by Brian Murphy
One squirrel came into view. It dropped down a few more feet. Then a few more. It was now so close he could make out the details of its ruddy coat and its tiny claws grasping the branch. In Crane’s right hand—throbbing from the cold—was the driftwood bat. Closer, Crane silently willed the squirrel. Just a little closer. He swung. But the squirrel’s hair-trigger reflexes were too fast. He was already bolting up the tree before the club hit the branch. Frustrated, Crane tossed it away. There was no way he could swipe a squirrel off the branches. Crane wrapped himself in his parachute, slumped near the fire, and dozed off to try to forget the hunger.
He awoke with a start. Another idea hit him.
He decided the trick was more power and a greater element of surprise. His engineer training also offered up a maxim: if the right tool doesn’t exist, design it. Crane broke off the straightest branch he could find among the driftwood. This could make a spear, he thought. Crane took his Boy Scout knife and began whittling down a point. He dipped it into the coals of the fire to char and harden the wood. The spear point probably wasn’t sharp enough to skewer the little animals, which chatter away with a churr-churr call when frightened. But the spear could certainly wound a squirrel and maybe leave it writhing in the snow long enough for Crane to pounce. The squirrels were still leaping around the lower branches, maybe ten feet above the ground. He took aim.
He missed by a foot. The spear flew wobbly and slow. The squirrels barely flinched.
Maybe a sneak attack is better, Crane figured. He pressed himself close to the tree trunk and waited until a squirrel was on the lowest branch, which was close enough to reach the animal in one thrust. Wait. Wait. A squirrel moved a little closer. Now. The jab was on target, but struck the branch right under the squirrel, sending it rocketing up the tree. That wasn’t too bad, Crane thought. He had come close. This could work. He waited again until another squirrel came within his killing zone. Another thrust. This time, it was just to the side of the creature. Crane kept at it until the light began to wane. He never managed to even graze his prey. In the concentration of the hunt, however, he lost track of how long his hands were exposed. Crane knew he couldn’t keep this up without risking more serious frostbite.
What else?
Crane looked over his parachute. He couldn’t hack away at it too much. The wrap he fashioned every night was one of the reasons he was still alive. But there were rubberized cords that had no role in keeping him warm. Crane tossed some more wood onto the fire and got to work. The spear would become a bow and arrow. Crane slashed off a four-foot length of parachute cord and tied it around notches in each end of the spear. It was taut and gave a weak twang when plucked. Step one. For arrows, he trimmed down two sticks and made cuts in the end to affix spruce needles in place of feathers. He gave it a test. The arrow lobbed harmlessly about twenty feet and skidded on the snow. Ridiculous, Crane cursed. What am I thinking? He didn’t even attempt to shoot at the squirrels, which were now eerie little chiaroscuro figures flashing between the yellow light of the fire and the complete darkness.
It was five o’clock on Christmas Day at north latitude sixty-four degrees, forty-nine minutes.
Crane’s breath came in puffs of frozen vapor. The temperature was minus twenty and dropping. The frustration of the day was building. For the first time, Crane felt a genuine panic rising. Idea after idea had failed miserably.
The chattering of the squirrels now seemed to him maddening, mocking. He cut away a short strand of the parachute cord attached to the harness. A sling shot might do it. He made them as a kid and had his share of broken windows to show for it. This had a shot. Crane loaded the contraption with frigid rocks of just enough weight. It might stun a squirrel long enough for Crane to dispatch it with his knife or wring its neck. He pulled back the cord. Even his modest effort seemed to test the limits for his sluggish fingers. The pebbles flew toward their mark, but no faster than a gentle toss. There just wasn’t enough recoil in the cord.
Damn it! Crane was panting. Suddenly, the Alaskan Yukon seemed to be closing in.
