Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  Though John seems to be thriving on the sort of life he is now leading—he knows no German and his wife speaks only a few words of English so “she doesn’t chatter all the time,” he boasts—he still hasn’t brought her over to my homestead for a visit. He says he’s afraid that once she sees my house, with the running water, the electric lights and the living room rug, she’ll become dissatisfied with the accommodations he has to offer. Sometimes I think I ought to start writing to his wife’s sister in Germany: I hate chopping wood.

  What about touring the States in search of a wife? Could be. Expensive, but could be. But what are the homesteader’s chances for success? It would be useless for him to look in the cities for a girl who would be either willing or eager to assume the hardships of homesteading—though I’ve no doubt there’d be plenty who would look mighty good around the house during the long winter months. No, what a city girl wants—if those I used to know in California are any criterion—is a junior executive husband who can provide entertainment, pretty clothes and a rose-covered cottage in the suburbs. She might find out later that she sees very little of her husband, and that when the children come along he can no longer afford the fancy clothes. But she can’t see that now. Now it would be impossible to convince her of the superiority of a life in which her husband would be around most of the time, the air she breathed would be uncontaminated by gasoline fumes and the whole of Alaska would be her home. It would be impossible to convince her, because you’d also have to explain that a husband with a year-’round job doesn’t exist in the homestead country, that the entertainment consists of two-year-old movies twice a year, an occasional square dance and visits from the neighbors, that lights and running water are considered luxuries, and that a new parka could seem more important to her than a new dress. And that would do it.

  Oh, maybe a city girl in love could become intrigued with the idea of “pioneering in the wilderness with My Man,” but after a year or so she would become bored and restless and would abandon the poor homesteader to his solitary fate. I’ve seen it happen. There was that guy who married a beautiful ex-model and brought her back to his homestead. She made every effort to get into the spirit of the thing—wore baggy jeans and a torn sweater and smoked a corncob pipe—but within a year she was in the States negotiating a divorce. And she probably entertained her city friends with hilarious stories about the hardships she had endured.

  But there are the farms: perhaps a homesteader would stand some chance of achieving success on a wife-hunting tour of the farms. Yes, when I start out on my search, that’s where I’ll look. And when I find a farmer’s daughter who can bake apple pies that melt in my mouth, milk twenty cows before breakfast, plow a field behind a horse and still have enough energy left to keep her feet going at a square dance at night, that will be the girl for me. Unromantic? Sure. But I’ll go even further: she’ll be an even better bet if she wears a hand-me-down flour sack and hates the sight of shoes; then I’d be sure she’d be satisfied with my lot. It would be nice, of course if she were pretty. But she musn’t be too pretty. To take a good-looking wife back to the homestead country would be to court certain catastrophe. With all the girl-hungry bachelors surrounding me on all sides, I would have to post “Keep Out” signs on all the paths leading to my house, keep my guns loaded at all times and never leave the cabin for a moment. Many a pretty wife has left her husband for greener pastures when a bachelor homesteader friend has moved in to help with the harvest. The only way to prevent this from happening would be to marry a pretty girl with three or four good-looking sisters. With all of them living at my homestead, every bachelor within a radius of a hundred miles would be hanging around offering to help with the chores. And by the time all the sisters were married off, I’d have the best-looking farm in the country. Yes, maybe there’s something to that idea....

  As the situation now stands, the poor single man goes to all the square dances in the community in hopes of meeting a girl of his own age who is unmarried and has just, miraculously (maybe she’s somebody’s sister) moved into the area. Instead he finds out, again and again, that there’s nobody to dance with but grandmothers, other men’s wives and little girls under twelve.

  And even the towns near the construction jobs on which he works in the summer offer nothing but the wrong kind of girl: a girl who is after nothing but his newly-made wealth. This type usually makes her home in the dark corners and recesses of the bars, waiting patiently for a woman-hungry man to fall into her trap. Result: the bachelor’s money is soon gone and all he has gotten for it is a few hours of dull conversation and a hangover the next morning.

