Frozen Stiff Page 4

  Out on the water, the eight-foot craft glided easily up the fjord toward Yakutat. But the air was so hot and thick that it was difficult to take in. Cody tied a damp bandanna over her nose and mouth, and breathing became easier. Then she pulled some of her hair loose so that it covered her ears. Derek’s ears were probably already sunburned.

  “Thank goodness we’re not on a sailboat,” she said, worrying why there wasn’t the slightest hint of a breeze. In the back of her mind the phrase calm before the storm repeated itself.

  An unspoken question prodded her into the narrow seawater passage. They hadn’t mentioned the rising water since early this morning. The water level was coming up even faster now.

  She felt as if she were inside a small fishbowl. Someone was carrying the bowl and water was sloshing up the glass sides, threatening to spill out. But the sides of this bowl were rugged mountains of record height, Mount Saint Elias on the north, Mount Fair-weather on the south. Both stood in ranges thick with impenetrable forests of western hemlock and Sitka spruce. And glaciers, such a mass of frozen rivers most of them didn’t have names.

  Cody’s shoulders started throbbing with a dull ache that pulled at her muscles. She set the paddle across her lap for a minute and watched water drip off the blade. Without sunglasses she couldn’t look at them too long; the drops were blinding in the bright sun.

  She lifted the corner of her bandanna and took a single satisfying tug on her water bottle. The water felt cool in her dry throat and helped fill the void in her stomach. Last night’s macaroni and cheese was long gone. Trail mix tasted like gravel in the heat and made her thirsty. Being in a kayak surrounded by water they knew they couldn’t drink made most people wolfishly thirsty.

  “It’s like we’re in a swimming pool,” Derek said. “Someone is filling it with a fat hose cranked up full blast. And it’s gonna overflow if someone doesn’t turn it off.”

  Derek had read her mind again, picked up on her thoughts about the fishbowl. She hated it when he did that. Patterson did it too.

  Well, she couldn’t tell someone to pull the plug.

  Cody’s light strokes were suddenly challenged by a strong current, and she dug her paddle in deeper. “Push!” she shouted back. “Harder!”

  It felt as if some invisible force were pulling them backward, away from Yakutat. She concentrated on deep even strokes. Push, pull. Even breathing. In, out. Even, steady. Push, pull. Breathing timed with strokes. Derek followed her lead.

  The bandanna slipped from her face. She didn’t stop to retie it. Sweat dripped into her eyes. She blinked away the stinging salt. The paddle was slick with sweat and water. Like wet feet, wet hands caused blisters. She sacrificed a few seconds to wrap her sweatshirt around the slippery handle.

  She figured that the current should have been pushing them forward, in the direction of Yakutat and the beach near the boggy trail that climbed uphill to the pickup. Instead, it was fighting them. Then she realized that all the beaches were buried in a watery grave, as the shoreline plants were. They’d probably have to swim through the forest to the truck.

  The Tide: that was how Cody thought about it—with a capital letter. It should be receding. Ebb and flow and gravitational pull. She’d studied it in science class. The moon and sun controlled the surface level of oceans, bays, gulfs, inlets, and fjords.

  But the water in Russell Fjord was intent on rising, with no signs of slacking off. The current was using all its muscle to fight the two paddlers, pulling on them from the open sea as if it would never let them go.

  “We’re hardly moving,” Derek said. “I’ve been watching the same clump of trees for half an hour.”

  Cody studied the mountains and forests through the early-morning glare. A landscape that should have been passing slowly to the side and rear of the kayak, passing behind them as they skimmed forward.

  Derek was right: Everything stood in place.

  Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she swallowed hard. She didn’t remember the outfitters mentioning a tide that refused to fall.

  She thought about the history of the fjord. Eight hundred years ago a massive glacier had filled both Disenchantment Bay and Yakutat Bay and extended into the Pacific Ocean. Russell Fjord had been blocked by a dam of ice and could only drain into the ocean along one channel, called Old Situk Creek.

  The answer came as clear as the freshwater layer on top of the seawater.

