81 Days Below Zero

by Brian Murphy

  Setting off into the hills was an obvious mistake. Crane was now forced to confront what to do about it. Is there any point in continuing other than the blind hope that some kind of settlement sits just over the hill? And, if there were, wouldn’t they have noticed the crash and tried to send some kind of rescue party? Far more likely is that it’s more wilderness, and more beyond that. Rivers were the real highways of the Alaskan interior. He knew that much and cursed himself for forgetting it. The rivers are where people lived, trapped, fished. Think as if this is a poker hand, he reasoned. Would you bet on drawing the right card from the hills or the river?

  Crane did not take another step away from the river. He turned around and headed downhill. He followed the meandering snow rut he had plowed with his numbing legs. He could have walked a straighter line to the river. But there was no sense in falling over a rock and risking an injury. If he had any chance—any at all—it would rest on making the right choices. He could not afford another folly like striking off on a cross-country trek. A sprinkling of luck wouldn’t hurt, either.

  That came as he spotted his camp.

  The fire was nearly out, but some of the wood still glowed. He coaxed flames from dried spruce needles. At least that’s one match saved for later. Crane cloaked himself in the parachute for another night. The idea now was to set off downstream. There was no other way.

  When Crane left his bivouac on the morning of December 30, he was certain he would not return. He would have to stick with the river until the end, whichever way that played out. Crane also chose to walk atop the frozen ice. There was a risk of breaking through, but it was faster than picking his way through rocks and gullies along the bank. Haste seemed important. Crane still felt relatively strong after more than a week without food. This surprised him. But there was no telling when his body would simply give way.

  In many places, the Charley River separates into a braid of channels, known as sloughs, along a rocky bed. But Crane could have no sense of what was below and where the ice could be thin. It was only a white pathway winding through white hills. At each bend, Crane would tell himself: I’ll turn the corner and there will be a cabin with a fire going and a family who will listen to my story while they feed me supper with steaming coffee. But, bend after bend, it was just more river, more hills.

  About three o’clock, as dusk was giving way to evening, the river valley widened. Crane began to look for a place to camp. Just the thought of collecting more wood and starting a fire discouraged him.

  He stopped. Hold on. What’s that?

  Crane squinted in the fading light. It looked like a tent perched on a platform. Impossible. Is it really? Crane took a few steps closer. It was certainly something.

  “Hey,” Crane yelled.

  “Anyone there?”

  He wondered for a moment if it could be some sort of North Country mirage. Could the cold be fooling him?

  But the closer he got, the more the tent silhouette sharpened. It’s real.

  “Hello. Hello!”

  Crane began running. Then, to his right, something bigger came into view. A cabin? Crane found it hard to believe. Yet there it was: a log cabin, half covered with snow, on the river’s edge.

  Crane stumbled over rocks, running and yelling, not caring that his hands were covered in snow.

  He cleared away a drift from the door. It was more like a hatch, about three feet high. He grabbed the handle. The door swung open.

  Crane tumbled inside.

  Eight

  December 30, 1943

  Phil Berail’s Cabin

  It took some time for Crane’s eyes to adjust to the shadows.

  The place seemed more cave than cabin. The floor was pounded earth, but hard as concrete in the subzero cold. Flakes of dust and dried moss and God knows what else floated in the shaft of yellow twilight that spilled through the open door. At the same time, it smelled enticingly of life: tobacco and sweat, candle wax and summer grass, and meat that sizzled in frying pans even if not so recently. After more than a week in the Alaskan Yukon winter—scrubbed clean of these warm, comforting scents—it was overpowering. Crane tried to sort out the different odors. Old fur. Wet wool. Meals cooked and eaten. Wood and canvas.

  Gradually, Crane could see the dimensions: a rough rectangle, about ten feet wide and slightly smaller from door to wall. The ceiling was low, sagging in places under the weight of the traditional dirt-and-sod covering on the roof, but it still managed to peak at the center. The nearly six-foot Crane could stand upright with some room to spare. At one corner was a bunk built on a sturdy wooden base. Next to it sat a pile of wood and shavings. Crane looked to his left. A table was packed with burlap sacks tied tightly with twine. His frigid fingers couldn’t manage to loosen the knots. Crane slashed the closest bag with his Boy Scout knife.

