Katherine McNamara
Excerpt from Narrow Road to the Deep North
by Katherine McNamara
Mercury House, San Francisco 2001
Published by permission of Mercury House
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Available MARCH 12 2001
The events related here occurred in the late 1970s, in the Interior of Alaska. For the sake of what remains of their privacy, I have changed the given names of people and the names of their villages. However, the rivers, the Athabaskan languages, and the town of McGrath can be found on maps and in linguistic surveys. The narrator is a version of myself as I was then, an itinerant poet from Outside learning a way to see the country.
A MAN'S LIFE
McGrath stood on boggy ground inside a U-shaped bend in the Kuskokwim River, across from the mouth of the Takotna; but it was an air town as much as a river town. When Pan American opened commercial routes across the bush, after World War II, McGrath was a convenient passenger and refueling stop, where DC3s and 4s touched down halfway to the Bering Sea Coast. Until then, bush pilots, and before them, steamboat captains, had ferried in the hordes of men and their tons of supplies, thousands of them headed for the nearby Iditarod gold fields: fields developed by big outfits like the Guggenheims, and small operators like my landlord, old Joe Devlin, and his boss who came from Europe, and many another adventurer looking for a strike at a rich vein.
When the gold petered out, McGrath became a transportation hub. The FAA built a regional station, and there was an air traffic control tower, rare in the bush. A colony of single-engine planes, airy and fragile as winged, bent-legged insects, lined the long runway. By the time I arrived, three air taxi services ran charters and mail flights to the surrounding villages. In good weather, a small scheduled-airline based in Anchorage flew a dozen or so passengers, three times a week, through daunting Rainy Pass; and on Tuesdays and Fridays, the dependable jets of Wien Airways brought them home safe over the mountains, along with tons of mail and freight. The jets now were the bush freighters; the town could never have survived on local resources.
About three hundred people, including the children, lived there. Most of them seemed to turn up at the field when the jet landed. The passengers rarely were strangers; those who were, were examined with skeptical though friendly curiosity. An interested newcomer strolling through the town, someone like me, who considered staying on, would call it calm and picturesque. Its roads were mostly unpaved and, in the mosquito-clouded summers, became skids of gravel and dust. Tall-spiked lupine grew prettily in its kitchen gardens, woods softened its house-lots. Its downtown was a dozen weather-worn structures lined up on one side of the long runway. A wooden sidewalk ran parallel to them and kept pedestrians above the mud and snow.
The downtown commenced beside the river at the Alaska Commercial grocery, a prefabricated metal shed also housing a warehouse and liquor store. The burly storekeeper stocked an abundance of bush necessities: canned vegetables, sugar and tea, spatter-ware tin coffeepots, instant coffee, instant pancake mix and mashed potato buds, knobby cabbages and white-eyed potatoes, white bread, canned milk for (one's imported) coffee, pressure cookers, cookies, cupcakes, candy. In the late afternoons women came to do the family shopping; orderly but competitive gatherers, sorting through the root vegetables, checking the newest eggs for cracks. The AC (it was a bush-wide chain) also ran a check-cashing service at the liquor store, one of three in town.
Next door was an outfitters/supply shop, where working men gathered to sit, drink coffee, swap stories. When a man stepped outside, a machine-shop smell of oil and dust and cold metal cut the air before him; the hollow thunk, thunk of work boots on wood followed him as he walked away.
The wooden sidewalk ended and the road turned into gravel and cinders. Set back on a weedy lot was a dark ramshackle pile connected to the town's generators, immense, rumbling, oil-burners. Then came an intersection, pointing toward the residential area. Across the road, in a field, slouched McGuire's saloon, a low-roofed, shabby place with a bleached-gray moose rack hung above the lintel. Some people looking glad went in. A man came out, walking carefully. This daytime scene never varied. Next to McGuire's was a tall-grass lot where two dull-silver Airstream trailers sat on pads; then came the post office, which shared a trim log building with the Wien Airways terminal. Here, midfield on the runway, the jet rounded on its taxi and rolled to a halt. The steel-blade shriek of the engine drowned the town, as the ground crew hustled to unload containers of baggage and freight, and people milled around. The event was over in half an hour.
The post office stayed open for a few hours in the afternoons. Tuesdays and Fridays, jet-days, were mail days. I waited in line at the window, as eager as anyone; letters and packages were our fragile link to the outside, and the post office was, briefly, the center of town.