  “I know why the water is still rising,” she gasped.

  "I don’t get it,” Derek said after she’d explained it.

  “What do you mean Hubbard surged?”

  Cody thought of another word for surge. “It advanced.” She remembered the outfitters talking about Hubbard Glacier one night after she’d crawled into her tent. They had used simple terms: advance and retreat. To advance meant to move forward. To retreat meant to move back.

  Their conversation came back to her: 1986 was the last time Hubbard Glacier had surged. More than seventy miles long, the river of slowly moving ice had slid across the mouth of Russell Fjord, sealing off Disenchantment Bay and forming the world’s largest glacier-formed lake.

  “Are you sure?” Derek asked.

  “All the streams and rivers are draining into the fjord.” She shouted over the wind, which was picking up. “All the water that usually flows out to sea on the tide doesn’t have anywhere to go.”

  “No way out.”

  She silently finished his thought: Just like us.

  She gripped her paddle as a fist of wind rumbled down the passage, smacking them in the face. The kayak lunged another foot backward. This wasn’t good at all. It was as if Yakutat were intent on pushing them away.

  A wind like this usually brought foul weather. An old Alaskan saying jabbed at her: “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.”

  Until now she hadn’t fully understood what it meant. But in just the past five minutes the sky, so transparent that you felt you could reach up and touch the sun, had disappeared. Whammo, everything had fallen into darkness under bruise-colored clouds.

  The wind was driving hard from Yakutat, pushing ahead of a storm like a warning.

  Cody handed Derek a rain slicker over her shoulder. She tied the bandanna over No Fear to keep it from blowing off and snapped the rubber skirt around her waist. Earth and water. Now wind. It seemed as if the entire universe were against them.

  We can find some kind of shelter, she thought, even if it’s only under a rocky ledge. Tie up and wait out the storm. Then turn around and battle the current back to Yakutat. That’s what she told Derek. But she knew storms like the one coming were unpredictable.

  No food. No fresh water pounded at her. And No one knows we’re out here.

  She checked her watch. She knew they wouldn’t be missed until Mom and Aunt Jessie returned from Juneau. The plane wasn’t due in until the next day, weather permitting. Small planes were grounded during storms.

  Her mother wouldn’t find the note she’d left—scrawled on a used envelope and taped to the milk carton inside the fridge so that Derek wouldn’t see it—until she came back to the cabin.

  Cody turned the kayak around. The wind swirled in minitornados that churned the water and sent it splashing over the bow. The kayak lurched forward in awkward spurts, lifting and falling as it slapped wildly at the uneven swells.

  That was when she heard it.

  A deafening crash rumbled through the steep mountain corridors. Thunder. She shuddered at the sound. It was too close. And it seemed to be in front of them. It didn’t seem possible. All the wind was blowing from behind, chasing them, closing in.

  Maybe a second storm was coming at them from the ocean. They could be squashed by two raging storms.

  The noise was like a firecracker set off in a tin can. Another bend in the fjord. There were no rocky ledges here either, or secluded coves. There was no shelter of any kind, except a giant tidewater glacier with its snout edging into the water.

  “Is tha
t Hubbard?” Derek hollered over the wind.

  Cody shook her head. “It can’t be.” She couldn’t believe the massive wall of ice less than a mile away. The frozen face was as long as a football field across and more than ten stories high.

  A woeful moan grew into a deafening roar, like the dull static of white noise. It hadn’t been thunder after all. A chunk of ice the size of Yakutat Tavern broke loose and plummeted into the water. Seagulls appeared from nowhere, swooping down to feed on the brine shrimp brought up by the turbulence.

  “Backpaddle!” Cody shouted.

  A series of icy walls of waves four or five feet high rolled out from the broken chunk, now an enormous iceberg bobbing in the salt water. The giant waves aimed at the kayak.

  Cody knew she should keep paddling, put as much water as possible between the iceberg and the kayak, but the undercurrent was too strong and much too swift. If the waves slammed the craft just right, her paddle would be torn from her grip.

