Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  That first night in our new home Red and I were lying on our cots discussing our chances for jobs and Ski was stretched out on the floor in front of the warm stove when two visitors turned up—homesteader neighbors who were working for the Alaska Road Commission in Kenai. In the excitement I put Ski out of the tent. After the guests had left, I looked for her and couldn’t find her. “Gosh,” I said to Red, worried. “Where do you suppose she went?”

  “Oh, she’s probably around here somewhere,” said Red. “She’s not used to this place. Must’ve wandered off.”

  In the morning, when Ski hadn’t returned, I hunted for her through the entire Kenai district, asking questions of everyone I met, even walking the beaches to inquire at the huts of commercial fishermen. Nobody had seen her. Nobody knew anything about her. She had vanished.

  For days I searched. Sometimes I saw a malemute who looked like Ski, but when I would run up to it I would see that the markings were different, the size was different, or the sex was different, and I would realize that I had made another mistake. Finally I gave up, consoling myself with the thought that maybe—just maybe—Ski had been picked up by some family that liked dogs.—A family with children, who could provide a good home. I didn’t like to think that she had suffered some horrible fate. But you never knew. You never knew. (It wasn’t until a year later that I heard what had happened to my dog from a friend who had known all along but had been afraid to tell me. That night when I had missed her, she had broken into a chicken house down the road from the tent and had been shot by the chicken farmer after killing several hens. It’s an unwritten law in Alaska that a chicken-killing dog may be shot on sight—but that didn’t lessen the blow when I heard the bad news. Ski and I had been friends, and I hated to think of her dying a death like that.)

  But even the loss of my dog didn’t prevent me from carrying out the main purpose of my life just then: getting a job. The hiring hall was in town. Each morning Red and I showed up there at a few minutes before 8:00 and waited, along with a hundred other desperate men, for the door to open. And every morning a little man came out and hung a sign on the door which read, “No hiring today.” Cursing and muttering, the men would slowly disperse, some, if they had money, to bars, the rest of us to our shacks or tents.

  Finally came the day when the little man opened the door and yelled, “Four laborers needed!” I pushed my way to the front, held up my laborer’s union book and said, “I have a paid-up book and I’m a local man.”

  The little man gazed dispassionately over the heads of the shoving, growling crowd. “That don’t make any difference here,” he said. “You fellows’ll have to decide among yourselves who’s to go to work.”

  Visualizing a hundred men fighting, with only the four strongest emerging from the pile alive, their knives dripping with gore, I closed my eyes for a moment. Then I heard someone suggest that we all write our names on slips of paper and put them in a hat. “The guys whose names are the first four drawn will get the jobs,” said the voice. Everyone seemed to be looking at me. Naturally. It was I who had spoken.

  Borrowing a hat, I wrote my name on a slip of paper and dropped it in. Soon everyone had followed suit and the hat was held high while I mixed up the names. It was only by peculiar coincidence that Red happened to be the man chosen to pick the names, and only by another odd fluke that my name was the one picked first. Maybe the fact that, in stirring the slips of paper, I had simply given them one mighty flip, which meant that the names on top were shifted to the bottom and vice versa, had something to do with my good luck. Anyway, I dashed into the hiring office before anyone could register a protest. Immediately I was signed up as the nineteenth laborer to be hired on the job and given instructions to report to the Kenai dock. It was the last day of April and I was in.

  Red, unfortunately, didn’t have ray luck. But three weeks later, after organizing the laborers into a first-come-first-serve list, with the men who had been waiting longest for a job and who maintained “permanent” residence in Alaska on top and the men who had just arrived from the States at the bottom, he was hired. He had a long, hard fight to maintain the “fair” order of the list, but Red was big and his temper was short then, and there had been no changes made without his O.K.