  Out spilled something white. Crane dipped his fingertips and brought them to his lips. He gasped. Sugar! The rest of the satchels held gifts that made Crane’s head spin: a tin of cocoa, another of dried milk, a half-dozen cans of baking powder, and a box of raisins.

  Crane stuffed the raisins into his mouth. They were as cold and hard as pebbles, but quickly softened and gave up their juices and flavor. Crane chewed wildly. Just a few nights ago, he had dreamed of polishing off a steak with Hoskin. Crane thought that might be the closest he would come to genuine food. He was now chomping on sweet raisins with a roof over his head. It was almost too much to absorb. Just concentrate on eating, he thought. He grabbed more raisins, but stopped before he tossed them into his mouth. He suddenly felt full. Unbearably so. It was clear he needed to go slowly to give his body time to reacquaint itself with food. He checked the raisin box. There were plenty left.

  But did that really matter? He figured he must be close to a village. Who would stock a cabin in the middle of the wilderness? Tomorrow, Crane assured himself, I’ll be in a real home. Tomorrow, surely someone will know how to treat my fingers. Crane examined his hands in whatever light was left. The skin was bone white. Sensations in his fingers seemed muddled and muffled. He could still feel the rough wood of the cabin’s table or the coarse weave of the sacks, but it was as if they were encased in a thick skin that allowed only the basic textures to come through. Crane would later describe it as though he was wearing boxing gloves. Crane’s fingers, at least, still obeyed his commands, but slowly.

  Crane knew enough about interior Alaska not to hope for a phone or telegraph office in whatever settlement he was certain was nearby. The only outside link at many outposts were two-way radios tuned to a bush-pilot frequency. He smiled—the first time since the crash—at the idea of putting on the headgear and letting the world know he was still among them.

  While he was examining his fingers, a glint under the bunk caught his eye. He pulled out a small wood-burning stove and ventilation pipe. Things just kept getting better. He spotted a tin covering for the pipe in the roof and fitted it through. Soon, a fire was lit. Crane filled a frying pan with snow, and—as if all this cabin magic wasn’t enough—within minutes he was wrapping his fingers around a tin cup full of hot cocoa. He still wasn’t hungry. It would take a while to restart his appetite. But he managed to gulp down two cups.

  There was enough light for one more exploration. Crane wanted to see what wonders sat under the tent on stilts he first spotted.

  It was too high to hoist himself to the platform, but he found a ladder leaning against a tree. He sliced through the tent flaps. At least a dozen times a day, he thanked the fates that he had the Boy Scout blade tucked in his parka. Inside the tent, two heavy tarpaulins covered the stash. He pulled away the first. Underneath was an array of tools: hammers, drill bits, saws. He was careful not to touch the metal. He remembered the careless mechanics at Ladd leaving behind flaps of flesh. There also was a coil of sturdy rope, two folded tents similar to the one on the platform, and two big cans of rendered animal fat known as tall
ow.

  Crane left the second tarp alone. He was too tired. That could wait. There were enough gifts already. Crane took a few moments to study the tools and tents. Could there be clues about its owner or the cabin’s location? Not a thing he could see.

  Crane was sure the folks in the village—the one he kept telling himself was right around the river bend—would know about the owner and he could offer proper thanks.

  For the first time since the crash, Crane set aside the parachute. He wrapped himself in the canvas tents and dropped into the bunk. The cabin held the warmth from the fire remarkably well. The spaces between the logs were filled with nailed rope and wedged moss, which served as reliable insulation. The earthen-covered roof also helped trap the heat. What a luxury, Crane thought before sleep came.

  Had Crane dug deeper into the cache, he would have found more supplies stored in boxes marked with the stenciled tag Phil Berail. Woodchopper, Alaska.

  It was something of a message from an earlier era. Crane was the accidental guest of a man whose story reached back to a time before Alaskan bush pilots, before the railroad came, before the more genteel customs of the forty-eight states migrated north to interior Alaska.

