Four Quarters of Light

by Brian Keenan

  Within minutes we were outside our accommodation, a brightly painted, rusty-red and white clapboard cabin overlooking the terminal moraine of the Kennicott glacier. There were four of these cabins strung out in a line. Only ours, and Mike’s next to it, were in a habitable condition. They were originally the homes of the mine managers and administrators and in their day had been real upmarket, privileged homes. Mike helped us unload our gear and gave me a quick rundown of the place while his partner, Laura, helped Audrey with the kids.

  In 1900, a couple of prospectors named Jack Smith and Clarence Warner spotted a large green spot on the ridge between the Kennicott glacier and McCarthy Creek which proved to be mineral staining from a fantastically rich copper deposit. The copper discovery sparked the construction of the two-hundred-mile-long Copper River & Northwestern Railroad, which connected the mining camp to the south-coast town of Cordova. By the time the mine closed in 1938 it had produced over four and a half million tons of ore worth a reported $200 million, which in those Depression years was an astronomical sum of money. It was easy from this perspective to see how Alaska had translated itself into a fantastical dream place where paradise and untold riches could be dug out of the earth. This was the other lure of the wilderness – earthly reward, not spiritual salvation.

  At its peak, six hundred people lived in Kennicott. The main settlement included all that was needed to mine the ore as well as houses, offices and stores, a school, hospital, post office, dairy and recreation hall. Just down the road, a second community eventually named McCarthy sprang up around 1908. A perfect complement to staid, regimented Kennicott, McCarthy played the role of sin city: among its most successful businesses were several saloons, pool halls, gambling rooms and back-alley brothels. In its heyday, some 150 people lived in McCarthy. But when the mine shut down only a few people stayed on.

  The mine at Kennicott closed overnight, and within a matter of weeks the mining town was stripped clean of anything that was portable. Only ghosts and the red and white leftovers of the mine’s architecture of bunk houses, train depots, workers’ cottages and the magnificent power plant, towering up hundreds of feet and looming over the Kennicott glacier, remain. Such places fascinate me. The emptiness echoes with stories and lives that more than a half a century of freezing mountain winters cannot eradicate. It is as if it holds them in cold storage for those who choose to find them. I could feel it already after only a few hours. Mike’s brief résumé and the manner in which he told it suggested that he too had found something more than a ghost town here. I was beginning to understand why such places sometimes serve as a quintessential haven. You would never be truly lonely for the ghosts would befriend you.

  We settled in for our first night in the mountains and already I was beginning to feel the same kind of snug comfort I had felt in our cabin in the hills above Fairbanks. Only one thing threatened to spoil it – the mosquitoes. Our flight into the mountains had not rid us of these perfidious insects, and over the next few days I was to learn just how many millions of them had come to welcome us.

  It wasn’t the constant light that awoke us in the morning but the silence, in which the slightest sound is amplified. One’s sensual awareness of the surroundings becomes heightened. In the early morning, before anyone was awake (even the mosquitoes), I was up and out.

  I looked out towards the Chugach and Wrangell mountains, telling myself that the flight had not been so bad after all. Then another thought set in: those same mountains that looked so scenic and serene were also the impenetrable walls that held us here. But that was the old me already translating newness and undiscovered things into insignificant insecurities. I consoled myself that the ghosts would protect me as I walked out of the enclosure of our mining encampment. I found the skeletal remnants of human occupation intensely comforting in the roaring mountainscape that confronted me.

  I was standing in a landscape that was fifty million years in the making. In a bygone age a series of warm interglacial periods had interacted with colder periods, thrusting massive rivers of ice through these mountains. Like teeth on a rake they gouged out the land, depositing millions of tons of rock and silt in glacial basins. I was looking out on the results of this ancient cataclysm as the first strident notes of birdsong echoed around me like Chinese wind chimes. The Kennicott glacier was a hideous moonscape of rubble, rock, earth and the fossilized trunks of prehistoric trees that looked like so many broken matchsticks littered around the ashes of a burned-out city. And if it wasn’t the moon it could have been Dresden or Coventry after wartime bombing; it could have been the decimated outskirts of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It was huge and ugly and repulsive, but contemplation of the power and persistence of it made those catastrophes seem pathetic. No human hand was at work here and that huge, cratered surface stretching out in front of me was living still, moving and melting and changing everything.

