Four Quarters of Light

by Brian Keenan

  The other principal commercial enterprises were a filling station with a mechanic’s work bay, and adjoining that a laundry with shower rooms which Audrey was especially relieved to find. ‘Civilization!’ she sighed at the discovery. I nodded in silent agreement. A hot shower and fresh clean clothes were the nearest thing to civilization I might encounter over the next few months. Across from the store was the unimaginatively named Fairview Inn which was as original as the store and would have made a perfect setting for a saloon scene in any Hollywood western. Even the customers had that ‘howdy, pardner, give me three fingers of red-eye whiskey’ look about them.

  Within minutes we had walked to the end of downtown Talkeetna and were standing on the banks of the Susitna River. ‘Civilization doesn’t last too long in Alaska,’ I said, reminding Audrey of her joyous remark on seeing the laundromat. She laughed, stating that she was only too happy to take whatever was on offer, and with that we made our way back to the RV and found ourselves a campsite only a mile or so from the main street on the banks of the river.

  The Road to McCarthy

  The following day, a few hours’ driving had us passing through the sleepy little village of Willow, and then Palmer. They had developed out of one of Roosevelt’s New-Deal relief programmes. Approximately two hundred farming families devastated by the great depression of the Midwest had been transplanted to the Mantanuska and Susitna valleys to raise livestock and cattle. The scheme was only a partial success, but the present inhabitants, grandchildren of the original settlers, had maintained a quiet, unexcitable air about the place.

  Apart from purchasing some foodstuffs we kept on the road to McCarthy. Though the route was scenic, abutting the Mentasta and Wrangell mountains with long wide valleys of spruce, birch and alder, it didn’t have the raw-edge sense of isolation Denali had offered. It was ‘settled country’. I was beginning to miss Talkeetna but then decided that too was a kind of halfway house, a patched-up romantic idyll on the edge of wilderness. It had all the colour of a frontier town and the mountain men looked as though they had been or were about to go over the range. But in the end I was left with a sense that they had merely stumbled to the edge of the wilderness and somehow their vision had stopped there. Maybe I was being unfair. They had, after all, created their own world, and there was only one Talkeetna. I had noted that on the fifteen-mile drive from the town to the main highway into Anchorage there were at least seven small Nonconformist churches. They were evidence to me that the world they inhabited on the fringe of the wilderness was the escapist world away from urban America. But maybe that was enough. Within a few miles of these townships you could hunt across enormous areas where a no-trespassing sign could never be erected – not that anyone would take heed of it. You could drink from the wilderness cup as much as you wanted and as often as you wished and return when you’d had your fill of it.

  Way out here, beyond the finite roads of civilization, was the isolation, a condition uniquely Alaskan that bore no comparison to anything imaginable, something you would have to be born into in order to survive in permanently. I thought of the taxi driver in Fairbanks and his remarks about the winters making people go crazy. I could believe that out there lay a kind of psychic crossroads where the worlds of humanity and nature elide and metamorphose into each other. All the way along the road Mount McKinley overshadowed us, changing slightly with the distance and the quality of sunlight but always a perfect enlargement of the Paramount Pictures logo – that industry which projected fantasy on to film.

  Finally we reached Glenallen, though we were not encouraged to stay there. It was little more than a service station for people heading north to Fairbanks and beyond, or for those wishing to get into the Wrangell and St Elias mountains. It was quiet at this time of the year, but I could well imagine that in a few weeks’ time Glenallen would be no more than a glorified RV car park.

  I looked at the map. We had another few hours to go on a poor secondary road to Chitina. I remembered Pat, who had planned this trip for me, telling me that the road from there to McCarthy was hazardous even at the best of times, and that we should check conditions for ourselves when we arrived in Chitina. The alternative was to fly from Chitina to McCarthy on a small four-seater aircraft; the twenty-five-minute flight could save maybe five or six hours’ driving. My fear of heights did not make her sensible proposal very persuasive and I was determined to tough it out, not realizing just how hazardous and dangerous the journey from Chitina could be. Pat had also advised us to take whatever essentials we needed with us. McCarthy had a general store, a restaurant and a few very small hotels, but because of its remoteness everything was expensive and might well be in short supply.

