a collapsed spinal column by the end of the photo session. The girl was probably still grinning with a sense of relief that she had sustained no bodily damage.

Anyway, I plowed on, through the awful rhetoric and the goofy photos. I plowed on because here was the missing link between the boyhood dreams of my past and the unfulfilled Yukon River dreams of my future. Here at last was a way to get to the many roadless, blank places on the maps. Places to fill in and claim as my own.

Near the end of the pamphlet I finally found the price for the double kayak. The cost, including two double paddles, was about $400 and way beyond what we could afford at that time. But in the short time that it took me to read the pamphlets, I had resolved to make the kayak mine and only needed to figure out a way to save that amount of money as quickly as possible.

Realizing that my wife would frown upon selling one or both of our boys, I hit upon the idea of saving all my spare quarters until I had $400. Saving quarters would not break us, and I would eventually be able to buy the kayak.

I started stashing the quarters and kept at it for almost three years, filling little film canisters with them. When I hit the magic number one day, I hauled them all to the bank and dumped buckets of quarters on the cashier's counter. I traded in those little silver critters for a cashier's check, headed for home and filled out the order form for the kayak.

The color of the kayak?

Why, what else but red? Passion Red to turn the water to steam as I churned down rivers and lakes, sucking up fish and debris in the vortex of the kayak's wake.

Or something like that.

Anyway, I sent both the check and the order form on their way to buy my long awaited passage to a dream.

After an infinitely long wait, probably about three weeks as measured by the marks on my calendar, I received a phone call from a trucking company that my long awaited kayak had finally arrived and that I could pick it up.

It was a hot and humid day in July when I wrestled the two body bag shaped boxes into our van. No time was wasted in getting them home. Since it was too hot to assemble the kayak outside in the blazing sun, I manhandled the boxes out of the van, down the stairs and into the basement where it was much cooler.

The directions said easy assembly ... thirty minutes from box to boat. Right! After about two hours of sweating, struggling, grunting, and directing unpleasant thoughts at the kayak, the manufacturer, and the author of the simple directions, the kayak was finally assembled. I wanted to try it out right away but my wife, Maija, refused to let me open the faucets to flood the basement. I even offered to let her try out the kayak first. For a while I thought that she had lost her hearing. There was just no response to my suggestions and offers. One of my sons proffered the observation that perhaps I was being ignored. Some people can be so obstinate at times!

Shortly after putting my kayak together, the menfolk of the family prepared to drive to the Park Forest library just to see if there were any books about kayaking and places to kayak.

While at the curb, I shouted to Maija to barricade the basement door and stand guard at the top of the stairs with Dan and Ben's bow and arrow; to protect the kayak. As we pulled away from the curb, Maija was left standing in the front doorway with an incredulous look on her face. I assumed that it meant she took her duties seriously.

Onward!

In the library, along with my two sons — the third one not being born yet — I came upon several books about paddling sports — canoeing, kayaking, and rafting.

Some were about the Everglades, some about the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and one was about paddling the Yukon River. That was Yukon Summer by Eugene Cantin. Being fully armed with books, the three of us staggered out to the van and loaded them in, causing the shocks to groan as the van's body descended toward the tires.

Great was my disappointment when we arrived home to find Maija in the garden. Not only did she fail to see the importance of protecting the kayak, she had also failed to barricade the door. What good does it do to repeat those solemn marriage vows about, ".... till death do us part" and "Thou shalt guard the kayak," and then ignore them when the need arises?

After checking the kayak to make sure all was well, that no threads had been cut and no glue had been removed from the seams, I settled in to read my books — leaving Yukon Summer for last, like a delicate dessert, confident that it would be the best of the stack.

When I finally got through that book I was ready to paddle and play in the water with my kayak and kids and Maija. The great adventure was about to begin. I read that book and re-read it and talked about it and the trip with Maija until she had reduced her responses to, "Uh huh, uh huh."

But unfortunately for her, I never noticed.