  I remembered that Mike had explained how on one occasion the road from the airport had completely washed away in one night, and that thousands of tons of earth and broken timber had been deposited. It was useless to attempt to clear it and the residents of the two townships had worked for months to clear a dirt road around it. I admired their community spirit and laughed when I thought of the man in Talkeetna who had complained about having shovelled more snow in twenty-five years than was on the top of Mount McKinley. Here was evidence, if I needed it, that the wilderness bends to no-one’s will. Yet another passing thought made me laugh again: if I was the set designer for the Pandemonium conclave of Satan’s disciples from Milton’s Paradise Lost I would set the scene right here on the grisly surface of this glacier, with the blood-red altar of the towering Kennicott mine as a perfect backdrop.

  Mike’s crowing rooster back at our cabin recalled me to my senses. I was deep in the biggest national park and reserve in the world, contiguous with the national park reserves of Tetlin, Kluane in Canada, Tongass, Glacier Bay and Admiralty Island, all of which constitute a world heritage site of some thirty million acres. And here I was standing on a hill, dizzy with contemplation of it all and imagining Paradise Lost being staged on a glacier! Well, if my imagination was running riot, so be it, for the inconceivable immensity of the wilderness in which I had dropped myself demands you abandon all preconceived notions of space and size.

  Back at our cabin, everyone was making ready for the day. Mike and Laura had arrived with a wonderful breakfast of fresh eggs, homemade bread, biscuits and rich, dark coffee. Mike had arrived in McCarthy several years earlier after drifting around doing several jobs that offered themselves to him. He had spent almost twenty-five years as a commercial fisherman working out of several ports in the Gulf of Alaska, but mainly Homer. He was originally from Wisconsin and had drifted up to Alaska in search of some kind of adventure that Wisconsin could not offer. Laura had been born and had lived in Alaska all her life and had worked as a law librarian. I suggested it was a big change from surviving off the sea to surviving in a mining ghost town.

  ‘The ocean is not so far away,’ he said, pointing out that in a light plane he could be in Cordova or Valdez on the gulf coast in a few hours, and probably less, depending on the weather. Anyway, he continued, he enjoyed the pace of life here and preferred looking after his chickens to gutting halibut all day long.

  ‘He doesn’t just prefer his chickens, he adores the creatures,’ Laura put in. ‘I wonder he has any time for me at all!’

  But a few egg-laying chickens and a couple of dogs are hardly a good reason to retire into the hills, I ventured.

  ‘Well, he does have me as well, you know,’ Laura countered with a chuckle, ‘and we have three boys between us.’

  The words ‘between us’ seemed a little odd and I didn’t know how to receive them. Mike relieved my curiosity: he and Laura had previously been married to different partners; he had one fourteen-year-old son and Laura had two boys. Mike was quietly candid about the break-up of his marriage, and his love for his son was evident as he spoke. It became obv
ious that his decision to settle in McCarthy had had a lot to do with his son. The boy had chosen to live with his father, and Laura’s children also spent the summer and most of the year with them.

  ‘What about school?’ Audrey asked.

  ‘All the kids here are home-schooled,’ Laura explained. ‘The state education system supplies everything we need – books, work manuals, stationery, teaching guides, computers and anything we request.’

  I looked at Mike. I had already decided I liked the man because of his ease and openness, and the air of gentleness about him. Jack had also taken to him immediately, and Cal, who was now beginning to walk, trotted into his outstretched arms without hesitation.

  ‘A fisherman, a backwoodsman, a pilot and a teacher?’ I said to him with unconcealed admiration and no small amount of hidden jealousy.

