Mystery in Trib 2

by Douglas Anderson

  “That leaves us wondering if the plane kept flying or whether it went down somewhere in the valley.” He swept his arm rather dramatically over and downward in the direction of the depths of Trib 2 valley. “It would have been flying too fast to come to a screeching stop anywhere on the top of this narrow ridge.”

  We walked thirty yards to the western edge of the ridge and contemplated the view,

  “Humph, well if it crashed into that valley it would be a soft landing. There’s nothing but bloody swamp out there. It would have been the same years ago as it is now. Remember when we tried to cut across there to shorten the hike to Trib 3. Big floating mats of spongy marsh grass. That swamp is bottomless.”

  “Yes, it’s mostly peat bog or beaver ponds,” Hagen agreed, “I guess anything crashing down there would bury itself or would soon sink out of sight.

  As we return to our belongings Hagen suddenly exclaimed. “Damn. Look at that.” He pointed with both arms outstretched. “Straight in line with the rock. There’s a hollow.”

  It surely was. Closer examination revealed a long shallow depression in the shale surface. It was obviously old but still quite well defined by berms of shale and rocks that had been forcefully ploughed aside. It would have been difficult to discern from any other angle because of years of erosion and an overgrowth of alpine plants. But it was certainly not a natural feature. In fact the slight depression and protruding rocks had promoted more prolific plant growth than had the natural surface.

  It was more evidence of a crash. An aircraft had not only hit the rock but had impacted with the ground just beyond.

  “This nails it. I don’t think there’s a plane made that could hit that rock, gouge a hole in this stony ground and simply keep on flying.” Hagen turned to face Trib 2 valley. “And it’s all downhill from this point. It must have crashed down the into the valley.”

  “I tend to agree. Hey! Look at this.” While we were talking, I had continued searching the depression. Now I picked up a ragged piece of aluminum. Just a small piece, six inches long by one inch wide. “Similar type to the larger piece I’d say.” I held it out to Hagen.

  “Yeah. Same stuff. Wow! Here’s some more.” He bent to pick up another shard of metal.

  “I bet there’s a lot more if we were to search the area carefully. There could be some big pieces down this western slope. We never would see them with all that undergrowth.”

  We walked west again a few paces to where the ground fell away steeply.

  Nothing. The western flank of the ridge was covered at its higher elevation by small shrubs, then a profusion of dwarf willows and, further down, conifers and silver birch.

  “There could be a whole plane wreck down there and we wouldn’t see it.”

  “No,” I said thoughtfully. “I don’t think that’s possible. We’ve scouted Trib 2 valley on two occasions from the air with the Cessna. Remember it was fall the last time. Most of the leaves were gone and I’m sure we would have seen a plane had it been there. Plus we’ve walked around from Trib 1 several times, along the western side of the swamp with a view of the whole slope. That pretty well covers it. There might be some bits and pieces but surely not the wreckage of a whole plane.”

  “Well, it’s easy to overlook something. We weren’t really looking for a plane wreck then. It could be in amongst the larger spruce trees at the bottom and we wouldn’t have seen it.”

  We fetched our binoculars and scanned down the slope, across the marsh and the hillside opposite. There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary.

  “Of course,” Hagen said thoughtfully, “here we are thinking we discovered something new. In fact, if a plane did crash here, they probably picked up the crew and most of the pieces.”

  “Nah!” I snorted. “There are crashed planes all over Alaska. I’ve seen a few from the air myself. There’s still most of a C-130 up near Cold Foot by the pipeline haul road. If it’s a cut and dried case they recover any survivors and bodies and might take a few important pieces for examination but they usually leave most of the plane right where it fell.

  I continued. “You know it had to be a government agency, either the military or the BLM, that left all those hundreds of rusting fuel drums over there on the top of Mt. Son.” I indicated the high peak in the ridge fifteen miles to the west. “ Disgusting mess. Why would they worry about a few nice clean airplane parts?” As an afterthought I added. “Especially thirty or forty years ago, before this became the State of Alaska.” This must have been really isolated in those days.”

