Sea Kayaking with Jon Turk

My kayak slid gently off a wave and settled into an eerie calm, sheltered by mesmerizing gray-green walls of water. A part of me relaxed, even though I knew that this moment of peace was ephemeral. To windward, the next wave reared higher and steeper than its neighbors. The wave loomed, then overreached itself and hung above my head. An instant later, cascading droplets leaped over the precipice and exploded into a growing line of white.

A kayak is so long and skinny that it should roll down the face of a breaking wave, like a window shade gone amok. But just before the wave crashed onto my deck, I grasped the turbulent water with my paddle and cocked my hips to set the edge of my kayak. The motion was automatic and relaxed by now, like resting on the shoulder of a friend rather than combating an enemy. The wave broke against my left cheek, washing away the encrusted salt from the previous wave and leaving a new coating to crystallize in my beard, eyelashes, and even the small hairs inside my ear.

I had launched this journey from Japan fifteen months previously to follow a small group of Stone Age mariners who-all evidence suggests-migrated to North America between 18,000 and 9,500 years ago. Most likely these long-forgotten sailors made their journey in open log canoes, paddling these same waters and marveling at the same menacing waves and the same magic that bears a small, frail boat over their crests. I had come here to share the thoughts, dreams, fears, and exaltations of these ancient seafarers-and in some indefinable way to understand why they had set out across this roiling and tempestuous sea.

At the moment, however, wonder was overshadowed by an acute pain in my elbow that jerked me rudely back into the present. I reached into a small waterproof bottle in my life vest, shook out a white oblong pill, and swallowed it. Soon its anti-inflammatory drugs entered my bloodstream. These molecules were designed to attach themselves to sites of tissue inflammation, but my body was a forest of sore, injured, and inflamed tissues. How were the molecules to know where I wanted them to go? I shouted down into my bloodstream, "Skip all the minor things-the countless little aches and pains, the sore muscles. You can even forget the bruised vertebrae. Go for the elbow tendon! The left one!" Another wave hit, and when I leaned against my paddle my inflamed tendon throbbed. "Go for the elbow tendon," I whispered hopefully.

The long Arctic summer was sliding into autumn, and the sun was finally dipping into the sea. A quarter moon glowed orange as it hung incongruously above the sun, like two companions on the same watch rather than alternating guardians of day and night. The first stars appeared in the eastern sky, then suddenly more twinkles appeared to the south. It took a few seconds to realize that this wasn't some strange celestial event but the streetlights of Gambell, Alaska. After a passage of 3,000 miles, I had finally crossed the North Pacific.
The Stone Age mariners saw no streetlights, yet somewhere near here they must also have rejoiced to a feeling of accomplishment and relief. When they sailed, the sea level was lower than it is now; more land was exposed, and a map of the North Pacific-had one existed then-would have looked different. At about this latitude, the ancient coastline of North America veered toward the southeast. As the weary sailors turned southward, they must have realized that they were at last heading toward warmer, more temperate lands.

Misha pulled ahead in his fire-engine-red kayak. For months I had been joking with him, "You get the red kayak because you're the Communist Russian." He always smiled patiently at my weak humor, revealing his prominent gold tooth and disarmingly blue eyes. I would smile back, wondering how he managed to maintain such a tidy appearance in this remote land of ice and storm. His Viking-blond beard was always neatly trimmed, and there was never a smudge of campfire soot on his cheek or a stray fish scale lodged in his moustache.
Misha's kayak dropped into a trough between two waves until it disappeared, leaving only his brown hat, which seemed to float like an apparition in a medieval legend. I had watched that brown hat bob on the waves for so many miles; it had stared at me when Misha bent over the campfire and greeted me when we awoke on cold, foggy mornings. Misha and I had been strangers four months ago, and now we felt like lifelong friends. Enough idle thoughts. I forced ten quick strokes, then tried to hold the faster cadence.

I searched for danger one last time, running through the mental checklist that had kept me alive through all the crossings and sudden storms of this journey: barometer, steady; sea, steep but not rising; clouds, fluffy cumulus with no indication of a nascent storm. Good. I punched the "where am I" button on the GPS and the screen blinked our position:
I scrolled through the menu:
Six miles-two hours to go.

Throughout the voyage, I had been deluding myself that we were in no great danger. But all the while I knew that this was a transparent, self-protective lie. We had been paddling across a vast, turbulent, unpredictable ocean. The ghostly truth had hidden itself in the folds of my brain, whispering its demoralizing logic and slipping into the shadows when I tried to exorcize it. Now the floodgates opened, and fear welled up inside me. For a brief moment, my body shook with adrenaline; but now that the fear was free to speak, the danger was over. Six more miles and we would be safe. The anxiety had no direction or purpose, so it spilled out of my body and dissipated into the great sea and sky. I felt drained, empty, exhausted, cleansed. My elbow still throbbed, but it didn't matter anymore. We were going to make it. I switched off the GPS and concentrated on an efficient paddle stroke, using my torso as much as possible to relieve pressure on the elbow. The dark, menacing sea was flecked with white foam and offset by streaks of red-orange twilight that shimmered from the wave tops. "Concentrate on this sea, these colors, this feeling," I reminded myself. "You'll never be here again." But I couldn't achieve a Zen-like focus for more than a moment.

Instead I saw my journey from beginning to end. I remembered the tidy harbor in Japan where we had embarked, and all the rough-hewn outpost camps in Siberia. I saw mirror-smooth calms and hurricane-force catabatic winds screaming down from glaciated peaks. I also saw mysterious, quixotic dreams-just wisps of thought-that propelled the Stone Age mariners, and me, across this inimical and capricious ocean.

For the past several years, I had been obsessed with two questions: How had Stone Age mariners crossed this northern ocean, and why? The quest had consumed me, but the answers had proved elusive-as I had always known they would-flickering over the next wave top and whispering behind the next headland but always receding, just beyond reach. At night, asleep in ancient campsites, I chased phantoms through dreams, struggling to interpret signs and images. The answers I sought were out there, hidden in the shadows beyond ocean swell or firelight, if only I could see them.