Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0100/01002.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 17KB | 302 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01002}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Glacier Bay
The Only Constant Is Change}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Kirk, Ruth}
$Affiliation{National Park Service;U.S. Department Of The Interior}
$Subject{bay
snow
water
cabin
sea
time
found
now
whale
whales}
$Date{1983}
$Log{}
Title:       Glacier Bay
Book:        Part II: Of Time And Ice
Author:      Kirk, Ruth
Affiliation: National Park Service;U.S. Department Of The Interior
Date:        1983

The Only Constant Is Change

Winter

     I came to Glacier Bay in late January once.  Perhaps that would be the
ideal time for anyone's first trip here.  White flakes from white clouds
muffle the world.  Low peaks seem handsomely tall compared with summer when
they're only patched with snow.  Spruce and hemlock rim the lower bay as
giant, white feather plumes.  Upbay, pan ice skims the water.  It gives way
with a quiet rasp as your boat cuts through and sends small pieces skittering
across the unbroken ice.

     The white heads of bald eagles, so conspicuous at other seasons, in
winter become camouflage.  They look like additional lumps of snow caught on
high branches where the birds perch.  Occasional blood spots and scattered
feathers dot the frozen sea, left from seabirds that became eagle dinners.
Cormorants fly low, wings whirring as though the birds were trying to catch up
to their own heads.  The goldeneye ducks, old-squaws, and murres that have
arrived for the winter continually up-end themselves to feed beneath the
surface.  Seals rise to stare with brown eyes incredibly soft.  The seals in
winter number only about half the bay's summer population and most now stay
away from the ice.  Their probable diet is fish, shrimp, and crabs.

     That January I traveled up-bay aboard the National Park Service supply
boat Nunatak, joining a group led by Greg Streveler, to make a winter wildlife
census in Adams Inlet.  It didn't take long to begin the count.  As we motored
ashore from Nunatak the first morning, a river otter streaked through slabs of
pan ice that lay on the low-tide shore like oversized almond bark candy.
Above the jumbled slabs we found three crab shells, apparently the otter's
dinner midden.  Rock sandpipers made a close-packed cluster of 80 to 90 black
dots where a river emptied into the inlet.  While strapping on skis, I noticed
a midge the size and form of a mosquito.  It was tiptoeing across the snow,
wings held straight up over its back.  Such insects are suited to winter
because they spend most of their lives as aquatic larvae and need only a day
or so out of water to mate and lay eggs and die.  For that bit of time they
can cope with almost any weather.  Spiders also stalked the snow as we set
off.  They apparently have a built-in antifreeze to pump through their veins.
Soon after striding out on our skis we heard the birdlike trill of a red
squirrel, a species that arrived in the park via Endicott Gap only within the
last decade or two.

     Our plan was to check for animal tracks along beaches, creeks, and at the
junctions between slopes and adjoining flats, chief winter routes of animals.
Fresh snow skimmed a firm crust.  Mountains rimmed a white world.  Brown
traceries of alder and cottonwood branches rose out of snow perhaps 40
Centimeters (16 inches) deep.

     Wolverine tracks laced the edge of a thicket - hiding place for ptarmigan
- and farther on we spotted the wolverine loping along the beach.  Wolf tracks
were frequent.  We found one shallow depression in the snow where a lone wolf
had rested, protected from wind by a low bank.  Greg guessed it came a long
distance or it wouldn't have lain down.  This wasn't a bedding ground because
no urine yellowed the snow.  Out on the flat three sets of tracks overlapped
and braided as they followed the river bank.  Turning onto a high moraine,
they vanished in the alder.  All the wolf scat we found held mountain goat
hair.

     Seven winters before, Greg counted more than 200 goats in the Adams Inlet
area.  We saw none.  Summer cruise ship passengers back then almost always saw
them as white dots in alpine meadows, particularly on Mount Wright. Not so
now.  Two successive winters of deep snow brought trouble for the animals.
Browse was buried.  Even beach salt grass and sedge were covered. Getting
around was equally troublesome, because sharp hoofs and deep snow make a poor
combination.

