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Prologue
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My kayak slid gently off a wave and settled into an eerie calm, sheltered by mesmerizing gray-green walls of water. A part of me relaxed, even though I knew that this moment of peace was ephemeral. To windward, the next wave reared higher and steeper than its neighbors. The wave loomed, then overreached itself and hung above my head. An instant later, cascading droplets leaped over the precipice and exploded into a growing line of white.
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I had launched this journey from Japan fifteen months previously to follow a small group of Stone Age mariners who—all evidence suggests—migrated to North America between 20,000 and 9,500 years ago. Most likely these long-forgotten sailors made their journey in open log canoes, paddling these same waters and marveling at the same menacing waves and the same magic that bears a small, frail boat over their crests. I had come here to share the thoughts, dreams, fears, and exaltations of these ancient seafarers—and in some indefinable way to understand why they had set out across this roiling and tempestuous sea.
The long Arctic summer was sliding into autumn, and the sun was finally dipping into the sea. The first stars appeared in the eastern sky, then suddenly more twinkles appeared to the south. It took a few seconds to realize that this wasn’t some strange celestial event but the streetlights of Gambell, Alaska. After a passage of 3,000 miles, along the remote, fogbound Kuril Islands and stormy coasts of Kamchatka and Chukotka, I had finally crossed the North Pacific.
Misha pulled ahead in his fire-engine-red kayak. For months I had been joking with him, “You get the red kayak because you’re the Communist Russian.” He always smiled patiently at my weak humor, revealing his prominent gold tooth and disarmingly blue eyes. I would smile back, wondering how he managed to maintain such a tidy appearance in this remote land of ice and storm. His Viking-blond beard was always neatly trimmed, and there was never a smudge of campfire soot on his cheek or a stray fish scale lodged in his moustache.
Enough idle thoughts. I forced ten quick strokes, then tried to hold the faster cadence.
I searched for danger one last time, running through the mental checklist that had kept me alive through all the crossings and sudden storms of this journey: barometer, steady; sea, steep but not rising; clouds, fluffy cumulus with no indication of a nascent storm. Good. I punched the “where am I” button on the GPS and the screen blinked our position:
I scrolled through the menu:
Six miles - two hours to go.
We were going to make it. I switched off the GPS and concentrated on an efficient paddle stroke, using my torso as much as possible to relieve pressure on my tired arms and sore elbow tendons. The dark, menacing sea was flecked with white foam and offset by streaks of red-orange twilight that shimmered from the wave tops. “Concentrate on this sea, these colors, this feeling,” I reminded myself. “You’ll never be here again.” But I couldn’t achieve a Zen-like focus for more than a moment.
Instead I saw my journey from beginning to end. I remembered the tidy harbor in Japan where we had embarked, and all the rough-hewn outpost camps in Siberia. I saw mirror-smooth calms and hurricane-force catabatic winds screaming down from glaciated peaks. I also saw mysterious, quixotic dreams—just wisps of thought—that propelled the Stone Age mariners, and me, across this inimical and capricious ocean.
For the past several years, I had been obsessed with two questions: How had Stone Age mariners crossed this northern ocean, and why? The quest had consumed me, but the answers had proved elusive—as I had always known they would—flickering over the next wave top and whispering behind the next headland but always receding, just beyond reach. At night, asleep in ancient campsites, I chased phantoms through dreams, struggling to interpret signs and images. The answers I sought were out there, hidden in the shadows beyond ocean swell or firelight, if only I could see them.
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