Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  It looked as though I would have to call on Greasy Grogan for help. I hated to do it—that business of raising the price on the land hadn’t made me like him very well, or trust him either, for that matter—but a cold gust of wind at my back made me think of winter, and winter made me think of getting some sort of shelter erected before the first snow came drifting down. But how could I build if I didn’t know where my land was? I had visions of myself in a snowstorm, crawling on my hands and knees through the drifts, still holding my tattered map, still hunting for boundaries. No, there was nothing else to do but call on Greasy Grogan.

  Greasy was in a help-the-poor-dope mood that day. He took me directly to a half-mile survey stake which was, he told me, at one of my corners. We then walked north along a faint blazed line until he stopped and said, “This is your other corner. All the rest of this land is mine.” Then he disappeared into the woods.

  Standing where he had left me in a kind of daze, I gazed with something like rapture at the wilderness of trees and brush which in time I would call my own. Excitedly, I searched through the forest until I found what looked like an ideal building site. It was close to the highway and not far from a spring. It had only one drawback: it wasn’t, as far as I could tell, on my land—it was on Greasy’s.

  But just to make sure, I paced off 1320 feet from the corner stake. According to my map, this distance formed the front of my homestead. No! Greasy was wrong! The building site I had selected was on my land. Delighted, I moved my tent to the new location.

  The patch of ground I had chosen was large enough to contain a cabin: no clearing away of trees or stumps would have to be done. But as it was, it took me two days of digging up two feet of tangled moss and tree roots to get to bare dirt. Then I decided that it would be a good idea to dig a small cellar before going any farther. Fighting clouds of mosquitoes with every shovelful of dirt, I didn’t make too much headway on the first day. On the second day I built a small smudge fire to drive the pests away, only to discover that I had attracted an even worse pest—whitesox. These were tiny gnats with white markings on their legs, and no amount of smoke or bug repellent would keep them from biting me. They would cluster around my eyes and forehead when my hands were occupied with the shovel and depart with sizeable chunks of raw meat before I could slap at them. By the time my cellar was six feet deep and six feet square, I called it quits; my eyes were almost swollen shut and I no longer felt like digging and fighting bugs at the same time.

  Trading my shovel for an axe, I went into the woods and managed to dodge the bugs long enough to cut down two fair-sized spruce trees, trim them, saw them into eighteen-foot lengths and drag them to the cabin site to use as sill logs, or foundations. Now I was ready for my lumber. I drove up the highway to a sawmill I had noticed in my travels, expecting to return the same day with the 2000 board feet of lumber I had figured I would need for building a simple shack. Instead, the owner of the one-man mill told me I would have to wait two weeks for my boards. Forlornly I returned to my camp to do battle with the whitesox, and with a new bug I recognized immediately—my father had had his troubles with it in British Columbia—as a “no-see-um.” The latest arrival raised welts as big as silver dollars on the most tender portions of my body and, being almost invisible as its name suggested, was impossible to fight. What a country!

  Greasy Grogan made an enraged appearance on the fourth day. Charging through the woods like a bull after a toreador, he shouted, “Get the——off my land, you——squatter! I showed you where to build!”

  When he had calmed down I explained the situation to him. Sputtering, he left, but in a short time he was back with a 50-foot tape. Together, we spent two hours measuring the survey line again, and when we finished we discovered that I had ten feet more of land than when I had paced it off. Greasy grumbled and fumed, but finally—by way of apology, I guess—he invited me over to his cabin for dinner.

  That night Greasy was the perfect host, and just as I was about to leave he made me what sounded like a very reasonable offer. If I would help him and his 18-year-old son, Tommy, pour a cellar for his home, he said, he would haul my lumber from the sawmill in his truck and stack it at my site. “That’s the way we do it up here,” he explained. “When we’re short of cash, we exchange labor.”

  On the following day we began a backbreaking three-day task. I hauled cement, sifted gravel, pumped water, carried rocks and, in general, worked like a Roman slave, stopping only for meals and laboring far into the night by the light of a Coleman lantern. Each night Greasy tried to persuade me to remain as his guest so that I could get an early start in the morning, but I always had to return to ray camp to feed my dog and he didn’t get away with that. At the end of the third night, I staggered back to my little tent and slept the clock around.

