Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

18. Pick all veggies in the greenhouse.

  19. Stack firewood. (There seemed to be a woodsful of neatly stacked wood.)

  20. Get studded tires put on van.

  21. Put new block heater on van. (You must keep your engine warm or it will never start. In Fairbanks, where Donna goes for shopping and medical attention, people either leave their vehicles on or plug them in.)

  22. Stock up on groceries, toilet paper, etc. (The “etc.” cost hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars.)

  23. Get winter supply of computer ink, paper, etc. (Donna’s a writer, too.)

  Donna’s survival depends on her ability to do much of the work herself, but to afford all the fuel and supplies, she must do well with her B&B in the summer, Alaska’s harvest time. It takes all her income from her B&B, her Permanent Fund check, and more to keep her world going. She would have it no other way.

  After Donna had shown me around her place, she invited me into her small cabin for tea. She sat like the mother of the earth in the corner surrounded by her collection of books and told me about moving to Alaska. She remembers it as if it were last night, though she was only six years old. One of her favorite people in the furnace that Kansas can be in summer was the iceman. He came once a week to deliver ice to her granddad. She’d sit on the brick front porch waiting for the iceman as heat came off the road in waves big enough for an imaginary surfer. When he opened the back door of his truck, she would rush around to feel that blast of cold air.

  Donna and her largest chain saw in Tok. PHOTO BY PETER JENKINS

  “I was six years old, and I ran out to my granddad’s carpentry shop and said as excited as a six-year-old could get, ‘Granddad, guess what? We’re moving to Alaska!’” Donna’s green eyes seemed to open as wide as they must have then.

  “Grandpa let out a terrible sigh and said, so very slowly, his voice lowered, ‘You … are … going … to … the … end … of … the … world.’”

  Donna’s big cat, Sweet Pea, climbed up in her lap.

  “I wanted to go to the end of the world, although that scared me just a bit—only until I saw my first northern lights and mountains. It took us seventeen days to get from Pittsburg, Kansas, to Anchorage. I was in love with Alaska before we ever got here.” Donna’s voice contained wisdom and warmth in equal measures.

  Their old truck, which her dad had bought out of a farmer’s field, had holes in the floorboard and the heater didn’t work. Her feet were the only ones in the family that stayed warm, because the family dog lay on hers. They left right after Christmas 1950 and arrived in January 1951. The road to Alaska hadn’t been open long, and she remembered that the grades and curves were wicked. A couple hills were so steep that they had to get out of the truck and walk partway up.

  Donna met her husband while both worked at the post office in Anchorage, and in 1964 they married and subsequently had two children. In 1977, while Donna was out exercising, some weirdo tried to grab her and pull her into his car. She and her husband had wanted to live out by themselves; that incident gave them the reason. That whole summer of 1977, they traveled like gypsies, looking for a place to settle. They loved the area around the Taylor Highway toward Dawson, in the Yukon, but no land was available. They didn’t want to go back to Anchorage; the idea of living out in the wilderness had captured them. Somehow they found out land was for sale around Tok. They drove there and discovered that land cost $50 down and $50 a month. They bought a plot, just off Route 2 in some flat land covered in cold-stunted spruce.

  They cut some trees, made a clearing, and set up an army surplus canvas tent that measured sixteen feet by thirty-two feet, just like in the TV series M*A*S*H. It had no liner. They were kidding themselves that it would be warm enough, but while they were building their log cabin to live in, it was the only choice they had. Alaska in the summer in the interior can be so warm, so sunny, so blue-skyed, and so perfect it can seem like a time of ease and relaxation. Even some Alaskans who should know better become seduced. How could it be seventy-five or eighty-five degrees in Tok in July and be minus forty degrees three or four months later? Somehow, they survived the winter.

  Donna and Dick loved their new land and life even if the only income they had was cutting firewood. They put up a paper plate at the local grocery store, a few miles away, that said, “Firewood for sale. Cut, split, delivered, and stacked. $65 a cord.” Interested people would write down their names, and Donna would call them from the store’s pay phone.

  One night in January, it was sixty below zero outside the tent. They had down sleeping bags and a roaring fire, but the heat didn’t last. Dick had been to the outhouse; now that’s an experience, especially if you have to sit down at sixty below zero. They got their first outhouse from the government, a “worn-out” one with a metal seat. No one wants to imagine a metal seat and bare buttocks at forty below, much less sixty below. Two-hundred-eighty pound Dick came back into the tent overwhelmed. Donna wondered if something had happened outside.

  “Dick told me to come outside. I thought something was wrong. Our bunny boots crunched real loud on that snow. He pointed up, but he didn’t need to. The northern lights were unbelievable. There was a big moon too. The northern lights are usually green, but these had pink shooting through them. It was magic looking up through the black outlines of the spruce to the dancing, darting lights. They washed across the top of the sky like wave after wave. I could feel the hair on my arms stand straight up. Dick grabbed me and we danced under those lights. I cried, it was all so wonderful.” Donna’s eyes teared up all over again.

  “I never danced. I just didn’t. I’m not the type. But Dick was so strong; he had hands the size of bear paws. He just took me in those tattooed arms of his and we waltzed or something under the lights of magic and awe. We had single cots and somehow we ended up in the snowbank. Let’s just say the next morning the indentation in the snow was not a snow angel. Or was it?”

