Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  In a day or so the news got around. My neighbors came to stare with me at the blackened frame. “We’ll help you rebuild it, Stoddard,” they said. “If we can get enough guys together, we can finish the job in a week.”

  “No, no,” I said. “I haven’t any money to buy any glass, or lumber, or anything.”

  “I’ll loan you the dough,” said one.

  “I’ll let you have the lumber,” said another. “You can pay for it later, when you’re on your feet again.”

  “No, no,” I said. “Thanks, fellows. But no. It’s no use.”

  I don’t know why I refused their offers of help. Maybe it was because of my pride, a stubborn pride that made my independence, right then, seem more precious than gold. Maybe—even though, like America’s first pioneers, Alaskan homesteaders always help each other out in times of stress—I didn’t want to feel obligated to my friends. Maybe the shock of seeing all my hard work and plans go up in smoke had broken my spirit.

  I don’t know. Anyway, it was weeks before I could think calmly—or think at all—about the matter. I spent hours sitting on my front doorstep doing nothing—nothing but stare. And when thoughts returned, they weren’t good thoughts: they were bitter thoughts. If I had had a wife or a partner to watch the greenhouse while I was away, I told myself, the fire wouldn’t have occurred. But I didn’t want a partner, and a wife was almost impossible to find. Okay. I would sell my cabbages and other stored vegetables little by little, enough to live on through the winter. In the spring, I would sell the homestead, and in the summer I would return to the States, admitting defeat. The hell with it all. The hell with Alaska.

  My fire seemed to have started a chain reaction. Within a month, another bachelor was burned out. This time it was Wayne Jones, a homesteader whose place was a few miles from mine. He was visiting a neighbor when it happened, drinking a friendly cup of coffee. Suddenly the door flew open and another neighbor dashed in, yelling, “Wayne! Your house is on fire!”

  His face white, Wayne started for the door. Then he stopped, turned around. “Just how bad is it?” he asked the friend who had brought the news.

  “The whole place is in flames!”

  “Well, there’s no hurry, then,” said Wayne, going back to his chair and picking up his cup. “I might as well finish my coffee.”

  By the time Jones arrived at his homestead the frame house had been reduced to coals, the coal pile stacked next to the house—his fuel for the winter—had become a fiery furnace and exploding ammunition was whizzing in all directions. “That’s why I wasn’t in any hurry,” he explained. “No sense in getting shot by your own house. There were too many bullets in there.”

  Jones had lost everything he owned but a heavy tractor which had been out of range and another small cabin he had built. He moved into the extra cabin and his neighbors contributed enough kitchen gear and food to last him through the winter. “I’m fine,” he would say, when anybody asked. “Just fine. I’ll build a better house in the spring.”

  One night I was playing pinochle at the Baileys’. The door opened and in walked two of my friends from Anchor Point: Ken Rickly, the postmaster, and his partner Tony.

  “Glad to see you,” everybody said. “Join the game.”

  “Naw, naw,” said Rickly despondently. “We’ll just sit awhile.”

  We all turned to stare. If there were two more avid, more enthusiastic players in the whole Territory of Alaska than Rickly and Tony, we didn’t know them. “What’s wrong?” I inquired.

  “I just don’t feel much like playing tonight,” said Rickly. “My house just burned down.”

  Gradually we got the whole story. Rick had been away from home at the time—just like Wayne Jones and me. Tony had been preparing dinner. A piece of insulating paper had dropped from the ceiling to the hot coal cookstove, burst into flames, blazed up and ignited the ceiling. In two seconds the whole house was afire. Tony had had just time enough to get out the front door, and when he found himself outside he had run confusedly down the highway shouting for help. Then he remembered that his truck and Rickly’s jeep were parked beside the burning house. He ran back and managed to move them just before the house collapsed.

