Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  No, I couldn’t. There was the well to be dug.

  I picked out a spot in the corner of the cellar directly under the kitchen and started to excavate. Under the thin surface of dirt I found layer after layer of gravel, most of which could easily be pried out by hand. After scooping it up in coffee cans and taking out ten or twenty bucketfuls every morning—the work of two hours—I would knock off for the day, though sometimes I had spurts of enthusiasm and worked for three hours. And gradually the 4×4-foot hole grew deeper.

  Occasionally a setback bit into my loafing time. At ten feet, I found that I would have to crib up the sides of my hole to keep from being buried alive; I did it with some birch boards I had been saving for furniture. And then, the gravel I had taken out was always threatening to slide into the hole. I would wait for a fairly good, sunny day, then start carting it upstairs, bucket by bucket, and taking it out into the snow and spreading it around the house, hoping that by spring, when the snow melted, I would have a nice gravel, unmuddy yard.

  At fifteen feet I began to lose some of my enthusiasm: I had planned on hitting water long before then.

  At seventeen feet I plunged my hand down after some more gravel and pulled it away wet. Eureka! The water was ice cold, and I knew that it must be from the same source as my spring. All I needed now was a pump, which I wouldn’t be able to buy until the following summer, But in the meantime, would I have something to show the next visitor who happened along! The only well for miles around! Now I did have the fanciest bachelor establishment on the Kenai Peninsula. A house with running—well, almost running—water!

  I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long before showing off my improvements. The situation had changed since the winter before—my first winter as a homesteader. That year, until my success in “Henry Gubbins’ Mail Order Wife,” I had been an unknown quantity to most of my neighbors. Though I knew most of them by sight and name and was quite friendly with several of them, I wasn’t apparently, on most of the visiting lists. But this winter I was not only apt to glance out my window at any time of day to see two carsful of families driving up, but as an eligible bachelor—even when there were no eligible daughters around—I was often besieged by invitations to dinner. In Alaska, I had discovered, the wintertime is the social time. In the summer, people are too busy working to play.

  The Keelers and the Baileys, whom I had originally met through the late Greasy Grogan, were the two families with whom I exchanged visits most often. The Keelers, a family of five, had come to Alaska from Oregon in 1948, purchased eighty acres on the banks of the Anchor River and started a small sawmill there. When I first made their acquaintance, they were in the process of homesteading more land two miles south of my homestead and had moved their mill to the new location. I had gotten to know them rather well through pinochle parties, through the community doings at the Anchor Point one-room schoolhouse, and through dealing with Lawrence Keeler, a man in his 50’s, at his sawmill, where his two teen-aged sons were willing workers except in moose-hunting and fishing and trapping season.

  Lorna Keeler, somewhat younger than her husband, had a well-deserved reputation for being the bachelor’s friend in time of need, and I had fallen into the habit of running to her for help whenever I had had an accident. During my first winter in Alaska, when I was still the greenest of greenhorns, I had been out in the woods with my double-bit axe trying to clean up some brush when the axe bounced back from an especially springy limb and hit me in the eye. I dropped the axe into the snow and put both hands up to my face. A deep cut in my eyebrow and cheek was streaming blood, but the steel frames of my glasses, which had turned the edge of the blade (and now lay broken at my feet), had saved my eye. Stumbling blindly through the drifts to my shack, I had tried to stop the flow of blood. Unsuccessful, I started for my car, remembered that it was still being repaired from the accident I had had in the fall, then staggered down the highway toward the Keelers’ homestead. When I arrived there, Lorna Keeler had washed the wound and gently, expertly bandaged it with some clean napkins.

  “I’m glad you came to me,” I remembered her saying as she waved away my thanks. “There’s no doctors around here. Folks just have to help each other.” Then she told me of the time she had contracted pneumonia in the middle of the winter when she and her family had lived at Anchor Point about two miles off the main highway. Lawrence had rounded up all the neighbors and they had dug a road through the snowdrifts to the main road and dragged Mrs. Keeler there in a jeep. At the highway she had been transferred to a car which drove her to Homer, and from there a plane had flown her to the hospital in Anchorage, 200 miles away. “I recovered,” she said simply, in ending the story.

