Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  And he was still ambitious. His plan, as he unfolded it during a long evening of talking, was to go uranium hunting in the far north. “In the meantime I’m seeing a few friends—like you, Gordon (and incidentally I took the liberty of moving into your cabin up the creek)—and playing some golf.”

  “Golf!” I said. “Where would you play golf?”

  “Oh, there are links, near the cities,” he replied. “Don’t you know that much about Alaska by now, Gordon lad?”

  I sat there, open-mouthed. It was still impossible to believe that the famous, fabulous Sandy Smith was sitting at my kitchen table, drinking my tenants’ coffee. It was as though the president of the United States had dropped in for a chat.

  After the Bertelles had indicated that they would like to go to bed before morning, Sandy and I climbed into my truck and drove over to the cabin. When we arrived there the truck crashed into it. “Oh,” I said, in the ensuing silence. “I forgot. My brake line is busted.”

  Sandy laughed. “It’s lucky the cabin was therre, Gordon lad,” he chuckled. “Otherwise we’d be sitting in the creek right now.”

  Shakily I climbed out, found no damage to either house or truck, got out my sleeping bag and followed Sandy into the cabin. Sandy had already made himself at home: the room was full of luggage—suitcases, boxes, a couple of duffle bags and a bag of golf clubs. “Y’see, Gordon, I’m prepared for any emerrgency,” Sandy explained.

  “Wasn’t it expensive to ship all this stuff up here?” I asked him in awe.

  “No, lad. I brought it with me when I came up the Alcan. I got a ride with two boys in Los Angeles and we drove up in four days.”

  This, like all of Sandy’s stories, was hard to believe. But I believed it, remembering what my father had always said on the subject: “Sandy’s tales may sound fantastic, but they always turn out to be true. He usually has some newspaper clippings to back them up.”

  As we lay in our sleeping bags on the floor, Sandy told me about how sorry he had been to hear of my father’s death. When he had received the news, he said, he had felt his true age for the first time in his life. “Your father was so proud of you, Gordon,” he added. “He would have been so proud to see the fine place you’ve developed here.”

  “Thanks, Sandy,” I whispered, choking up. “It’s almost like having Dad here to have you, his best friend, here to see what I’ve been trying to do.”

  “But you say you’re leaving Alaska, Gordon. You might think so, lad, but it isn’t true. Alaska will always have a hold on you. You may go ‘outside’ now, but you’ll be back. They always come back. Look at me.”

  I looked at him in the darkness, marveling. Yes, Sandy Smith had came back—at 93. But not me. No, sir; not me. I was getting out for good....

  I got only three hours’ sleep that night. Sandy, much more energetic at 93 than Gordon Stoddard at 30, was up and about early, hungry and “rready to get goin’.” I persuaded him to wait for his breakfast until after the first tendril of smoke could be seen curling from the Bertelles’ kitchen chimney. That afternoon I had to work on my truck and didn’t have much chance to talk to him before heading back to Kenai and my job. But I remember his saying, as we shook hands in farewell, “Stick to Alaska, lad: it’ll stick to you.”

  When I returned to the homestead on the following weekend the Bertelles told me that Sandy kept them company for five more days before taking off for the north. “My, what a lively man,” said Mrs. Bertelle. “He ran us ragged.” Then the story came out of how Sandy had hustled the Bertelles around to the point of exhaustion. He had shown them how to pan gold, instructed them in the sourdough way of catching salmon and in general talked them to death. And he had eaten quantities of their food.

  I laughed and laughed. “I don’t know who was showing whom what true Alaskan hospitality can be,” I said.

  Chapter XXIX—Goodbye, Alaska!

  FOR EIGHT WEEKS I worked on the job at the Kenai School. Then, one evening after work, a friend of mine who was a labor foreman on a construction job at the Army base came to tell me about an opening for a hod carrier. The job paid more per hour than the one I was on, offered at least a nine-hour day, and, as far as he knew, would last a lot longer than my present job. Would I take it? I sure would, if I could get a release from the school project. The next day I approached the contractor and explained my reasons for wanting to change jobs. He was more than fair: he would hold my job open for a week or two in case I didn’t find the new job to my liking, he said. On the following day I reported at the main gate of the Army base and was signed up as a hod carrier.