Farther down the runway were a couple of cottage-like offices, then the control tower. On the far side stood the FAA compound, the spit and image of every Federal compound: set apart, tidy, squared off, subduing. The civil servants who worked there looked the same.
The long runway crossed a shorter landing strip and petered out in crumbling asphalt. Back in the brush you came upon a rifle and pistol range, where the high-school shooting team practiced, and the McGrath sporting club held turkey shoots. I broke in a .22 Remington lever-action rifle there. I had won a chain saw in a raffle, but had no use for it, and traded it for the rifle to the comptroller of the school district. I used to go shooting with him. He showed me how to handle a pistol; a photo from that time shows me standing, intent, knees bent slightly, hands gripping the pistol, sighting down the barrel toward an invisible target. I enjoyed shooting tin cans, but was no good at skeet. Toward the end of my time in McGrath, I kept the rifle by the door with a shell chambered.
Around the corner from the AC was the old river road, curving along a bend of the brown Kuskokwim. A little way up, Joe Devlin and his wife kept a roadhouse, where they ran a cafe and a bar and billiards room, and rented the few bare rooms in the back to travelers. Joe's wife, Margarety, was an ill-tempered woman; hard to say if it was only because of her bad rheumatism, though people gave her leeway because of it, and because they enjoyed the stories about her mean tongue. She was not a good cook, but she served an edible hamburger. School administrators, bureaucrats, and local businessmen met there every day for lunch.
That was the downtown. It had an old-time, engaging, sham-romantic feel to it, like a Saturday-afternoon Western movie set, except that the old wooden buildings and the lore behind them were not false fronts or tourist draws. People lived and worked in them. A dusty aura of gold and furs, steamboats and trading posts still hung in the air. The downtown looked as raw and possible as any frontier town must have looked. To my eye McGrath was still on the frontier, and despite what I might find to say in its favor, it gave my heart no solace; it was a frontier town of American history.
Pioneer chronicles told a restless people that the frontier was a great, unbounded place, where men went to find freedom, solitude, fur-bearing animals to trap and sell; where the Indians, whose country it was, had to be fought and killed, or pacified and moved: a place for soldiers, the killing policies not necessarily having been set by them, but carried out by them; where farms and small settlements could be hacked out and built up, if the pioneers worked hard and long, and had enough good luck. They wanted a piece of land to call their own, and to live a life of sturdy self-reliance.
Any American child knows about the frontier. Mine was first a child's knowledge, all words and pictures, and no experience. The frontier was part of Eastern history. The child, curious and full of longing, had read wonderful tales about Daniel Boone leading wagon trains over the great Wilderness Road, and Daniel Boone moving west, deeper into the woods, whenever he smelled his neighbor's chimney smoke. Entrancing, the idea of going deeper and deeper into the unknown woods. How did he learn to survive—who taught him? I meant: how did he know how to move silently, to walk without leaving a trail? How did he learn to know animals?
I thought Indians must have taught him. I played being Indian and painted my face and chest, until the summer I had to wear a shirt, and made twig bows strung with butcher twine, that in my mind were mighty bows; in summer camp, I pulled real bows, as heavy as I could handle. I knew the names of every nation west of the Mississippi, and most of those east. I read of the wars, the massacres, the suffering of women and children freezing, starving, dying of no buffalo.
Into the woods: become wild, or, in its original sense, savage: a man who is removed from (his) civilization. The child grew up. Chronicles and narratives of mountain men, scouts, farmers, soldiers; the photographs of sod houses and farmers and farmers' empty-eyed wives; the movies (John Ford's, Howard Hawks'): these were not hard for a young woman to understand. Westward expansion was how one kind of people moved outward and overcame—asserted a God-given right to overcome—another. In the Sixties, it was a formative idea, and all the while I lived in Alaska it framed American history for me. What does the idea mean, however, when your mental pictures of "the frontier" came from chronicles and movies; from fiction, and photos of people you never knew? The West, where frontier and wilderness are confounded, was, for such an Easterner, unimaginable in its scale and absence.—Would you change your mind if you went there: if you experienced that distance, that ethereal light? What would happen if you yourself brushed up against—what if you were part of—the implacable movement that desires to inhabit it? What is that movement composed of; who are its actors? Can it be enough to say, They were individuals, like yourself? What hard facts would you have to face, then? Which ones would you try to ignore?