  And then there’s the other kind, the “home town” girl. Every summer there descends on the towns near the construction camps a bevy of these pretty females. They are young, fresh-faced and look just like the girls you went to school with back in the States, but their object is the same as that of the women in the bars: to shake loose some of the money from the wallets of the unsuspecting bachelors.

  They come under the guise of magazine subscription saleswomen. Red Freimuth and I went into Kenai one evening to relax over a beer. As we approached a tavern we were set upon by two lovely creatures. I found myself backed up against a wall by a blonde, and when I came out of my trance I was five dollars poorer and holding a receipt for a three-year subscription to some magazine I had never heard of. Red was reeling, too, and when his girl and mine flitted off to work their deadly charms on two other suckers approaching down the street, I turned to him and said, “How much did the redhead get from you?”

  “Ten bucks,” he said, mopping his forehead. “But she invited me over for a chicken dinner.”

  “Yeah? Where does she live?”

  Red’s expression was one of pained chagrin. “Alabama,” he said.

  “Too bad,” I said. “Mine invited me for a duck dinner and she lives a coupla thousand miles closer. In Washington State.”

  “————————————!” said Red.

  Months later Red was still cursing: he had never received a copy of the magazine to which he had so expensively subscribed. I was a little luckier: I did get my magazine, but it turned out to be one I was totally uninterested in reading.

  *****

  I came out of my coma by the stove in a marrying mood. “I’ve got to do something quick!” I shouted, jumping up and pounding my fist on the table.

  Then I sat down again and thought more calmly. It was the first part of December and I still had a pretty good chunk of money left over from my previous summer’s work. I had nothing to do until March, when I would have to get some plants started in the house. Why shouldn’t I take a trip “outside” for a few weeks and make that tour of the farms? Well, maybe that was a pipe dream. What would I say when I knocked at a farm door? “Good morning, sir. Have you any daughters you want to marry off?” But I could get my sister and sister-in-law to introduce me to some girls—see some pretty faces, at least. Yes, by golly: that’s what I’d do. Spend Christmas with my family, meet the girl, sell her on Alaska, and rush back to my homestead in the woods a happily married man. That’s what I’d do!

  Chapter XVIII—Civilization

  “DON’T COME HOME until you’ve made good,” my father had said when I left the enfolding arms of the family.

  Well, I had proven up on a 120-acre homestead, built the biggest and finest house in my part of Alaska and was ready to go into business for myself. If that wasn’t “making good” enough for my father, he could boot me out when I arrived. Anyway, I was going home: I was going home for Christmas. After two-and-a-half years in the “wilds,” I was going HOME. After two-and-a-half years of loneliness, I was going home to look for a wife. Boy!

  Packing my battered old cardboard suitcase with the few “city” clothes I still possessed—including four white shirts which had cost me a dollar apiece to have laundered in Homer—I carefully arrayed myself in a once-good tweed suit that had been gathering cobwebs in my storeroom upstairs. When I
was ready I took one final look around the house to see that everything was shipshape. Then I stepped outside and locked the door.

  As I climbed into the car, I glanced at the greenhouse and garage and breathed a silent prayer that the snow wouldn’t get so deep while I was away that it would cave in their roofs. There was a lot of work involved there, and I wasn’t anxious to do it again.

  “Aw, what the heck,” I told myself. “Stop acting like a fool. Everything’s gonna be all right.”

  In Homer I left my car at Vern Mutch’s drugstore and walked across the street to the Pacific Northwest Airlines office to buy my ticket for San Francisco, paying out $137 for the privilege. The first of the three planes I would take was the only scheduled flight out of Homer—the Kodiak plane heading for Anchorage. It would take me over my homestead, too. As it did, I said my final farewell to the tiny house, far below in its miniature clearing. Then, patting the wallet in my pocket, a wallet fat with the $400 I had put aside for “spending money,” I turned my thoughts to the good time I would have “outside.”

