Pecked to death by ducks (42 page)

"I suppose I did."

"And in spite of that, you chose to watch."

"In all honesty," I said, "it made me laugh."

The officer stared at me with courteous disapproval. "It doesn't make me laugh."

The officer's attitude—stiff, proper, stern—brought the beginnings of an involuntary giggle up from the pit of my stomach. I swallowed hard and tried to look remorseful.

"We didn't think about that, did we," the officer asked.

Kirke sometimes actually pulls off an event without getting arrested. He once attempted to fly an ultralight—a kind of hang-gliding device equipped with a propeller and snowmobile engine —across the English Channel. "It was," Kirke said, "a hundred-ten-pound machine, carrying one-hundred-thirteen pounds of fuel and a hundred-sixty-pound navigator." The first attempt was a dismal failure. Kirke crashed into a tree only fourteen miles from takeoff. The second attempt was a success. Kirke flew four and a half hours at two thousand feet, landed in a field, and almost immediately heard the far-off sounds of police sirens, coming closer. A woman in a nearby farmhouse motioned to him: hurry, hurry. Kirke packed up his gear, and the woman guided him to a hidden attic room. "As it happened," Kirke explained to me, "during the Second World War, when France was occupied, this courageous woman had hidden downed British pilots in that very room. She had a certificate of appreciation from the Dutch and British governments." Kirke hid out for a day, savoring the romance of the situation, then escaped.

He wasn't so lucky a few years later when he flew a giant inflatable kangaroo across the channel. The impossible kangaroo hung from several helium-filled balloons, and Kirke piloted the beast from its pouch. "Really," Kirke said, "it was a childhood

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS ▲ 362

fantasy: a little boy holding on to some balloons, floating through the air."

Kirke made the crossing at about ten thousand feet and was losing altitude rapidly when he sighted land. The stunt was sponsored by Fosters, the fine Australian beer, and though it hurt him deeply, Kirke was forced to toss out several cases to gain a bit of altitude and avoid some power lines. "I kept a prudent supply/' Kirke explained, "but helium balloons are at the complete mercy of the wind, and I could see that I was coming very close to the cross atop a church steeple." It rained cans of Fosters on the churchyard, and Kirke cleared the holy structure by less than a foot. "I truly didn't want to damage a church," Kirke said. "I know they would have been miffed."

Instead, Kirke was merely arrested for not filing a proper flight plan or having a pilot's license. It cost him about eight hundred dollars in all.

Inflatable gadgets occupied his mind for some time. There is the giant inflatable pink elephant he rode across Loch Ness. And the Midori melon ball got a lot of press.

Midori is a Japanese melon liqueur, and Kirke decided to build the largest inflatable melon he could. It stuck him as a distinctive and amusing advertising stunt. The melon ball is sixty-five to seventy feet in diameter. Inside is a gimbal device that keeps the "navigator" upright no matter which way the ball may roll.

It had been thought that, if the winds were right, the massive melon could roll across the Channel from England to France. Kirke's trial run was a disaster. The melon was inflated on a lake north of London. A brisk wind sprang up and seized the melon, which, after all, was about the size of a five-story building. The wind sent the inflatable melon skidding and rolling across the lake. Nothing could stop the giant melon ball. It rolled over a car, causing no damage. It rolled across a roadway, accompanied now by the squeal of tires. "You have to calculate the weight of the air inside the melon ball," Kirke said, "to understand what happened next."

A ball seventy feet in diameter contains about two tons of air. The rogue melon rolled into a cement light post twenty-five feet

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high and "mashed it." It finally came to rest against an electric pylon, toppled it slightly, and effectively blacked out the town of Telford for some time.

Later Kirke had the melon ball towed between two barges down the Thames, past the houses of Parliament, and everything went swimmingly until a metal towing cable snapped, rebounded against the melon, and punctured it. Kirke felt the enormous thing collapsing around him, cutting off his air. The deflated melon began to sink. Kirke cut his way out with a knife and was —humiliation—rescued by the river police. "Of course," he told the press, "I'm a bit melancholy. Still, this is in the finest British tradition of vessels that sink on their maiden voyage. I'm thinking specifically of the Titanic.'"