  At one time, Lorna said, there had been an emergency plane which, when radioed, would land on the beach at the Point to pick up people who were dangerously ill. But after one woman had cried wolf once too often with a simple stomach ache, the plane had stopped coming. That left only the hospital at Seward, 150 miles away by highway, and a doctor at Seldovia, fifty miles away across the bay from Homer, as islands of medical help, but these two spots were almost impossible to reach in an emergency because of the lack of proper transportation. “So you just come to me when you’re hurt,” said Lorna Keeler. And I always did.

  In the food department, too, the Keelers had proved to be the special friends of the unmarried men of the community—especially to the ones who preferred good, home cooking to their own. Often they invited me and some of the others to dinner, and if I ever happened to drop in without an invitation while they were eating, it was always a case of “Have you eaten? No? Well, draw up a Blazo box and fall to.” It was in the baking of pies, particularly, that Lorna excelled. She baked the best pies in the area and the most. No matter when I passed by there would always be a pile of five or six pies of all kinds on the sideboard, and Lorna always got a kick out of saying, when she saw me eyeing them, “I just knew you were coming, Gordon. You can smell my pies two miles away.”

  But good things must be paid for. Shortly after digging my well. I made up my mind to give a Christmas party for the Keelers and rang Red Freimuth in on the deal. On Christmas morning at my house Red and I began our preparations. The baking of a ham, biscuits and several pies, and the making of salads and other assorted dishes took up a good part of the day, and we had no more than finished when our guests arrived. In addition to the Keelers and their children—the two teen-aged boys and a younger girl—there were Mrs. Keeler’s sister and her young daughter and “Old Man Smitty,” who was a house guest of the Keelers at the time. I counted heads and decided that we had provided just about enough food. And luckily, there had been enough pots to cook it in and there were plenty of dishes on which to serve it: my family in California had sent me quantities of those things as Christmas presents.

  Everything was in readiness. I had moved my big kitchen table out into the front room and set Blazo boxes around it for chairs, adding my bed as a davenport, bench or what-have-you. Too, there were a couple of card tables (Red’s) to hold the extra supplies. The Christmas tree, a young spruce, had been decorated with strings of chinking cotton and sprinkled generously with soap chips, and there were presents underneath it for everyone.

  “Oh, boy!” said the kids, spotting the tree. But Lorna Keeler had eyes for nothing but my new rug, which had turned out to be the same shade of green as the tree. “My!” she marveled. “Wherever did you get it? Its—it’s beautiful! Imagine, a bachelor with a real rug to walk on. Why, I bet it’s the only rug for fifty miles!”

  Then she noticed my curtains and shades, and her compliments made me feel that, as far as Alaska was concerned, anyway, I was a success as an interior decorator. Encouraged, I conducted the entire party on a tour of the house to show them all the new improvements, including the dark hole in the cellar that would some day be a working well. And when I received enthusiastic congratulations from all, I knew that my Christmas party was made. The only sour note came when Lorna said, “Gordon, what
you need now is a wife to keep the place clean.” How well I knew it.

  No one made any complaints as he wolfed the dinner down. After the meal, we cleared off the table and started another of our never-ending pinochle games while the kids drank punch and read my magazines. Suddenly I noticed that two of the children were frothing at the mouth. I took the sick looks on their faces for a slam at my cooking and their parents yelled things like “hydrophobia!” until I observed that the punch pot, my large-size pressure cooker, was sitting under the Christmas tree. Apparently someone had bumped into the tree and knocked some of the soap chips into the pot: it was full of suds—and so were the kids. This added the touch to the party that would make it an event to be talked about for years.

