An Inside Passage

Contemplative Pilgrimage in the Alaskan Wilderness
by Drew Kampion

The steady stitch of paddle strokes pulls our kayaks out onto the quicksilver stream and into The Pass. The rolling movement of arms and shoulders guiding and plunging the paddle - first the left blade, then the right - into the slate-colored, cold water is the rhythm of the moment, and I am doing my best to pay attention to it, to be mindful. Reach, plunge, pull...reach, plunge, pull...reach, plunge, pull....

Then, as the five kayaks slip through a wide, glassy expanse of water between forested islands, this gentle, brilliant little shower begins, and all the paddles stop. Raindrops ping delicately, popping open small bubbles, making concentric seismic rings all around us. We glide forward on our momentum, listening. There is no other sound. We are in a remote pass in southeast Alaska, and silence, we are learning, is something we can always rely on. There is only the sound of rain on water, and the larger silence of our listening.

Earlier on this overcast July morning, we packed up our camp at South Camp, stuffed an impossible amount of gear into every nook and cranny of our two-person sea kayaks, and pushed off onto silver water. Now, we have just entered the wide southern portal of a snaking stream of salt water in a small, wild corner of the Inside Passage.

Broadly defined, the Inside Passage is an island-sheltered seaway that extends from the southern end of Puget Sound to Juneau and Skagway in southeastern Alaska. At several junctures along this thousand-mile stretch, especially in the 300-mile-long Alexander Archipelago north of the Queen Charlotte Islands, there are alternative routes a ship's captain might decide to take. The pass we're paddling wouldn't be one of them. The 50-mile-long Pass is a sometimes expansive, often-narrow, twisting stream of salt water that fills to the brim then drains back out again twice a day. Lots of volume; parts of it run dry at low tide.

We haven't heard an airplane or seen a boat since our first afternoon at South Camp, two days ago. There, just an hour after the Pacific Wing seaplane had landed in the shelter of a small island, unloaded us, and flown off, a working boat eased into our little lagoon, sending one of our guides, Lori Wilson, out of the water and running for her clothes (she was bathing). It was a crabber, and the lone occupant, in sunglasses, big gloves, and a yellow rain slicker, stared down at me as he nosed the boat neatly into the mid-tide gravel.

"You folks trespassing, or do you have some sorta permission to be here?" he asked me.

"Nice day," I shrugged.

"Just kiddin'," he grinned. "You people have crab?"

"What?"

"You've gotta have crab," he boomed, smiling broadly beneath a neat salt-and-pepper beard. "How many are you?"

"Nine," I said. Lori was already up at the pile of kitchen stuff, digging out large pots, and a couple of the others were slogging down to the boat as he turned and started to pull big, fat Dungeness crabs out of his hold.

"Hi, Chuck," called Kurt, crunching towards us over the shingle. Chuck blinked a few times through his dark glasses, then remembered Kurt from last summer. Kurt is the founder of Inside Passages and leader of our expedition. A year ago, Chuck had been nearby to relay a critical call out to Pacific Wing when low clouds complicated pickup arrangements for another group of meditating paddlers. Now, under a blue bowl of sky, he'd been out checking his pots again. The two talked a while in the afternoon sun, and Kurt offered to pay for the crabs, but Chuck waved him off.

"Oh no-no," he grinned. "This is one of the last places where we can still be people."

South Camp was a good place to land, in more ways than one. Situated just around the corner from the entrance to The Pass, old-growth forest - mostly hemlock, Sitka spruce, and alder - crowds down to the big white logs that crown the sloping beach of blue-black stones. We arranged our campsites on the lush, green undergrowth just inside the forest's edge, staying clear of a network of interlacing animal trails.

A few hundred yards out, a two-acre dome of hemlock and spruce is connected to our beach by a gravel spit at low tide; at high tide it is a solitary and somehow eloquent island. It perfectly filled the arch of my tent door when I laid on my back and looked out past my toes. In the moment, I think the island served as a symbol for each member of our group - how we were alternately connected and disconnected as we journeyed through our eight days together in this place.