He raged in return. He was beyond caring. Crane grabbed rocks as big as baseballs with his bare hands and started hurling them at the animals. You little bastards, he yelled. Go to hell. He screamed as loud as he could, from a place inside that was deep and primitive. Days of fear and fatigue and frustration poured out. Crane, the man who dropped from the sky, shouted back at the heavens—in fury, in helplessness, in a primal act of submission to nature as the life giver and, now it seemed, the life taker.
Just as quickly as his unwinding occurred, Crane stopped. Get a grip. Don’t be a fool, he told himself. You are just wasting energy. He slumped into his bed of spruce branches and tossed fresh wood on the fire. It would burn for several hours. Crane wrapped himself in the parachute. Above, steel-sharp stars dotted a sky awash with the pale purple gossamer of the northern lights.
Crane slept, feeling beaten and truly lost for the first time. Instead, the opposite was true.
He just wasn’t aware of it yet.
It’s not an easy concept to translate. But, like many things of deep substance, it can be understood without many words. It just is.
For the Native tribes along the Charley and surrounding rivers, it’s part of their ancient codes in a place where life is a fragile bargain in the best of times. In their world, nature rewards. It also punishes. To mock it—with greed, insincerity, arrogance, or any number of human failings—was to guarantee an unpleasant sting in return. It might not come right away. But it will come. The clans of the Athabascan people, cast across the Yukon basin and beyond like seeds in reluctant soil, built their beliefs around the most towering truth they knew: the spirits of all things, from man to minnow, are bound in a chain of yega, or souls, going back to a time when all creatures spoke a common language and understood each other fully.
There are many ways to stumble. Animal spirits are displeased by a hunter not utilizing an entire carcass. Water spirits are angered when someone takes more fish than they need from the rivers. The payback comes later. The spirits might make the caribou herds disappear or the salmon stay away from the nets, and the winter will be heavy with hunger. To abuse the land with needless fire or reckless tree chopping might also close the door to the Athabascan afterlife, which some imagine as a place so plentiful and joyous that the flowers trill sweet songs.
The Athabascan world, however, is not just about dread. Like most faiths, the righteous have the last laugh. One often-told story begins with an Athabascan man who lives in full harmony with nature. As a reward, the spirits bestow him with a dream: a moose sitting on a particular spot where he hunted. The next day, the animal was there waiting for him and his weapon.
Learn to listen to the wilds, the Natives say, because it is always listening and judging you.
“You just can’t go out and kill a bear and let it rot, you know,” an elder from the Alaskan town of Beaver told researchers compiling a 2012 study on Athabascan culture. “It will be no good and you could feel bad about it. . . . Some of it you give back to the land. Some to the water, set some aside for the wolf, and the camp robber [gray jay]. . . . Put some back in the river, even just a little piece of fat in that water.”
It’s a lesson told in endless variations, including some much closer to Crane’s home and traditions.
The nature philosophers of the nineteenth century looked for answers in places beyond the touch of man—even as the industrial age was selling the idea that a better future was being forged on factory lines and inside inventors’ workshops. Nature’s rhythms and continuity, the transcendentalists believed, are reminders of the humility we must retain and the innocence we cannot let slip away. “Nature grows over me . . . and I have died out of the human world,” wrote one of the guiding lights of the transcendental movement, Boston-born essayist and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his journal kept while contemplating the New England woods, “and
come to feel a strange, cold, aqueous, terraqueous, aerial, ethereal sympathy and existence.”
Emerson lived in a time when the world was shrinking at an astonishing pace. The dots and dashes of the telegraph had killed off the pony express. Railroads made it possible to have breakfast in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park and dinner in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. Whaling ships set off from New Bedford and other ports on yearlong voyages into the Pacific and far-flung seas. Other vessels headed north, their hulls reinforced with foot after foot of oak planks and captained by explorers and mercenaries driven by the promise of glory.
