<
By Holly Robinson
Eighteenth Annual Solas Awards Silver Winner in the Adventure Travel category
By the time I arrive in Wrangell, Alaska by ferry, it’s seven o’clock in the morning. Through the soupy fog, the harbor lights twinkle like a necklace missing a few jewels.
I have traveled 3,781 miles from Boston over the past 30 hours to visit my daughter in this remote corner of the world. Now I’m shaky and seasick: The planes grew smaller and the weather worse as I traveled, until the final plane was grounded and I had to journey the last leg by boat. At 23, my daughter Taylor’s age, I would have loved this adventure, but all I can think about is sleep and a shower.
When Taylor first told me where she was moving for her new job, I was certain I’d misheard. “Wrangell, Alaska,” sounded like a Wild West town where everyone carries guns and bears roam the streets.
As it turns out, that’s pretty true. I met one man on the plane who showed me photos of his recent kills: a moose, a bear, and a wolverine. So how had Taylor, my little girl, ended up here?
Taylor was always a girly girl. I indulged her preschool passion for dress-up by buying ruffled dresses in thrift stores. In fifth grade, she had whirling dervish tantrums because I didn’t know how to do anything “pretty” with her hair, until I remembered that I could put it in a French braid. I didn’t tell her that it was the same technique I once used to braid my horse’s tail for shows.
Yet, a year after finishing college, Taylor is a “timber tramp” with the U.S. Forest Service in Wrangell. She can rattle off statistics about trees and the fishing industry, lives in a crew bunkhouse, and comes home most days soaking wet and covered with bug bites.
“Maybe we can take a float plane to see the glaciers,” Taylor had suggested as we were planning this visit.
“Maybe not,” I said.
“Come on, Mom,” Taylor said, laughing. “You’ve got to get out of your comfort zone.”
As I reach the inn and collapse on the bed, I realize that I’m already miles out of my comfort zone just by being in Wrangell, an island that naturalist John Muir once called “the most inhospitable place at first sight I’d ever seen.”
~ ~ ~
Taylor arrives at the inn carrying a homemade huckleberry pie with a heart cut into the crust. “Welcome to Wrangell, Mom,” she says, and gives me a hug.
I’m touched to tears and happily follow her through town, a jumble of buildings above the harbor. The water is silver and the islands offshore are silhouetted black against a pewter sky.
Over a dinner of halibut tacos, Taylor reports that she spent the day in “Saw School.”
“What’s that?” I’m sipping my wine, but snap to attention as Taylor explains that “Saw School” is just what it sounds like.
Apparently, knowing how to operate a chainsaw is a must-have skill in the Alaskan wilderness. If a 200′ spruce blows down across the road, you’d better know how to cut it up if you want to get home.
“I felled a 100′ pine today,” she says.
I try not to choke on my wine.
“Good job, honey.”
Taylor describes her other survival training classes, too. By now, she can staunch a bleeding wound, escape from the cage of an overturned float plane, and protect herself from bear attacks.
Meanwhile, I’m remembering how I took Taylor on a cheap cruise to Bermuda the summer after her freshman year of high school. I had never wanted to go on a cruise; I indulged her because we fought so much during her early teens that I was scrabbling for ways to feel close.
What did we fight about? The usual: boys, chores, attitude. Taylor was an honors student and varsity athlete who landed her first job at age fourteen. Still, there was such tension between us that I felt battle-scarred and frightened that I’d lose my daughter completely once she escaped to college.
I gave Taylor a good reason to shut me out: I am emotionally pushy. I constantly needled at my daughter to open up, making her feel cornered and vulnerable. Mothers of my generation don’t just want to raise our kids. We want to know them.
When I booked that cruise to Bermuda, I fantasized that Taylor and I would share a tiny cabin and do everything together. It didn’t turn out that way. She made friends with an older boy and I saw less of her than I’d hoped. But there were rare moments of connection, like one excursion where we donned glass-fronted helmets attached to oxygen hoses and sank among the coral reefs. As we strolled the ocean floor, Taylor’s blue eyes widened with delight and she held my hand. I could have stayed in that peaceful, silent, neon-colored world with her forever.
As we walk back to the inn after dinner, Taylor says that a friend might take us by boat to see grizzly bears.
I hesitate. Among my list of fears, grizzly bears rank near the top. I once knew a woman who was doing field work in Montana when she made the mistake of getting between a grizzly and her cub. She had her arm ripped off.
“Let’s play it by ear,” I murmur. “It might keep raining the whole time I’m here, right?”
Taylor isn’t fooled. She grins.
“It’s okay, Mom,” she says. “You don’t even have to get out of the boat.”
~ ~ ~
Over the next few days, we hike and hang out at Taylor’s bunkhouse, which she shares with other Forest Service employees. Taylor carries a pack on our hikes loaded with food and water; I’m reminded of the years I carried backpacks when my children were small, doling out snacks as needed. It feels odd to have our roles reversed.
All parents dream of raising children who are better versions of themselves. By the time she was in college, I knew I’d succeeded with Taylor. In high school, sports saved her—she was a fierce competitor—and we reached an uneasy peace when her two older brothers left for college. She had also discovered art and spent much of her free time drawing.
I expected Taylor to major in art or fashion design, but she chose Natural Resources, drawn by her love of the outdoors. By senior year, she had studied in Spain and been to Indonesia to do environmental research.
“Looks like I’m following in your footsteps,” Taylor wrote to me on the back of a postcard.