Frontier, says the OED, comes from a word in Old French for forehead; it grew in figuration to mean the front edge, the leading part, as in the forward line of an army, and as in the part of a country that fronts or faces another country; its marches. Frontier also means boundary, the place a man crosses to enter another country. This is not the usual American meaning, except, I believe, among Native Americans; the tribes, even those called nomadic, among them the Alaskan tribes, have always been rigorously conscious of boundaries, their own and other tribes'. But the Alaska I lived in grew from the American idea. We were the Last Frontier, said Alaskans, thus claiming the place with that we: as if the frontier were the 'wilderness,' an open space, a freedom from social constraint. North To The Future said our license plates: as though our frontier were the unbounded future we crossed into, and our small, crowded, disappointing pasts could be left behind, Outside.
When the United States had its ever-expanding frontier, Americans (and not only Americans) went to it. They needed no passports for the right of passage. Who would have heard them say they had crossed the frontier; who, that they had reached the other side?
Frederick Jackson Turner proposed to American historians that the frontier ended in 1890, when the last open lands were conquered and claimed under American law, and the first fences put up. If Turner's thesis had been a useful definition of the American frontier, then it seemed to me its analogy was inevitably, in lore and law, the Alaskan frontier. And if it was as I saw it, then that frontier was closed in 1980, when the last great boundaries, which overlaid and contradicted the old Native boundaries, were set in place by the passage of the Alaska National Interest Land and Conservation Act.
But I went to McGrath in 1978, and although some people could foresee some of what was going to happen, the boundaries were not quite closed. In the brief time remaining, while the oil economy was still expanding, the town's life had the hum of regularity, and people knew, more or less, what to expect across the seasons. In winter, the snow fell six or eight or ten feet deep. All perspective changed then. Cabins sunk to roof lines under their blanket, pencil lines of smoke rose from smudges of chimneys. In the brief light trees were black sticks in the blinding snowfields. Tamped-down footpaths led up and down hillocks, wound under branches of alders and birches along the margins of yards and lots, and passed through willow thickets where no one had built yet. Snowmachines plowed their trails. Farther back in the woods you saw tracks of rabbits, foxes, mink, small birds. In the falltime, boys and their fathers hunted moose; in cold weather they went for birds: spruce hens, ptarmigan. They ran far-flung traplines.
The winters were times of closing in, closing down, when the line between indoors and out- was rigorous, when you passed well-protected from one condition to the other. At winter solstice the sun turned back toward north. We knew it, but could not yet rejoice; the siege wouldn't lift for two long months. We battened down, cranky and impatient. As the sun came back we felt it, and counted the minutes of its advance day by day, four more minutes, five, six, as it rose toward summer solstice. At last the returning light opened our shuttered faces. We looked around at ourselves, pale and squint-eyed, and saw how the long, cold darkness had hammered us.
Around the end of February, the Iditarod race passed through McGrath. Every day for nearly two weeks long teams of dogs whirled in, halted, and were tied up alongside the paths, chained in the snowy fields, staked in side yards and off the long runway close to the checkpoint near the FAA compound. Hospitable folk of the town race committee cooked bottomless pots of stew and brewed great urns of coffee for the exhausted mushers, who stopped for five minutes' warmth and pressed on, or crashed into a few hours' sleep. Their handlers and suppliers moved around like roadies, efficient, conscious of their glamour. Trappers sold them beaver carcasses for handsome prices, then they cached the meat along the trial for dog food. Every day opened on a new wave of mushers, their yelping dogs, handlers and trappers, packs of reporters in their new parkas, thrilled tourists trailing the progress of the race. Everyone crowded into the roadhouse bar or McGuire's saloon, shouting and singing, trading news and wild speculations, spending freely; the odd confidence man bounced a check in the bar. The town was heady with excitement and relief.
A woman showed up at the height of the fun, a fine-looking, high-spirited sportswoman who had run the race, then retired to write children's books. I knew and liked her; we had met at a writer's conference. We sat amid the noisy crowd in the roadhouse, toasting our fellow drinkers and barely able to hear ourselves speak. She leaned across the table. She was trying to persuade me to train for next year's run.