We are deep into the islands of the Tongass National Forest, a virtually wild and untouched place, yet just a few miles off the beaten path - nine people looking to recover important (and maybe vanishing) connections between soul and spirit, between people and place.

Seven of us are the paying guests of Kurt Hoelting and his able assistant, Lori Wilson, on this unique "Islands & Currents" expedition. We have each been inspired by Hoelting's vision for a new kind of experience - part spiritual practice, part ecotourism. "The Islands & Currents experience," he states in his Inside Passages brochure, "is inspired by the ancient Zen tradition of walking meditation, rooted in the cultures of China and Japan. In this spirit of meditative pilgrimage, we travel by kayak through the heart of Southeast Alaska's vibrant coastal wilderness."

Kurt is a founding member of the Whidbey Institute (an educational center dedicated to the relation between earth and spirit); he recently moved from the young organization's board to its council of teachers. Inside Passages is his contribution to the institute's curriculum. The form of the program was inspired by Kurt's experiences with his zen teacher, Nelson Foster, at a Mountains and Rivers Sesshin at California's Ring of Bone Zendo. There, Gary Snyder and others had resurrected the ancient Chinese practice of journeying on foot as a form of meditation practice. Like walking, kayaking provides a simple ritual structure without (as Kurt puts it) being explicitly Buddhist.

Hoelting's plan is to use the disciplines of meditation, mindfulness, and silence to explore both our hunger for wild nature and for authentic spiritual experience. "In a place far removed from the demands of busy schedules," he says, "we come back to ourselves, back to the nurturing silence that dwells at the heart of life. In so doing, we renew our commitment to bringing this connection back with us to our daily life and work."

Getting something this large from a week in the wild would be a consummation devoutly to be wished. Kayaking, meditation, group discussion, good food, and all the beauty you could handle - it sounded like the right kind of getaway for one of the last summers of the millennium.

At South Camp, Kurt gradually revealed his plan for our trip. We would be camping on three islands, two or three nights each. We would use the movement of the tides intelligently, so the paddles would not be too strenuous. There would be meditation periods, generally one or two 20-minute "sittings" before breakfast and one or two again later in the afternoon. Sometimes we would also use kayaking as a meditation form, holding silence during our morning paddles and attempting to keep our conversation focused in the afternoons. There would also be some ritual at meal times - certain gestures and mindfulness practices.

Clearly, this was going to be a very different kind of kayak adventure. "We need a shared ritual container," Kurt told us. "Without one, we'd all have a good time, but we wouldn't be as effective at getting our conversation and experience to a deeper level." He said zen is a simple form that works very well. "It's a bare-bones approach to entering and holding silence, so simple that it's available, no matter what your traditions are."

His larger agenda, too, was put on the table: "I want to give people an experience of intimacy with nature in a place that is unaltered," he said, "so they can have more of a sense of what's been lost, of what the world was like. I want to give them a benchmark, create a frame of reference; I also want to give people an experience of silence and our inner life in a place that allows and invites that without shutting it down." He also wants to bring people here who will be effective voices for protecting it. (While virtually wild, this part of Tongass is classified as "primitive recreational" area, and even bear and wolf hunting is permitted.)

Kurt explained that, since this is still a new program (we are his fourth group, the first this summer), its structure is flexible and evolving. "The idea and the combination of elements are new to me though ancient in essence. Reintroducing it in this time and culture is pretty uncharted territory. The weather is a huge variable, and the complexity of a group. We are, after all, playing on the edge a bit here. It's simple, but there are surprises; we may be shocked at what we see."