  As in the case of Wayne Jones’ fire, everything was lost—clothing, guns, bedding, furniture, an expensive movie camera, and even a coffee can full of money. The two trucks and the clothes they wore were all Tony and Rickly salvaged. But on the following day they found an empty cabin in Anchor Point, and on that same day people began to look through their supplies and see what they could spare. All morning long homesteaders trooped into the post-office carrying boxes and bags. By noon Rickly was worn out saying “Thanks.” “I wish they wouldn’t do it,” he told me when I dropped in that afternoon. “It’s embarrassing. It’s awfully kind of them, but it’s embarrassing. They’ve brought clothes, bedding, groceries—everything. What’s a guy to do?”

  My contribution was outside in the truck: a sack of potatoes, a box of cabbages and carrots, some dishes and silverware and two almost-new packs of pinochle cards. Now I knew I couldn’t give any of it to Rickly without embarrassment to us both. When I left the post-office, I took the sack and the boxes over to his new cabin and dropped them on the doorstep. For weeks Rickly kept saying, “I wonder who left that stuff at my door. Why don’t they come forward and be counted?” And finally, my tongue loosened over a glass of vodka, I admitted the crime. “Oh,” said Rickly, looking away. “Yeah,” said I, looking away. “Let’s not talk about it.”

  After Jones’ and Rickly’s fires, mine began to seem very insignificant. I still had my house, at least, and it was heavily insured: in spite of the high rates charged in an area where there is no fire protection, I had scraped together enough cash for that. But because none of our burned buildings was insured, none of us was able to rebuild. Much later, Wayne Jones was to convert a greenhouse into a liveable home, and Rickly was to build a store next to the post-office with living quarters in back, and by that time both of their tragedies were forgotten. But just after the fires, we were all so despondent that we cracked jokes. Whenever the three of us got together we did nothing but kid each other about the fires. “It’s funny how three bachelors should get burned out,” one of us would say. “Yeah,” someone else would reply. “Must’ve been some frustrated old maid done the deed.” And “Yeah,” the third would agree. “Some old maid from the States who went right back again after she did it. She must’ve been from the States! there ain’t no old maids in Alaska.” Then we would all roar and slap each other on the back as though we had just heard the funniest joke in the world.

  However, bachelors weren’t the only victims: several other fires occurred during the latter part of the year. At Clam Gulch, midway between the towns of Ninilchik and Kasilof, a warehouse burned to the ground. At Kenai the bakery burned up. In Homer a garage burned down, a total loss. At Anchor Point another family was burned out. None of the buildings except the last was fully covered by insurance.

  How did the three fires start? Well, I blamed mine on my dog, Attu. On the morning of the fire, I had checked the double-barrel stove in the greenhouse and had left only after satisfying myself that its doors were closed up tight. The fire in the stove had been burning since the previous night and there should have been nothing remaining by morning but a bed of coals. Attu had a habit of sleeping in front of the stove on the warm sand, and my guess was that, after my departure, he had gotten up, stretched, brushed against the stove’s draft door and knocked it open. This would have caused the fire to flare up, and it had probably gotten so hot that the stove pipe melted, setting the building on fire. No other explanation has occurred to me.

  With the Jones fire a similar thing happened. The coal cookstove had gotten too hot and the pipe had collapsed, the sparks from the firebox igniting the rest of the room. Rickly’s fire could be laid to cheap building: bare insulation paper—two layers of paper with a layer of tar in between—isn’t very fireproof when tacked to a ceiling
.

  A couple of years before, Bill Rabeck had started the fire which had burned his house down and thrown his family out into a snowstorm by bringing a gallon jug of gasoline inside and placing it next to a hot stove. The gas had expanded, popped the cork and filled the room with fumes. The fumes had collected under the roof, and when a spark from the barrel stove had ignited them, the house burned down in a very few minutes. The Rabecks stood in the snow in their pajamas and watched it go. The next day, true to tradition, the good people of the community had rallied around. Within a week, loads of clothing, bedding, foodstuffs, toys for the children and even contributions of cash were bursting the seams of the new house someone had offered the burned-out family. I remember Bill’s saying, not long after, that he’d never had it so good. “Before the fire I could only afford one pair of shoes,” he said. “Now I’ve got sixteen.”