Their goal was the Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific. But even for the fast-expanding nineteenth-century mind in Europe and America, the truly Far North was still an otherworldly place of mystery and fantasy. In salons, lecture halls, and universities, there was boundless speculation about what lay at the top of the world. Some believed the ice floes of the Arctic were like sentinels encircling a temperate North Pole sea. Other theories sounded more at home in the Dark Ages. They spoke of worlds within a world. Some self-appointed “experts” packed auditoriums with crowds eager to hear musings about the hollow earth. The pole, they claimed, opened into passageways, leading to a verdant Eden lit by a subterranean luminous sky—which sometimes spilled out into our outer world in the form of the aurora borealis.
Yet the crackpots and their critics were linked by one undeniable element. The Far North is truly as unforgiving as the deep desert or high peaks. It offers no pity to those who fail to understand it. Emerson, even from his comfortable Boston-centric world, recognized the dangerous arrogance of those who thought they could simply bully their way through the world’s harshest corners. “Nature is a language,” Emerson told audiences, “and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language, not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue.”
This reality was sinking in, too, for Crane bit by bit.
He had already time-traveled on that Christmas Day, plunging back to impulses that could get no more primeval: a hungry man throwing rocks at food. He knew he would have to rebound and be more cautious, more attuned to what the wilderness could share rather than what he could plunder. Perhaps it could be some kind of plant that survives the winter or the gift of coming across a frozen animal carcass. Crane figured he would have to be more like the squirrels that remained just beyond his grasp: more watchful, more nimble.
The wilderness education of Crane was swift and, in many regards, unusual. There is a long tally of those who have struggled in the tundra and ice. But the list is populated mostly with adventurers, explorers, roamers, fortune hunters, and hired hands. They sought out the Far North or at least signed up willingly for the ordeal. Few were instant castaways like Crane, who had to face the wilds alone and unschooled.
It’s likely that Crane, in his young days, came across the short story “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, who himself tried a stint in the Yukon prospecting but came away with less than five dollars in gold dust. London’s doomed wanderer in the story was given no name. He didn’t need one. He represented everyone—rich or poor, erudite or illiterate—foolish enough to underestimate the cold. It is among the great levelers. Crane understood that now.
After giving up on hunting squirrels, he spent the next three days in a kind of hibernation.
Crane would climb out of the parachute cocoon to feed the fire and drink from the river. The temperature never moved much above minus ten. The hole in the ice from the gurgling Charley River was closing. At least it wasn’t snowing. A blizzard would have been a huge blow. All Crane’s energy was funneled into making sure the fire kept burning, day after day. On the one-week mark after the crash, December 28, Crane experimented with trying to signal with smoke. He threw healthy spruce boughs into the flames. The smoke was weak and thin. It blew away before it reached the treetops.
“Freezing to death must be a queer business,” wrote one of the star-power names in polar exploration, Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who was also a lightning rod for controversies over weakly supported claims of points reached. Nevertheless, there is no questioning what Byrd endured. Crane knew it now, too: trying to survive in a place that does everything in its power to crush that hope.
“Sometimes you feel simply great,” Byrd went on in a memoir. “The numbness gives way to an utter absence of feeling. You are as lost to pain as a man under opium. But at other times, in the enfolding cold, your anguish is the anguish of a man drowning slowly in fiery chemicals.”
The logic of remaining on the spot was now gone. No one was coming.
Crane knew he would have to walk out.
Six
December 29, 1943
Philadelphia
All eyes were on the boy. It was like this always.
The attention used to unnerve him. Gradually, it became just a part of the job. It takes a certain detachment to do it right, the boy had figured out. By now, he was an old hand. He had delivered hundreds of Western Union telegrams issued by the secretary of war. The news, naturally, was rarely good. He learned to keep his gaze forward as he rode his bicycle, focusing only on the address in question. But he could sense the nervous pause as he passed. Barbers’ scissors would freeze in midsnip. Clothespins would stop snapping on laundry lines. Fingers would pull back curtains just enough to get a look. The prayers were all the same. It was as if he could hear them: Please, please, please don’t stop here. Keep on pedaling.