I decided that one day soon (I guess twenty-two years is soon in a cosmic context) my family and I would paddle the length of the Yukon River, from its source in the glaciated mountains to the Bering Sea. For many years the plan was that Maija, the boys (three of them now), and I would paddle the river together in two kayaks. Then, as time passed and Maija excused herself from the Yukon Trip, I thought surely at least one or more of my sons would make the trip with me. Finally, in 1998 the realization dawned that I would probably be doing the trip by myself if I did it at all. Work and lack of interest on their part at that time kept them from enlisting. On the other hand maybe they shuddered inwardly at the thought of spending the better part of a whole summer confined to extremely close quarters with their old man.

Maija refused to go because she stated quite emphatically (the words still echo in my ears) that she had no interest in becoming a source of protein for bears or a tender feeding station for mosquitoes.

Dan was working desperately on two or three jobs to keep his family intact and above the flood line.

Ben was working his full weeks; seven days of labor where rest was considered the time spent driving to and from work. The perpetual motion kept him just ahead of the people who try to slide their hands into his rather shallow pockets, which certainly don't clink and crinkle with the sound of money.

And Lukas. Lukas was gainfully employed in a full-time, all-consuming search for himself, trying to discover where he lives. Looking for the time and the place and the space where his heart waits with an open door.

Because all three were so intently engrossed with their life's occupations, I came to realize that this trip would be my own continuing journey through life and hopefully, my further spiritual unfoldment. Not only was I going to have to clear the smog of daily life from my eyes and the relentless cacophony of city sounds from my ears. I was going to have to listen for the message; the spiritual message underlying my physical passage down the Yukon River.

CHAPTER 3

CPR (Collect, Patch, Repair)

THE Yukon River! What a mighty river! What a mighty dream! The confluence of the two was drawing ever nearer.

Twenty years later, dreams of the Yukon could not be held back and they spilled furiously over the banks of logic and reason; eroding those banks and bearing them away in bits and pieces of broken debris in the foaming flood.

In late February of 1998, my dear, long-suffering wife and I were talking about places to visit and explore. I once more suggested that we paddle our kayak down the Yukon River. But she was concerned; no, worried, about bears — black bears, brown bears, grizzlies and any other kinds of bears that lay in between. As we talked, Maija did say, in all sincerity, that she was afraid but that I should go, that she did not want to keep me from my Grand Adventure, from tracking and perhaps finding Sgt. Preston, that elusive ghost of my boyhood past who probably still rode the ethereal radio waves of another reality, of a parallel Yukon Wilderness.

As we looked at each other both of us knew that it would mean being separated for nearly two months but neither of us was willing at that time to breach that unpleasant subject for fear of shedding streams of tears. So, we let that pass for the moment and talked instead about equipment, gear, clothing, food and getting there (wherever that might be). My hope was to start where the Yukon River started and end where the river ended.

From the source to the sea.

The shining Bering Sea.

Even though the mouth of the Yukon is a braided delta, it was easy to locate on any map. The source of the river was somewhat more problematic since it was based on scholarly opinion; but, opinion nonetheless.

After reading Eugene Cantin's Yukon Summer, I decided to start my trip from Lake Bennett as he had. But along the way, and only a week or so before leaving on my trip, National Geographic published an issue that featured an article about the Yukon River. In that article, the author declared that the source of the Yukon was a glacier that fed Lake Atlin, in British Columbia. Looking at the map I saw that by starting in Lake Atlin my trip would be much longer, so I immediately decided to start there rather than from Lake Bennett. If bigger is better, then longer, most certainly, must also be better.

Distance was an important factor in determining time, that is, the number of days needed to complete the trip from Lake Atlin to the Bering Sea. Working as a middle school principal (when people found out what I did for a living, they usually thought they understood why I planned such a trip) I had accumulated many days of vacation over several years. I had a total of 51 days for the whole trip. Taking from that three travel days still left me with 48 days on the river. That in turn meant I would have to paddle an average of 46 miles each day to cover all of the 2,300 National Geographic miles.

Logistics, logistics, logistics.