  I had always thought of a hod carrier as a man who carried a small, concrete-filled trough at the end of a long pole. Maybe so, but during my entire experience as a hod carrier I never laid eyes on one of those contraptions. My duties, instead, consisted of wheeling wheelbarrows of concrete and concrete blocks to the place where the two blocklayers to whom I had been assigned were laying a wall. Piling up the blocks within their reach, I would add mortar to their boards as they needed it. They worked fast, and it was a running race to keep up with them. And when they called for other materials—wall ties, clips, steel web, jumbo bricks, jam blocks, half blocks, bricks, steel rods—it was a case of “Hey, Stoddard! Get the lead out of your pants!” as I and my wheelbarrow trundled constantly. After a few days of this I began to wonder why I wasn’t asked to feed the blocklayers their lunches bite by bite and pour their beer down their throats, too—so that they could become living examples of the theory of perpetual motion. I felt like a freed slave when, after two weeks of the hardest work of my lifetime, I was told that my two blocklayers were to be laid off, and with them, me. But I was a little worried about my future until the foreman who had gotten me the hod-carrying job informed me that I was to be transferred to a grading crew without the loss of a day’s pay.

  My new job, however, threatened to be even harder than the last: I was to work fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. But was I disheartened? No! My pay would come to at least $350 a week! For that amount of money I’d have poured beer down the throat of an elephant!

  As for work, there was plenty of it. Wielding rakes, picks, and shovels, a corps of laborers—me included—prepared numerous streets and parking lots for asphalt paving. It was a monotonous job, and meeting the Army Engineers’ requirements of “not more or less than 3/-16ths of an inch from final grade” was no cinch. After the big five-yard dump trucks had dumped their loads of crushed rock and gravel on top of a sub base, the huge graders had leveled the mounds off and worked the gravel down to within half an inch of “final grade,” and the heavy rollers had packed the whole until it was as hard as concrete, we would swarm over the street to take out the big rocks, carve off the humps and fill up the hollows. Then, stretching strings from crown to gutters, the foreman would tell us how far we had come from the requirements and direct us to grade the whole thing over—literally by hand—to the different pitches indicated.

  Suddenly I was made a labor foreman, at two bits more per hour. The promotion came as a shock—like my fellow workers, I had had little or no idea of what I was doing, merely taking orders from the foreman of my gang and pocketing my large check at the end of each week—but I accepted it. And after worrying for awhile as to whether or not the other laborers would take orders from a foreman who obviously didn’t know any more than they did about grading streets, and after working side by side with the men for a week in an effort to gain their respect and co-operation, I began to relax and enjoy it. I relaxed so thoroughly, in fact, that I soon found myself standing around doing nothing but bawl commands.

  But after five weeks I had had enough. With all my debts paid off and $1500 left over (I had saved $1100 during those five weeks alone), I was stake-happy again. I fired myself, collected my pay and dashed for my truck. Driving back to Red Freimuth’s old tent, I packed up my gear in nervous haste and drove as fast as I could toward my homestead. It was almost the end of September, my tenants w
ould be leaving for the States for the winter, and if I didn’t catch Bob Bertelle before his departure I might never get another chance at his $5000. Maybe I could talk him into coming up to my price of $7000 for the house and ten acres and giving me the $5000 as a down payment. If I could, I’d have a stake for returning to California. I pressed my gas pedal to the floor and the old truck rocketed over the rough gravel road leading south.

  Pulling into my front yard, I was relieved to see smoke curling from the stovepipe of the house. They were still there! I barged inside and found the living room piled high with packing cases. I had arrived in the nick of time!

  I got right down to business. Asking the Bertelles to sit down around the conference table—the kitchen table—I inquired about their plans. “We’re heading ‘outside’ tomorrow,” said Bertelle. “We love Alaska, but we’re leaving.”