  A series of steamships, horses, and mule trains brought the young Berail to Alaska a few years after the turn of the century. Gold rush fervor was roaring back after discoveries in feeder rivers off the Yukon. Soon, a flood of strike-it-rich dreamers—and the inevitable schemers and merchants who followed—was quickly populating a frontier bazaar. Things were moving so fast that there was no time to remove the stumps of trees whipsawed down to build new saloons, stores, and flophouses. Many places have entertaining origin stories. Few can top Fairbanks’s.

  It begins with a stern-wheeler moving up the Tanana River in late August 1901. Aboard the Lavelle Young was a backwoods entrepreneur named Elbridge Truman Barnette, who came West from Ohio and had given himself the fabricated title of “captain.” He had visions of setting up a new trading post along the Chena River, which branches off the Tanana. But the Lavelle Young was blocked by low water on the Chena far short of the captain’s goal. E. T. Barnette and his wife were unceremoniously sent ashore in the wilderness, along with their merchandise. Barnette was furious. His wife—who had misgivings about the whole enterprise from the beginning—was sobbing.

  Meanwhile, on a far hill, an Italian-born prospector and his Iowan partner, Tom Gilmore, were trying to find their way back to civilization. They had found a creek they believed was rich with gold, but now needed the equipment to dredge it out. The Italian, who had changed his first name from Felice to Felix, spotted the smoke from the Lavelle Young and used it as a guide to walk out of the bush. They found Barnette fuming and his wife fretting amid the crates and sacks. Felix asked to poke around. They made some deals with Barnette, including buying some winter gear for the fast-approaching cold. A city was born.

  What came next was a breakneck blur of construction and conniving as gold was scooped from the creeks flowing into the Yukon and Tanana Rivers. The tandem of Felix and Gilmore wasn’t so lucky. They never relocated their gold-flecked creek. Others struck it rich, though. As Barnette’s new town took shape, it needed a solid name. A few were tried, but none seemed to stick. Finally, a judge overseeing a huge swath of the Alaska territory, James Wickersham, persuaded Barnette to call it Fairbanks after one of the magistrate’s political buddies, Indiana senator Charles W. Fairbanks, who would go on to become the vice president under Theodore Roosevelt. It was a blatant bid by the judge at gaining some inside clout in Washington. Yet the newly minted Fairbanks didn’t really need much outside help to get off the ground. Gold does that just fine. Within a few years, Fairbanks had more than three hundred buildings, six saloons, and no churches. It was also a place where few questions were asked. Pick a new name, new life story, or just about anything as part of an Alaskan second chance.

  Barnette, too, left out an important item from his past. It later came to light that he was convicted in Oregon in 1886 of swindling a partner in a horse-trading venture. His four-year sentence was later commuted because of Barnette’s political connections in his native Ohio. He rode out that miniscandal, but wasn’t able to dodge trouble when his Washington-Alaska Bank went belly up in 1911 after the boomtown days cooled. He was accused of fleeing Fairbanks with a fortune from the bank’s vaults. Prosecutors, however, could get a conviction only on a misdemeanor charge of falsifying bank records. Protests broke out, and the word Barnette became, for a time, a verb meaning “to swindle.” Barnette never returned to Fairbanks. Some believe he spent years holed up in his Mexican hacienda with his girlfriend. Other sketchy reports had him making his mark in the oil business in Montana. All that’s clear is that the disgraced patriarch of Fairbanks died in Los Angeles in 1933 after falling down some stairs.

  Barnette may have been vilified as the king of con artists in Fairbanks, but small-bore crooks were everywhere in those early days. Barkeeps were notorious for watering down their drinks. Fake maps were peddled allegedly showing the route to El Dorado–style riches. One pitchman tried to persuade gold rushers that a hybrid contraption called the “Klondike Bicycle” was the answer to their transport problems. The thing had four wheels made of solid rubber and served as a wagon, but two of its wheels could be retracted and it became a bike. Needless to say, it never caught on.