Talking about "longer," as I began to pull my head out of the clouds and started to look at the practical needs of actually pulling off the trip, I discovered that the Yukon River is like a giant rubber band. Its length varied from 1,800 to over 2,300 miles depending on the source of information. That's a difference of 500 miles! Now, in the global scheme of things 500 miles is of no consequence, but when that distance is superimposed on a map of the continental United States, it is almost equal to the distance between St. Louis and Atlanta. What a margin of error! That distance becomes quite significant when it involves paddling a kayak loaded with camping gear, food, water and a soft, citified body.

To improve my chances of having a safe and successful trip, I settled on the longest estimated distance thinking that it would be better to have "stuff," such as money and supplies, left over at the end of the trip, rather than running out of things and being forced to end the trip early. I settled on the 2,300 mile distance because it was closest to the Geographic distance, thinking that if anyone knew the correct distance, surely they would.

In the early part of January, I began to prepare in earnest for the Yukon River trip. One of the first things that I did was write down everything that I thought I would need for the trip — my list of essentials. Once the list was well on its way, I looked for and bought a few necessary items of clothing.

My next concern was the kayak. By the time I got to it, March had arrived. My day job was just taking up too much of my time.

The kayak had been stored in its bags for two years. Big mistake. I should have stored the kayak in its assembled form. The kayak is made of a wood and aluminum frame that fits into a rubberized fabric skin, and all three had deteriorated with use and time. I wondered how the fabric stitching had held up over the years.

I knew that the skin had probably shrunk somewhat, so I was prepared to spend some time forcing the wooden framework into the kayak skin. When I got to the point of actually putting the frame into the skin, I discovered that the shrinkage had been much greater than I had expected.

It was extreme.

The foot-wide wooden floor would not unfold flat, but rose above the sides of the kayak opening like the top of a triangle. To force it down gradually and stretch the skin slowly, I placed weights on the pyramided floor.

Slowly, over a period of about a week, the weight caused the floor to lie flat, thus gradually stretching the skin enough to force the frame into the skin without tearing or breaking anything. The stitching held firmly. Next, I waterproofed the stitches and made a few more minor repairs.

Pulling the skin tightly to the crosspieces took a couple of weeks because the skin refused to stretch easily from the sides toward the center of the cockpit. I let the kayak sit in the garage as I gradually tightened the screws. The kayak screamed in protest. I laughed insanely in the dark recesses of the garage.

At the end of about three weeks, everything was repaired, the seams sealed, and the scrapes and cuts on the skin were filled in with waterproof caulk. The kayak remained fully assembled until June 16, two days before I left for Juneau.

One of the other items I knew that I would need was a sprayskirt for the kayak. The cockpit was quite large since it was a two-person kayak. Without a sprayskirt, a great deal of water would collect in the kayak if it rained (was there any doubt about rain?) or if the water became too rough on the lakes and on the river.

So, I turned to the resident, expert seamstress, Maija, knowing that if I were able to explain to her what was needed; she would be able to sew the sprayskirt to my specifications. Maija gladly agreed to sew the sprayskirt because she apparently wanted me to return to her without mishap and without the weather and water turning the kayak into a red submarine.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Paddle 'Til Dark"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Raimonds Zvirbulis.
Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

IN THE BEGINNING ... (Beatrice), 3,
ICE BOUND (The Kayak), 6,
CPR (Collect, Patch, Repair), 10,
GETTING THERE (St Louis to Atlin), 18,
STRING OF PEARLS (The Lakes), 38,
ROLLING ON THE RIVER (Quest for Sgt Preston — Lower Laberge to Dawson City), 98,
FIRE AND WATER (Dawson City to Eagle Village), 132,
SHORT TRIP HOME (Eagle, Circle, And The Pipeline), 150,
INTO THE MAELSTROM (Tanana Bound), 211,
PEACE REGAINED (Tanana to Holy Cross), 229,
SUNSET AND SUNRISE (Holy Cross To Russian Mission), 266,
HARVEY (The Good Samaritan As Beachcomber), 278,
EPILOGUE (Flight of Fancy), 287,
Index, 289,