heard it happen. The crash, the wail, Beth rushing to comfort him. Standing there on the Alaskan coast, gazing out past the marina at Resurrection Bay, listening to my son wailing inconsolably somewhere on the coast of Delaware, in a house I couldn’t imagine, I felt like a truant, a deadbeat dad. Like a serial deserter who’d dressed up his restlessness in the trappings of a quest.
Still sniffling, Bruno finally took the phone, or more likely his mother held it to his ear. I could almost see them, him slumped in her cross-legged lap. “I slipped,” he said in his tiny toddler’s voice, which on the phone seemed tinier still. “I fell on the floor.”
“I’m in Alaska,” I said, hoping he’d think of the picture book I’d given him, called Alaska, in which appear illustrated mountains, illustrated eagles, illustrated sled dogs, illustrated bears. If he was thinking of such marvels, he gave no sign, so I tried again: “Last night, I slept on a boat.”
“I slipped,” Bruno repeated.
“Are you going to be okay?”
No answer. Probably he was nodding, yes, forgetting that I couldn’t see him nod. He had only just begun to learn the magic of telecommunication, the trick of speaking to a disembodied voice. Into the silence between us came the cosmic hiss of satellites, the static of the spheres. If he were nine years old instead of two, perhaps I could have brought him with me, and perhaps it would have done him some good. In Wilderness, as the Rockwell Kents, younger and elder, are crossing Resurrection Bay, braving a storm in their open boat, Rockwell III, showing “a little panic,” says to his father, “I want to be a sailor so I’ll learn not to be afraid.”
At his first glimpse of his hermitage on Fox Island, Kent the elder had said to himself, “It isn’t possible, it isn’t real!” Which just about sums up how I felt motoring across Resurrection Bay in the copilot seat of the Opus. So many books have been written about Alaska, and so many cruise ship commercials shot there, that the place, even when you’re in the midst of it, can seem a symbolical mirage.
In his late twenties, in pursuit of that mirage, Pallister persuaded his high school sweetheart, at the time pregnant with their first child, to move with him to Anchorage because of a map—a map of Prince William Sound that he’d happened upon in the back of Field & Stream. Growing up in Montana, he’d fallen in love with the mountains of the American West. He and his brothers hiked in them, camped in them, hunted deer and mountain goats in them. Then, as a teenager, Pallister read Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World and dreamed of going to sea. What he glimpsed in Field & Stream seemed to him, as Fox Island had seemed to Kent, a kind of paradise, an American wilderness that was maritime and mountainous both. Thirty-five years later, the spell had yet to break, though the place of Pallister’s dreams has receded into the blue, nostalgic distances of remembrance. To his great dismay, there are plenty of other people in the world who want in on his paradise.
Although Pallister scorns organized religion, considering it the enemy of reason, there is something puritanical about his brand of conservationism, which is in large part a crusade against idiotic hominids. Like many conservationists in Alaska, he dates the beginning of his activism to March 24, 1989, the day the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef. What troubled Pallister the most wasn’t the spilled oil, however; it was the crowds—the volunteers, the cameramen, the news anchors, the oilmen, the politicians. “All of a sudden there were literally thousands of people in places where I’d never seen people before,” he told me. “I thought to myself, ‘Holy Christ! This is on the national news. Everybody’s going to see how beautiful this place is. It’s going to be a tragedy for Prince William Sound.’”
What he feared had come to pass. On the eve of our embarkation, when we were towing the Opus over the Kenai Mountains, the traffic on the Seward Highway had been thick as on the Long Island Expressway at rush hour. So thick it felt as though we were participating in some sort of exodus or pilgrimage. It was the weekend, a weekend in the middle of July, at the height of Alaska’s tourist season. The salmon were running and the creeks were crowded with