LAUNCH "KAMCHATKA-'01" WITH LONG FLIGHTS CROSS-COUNTRY
AND UP TO THE "GREAT LAND"-ALASKA, SITE OF MY ARCTIC BROOKS
RANGE HUNT A YEAR AGO THIS MONTH, IN WHICH MY "FIRST RAM" MADE
IT FROM THE NORTH SLOPE TO THE DERWOOD WOODS---AND SO DID I
August 18, 2001
I have packed off to Washington from Derwood, with the send-off blessings of a nearby Derwood deer, and parked my car in the Ross Hall lot, stopping only to make a farewell call before turning off the phone and leaving it in the parked Bronco. Now came the hard part. I have essentially four hands' full to manage as I struggled out of Ross Hall over toward the Metro. I thought there might be some alarm by the GWU police as I passed the security desk at their change of shift, while I am emerging from the building with an obvious rifle encased in a battered Kolpin Gun Boot, while being strangled by a backpack, duffel bag and a large carryon bag. They did look me over and note that I was obviously on my way toward a very long trip, and one of them held the door open for me with no other comment about the shape of the baggage. I had to stop several time sot change or rest my ischemic hands and stretched out arms as I struggled through the elevator system of the Metro. I had to perch forward on my chair, since I had no where to put the backpack if I took it off, so I looked like a concert pianist's posture until I got to West Falls Church Metro Station. There I sweat my way around to the Washington Flyer where I awaited the bus after "leapfrogging the bags forward and going back of r the two left one hundred feet behind. This is the way I had emerged from the tube station into London coming back out of Africa in early 1990, with more than I could possibly carry-which is exactly as much as I was packing this time. I estimate the weight of the stuff as about 125 pounds. I worried that if I am overweight at takeoff, what will it be like on return, when I may be packing two large hides and a couple of skulls and a massive set of horns? I should be so lucky!
In the duffel bag are two new duffel bags not yet unwrapped, with the thought that they might either be extra baggage stuffed with capes and horns, or, in the case of a massive brown bear, as I learned from the big one that Craig got the last time I was in Kamchatka in May of 2000, it will be about a couple hundred pounds of overweight which converts to a couple of hundred dollars for each flight segment. But, I barely managed the tussle as I had the backpack on my back, the duffel bag in one hand and then trying to juggle the rifle case and carryon bag with a single hand, still holding a farecard or bus ticket between two fingers. It was not easy.
I got to Dulles, still in the throes of its expansion, with a lot of new concrete over a self-contained train underground to connect the mid-field terminal to the main one-and began a near-desperate search for a hand cart. The bottom "luggage claim" floor had none, but I saw a sign which said "no trolleys" on the escalator and figured if only I could get to the top of the escalator with the over-burden I was packing, I should be able to find a cart at the top of the escalator discarded by whomever may have seen and even obeyed the sign in trying to get down to the lower floor. Voila! There one was-and just in time. My hands were so stretched by the straps on the bag that there were black and blue bruises on my right hand. I loaded the cart and then made the long trek around to U/A general check-in---a mistake. I should have done my usual end-run around to the rear and checked in as a Premier card holder. When I got to the counter, the agent asked how many bags I had planned to check, and I said "Three." I had the backpack, the duffel and the rifle case, which I have to open to assure them that I can put the slip of paper inside which says it is certified to be unloaded. That will be $100 for the extra baggage, since you are only allowed two check-ins." Well, now, I am a regular traveler and I had not heard this stuff-but that is almost always because I am either on the premier side or that I have a special privilege because of the mission baggage. This time I did not think of the Premier status in time and just wanted to get rid of the extra burdens. I am allowed two carry-on bags---but an airport is a sensitive e enough place to be packing heat that I do not imagine I would be welcome muscling on to at 757, saying "Excuse me!" as I struggle through the doorway with a large rifle case to be chucked into the overhead bin, for later unpacking and use at the very long range that is available inside this cabin!
So, add another expense item to that which will probably come in waves on the far end of this trip. It is highly likely that I will score on one or more very large species, and that would mean my overweight kit at the outset will look like a small down payment on the surcharges on the far side. But, it is no sense counting trophies before they are met.
I met Amitai Etzioni, GWU University Professor of Sociology, as he was asking how to get through registration to get himself to Los Angeles. I told him to go around the back to the Premier check-in, and only then remembered that this is what I should have done myself. So, he went smoothly through and checked what ever he wanted as I put my credit card receipt for my "excess luggage" in my ticket folder. "Just you wait if you think this is excessive now!"