  My first job involved unloading the barges arriving in Kenai with loads of construction equipment and lumber. Soon the lumber was stacked three piles high in the dock area and covered an acre of ground. After a few weeks all the other laborers seemed to have disappeared and I was the only one left to keep track of the lumber and help load the trucks when they arrived from the Army base. After five weeks I was sent out to the base, where a camp for the workers was being constructed. There I was put to work digging sewer ditches and stacking lumber for the carpenters who were beginning to swarm over the project.

  A break in the monotony finally came when I was assigned, temporarily, to a “rod busting” gang. On this job I helped bend reinforcing rod into different angles for concrete forms, helped tie mats for foundation forms and draw a nice, fat check.

  We were operating on a nine-hour-day, six-day week, and everyone was getting his share of overtime. My take-home pay averaged around $150 a week and I was able to save at least $125 of it. Red and I, living in the tent and cooking all our meals out of food we had canned up the year before—except for a few “hooligans,” eight inch, almost transparent fish we bought from the native kids—kept our expenses at a minimum. It annoyed us a little, therefore, when various of our homesteader neighbors from Anchor Point kept moving in on us to wait for jobs. We fed them from our stock of supplies and were glad to do it, but we fervently hoped they’d become employed before our stock was down to nothing. A few did get jobs. Those who didn’t returned to their homesteads to make out as best they could, or borrowed money from us to travel to Anchorage to look for jobs there.

  All of our neighbors had departed when Red brought home a man he had met in town. He was down from Anchorage to look for work and would “stick around” for awhile, he said. We fed him for a couple of days, but when he gave no indication of intending to move we put our heads together to try to figure out how to get rid of him in a fairly nice way. We didn’t object to feeding our friends, but a stranger was a different matter.

  We tried hints of various kinds, then open suggestions. But nothing moved him. He was either very stupid or a lot smarter than we were. He seemed determined to stay with us all summer—or at least until he got a job. One night we held off from cooking dinner at the usual time, hoping to starve him out. He just sat there, waiting. Finally, when Red and I were so hungry we could have eaten him for dinner, we capitulated and cooked. And because you wouldn’t let a dog go hungry in Alaska, we invited him to share our stew.

  As far as I was concerned, there were only two things left to do: knock him over the head and dump him into the inlet, or move out and leave him in possession of the camp. “No, wait,” said Red, during a whispered conference outside. “I’ve got a better idea. You know how people get rid of cats they don’t want?”

  On Sunday Red went into action. Throwing the few possessions of The Man Who Came To Dinner into his truck, he told him he was driving down to his homestead in Anchor Point. “I’ll take you as far as the turnoff to Anchorage and you can hitchhike to the city from there. I hear tell there’s lots of work in Anchorage now,” he said.

  The Leech (as we had begun to call him) showed a considerable amount of reluctance to fall in with the plan. “Oh, I don’t know,” he kept saying. “Maybe I’d better just stay here.” But with Red coaxing from the truck and me pushing from behind, we finally persuaded him to climb in. Red gave me a wink as they drove off. He returned two hours later without a passenger. “How did you do it?” I yelled.

  “Well, it wasn’t easy,” said Red, modestly. “He wanted to go all the way to the homestead with me, but I dumped him off at the turnoff just the same. Then I drove down the road a couple of miles and waited until The Leech had had time to get a ride
in the other direction. When I got back to the turnoff, he was gone. Good news?”

  “Good news!” That night we celebrated by buying a case of beer and drinking it all ourselves.

  Eventually I was transferred to a concrete crew which was working in the 600-acre clearing I had worked on the year before. Base forms were scattered throughout the clearing, and it was our job to pour concrete into them, wait for it to set, then return and pour a pedestal which would support some sort of metal tower later on. My specific task was to operate the vibrator, an electric device designed to set up a vibration in the freshly-poured concrete and thus force it to settle into the form and fill up all the pockets. I was pleased with my job: it paid ten cents more per hour than most laboring jobs.