  He smiled and answered quietly, ‘Things happen as much by chance as necessity.’

  For a split second I thought about asking him which had played the greater part in bringing him here, but decided against it. I was sure he wouldn’t know, or if he did he wouldn’t want to analyse it. Mike half answered my question anyway as he and Laura left us to our breakfast. ‘The kids will really love it here,’ he said. ‘It’s a pity you can’t stay longer. We’d love your kids to meet ours.’ I followed them out onto the porch and called after them that we would meet up later.

  I’d entertained confusions about the dual nature of wilderness that Grimm’s fairy-tales had taught me and how I felt places to be a perfect haven for recluses, but Mike and Laura were making me think again. He had no such confusion about the remote area he had come to live in and his affable nature was not what one associates with being reclusive. But I was equally sure he had found some sort of sanctuary in this derelict ghost town.

  Breakfast was finished with gusto, and over coffee Audrey and I discussed how different our hosts’ personalities were from others we had come across en route here. They were so welcoming and open; they’d even shared quite intimate details of their lives as if they had known us for ever. In comparison, the locals we had met in the café at Chitina and the roadside teahouse were frozen, withdrawn and uncommunicative. The impression they had given was that they were intimidated and annoyed by our presence. But up here in the mountains, we felt at home.

  But comfortable feelings proved short-lived. Whatever plans we’d had for the day were quickly aborted. We had planned a short hike through the alder and spruce woods that backtrack along the course of the McCarthy River. The gradient wasn’t too steep and we hoped to get high into the hills without too much strain. Audrey had Cal papoosed on her back while Jack and I led the way. But we didn’t lead much further than a few hundred yards. Mosquitoes were everywhere, and the nearer we got to the river the more their numbers seemed to multiply. Audrey had made a point of soaking all of us in the mosquito repellent Deet; we had been warned not to go anywhere in Alaska without it. Everyone swore by it – it was the only thing that would protect us. But obviously the mosquitoes of McCarthy were of a different species, somehow immune to the power of Deet, and within fifteen minutes we were scurrying back to our cabin for refuge.

  It was not an unpleasant confinement. The cabin had been tenderly restored with white walls and polished wooden floors that gleamed in the sunlight. A low shelf skirted the whole dining area displaying a collection of various shaped bottles, blue, brown, green, ruby and curious lavender-coloured ones that had contained medicines and chemicals from the mine’s infirmary. On the window ledge, a small set of child’s building blocks spelled out its own intimate welcome. It was obvious that everything in the cabin had been repaired and salvaged from what had remained as the mine fell into disuse. Apart from his many other skills, Mike had a craftsman’s hands, and his attention to detail suggested someone who enjoyed what he did and took his time doing it. My envy of the man deepened.

  There was neither a TV nor a radio in our cabin. I suspected that as we were holed up in the hollow of a mountain neither would have worked anyway. Instead, Mike and Laura kept a small library of books mainly about Alaska. The small living room held the real treasure: an old glass cabinet with glass shelves, sitting on a small table. It too was an item looted from the remains of the infirmary. I could imagine it filled with small shiny instruments for looking into throats, ears and noses. It would have housed small bottles of all sorts of evil-smelling things, tins of greasy ointments, a selection of thermometers, a stethoscope and various emergency odds and ends of a medical era long since past. But all these supposed things were not to be found. Instead, the cabinet and the table it sat on were filled with animal skulls, teeth and bones. I was just as fascinated with them.

  Later, Mike and Laura called to invite us to supper with them. A friend had delivered some fresh salmon and there was more than enough for us all. They also brought over an old incense burner with a handful of anti-mosquito tablets to burn out on the porch. Mike noticed my interest in his collection and he named each of the skeletons for me – brown bear, black bear, wolverine, wolf, lynx, a collection of goose skulls too numerous to name. Outside, as we set up the burner, Mike pointed at several racks of antlers piled inside his chicken coop. ‘We’re allowed to take four moose a year, though I’ve never shot that many in a season. Ain’t got a big enough freezer, and people here generally share their surplus from a kill.’ He further confessed that his bone collection was only partly related to his hunting skills. The wolverine and the lynx had been given to him, and he was adamant that he would not have shot either of them even if they had been staring him in the eye. Having already got to know the man I didn’t need to ask why, but by way of explanation he remarked that they could be more trouble than they were worth, and anyway, there were some creatures you just left to themselves.

