The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 (43 page)

 

10.

 

When I lived on Anchorage's Hillside, I could sometimes watch Dall sheep from my front yard. Even through binoculars, they were small white dots on the green or brown slopes below a Chugach landmark called Rusty Point. I always considered it a marvelous thing, to watch wild sheep move about their alpine homelands while I stood in my own suburban neighborhood, with its houses, roads, gardens, garbage pickup, and lawn mowers.

 

11.

 

Though my geology career ended in the 1970s, I've periodically returned to the Central Brooks Range in the years since then, as writer, adventurer, and wildlands advocate. Now largely protected by the 8.2-million-acre Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, it has remained my favorite wilderness, a largely unpeopled landscape where one can spend days, even weeks, without seeing obvious signs of humans; a place where knife-edged ridges stretch in waves to the horizon and beyond, and glacially carved basins grow lush with tundra plants in summer; a place enriched by free-roaming grizzly bears, wolves, wolverines, sheep, and other northern animals.

In August 2008, I traveled to Gates on a ten-day solo trip. My visit got off to a rough start, with a broken tent pole and wintry weather, raising worries and dampening my spirits. My second day in the range was mostly rainy and gusty, so I stayed inside the tent except to cook and stretch muscles on a short hill climb. That hike proved to be exactly the tonic I needed. Step by step my worries washed away while I gently slipped into the wonder of those wild and ancient mountains. It was as if the harsh, rugged surroundings somehow eased me into a more tranquil state of being. The shift was subtle, until finally a thought hit me brightly: Wow, it's great to be back.

Near the end of my ascent, I happened to spot four sheep with short, spiked horns in a creek bottom below me. One looked small enough to be a lamb, its horns barely nubs. Unaware of me (as far as I could tell), they moved steadily yet leisurely up the valley, the smallest one prancing playfully at times among the boulders and meadows. Looking through binoculars, I then spotted three more sheep on a neighboring ridge.

Once atop the hill I hunkered down out of the wind and pointed my binoculars east, across a broad river valley. Scanning the distant hills, I first found a group of five sheep, resting on a dark slope. Then two more. And on another mountainside, nine sheep were scattered across the tundra. I was too far away to tell if any were mature males; I wondered about this, because all of the sheep across the valley were on national preserve lands, where trophy hunting of big-curled rams is allowed. By the end of my walk, I'd counted thirty-one sheep. As I noted in my journal, “Not a bad sheep-hunting day,” at least for a guy armed only with binoculars.

A few days later, while hiking through a neighboring valley in designated wilderness, I made a curious discovery: a bleached ram's skull, its massive horns still attached. The horns nearly made a full curl, and both they and the skull were remarkably well preserved. What struck me as strange was the skull's position. It sat upright on a tundra bench, facing north, with no other skeletal remains, body parts, or hair nearby, as if someone—or something?—had carried the skull to this spot and placed it carefully on the ground.

The horns' annular rings showed that the ram lived to be six years old, and I tried to imagine how one in its middle-aged prime might have died. Deep inside the park's wilderness boundary, he couldn't have been killed by a sport hunter, at least not legally. Park rules do allow residents of the area to lawfully hunt animals for subsistence purposes throughout Gates of the Arctic. But would such a hunter have left this beautiful head? And this locale seemed remote, even for someone aided by plane or snowmobile; there are many easier places to hunt.

Neither a grizzly nor wolves were likely to kill a ram during the peak of its life, unless the sheep was injured or otherwise infirm. Could a ram be so severely wounded during the rut's head-butting battles that it would become easy prey for a bear or wolf? Or starve? Maybe the animal died in an accident of some sort, an avalanche or a fall. Were there clues that I was overlooking? I reluctantly left the spot, filled with questions about the ram's life, its last days and hours.

 

12.

 

Nearly three decades have passed since I stalked the Falls Creek sheep on that steep hillside above the Seward Highway. Nowadays when I venture into the Chugach Mountains, I carry only a small point-and-shoot digital camera, or none at all. And when I watch Dall sheep it's usually from afar, through binoculars. Because of my own habits and favorite haunts, the place where I most often see them is along the rock-and-tundra-quilted flanks of Wolverine Peak, on a south-facing slope below the ridge that leads to Rusty Point.