  The supermarket we visited in Chitina was certainly not in short supply of anything. We seemed to be the only out-of-town shoppers and the place had an oppressive atmosphere. At first I wasn’t sure what it was. It was gaudy and bright, and the piped music was dated. It felt like it was being squeezed through the PA system like cheese through a grater. Then I noticed the other customers. None of them revealed any marked ethnic features of the Eskimo or the Indian. It was the manner in which they were dressed that set them apart. The young girls wore long floral print frocks and short ankle socks over very plain shoes or baseball boots. Their hair was pulled back off their heads and tied in a tight bun at the back. Most of them wore round-neck cardigans buttoned right up. Their mothers were dressed almost identically. The few men who were there seemed to have shopped at the same outfitters. All wore jeans or dungarees with working men’s boots and plaid shirts. I got the feeling they were not dressed this way simply because it was a rural community where style was irrelevant. The charity-shop hand-me-down appearance of these people had much to do with poverty, but it was also a cultural expression. The children followed their parents around the store subdued and obedient, which seemed a perfect reflection of the sullenness on the faces of their parents.

  I remembered my discussions with Jane Haig and what she had told me about the reason for the plethora of small dissenter churches that sprawled around Fairbanks. She had suggested that the poor protestant whites of the southern dust-bowl communities had been attracted by the homestead ethic that the Alaskan frontier offered. Consequently they brought their various hues of Christian evangelism with them. The ‘mission ethic’ that was central and common to all these churches was, she said, drawn to the lawless, amoral townships of gold rush Alaska, where there was a multitude of sinners as well as savages to be saved.

  At the entrance of the supermarket, one family was gathered. The children had constructed a counter out of empty cartons and were selling small parcels of cakes and cookies. Their father stood behind them in his patched overalls and threadbare shirt. He had a young man’s build and face hidden behind a long beard but his eyes were watery like an old man’s. Looking at them huddled together, trying to make a dollar or two, I felt I could have been looking at an old, yellowing photo of a family in the Ozarks over half a century ago. In my imagination, these were the descendants of Steinbeck’s ‘dust bowl’ people, the people Jane Haig had spoken of and the New Deal plantation of Palmer had confirmed. History and geography had eroded nothing from them, but neither had it given them much. I was sure that there was no wife for this man or mother for his four young daughters. Maybe she had died, or maybe she was a snowbird who had neither the courage nor the energy to return. I decided it wasn’t only sullenness I could read on the adult faces, it was desperation, rejection and maybe even anger too, subdued under the weight of the effort to survive. There would be work on the farms and on the land for two, possibly three months in the year – hard work, with long hours; any spare time was given over to preparing woodpiles for the winter, and hunting moose and duck to provide sustenance, and then comes the long, dark winter when you just hang on with what you’ve got, hoping it’s enough. In their own way, they were the living inheritors of The Grapes of Wrath.

  Much play is made of Alaska’s national cuisine
of spam and pilot bread – a type of ship’s biscuit containing neither oil nor eggs to make it go rancid and little water to discourage mould. It has a shelf life of years, some say. Spam, that chopped-ham-in-acan, has similar qualities of longevity. The bread may be as tasty as a bowl of toenail clippings and as mouthwatering as old plaster, yet together they have held back hunger pains and the worst of the long winter when the cupboard is bare.

  I looked again at my family in the stores hallway and threw some pilot bread and spam into our trolley.

  ‘What’s that for?’ asked Audrey.

  ‘You never know when we might need it,’ I answered, having already decided to leave it in the miner’s cabin we would rent at Kennicott, in the hills beyond McCarthy. It was an act of acknowledgement and empathy. Maybe it salved my conscience. Whatever had brought me to Alaska, it wasn’t driven by the same desperation that had washed these people up here and still held them.