  We returned to the rock where our gear lay.

  “There’s not much we can do about it at the moment and I sure don’t feel like its worth our while scrambling around that overgrown slope. But I do think it would be interesting to follow up on this when we get back in town.” Hagen commented as we settled on the edge of the rock ledge and broke out our picnic supplies. “We’ll carry these bits and pieces out.”

  He rummaged in his backpack and proceeded to build a sandwich of Squeeze-Cheese spread on his favorite German rye bread. His multipurpose tool; a big, mean-looking knife he always carried while hiking, glinted in the sunlight.

  “We could fly over again sometime after the leaves have gone and have another good look,” I mused.

  “That’s one way of satisfying our curiosity.” Hagen nodded agreement “But it’s hardly worth a special trip. Someone in town might be able to tell us what type of aircraft these bits came from. The pattern of rivets and the paint should help and there must be some kind of records from those earlier days, crash reports and the like. Maybe we should contact someone at the FAA or Elmendorf Air Force Base and let them deal with it?”

  “Hey.” I interjected,“ That fellow I met at the Anchorage Air Museum last year might be helpful. I forget his name. But he probably has access to all kinds of historical records. I think he flew in the wartime so he might know if they did bombing practice out here.” I thought a moment. “Bob. That was his name.”

  Hagen munched thoughtfully for a few minutes on his sandwich, eyes fixed on something distant.

  “Uh! Bombing practice, eh. Practicing to bomb me out of house and home in Germany I’ll bet. Urach, where I was born, is only a few miles south of Stuttgart. Like most of the towns under the bombing runs, it took a quite a beating. There were hundreds of planes on some of the air raids. Our little town might not have been a target but still a lot of bombs landed there.”

  “Young as I was I remember hearing bombs exploding. Of course it didn’t have so much meaning to me at the time. In later years I saw bomb craters in the surrounding woods. Massive they were. Much larger than those over there above Trib 1. Or so they seemed to me.”

  His face grew grim. “My father was away in the army most of the time, and was killed in forty-five so I hardly have any recollections of him at all. He hesitated, searching for words. “It was a terrible situation for a good many years.” His eyes clouded with the memory of it all.

  Arctic Ground Squirrel – Sounding the Alarm

  1. See ‘Gold In Trib 1’ Chapter 17. One Mean Wet Saturday.

  Chapter Three

  Memories

  Hagen sat on the edge of the rock and related in detail memories of his childhood years and some of the tales his mother had told him. Of course I had heard parts of this before but I listened quietly. There was always something new. Some small detail to be added to his story.

  The worsening state of the prewar German economy. Gleichschaltung, the stern regimentation and conformity laws imposed by the Reich on every aspect of German life. How much his mother had struggled to care for them during the war years, her husband away with Wehrmacht Heeresgruppen south. How the last letter arrived from Sicily.

  His mother had to leave him and his younger sibling in the care of his older sister—Older? Well, she was four years his senior, while she went to work evenings inspecting blueprints at a nearby factory taken over by the Reichs Versorgungs Ministerium Amt; The Reich Ministry of S
upply.

  One night, on the way from work, she had cowered absolutely petrified in a doorway near the town center while bombs fell all around and destroyed many of the town’s historic buildings. That night she had watched, with little satisfaction, as a flaming allied bomber torched down to explode on the outskirts of the town. How she and her kids had huddled together in the cellar of their house while the nearby city of Stuttgart was pounded.

  Later, when the air raid was over, she sat by the living room window and watched the northern sky light up with a ruddy glow as vast areas of Stuttgart burned. Yet she, by marked contrast in Urach, bathed in the scent of roses from a neighboring garden. “Ach,” she told Hagen when he was old enough to understand. “Over there it was death and destruction, here it was the sweet scent of roses. I truly wondered what had the world come to?”