     Wolves found the severe conditions less crucially difficult.  Their broad
feet upholstered with stiff hair facilitate snow travel.  And potential food
for the wolves was ample that winter because the mountain goats were
conveniently forced down to the shore.  Predators don't, as biologists
formerly believed, necessarily rely exclusively on weak animals.  In this case
the wolves might take animals in any state of health, eating only choice parts
- there's more where that came from.  Predator numbers go up; prey numbers
drop.  Then the pendulum swings and predator numbers drop, maintaining balance
over time.  Populations and species seem to be what matter, not individuals.

Aboard Ginjur

     My journal from the research boat Ginjur notes that "Charles Jurasz
greeted Austin Post saying, "You're the bottom man and I'm the whale man."
Biologist and glaciologist then disappeared into the wheelhouse to pencil
notations onto marine charts."  The Ginjur is a converted 15-meter (50-foot)
Navy ship-to-shore transport aboard which biologist-owner Chuck Jurasz is
researching acoustics, which is why he wanted Growler's depth information for
Glacier Bay's underwater basins.  Additional work will show details: where is
the bottom soft and sound-absorbing and where does bare bedrock reflect sound
back into the water, perhaps echoing it, or - for a whale - accentuating it
painfully?

     Beyond Ginjur's fantail I watched chunky little murrelets flip themselves
below the surface, then bob back up, each with a silver fish dangling from its
bill.  Humpback whales also feed on these capelin: 45-ton monarchs swallowing
84-gram (3-ounce) prey.  Humpbacks sometimes lunge to the surface with their
mouths agape, scooping in a ton of water and capelin or krill, and opening out
their accordian-pleated undersides.  Powerful throat muscles then force the
water through curtains of baleen, catching prey as though in a sieve.  The
pleats fold shut.

     Chuck has seen three whales working together, rising with the dark sides
of their flippers uppermost, only to suddenly turn them over, flashing the
white undersides.  Perhaps the light color of the humpbacks' extraordinary
flippers, far longer than those of any other whale, helps to concentrate the
feed.  He has also watched the whales flick their great tails forward,
whooshing the chowderlike water toward their open mouths.  Chuck has seen this
scores of times but - and this he emphasizes - only by two individuals:
Garfunkle and Gertrude.

     "Garf is innovative," says Chuck, who recognizes these individuals by the
distinctive color patterns of flippers and flukes.  "Garf's always coming up
with something the other whales aren't doing.  He started feeding this way one
summer off Johns Hopkins and the next year, while following him, Gertrude
began doing it too."

     Bubble-net feeding?  Chuck first noted this in 1968.  He saw bubbles
rising in a ring where he knew a submerged whale was.  "Hey, it's letting out
air underwater instead of at the surface," he thought.  Then he saw the water
come alive with herring and the whale rising through the fish, jaws open.  The
whale was working like men do in a hatchery, using bubbles to shunt fish to
where they're wanted.  The bubble net nicely concentrated the capelin in
position to swallow!  All previous whale records - s.f.a.k. - mention this
feeding method only once.  This is in a French report written years ago by a
Norwegian whaler in the Antarctic.

     The paucity of written records is a problem.  "We know about whales from
chasing and killing them," Chuck explains, "You can read a lot about anatomy
and the measurements taken from carcasses.  But until very recently you
couldn't read much about the living animals.  What we're getting aboard Ginjur
is basic data on how humpbacks feed in Alaska: what they go after, how they
Capture it, and where they have to go to find it.

     From the late 1960's to '70's, 20 to 24 humpbacks summered in Glacier
Bay.  But in 1978 and continuing into the '80's, fewer whales seem to have
come.  Why? Despite research, nobody knows.

     Investigators find that an enormous quantity of humpback food is
available in Glacier Bay waters, but it quite likely varies at times.  Also,
park waters may be somewhat noisier than those nearby.