  While others were chasing the siren call of gold, young Berail was knocking around Alaska doing what he could for a roof and meal. But he was also well aware he was a guest. He studied the Natives and their ancient rapport with Alaska. At the time, the followers of an Athabascan leader named Chief Charley were still following the age-old cycles of fishing and trapping. Two waterways—the Charley River and Charley Creek (now known as the Kandik River)—bear his name. It’s unclear whether the chief took his name from the river or the other way around. Regardless, the whirlwind of the early twentieth century was a time of transition that left few untouched. The ways of the outsiders were leaching into the lives of the interior tribes. One photo shows Chief Charley flanked by two men, all wearing a cloth version of a porkpie hat and striped flannel shirts.

  Their traditional wisdom, though, remained uncorrupted. Some of the newcomers, like Berail, bothered to listen. They learned such basics as how to best store a cabin’s supplies to ensure they were safe for the next season or available to a traveler in need. The preferred place for the cache is an elevated platform to keep away unwanted scavengers such as bears, lynx, foxes, and porcupines. Floods, too, made the raised platforms a necessity. The annual spring high water on the Yukon River reached such levels that it swept away just about everything in its way. That included Chief Charley’s settlement, which was lost in a great flood in 1914.

  When Crane awoke, it was still dark. It took him a few moments to remember where he was. He reached out and felt the curves of the peeled spruce logs. The amazing events of the previous day poured back: the cabin, the raisins, the supplies. He rose quickly and fixed the rest of the cocoa, sugar, and powdered milk into a delicious, sweet concoction. Crane drank it quickly. He was sure this was his last day in the wilds.

  He filled his pocket with the rest of the raisins, ducked through the cabin door, and set off downriver. Maybe the village will be close enough to get a real breakfast, he thought hopefully. Anticipation drove away any discomfort. He even forgot about his fingers. The morning on the last day of 1943 broke at minus twenty-five along the Charley River.

  The river bent to the west. The slopes along the banks grew steeper. The valley narrowed. Crane hiked on, waiting for the outline of homes and maybe the smell of warming fires. Instead, there was just more wilderness. The next turn will be the one, he promised himself. Yet nothing. For hour after hour. The Charley was now straightening out into a near–due north path. Crane was walking into the wind. Eddies of whipped-up snow skittered over his cheeks.

  By midafternoon, with the sun going down, Crane stil
l pushed ahead. How could there be a lone cabin and nothing else? He hadn’t lost faith that a village was near. To his logic, informed by the tight confines of the urban East, the idea of a far-flung cabin seemed outrageous and just plain unnatural. He refused to consider any other explanation. But there was always that background noise in his mind. It said: what made sense to the Philadelphia mind doesn’t always apply in Alaska. He tried not to listen.

  It was, however, true. There were no villages and no inhabited cabins nearby. Crane could not know this. He willed himself forward. Darkness returned.

  Whatever Crane had learned about respecting his limits was tossed aside just days after his failed journey into the hills. He was again putting it all on the line.

  A half-moon rose into a cloudless sky, dark as polished onyx. The North Star was dead ahead, tucked between the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia. It was much higher in the sky than when he had studied star charts during flight training in the South. The gossamer of an emerald-green aurora borealis flickered just below Polaris. It was really quite beautiful, Crane thought. For maybe the first time since the crash, Crane was taking in the majesty of the Alaskan wilds. He recalled the first time he saw the northern lights. It was during midterms at MIT in late January 1938 when some of the people on his block—just over the bridge from Cambridge—began pointing to the sky and rushing to their roofs after sunset. The horizon to the north was a deep red that shifted and flared as if coming from the glow of a huge fire. The next day, the papers were full of accounts of one of the most intense geomagnetic storms in decades, visible as far south as Virginia.

  The clear Alaskan sky over Crane also brought more danger. With no cloud cover to hold in even the fractional amount of daytime warmth, the temperature tumbled downward. It was brushing against minus forty. For weather watchers, it’s more than just a number. It’s the only point where the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales cross. It’s also near the freezing point for mercury. Below that, traditional thermometers are worthless.