  The Baileys—man, wife and four children—occupied the next homestead to the Keelers’. They had moved into the area at the same time as I; in fact, in comparing notes after we became acquainted, we found out that we must have passed each other many times on the Alcan Highway while driving up from the States. Originally from a small town in Ohio, where Mr. Bailey had worked as an electrician, they had bought their homestead-complete with an already-built log house—from a bachelor who had wanted to return to the States. Immediately they had begun to build a small summer business out of a gas station, restaurant and tourist cabins. They had been successful, and there were no adopted Alaskans in the Homer area more enthusiastic about their chosen home than the Baileys. Fred Bailey said to me once: “Gordon, this is a hard life we lead up here at times. But where else can a man start out with little or nothing and end up owning his own business in just a couple of years? Why, we wouldn’t trade what we’ve got here for the best job in the States. My business is pretty small, now, but even when it gets bigger I’ll be able to take time off when I feel like it and go fishing and hunting. By gosh, this is the life!” And I agreed with him.

  Looie the Goat Man—as everyone called him—was another of my neighbors. Acting as caretaker for a homestead whose owner had died, he lived a half mile away in a little one-room round log cabin. He was the most independent man in the whole region: he kept a herd of thirty goats for milk and meat, maintained a small flock of chickens for eggs and raised the best potatoes “in the whole danged country.” At one time during his forty years of residence in Alaska he had raised foxes, too, but when the female mind had veered to ermine and mink he had given it up as a bad job.

  The first time I met Looie was during my first fall as a homesteader. I had been hunting spruce chickens and stumbled accidentally into his domain. As I stepped into the clearing a savage malemute rushed me, snarling as he leaped out from behind a tree. For several seconds he circled me, fangs bared, trying for an opening; but my gun seemed to intimidate him. Just as I thought I would have to shoot the dog in self defense a little white-bearded man ran up and grabbed him. “Put your gun down,” he said quietly in an accent which could have been German or Swiss. “He hates the sight of dem.”

  As soon as I had laid my .22 on the grass the dog’s attitude changed, and he came over to me wagging his tail. But there was still a snarl on his face, and when I accepted the old man’s invitation to “Come in,” the dog followed me, growling softly as his teeth nuzzled my ankles.

  As we entered the small cabin a goat, two chickens and a cat took their leave. Removing a pile of National Geographies from a chair, my host formally offered me a seat, and after we had talked for awhile he gave me a cup of coffee. When he handed me the cup, I took a big gulp and nearly lost my stomach; the brew was composed of equal parts of hot coffee and strong, cold goat’s milk. But you don’t refuse hospitality when it’s offered in Alaska. Before I got away that day, I had drunk enough goat’s-milk-coffee to float a small tug, and I had been completely unsuccessful in my efforts to convince Looie that I liked my coffee black. I had, however, made friends with the dog—inside the cabin, at least. Outside, he turned into a wolf again and drove me off the property.

  It was during my first winter—the winter I shall always think of as “The Greasy Grogan Winter”—that I returned home from a hunting expedition one day to find the leg of an animal lying on my kitchen table. Not knowing who had left it but grateful for the meat, whatever it was, I made a stew out of it. It didn’t taste bad.

  A few days later I ran into Greasy. “Did you leave that meat I found at my house?” I asked him. “That leg?”

  “Sure,” said Greasy. “It was a coyote leg. I left it to see if you’d have guts enough to eat it.” I was sick for a couple of days. Then I saw Looie and told him the story. “That was no coyote leg,” he said. “I left it for you. It was a goat’s leg. How did you like it?” I was sick for two more days.

  Now Looie and I were good friends. He had taken to dropping in for an occasional visit, and he would sit in my kitchen drinking coffee—which, in retaliation for the goat’s-milk-coffee I always had to drink at his house, I served him black—and telling me stories of his experiences in Alaska in the early days. He had been a trapper and a hunter, and he liked to tell me about the “porky-pines” he had killed by the dozen on my homestead when it had been nothing but a forest of trees. He had fed the bristly little beasts to his foxes, he said, but he hadn’t seen one of them in the area, now, for years.

  Sometimes we would argue about houses. He didn’t think much of mine. A log cabin without moss for chinking and a roof without dirt piled on top wasn’t worth living in, he said. My only defense was that I liked my house, and that I expected to live in it for some time to come. Luckily, the arguments always ended on a friendly note; Looie had nothing in common with the late Greasy Grogan.