The 757 apologizes for the non-functioning video system, the announcement said, which I considered not a very major loss for me. But, what was starting off as a major problem was a techno-glitch that actually was resolved by the time I sat down on the plane. I could not get the Dell laptop to recognize the A-drive after going through the handstands I had done to prepare this computer for the long trip. It had pooped out on me almost before takeoff on the last trip into the electricity sparse environments---first of a round the world series of plane flights-and then in the remote Himalayas-not exactly an energy replete area. So, I was fretting over that and tried to shut down, re-insert the bay with the A-derive and start up again. They were calling for "all remaining passengers" by the time I found my way to my seat, with a machine, that, up to this point actually seems to be working on the battery I had charged up for this series of flights.
Sitting next to me are a husband and wife, he doing his bill paying (some of which I have recently graduated to doing "on-line" by withdrawals from the several checking accounts I have primed for this purpose for such regular events as American Express and Pepco. But, she is an Orange County California Spanish teacher, and somehow got started into adventure travel and remote medicine, probably from looking at my appearance as a soon-to-be sheep hunter in remote Kamchatka. She decided I looked and sounded exactly like Indiana Jones and was by far the most interesting man who is leading by far the most exciting life of anyone she had ever encountered. She said she imagined that such folk were only made up and had the scripts written for them by some Hollywood agent, and here she was with someone who was not only script-less, (and, I can assure her, agent-less!) and living a real life far more genuinely filled with adventure than any that could be made up. She now has the web site for the book "Out of Assa: Heart of the Congo." And says she will recommend it to friend since she has met the author. Now, would be the time to also have given her the completed "Year of Fulbrightness" and the "Himalayan High," since this is the appreciative audience for which such books are already written and not yet prepared for them!
"NORTH TO ALASKA"-PART THE NEXT
I flew over the Eastern Sierras as we saw the Mammoth Lakes ski area and the mountain lakes around which I had climbed in the year 1999 when I did the john Muir Trail and had also seen the Mono Lake and its environs. We crossed over Yosemite, and I could look down on El Capitan and half Dome-while a large forest fire was burning between Yosemite and mono Lake, I could retrace the steps I had driven along independently when I cam out after being at the Whistlers WMS meeting in August an then hiking a fair chunk of the John Muir Trail later that month, on what was probably at least as photogenic a spot as any other of that whole year including the Peruvian Macchu Piccu and the later Nepalese Everest Trek route.
After five and a half hours crossing the continent in an ocean to ocean flash that would have startled the Pony Express riders, I am now headed up four and half hours more to get from here to the Great land. This time I will be getting a hotel for tonight and meeting my Kamchatka camp partner, and I am "loaded for bear" packing all the things I had needed last year when I came to Alaska to the Brooks Range to hunt Dall sheep with Chri9stina Elwell. I may be doing that in the future with Zack and Christian when it is time of me to look for a mountain goat and then a big Alaskan moose.
But, for now, I'm a just a passin' through! I am going into another vast wilderness, this one the Kamchatka Russian wilderness, red in tooth and claw. But, I am "loaded for bear" so I will climb high for a look at the Bighorn Sheep-the Bharan Ram. Then I go down to the streams where I am not the only carnivore fishing, and despite my new hip boots and the fishing for Arctic Char, salmon and trout, I will; be on the lookout for a near inevitability-the totemic emblem of the Great Russian motherland---Ursos Arctos horribilis---the Great Russian Brown Bear. So, I may have a rug to put into the new Derwood addition, as well as a second ram to hang on the wall next to the fraternal Brooks Range ram "Ovis dalli" and who knows-I may have to keep expanding this museum for some further time and space if other large game heads will be gathered as the big heads of the Maral stag and a number of others have not yet arrived in additon to those that are already here. But, I do not need to count trophies before they are bagged and that includes the game room itself!
I am going along the Mount St Elias Range now and had passed over a large California fire, and had shot a photo of Mount Shasta when I came along side it thinking of Imme and Freeman Dysons' daughter Becca and her consort Peter who are now the two person/one job radiology unit at Shasta California and are probably driving the restored original Land Rover around the countryside here in rural California.
Timing is everything-for Peter and Becca, and also for me-which is how I happen to find myself out her in the wilderness of the Great Russian Bear. Each of these are totemic expeditions along our own self-definition, and the Great White Hunter/Gatherer has this narrow window to enjoy and to see if he can measure up against the Pacific Rim of Fire as it stretches into the Arctic and vast Siberian ice-locked land mass, that makes the Russians so envy and admire the great bear. I may join in that admiration at a closer range-and soon!