by Janet Dailey
When Ace banked the plane away from the field, Glory felt her stomach lurch sickeningly. She grabbed hold of her seat, certain she was going to fall out of the plane—or that the plane was going to fall out of the sky. But Ace leveled out the wings and they were flying smoothly again.
“McKinley!” he shouted and pointed to the north.
Far in the distance, the mountain the Indians called Denali, “the high one,” dominated the sky, dwarfing the peaks that were closer. For once, its towering crest was free of the clouds that usually hid it. Glory was awestruck, never dreaming she would have such a grand view of the majestic mountain from the air. Below were the railroad tracks that led north—as of this year, all the way to Fairbanks.
Then Ace banked the plane in another slow turn and flew over the town of Anchorage. Glory couldn’t get over how different everything looked from the air. She didn’t even recognize the boardinghouse until Ace pointed it out to her. It was a whole new world—an exciting one. At last she understood her son’s passion for aviation. It offered more than a new town and a new start. It gave him an ever-moving horizon; he could never fly to the end of it.
She was almost sorry when she saw the airfield come into view again and Ace set up for his landing and the wheels touched down with a bouncing jolt. When they stopped, Glory climbed out and let Trudy and Wylie take her place in the Stinson. Before the day was out, Ace had taken every one of the family up for a ride in his plane.
A week later, Ace quit his job with the Alaska Railroad, and the Ace Flying Service came into existence. Glory acted as his financial partner, Trudy kept the books, Billy Ray was his mechanic and ground crew. That same month, the stock market crashed and Wall Street was in a panic.
With the “outside” in the grips of the Great Depression, there was widespread unemployment. People who had left Alaska for the high-paying jobs in the States, started coming back. Rising gold prices made small-scale mining operations feasible again. The salmon industry improved.
Almost from the beginning, Ace was kept busy. Somebody always had someplace they had to go—whether it was miners, trappers, fishermen, engineers, or even prostitutes—and they usually wanted to get there in a hurry. Or if they didn’t, they had something they wanted to send or have picked up. Or there were supplies to be dropped or a medical emergency that required a doctor to be flown somewhere or the patient flown to the doctor.
In those first years, Ace hauled everything from a small gas tractor, diapers, frozen meat, and mattresses to Victrolas and phonograph records. His passengers had been whites, Eskimos, Indians, malamute dogs, and even a corpse or two. Drunk or sober, sick or healthy, crazy or sane, he’d take them wherever they wanted to go—or as close as he could get to it.
But the flights were rarely accomplished without incident. Most of the time, his landing fields were small sandbars in rivers, frozen lakes, or hilltops. He’d knocked off his landing gear, broken propellers, torn wingtips, busted struts, and half a hundred other things. Sometimes the plane was too damaged to fly out, and he’d either have to repair it on the spot with whatever was at hand or walk fifteen or fifty miles through wild terrain that in spring was sometimes a junglelike swamp to the nearest scrap of civilization and have the needed parts flown in to him, then repair the plane and fly it out.
He flattened his propeller blades for maximum power. On short-field takeoffs, he’d learned to wait until the very last second before raising his flaps to obtain maximum lift and angle of climb. In subzero temperatures, whenever the plane’s engine wasn’t running, the oil had to be drained to keep it from freezing. In the deceptive whiteness of snow-covered landing fields, he’d learned to feel for the ground. Surviving meant learning to crash safely. And like a lot of other bush pilots, as they were called, Ace often joked that his red Stinson was merely a collection of spare parts flying in formation.
Navigating in Alaska was no easy trick either. His plane was equipped with a compass and an altimeter, but he was never too sure how reliable either of them was. For all the beauty of Alaska’s mountain ranges, her glaciers and lofty lakes, or the mystical effect of her natural phenomena like shimmering sundogs above the snow or dancing northern lights, she could be cruel with her winds and fogs, her squalls and blizzards that could encapsulate a plane in a white-out that made the earth and sky seem one, with no up or down.