"You can do it!" she yelled over the din. "I've got the dogs, and I've got the equipment! You'll have to train hard, but you're strong enough! Of course women can do it! We've got stamina, and we're not kids! Hell, no—older mushers are tougher! They know how to pull for the long haul! Dogs are temperamental! You have to treat them like babies! Some of these bastards treat their dogs like shit! They push them too hard! The vets don't always see it! You have to let them rest! You have to watch them for sickness and sore feet! One thing's for sure! You end up carrying your dogs to Nome!" She grinned her skewed grin.
A different life, handling dogs: feed them, keep them healthy, train them, smell them, learn their idiosyncrasies, live with them, clean out their pens, work out, eat cold meat on the trail, sleep in the snow. Don't even think about money. You're not in bad shape; why not? "Do it," she shouted gaily. We ordered another round, and flirted with two dark-eyed men from a Spanish camera crew who had come North to film the race.
Two days later the Spaniards and their pilot were killed in a plane crash. My friend left for Nome, to greet the first team to cross the finish line. I rubbed the late-night remnants of smoke and noise out of my eyes. For a moment longer, I toyed with the idea of racing: it still sounded possible, I told myself, if I worked hard enough at it. If McGrath was on the frontier, it was, on the face of it, because of the sense of possibility that still crackled in the air.
At breakup the town turned to mud. Little kids ran straight to the puddles, shouting with glee in icy water up to their knees. During the second winter I had an office in an old trading post on the riverbank, not far from the roadhouse. That year the ice went out at the end of April, the earliest date in general memory, at about five o'clock in the afternoon. I was reading and keeping my eye on the river, but grew sleepy and stopped paying attention. The next thing I knew a boy skidded up on his bike, banged on the window, and yelled, "The ice is moving!"
The town was built on a peninsula inside a bend in the river. In some years the ice jammed along the banks so that the river flooded. An old man named Enos Chandler stood leaning on his stick. He nodded hello. I nodded back. We watched the river flow past. I asked him if he thought it would flood.
"Not this year," he replied. "We've had such warm weather lately that a good deal of snow atop the ice has melted. The water underneath has worn away more of it. Even where the ice jams up, I doubt it is more than about eighteen inches thick, and pretty rotten.
"People have always liked to see at least a threat of a flood," he went on, "to make things interesting. Now that we are growing so fast, and there is so much government, we could probably apply for Federal aid if it floods, and grow faster." He shook his head, and recalled another flood.
"It was a peaceful flood," he said. "People went around by boat to the store, or to collect driftwood, and waited for the water to go down. Late one night I got out of bed to check on the situation and, looking into the moonlight, saw a canoe glide by, with a pair of lovers in it. I knew who they were, and knew they had left their respective spouses at home. I grinned to myself, and lowered the curtain." Amusement flickered in his pale eyes, and around his mouth. "A little while later, I got out of bed again, and opened the front door. Another boat floated by, with another couple in it: same story. I figured everything was calm, and went back to bed."
During summer the second great wave of transients crowded into town. In the Interior fire-fighting was an annual preoccupation, when the dry heat prepared tinder, and flames leaped and sped through the forests. At some moment the smoke blown from a distant fire darkened the sky: we tracked it like a storm moving in, wondering if the wind would shift. Over the CB radios we heard that villages were being evacuated. Twice I tasted ashes in the air, and smoky haze stung my eyes and lungs. Once it seemed to me that the ghosts of animals flew in the smoke. Later on, flying over a great burn, I saw it was the dark hide of some immense animal of the mind stretched across the ground to cure. But quickly the burns begin to recover, and turn pink and rose with fireweed. "It is called fireweed," wrote the botanist Ada White Sharples, "because it is usually the first plant to take possession of burned-over areas, quickly covering the blackened scars."
For the Bureau of Land Management McGrath was a regional field base. Hundreds of crews from Native villages around the state were called up at a few minute's notice. Outside the town was the permanent BLM camp, where thousands of firefighters, and hundreds of pilots, in rotation, camped in wall tents. During the light-filled days and twilit nights, the roar of plane and helicopter engines never ceased.
The town profited from these annual events, welcoming the diversion, and remained undisturbed.