Besides its southern exposure and abundance of rocky knobs and cliffs, that hillside must produce plenty of sheep food, because they can be found there throughout much of the year. One time I counted seventy-two animals scattered across the slope, a mix of ewes, lambs, adolescents, and young adults. More commonly I'll spot a dozen or two sheep. Now and then some large, full-curl rams (or nearly so) also congregate here, keeping to themselves as older males do.

Over the years, Wolverine Peak and Rusty Point have become two of my favorite hiking destinations, for any number of reasons: the terrain, the views, the easy access to high country, the exercise, the wildlife. For Rusty Point especially, nostalgia and solitude also draw me back. I still recall looking up there from my Hillside yard, watching those sheep. Over time, that distant rocky hilltop began to feel like an extension of my own neighborhood.

Though I've moved to another part of town, Rusty Point remains a special place to me. After reaching the point, I find a comfortable spot among the rocks and grasses and wildflowers, remove my pack and sweaty shirt, add layers of dry clothing, eat snacks and drink water, write in my journal, and take in the world immediately below me: mountains and city side by side, and then the landscape that stretches far beyond Anchorage.

Eventually I gather my belongings and follow the ridgeline, looking for signs of sheep. Almost always I'll find their scat—piles of small brown pellets—and clumps of coarse white fur. Occasionally I see the sheep themselves, grazing or resting on the slopes below. There is something wondrous and reassuring about this, to be up high in their rugged domain, to be walking where sheep walk and otherwise lead their wild and largely mysterious lives, which sometimes overlap with mine, however briefly.

FROM
Harper's Magazine

 

E
DDIE BACON WAS A FORKLIFT OPERATOR
at Trident Seafoods in Akutan, Alaska. In the summer of 1999, he developed mysterious rashes on his hands, arms, and legs. He visited a doctor, who gave him a variety of ointments, but they did nothing. He grew weak, lost weight. He had trouble seeing. No longer able to earn a living, he moved into his parents' house in central California. There, at a New Year's Eve party in 2000, he passed out, and his parents took him to the emergency room. He had green blisters on his hands, his weight had dropped to 90 pounds, and he couldn't stand up by himself. The medical staff at the hospital regarded Eddie with puzzlement and dread, asking his parents to put on gloves, masks, and gowns when visiting him. Finally, after four weeks, an infectious-disease specialist solved the mystery. Eddie had leprosy. Although a quarter million new cases of leprosy were diagnosed worldwide in 2011, only about 173 of those were in the United States; it's no surprise Eddie had a hard time getting a diagnosis. Once his symptoms were explained, though, his doctors could prescribe a venerable course of treatment: in June 2001, they sent him to the nation's largest leprosy clinic, which had recently relocated to Baton Rouge from its historic home in Carville, Louisiana.

The Louisiana Leper Home was founded in 1894. Infected residents were provided free room and board and medical care, but for the first fifty years of the home's existence, until the rules progressively relaxed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they were denied the right to vote, to marry, to live with an uninfected spouse, or to leave the grounds. Children born to residents were taken away shortly after birth and put up for adoption. The Carville facility has been federally run since 1921, and the government allowed for the construction of a golf course and a lake, but there was also a cyclone fence topped with three rows of barbed wire and a jail to punish those who left the grounds without permission. In the 1950s, even after a cure for the disease had been found, escapees were still brought back in iron shackles.

Leprosy is really two diseases: the physical effects and the social response to them. In Hawaii, where leprosy was widespread in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was called the “separating sickness.” Once diagnosed, Hawaiian sufferers were hunted down like outlaws and offered a choice of exile or death. Those who chose exile were sent to a bleak camp built below the great cliff at Molokai (the leper colony there didn't close until 1969). And Hawaii wasn't alone. For centuries, from India to Iceland, people with leprosy—most don't like being called lepers—were ostracized. Only in the past sixty years have even a minority of leprosy patients received truly humane care.

