You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck

by Bill Heavey

  Then Marty gives me the lowdown on Alaskan cold:

  At 20 below: It’s business as usual for a trapper. Wiggle your toes in your bunny boots, and make sure you have your hood up when running on the snow machine to prevent frostbite.

  At 30 below: Pretty much the same deal. Marty will still fly if he believes he can find warmer air up top, which is usually doable. “Nothing fun happens above five hundred feet,” he says. “I like to see critters and tracks. And I prefer gloves when flying. Better feel for the plane. But at minus thirty, I’m wearing mitts.”

  At 40 below: He reconsiders whether he really needs to leave the cabin. “You might be fine. But the thing is, once you even start getting cold, it’s hard to get any warmth back at minus forty.” And things start to change. Gas doesn’t flow the same. Marty carries a .22 Mag rifle to dispatch troublesome trapped animals because a regular .22 bullet “just sorta falls out the end of the barrel.” For the same reason, he doesn’t like semiauto anything.

  At 50 below: You’re looking at an entirely different beast now. “If anything goes wrong, it’s bad. Period. I don’t go much farther than the woodpile those days.” Snow machines, even if you can get them started, tend to flood or stall. There is absolutely no mercy at minus 50. Your urine rattles when it hits the ground.

  Marty seems happy and at home here, bustling about the cabin, cranking up the propane that powers a light. After we clean the dishes, I prepare myself for a dreaded but necessary visit to the outhouse. Once I’m there, I arrange myself to expose the absolute minimum amount of skin. But when I finally sit down, I am amazed to find that the seat is instantly warm. This just happens to be one of the miracle properties of the extruded polystyrene foam we know as Styrofoam. The outhouse seat is two full inches of the stuff carefully whittled to the appropriate shape. It is ingenious.

  “Man, that Styrofoam is awesome!” I tell Marty upon my return. “Who knew?”

  Then, as I fall into sleep in my bag, I nevertheless remind myself of the need to be careful. Don’t be blinded by the false miracle of the toilet seat, I tell myself. There is precious little luck in this place. And less forgiveness.

  A Self-Taught Loner

  The next day Marty and I go for a short ride to get me used to the snow machine. He instructs me in the rudiments of riding—how to lean, how to absorb bumps with your knees. Even in this cold, I’m soon shedding layers.

  It strikes me that what separates Marty from an uncountable number of other dreamers who pour into Alaska every summer is simply this: He refused to give up. Each time he encountered another obstacle, he set about overcoming it and never doubted that he could. When he realized that life out here depended on snow machines and chain saws, he taught himself enough mechanical skill to fix both. He learned carpentry so he could build cabins. He learned welding and electrical skills. He picked up a working knowledge of wildlife biology, of predicting where an animal will or won’t go, by studying the critters and their tracks. When he realized he’d eventually go broke paying for air charters, he set to work learning to fly. By his own admission, he is not a particularly good shot, doesn’t seem to be able to sharpen a knife without grinding it halfway to nothing, and is a lousy businessman. But he’s good at being alone, and he doesn’t give up easily.

  The hardest part of being out here, though, is readjusting to society. “You get ‘bushy’ is what it is,” Marty says. “You get so you can’t have people around you.” In the bush, for example, if something moves, you focus on it instantly. In society, everything seems to move all the time. He tells me about once going straight from a few months in the bush to a grocery store, having a guy walk behind him down an aisle, and “just freaking out.” He left the store without buying anything. Another time, waiting at a counter at the post office, he saw a female clerk approaching and could not stop his feet from backing up to expand the distance between them. “It was just something I felt I needed to do at the time.”

  The Moment of Truth

  You really need to get that fire going. I need it primarily to keep my mind occupied, to stop fixating on just how alone and helpless I am, on how quickly my body, with the help of the raven and all kinds of other creatures, would be reabsorbed into the ecosystem. I need it to stave off that shadow sliding over the snow.

