The belugas of Cook Inlet, near Anchorage, Alaska, are some of the most reliably viewable whales in North America. There’s no need to board a boat or to stand on a cliff edge straining to spot a plume of spray. The belugas—there are several pods of them, totaling about 375 animals—can be spotted from a car window while driving up Turnagain Arm on Seward Highway. Turnagain Arm is the southeastern arm of Cook Inlet, which stretches up from the Gulf of Alaska to Anchorage, forming the Alaska Peninsula. There, jagged mountains spike against the cloudy sky and plummet into the water on the west bank of the arm. Piney crags flank the east side of the arm, too, but they are broken near the bottom by the highway and, below that, a narrow stretch of mudflat beach. In the churning waters of Turnagain Arm, the belugas appear like specks of light, easily confusable with whitecaps, until the telltale hump of a cetacean back crests and the whales solidify.
That was how I saw them in September 2008, four months after moving to the forty-ninth state to see what Alaskan life was like. The boyfriend I’d met not long after arriving, a line cook named Matt who lived in a one-room cabin, and I were driving to Anchorage for Thai food. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive north from Moose Pass, the 200-person village where we worked menial jobs at the lodge. We were nearly to Anchorage when I saw the white curves of the belugas. I convinced Matt to pull over and darted across the highway, my hair whipping behind me in the wind, for once oblivious to the cold that never stopped that summer. I hopped the metal guardrail and scrambled down the embankment digging the sides of my Converse into the dirt. I paused when I reached the shale-colored mud beach. It looked firm enough.
“Hey!” Matt yelled from the highway. I looked up and saw him standing at the top of the embankment. “The mud. Don’t be stupid.”
I drew my foot back, rooted myself on a rock at the bottom of the embankment, before the dirt turned into the mud of the beach.
How did you tell a tourist in Alaska from a local? According to Matt, who was from New Jersey but had lived in Alaska for more than a decade, one way is by how they behave at the Turnagain Arm mudflats. Tourists stop their cars to admire the peaks plunging into the swirling waters, to watch the mountain goats leap the slopes, to train their eyes on bald eagles circling. To admire the belugas. And sometimes tourists go too far out on the mudflats. Sometimes their shoes start sinking. The mud starts sucking. It swallows calves, kneecaps. And that old word arises like a black-and-white horror movie still, letters gory and dripping: Quicksand.
Tourists have died from the sucking mudflats. One case: a girl. Her father, unable to pull her out, went for help. The tide came in. Water turned the mud to concrete,“making rescue virtually impossible,” according to the Turnagain Times. It doesn’t help that the arm’s tides are among the highest in the world. Other tourists have died from hypothermia, for the mud is freezing. When dry, the mudflats can be stable, though not always. They are composed of very fine glacial silt that, when touched, can turn to consuming liquid. The danger is greater when the mud is damp. You don’t know which step, if any, might be your last.
When Matt told me about the mudflats, several weeks after we began dating, I asked him why no one put up a sign warning people to stay off the beach.
“Eh,” he shrugged.
I understood. People should know.
So I stopped and didn’t take another step. I watched the belugas surface, breathe, and dive. These toothed whales were my white whales long before I’d ever heard of Moby Dick. Their unique coloring—no other whale is as pale—evolved as camouflage for their Arctic environment. Their lack of dorsal fin allows them to swim smoothly under ice caps, blending in seamlessly with the ice. Born grey or smoky blue, belugas lighten as they reach maturity. In the winter, their skin can turn yellowish and thick. Then they molt. In the spring, belugas rub themselves against the gravelly beds of estuaries, scraping off old skin, growing fresh milky dermis in its place. They are the only whales to do this, to take on new skins every year.
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