  When we weren’t engaged in pouring, we were supposed to be readying other forms to pour. This wasn’t as simple as it sounds—not in Alaska. The muskeg in which we worked was composed of a layer of moss, a few feet of mud and about six feet of water-saturated gravel. When we came to a big hole in which we knew there was a form, we had to set up two pumps to pump out four or five feet of water before we could find it. When the form came into sight, we would all jump into the hole and clear out the mud. Then we would pile great heaps of muskeg moss around the form to keep the mud from flowing back in. With both pumps and men working at top speed, the hole would be in proper shape for pouring by the time a cat with a “Garbo” bucketful of concrete showed up. The concrete would then flow down a chute into the form to be vibrated, and we would move on to the next hole to repeat the operation.

  Sometimes, however, the concrete would be delayed in its arrival. At these times, to keep from becoming bored, I would take my shovel and pan for gold in the bottom of the pit. Pretty soon the entire crew would be engaged in the same occupation. We found several signs of gold, but I’m sorry to report that no one made a strike.

  After the construction workers’ camp had been set up, dinners were offered at $2 per. Being slightly tired of our own cooking, Red and I started turning up at the mess hall every night. We looked forward to that meal all day. The food was good—a lot better than ordinary homesteader’s fare—and you were allowed to eat as much as you could hold. It was easy to tell the homesteaders from the other men: when the meal was over, the only men left in the hall were homesteaders, busily cleaning up all the food left behind by the others and stuffing their pockets with enough food to make their lunches for the following day.

  After four months of hard work I had collected $2000 in my checking account and was ready to send away to the States for the equipment I needed for my homestead. After much thumbing of catalogs and considerable careful calculation, I finally made out an order for a garden tractor with several attachments, a shallow well pump and five rolls of trans-o-glass, a glass substitute I planned to use in building my greenhouse. When I wrote out my check to Montgomery Ward’s for a thousand dollars my hand was trembling. It was the largest check I had ever written in my life and there was the most money I had ever had in the bank at one time to back it up. Writing that check, to me, was like cutting off my right hand and throwing it to the wolves. But, consoling myself with thoughts of what that money would buy, I felt better after the deed was done.

  In another two months I had returned the amount of the check to my account and contracted that disease known as “stake-happiness.” One day the boss came up to me and said, “Stoddard, do you want to dig some post holes?”

  “No,” I replied. “I’d rather not.”

  The foreman stared at me. Then he hollered, “Stoddard, you’re stake-happy! When do you want to be laid “Thursday,” I said. “I don’t want to make over $5000 and by Thursday I’ll have made exactly $4,973.56.”

  “Okay. Thursday it will be.”

  On Thursday evening I collected my last big check from the foreman and drove through the main gate of the base for the last time, a free agent once more, a homesteader who, only twenty-five weeks before, had had a hard time raising a few dollars to buy gas for his car, but who was now the proud possessor of a four-figure checkbook. It would have taken me three years in the States to save as much.

  When Red arrived at the tent that night he told me that the construction laborer who was camping on the next lot was leaving, too. “He says he’s got a lot of canned goods to sell cheap,” he said. “He wants to get rid of everything before he goes.” This often happened around construction jobs where men who camped out had bought large stocks of food in order to save money but quit or were fired from their jobs before they had had time to eat it all up. “Let’s see what he has,” I said.

  Red and I dickered with our neighbor until we bought everything he had at a very low figure. The food—to homesteaders who weren’t used to it—was of the fancy variety: cans of tuna, roast beef, boned turkey and chicken soup, and even a case of tomato ketchup. But I was feeling like a millionaire and felt I could afford a little luxury for a change—especially when it cost practically nothing. (Later on I was to get rid of the ketchup by presenting a bottle of it as a housewarming present to each new homesteader who moved into my area).

  The next morning, after packing my car with my share of the camping equipment, I said goodbye to Red, who was planning to work for another two months, and headed for the homestead country. It had been a long, hard summer, but I had done what I had set out to do: made money—lots of money to turn my dream of a greenhouse and small truck farm into reality. And I still had two months of fair weather before winter set in in which to build my buildings. Best of all, I would be working for myself—as contractor, foreman and crew, all wrapped into one.

