the Adventure Lifestyle magazine

I rA n June. Alaska had taken 0 reat dimensions in my mind and in my heart: a symbol for all th as wild, a metaphor for the untameable, the unknown, th -_trnntler. I wasn't a stranger to hiking through the wilderness, I'd never before experienced what I imagined to be th remoteness, or the enormity, of Alaska's majestic terrain. I'd� ..... rmed Alaska into my own dark forest, and endowed it an almost mystical quality. I sensed that my trip to the Land of the Midnight Sun would be far more than simply a summer acatio n. It wou I d be a pi I g ri ma ge. rough the Inside Passage, a panhandle of islands and inlets in utheast Alaska that is accessible only by boat or plane. After ays of kayaking, whale watching, backpacking and hitchhiking, it s time to move north. I bought a plane ticket from Juneau to horage, then took a train north on the Alaska Railroad to For the first few weeks I wandered aloneL I __ .....:�_-=�::i Denali National Park, one of the state's most famous and ectacular regions, smack in the center of the rugged Alaskan Denali is known for its physical beauty and plentiful Idlife. As a lover of open spaces and wild animals, Denali's rolling plains were a dream come true. I made my way inside the park and eventually discovered a narrow stream that cut along the base of Mount McKinley and the Alaska Range. I followed the stream for some distance, flanked by snow-capped mountains and ic tundra. The day was clear and the air was cool. I passed caribou and Dall sheep as ptarmigans darted across my path. My mind wandered from images and memories of the past year in Boston to forecasts and fantasies about the year to come in Jerusalem. The presence of wildlife was mesmerizing. Even when it was invisible, I sensed its reality. Through imprints in the soil. Droppings. Hair on broken twigs. Living beings surrounded me at every turn. Yet as hypnotic as these creatures were, it wasn't until I stomped through a thicket and into a clearing that I was truly stopped dead in my tracks. At first the vision before me looked like a fuzzy golden ball, a mound of bronze shimmering in the summer sun. But this ball had legs and, as it lumbered towards me, I quickly came to realize that it wasn't a ball at all, but a bear. A young male grizzly bear. As the distance between the two of us shrunk, what darted through my body was beyond words. I had at that instant a 28 ��1!!!!!!��� __ �� -=-=- � __ _ ...:.:.::� kind of sensation, raw, primal and as palpable as the sound of the brush as it crunched under the grizzly's paws. If I had to choose a name for it, I'd call it fear. Naked, unbridled fear. In classical Jewish thought, it is only after one has experienced the fear of God that life gains total clarity, that a person fully and finally understands their place in the cosmic whole. Standing alone in Alaska, in the presence of a being far more powerful than I could ever hope to be, gave me a hint, a taste, of what it must be like to truly behold the divine presence. There's an inscription above the Holy Ark in many synagogues around the world-I'd seen it myself in places as different as Brooklyn, Nai robi and Casablanca. The Hebrew reads Da lifney mi atah omed: "Know before whom you stand." But there are times in our lives when such an admonition hardly seems necessary. I felt terror. But I also felt a strange sort of reverence. The threat of being eaten alive was somehow tempered by the knowledge that if it occurred, it would occur not as some random or malicious act, but as an enactment of some grand and mysterious design. This situation was beyond good and evil­ beyond reason. It was a situation that transcended all logical categories, a moment in which the whole was far greater than the sum of its parts. Don't run. Don't stare into the bear's eyes. Keep it in your peripheral vision. Do nothing to excite the grizzly's predatory instinct, but get the hell out II •• iIII

• Cover