"We are not charging you," the polite officer said, in the same tone that a priest might say, "Go and sin no more."

David Kirke and I drove immediately to London, where he had made reservations at a Russian restaurant famous for its quality caviar and vodka. A young woman who works for the British equivalent of MTV was waiting for him in a private booth. I mentioned that my seven hours in jail had provided me with "all the fun of being in the club and none of the risk."

"Just so," Kirke agreed. We discussed his latest adventure, which involved a catapult powered by bungee cords used by twenty-one governments worldwide to deploy drone aircraft. The drones, which go from zero to sixty miles an hour in a second, are used to test weapons systems. Kirke rigged a chair and had himself catapulted over a 650-foot-high cliff in Ireland. He took ten Gs, did not pass out, went from zero to sixty in a second and a half, and managed to deploy his parachute with, oh, dozens of feet to spare.

This stunt was for a Japanese television program, and Kirke was touched that some of the female production assistants had burst into grateful tears when they saw him land safely. Usually, he gets arrested.

We had the lemon-grass vodka delivered in an iced carafe along with great quantities of caviar. Kirke talked about one of the first

DSC events: a party on Rockall, a remote island 220 miles west of Scotland, five days' hard sailing from the mainland. The islet is bounded by walls seventy feet high that are difficult to climb in a tux while hauling a backpack full of champagne and the proper glasses, not to mention caviar with the proper trimmings. Such a party is best ended by a seventy-foot jump into a churning, rocky tidal pool. Kirke had no experience diving, but, as he explains, "I could swim."

In the DSC the idea of sport as a party somehow got confused with the idea of the party as an art form. Kirke had noticed that people attending art-show openings never looked at the art. They drank the wine, ate the cheese, but never looked at the art. Kirke and company sent out invitations to all the movers and shakers in London's art world. It was to be a private viewing of the emerging "Neoclassical School of Futurism." Placed on the wall, inside classical frames, were glasses of spirits, expensive hors d'oeuvres, and full meals prepared by celebrated chefs. "It was," Kirke recalled, "a pleasure watching gallery-going sponge artists stare at all this food and drink. They were afraid to touch it. It was art. It took quite some time for people to realize that the party was the art. And the art was the party. After that it was quite a success: a sixty-broken-glass cocktail party."

We threw down another glass of lemon-grass vodka in the traditional manner. "The police," I said, "don't get it. They said I should ask you what you think you are doing with your life."

Kirke thought it over for a second. He said, "I like to think we in the Dangerous Sports Club hark back to the flamboyant bohe-mianism of Paris circa 1900, when artists walked lobsters on pink ribbons, and there was a sense that art was something worth dying for." The founder and director of the Dangerous Sports Club signaled for more caviar. "I like to think that what I do closes the gap between parties and life, between living and art, between art and sport."

"Sir?" The waiter was standing at our table.

"More of the beluga," Kirke said, "and perhaps a spot of champagne."

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I suppose most people were asleep when it began, but I suspect that many in Juneau were awakened by the continual barking and howling of the dogs. It was a cacophony beyond the usual level of canine complaint, beyond "I'm cold" or "I'm hungry" or "I'm bored" or "there's a real loud motorcycle going by at about fifty miles an hour, and I'd sure as hell chase it down if I had the time." No, these Alaskan dogs were responding to some primeval instinct welling up from below the level of domesticity. In the dark of a moonless night they were howling at an eerie, cold fire sweeping across the sky.

It was one of the more spectacular northern-lights displays anyone in southeast Alaska could remember. The early October weather was fine: a cloudless and balmy 40 degrees at 2:00 a.m. Parents woke their children, and entire families stood out in the middle of residential streets staring up into the living sky. The dark surrounding mountains looked two-dimensional, like cardboard cutouts, and a dim glow played off the highest ridges. Above, the moving curtains of pale green were so vivid that they colored the upturned faces of sleepy kids and wondering adults. If you gave the lights any explanation other than the natural one

and added the helpless howling of the dogs as a sound track, this would have been the best scene in an otherwise very bad movie titled Invasion from Planet X.