  “Hang on to your paddle!”

  The first wave hit them sideways, spraying salt and buckets of water. The kayak dropped into a deep trough, tipped unsteadily, and nearly capsized. It lolled on its side and would have spit them out if it hadn’t been for the rubber skirts holding them in. The kayak rolled back the other way and righted itself.

  Derek cried, “Here comes another one!”

  The second wave struck harder than the first, lifting the kayak and letting it coast on the crest. One, two, three seconds. It seemed like a lifetime. Then it dropped flat into a deep trough. The wooden craft shook when it hit bottom, threatening to split at its canvas shell.

  Wave after wave.

  Boom, boom, boom.

  The next wave sailed right over the bow and slapped Cody in the face. She coughed, unable to catch her breath. She felt as if she were drowning; still in the kayak and above water, but choking instead of taking in oxygen.

  Even now the noise wouldn’t let up—the relentless gusts, the scream of seagulls, the slapping of paddles—all loud enough to wake the dead.

  Cody clung to the paddle as to life itself, shouting to Derek to do the same.

  The kayak finally pulled out of the wave and glided into the open air. Cody coughed up seawater. She’d swallowed a ton. Salt scraped the back of her throat.

  “You okay?” she called back.

  “Yeah,” Derek returned weakly.

  “Paddle?” she barely managed.

  “Got it.”

  Both paddles still in hand. Two sticks. This crumb of news filled her with hope.

  With a death grip she paddled hard on the right to turn the kayak before the next set of waves hit. Being slammed head-on was better than taking a lateral strike. It came, as she’d known it would. Slam! Not quite as hard as before. But the kayak still spun like a kicked bottle.

  Each time a wave hit the kayak, water seeped into the rubber skirt. Several inches sloshed in the bottom of the craft. Some had even worked its way inside her knee-high boots. Everything was drenched: clothes, gear, and paddlers.

  The waves finally weakened, dying into swells less than a foot high. Cody slumped in her seat; her shoulders sagged. She was utterly exhausted. “We made it.”

  High above the kayak and less than a half mile away the glacier mirrored a dozen shades of blue. Some of the ice was so light it was nearly colorless; some of it was so dark it looked black. The face of the glacier, where the ice had broken off, wore a new expression now, an ice sculpture of hundred-foot-high spires and turrets.

  Catching her breath, she thought about how much of the earth was covered with ice—one-tenth, she’d learned from the outfitters. An entire ocean was covered with it, like a white layer of congealed fat on a pot of cold turkey soup.

  She forced herself to put her paddle back in the water. Her muscles screamed at the first stroke. Her shoulder blades felt as if someone were tightening them with screws.

  “We have to get away from the glacier,” she said. “Before it calves again.”

  “I can’t lift the paddle.”

  But Derek did. Barely. One stroke, then two.

  Soon the kayak skimmed water that spread across the fjord like soluble paints on paper, bleeding colors too mixed up to have their own names. They were alone in this vast maze of land and water and disconnected from everything that was familiar. Everything that was safe.

  Cody wished they’d never left Yakutat.

  The violent tailwind died to an occasional gust, but the undercurrent stayed just as fierce as before, drawing the kayak toward the ocean—toward Disenchantment Bay and Hubbard Glacier.

  “Some people think the Ice Age is still with us,” Cody said. “That we’re in a warmer phase of it.”

  Derek strained with each stroke. “Do you think that berg is like the one that sank the Titanic?”

  “That’s just a baby,” she said. “Some of them are over a hundred miles long.”

  “No way!”

  “Way.”

  Cody looked back at the clouds suspended over Yakutat: a solid wall of black. “Maybe we’ll luck out,” she said. “Maybe the storm will dump all its rain in town. It’s about time we had some good luck.”

  The kayak skimmed away from the calving glacier, away from the three-story iceberg, in case it rolled. “No one in California will believe this,” Derek said.

  Cody’s strokes were as lifeless as her arms, with about as much power as a frayed bow rope. Her shorts and T-shirt were soaked. Her sleeping bag was a soggy mess under her rear. She wondered if wet clothes could freeze to skin.