  At Anchorage I was told I had missed connections with the Seattle plane and would have to spend the night in the city. This was no hardship: the airlines would put me up in the best hotel, The Westward, and provide me with several free meals. I spent the time enjoying the feeling of being dressed up again—in a clean white shirt, a yellow tie, a slightly rumpled tweed suit and—I glanced down at my feet—Marine combat boots. Hmmm. Something wrong with that picture. I went into a shoe-store and glanced over the stock.

  “Something?” said the salesman, following my gaze floor ward.

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. “Yeah. Say, what’re they wearing in the States these days?”

  “All the best-dressed men are wearing suede shoes, sir.”

  “Suede, huh?” I rubbed my chin. “Okay. Fix me up.”

  A few minutes later I walked out minus combat boots and fourteen dollars. “Now,” I thought. “Now no one in the States will know me from a stock and bond salesman from Sansome Street. Though what I should really do”—I chuckled, and a construction stiff I almost bumped into on the street gave me a funny look—“what I should really do is turn up at home in a parka, snowshoes and a long, long beard.” I chuckled again, remembering a scene like that in a magazine cartoon. “Why Uncle Joe from Alaska,” the man at the door was saying to the old trapper outside. “Won’t you come in for a minute!”

  The flight to Seattle occurred during the night. I would have liked to see some of the country we were flying over, but since I couldn’t, and since the scenery inside the plane was much more interesting anyway, I spent the time watching the two pretty stewardesses. “Girls,” I marveled, as my eyes rested on every detail of their lovely faces. “Pretty American girls.”

  In between their sessions of handing out paper bags to airsick women and children, I managed to draw one of the stewardesses, a redhead, into conversation. Undoubtedly she had heard all about homesteading in Alaska from the numerous homesteaders who had preceded me, but she was nice enough to give me her full, flattering attention. “Have you ever thought of living on a homestead?” I asked her, after talking awhile.

  “Oh, yes!” she breathed ecstatically. “I think it would be grand—for a week or two.”

  That was that. “See? What did I tell you!” I said to myself disgustedly. “City girls!” But as soon as the redhead had left me to attend to her duties I got the attention of the other stewardess. I asked her the same question and received approximately the same answer. “Oh, well,” I told myself. “When I get to California...”

  Landing in Seattle at 3:00 in the morning, I transferred to another airline and boarded a coach plane five hours later for the last lap of my trip. From then on my impatience to get home rose as the altitude fell for what I considered quite unnecessary stops at Portland and Oakland. But as we circled the San Francisco airport for a landing, I reflected on the wonders of air transportation. Here I was in California after less than twelve hours of actual traveling, and the car trip from California to Alaska had taken me several weeks.

  Yes, here I was in California, and I should have been feeling great. But I didn’t: I felt terrible. My head had expanded to such an extent that I was afraid it would explode all over my fellow passengers, my ears were pounding like twin snare drums and I couldn’t hear a thing. I could see, though, and when I glimpsed a familiar blue-suited figure coming toward me down the airport ramp, I ran to meet it. It was Dad. We shook hands, pounded each other on the back and, I suppose, yelled our greetings. But I was unable to make out a word of what either of us was saying.

  Within the next hour, with my father hollering into my face and me making abortive attempts to read his lips, we managed to convey something of our happiness over seeing each other again. Driving back to Dad’s apartment in the city, we settled down there with a few of his special martinis and had what—after my ears had cleared enough so that he only sounded as though he were talking from two apartments away—amounted to a reunion talk.

  That night in bed on Dad’s living room couch my ears began to pound like a pile driver gone mad. In the morning, my father called a doctor who, after examining me, told me I had “only a very bad cold.” An hour after he had left the apartment my right ear exploded like a paper bag and started to bleed. Three hours later I was sitting in the office of an ear specialist who stuck a pew-like instrument down my left ear and caused another “Pop!” He then explained to me that I had a bad sinus infection in both ears—“probably aggravated by the plane trip”—and that I would have to live on a diet of penicillin shots in the arm for the next few weeks. “There goes my bankroll,” I said to Dad. “I should have stayed in Alaska, where I was safe.”