  The chemical warmers in my mittens are stiff. I can’t tell if my hands are cold or not, but a stiff hand warmer is a spent hand warmer. To use my lighter, I’ll need to remove the mittens—huge things that reach nearly to my elbows and are snapped to a keeper cord running behind my neck. I try digging down to bare ground with a stick to clear a base, but it doesn’t work. Snow remains in the matted mosses and grasses beneath. Instead I lay a thick base of green boughs and begin gathering three times as much tinder, kindling, and fuel wood as I think I’ll need. Lower branches of most trees are fine for tinder and kindling—dry and easily broken off. But fuel requires whole trees, none of which are much thicker than my wrist. These I break by grabbing the trunk as high up as possible and then swinging on them, using my weight to bend and, hopefully, break them. It’s exhausting work. I kneel, fish out my paper towels, and tear off two sheets, reserving the third in case of failure. I build my tepee of tinder and kindling, place broken lengths of bigger wood beside it. It’s time.

  I transfer the lighter from its pocket to the inside of my right mitten and finger the striker, rehearsing the movement. You don’t want to waste time, but you don’t want to rush it, either. It works on the first try. The paper catches, the tinder crackles. The problem is that the spruce burns like gunpowder, done almost as soon as it’s lit. I pile bigger pieces on and go looking for more. Within twenty minutes, it becomes clear that if I’m to stay warm tonight, it will be the physical activity of keeping the fire going that does it, not the fire itself. And I know I don’t have the juice to do that all night.

  It’s about 3 p.m. now. I’m two hours in, with two hours until dark. I’ve eaten a KitKat. I’m very thirsty and wishing I had a metal cup to melt snow for water. I’m not especially cold, but it’s better to bite the bullet now and put on my heavier duds. The stripping down and exposure to the cold in socks and a single layer of long johns are as bad as I’d feared, and it takes a while before my body is capable of generating enough heat to derive any benefit from the insulated clothing I’ve just put on. I find myself thinking of my daughter, Emma. I want to see her again. I want to hear her laugh again.

  I wouldn’t mind stretching out by the fire, just for a bit. I’ve been doing nothing but gather wood since I built it. It probably wouldn’t go out entirely, and then I could stoke it again. But even in my reduced consciousness I know that this is not the smart choice. And now I’m nearly crying at how badly I want to see Emma grow up. My fear of the dark flares up again. You’re being stupid. Worrying about what hasn’t even happened yet. But the darkness, I know, will drive home the reality of how alone, remote, and helpless I am in ways I can keep at bay during daylight. Darkness is when the sentries of the mind drop their guard. Fire or no fire.

  How will Marty find me? I note with a sinking feeling how the smoke from the fire doesn’t rise. It heads directly downhill, as if an invisible hand were pushing it down and herding it along the ground into irrelevance. And even if I could build up a big flame, it wouldn’t be visible for any distance with all the trees blocking the view. I’m on autopilot now, trudging ever farther along the path to break and carry back trees and parts of trees. The light is dimming now. I have fears of a moose stumbling across me and getting pissed that I didn’t ask permission before trespassing. I’m scared that a bear may smell the fire and come to investigate. Bears, I remember reading somewhere, aren’t true hibernators. Their temperature only drops a few degrees and since their sleep is not particularly deep, they may be fairly easily roused. By wood smoke, for example, or the smell of a man. Could a bear tell by the way I smell that I’m unarmed and vulnerable? I doubt a
bear would consent to giving me time to drop my mitts and open my pocketknife just to make things more interesting. A hungry bear probably doesn’t stand on ceremony. As the dimness grows, these thoughts and other distortions elbow their way to the front of the line outside the box office of the mind.

  The Long, Painful Journey Back

  A little after dark, as I’m resolving to take the night one load of wood at a time, I hear a fly buzzing. I’m standing by the fire, pondering how I have to walk a bit farther each time I seek wood. Then the sound dies. I lumber back into the darkness, which is not yet full. I’m saving my headlamp for emergencies. The batteries won’t last long in this cold anyway. The buzzing returns. I’m afraid to hope. If it’s not a snow machine, the disappointment will be too much to bear. But now the buzzing grows. It is a snow machine. I see its headlight crest a rise below me in the distance. I’m saved.

  Marty is all up-tempo and good humor. “Well, I see you got a fire going, Bill!” He claps me on the shoulder. “You okay, buddy?”