  Then, as the allied forces fought their way through, the townsfolk were compelled to evacuate. They fled with few possessions and spent weeks, pushed from place to place around the countryside. Forced to beg for food, compelled to hide in the woods, in hedgerows or, if lucky, take shelter in a farmers barn.

  Sure. He could recollect the sound of exploding bombs. He remembered being in the cellar during the air raids. He remembered seeing convoys of military vehicles and he remembered “camping” in the hedgerows. Recalled it like it was only yesterday. It was the kind of thing you couldn’t easily forget. “Saw a lot of dead bodies lined up by the side of the road on several occasions.”

  Only when Hagen trailed off into silence did I speak.

  “It’s surprising how things impress themselves in a young mind. There weren’t any big bombing raids on our part of England—The Midlands—after nineteen forty-three. Still, in later years, I amazed my Mom with my clear recollections of going down into our cellar during air raids. I remember amusing myself with some old nuts and bolts my dad kept in tin cans. Sometimes we went to a nearby air raid shelter and I remember that too. I also heard the anti-aircraft guns firing and I remember seeing the gun emplacements encircled by sandbags. I must have been less than three years old at the time.”

  “I thought you were brought up on a farm?” Hagen interjected.

  “Not for my early years. My Grandfather had a farm eight miles from Derby so we did spend a lot of time out there during the war. My sister is two years older than me and she lived there most of the time. Safer I guess. We all moved out there after my dad passed away in early forty-seven.”

  “I really don’t remember too much about my father either. Though I have a few recollections of going with him to different places. I must have been younger than five, I suppose, because he was in hospital for quite a while before he died.”

  A moment or two of silence, Hagen brought some trail mix out of his pack and started munching but said nothing, so I continued with my own reverie.

  “June 28th 1940, so I was told, your guys came over on a night raid. They were always trying to hit the Rolls-Royce and British Railway factories in Derby and they almost succeeded that night. They also dropped a string of bombs across my granddad’s fields and blew most of the windows out of the house and farm buildings. Those bomb craters were so large they filled with water and my grandfather had to put a barbed wire fence around them to stop the cattle from getting in and drowning. The holes were still there when we gave up the farm in nineteen sixty.”

  “Anyway. You will note the date. I was born at eight o’clock on the 29th of June. My mom always said it was the bombing that started her in labor.” I laughed and so did Hagen.

  “Scared you out, did it?”

  “I guess so,” I continued. “When I was four or so, I remember standing in front of the farmhouse watching hundreds of bombers flying over at low level. They must have been marshaling for one of those big air raids. Maybe even the same ones you remember.”

  “Well” said Hagen with a long sigh, “they say time heals all wounds but those who knew my mother say she has never been the same since the war. Losing my father right at the end was, well, the straw that broke the camels back, and she’ll never get over it. Now she behaves as if it’s still wartime and squirrels away food as if there’s going to be a shortage any day.

  Hagen paused for a moment, obviously disturbed by this present-day situation. “It’s distressing to visit her but it’s no use trying to change things you cannot change either. She used to paint beautiful oils—well, you’ve seen the ones I have —and she set up an art gallery for a while after the war but gave it up after a few years. That’s when she sent me those paintings.”

  He had several large oil paintings of flowers and garden scenes, somewhat after the style of Monet, adorning the walls of his living room.

  “You never mentioned the gallery before. I didn’t know about that. But your mother obviously was quite talented. Those paintings are really good,” I concurred.

  “Yeah they’re good, but sometimes I look at them and notice a change in style. She seems to have been angry when she painted the most recent ones. And it’s almost like there is a hidden message in her paintings. Can’t quite put a finger on it but something’s weird about them.”

  “Well,” I said, “the war affected so many, millions, didn’t it? Your mother was one of them and she has plenty of reasons to be angry. She probably expresses it—expressed it—in her art work without realizing it.”

  “I guess I was insulated from the worst of the war. At least I don’t remember being hungry, despite the food rationing, though I recall our farm meals were always pretty basic.”