  When my lumber was ready Greasy kept his part of the bargain. At least, he provided the truck and hauled the lumber from the sawmill. But when it came to unloading the lumber, Greasy demurred, lounging lazily in the truck cab while Tommy and I did all the work. He seemed to feel that he had paid off his work debt in full. I didn’t agree, but I was so glad to be able to start construction on my cabin that I failed to point to him that, by the standards of the “labor exchange” system he had so carefully explained to me, he owed me at least a couple of days’ work.

  With a lot of guesswork, several clumsy mistakes, some fool luck and a small pamphlet entitled, “How To Build a Cabin,” I finished the framework and covered a roof with boards within three days. My shack was to be a story-and-a-half affair with a living room downstairs and a bedroom upstairs—pretty elaborate, really—and it was well on its way to completion.

  Then the rainy season began. Hurriedly, with the steady downpour threatening to ruin everything it hit, I moved all my gear into the unfinished cabin, stacking it on some loose boards laid across the floor joists upstairs. At night I had a miserable time trying to keep dry under the leaking roof, trying to keep from rolling off the temporary platform onto the floor below, and trying to keep Ski, the malemute pup, from crawling into my sleeping bag when she was soaking wet.

  Whenever the rain let up, I would slap as many boards on the side of the shack as I could before it started again. Within a week the cabin—except for the windows—was enclosed, and there was 90-pound roofing on the roof. The lumber yard in Homer to which I had gone to purchase five windows had informed me that they would arrive “some time in the future,” so I would simply have to do without that little luxury for awhile. But I was stubborn: I talked Greasy out of some plastic glass to cover some of the holes and tacked tarpaper over the rest.

  The heating problem was solved when I found a 50-gallon gasoline drum, cut a hole for a door in one end and a hole for a smokestack on the top. Every homesteader in the area, I was told, had a stove like that: it was called a “barrel” stove. It wasn’t the most efficient stove in the world—sometimes it would roar and grow so red that it looked as though it might melt and set the house on fire, and sometimes no amount of poking or kerosene would start it burning—but it was the best I could make at the time.

  For cooking, I decided to use the two-burner Coleman stove I had brought with me from the States, and I was to use it continuously during my entire stay in Alaska. Later on I intended to order a wood and coal-burning cookstove from Montgomery Ward’s—mainly for baking pies, and to have an oven to keep my feet warm on cold winter nights.

  The furniture in my dream house-such as it was—was constructed of odds and ends left over from the building lumber. I made a “homesteader” table big enough to hold everything from cigarette papers to my total supply of foodstuffs. I made a bed of rough lumber—just the right size to contain my thin cotton mattress and my sleeping bag but only a few degrees better than sleeping on the cold, wet ground. I figured I wouldn’t need any chairs because I wasn’t expecting any company just then.

  But my cabin still wasn’t complete: I was told I would have to insulate it in some way. Accordingly, I co
llected a large number of cardboard cartons in Homer, flattened them out and tacked them over the studs on the inside walls. Then I built a fancy bookcase with five boards against the day when I might own some books. My mansion was done.

  It was pointed out to me by Greasy a few days later, however, that I still lacked one important item: an outhouse. This seemed to me to be an unnecessary luxury: hadn’t I 160 acres of forest? But on the other hand, who was I to flaunt convention? I dug a hole 100 feet behind the cabin and built a fancy one-seater with an excellent view of a muskeg (a mossy, wet piece of ground—they were everywhere) and stocked it with a generous supply of mail order catalogs. Now, let them sneer!