  Maps of Alaska can be misleading things, especially when it comes to revealing small areas of roadway on an otherwise massive landmass. Such roads look relatively straight and unencumbered, as did the seemingly short route to Chitina. But such was not the case. The old roadway hacked its way over lakes and meandering rivers and skirted endless forests of spruce and birch, its course dictated by the lie of the land. It rolled languorously. The bedrock and permafrost were resistant to dynamite. Nowhere was there a straight line between two points. Nature determined everything here, and all around us the mountains, still dusted with snow, seemed to melt in and out of the azure sky.

  The further south we headed the worse the road became. The softening permafrost had buckled and left craters in the road that had only been temporarily filled with loose screed. We rolled in and out of them frustratingly and the Pequod began to lurch dangerously like a sailboat caught in a crosswind. Audrey had to dash back to Jack and Cal to prevent them falling out of their chairs (luckily they were asleep). The large culverts under the road had been crushed by the shifting permafrost and the road had had to be dug up to replace them, so every twenty to thirty yards a trench had been loosely filled with small stones where the drainage pipes had been replaced. Travel was frustratingly slow, and the Pequod was swallowing petrol at an astonishing rate.

  At last we reached Chitina, which comprised six buildings, all of which looked as though they were about to collapse. The clapboard structures had not seen paint for years, and most of them were empty. Inside the rickety café the owners lazily watched us enter. They were neither surprised nor interested; we were just some more flotsam that had been washed up at this end-of-the-world place. Over a cup of coffee we quizzed the owners about the state of the road to McCarthy.

  The road was only seventy-five kilometres long but had been the original rail line (minus the sleepers and rails). It was too soon after meltdown to be sure that it had not been washed out completely. We were warned about debris and sharp metal leftovers from the road’s previous life. We were also told the trip would take up to five hours. Having already driven for ten hours, we were not encouraged by this. We decided to call Wrangell Air on our mobile phone, but the café proprietors told us that cell phones don’t work in Chitina; in fact, they elaborated, nothing worked in Chitina. We used a portable landline and rang Anchorage, only to be told that it would cost $140 per person to fly the twenty-five minutes to McCarthy. I complained to Audrey and said I would ring back. Over $500 was robbery, and I was determined to drive. In the meantime, we ordered some food.

  While we were there two new visitors entered, an old man and his daughter who had just driven back from McCarthy. The journey had taken over three hours in a four-wheel drive, and they’d sustained three punctures. It didn’t seem as if we had any option. After five minutes or so the airline rang back to confirm that the plane would come from McCarthy to meet us at eight p.m. I complained about the cost and pretended I would rather drive. The lady in Anchorage wavered and confided that she would not charge for Cal. I remained unhappy. Audrey was signalling with her hand for me to keep cool, but the choice between five hours of hazardous driving (after ten hours of driving on a crater-filled highway) and flying at exorbitant prices made it beyond my capacity to be reasonable. I stated that I would ring her back as our supper was being served.

  The proprietors, the couple who had just returned from McCarthy, and a few locals who had come into the establishment were silently engrossed in the exchange between myself and the airline operator in Anchorage. I couldn’t be sure, but I felt they were enjoying my obstinacy. The truth was, I didn’t really have an option. Even if we drove carefully and made it to McCarthy without mishap, we would still have to make the return journey. We could not be in luck twice! While I was considering this the phone rang again. It was Anchorage for Mr Keenan. They offered to charge only for Audrey and me, which effectively halved the price. With pretended uninterest, I accepted.

  We hurriedly finished our meal and asked for directions to the airstrip, which was apparently only ten minutes back along the road we had come in on. There would be a small sign pointing out where we should turn off the road. What we discovered was that there were many signs, and they were warnings, not instructions. Everywhere we found evangelical injunctions declaring the need for salvation and the dreaded consequences of refusal. Placards on trees roared out that ‘the wages of sin’ were death, that ‘God would punish the ungodly’, or to ‘Get ye the lord while he may be found’, and reinforcing these dire proclamations were ‘no trespassing’, ‘private land’ and ‘keep off’ signs. Collectively they gave off the impression that the whole place was somehow contaminated and under some kind of prohibition.