  I felt good. I stepped on the gas and put on some speed.

  Chapter XIV—Jack of All

  THE HOMESTEAD. The good old solid homestead. Was I glad to see it again! My property had never looked so good. The birch trees were losing the last of their reddish fall leaves, the creek was running clear over its shining rock bed and the evergreen spruce trees seemed greener than ever before.

  Only one little detail bespoke the invasion of man. There, near the house, was a huge, deep pit, twenty feet wide and fifty feet long, the freshly-dug dirt beside it a blot on the otherwise sylvan scene. But no enormous mole had been at work. Recently, on my order, the same cat driver who had cleared the land for me a year-and-a-half before had dug the hole. It was to be the cellar for my greenhouse.

  The greenhouse, I knew, must be complete before the first snowfall. I would have to work fast. Ordering the necessary lumber from the Keelers’ sawmill, I hurried into Homer to pick up some supplies. I bought tools, nails and many other odds and ends. I spent money like a drunken laborer but it was going for a worthy cause, I hoped.

  A few days of getting the pit into shape consumed the time until the first of my lumber began to arrive. It would have taken me until Christmas to haul the boards myself, small load by small load, in the back of my car, but the Keeler boys were kind enough to deliver them to my building site. And there was, perhaps, more than kindness in their action: I was one of the few cash customers available to them at that time, and they wanted to buy themselves a small John Deere tractor, using my money as a down payment.

  Mixing my concrete as fast as I could in order to beat the winter freeze-up (when pouring concrete would be as impossible as pouring a drink from that whisky bottle full of stage tea two winters before), I began construction by placing 4ʺ×4ʺ posts eight feet apart around the sides of the pit to act as studs for the cellar walls, which would be sheathed later, and then erected a line of sixteen-foot 4ʺ×4ʺ’s in the center of the pit, cementing them in place. The latter would support my greenhouse roof.

  A top layer of beams held my center posts together, and my nine-foot wall studs—five of the feet in the cellar and four sticking out above the ground—were united by 2ʺ×4ʺ ‘s. When more lumber arrived from the mill, I started work on the rafters. Using specially-cut 2x3’s, I nailed the rafters every two feet, adding a line of 2×4’s under each line of rafters and br
acing them from my middle uprights so that the roof, with a foot of snow on top, would be properly supported.

  With the shell of the greenhouse completed, I was ready for the interior. Working ten to twelve hours every day, I nailed a spruce board sheathing on the cellar walls, built growing benches which, when filled with soil, would be at ground level, and constructed walkways between the benches, using 2×12 planks on a framework three feet above the basement floor. When this was finished I stood back to survey my accomplishments. The benches running along each side of the greenhouse were four feet wide by 48 feet long, and the bench in the middle was six feet by 36 feet. Though still only covered by a naked framework, it was one heck of a large greenhouse, and when the benches were filled with soil it would grow one heck of a lot of tomatoes. I was almost in business!

  Before even thinking of covering the greenhouse with glass, I considered the problem of my northern exposure. At that end of the house, glass, battered and blasted by the prevailing wind, wouldn’t last any longer than a skiier in bathing trunks at 30 degrees below. What I needed was a solid wall. But wait! If I built a combination garage and workshop at the northern end, an outer wall would take the main force of the wind and I would have two walls to protect the tender tomato plants instead of one. I ordered some more lumber immediately, and within a week I had put up a building somewhat resembling a garage. It was 20 by 18 feet, included a work table, and there was plenty of room in which to store greenhouse supplies. The only thing it lacked was sufficient room for my car.

  One day after the ground had begun to freeze I heard the roar of a powerful motor and a large, covered truck drove into my yard. Stopping his vehicle in a rut in the road, the driver climbed out of the cab and informed that he was carrying about a ton of freight addressed in my name.