It was a trackless land without vast interconnecting road systems or telephone poles or railroad tracks to use for landmarks. Ace learned to recognize rivers and know one from another—no easy task, considering the thousands of rivers in Alaska and the equal number of streams that during spring thaw ran as swollen as rivers. Since a tree always falls downstream, he learned to tell downstream from upstream by watching for fallen trees. For him, every little twist and bend and branch of a given river was a road sign: Two turns after the fishhook bend and there’s Cosgrove’s cabin. Odd-shaped hills, distinctive peaks, peculiarly shaped lakes—he knew them all, whether they were on a map or not. There were times when he got lost, but not many. And he was never really lost, because he always knew he was in Alaska.
PART FOUR
Full Circle
CHAPTER LII
Anchorage
May 10, 1935
Twelve-year-old Lisa Blomquist looked around the crowded hall, twisting and craning her neck in an effort to see over and beyond the heads of people seated at the long tables.
She didn’t see how her younger brothers could have disappeared so quickly. One minute they had been playing by their chairs, and the next they were gone. She had promised Mama that she’d keep an eye on them and make sure they didn’t get into any trouble. She didn’t understand how her brothers could behave like this when this grand dinner had been given in their honor.
Well, not exactly their honor, she corrected herself, since they were only children. But it was for the families who had come to build farms in Alaska at a place called Matanuska Valley. And she and Erik and Rudy were a part of the family, so it was for them, too.
The whole town of Anchorage had declared a holiday and turned out to meet the train when they had arrived that day. A band had played and everywhere flags had waved. She couldn’t blame her brothers for getting tired of the endless speeches. That’s the way it had been ever since they and the other families from Minnesota had left St. Paul, traveling by train to Seattle, then by ship to Seward, Alaska. All along the way, people had met them and newspapermen had asked them questions. “Colonists,” that’s what the newspapers called them—“colonists” and “pioneers” going to the great frontier of Alaska.
It was all a part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, a program of resettlement that would take farmers from lands on which they were unable to make a living and transport them to Alaska. Lisa didn’t understand it all exactly, although she had listened when the relief worker had explained it to her parents. She did know that the government had paid for the trip, provided the whole family with suitable clothes—the first she’d ever had that weren’t hand-me-downs, made-overs, or flour-sack dresses—and supplied needed furniture even to the extent of replacing that which was too old or rickety. Her mother had discovered they had a lot of furniture that wasn’t worth moving.
All the attention and excitement had been a little frightening at first. Lisa had always felt very self-conscious among strangers, but everybody she’d met on the long journey had made her feel so important—and brave. All of them were being treated as if they were special. Before they’d left Seattle, she and her brothers, as well as the rest of the children in the group, had been given toys—real toys. Lisa was so glad that her mother had encouraged her father to sign up to come.
As she was about to despair of locating her brothers, nine-year-old Erik came running up behind her and grabbed her hand, then started pulling on it to drag her with him. “Come, Lisa. I’ve gotta show you somethin’.”
“What is it? Where’s your brother?” Reluctantly she let herself be pulled along while she scanned
the area ahead of them, looking for Rudy. “You were supposed to stay near the table, both of you. Mama’s going to be mad and then you’ll really be in for it.”
“But we found an Indian,” Erik whispered, his blue eyes rounded and shining with excitement. “You said there wouldn’t be any, but we found one.”
“That’s nonsense. I told you there aren’t any Indians in Alaska, only Eskimos, and they live way far up north in igloos where there’s ice and snow all the time—not down here where there’s trees and everything’s green.” An instant later, she spied her curly-, flaxen-haired brother rocking back and forth against a side wall, his head slightly turned so he could peer out of the corner of his eye at someone down the way. Erik pulled harder on her arm to hurry her along, although she needed no urging to confront her errant brother. “Do you realize I’ve been looking all over for you two, Rudy?”
“Sssh.” Even though he was a year younger than Lisa, Rudy always tried to boss her around.