  A few days before Christmas, pumped so full of dope that I felt like a cocaine addict, I drove down to Los Gatos with Dad. We were greeted by my brother, his wife and my two nieces and a nephew with what sounded, from a great distance, like expressions of joy. I could tell from the brightness of their eyes and the width of their smiles, at any rate, that they were glad to see me, and if I needed further evidence, all I had to do was look at the big picture window in the living room: inscribed on it, in the careful letters of a child who had just learned to print, in paint that would take weeks to scrape off, were the words, “Welcome home, Unca Gordon from Alaska.” I was home at last.

  On Christmas day my mother arrived from Los Angeles—though long since divorced, my parents always spent the holidays with “the children”—and my newspaperwoman sister from Carmel. The family was complete. Trying to keep my eyes off the television set—television had made great strides since my departure from civilization—I related detail after detail of my experiences in Alaska to a most attentive audience. But the more I talked, the more I built up Alaska as the greatest place on the face of the earth, the more homesick I became for my log cabin in the woods and the fishing stream at its very back door. I told them of my good neighbors, the hunting and fishing, the big-paying construction jobs and the winters of leisure, and I yearned, as I talked, to be home in Alaska again.

  When I paused for breath my mother spoke. “You poor, poor boy,” she said. “How terrible it must be to be up there all alone. Why don’t you move back to California, where everything is easier?”

  I shut my mouth and concentrated on watching television.

  Between my mother’s urging me to stay in the States, my father’s arguing that it would be better for me to return to Alaska “to finish his job,” my sister’s begging me to take her with me when I went, my brother’s asking me to “stick around awhile and help me landscape my place,” my sister-in-law’s worrying about feeding me “anything to compare to moose” and the children’s bringing their friends around to stand in line and stare at “Unca Gordon from Alaska,” my nerves were very quickly shattered to bits. “Oh, for the peace and quiet of the homestead,” I thought. “I’m not used to families, any more.”

  But finally Christmas was o
ver and I was allowed to return to San Francisco with my father for another shot of penicillin. Good for another few days, I started on the necessary rounds of relatives and friends. In addition to seeing some old acquaintances of my own, I was forced, by an increasingly difficult effort to please, to be the guest of honor at dinner parties hosted by my father’s cronies “who want to hear all about Alaska” (no marriageable girls present), luncheons given by my mother’s friends “who want to hear all about Alaska” (no marriageable girls present) and cocktail parties to which my sister dragged me “because there’ll be so many people there who’ll want to hear all about Alaska” (too many sophisticated girls). Maybe I was anti-social, maybe I had become a misanthrope, during the long winter nights in the north; but I had had enough “social life,” after just a few weeks, to make me a candidate for a rest home for aged men. And my feet hurt: people never seem to sit down, at cocktail parties in the States.

  The city was my undoing. Walking down San Francisco’s Market Street was like swimming against a tide. People—great mobs of pushing, jostling people—were everywhere. The noise was terrific, even to my two disabled ears. It sounded like the ice tumbling down Stariski Creek in the spring thaw—but how much better was the clean roar of the river than the crying and shrieking of the metropolis!

  Worst of all: with all those thousands of people pouring through the streets, there wasn’t a single face I knew. I was lonelier than I had ever been snowshoeing over the frozen muskegs, miles from the nearest neighbor. On the Kenai Peninsula I knew everyone within fifty miles or more. In San Francisco, my father had lived in the same apartment house for over ten years, and the only person he knew in the 40-unit building was the manager of the place. I had to get home, home to Alaska and the homestead, where I was an individual among individuals—not just one of a thundering herd.