We? After breakfast on our first morning at South Camp, Kurt got us playing an introductory name game that involved tossing several non-lethal objects to each other, calling the receiver's name just prior to the toss: Linda is a very witty and wise columnist for an East Coast newspaper's weekly home magazine; her life and family provide material. Her husband, Jack, is a family and child psychiatrist; he's spent time in an ashram doing Siddha meditation (powerful feeling of coming home) but has stopped meditating. Jane is a young grandmother and, since her kids left home, a world traveler; now she's here. Ann (a young grandmother) is Jane's friend; they met as wives of Marine flyers and stayed in touch; she meditated for ten years but "stopped when I could have used it the most - over the past four or five years." Peggy is a magazine editor who says she's at a significant transition period in her life - she's quitting a great job and wondering if she's crazy; "There's something regenerating about being out of a time structure," she says. Her husband, Rick, is a psychiatrist turned cybernaut who meditates and offers prayers of gratitude each morning, but, he admits, "after five years of this I am still horrified by the state of mind I live in." Me, I'm a seasoned home-based Gurdjieffian surf writer with a green streak.

And then there are our two guides: Kurt; and Lori, an experienced outfitter, naturalist, and kayak tour leader in the Pacific Northwest, she's in charge of our food and our boats and some paddling instruction; she keeps a mother-hen eye on everyone. Lori will have a full kitchen up and running within ten minutes of touching gravel. She is a practicing Zen Buddhist, a student of Shodo Harada Roshi, the master of the Sogenji monastery in Japan, who is opening a Zen center on Whidbey Island in Washington. Her biggest challenge here, she says is staying in her "big mind," her "spacious mind," her practice. "My edge here is to keep going deeper."

It took us a day or so to get into the groove - to become familiar with the kayaks and paddling, to be cautioned about resident black bears, to experience meditation, some ritual and silence, and to become acquainted with each other.

Our first meditation sessions were on the island at South Camp. I have the honor of serving the hot tea that helps clear the physical and mental palet at the start of each sitting. As the other eight sit on cushions or sleeping bags in a clearing in the forest in the late afternoon, sun streaming in, I wait for them to settle, then I enter the circle with a full pot of hot mint tea. I bow to the group, and they return my bow. I serve clockwise around the circle, exchanging bows and pouring as I go. I come last to my own place, fill my own cup, and bow to honor myself; then I sit. The tea is drunk, hot, cleansing. We settle. Kurt rings the meditation bell, a fine high chime that wants to carry you off or bring you in, depending on how you look at it. Two more rings, the last one shrinking beautifully into silence of the forest. This is the ritual, each time.

It's curious how quickly silence opens up space, and the more space it opens , the more there is, until you're left with the elemental building block of your existence, being. Just being where you are. The meditation creates a wedge between where we were before we came here and where we are now. It allows the world to simply enter into us, and it allows us to enter more into the world.

And so we have begun to melt into the journey. Ann is my paddling partner; we've been together on a couple of practice runs and now as we enter The Pass, heading for our second camp. The aim of paddlers in two-person sea kayaks is to strike a synchronous rhythm. Slow, steady, easy strokes will get you just about anywhere. Ann paddles in the front; I work the pedal steering and paddle in the back. We do fine once I relax and copy whatever she does. And then I realize she's paddling in time with Kurt, who usually leads the way.

We paddle in silence (as we do each morning) over glassy water, drifting between forested islands as we work our way up The Pass on a rising tide. We concentrate on our strokes and practice the mindfulness of kayaking, as Kurt advised. As we do, the world opens up wide around us. Today, it drizzles or rains most of the time. We make one relief stop after paddling through The Boomerang, an especially narrow and powerful bend of the stream, where we met a boat coming south, straining through the bend against the flooding tide - first boat we've seen since Chuck's.

Several times ahead of us now we've seen salmon "popping," bursting sprays of whitewater as the big fish jump up out of the water and flop back. I've never seen such a slurry of leaping fish - chum and pink salmon in an ecstasy of anticipation, it seems. We see them in wide bays, concentrated near the mouths of estuaries. It's still a little early in the season, Kurt says, and the salmon know they aren't quite ready to spawn, but their courtship/death dance has begun. Kurt hooks one pink salmon, fully mature but only about four pounds. We paddle up into a forested estuary; it meanders for perhaps a quarter mile, then ends where a small creek flows down over slick rocks. Paddling back out the green stream, big, striped chums slip beneath our kayaks.