  I tell him yes. He is speaking to me in the casual tones experienced EMTs use when talking to traumatized people.

  Marty will later tell me that he knew I was lost when he saw my tracks going straight when I should have turned. At that point, he was at least two hours behind me, long enough for me to have covered a good bit of ground. While he suspected that I wouldn’t be able to hold to the trail going up into the high country, there was a slim chance that I could. The danger in that case was that I could end up even farther from camp and be that much harder to find. Having limited fuel and a sled full of fur, he’d decided to race to the cabin, gas up, unload the animals, and carry spare gas in the sled in case I needed it. The prudent thing was to plan for the worst, which meant heading to where I would have come out in the event I’d been able to stay on the trail. Only after having raced there and seen no tracks did he circle back to where I’d made my wrong turn and follow the tracks I’d made.

  Marty’s headlamp is blinding me. He has his face right in mine as he continues his upbeat banter.

  Later he will tell me he was checking for frostbite. I like hearing his voice. It does what he intends it to do: It makes me feel like everything will be all right. It makes me want to keep it together when in reality I’m so exhausted and so relieved that I want to sob. He says the fastest way home is to keep going up rather than backtrack, but that the trail has a few steep spots before it levels out again. I nod. I’m an infant now. I’ll do as I’m told.

  He plods down to my machine, rights it, and starts the engine. He stands to one side, gunning it and pushing at the same time. He grunts and the snow machine rises up and returns to the path like a dog obeying its master. Later I will learn that Marty can bench 350 pounds and that to qualify for the annual physical for the smokejumpers, he has to run either 1.5 miles in 9 minutes, 30 seconds, or 3 miles in 22 minutes. I get back on my machine, but Marty remembers that its headlight doesn’t work. He has to move both machines around so he can switch the sled to the one I was riding. He has a good headlamp, he says. All I have to do is follow him home.

  The trail gets much steeper. I fall off within thirty yards and stick the machine in a drift. Up ahead, I see Marty’s headlamp stop moving, then start coming my way. He walks down, again picks up my machine, and sets it back on the path. I fall off fifty yards later. He does it all over again. We come to a part of the trail that is even steeper. I tell Marty I can’t ride this, that it’s easier if he rides it up and I walk up. And it is. I would much rather walk than ride the damn machine another inch. I am exhausted. Every part of my body hurts. Marty rides my machine past his to the top of the hill. Walking back down to his as I’m walking up, he shines his lamp in my face again.

  “Camp’s not far, Bill,” he says cheerily. “You okay? Warm enough?”

  I nod and keep going. He steps off the trail into the snow to let me pass. The steep part is so steep that even he can’t get up it pulling the empty sled. He unhitches the sled and rides the machine up, then hikes back down to push the sled up. I hear him grunting with each step. I turn my head and see the bobbing white dot of his headlamp below me. That poor bugger. What a trouper. Somebody ought to go down and help that man. I am no longer in the running as an asset, as a somebody. I’m cargo now—no more use than a dead lynx.

  We still have to run almost an hour to get back to camp, but Marty wisely lies to me each time I ask how far it is: “Oh, about twenty minutes or so.” Even though the trail is almost flat, I keep falling off at the slightest bump. I am a sack of potatoes. Marty keeps pushing or pulling my machine back onto the trail. Along one straight part, I lose my hat. When he next stops to check me over, he asks where it is. “Back there,” I mumble. “It came off.” I don’t want him to go back. I don’t care about the hat. I’ve got a hood that will protect me. I could be dropping hundred-dollar bills every five feet and I would not want to stop and have him go back to retrieve them. All I want is the cabin, warmth, a place to lie down. He goes back for my hat.

  Finally, about the time I am imagining that I hear bagpipe music, the cabin comes into view. Inside, Marty lights a propane lamp, stokes the stove, and rustles up some stew, hot tea, and a slug of Scotch. It’s all I can do to crawl the five feet from the table to my sleeping bag. “I was starting to get a little worried about you out there, Bill,” he says brightly, as if he himself is surprised at the notion, and as if the idea of my actually being in danger was an outlandishly remote possibility that nearly came to pass. Which is probably how you want to tell a man in my condition that you were worried about him. To acknowledge that something has just happened, without saying it could have turned out any way other than happily.