The change started when doctors realized that leprosy, contrary to long-standing belief, is very nearly the least contagious contagious disease on earth: in more than a hundred years of Carville's operation, no employee ever caught leprosy from a patient. Ninety-five percent of us are naturally immune to the disease, and the rest have a hard time catching it. If you contracted leprosy at any point before 1941, your illness would not have been treatable, but your prognosis would not necessarily have been dire. If you were very lucky, your immune system might eradicate the bacterium on its own, or you might manifest only skin problems—lesions, eruptions, thickenings, numb spots—and little more. (Then as now, many with untreated leprosy live decades beyond diagnosis, into old age.) If you were less lucky, you might endure the collapse of the cartilage in your nose, an infection of the throat that could require a tracheotomy, or a permanent swelling of the face called leonine facies. Worst of all, you might suffer peripheral neuropathy—an absence of sensation that can cause patients to lose fingers, toes, and feet; blindness; and a host of other problems.

In 1941 a highly toxic tuberculosis drug, Promin, was shown to eradicate the bacterium that causes leprosy. Promin was tested on patients at the Leper Home, who improved dramatically; it was called the miracle at Carville. Painful Promin injections were followed by dapsone pills, and by 1981 an even more effective multiple-drug solution was found. The disease is universally curable now with a year or two of treatment. If you are diagnosed early in countries such as the United States, you're likely to be disease free and left with no evident disfigurement or damage. The problems of leprosy now lie elsewhere—in the lasting stigma against sufferers, in the lack of resources for treatment in the developing world, and in the very rarity of the illness in the developed world, where doctors may not diagnose it in time to prevent permanent harm.

Eddie Bacon was unlucky. He had no natural immunity. But he was also lucky: he was sent to Louisiana at a time when he could be treated for both the bacteriological and the social effects of his disease. After his initial treatment, Eddie returned to Baton Rouge regularly for therapy to teach him how to take care of his body, which has suffered some irreversible damage.

“It was a nice place,” he recalled when I spoke with him in 2010. “I was scared they were going to treat me bad, but when I went there, those people were touching me, they were hugging me, those doctors and nurses.” That physicality made him feel less like an outcast. At the clinic in Baton Rouge, he said, “it's like I have a second family.” Eddie told me he's known as a “miracle guy” because he survived one of the worst modern cases of leprosy recorded in the United States, one that struck harder and moved faster than the disease usually does. He's had to have both feet amputated, has scarring on his hands and arms, lost an eye (it went blind and scared his nieces, so he had it replaced with a prosthesis), and, like many others with the disease, lost his eyebrows. But he is alive and he is free—and in December 2010 he got married.

 

To get to Carville, you drive northwest from New Orleans, leaving the highway after an hour for back roads through swampland, where people live in trailers and old wooden shacks. Chemical-manufacturing plants line the road, fenced-off palaces several stories high, wreathed in cold lights, giving off emissions that sharpen the smell of the air. Past a few of these plants, the road dead-ends at a T junction near a gas station, a Baptist church, and a cemetery—all there is of the townless town of Carville. If you turn right and drive along the high levee that hides the Mississippi, you arrive after a couple of miles at what is now called the Gillis W. Long National Guard facility, set on 350 acres of flat green land dotted with handsome old oak trees. Near the entrance is a cluster of white buildings—a colonnaded plantation manor surrounded by houses, chapels, and industrial structures. A few patients still live at the center, and there is a museum of memorabilia from the days when hundreds of people lived and died here.

Many relics of the Leper Home remain: the covered walkways from building to building on which patients traveled on foot, on bike, and by wheelchair; the 1930s-era hospital that became a hotel (in which I was lodged); the cemetery. The museum displays ledgers and registry books; long, hand-knit bandages from the Ladies Auxiliary; antiquated medical equipment; a wheelchair made up as a Mardi Gras float; a pair of iron shackles; and numerous photographs of the residents at work and play.