Someone Who’s Been There Before
Beyond the windows, the Lynn Canal wrinkles beneath a cold wind. White flashes appear between the waves. A gull. A whitecap. A whale.
It is April. Humpbacks are moving north with their calves, leaving Hawaiian breeding grounds for the nutrient-rich waters of Southeast Alaska. Soon the herring will spawn, turning sheltered coves silver. Eagles, sea lions, bears, and whales will gather for the annual feast.
Winter, meanwhile, seems unconvinced it is over. Snow from a record-breaking year remains piled around the parking lot of Haines' waterfront RV park. Meltwater streams down the mountainsides. A damp chill drifts off the fjord. Tomorrow I will spend hours immersed in that water.
For now, there is coffee.
The clubhouse offers the comforts of shore life: showers, Wi-Fi, washing machines. A whiteboard blocks the view. Scrawled across it is an ambitious syllabus: incident management, expedition skills, sea survival.
There are four of us in the guide course. It is scheduled for sixteen days. It will eventually stretch to nineteen.
The Grey Heron is already in the room. Among sea kayakers, he is known as an expedition paddler, coach, and guide. Decades on the water have carried him along remote coastlines from Japan to Norway. He has spent much of his career teaching paddlers how to become guides and guides how to become seamen.
Tall and long-limbed, the sixty-something Brit moves with the economy of someone who has spent much of his life outdoors. He has a habit of pausing before speaking, as if checking conditions. Weather, tide, wildlife, group dynamics—it all appears to occupy the same mental shelf.
In the absence of bears and rough seas, we become the object of observation: a seasoned outfitter from Sitka, a young NOLS graduate already guiding in Alaska, the Wolf whose enthusiasm arrives several seconds before the rest of him, and me, fresh from a winter of teaching skiing.
When the Grey Heron paces before the whiteboard, the room takes on the feel of a vessel underway.
"As kayakers, each individual is captain of their own ship," he says. "Through your leadership, they're going to follow you. Seamanship is about knowing what's coming up."
The course is full of mnemonics: STOP. SAFER. SHEETS. CLAP.
A tourist paddles a kayak along a stretch of coastline.
A sea kayak guide reads the same coastline the way a fisherman reads a tide rip or a hunter reads tracks in fresh snow.
The distinction sounds simple. It isn't.
Long before maps, roads, and GPS satellites, traders crossed deserts, pilgrims crossed mountains, and sailors traversed unfamiliar seas by following someone who had already done it. Guiding remains essentially the same arrangement, albeit with lighter equipment and more expensive gear.
The lessons move quickly from theory to practice.
"Stop! Capsize! Swimmer!"
One by one we tumble from our kayaks and feign hypothermia until the real thing begins to creep in. We tow one another through confused seas, rescue swimmers beneath rain-slick cliffs, descend rock faces in improvised harnesses, and build fires with whatever will burn. The line between exercise and reality proves surprisingly thin.
The Grey Heron's preferred teaching method is disruption. Whenever the group settles into a comfortable rhythm, disaster arrives. A flooded hatch. A shoulder injury. Cold shock. A cardiac arrest. One moment he is paddling quietly among us. The next he is upside down, holding his breath while someone struggles through a rescue.
Every module points toward the same conclusion: weather deteriorates, equipment breaks, people become tired, and assumptions fail. Rarely all at once, but often enough that some scale of catastrophe should be expected as the guide’s constant companion.
Just because people follow you doesn't mean you always lead them well.
A month later, I find myself leading a group of six experienced river kayakers from Letnikof Cove. Their goal is ambitious: paddle the Inside Passage from Seattle to Skagway the following summer. Our job is to show them tides, crossings, and the practical realities of traveling through bear country.
The strongest paddlers quickly pull ahead. A high-school teacher drops behind.
"My arms are screaming at me right now," he says.
"Push with your feet."
Later, around camp, he recounts my advice.
"'Push with your feet,' she told me. Shut the fuck up."
The group laughs.
The guests show little interest in rescue scenarios. What concerns them is weather, mileage, and wildlife. They care about making camp on a beach with a short carry across sand or small rocks. They care about the porpoises surfing a ferry wake and the river otter snacking on a fish until an eagle arrives and attempts to steal it.
They care about seeing Alaska.
The previous summer I had traveled this same route under the watchful eye of a local guide. Waterfalls poured from hanging valleys carved by ice. Evening light moved across the Chilkat Range. Humpbacks surfaced offshore. The place seemed less like Alaska than a rough draft of the planet.
Now I was returning with a pencil. The landscape itself was unchanged, but I had begun to read it differently. Freshwater here, lunch beach there, porpoises off this point, bears on that one. The rough draft was acquiring footnotes.
On the final day, the high-school teacher pulls alongside.
"All jokes aside," he says, "without you guides pushing me along, I would've turned back on day one."
When we reach Juneau, rain falls in sheets. Everything is soaked.
We emerge from the water like seals flushed from a haul-out and gather beside a stranger's fire. Steam rises from wet fleece. Around us, the guests swap stories from the crossing as though it happened years ago instead of hours.
I smile. Before he left, the Grey Heron offered perhaps the simplest definition of a guide: someone who's been there before.