  “If it’s raining in Yakutat,” Derek asked, “won’t all the water drain into the fjord?”

  “Add tons of water from rivers and streams and runoff from glaciers,” she said.

  Cody peeled off her rain slicker, then unsnapped the rubber skirt and rolled it back. Earlier her toes had been numb. Now they’d started to burn. The glare off the ice and water was blinding, like having a sunlamp plugged in only inches from her face.

  “Look for a place to tie up.” She forced the water away with deep strokes, glancing at Derek. “We have to build a fire and dry out.”

  Derek pulled his T-shirt away from his wrinkled skin. The whiteness was stark against his tanned arms. “Maybe there’s something to eat around here.”

  “We should be able to find some berries.” Cody was half starved too. She had a gnawing sensation that felt as if her stomach had started eating itself. “Where’s the trail mix?”

  “Buried at sea along with my sunglasses.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “They just fell overboard.”

  At a cultural fair earlier in the summer Cody had watched natives drying salmon, roasting seal flippers, smoking bear meat, and fermenting fishheads. Now she scanned the terrain above the waterline and wished she could remember how they preserved berries.

  She wasn’t looking for shelter anymore, just a small clearing in the trees where water met land. A place to tie the kayak, build a fire, and find something to eat. She scanned the areas that had once been mudflats and sandy beaches, that had supported a world of small animals only the day before, now all under water. Somewhere there had to be a place to stop.

  Cody couldn’t remember ever being this tired. She was so exhausted that she felt like dropping her head in her hands and blubbering like a baby. Suddenly she was overcome with emotion. If I don’t make it back to Yakutat, and die out here in the wilderness, then Mom will be alone, she thought.

  I’m all Mom has now. We can’t die out here.

  There was another reason to survive. She’d never told her dad how she felt about what he’d done. She’d written lots of letters but never mailed any of them.

  Cody swallowed the ache in her throat, using all her strength to search the old-growth trees and rocky knobs for a place to tie up. Normally grasses and sedges sprinkled the shoreline, mixed with splashes of colorful wildflowers. Edible herbs, even. Now they lay rotting under several feet of water.

/>   She wondered what finally had happened back in 1986, when Hubbard had surged. The glacier hadn’t closed off Disenchantment Bay forever; otherwise Russell Fjord would still be a lake. Then she wondered if seals and porpoises had been trapped in here too. If only she’d paid more attention when the outfitters had talked about it.

  She blinked at the sun passing far beyond the midday mark. Her eyes felt as if they’d been ground with coarse salt. Each blink rubbed the grains in even deeper. Sunburned. What she’d give for a pair of shades.

  Derek nudged her. “Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  “Something moved in the forest on the other side of that stream.” He lowered his paddle and pointed across the water at the distant forest, thick in some places, sparse in others. “Something big.”

  She followed his gaze beyond a silty stream; the sound of water played everywhere. “Maybe it was a bear.”

  “No way. It didn’t move like a bear. Has anyone around here ever mentioned Bigfoot?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m not. I know what a bear looks like. I’ve been to the San Diego Zoo. It wasn’t a bear, Cody. That thing I saw stood up straight and walked like a person.”

  “Out here?” A wave of gooseflesh rose on her already chilled skin. Déjà vu. She’d experienced the same sensation at the waterfall the day before. For an instant she’d wondered if something had scared the bear away.

  “It was probably a shadow.” Cody searched for an answer that made sense. “If the angle of the sun was just right, a bear might look like a person. Or maybe it was a tree.”

  “Right.” Derek didn’t sound convinced. “A tree that walks.”

  She turned on her sleeping bag and water oozed from the goose-down lining. He had her on that one. For the first time since they’d battled the assaulting waves a few hours earlier, she really looked at her cousin. His hair was a matted mess, stuck to the bloody mosquito bites across his forehead. Watery blisters covered the freckles on his nose, and sea salt had dried on his cheeks in crusty white splotches.