"That's Joko Island straight ahead," Kurt calls back across the water to the rest of us. (Because we are nine, he paddles his double kayak solo.) We approach the small island from the south, paddle around its east shore, and slip into a tiny inlet on the north side. The sun breaks out as we pull our kayaks high up onto a grassy area that's booby-trapped with swampy, sludge-filled cracks. It's about 1:30, and we begin to unload the boats. Lori has burritos ready to assemble in about five minutes.

Joko is shaped like a butterfly: east and west wings with a narrow isthmus and inlet between. We locate our camp sites on the mossy western highlands of the two-acre island, in lichen-draped trees which will be only a few feet above tonight's high-tide. The moon is full, and there is a 24-foot differential between ebb and flood. This endless cycle - the rough, rich, and stony topography of low tide, the serene, watery world of high - keep things changing in The Pass. Being here is like being in a lung, always breathing in and breathing out, always changing, like consciousness.

Kurt and Jack put up the cabin tent on the ridge of the isthmus. We'll use the 8'x16' shelter for meditation. Today, I forget to bring my own cup: the mindfulness of logistics. After I serve the tea and we all settle, Kurt rings the meditation bell, and the vanishing vibration leads us into ourselves. It seems utterly silent, but there are sounds. The frequent, distant splashes of salmon over towards the estuary. A bird's bright conversation. Soft waves of breeze brushing over grass. But each sound seems to accentuate the silence. Eyes-closed, encircled, minding our breathing, we are each wherever we are when a light scatter sounds on the roof of the tent Š hesitates Š resumes and builds to a racing patter, then a full galloping shower, white noise for a couple of minutes, then slowing to a sighing patter, and then a scatter, and then no more.

After perhaps 20 minutes of sitting, Kurt strikes the bell twice more, and we open our eyes to each other again. Most of us change position. Personally, my legs have a life of their own after about ten minutes of sitting cross-legged; they don't know me, I don't know them.

Our post-meditation discussion is initiated by Kurt. He says a few words about the concepts of Christian love and Buddhist intimacy as values, referring to the question posed by Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, "Will we love the earth enough to save it?" and dovetailing it into Thich Nhat Hanh's notion of intimacy as the ground of compassion. He is saying that we must become more intimate with the earth before we can love it.

The subject seems to be at the core of Kurt Hoelting's angst. A commercial fisherman with a master's degree from Harvard Divinity School, a family man and a Zen practitioner, the 46-year-old was born in Vancouver, B.C., grew up in Bellevue, Washington, and spent his summers pursuing the legendary salmon with his older brother, Kim. In all their youth, they only hooked one - a beauty - and it got away. It was years later, as a college student working on a salmon seiner, that he finally did catch one, not so far from The Pass.

The topic of Hoelting's Master of Divinity thesis paper, it turns out, was prophetic: wilderness as an ethical and spiritual imperative. His inspiration: poet Gary Snyder. He was ordained a congregational minister by the United Church of Christ and spent two years as a campus minister at the University of Oregon before he realized it wasn't for him. He was drawn to more contemplative traditions. Ironically, it was Trappist monks who introduced him to zen meditation. Like Lori, he's a student of Shodo Harada Roshi and of zen, "the religion before religion."

For more than 25 summers, Kurt has returned to the coastal waters near here to fish. He lived in the fishing port of Petersburg for ten years; his two kids were born Alaskan. It is clear that in this place he's found work and terrain resonant with his seeker's soul.

Lori slips out of the tent mid-way through our discussion. When we emerge and follow the moss lane through the trees down to the kitchen area, she's in the thick of meal preparation and the western sky is going nuts with cloud and light and color. We eat dinner around a fire at the island's West Point. It is very still, and the gnats and noseeums are out in force (there have been few insects otherwise). We each have a piece of Kurt's salmon, fire-grilled and perfect, with curried vegetables and rice. Jack does dishes (we take turns assisting with the cooking and washing the dishes in beach gravel and camp soap). Kurt casts fruitlessly for another salmon. Out on the point, Rick sits Buddha-style and watches the sunset.