  Inevitably we missed the sign we were looking for and resorted to stopping at one of the homesteads to ask for directions. Our reception could not have been colder, nor the directions less helpful. At a small roadside teahouse I approached the only occupant, a small woman wearing a straw hat, long purple blouse buttoned at the neck and wrists, and a long floral dress down to her ankles. Her demeanour, too, was distant and cool. She told me in as few uninterested words as she could manage that the airstrip was a few miles along on the right, but when I asked if she could be more specific she said I should ring and pointed to the phone. Above the phone was a framed embroidery of a biblical text declaring that I needed to be washed in the blood of the lamb, and across from it was another assuring me that only the redeemed shall be saved. I chose not to pursue the admonishment and rang the airstrip, informing someone there that we would be a little late arriving. As I left, the woman emerged from the room she had disappeared into and began to wipe the telephone.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said to Audrey as we drove off, ‘you’d have to hit her in the face with a four-pound lump hammer to crack a smile out of that one! This place is beginning to give me the creepy crawlies!’

  When we eventually found the airstrip we saw a lone man walking around a small yellow plane pointed out along the runway for take-off. The tiny four-seater Cessna did not look encouraging, but Mike McCarthy, the pilot, was so relaxed and accommodating about our being one hour late that we loaded up the tail of the plane in relieved good humour, joking with Mike about his surname and our destination. Then we loaded ourselves: Audrey and the kids got in behind Mike and I went up front, which was not where I wanted to be.

  I bit down hard as Mike fired the engine and within seconds we were scooped up into the air. Mike explained that our ascent would be bumpy as there were strong winds blowing up the creek. I whispered ‘okay’. I hadn’t meant to whisper, but rising panic had choked my words. ‘How long?’ I managed through clenched teeth, trying to sound calm.

  ‘Forty minutes or so, depending on the winds,’ Mike answered, unaware that every time he mentioned the word ‘wind’ he ratcheted up my panic levels. Though it was a several-million-toone chance that anything would happen during a half-hour flight my imagination created several scenarios for catastrophe. Fear is usually irrational, and if you cease to believe in it you can make it dis
appear. It’s a matter of telling yourself lies and believing them.

  We made it. After reloading our baggage into Mike’s very dilapidated flatbed truck we rattled, bumped and collided our way along the last few miles of the old railway road I had considered driving on from Chitina. I concluded then and there that we would never have made it. The Pequod would almost certainly have floundered, and us with it. I turned to acknowledge to Audrey that she had been right about flying after all only to witness her furious attempts at beating off mosquitoes. The cab was full of them!

  Paradise Lost

  I knew nothing about where we were going and had entirely open-ended expectations about what we might find there. Telling Audrey we were trying to stay ahead of the mosquitoes was a half-truth, and now she knew it. At least Pat Walsh had spoken highly of the couple we were going to stay with.

  Outside the town of McCarthy the road bifurcates, and we travelled for little more than a mile up a steep, washed-out, boulder-strewn passage enticingly named Silk Stocking Road before we came into the town of Kennicott. Yet to apply the title of ‘town’ to either McCarthy or Kennicott is more than a misnomer, for the permanent population of both rarely exceeded more than two dozen; Mike McCarthy informed me that during the summer months that figure quadrupled, swelled by hunters, hikers and the extended families and friends of its permanent residents. But that fact seemed insignificant set beside the name of the road we had bumped and swatted our way over to get here. A Silk Stocking Road joining up two ghost-town communities somewhere at the end of nowhere between the Chugach, Wrangell and St Elias mountains was an unexpected anachronism that tantalized more than the mosquitoes.