     Noise from ship engines and small boat motors seems more noticeable here
than nearby, and vessel traffic here is greater.

     Understanding has barely begun.  Consequently, park regulations require
staying at least 400 meters (0.25 mile) away from whales; and courses for
water travel may at times be restricted.  Today's humpback whales have few
havens.  Extinction threatens - and extinction lasts forever.

     Disrupted balances inevitably domino.  Take sea otters as an example,
Laperouse, remarking on their beauty and abundance along Glacier Bay's outer
Coast, estimated that a Lituya Bay factory could take 10,000 skins per year
from the coast.  Only a few years after Laperouse's visit, a Russian vessel
arrived bringing Aleut hunters and 450 of their bidarkas, fleet skin boats
much like Eskimo kayaks.  Within mere days, men stowed 1,800 sea otter skins
into the ship's hold.  Most were from the Aleuts' kills, but many were from
trade with resident Tlingits.  Lituya Bay was a prime sea otter hunting
ground.

     Sea otters were killed off along this coast by the dawn of the 20th
century, and the effects of such a loss are only now beginning to be
understood.  The entire marine community is involved, not necessarily
negatively but with repercussions of implicit change.  Sea otters feed on sea
urchins, which in turn feed on kelp.  Eliminate the otters and urchins
increase, eating far more kelp.  A plethora of plants and animals next are
affected, because kelp beds are the great near-shore nurseries of many ocean
species.  Eventually seabirds, eagles, seals, bears, and even people are bound
to feel the change.

Dundas Bay, Aboard Taku

     Rain during the night.  Taku bobbed considerably, especially at the turn
of the tide.  Yesterday we went ashore to explore, wearing every bit of rain
gear we possess.  Today will be the same.  Checking the long abandoned salmon
cannery here in Dundas Bay, we found the pilings deeply worn at the base,
etched by saltwater and time.  Some have fallen.  Those still standing look
like trees gnawed by a beaver.  Remarkably, two big brick-walled boilers
remain in place on the pilings, though they surely can't stay perched much
longer.  Nearby, timbers mark what once was a shipway, and a wrecked barge
lies stranded at the hightide line.

     Near the forest edge is a cabin with a sign reading "Government
Property."  The door is unlocked but a note asks you to close the cabin
carefully when leaving, to keep out mice.  Inside, there's an oil-barrel stove
and a pencilled invitation to "Have a warm time."  Old magazines include Quest
with an article on whale watching promoted on the cover but missing inside. A
guest log requests "Please sign in," but names from the last five years take
up less than a page.  Earlier pages have been torn out.  A note addressed
"Dear Nunatak" and dated three years ago asks that the cabin's mattress be
taken to Bartlett Cove.  The mattress still is here.

     Dave Bohn writes in Glacier Bay, The Land and The Silence, that this
cannery started in 1898.  Sixty-one men worked here, half of them Chinese, the
others Caucasian and Tlingit fishermen who supplied salmon.  A 1912 photo
shows about 40 houses along the beach north of the cabin.  Now none is
discernible.

     From our anchorage we have two objectives ashore: Buck Harbeson's place
and the old Tlingit cemetery up the river.  Harbeson, a prospector, died here
in 1964 alone in his cabin.  He had come 33 years earlier to work on Doc
Silvers' claim.  Silvers had arrived with his wife in 1928.  The rain and the
silence of our few days in Dundas Bay were theirs year-round, although
canneries, salteries (the predecessors of canneries), small mines, and fox
farms then accounted for a human population here far greater than today's. A
farflung neighborliness must have prevailed as an antidote for the cabin's
poignant isolation or, perhaps, as an irritant for any hardcore recluse.
Before the arrival of miners and cannery men, fox farmers and squatters, the
Tlingits lived here.