  We had all learned lessons from our fires: the value of safety precautions and of fire insurance, no matter how much it cost. And we had learned that no one—not even in a wilderness—can be totally independent. And we had learned—though we all should have known it before—that no one knows how many friends he has until he gets into trouble.

  But friends or no friends, I was discouraged. Without my greenhouse I was lost. I had no ambition to start over again, no further projects to dream of. All I wanted to do was to get through the winter, somehow, and sell out—lock, stock and barrel stove—in the spring.

  What a lonesome, hopeless sort of winter this was going to be!

  Chapter XXVI—Winter, Art and Pinochle

  SOMETIMES WHOOSHING BY like a train in a hurry to get to its destination on time, sometimes knocking on the doors and windows like a traveler who has lost his way in a storm, the cold north wind blew a sad, ghostly refrain. Overhead, flights of sandhill cranes and geese headed south. Underfoot the frozen ground waited for the first touch of snow, while the muskeg ponds, almost as you watched them, glazed over with thin skim ice. Another seven months of cold Alaskan winter was beginning.

  I was ready for it. My root cellar was full to bursting with vegetables to eat and to sell. My house cellar was stuffed with potatoes, cases of canned vegetables, jars of salmon, clams and berries. The storeroom over the kitchen was piled high with lard, canned fruit and sacks of flour and sugar. By Alaskan standards I was pretty well off: by the standards of my relatives in the States—the States, where a full wallet was the measuring stick—I was poverty-stricken.

  It was the first of December and I was starting my usual winter routine of sitting by the barrel stove reading endless pocket books and drinking countless cups of coffee. A dull routine, but it had never really bothered me before, when my mind had been full of plans and dreams for the coming year. But this year, without any plans except to sell out, get out in the spring, and without anything to think about except my troubles of the past fall, the winter stretched ahead in a bleak, unbroken line. I’d get a good case of “cabin fever” if I wasn’t careful—might even end up by talking to myself. True, there were Attu, the malemute, and Happy, the cat, for company; but what I needed was a human companion—someone to talk to who would answer when I spoke!

  My problem was solved a few days later. A new homesteader who lived up the creek about a mile above my place, Smitty, offered the perfect solution. When he had come down from Anchorage to build a house on his homestead during the summer he had brought with him an old man to help on the job. Now he was returning to Anchorage for the winter, but the old man, he told me, preferred to “stick around on the Kenai Peninsula.” Would I take him in? He could help me around the house in exchange for room and board. I jumped at the opportunity, and when Smitty left for the city I acquired a combination companion and “valet.”

  The old man’s name was Art Sorenson. Though about 60, he was heavy-set and strong for his age: he had been a blacksmith in his youth, turning to welding when the machine had replaced the horse. He had come to Alaska in 1947 to work on construction jobs and had never returned to his native state. Every summer he had made good money—big money—every winter he had “lived high,” and every spring he was broke. He was a prime example of what was known as a “construction stiff.”

  The previous summer, feeling that he was getting too old to hold down a construction job, Art had come to the Kenai Peninsula to help Smitty build up his homestead and had hoped, maybe, to find one for himself. Now, without even enough money on which to live frugally in the city during the winter, he was only too anxious to do my chores for his room and board.

  I fixed up a place for him upstairs and we settled down like a couple of squirrels to eat our way through my winter stores. A typical day—after the ground was covered with snow and we were more or less confined to the house—would begin at about 10 a. m., when I would open my eyes to find the living room warm and a fire burning merrily in the barrel stove. Art, who would be sitting by the stove, would come to attention at my first sleepy yawn. Springing up, he would pour me a cup of coffee from a steaming pot and hand it to me as I lay at ease in my bed. What a contrast from other winters, when I had had to jump out of bed onto an icy floor, build a fire quickly with a generous amount of stove oil, hop back between the blankets to wait an hour for the room to warm up—and then get up and brew my own coffee!