These saltwater estuaries are lovely, languid, mesmerizing places at slack high tide. The afternoon is overcast but bright, and we float in a silver-green dream, drifting and slowly, gently paddling up the narrowing channel from wide bay to narrow stream. Thick forest lines the shore - hemlock, Sitka spruce, and alder - and the salmon are restless. They leap high out of the water near our kayaks; some jump again and again in circles as if chasing their own tails. They ghost swiftly beneath us in threes and fours and dozens. You'd never know they were there unless you focused past the water's surface sheen.

Peggy and Rick have drifted ahead of the rest of us, meandering up the stream, gathering in the beauty that surrounds them, when, suddenly, they're pointing, frozen. Peggy looks back at the rest of us, her expression excited and dark. Kurt paddles past as Lori gets us turning around and moving back out of the estuary. Rick and Peggy have surprised a black bear and her two cubs, which have taken refuge in a tree. The mother stands her ground and studies us as Kurt moves in with pepper spray at the ready and shoos everyone off. Black bears can run some 35 mph (according to the brochure), so nobody sitting 15 feet away in a kayak should feel too secure. Surprised mother bears with cubs don't have a clue what your intentions are, and they'll do whatever comes natural.

Kurt guards our rear as we paddle back out of the estuary. The salmon are jumping in the wide, blue inlet. We paddle north to another estuary looking for water, but it's a dead end. Full flood tide, then it turns to ebb as we round Divide Island and head back south. Some interesting and strong currents keep the trip conservative. We stop on an island and have lunch in the lush understory garden of an old-growth forest, sampling perfect blueberries from several small bushes.

Back to Joko on the ebb but into the teeth of a good breeze, so there's lots of chop. When we arrive, the sun is shining. As I sit on a flat rock talking with Linda, some of the others bathe off the northwest side of the island, yelping at the water temp (50-ish). The wind is rising, and I have to tie my tent down.

Late in the afternoon there are two sittings with a walking meditation between them. (Slowly circling around in a tent creates some odd moments, but it works.) It is very windy, and the tent's flapping and drumming; at moments it gets pretty wild-sounding. I open my eyes to observe the group meditating. (Everyone's are closed, it looks like.) Afterwards, I ask Kurt if meditation requires opened eyes or closed, and he says it's recommended the eyes be opened and unfocused, but we should do whatever is comfortable for us. Then we discuss the Gurdjieff idea of "chief feature" as presented in Nothing Special by Charlotte Beck.

Later, we enjoy cous-cous and minestrone soup around a smoky fire on West Point. It's dusk, and we're just settling into conversation when we realize we've forgotten to get water for the morning. In a few minutes, Kurt and I are paddling toward a likely notch in the big island to the northeast, the outgoing tide pulling against us, and I'm feeling excited and a little nervous. We make it to a low-tide mudflat beach, pull the empty five-gallon jugs out of the boats, and double time across a wide, wet plain of muck, heading back towards the notch where there might be a stream. The evening is darkening, and we pass bear, wolf, and deer tracks - fresh since the tide went out in the last hour or two. We beat on the jugs and speak loudly as we work back up the narrowing, darkening estuary until we come to the end, where a stream trickles down out of the hills. We scramble up a hundred feet of rocky streambed until we're well clear of any saltwater contamination. "This is classic old-growth forest," says Kurt, "as wild a little outlet as anywhere on the coast." We fill the jugs in a pool of tea-colored water, waving off mosquitoes and listening for bear in the darkness. As we slog back to the kayaks, I look over my shoulder often to see if we're being followed.

It's almost dark when we paddle up to Joko Island to the fire blazing, to the hails and cheers of welcoming humans (after all, we bring water!), and to fire-toasted marshmallows and conversation. I crawl into my tent around midnight and drift toward the island of sleep with the sounds of salmon splashing and the dark shapes of bear slouching around the periphery of my dreams.

In the gray wet of morning, Kurt comes out dressed in black wearing his Alaska baseball hat and blows three times into a two-foot-long trumpet carved from the business end of a bull kelp. Each blast starts with a little tentative sputter, rings deep and clear as he finds the note, then echoes for a while after he takes the trumpet from his lips.