Away from the river, in the heart of the residential area, McGrath was about to boom. A market for commercial space had opened; a bustle of movement stirred the dust. Native-owned village corporations, set up under the land claims settlement, invested in local, Native-owned enterprises. Non-profit agencies, off-springs of the corporations, offering health care and social services, used the town as a regional base. A consortium had built a two-story 'professional' building; houses and meeting halls were being converted into offices. The school district administration had spread across two buildings, and wanted another. A new school was in the works.And the population was growing. As bureaucracies began to alter the seasonal-work patterns, a new kind of resident appeared, the people who managed the schools and offices, lived on a salary, followed a corporate calendar. These new people came from small towns and the state colleges and universities of the West and Midwest. They needed homes, and places in school for their children. Most of the houses near the downtown were small, neatly kept, often had gardens, but were old, as well, and in short supply. The teachers, business people, pilots, and young bureaucrats took out mortgages, and built handsome, expensive, wooden houses on town land that had been newly platted for development.
McGrath needed, and had, an active religious life. Ministers of several fundamentalist faiths led ardent congregations. A pilot-priest flew in periodically on his rounds among the Catholics of the region. The Baha'is, kind people, formed their fellowship. The churches were composed of families whose values were order, modesty, decency. These people set the civic tone.
And so, this river-and-air town seemed to have achieved a successful mixture. There were the old-time white settlers, men and women who had come with the steamboats and the gold; and their younger successors, who had left town and farm for a more independent life. There were the established families of Native-and-white ancestry, often descended from Russian or European traders; and the younger Native people from the villages, who hoped they could at last be proud of their culture in public, and who looked for opportunity in the expanding economy. And there were the bureaucrats; among them, me.
The various groups followed their own habits without serious conflict. The town had a peaceful, law-abiding tradition, people said confidently. No murders had occurred within living memory. Drinking and domestic troubles were—properly, they thought—kept from public display. They had a habit of privacy and personal respect; and what went on in a man's house was held to be his own business.
&&&&&&
From old Joe Devlin I rented one of the Airstream trailers: "the Cadillac of trailers," he pointed out helpfully, one of a pair he had brought in by barge to help ease the housing shortage. The new school district was a bounty for the few but growing number of landlords because it underwrote teachers' rents. At once all rents had risen to the limit the district would pay. I was not a teacher and did not get a rent subsidy; but Joe let me negotiate a price, reasonable in local terms, for the Airstream.
For my needs, the place was ample. The storage bins held my books. An oil furnace would keep it warm enough, and Joe had wired it for electricity. It had well-water and plumbing. In the Interior running water was seldom standard. Sweet water was rare and precious. In most households, even in McGrath, people carried water from the river, or, in winter, cut blocks of ice to melt in tubs. Wells were expensive to drill, because they had to go deep; even then the water wasn't sweet, but hard and full of iron. People's hair and skin always smelled of rust.
Joe Devlin took care of his tenants, most of whom were young single women who taught school, or, like me, worked in the administration. He saw to my oil supply, checked the well, and re-insulated the skirting before winter set in upon us. In return, he liked a hot cup of tea and a chance to tell his stories.
And so. "Joe:" I asked the usual question: "How did you come to Alaska?"
"Well," he said, pleased, settling back. "I got out of the Army in 1934. I cam back to San Francisco from Hawaii with no money. Spent all the money on the ship playing cards. So I got to San Francisco and I thought I'd head north, heard about Alaska, thought I'd give it a try."
And, having begun, he went on.
"I fell in with a horse wrangler from Wyoming. He'd been horse-packing into some of those remote sites in Crater Lake, fire stations in Crater Lake National Forest. And he was on his way north, with twenty head of horses. He said to me, Why don't you team up with me?' So I did.
"We came to the town of Medford, Oregon, near Grants Pass. Little town, sort of like McGrath, people minded their own business, didn't care much about what you did. Well, we decided to winter there—lots of pasture (this was 1934, of course), lots of open country. So we spent the winter there.
"Well, the spring of the year rolled around, and I decided to head north. Thumbed. Just outside of Portland there, I was standing by the side of the road and I saw this car weaving back and forth. I hailed it. The driver pulled away and asked, Where ye headed? Alaska, I said real casual.
"You know, I believe in fate. Can't explain it, it's just how things seem to work out. Turned out he was from Alaska: a contact, you know. Hop in, he said; so I did.
"He asked me if I knew how to work, and I said it was all I ever knew. He owned a mine, you see, and asked if I wanted to go to work for him. I said, Sure.
"He taken me north to Spokane; but he had family there, so he left me off, and he told me to look him up in Seattle, he was staying at the Frye Hotel.
