The Genius Loci Tour

I am sitting on the spongy ground, leaning against my backpack in the coolness of the Old Man’s shadow. The Old Man is a massive granite bulge in Alaska, the highest bulge in North America. Native Athabaskans call him Denali, the great one--a far better name than Mount McKinley.

It is July, mid-afternoon, and my tent is four or five miles behind me. I am the only human being in sight.

I came to Alaska last week at the invitation of a filmmaker who was shooting footage of the Porcupine Caribou herd migration. Unfortunately, his employer abruptly called him home the day before I arrived on the Arctic Circle, leaving me to search for the caribou on my own. Eight hundred dollars spent slingshotting in and out of, and miraculously not into, the peaks of the Brooks Range, stiff with fear in a rattletrap bush plane that moaned with every stomach-rolling maneuver, yielded not a single caribou. There are a hundred and fifty thousand of them out here somewhere, filling their four-chambered bellies with sweet moss and mushrooms as they amble toward Prudhoe Bay.

Tomorrow I fly home, but not without good memories. After driving the Alaska HIghway from top to bottom, I came here to Denali. Near Wonder Lake, at the end of the dirt highway carved through the wild interior, I pitched my tent. One day of hiking brought me within snorting distance of a bull moose. Another day, I crawled out of heavy brush to find myself ten yards from a fat grizzly bear stuffing herself with blueberries. In neither case was there any question about who would retreat.

And now I am leaning against my backpack on the Alaskan tundra, with notebook and pen in hand as I consider what to write. Soon the quick patter of little feet grows out of the vast silence. Off to my right, her brown fur glinting like copper shavings, an Arctic fox comes prancing toward me with a ground squirrel clamped between her jaws.

I keep waiting for her to notice me, freeze, and dart away. Instead she alters her course so as to pass even closer. She even gives me a nod as she passes, and jerks her chin up as if to say, “See what I got here? We’ll eat good tonight!”

The entire trip was worth this moment. Here, I think, is the spirit of Denali, the genus loci. “The great thing,” Lawrence Durrell wrote, “is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open…. It is to be had for the feeling, this mysterious sense of rapport…. If you just get as still as a needle, you’ll be there.”

Finally, I'm there.