  I presented my proposition. They politely rejected it, I argued. They argued. I pleaded. They demurred. By nightfall all I had secured was their promise to “stay a few more days and think it over.” I helped them unpack their bedding and retired to my other cabin to rest up for the campaign of the morrow.

  In the morning I got out my biggest guns, and for three days and three nights thereafter I talked. Finally, when I had accepted the fact that the Bertelles would never meet my price, I changed my tactics. “Why don’t you buy my new cabin?” I said. “I’ll lower that price to $2500.” I went even further: I told them that they could live in the bigger house rent-free until they had built the necessary additions to the cabin, offered them my jeep truck rent-free for hauling logs, coal and lumber throughout the winter, offered them, free, two weeks of my services as a logger. “Well, now, maybe,” they’d say. “Yes, maybe that’s a good idea. All right.” And the three little girls would shout, “Oh, boy! We’re going to stay in Alaska!” and start doing an Indian dance around the living room. Then the Bertelles would change their minds. The stumbling block—the one we always came up against in the end—was Mrs. Bertelle’s arthritis: she wasn’t at all sure, she said, that she could stand the long Alaskan winter. And in the end, I saw their point. I had seen it all along, but I had wanted that cash.

  Finally, after we had all talked ourselves hoarse, the Bertelles packed their car, assured me of their intentions to “return next year and buy the place,” waved goodbye and drove out of my life. The house, after they had gone, was as empty as it had seemed after my mother left. I got out my own suitcases and began to pack. With or without the necessary money, I would return to California. I would go right away. And I didn’t care if I never came back. Alaska hadn’t been kind to me and I wouldn’t be kind to it. What was there here for me, anyway? A little hunting, a little fishing, a few good times, an annual opportunity to make a lot of money fast in order to be able to loaf for the rest of the year. But what future was there in a life like that? I had proved to myself that I couldn’t make money on farming here—not with the markets so scarce. And life on a homestead was lonely—undeniably lonely. No more Alaskan winters for me. I was going home.

  Two days later, as I walked out to the garage to get some nails with which to batten down some shutters over the windows to protect them from the winter storms, I took a long look at the house. It was beginning to show its age. The logs really needed a new coat of linseed oil before I left. I must see to that. But on the other hand—why bother?

  My house. I thought back to the time of its building. How much work it had been, and how proud I had felt on the day it was completed! But in just a few years people would wander through the overgrown grounds and say, “That’s the old Stoddard house. Used to be quite a place in its day. I wonder what ever happened to Stoddard?”

  Gazing out over the field, the field in which I had dreamed my dreams of becoming a successful truck farmer, I could see nothing but masses of dried-up fire-weed stalks, though I knew that here and there, buried among them, were the stems of cabbages gone to seed. The jungle was already taking over. Would that fertile volcanic ground ever be planted again with vegetables—vegetables which grew so fast and large in the rays of the midnight sun?

  I passed the blackened shell of the greenhouse with hardly a glance. It was hard to look at, and I didn’t have to look, anyway, to find out what was there: where, the year before, there had been a shining new structure filled with ripe tomatoes and cucumbers, now there was only a gutted wreck filled with nettles. I didn’t want to see it.

  I stared down into the empty root cellar. Mold was growing on its damp ceiling and sides, but I could see it as it had been, in its prime: stuffed with cabbages and carrots, and with me, huddled in a parka on a cold winter night, weighing produce under a Blazo lantern for delivery in the morning. Those days were gone forever; no use thinking about them now.

  The house, the field, the greenhouse, the root cellar: these were what I would leave behind me in Alaska—the only tangible evidence of my ever having been in Alaska. And what were they? Relics: relics of the failure of a man.

  But wait: there were other things I would leave behind. My friends—those good friends with whom I had shared my sorrows and triumphs, with whom I had hunted and fished, with whom I had played endless games of pinochle. Yes, and I would leave behind the square dances at the Keelers’, the Ninilchik Fair, the card parties in the Anchor Point schoolhouse. I would be leaving them behind for a city, where you could live for ten years in an apartment house and never get to know your neighbors.