  By that time—the middle of October—the weather had begun to change. There were frosts every morning and many windy days. I began to realize that, like the squirrel, I would have to be storing up some food for the winter. Just as I conceived this thought I ran into Vern Mutch in Homer. “Want to help me harvest my vegetable garden and dig my potatoes?” he said. “I’ll give you a share of the produce if you will.” Two days later I left Homer with my car groaning under the weight of 300 pounds of potatoes, a sack of carrots, a sack of turnips, a dozen large heads of cabbage and numerous boxes of radishes, green onions, peas, lettuce and Swiss chard. These were in the luggage compartment. Up front with me were some cans of salmon, some cans of clams and several pounds of smoked salmon Vern had given to me in return for the help I had given him in catching the fish and digging the clams. I could hardly wait to get home with my loot, and when I did, I immediately started construction on some shelves and bins in my cellar to hold it all. When everything was stored away in its proper place I was a proud and happy man.

  Then I began to think over the matter of canning. It was woman’s work, but what a wonderful way to preserve game and the fruits of the field! On my next trip to Homer I bought a medium-sized pressure cooker, a half dozen cases of pint jars and a book on the art of canning. I also bought a cheap .22 rifle and a couple of boxes of ammunition. Throughout the last two weeks of October I hunted spruce chickens (a kind of grouse) and put them up in jars, and in my travels I found wild cranberries and mossberries and cooked them up into a mess resembling jam. So pleased was I with my project that if my dog had been a little fatter and a little bigger at the time I’m afraid she, too, would have ended up in a jar.

  My cast-iron cookstove arrived from Portland, Oregon, at about that time. It was the second smallest in the catalog and cost only $29, but it looked mighty beautiful to me. But now I was faced with the problem of finding fuel. The beaches from Homer for 38 miles up the coast past my place to Ninilchik, I had heard, were literally littered with big and little chunks of coal. They came from submerged reefs in Cook Inlet and dropped from seams that lined the bluff encircling it, and anybody who wanted them could take them. But how could I? Only a four-wheel-drive Jeep or a Dodge power wagon could drive out on the beaches and return with a heavy load, and I possessed neither.

  But I was in luck. I found out that Mr. Doner, just down the road, owned a Dodge power wagon, and that he would be agreeable to picking up a load of coal for me for $20. I went along with him to help and to find out more about this coal business. We drove six miles up the highway and turned down a road leading to the beach at Happy Valley Creek. Sure enough: big chunks of coal were everywhere! As Mr. Doner drove slowly along the hard sand, his boys and I tossed the shiny black stuff into the back of the truck. Once I picked up a brown piece and was aggrieved when everybody laughed. “You don’t ever want to take that brown stuff,” Mr. Doner explained. “One bucket of that’ll make two buckets of ashes. Always take the shiny black kind. It makes a much better fire, and it’s only about twenty percent ash.”

  My load, when delivered, proved to be about two and a half tons. I carried it piece by piece from the highway and stacked it carefully against the cabin. That pile was to last me through the winter and part of the spring.

  I was getting to the stage, now, where I would have to watch my money: I was down to less than a hundred dollars, and there was certainly no more coming in. But I had an asset: my car. It was still new and in fairly good shape, and I made up my mind to trade it in on a cheap, second-hand Jeep and pocket the difference. I told Vern Mutch what I was planning to do, “Good,” he said. “I’ll go along with you to Seward. You can pick up an old Jeep there, and I can pick up a new Jeep that’s just arrived by boat for my store.”

  There isn’t much traffic in Alaska. You can drive for miles and miles without ever meeting another car, especially during the fall, when the roads are slippery with ice. Nevertheless, just 25 miles from Seward I rounded a curve in the Plymouth and CR-ASH!

  Finding myself in a five-foot ditch against a spruce tree, I climbed out from behind my bent steering wheel and surveyed the scene. The other car stood in the center of the road where we had met. Silently, I helped its driver, an old man, pick up his headlights and what was left of his grillwork. Then the cursing began. Seeing that I was liable get the worst of it, I muttered, “See you later,” and went back to my car to see how Vern was feeling. I found him with his head in his hands and nursing a growing bump. Apart from that, neither of us was more than slightly shaken up.

  Our efforts to back the car up onto the highway proved futile: the reverse gear wasn’t working. When this became apparent, Vern hitchhiked to Moose Pass and brought back a wrecker which pulled us out in short order. In the meantime, the old man in the other car had disappeared.