  I murmur, “Thank you, Marty,” mean it, and fall into an endless drift of sleep.

  HANDY MAN

  2.6 million–2.5 million years ago: Our distant ancestors have long forsaken the trees and moved to where the meat is—the savannas of central Africa. Hairy little bipeds indistinguishable from hundreds of previous generations, they nevertheless produce the oldest knives known. Struck from larger stones and surprisingly sharp, they revolutionize butchering. Before, everybody just grabbed a hoof and tugged, a practice still seen in some western Pennsylvania deer camps. Archaeologists see evidence of extensive resharpening and conclude that the blades were—this will blow your mind—prized possessions. But science cannot verify what a knife guy already knows, which is that knives were the springboards to our most human traits: pride of ownership, jealousy, covetousness, and the way in which a man with four knives always loses his favorite one first.

  9000 b.c.: On a ridge just below the Continental Divide in Idaho’s Beaverhead Mountains, a hunter parts company with a spear point of obsidian, a kind of volcanic glass. Discovered by an archaeologist in 2004, it predates such human inventions as the wheel, SSRI anti­depressants, and the cable TV industry that makes such drugs necessary. Obsidian surgical scalpels are still used today to reduce tissue damage or if a patient is allergic to metal. This material can be worked to an edge much sharper than any steel because it lacks the crystal structure of all steels. How are such precision scalpels forged? The same way the first ones were: by skilled knappers striking one rock against another.

  June 16, 1965: I am ten and need a knife for my first sleepaway camp. At a surplus store, my dad buys me a large sheath knife. Eleven inches overall, it sports a six-inch blade, stacked leather washer handle, and metal pommel. On my belt, it reaches nearly to my knees. I have to tighten my belt to keep it from pulling my pants down. But I am in love with it, with its weighty sense of purpose and resolve.

  October 20, 2006: I rediscover it in my parents’ attic. Research reveals it to be a Pal RH-36, a fighting knife issued in World War II. I keep this artifact, this totem, atop my desk. It’s still the biggest knife I own. Sometimes I hold it in my hand, remember my dead father, and resolve once again to be a better son.

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nbsp; 1975–Present: For inexplicable reasons, I have trouble leaving the house without a pocketknife. Where I live, most people think this is an eccentricity, like wearing sock garters—until they need a blade. There was the mom rushing toward the soccer game, trying to bite her way into the plastic clamshell holding the required shin guards. There were the hosts of the ice-skating birthday party whose cake showed up forty-five minutes late, and who realized, as a dozen kids came down from their initial sugar high—they’d already started on the ice cream—that the only blade in sight was attached to the bottom of a figure skate.

  June 11, 2009: Desperate to win the affections of a woman who loves to cook, I buy her the costliest knife of my life: an eight-inch chef’s knife by Master Bladesmith Bob Kramer. The designation is earned by forging a knife that can 1) slice an inch-thick, free-hanging rope in one cut; 2) chop through a construction-grade two-by-four—twice; 3) dry-shave hair from the applicant’s forearm; and finally 4) be clamped in a vise and bent 90 degrees without breaking. Kramer averages five knives per week, no longer accepts new orders, and bumps me to the front of the line only after I pester him daily for weeks. The knife is terrifyingly sharp and comes alive in the hand. It proves more durable than the relationship, which, subjected to pressure, breaks along the spine.

  June 25, 2009: Off on a fishing trip, I arrive at the airport packing a Leatherman Wave, a Spyderco Dragonfly on my key ring, and a Benchmade Mini-Griptilian. Two of these I discover in a reflexive pat-down before locking the car. The Spyderco I discover as I’m about to enter security. Think fast or you’ll give the TSA another one, I tell myself. Then I notice a horizontal beam running the length of the glass wall facing the airfield. I approach. In one of the most heavily monitored locations in the country, I palm the knife and pantomime a weary stretch. Yawning and extending both arms, I can just reach it. The beam has the hoped-for edge, and a layer of dust indicating infrequent cleaning. I stash the blade and mark the spot opposite the register in the Verizon kiosk.