     The remnants of Harbeson's cabin remind me of Reid Inlet and the Ibachs'
little barn-red cabin.  When Louis and I stayed there squares of wallpaper
samples covered the walls of the Ibachs' back room.  Halves of a Mother's Day
card were tacked over the two bunks, the cover picture - roses - above one
bunk, the inside message over the other.  Dave Bohn's book includes a snapshot
of the Ibachs (above).  They have that gentle expression frequent among people
living alone in the wilds.  You expect a grizzled, weary, hard look.  Instead
there's this incredible innocence.  Jim Huscroft had that look.  He raised
foxes on Cenotaph Island in Lituya Bay from around World War I until his
death, alone, in 1939.

     The 1936 Lituya Bay wave damaged Huscroft's cabin.  The 1958 wave
demolished it.  Pieces of stovewood and scraps of plumbing scattered through
the alder are all that tell of its presence now.  Human marks have never been
great in this country.

     Gales today are reported on the outer coast.  Winds to 60 knots and
4.5-meter (15-foot) seas.  Louis is ashore with the water cans at a stream
that flows over granite boulders in an idyllic, mossy, rain-forest setting.
Chess stands in the cockpit fishing.  We've decided against going ashore to
look for the Harbeson cabin.  Nor will we chance taking the dinghy up-river to
the Tlingit cemetery.  This anchorage is too poor and too windy for all of us
to leave Taku.  We thought about holing up and waiting, but have decided to
head out.

     Gray sky, gray sea.  The shore shows only as a low blue-black streak.  No
mountains, no detail.  We failed to explore either cabin or cemetery but the
day's mood and the unseen traces of humanity beyond the porthole now merge
into remembrance of having once rowed to a grave island opposite today's
Tlingit village of Hoonah.  You walk across the beach there, climb a bank, and
step into the dripping hemlock forest.  Headstones are decorated with marble
cherubs and crosses that include Russian Orthodox crosses with a second,
dipped crossbar.  Indian clan crests mingle with the Christian symbols.  A
marble grizzly drapes over one headstone.  A wolf head tops another, jaws
open, teeth and tongue realistically carved.  There are marble salmon,
dogfish, eagles, ravens, and a stone chief's hat embellished with a wolf's
face which is outlined with abalone shell.

     Step among such graves and you feel a shiver of time and of intersecting
cultures.  Talk with Indian villagers and you feel it even more.  The mother
of one of our Hoonah friends watched the Russian flag come down and the
35-star American flag go up in 1865 at Sitka.  The entire English-speaking
era in Alaska spans just two generations.

     Go further back in human time and you come to the tale of ice forcing the
Tcukanedi people out of Glacier Bay.  Further still, and you're reading
archeology reports.  Near Point Couverden - where I found the best huckleberry
picking of my life - Dr. Robert Ackerman of Washington State University
excavated a site that radiocarbon dates as 10,000 years old.  The Ground Hog
Bay site is one of only two comparably old sites known so far in Alaska.  The
other is on nearby Admiralty Island.

     Bits of charcoal give the date.  With them lay stone choppers, gravers,
scrapers, and tiny blades technically called microblades, significant because
they represent a distinct, and sophisticated, tool manufacturing technique
found on both the Russian and American sides of Bering Strait.  A paint stone
was also found at Ground Hog Bay: part of a woman's cosmetic kit?  a shaman's
medicine kit?  the palette an artist used in painting hide?

     The Ground Hog Bay site now stands 13.3 meters (44 feet) above sea level,
or it did in 1965 when Ackerman and his crew first tested their discovery.
Now it must be minutely higher, rebounding as the ice continues to retreat.
When the fires of early peoples flickered there the site was at beach level,
for artifacts and charcoal lay in beach gravel.  Beneath the beach gravel are
glacial deposits.  Layers of time.

     Taku's voyage is ending.  Two porpoises are close off the starboard bow.
A distant storm petrel flies low to the water, utterly controlled.  We're
heading for Elfin Cove and from there to Juneau to reboard the ferry.  Are we
returning to reality or are we leaving it?