Several days later I was a hundred miles northwest, at the terminus of a long, narrow fjord known as Glacier Bay. Two hundred years ago the bay did not exist. In 1794 explorer Captain George Vancouver observed an ice sheet almost a mile thick and twenty miles wide in what is now the mouth of Glacier Bay. Over the past two centuries the great glacier has been in retreat, and the ocean has followed it to reclaim the deep valleys. The once-monolithic wall of ice has broken into sixteen tidewater glaciers, still grumbling and thundering their way back up into the mountains where they were born. Tides rise and fall as much as twenty feet in Glacier Bay, and these waters eat away at the feet of the dying glaciers. Daily, as the tide ebbs, a new shelf of ice hangs over the sea below. When the weakened ice gives way, blue-green pillars up to two hundred feet high come crashing into the water in an explosion of spray.

I was kayaking Glacier Bay with photographer Paul Dix. We'd spent a few nights on the bare headland across from Riggs Glacier and two more nights near Muir Glacier, on the eastern arm of Glacier Bay. This land that emerged, in the wake of the retreating glaciers, was all bare rock and talus. In a few years a feltlike algal nap will cover the rocks, retaining moisture and stabilizing glacial silt. Next will come moss, then small, flowering plants, followed by an impenetrable morass of alder breaks. These pioneer plants enrich the nitrogen-deficient soil so that, over the years, spruce and hemlock will shade out the alder. Bartlett Cove, at the mouth of Glacier Bay, has a lush, far-north rain forest, and the forest floor is alive with ferns and swampy muskeg.

We were seventy miles from the living land, in the cove that contains McBride Glacier. Dix wanted to take advantage of the fine weather to shoot what we hoped would be some spectacular photographs. John Muir described Glacier Bay as "dim, dreary, and mysterious," but this day the sky was a deep-water blue and the temperature stood at 55 degrees Fahrenheit. The wall of ice

glittered in the sun. Dix beached his kayak and climbed a talus slope that rises to the glacier's south edge. We both knew that quicksand often covers the edges of such glaciers and that it was foolish for him to climb alone, without a rope. But Dix is an experienced mountaineer, and he assured me that he could handle it. I could see him, standing on the ice at the edge of McBride Glacier, and I knew that the ice was moving imperceptibly and that he was surrounded by crevasses on all sides.

I could just barely make him out up there, a tiny silhouette with the sun behind it. He waved his arm, a signal for me to paddle my kayak toward the groaning wall of ice. I couldn't move at top speed because the water was littered with chunks of icebergs that had calved off the wall. Some were the size of tugboats, and small rivers had formed on their surface where they caught the sun. I could hear dozens of small torrents. There were other smaller icebergs, floating chunks called bergy bits that clattered against the hull of the boat. The Park Service suggests that kayakers give the glaciers a half-mile's worth of respect. But it was hard to judge distances with only a wall of ice perhaps 150 feet high looming above for perspective.

A block of ice about the size of an eighteen-wheel truck broke loose from the glacier and fell toward the water in the slow motion of massive catastrophes viewed from afar. The pillar of ice, falling on the floating icebergs below, set up a sustained thunder that echoed against the bulk of the glacier and reached my ears almost three seconds after the event. This out-of-synch roar was a measure of distance: Sound moving at eleven hundred feet per second had taken three seconds to reach my ear—thirty-three hundred feet. I was better than a half mile from the wall.

A wave perhaps three feet high formed and rose at the foot of the glacier. It rolled toward the kayak, lifting the largest of the icebergs with it. The water was dirty brown with the melted mud of centuries past. For a time the wave grew in the perspective of proximity, but the blanket of the icebergs on the water weighed it down so that when it hit my kayak, it was only a gentle swell.

Some small specks, sea birds, sailed hard by the glacier's face,

diving for the stunned fish and shrimp that had been brought to the surface by the falling ice. I stared at them for a while, paddled in a bit, and calculated that I was floating at the half-mile mark. I felt compelled to paddle in farther. When I could clearly recognize the specks as birds, I stopped again. The icebergs and bergy bits here were newer, fresh from the glacier, and occasionally, in the relative warmth of the sea, they snapped in the way an ice cube pops when dropped into a drink. Closer. The birds—I could make them out now—were arctic terns. The snapping was intense. It was a sound like electricity, out of control.