  In Seward I heard the bad news: only my second and third gears were working, the whole front of the car was a twisted mass of steel and chrome, and the repair job, with parts being ordered from Seattle, would probably take several months. Worse still: cost on the job was estimated at over $400, and I had cancelled my insurance policy only the week before, planning to buy new insurance with an Alaskan company when I bought a Jeep.

  Back at the homestead I examined my plight: I was starting out my first winter in Alaska with no transportation, a large debt hanging over my head and only about ten dollars in cash to see me through to spring. Don’t come home? I could never go home!

  Then I remembered my family in California and sent out a series of airmail calls for help. I wrote my parents, my brother, my sister. I even considered asking my father for the loan of enough money to enable me to crawl home with my tail between my legs like the beaten cur I was. But luckily that was one letter I didn’t write. In the following days, while waiting for answers to my letters, I began to see the light. First, I told myself that I had only six months to go out of the seven required for a veteran to prove up on a homestead. Second, I had a warm little shack to live in rent-free with no fuel, light or water bills to pay. Third, the cellar was stocked with enough food to last at least a couple of months and I could charge whatever else I needed in a Homer store. If I could just figure out some means of raising enough money to pay the repair bill on my car so that I could sell it for a decent sum instead of letting it go for junk, I could turn into a hermit for the winter and live, in a measure, like a king.

  A week passed before my break came in the form of the Farm Training Program for veterans. Six miles south of my homestead, Greasy told me, classes were held once a week in the Anchor Point schoolhouse, and any veteran who took them was entitled to $67.50 a month for subsistence. I could go with Greasy in his truck: he had been taking the classes for a year.

  In my circumstances, $67.50 looked like a veritable fortune. I signed up at once. In the meantime, checks had started to arrive from the States. Though I wouldn’t be able to get my car out of hock for some time to come, it looked as though I would be able to survive the winter after all.

  Chapter VI—Greasy Grogan

  ONE MORNING IN NOVEMBER I awoke with the feeling that something was wrong. Something was missing, some sound that I was used to hearing. I remembered a pocket book story I had been reading in which the character awakes to find himself the last man alive in the world. It was something like that.


  Springing out of bed, I hurried to the front window to look out. Wrong? Nothing was wrong! Everything was right! It was snowing, by golly, and it was the first time I had seen it fall in my life!

  Dressing quickly, I rushed outside to feel and taste the miracle. Great big doughy flakes were pelting softly down, and they were already piled several inches deep on the ground and flouring the trees. Even Ski, the malamute pup, was powdered with them, and when I released her from her chain she dashed madly around, as happy as I to see the new clean white world. Together we rolled in it, played in it, ate it. “Our first snow, Ski!” I shouted. “It’s our first snow!”

  After awhile I felt the cold seeping through my thin summer clothes. I returned to the shack and found my winter gear—long woolen underwear, heavy wool socks, clumsy shoepacks, a wool shirt, my parka. I gobbled a quick breakfast and then went out in my new outfit to walk through the woods.

  Everything was quiet, everything was hushed. It was as though a blanket of silence had been dropped over the countryside. I felt for the first time that I was completely alone in the world, shut off from all other human beings. And I didn’t mind the feeling: I liked being alone.

  But I hadn’t counted on Greasy Grogan. With that first snowfall my giant enemy-friend came out of his den and began his favorite winter sport of paying unexpected calls on all his neighbors—a neighbor being anyone within 50 miles who would open his door to him. And because I was his closest neighbor, my shack always seemed to be the last stop on his way home from Homer, where he went frequently to take on a full load of booze. At these times he would hang around, roaring and cursing and knocking things down, until he had driven me to the verge of insanity. But there was nothing I could do: Greasy was much too big to throw out.

  Some of the other homesteaders I had met at Greasy’s called him “Obnoxious” Grogan behind his back. I had no difficulty in understanding the reason for that, but I wondered about the origin of the nickname “Greasy” until the night he invited me and some of the other neighbors over for a pinochle session. Then I knew.