It's moving day. We're heading north to Goosetalk Island, and we want to catch the last two hours of flood. In the cabin tent, I serve hot mint tea, and we have two sittings with a walking meditation inside the tent (a rhythmic, scrunching chorus of wrinkling polymers) between them. Afterwards, we eat our oatmeal in silence at West Point, and then I bathe in the rising tide off the big black rocks near my tent and towel off in an exquisite, fine drizzle, standing on moss as soft as a lamb's cheek.

We move our kayaks down onto the beach and load them while Kurt combs the island for his only fishing pole, which mysteriously vanished overnight. We launch our boats onto the buoyant midday flood. I'm up front in Lori's kayak now; Jane and Ann have got the paddling program wired, and they're paddling together the way they imagined they would.

Drifting north from Joko Island, with the wind at our backs and the tide going our way, we settle into the mindfulness of paddling. There are some twisting, rushing currents that surge past the points of the islands, but we're all comfortable with that now. I look around at us, the five kayaks, the odd array of hats and shoulders, the nine of us snug inside fat life vests and spray skirts, rhythmically paddling and feeling a bit like a family on this, the fifth day.

My slippered feet sink an inch or two into the deep, moss-cushioned floor of the forest. My mantra for the moment is Kurt's feet (inside fisherman's boots, the ones southeastern Alaskans live in), pressing soft shapes into the lime green of the old-growth carpet. I'm feeling the body of the forest through my feet, smelling it in the cool purity of the air, hearing the bird calls and the squishing, twig-snapping cadence of nine pairs of feet slowly snaking single-file around old trees on Goosetalk Island. It's our walking meditation between afternoon sittings. It's a nice, restful, intentional walk on the seventh day.

The eighth morning dawns clear as a meditation bell. The water is electric with shimmering light and energy, sparkling. The forest and islands gleam with robust health and tingle with texture. Glorious! We make coffee. I sit and look out on Bear Mountain and feel the warmth of the rising sun.

It's Sunday morning, and we're packed and ready to leave Goosetalk Island. We had expected to fly out yesterday, but low, thick clouds kept our seaplane on the ground beyond Bear Mountain, and we enjoyed another night in this wild and gentle paradise.

Our time on Goosetalk has been magic: Fresh, fire-grilled clams, a noisy train of migrating otters, myopic black bears blinking at us slipping up estuaries, the full moon lighting a wide crescent of bay with lustrous midnight silver, geese honking their talk, the poems of Mary Oliver and David Whyte and Gary Snyder so passionately and beautifully spoken by Kurt, bathing in cold mossy streams, bright Arctic terns, a pair of large watchful eagles guarding a nest, and all the other birds we saw - scoters, ravens, gangs of crows, common mergansers, a northern goshawk, a couple of merlins (falcons), Napoleon gulls, a pair of exquisite loons, the powerful pulse of two sets of ravens' wings passing over the cabin tent as we meditated Š New and powerful memories flood over me as I skip a last few flat stones out over the smooth blue water, feeling metaphor in the overlapping rings of contact.

Then, as I help Lori disassemble and repair a neat single-burner Primus stove, the distant drone of a plane comes resonating from a deep notch on the south side of Bear Mountain. In a few seconds we can see it - the blue De Havilland Beaver. A new group of kayaking meditators is flying in, and we are flying out. Immediately, I don't want to leave. I'd rather stay and serve tea and paddle again tomorrow, and maybe we'll get lucky and see a pod of killer whales, and there'd be one more night still in the great and full silence of this inside passage.

And finally, from the plane, pulling slowly up out of The Pass, I worry about those stupid, half-blind black bears down there on the banks of the estuaries, just waiting to gawk at any hunter that moseys up with a shotgun and a consciousness problem. I wonder how we're going to do this. How will we manage to keep the wild alive - outside of us and inside of us, too? The answer that comes says, "go deeper."

NOTE
For information on Kurt Hoelting's Islands & Currents trips (a collaborative project with the Whidbey Institute), write Inside Passages Project, 3677 Woodland Hall Lane, Clinton WA 98236; or call (360) 579-1498.

© Drew Kampion, 2006