"I went right through Seattle. I thought I'd head for the border, as I didn't have much money and I didn't want to lose time. But you had to have sufficient to guarantee your passage or they'd turn you back, especially as it was still cold at that time of the year. So, I headed back to Seattle.
"In Seattle I was walking down First Avenue—remember, this was 1934, and I didn't know a soul there—and somebody hails me. It was this fellow who'd picked me up outside of Portland. He asked me how I was, and I said I'd been up to the Canadian border and back already, because I had, and he asked why I hadn't looked him up. Well, you know: I figured he was just pulling my leg about a job, just kidding, you might say.
"He was one of those old-timers, not used to the traffic patterns and so on, and he asked me to drive him around Seattle. Some of the boys were out there at the University, old friends, and he wanted to visit. So I drove him around for a few days, and at the end of that time he offered to pay my fare. Gave me forty dollars, and I could pay him back. I bought a steerage ticket. I was miserly with that forty dollars, steerage cost just that. I booked passage on a steamer.
"Got off at Seward, jumped a freighter, and landed in Anchorage. He given me a letter to McGee Airlines. They flew to Ophir in those days. I said I didn't have any money but I was going to work in the mines, and they said, That's all right, pay us when you can. That's how they did things in those days. Well, they taken me over there, and I went to work.
"But this man and I, we had a difference of opinion. Couldn't get along, you know what I mean: personality differences, you might say. I knew how to work, always had, but he wanted too much out of me. From the old country, you know. So, I rebelled.
"Eventually we came to agreement, and I bought him out. We mined that property for twenty-five, no, twenty-seven years, bought property contiguous to it, and worked that.
"That's how I got to Alaska. Not a common story, you might say, and that's why I say fate, luck, what have you, is important. Here was this man who picked me up outside of Portland, and look where it got me."
Stories of gold traveled happily around McGrath. People liked to tell about an old-timer up in Takotna, who used a one-pound nugget as a doorstop. Nugget jewelry—oversized rings, bracelets, earrings formed of tiny bits of gold—was popular among women; men wore wide nugget watchbands embedded with chunks of Alaska jade. Early one spring the school superintendent glowed with the notion of prospecting an old site out near Flat that (someone had confided to him) was ready to be exploited, if the necessary capital could be raised. He suggested I throw in with him: life was healthy in the open air, we would sluice for gold.
"You could become rich, you know," he said hopefully.
That March the air was warmer than usual. A light breeze softened the snow, dark patches of bare ground showed on the roads. With a consultant who had piloted down from Fairbanks, I walked over to the river to watch an old-time miner, a man named Don Tweed, carry his gear across the ice by Cat-train.
First the ice had to be tested. Grog Johnson, brother of Rocky and himself a famous musher, had driven his own D-7 Cat to the site, and was rearing and scraping his way over the bank. He stopped at the edge to hook his bulldozer to a five-thousand gallon oil tank, mounted on skids; and, tentative, prepared to leap at the first sign of danger, drove his machine out onto the ice. A trapper named Mick Hannigan watched Grog Johnson with practiced interest. The ice, he told me, was twenty-nine inches thick: but the water was thirty feet deep in the channel.
Slowly the machine rumbled toward a sandbar on the other side of the river.
From out of the woods behind us roared Don Tweed in his D-9. At the edge of the bank he dropped the blade with a crash. (The D-7 was maybe twenty thousand pounds lighter, the consultant from Fairbanks remarked: a good test vehicle.) Don Tweed's adopted son, John, and John's friend Dave Frimmel moved in, to help the older man hook tow chains between three flat-bed skids. The skids carried his wanagan, a scraper, sluice boxes, and trappings. The boys were strong and lithe, and worked carefully and quickly. The machines dwarfed them. They pretended not to notice the cluster of high school girls, who watched them, thrilled; then their task absorbed them, and they were no longer aware of anything but their work. They leaped about the machines as though born to them.
As his Cat idled, Don Tweed supervised them. He was a burly man with a watch cap glued to his head, and looked to be about sixty. He had made the Cat move as easily as the boys moved their own bodies.
They found a hair-line crack. Grog drove back to our side, in order to drag Don Tweed's skids across the river. The men talked; pointed; walked out on the ice. The D-9 remained perched high on the bank. By the time we turned to go, they had decided to detach the blade and ferry it across the ice. Tweed had another D-9 waiting on the far bank.The consultant from Fairbanks said you didn't see many Cat-trains these days. Federal regulations about land use prohibited them in many places; and they were expensive to run.
