decides to chance it. The elder Pallister boys will fly out ahead in a floatplane to help Leiser and Raynor ready the Super Sacks. Pallister and Ryan, his youngest, will come out tomorrow night on the barge, weather permitting. There’s an extra spot on the floatplane, mine if I want it. If the barge is delayed by bad weather, I could end up stuck at Gore Point and miss my return flight home, at considerable expense. I’ve never ridden in a floatplane. I, too, decide to chance it.
The Pallister boys, invariably polite, let me have the good seat, up front beside the pilot, a tall, lanky fellow named José de Creeft, whom we meet beside his dock on the lake that serves as Homer’s unofficial airport. De Creeft wraps our luggage in garbage bags and stuffs them into the plane’s hollow pontoons. We buckle ourselves in, clap miked headsets over our ears, and go taxiing across the water. Through the blurry discus of the prop I watch a pair of swans and a gray cygnet paddle in a hurry out of our path. Then the motor accelerates into a deafening whine, then we are aloft, the silver waters of Kachemak Bay flashing far below. De Creeft pilots us through a foggy notch in the snowcapped Kenai Mountains. Here and there through the fog you can see waterfalls pouring from ledges, feeding into the Red River far below. “Been raining,” De Creeft says through his headset mike. “Lot of water coming out those rivers.” We bounce around a little. “Tends to be pretty squirrelly in here for the wind,” De Creeft says.
With disorienting speed we reach the fjords of the outer coast. Soon Gore Point’s leeward lagoon comes into view. Toylike at first, the Cape Chacon and the Johnita II grow life-size as we make our descent. De Creeft touches down, skis up to the Cape Chacon, unloads our bags, and minutes later is taking off again, anxious to make Homer ahead of the anticipated storm. The plane’s drone fades into the distance and the wake of silence it leaves behind is immense.
With no time to waste, we work late loading 1,800-some-odd garbage bags of flotsam and jetsam one by one into Super Sacks. My postoperative convalescence now complete, I help out, too. Rain has puddled in the folds of plastic, and when we lift a bag it pours off, drenching us. When we finally call it quits, we are all wet and exhausted and eager to learn what tomorrow will bring.
“It is now 11:04 P.M.,” Raynor will write in his logbook at bedtime. “Bryn and I are aboard for what I hope is the last night at Gore Point.”
Waking early, I am relieved to see, out a port window, in the dark, a pair of lights like eyes above the water. Dawn breaks to reveal Otto Kilcher’s amphibious bow-loading barge, a one-hundred-foot steel box called the Constructor, anchored on the far side of the lagoon. It is shaped something like a very long black shoe, the white tower of the wheelhouse resembling a spat. To the east the sky begins to turn all peachy, then the upper slopes of the western mountains go from black to green. As the sun rises, the brightening line of green slides slowly to sea level, the darkness withdrawing like a sheet. There are few clouds overhead, and only a mild breeze blowing, which goes to show how much you can trust NOAA forecasts out here on the unpredictable coast.
As we’re tugging on our Sitka sneakers and preparing to board the Zodiacs, Ted Raynor, like a high school football coach before a big game, gives us an unfortunate pep talk: “Mother Nature’s saying, ‘Please, please finish what you started. Please give me the big O.’ We’ve got her stroked and stoked and now we’ve just got to finish her off.”
A visitor who happened by Gore Point this morning might well wonder if a reenactment of the Valdez oil spill is under way. Here again is the barge, here again the garbage bags of debris, here again the remediation contractors assembled on the pebble beach. All that’s missing is Exxon’s oil. Slumping into overstuffed Super Sacks as if they were Barcaloungers, dressed in jeans and Polarfleece, Raynor and his crew gaze west, beyond the yacht and barge, to the Kenai Mountains, above which, any moment now, they expect the helicopter to appear. It’s foggy on the other side of those mountains. You can barely see the