Now, as I pop ibuprofen to tame my knees and watch Taylor’s powerful legs carry her up the mountains ahead of me, I feel a surprising stab of pain that isn’t joint-related. I was as fearless as Taylor once, an avid horsewoman who adventured to far corners of the world, from Argentina to Nepal and everywhere in between. Yet, all I can think about right now are plane crashes, bear attacks, and yes, even wolverines as I pant uphill, struggling to keep up with my daughter. When did Taylor get so strong and brave, and how did I become so old and fearful?
~ ~ ~
“When I was a teenager, I used to worry about how I looked in the morning,” Taylor says over a dinner of pizza and beer in Wrangell. “Now I wonder whether I’m wearing the right clothes to stay warm and dry while I’m working.”
“You have changed a lot,” I venture. “I always wondered what you were so angry about, growing up.”
Taylor shrugs. “I don’t know. I was just angry all of the time. I used to be embarrassed by the people I was associated with—my boyfriend, my family, whoever was with me. A lot of that stemmed from being self-conscious. I didn’t want to call any attention to myself. If you’re a hormonal teenager, you have a mother who isn’t afraid to talk to anyone, and you’re in a family with five children, it isn’t easy to pretend people aren’t taking notice of the traveling circus that accompanies you.”
The truth, we both know, is that our family is complicated. We talk about that as well in Wrangell. It’s a tough subject even after so many years: Taylor’s life was turned upside down when I divorced her father and married my second husband. At age six, Taylor found her world suddenly overcrowded with a stepfather, a stepbrother and a stepsister. Two years later, we added another baby.
In essence, Taylor had to adapt from life in a quiet, two-parent, two-child home to a chaotic household of seven people—and I had to juggle being a busy working mother with worrying about everything from babies choking to teens crashing the car.
Was ours a happy family? I would say yes. My second husband and I still have a loving marriage after many years, and nothing makes me happier than having all five children come home for holidays.
Taylor agrees. “Looking back, I wouldn’t change my childhood for anything,” she says now, “but at the time, I wanted to be Chris McCandless in Into the Wild so that I could wake up and walk away from those who knew me and anything familiar.”
Immediately, I go into worried mother mode. I have to bite my tongue to keep from shouting the obvious: Chris died! Think of his poor mother!
~ ~ ~
When the fog lifts the next day, Taylor’s friend Bruce invites us to Anan Wildlife Observatory to look for grizzly bears. I agree to go, determined to be brave.
Then I see the boat, a metal skiff the size of my dining room table, and panic sets in. The water here is so cold that you could survive only ten minutes if you fell overboard. I am not comforted by the fact that Bruce is loading survival gear into the boat. Oh, and then there’s the bear spray, which comes in canisters with complicated black and orange latches you’re supposed to push or pull or flip—I’m still not sure.
“The important thing,” Taylor says, “is to wait until the bear gets close enough to spray him in the eyes. Otherwise he’s likely to get more pissed off.”
Bruce tells me never to run from a bear. Instead, I’m supposed to wave my arms above my head and talk to it. Loudly. “Let the bear know you’re human, and he’s likely to back off,” he says.
I’ve already researched bear safety online, where I found a website that advised playing dead during an attack. “If the bear continues biting you long after you assume a defensive posture,” the website writer adds in a resigned voice, “it likely is a predatory attack. Fight back vigorously.”
The boat ride along Wrangell’s shoreline is jaw-droppingly gorgeous, with glacier peaks gleaming above snow-covered mountains. Porpoises leap alongside the skiff and seals pop up in unexpected places.
Anan, 35 miles southeast of Wrangell, is a prime bear viewing area because salmon spawn in the river here. When we arrive, a dozen bald eagles are swooping into the river to carry salmon to shore and feed. The water is clear enough to watch the fish—some as long as my forearm–running beneath the boat. The air smells of blood and pines.
We anchor the boat and clamber onto shore, then follow a trail leading to a bridge. Bruce leads the way. He’s carrying what I’d hoped was a pistol but turns out to be a flare gun; Taylor and I are each armed with bear spray.
Taylor is disappointed to see only more eagles from the bridge, but I breathe a sigh of relief.
As we head back to the boat, I’m startled when Bruce starts running like hell in front of me. Taylor follows at the same stiff clip.
I raise my arms and start waving to any hidden bears. It turns out that Bruce has only sprinted for the boat, fearful that it will be carried off because the tide’s going out and the rope has come loose.
We finally spot a bear on shore as we’re headed back to Wrangell. It’s small and black, as docile as my Pekingese back home, but my heart is still pounding.
~ ~ ~
“I’m glad you came and saw my life here,” Taylor says on my last day while we hike through a steady drizzle.
“Me, too.”
I take her hand and we walk that way for a little while, the tall trees sheltering us from the rain, as alone and together as when we walked silently underwater around those Bermuda coral reefs years ago. “Maybe next time I’ll let you talk me into a float plane.”
That night, Taylor makes homemade granola bars and wraps a couple of them in wax paper for my return trip.
“I don’t want you getting hungry on the plane, Mom,” she teases. “It’s a long way home.”
I thank her with a hug, thinking that my true home will always be partly with this brave daughter so fiercely making her way into the world, carrying a piece of my heart wherever she goes.
I also know that the bravest thing I’ve ever done is let her go.
~ ~ ~
Holly Robinson is a novelist, journalist and ghostwriter. Under her own name, she has published a memoir and six novels with Penguin Random House as well as articles, essays and humor columns in national publications such as Real Simple and Parents. As a ghostwriter, she has published twelve works of nonfiction with major publishers such as St. Martin’s, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin Random House. Holly holds a B.A. in biology and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and she is fluent in Spanish. Her special areas of interest include education, health, medical research, family relationships, immigrant stories, Latin America, and women’s lives.