I turned back and, over my shoulder, watched an improbable sight. The D-7 rolled on, dragging the three skids, one spaced precisely behind another, across the wide, frozen river, under an immense, brilliant sky. On the long runway, a relay of small planes lifted off, light as mosquitoes in the air. In the middle distance, the mountains, crisp and icy, shone. The train lumbered out toward the horizon; the huge noise of its engine faded; and the optical effects of light and distance condensed it to a line of toys.
&&&&&&
"I've been here thirty-four years," mused Joe Devlin. He was as small-framed as a cowboy, but looked fit, though his red hair had lately grown ashen. He had been stopping by more often. He held his mug of tea in gnarled hands.
"When I came here I didn't have any home ties. And over the years we've done pretty well. Of course, the price of gold being what it is now, we're going to pay more attention.
"Over the years, we've taken about a million dollars worth of gold out, and that was at thirty-five dollars an ounce. At these prices today, we'd be getting sixteen times that.
"But you know, I don't get very excited about the price. I never was struck by the gold fever, that is, I never lost the use of my logic about gold. I know it's in there, I know what's on the properties. On one of the properties, they made it pay, back in 1915, 1917, taking the material out with picks and shovels. There's a lot they overlooked then, and of course eventually you have to go deeper, which they couldn't do. That makes it just about right for machinery. Oh yes, I know it's there.
"But I wish we had a place like this"—he gestured at my little metal home—"over in the mining camp. It isn't practical to haul a thing like this out there. One summer the wife and I stayed out for four months, never saw a single face. That was no way to treat anybody. Next year, I told her, we'll give this up, close down the property; and I'll go to work for the Air Force."
But he had kept trying. Early one spring, while the rivers were still frozen, he drove an ancient D-7 Cat he had rebuilt out to the property. (He screwed up his mouth when he recalled the event.) First thing, he said, he broke through a small lake and had to walk back to town, to find someone who could drag the Cat out of the water. Not an easy matter, he said crisply, but there were still a couple of old-time miners around, with heavy equipment.
In that season the sun rose higher, and the days grew longer, in no time at all. A week passed; it had warmed up appreciably, and he set out once again on the Cat, dragging a sledge with a wanagan. (I had seen that Cat, the sledge, and the wanagan on top of the sledge, parked outside the roadhouse in mid-winter. The wanagan was a frame shelter, built like a tiny house; a stovepipe stuck out of the roof, and smoke was rising straight up from the chimney, as Joe worked inside. Maybe he was finally insulating it. A Coleman lantern glowed like a jack-o-lantern at the window.)
Joe made a day's progress. That night, the temperature dropped to minus 35. He was caught in the open, with no shelter—the wanagan wasn't warm enough—and only peanut butter sandwiches to eat. When he got back to town, the hamburgers Margarety served looked mighty good to him.
"The property was marginal anyway," he concluded philosophically, "and you might say we were barely getting out of it what we were putting in. So I could make more, working for the government.
"But I like the life. Been here forty-four years and, as I say, I had no home-ties when I cam here to the country. It grows on you. You get stuck, you might say.
"I like being independent. It's not the money. At our age, we have everything a couple like us could want, so it isn't as if we needed more. But I like the chance to do what I want, and be independent. It's a man's life out here, I suppose you could say."
&&&&&&
I heard another Iditarod gold story. A Native woman who lived in a Yukon village on the western side of the district suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, for which she received injections of gold. Her doctor had given her a standing prescription. When she was in Anchorage, if she needed a shot she went to the Alaska Native Hospital.
One day she was assisted by a nurse she barely knew, a white woman who told her crossly that gold was too expensive to be injecting it into someone every time she asked for it.
The Native woman was of course given her shot; but her ear had caught a certain tone, and soon she had the nurse talking about herself and her unhappiness. It happened the nurse's husband had the same disease, "poor man, and couldn't afford the shots himself. And here she was so upset," this lady said to me: "Imagine, a Native woman getting gold shots, free!
"I laughed to myself," she finished lightly. "Here they came right into our own country to get gold; they exploited us and took our land; and now we can have gold when we need it, to save our lives." She laughed and laughed. "And you know what my husband says to me? He says, 'I wonder whether that stuff comes out when you piss. Imagine how much you've pissed away.'"
© by Katherine McNamara, 2001