Erik hovered close to his big brother and snuck a look around him. “There he is, Lisa.”
“Sssh,” Rudy hissed again. “He’ll hear you.”
“Stop it, Rudy,” Lisa declared impatiently, then looked to see who they were talking about. The boy was tall and broad-shouldered, although on the thin side, yet she doubted that he was much more than two or three years older than she was. His hair was black, and a little on the shaggy side. He tugged at the collar of his shirt where it buttoned at the throat as if trying to ease its tightness. “He’s no Indian, Erik. See the way he’s dressed in long pants and a jacket.”
“Yeah, but look at his black hair and eyes,” Rudy insisted. “See how brown his skin is. You don’t know everything, Lisa. Alaska’s a frontier and Indians live in the frontier and they attack settlers like us.”
“Yeah, they do.” Erik piped in his agreement.
“He’s probably here spying on us so he can go back to his tribe an’ tell his chief how many of us there are so they’ll have enough braves to kill us all when they attack.” Rudy smiled at his brother’s frightened look.
“I don’t wanta be killed.” There was a slight pout to his lower lip.
“Don’t listen to Rudy. He’s just being a smart aleck.” She noticed the boy glance in their direction, and decided to put an end to Rudy’s scare tactics once and for all before he gave Erik nightmares. She took Erik by the hand. “Come on. I’ll prove it to you.” When Erik realized she was taking him over to the “Indian,” he tried to twist free but not too wildly for fear of attracting attention. “Excuse me,” she said to the older boy, indifferent to her brother’s struggles. “But my brothers think you’re an Indian.” For a moment, his stony stare unnerved her a little, then he smiled. It was a nice smile.
“My grandmother’s great-grandfather was five-eighths Indian, but I don’t know if that counts. She says I look like him, though.”
“See. I told you,” Rudy declared triumphantly.
Lisa wasn’t sure whether the answer meant he was part Indian or not. It sounded like it. “Do you live here?”
“Yeah. My dad’s a bush pilot.”
“What’s that?”
“He flies planes, hauling people and supplies to remote villages, wherever they want to go.”
“Oh. That kind of pilot.” There weren’t many planes in northern Minnesota, but she’d seen pictures and newsreels of them.
“Can you fly a plane?” Rudy wanted to know.
“Yeah. My dad taught me.”
“Wow! That’s super!” Rudy was roundly impressed. “How old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
“Wow, I’m going to learn to fly when I’m fourteen, too. Maybe even sooner,” he declared.
“And just where do you think you’re going to get a plane to fly?” But Lisa thought better of getting into an argument with her brother, and quickly changed the subject. “I’m sorry. My name’s Lisa Blomquist and these are my brothers, Rudy and Erik. We just arrived from Minnesota.”
“I guessed that. I’m Wylie Cole.” But it was more than good manners that prompted Wylie to tell her his name. Usually he didn’t like girls; the ones he knew were always giggling and acting silly. But this Lisa seemed different. He had to admit she was kinda cute with those big blue eyes and hair the color of wild honey, plaited into long braids that hung well below her shoulders.
“Yeah, we’re from Minnesota, the land of ten thousand lakes,” Erik inserted importantly.
“We don’t have ten thousand lakes in Alaska,” Wylie replied. “It’s more like a couple million. And some of the best hunting and fishing you’ll ever find anywhere. There’s moose and salmon—and bighorn sheep in the mountains.”
“Are there bears here?” Erik remembered the stories Rudy had told him.
“Yeah, will we see any of those big white polar bears?”
“No, they don’t come this far south. Around here, it’s mostly grizzlies. I shot my first one last spring.” Wylie saw the way her eyes widened and knew he’d impressed her. “I go hunting and fishing a lot. This next winter, my dad says I can run a trap line. I figure I’ll get enough money from the furs to buy me a new rifle.”
“I got a rifle,” Rudy said, but Lisa noticed he didn’t brag about how many squirrels and rabbits he’d shot with it. They hardly compared to a bear.