Morning affairs were in full swing along Baltimore Avenue, the busy Philadelphia leg of an old colonial route that sweeps down into Maryland. At the fire station, the day crew was wiping down the engines after an overnight blaze. At the Ambassador Theater, the neighborhood’s grandest movie house with the urn-and-laurel trimmings of a Greek temple, the marquee was being changed for the upcoming Spencer Tracy film A Guy Named Joe—planned as the first big movie of 1944—about a dead pilot who becomes a guardian angel for another airman. Commuters heading downtown huddled on corners for the streetcar, stamping their feet on the pavement to stay warm.
It was just below freezing, but a stiff wind made it seem far more biting. The boy was glad the snow held off. Even a few inches made getting around on his bike a treacherous proposition.
He glided to a stop. He leaned his bicycle against a metal sidewalk fence at the bottom of a small dip on Baltimore Avenue. There was no need to lock it up. Who would steal a bike in winter? He checked his cap. Western Union had rules for the messengers’ image down to the smallest detail. Flapping shirttails and sloppy shoes could cost you a promotion when it came time to select applicants for an office job. “Your Appearance and Your Future” headlined the section on grooming and presentation. It advised that the Western Union cap should be worn at a slight angle, with the visor just over the eyebrows. The cap’s brass-colored company emblem gave the messengers the look of a scaled-down cop. Also make sure your uniform is pressed and clean, the company advised, and your tie should have a tidy four-in-hand knot. The leather puttees around your calves must be shined to a chestnut gloss.
The irony was unavoidable. These fresh young kids, dressed up snappily and with their lives ahead of them, had the gloomy task of carrying the worst news possible.
The boy checked the address again: 5464 Baltimore Avenue. Crane, Louis, Mr.
He walked up the four steps from the sidewalk. Then five more until he was on the porch. To his right and left, a long string of steps and porches—some with hardy winter plants, some with chairs, some with fancy ironwork—stretched down the block of row houses. The Cranes’ door was straight ahead. The metal outer door was decorated with floral swirls. It made a tinny clang when the boy knocked. Crane’s mother pulled open the inside wooden door, sucking the metal
one shut with another rattle. Sonia Crane was a sturdy woman, just short of fifty, who favored plain dresses and the simplest jewelry. It was Wednesday. Her husband, Louis, had already left for work at the auction company. He had learned the business well. Louis would sometimes buy entire failed businesses, right down to the office watercooler, and put them on the block bit by bit to the highest bidders. The Cranes rarely received telegrams, though. This one made Sonia’s heart pound. She knew what it likely meant. She saw the black armbands worn by fathers on the trolley and the gold-star banners of grieving families in home windows. All her sons were in the military. Morris, whose high school friends once called him Muff, was in Europe. Nathan was in the Pacific. Leon was the youngest.
Western Union policy urged messengers to remain on an even keel. The company portrayed it as an almost patriotic act. “You are entrusted with one of the most important jobs of Western Union’s war service,” the employee manual reminded. If the telegram causes a “shock,” the messengers were instructed to ask: “Is there anything I can do?” In cases where the recipient has a severe breakdown, the messenger should offer: “May I call someone or ask a neighbor to step in?”
Sonia Crane was not the type of woman to fall to pieces. She’d seen far too much in life already. With a deep breath, she took the telegram: eight-by-six-and-a-half-inches of newsprint with a two-way fold to fit into the envelope. She read the block letters.
THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR SON FIRST LIEUTENANT LEON CRANE HAS BEEN REPORTED MISSING SINCE TWENTY ONE DECEMBER IN ALASKA.
There were a few more words after that, but no more details. Crane’s family knew he had been sent to Alaska and was at times testing planes. But was this a crash? Or some other type of mission? Was he alone? Were they still searching? The telegram, however, offered nothing more than just promises to pass along more information if it became available.