  Hagen grunted, “Huh! Hunger, I think that’s what I most remember about my childhood. Even after we were able to return home there never seemed to be enough food. You know, they called the winter of forty-five to forty-six Vergeltungs Winter, ‘Payback winter.”

  “We were close to starving for two or three years and I recall I got myself into trouble many times because I had to beg, steal, or fight for whatever scraps I could get to eat. I must have been ten years old before I tasted anything really fresh like a banana or orange. Those were tough years despite the Marshall Plan going into effect in forty-six.” He lapsed into silence.

  After a couple of uncomfortable minutes I clapped Hagen heartily on the shoulder. Hard enough to make him wince and shake him back to the present.

  “Hey. Just goes to show you. Here we are forty years later, a bloody Limey and a stubborn German having a picnic together in the wilds of the forty-ninth state. Not really short of anything we need, got lots of food and we’re both healthy. Time does change some things, I guess. Who could ever have imagined it would turn out this way? Both of us so far from our birthplace.”

  “Yeah. Well, don’t feel bad about it Doug,” Hagen responded, sensing my discomfort, “Neither of us had much to do with the crazy things that went on in those days. My mother always said I would travel away when I was old enough and she was right. I bugged out just as soon as I could. It hasn’t worked out too bad taking it all around. At least I seem to be a bit more…” He hesitated and searched for words. “…in control of my own destiny.

  That forced a few more minutes of silence. Hagen seemed to be immersed in deep thought before he spoke again.

  “Anyway, about those bomb craters above the claim. Out here I suppose it’s more likely they were practicing for the war in the Pacific. Jimmy Doolittle and his bunch getting in shape to bomb Tokyo.” He chuckled at his own wry sense of humor.

  “You know,” I said, pleased to shift the subject a little. “There was a surprising amount of activity around Alaska in those days. I think it was nineteen forty-two when the Japs took some of the Aleutian Islands. Attu, Kiska and … uh … another island. I remember reading about how the U.S. and Canadian forces drove them off … whatever it was first… then Attu and then used the islands as air bases to stage the bombing of Kiska. The U.S. Army Air Force, as it was called then, bombed Kiska for a month only to find the enemy had bugged out some time earlier.”

  I paused to think for
a moment. “After they got Kiska back they used it as a base for air raids against the Japanese-held Kuril Islands, just north of Japan. In those days there must have been a lot of bombers up here in Alaska.”

  “Well I guess they had to practice somewhere. This might have seemed as good a place as any in those days,” Hagen said thoughtfully. “There could be dozens more bomb craters out here. Besides, you know the U.S. sent a lot of aircraft to Russia. In fact there’s a picture of some kind of plane and a write-up about it on the wall in Fairbanks Airport. Ladd Field, now Fort Wainwright, was one of the places they refueled.”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen that too. Lend-lease they called it. Thousands of planes. Fighters and bombers.” I paused for a moment. “Northway and Tanacross were both emergency fields for those planes. The planes must have passed close by here. Who knows? Maybe this was one that didn’t make it. There could be a plane and crew out here still waiting to be found.”

  With that rather sobering thought in mind we finished our snacks.

  I looked down at my boots and laughed. “Just look at those laces.” My hiking boots were equipped with colorful cotton laces that had turned into a tangled bundle of fluff due to all the snagging on tough wiry shrubs. “I wonder if they’ll hold up for the rest of the trip?”

  “Got two chances, I guess,” said Hagen dryly. “They either will or they won’t.”

  “Ah, well. I think we have some cord back in camp.” I pointedly ignored his attempt at cynical humor. “Your own laces don’t look much better. In fact they might just give out before mine.”

  We lapsed into silence and lay back on the warm slab of rock to enjoy the sunshine. After all, this was our day of R and R after the hard work on the mine. The gentlest of breezes washed warmly over us and encouraged us to doze.

  “Damn,” Hagen suddenly said five minutes later. “You could at least have picked a better place to rest. All the nice, soft, comfortable tundra around here and we have to sleep on a damned hard slab of rock. This is your idea of rest?”