“Lisa. Rudy. Come here this minute.” At the impatient summons, Lisa turned guiltily. As Wylie followed the direction of her glance, he noticed the woman walking stiffly toward them. A cloche hat hid all but the curly ends of her blond hair and framed her stern expression.
Lisa turned back to him. “It’s my mother,” she explained hastily. “We have to go now. Good-bye.” But she glanced over her shoulder at him one last time as she started shepherding her brothers toward the woman. “It was nice meeting you.”
“Same here. Maybe we’ll see each other again,” he offered hopefully and received a quick, wistful smile in response.
When Lisa and her brothers rejoined their mother, Wylie overheard the tongue-lashing she gave them. “How could you be so rude?” she scolded. “Now you will go back and you will sit in your chairs until I say you may move.”
“Mama—” Rudy started to protest.
“You will do as I say or I will have your father take you outside and lay a switch to you.” The threat ended any further argument.
Wylie sighed in disappointment. He hadn’t wanted to come to this dinner for the colonists in the first place. He never felt comfortable among a lot of people, never knew what to talk about. But it had been easy to talk to Lisa Blomquist. He wished her mother hadn’t made her go back to their table. It would have been nice if he could have talked to her a little longer.
Alaska probably seemed strange to her. He hoped he hadn’t frightened her when he referred to the grizzlies in the area. But somehow she didn’t strike him as being the type who was a scaredy-cat. In a way, she reminded him of his mother and Grandma Glory. Which was kinda silly, because she was just a girl.
He wondered whether she’d like it here. A lot of newcomers to Alaska didn’t; they felt too isolated from the rest of the world and endlessly complained about the cold and the mosquitoes. He wished he’d had the time to tell her all the good things about Alaska and convince her that it really was a great place to live.
In hopes that he might have the chance to talk to her again, Wylie moved to the other side of the room, where he could keep an eye on her table. A couple of times during the remainder of the evening, the milling crowd parted long enough for her to notice him standing by the wall. Each time she smiled at him a little hesitantly, and Wylie smiled back. He didn’t want her to feel all alone without a single friend in Alaska. But she never ventured from her mother’s side and he didn’t get another chance to talk to her.
Later, as he followed his family out of the community hall, Wylie reached up and unbuttoned his collar. His mother observed his action with a smile. “I wondered how long it would take you to do that. I’m s
urprised you didn’t pull the button off.”
“I would have, but I figured you’d make me sew it back on. Then I’d have to wash the shirt ’cause I got blood on it from sticking my finger with the needle so many times. And I’m not very good at that woman stuff.” He shrugged.
“I realized long ago that you were never going to be any help to me around the house, Wylie. I sometimes think if you had the choice you would live outdoors. Most women get married so they won’t have to live alone. But here I am with your father flying off for days to parts unknown and you traipsing off to hunt or fish in some forgotten neck of the woods.”
Ace put his arm around her shoulders. “Just think how fast you’d get tired of us if we were around all the time.”
“The shock would probably kill her.” Glory paused beside the rear passenger door of the closed sedan and waited for them to catch up with her. “That was quite a dinner. What did you think of these cheechakos, Trudy?”
“I have the feeling that, regardless of what they might have been told to the contrary, they expected to find a land covered with ice and snow. That was my image of it when I was a newcomer, a cheechako. I’m certain they never expected it to be so green or the weather so mild and warm.”
“They probably didn’t.” Glory opened the rear door and slid onto the seat. Trudy climbed into the back seat, too, letting Ace and Wylie sit in front. “I must say they didn’t fit my image of farmers. Some of them looked poor enough to qualify for this program, but one of the men I talked to said he’d worked in a sawmill most of his life and farmed a few acres on the side. He said he raised enough to feed his family and keep a cow and some pigs. I wouldn’t think that makes him a farmer, any more than playing poker makes a person a gambler. And he thought the stumps on his farm were a problem. Wait until he sees the stands of timber in Matanuska Valley. Turning that land into farms isn’t going to be as easy as he thinks.”