  After a breakfast of pancakes and more coffee-prepared by me—Art would wash the dishes while I drank still more coffee and read by the fire. Then Art would sweep the house, empty the garbage, check the water tank to see if it needed filling, feed the dog and cat and bring in a day’s supply of wood. Meanwhile, the master of the house would do nothing but loaf.

  When the chores were done, Art would join me in the kitchen. Then would begin a series of two-handed pinochle games which would continue until we were both tired of the game. After that we would retire to the living room to read for awhile, Art a Western and I an adventure novel.

  At 2 o’clock in the afternoon we would both be hungry again and I would make more coffee and some salmon sandwiches. After eating we would have another pinochle session, or—if there were a few sunny hours left before the winter night closed in—I would put on my snowshoes and go ptarmigan hunting while Art stayed home to split wood or shovel snow from the driveway. When I returned from my hunt—usually unsuccessful—there would always be a fresh pot of coffee awaiting me, along with a greeting apiece from Art and the pets. After a dinner of clam chowder, coleslaw and apple pie (our menu hardly ever changed), Art and I would each relax with a book until it was time to play pinochle again.

  There was only one variation in our daily routine: on Mondays and Thursdays I would walk out to the mailbox on the highway and pick up the mail, which had been brought out from Homer by truck. On these afternoons Art and I would answer letters and devour all the new magazines. And somehow, these landmarks in the course of every dull, similar week, to be looked forward to in advance and discussed when they had passed, helped the days go faster....

  The evenings were a little more exciting, though they had their element of sameness, too. “Going pinochling,” as the late Greasy Grogan had called it, had become the favorite indoor winter night sport of all the bachelor homesteaders on the Kenai Peninsula—or at least in the vicinity of Anchor Point and Stariski Creek. It was the perfect cure for “cabin fever,” that malady which seems to afflict everyone who has lived too long by himself or in too close quarters with someone else. This winter there were four of us who had banded together for our mutual health: Art and I, Ken Rickly, and Ken’s partner, Tony. We had formed the habit of playing virtually every night until the early hours of the morning. Half the time Rickly and Tony came to my house to play and be fed and half the time Art and I would go over to their cabin at the Point.

  When it was our turn to visit our antagonists, Art and I would have to start getting ready two hours before the time when we were expected to arrive for the game. Right after dinner, while Art did the dishes, I would plow out through the snow to the garage and start up the light pl
ant. Attaching one end of a long electric cord to the head bolt heater on the engine of the jeep, I would affix the other end to a wall socket in the living room. For an hour I would let the plant run to heat up the truck’s engine block. Then, turning the juice off, I would retrieve the truck’s battery from its place beside the barrel stove—where it was kept to keep it from freezing when not in use—and put it in the jeep. Then I would put gasoline in the tank; check the oil and water (making sure that there was enough anti-freeze solution in the radiator); put a few drops of Band-ice, a liquid which was supposed to prevent condensation, in the gas tank, and, at the last, start the motor, to leave it warming up for half an hour. Then, donning parkas and leather, wool-lined mittens, Art and I would start out for Rickly’s cabin, six miles away. At Anchor Point the temperature was usually ten degrees colder than at my homestead—sometimes 30 to 40 degrees below zero—and when it was time to go home Art and I would almost always have to get Rickly to tow us in his jeep, which was easier to start. For these reasons I much preferred to stay at my place on the coldest nights and let our partners come to us. And they were usually glad to, mainly because mine was the bigger, more comfortable house, and because I had electric lights. When they didn’t show up, it was a sad, gloomy night at the Stoddard homestead.

  As Christmas approached, all the bachelors in the area got the holiday blues. You can scoff all you want about Christmas, and about how commercial it has become, but it is one time of the year when you regret being thousands of miles away from your family. Feeling this way but not putting it into exact words, Art and I had a talk a couple of days before the important day and made plans to have a party at my place on Christmas Eve. We would invite all the bachelors in the district and try to cheer each other up or drown our sorrows in holiday spirits.