A Stormy Honeymoon

The savage wind flattened the tent wall into my face. Again. I was in a fetal position inside, with my hand out the zippered door in a desperate bid to hold the fly in place against sixty-mile-per-hour storm gusts. My newlywed husband lay at the other end, doing the same with the opposite corner. If the fly were ripped away, we’d be exposed to the rain being unleashed like breaking waves, courtesy of the biggest thunderstorm cell I had ever seen.

We were camped in the tundra on the north side of Alaska’s Brooks Range, on a honeymoon packrafting trip through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The mountains had laid down two days before, leaving only flat land running to the Beaufort Sea. The only cover out here was willows, although calling those stubby shrubs “cover” from the monster bearing down on us was generous at best. In six days of hiking and paddling, we hadn’t seen evidence of another human. We were utterly—and