  When I had arrived in the homestead country, I reflected, I had been a stranger, a greenhorn, a “cheechako,” a new bachelor who hadn’t been encouraged to settle. Now I had friends from Kenai to Homer. “Hi, Stoddard,” “How are you, Stoddard?” “Good to see you, Stoddard,” they said when they saw me. And they had urged me to stay when I had told them I was leaving. And when they hadn’t been able to persuade me, they had said, “You’ll be back in the spring. A few weeks in the States and you’ll be sick of it. I know. I tried it once.” Yes, it would be hard to leave my friends behind.

  In the empty house I took one last look at the view from the kitchen window before boarding it up. I could see the creek, snaking toward the house, disappearing from sight, then coming into view again to flow toward Cook Inlet. How many times I had lounged on the window seat and watched the salmon working their way up against the current to vanish around the bend! And that old beaver who had tried to make his home by the log that crossed the pond: I had watched him, too. Every fall his house had been swept away in the heavy rains, and every year he had returned to try again. Maybe that ripple out in the water was the little devil starting this year’s construction project.

  And the moose. I would miss seeing my own private herd feeding in the willows in the winter. And how I would miss the taste of moose steak! How I would miss—

  Well, no use thinking about all that now. I went outside, nailed on the last shutter, went back into the house, picked up my suitcases, walked out the front door, locked it. Then I walked slowly down the road to the mailbox to wait for the bus to Anchorage.

  As I sat there on my suitcases, I found myself staring at the new power line poles that had gone up during my absence in the summer. Electricity was soon to come to my part of the Kenai Peninsula. All my neighbors would have it, but the linemen would bypass my empty house. It sure would have been nice to have steady power for my well pump—nice not to have to run out to the garage every time I needed water. It sure would have been nice to have continuous electric lights. Oh, well.

  There had been rumors, too, that the old highway was to be paved all the way to Homer inside of two years. What a pleasure it would have been to drive the truck over a nice smooth road when I wanted to go to town! And I could have sold the Highway Commission some of the gravel on my land, too—and probably gotten a job on the grading crew, to boot.

  And those rumors of oil. More than rumors. On the Keeler homestead during the summer one big oil company had been digging test holes, and there were several other oil companies comin
g in. And with all the coal lying underground throughout the area, it was reasonable to suppose that there might be oil under my homestead, too. Boy! Gordon Stoddard, the Oil King!

  I began to dream. With a little cash, I told myself, I could fix the house up—put a cement-block basement in, build a fireplace, panel the inside walls, buy some comfortable furniture, have the power line hooked on, buy a deep freeze for my fish and game. And I could rebuild the greenhouse-right, this time, with thermostats and safety devices to prevent another disastrous fire. Maybe I’d even build one or two extra greenhouses—really go into the business, Greenhouse tomatoes would always be something I could sell. And I might build the three extra cabins up the creek as I had once thought of doing—to sell, or possibly to rent out to people like the Bertelles.

  Maybe I could make the place kind of a millionaires’ fishing lodge—take a party of four or five paying guests at a time, during king salmon season!

  Of course, oil wells all over the place might spoil the scenery a little: the millionaires wouldn’t like that. But I could dream, couldn’t I?

  But wait! What was happening to me? I was becoming ambitious again! I was making plans! Was I crazy? I had burned all my bridges behind me. I had to leave Alaska. I had stored up no food for the winter, I had given my dog and cat away, and my jeep was at Red’s up for sale. But—and I knew it now—I didn’t want to leave Alaska: Alaska was in my blood; Alaska was my home.

  What to do? I tried to think calmly. Well, this was what I would do: I would go “outside” for the winter—I had enough money to last me for awhile—but I would return in the spring. Maybe I’d even find a wife in the States this time. That was what was really the matter: I’d had no one—no one close—with whom to share my life, good or bad as it was. That was all I needed to keep me happy in Alaska: a wife!

  Whew! Lucky thing I hadn’t talked Bob Bertelle into buying! Yes, I would come back. The beaver had come back. Sandy Smith had come back. And I’d come back.