  Looie was almost a fanatic about animals. He talked to them, slept with them, called them his “friends.” But he was practical about them, too. In addition to his ferocious dog, he seemed to own a second dog, but after awhile that dog disappeared. “What became of it, Looie?” I asked him.

  “Oh, he was old and mean,” he said. “I shot him, cooked him up and fed him to the chickens.” Yes, a very practical man was Looie Huber.

  The Rabecks, you might say, were my “farther” neighbors: they lived in Anchor Point. A young couple who had met in Pennsylvania Station in New York when she was a ticket clerk and he a Coastguardsman passing through, they had traveled to Alaska from the east coast in a jeep. They had arrived in Anchorage after a series of harrowing hardships with less than a dollar of their original capital left. (Whenever they told me the story, I thought of my arrival in Anchorage and how similar, in some ways, it had been). But they had rallied. Wiring home for money, they had existed on that until Bill got a job with the Alaska Railroad, and, living on the Anchor Point homesite they had taken, they had existed fairly well ever since, adding two small daughters to the one they already had. But “hardships” seemed to be their middle name. After driving his jeep into every ditch between Homer and Kenai, Bill Rabeck had discovered that he was going blind in both eyes. That had prevented him from working regularly, but a small inheritance had enabled him to support his family between jobs.

  The only thing I didn’t like about Bill Rabeck was his bad memory. Twice I invited him and his family to dinner, and twice I spent a whole day preparing some special delicacy like fried snowshoe rabbit and had to sit down and eat it myself. Bill would apologize profusely when I reminded him of the broken engagement—“I forgot, Gordon. I’ll swear I forgot!”—but it would happen again. I began to think that either Bill was too blind to find my place or that the food was too terrible, and that he figured he’d had enough disasters in his lifetime without adding indigestion to the list.

  My closest neighbor, Red Freimuth, was a fugitive from civilization who lived to hunt, and since I, too, was a fugitive from cities, we had much in common. We spent a good deal of the winter discussing hunting (Red), fishing (me) and our plans for the future. Red was a gunsmith and welder by trade and was making plans to put up a shop. All he needed was money. I had finally decided to build a greenhouse and grow tomatoes and do some truck farming on the
side. All I lacked was money. In anticipating the coming spring, we agreed to find a job together and save enough money to fulfill our dreams and get our separate businesses going. The farm training subsistence we were both receiving was carrying us along month by month, but it wouldn’t last forever. And after that—what? Jobs: Alaskan jobs, with long hours and big pay!

  Chapter XIII—The Rich Homesteaders

  IT WAS APRIL, 1952: the time of the spring thaw. Red’s battered four-wheel-drive Army truck lurched sickeningly through one of those mud-filled trenches we call a highway in Alaska, dragging my mud-spattered, nearly disabled car behind it at the end of a long, rusty chain.

  Clutching my wheel, I looked out on the bleak, cloudy landscape and slumped in fatigue. So far, it had been a tough year. In March, when the farm training program had been cancelled, Red and I had loaded up our vehicles with camping equipment and livestock (Ski, my malamute dog) and started out to look for jobs with high hopes. Since then we had traveled the length of the Kenai Peninsula following rumors of jobs, only to find out that the jobs had never existed or that the crews were already full up. Now we were heading for Kenai to make our last stand. There was an Army base going up there soon, we had heard, and the construction outfit—J. H. Pomeroy and Co. of San Francisco—would be needing men. If we couldn’t get on a crew right away, we had decided, we would sit it out until we did.

  “Kenai coming up!” yelled Red from the truck.

  “Kenai it is!” I hollered back.

  We drove through town to a homesite whose owner, a mutual friend, had given us permission to camp on his lot as long as we wished. Within half a day we had erected a tent house and parked our cars off the road where they wouldn’t be run down by dump trucks or fined by the highway patrol for blocking traffic. After unloading cases of canned moose meat, fish, clams and vegetables, cases of staples and numerous sacks of potatoes, plus half a ton of coal, a coal cookstove, beds, blankets and other necessary items from Red’s truck, we were ready to spend the summer if need be. “Come on, you contractors!” yelled Red. “We’re ready to go to work!”