  ‘A hunter as well as your other attributes, Mike!’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘it saves a lot of money to hunt your own food, and the hides and the horn supplement your income.’

  I was curious about the horn, and asked him about it. He informed me that many people in Alaska like to keep a personal hunting knife or a fancy skinning knife, hunters especially, so Mike would collect moose antlers and sell them by the pound to the knife manufacturers. ‘You go into these places, pick out a piece of antler or bone, make a drawing of the knife you want and they make it for you. They can make them as fancy as you want. But you generally find that genuine hunters don’t go in for fancy. There are some people who like to have them hanging from their belt.’ I remembered the men at Talkeetna. I had admired their bowie knives and had priced several when we were buying our gear in Fairbanks. Boy, was I now glad I hadn’t given in to the temptation. As I was thinking this, Mike added that he didn’t do much hunting now. Winter was the best time, but he was finding the winters more difficult to endure, and when he could he cleared out during the worst of the weather.

  I was curious about the hunting economy and pursued Mike about it. Most people in the area hunted for food. It was a low-income area and its remoteness made the cost of living excessive. Hunting was not a pastime, it was essential to survival. Twenty-five per cent of people lived below the poverty level, so harvesting natural resources was as much a matter of your personal economy as it was for the big timber and fish processors. Mike and Laura still picked berries in the lard pail, with a can full of rocks – one for the berries and the other to keep the bears away!

  I pointed up at the huge mill building then waved my hand towards the derelict outbuilding. ‘Is this what happens when we get too greedy?’ I asked.

  Mike’s answer was ambiguous. ‘Sure, some people got very, very rich and still are from this operation, but the others who worked here, well, they had a job, a home, an income, they had a school and even a hospital. Whole families were born and raised here. The only thing that didn’t work too well here was the church.’ Mike laughed. ‘Anybody who was walking down Silk Stocking Road after a hard day at the mine wasn’t thinking of his soul.’


  By this stage it was blizzarding mosquitoes and we both dived inside the cabin. Mike’s dislike of mosquitoes was matched only by Audrey’s. He complained bitterly that for the past three years Kennicott had been relatively free of mosquitoes but now it was like a biblical plague. ‘We came hoping to stay ahead of them,’ Audrey volunteered, ‘and now look what you’ve done. You’ve brought them with you!’ Laura ribbed us, making a mock expression of desperation and anger on her face. All of us laughed together while looking out of the window at the clouds of mosquitoes swirling frantically in the warm afternoon air. It could have been a scene from a Hitchcock film, only this time the waiting predators were insects, not birds, our nervous laughter confirming how helplessly trapped we were. ‘Mosquitoes have got to be worse than the snow,’ confessed Mike. ‘At least you can work in the snow, but these things bring everything to a halt . . . except insatiable itching!’

  Mike’s distress made me ask what happened in the towns of McCarthy and Kennicott if someone was seriously hurt. ‘In a medical emergency people can be medivacked out by air very quickly,’ he explained, but when I asked about crime and policing both he and Laura laughed. ‘There isn’t any crime. It’s a very small community and nobody has much to steal, and even if they did, where are you going to go with it? As for the police, it’s a known fact that they refuse absolutely to come here unless there has been a murder and the assailant is in custody, chained to a tree with a handwritten confession as evidence.’ Audrey and I expressed our disbelief but Mike re-emphasized the matter, assuring us that the police would not come unless there were bodies and someone was being held for the crime. ‘The moral dictates of the Church stop more than fifty miles across the mountains, and they don’t seem in any hurry to come here.’