  Her story finished, Donna got up from her chair. The chair’s arms were covered with little brown muskrat furs. She spent much of the winter in this chair, reading, or in her chair at her computer. Outside her little cabin window, she feeds the chickadees, magpies, three different kinds of woodpeckers, red squirrels, and flying squirrels. Also outside that window this time of the year is Marigold, the mama moose, who has come around Donna’s cabins eight winters in a row. She stays till spring, when she’s had her calf. One time Marigold had triplets. Some of the largest wolves in Alaska live around Tok, and they do major damage to moose in the winter that are not as smart as Marigold. Being this close to Donna, she has never lost a calf to predators.

  Donna stoked the woodstove. It should snow soon, she said. Normally—though really, there is no such thing—by Halloween the temperature is usually steady at twenty to thirty below zero. Donna said she was ready to turn in. She reminded me I could use the bathhouse or the outhouse. She wanted to be sure I knew about her outhouse. The outhouse was surrounded with glowing, little tiny Christmas lights, and it gave off a faint red, yellow, blue, and white glow to the black-dark woods around it. Once she made a fur cover for the toilet seat, but it is the big award of which she is the most proud. A few months after Dick, the love of her life, died too young in February 1987, she entered a statewide contest: the First Annual Alaska Outhouse Contest, put on by The Cordova Times. Entries were accepted from all over the state. Categories included the “Prettiest Outhouse,” “Outhouse with the Best View,” “Outhouse Detrimental to Human Health” (built on the edge of a cliff, say), and the “Governor’s Award.” The Cordova folk chose all the winners except the Governor’s Award, which was selected by Governor Steve Cowper. Donna wrote a poem about hers called “The Saga of One Great Alaskan Outhouse.” She sent along a series of pictures showing its progression from hole in the ground, to A-frame, to a larger house built around it, to their Christmas picture, where it is outlined in Christmas lights with two candy canes on the door. Governor Cowper chose Donna and Dick’s outhouse as top Alaska outh
ouse. She’s left the Christmas lights up permanently since Dick passed away.

  When I got up the next morning, I saw we’d had a surprise snow that had come in from the direction of Sixty-Mile Butte. It was my first Alaskan snow. I said good-bye to Donna. She’d put up her long red hair and was going to cut up and stack some more firewood with her two chain saws. She had a feeling the winter would be a demanding one. When Alaska has an extratough winter, it is like a two-year-old child you can’t take your eyes off, even for a second, unless he’s asleep, and sadly he doesn’t sleep much. Winters like this wear you down, Donna said; they require all your attention, they cannot be ignored.

  I headed northwest on Route 2. Luke, my only redheaded child, not my only one with freckles, had left his Creed CD here after the summer, and I’d gotten into listening to it. Luke and I have a talent for leaving things everywhere. The haunting power of Creed’s music seemed small in Alaska. I listened to them with the windows down all the way through Delta Junction and Moose Creek. I was almost to North Pole. Then came Fairbanks. It’s the home of the University of Alaska, which you’d better not confuse with the University of Alaska at Anchorage. That would be almost as bad as getting the University of Michigan and Michigan State, or UCLA and USC, confused. Past Fairbanks, I blew through Nenana, the home of several excellent Iditarod-class mushers, including Jerry Riley, Rick Mackey, and Bill Cotter. Another fifty miles or so, somewhere between Healy and Cantwell, past the entrance to Denali Park, I would be getting close to Jeff King’s home.

  11

  Howls of Glee

  I found the hidden entry through some thick spruce and figured I must be on the right driveway because there were a few yellow signs on a couple trees, one showing a team of sled dogs. I could hear dogs barking. At the top of the hill were the most sled dogs I’d ever seen in one place, each with its own wooden house. The young ones, the ones that were slim and hyper, moved around the most and so were farthest from the big house. A construction project was under way, with lots of workmen around. It looked like a garage and a few rooms over it were being built to connect to the older house. The front door, an arctic entry, was open, and I could see a step or two up into the kitchen.

  I would come back to spend some time with Jeff King several times over the next several months to watch him train his dogs for the 2000 Iditarod. This first time, I don’t know what I was expecting; my friend Maggie had known him and his wife for years and thought enough of them to encourage me to meet them. I knew he’d won the Iditarod three times. I’d heard from a couple people that he was a hard-ass, but I disregarded that. People in Alaska have strong feelings about Iditarod mushers. Everyone has a favorite. It is their Super Bowl, World Series, U.S. Open, Final Four, Stanley Cup, Daytona 500. The musher must be the coach, the trainer, the breeder, an intense athlete, and team spokesman. The dogs don’t do interviews—too bad, because they’d have so much to say and probably notice more than some mushers do. In Alaska you choose your musher, and if you’re an impassioned fan, you don’t like your rivals. Families are divided, couples disagree. Mushing dogs, especially for the Iditarod, is so all-consuming in Alaska that when you walk into superstores in Alaska, you won’t see a life-size cutout of some NFL or WWF or NBA superstar, you’ll see one of a musher.

  At Jeff King’s, I could hear loud music coming from a stereo inside, Marshall Tucker. My knock went unheard; I knocked again. Nothing. I stepped inside, where I could see a small, thin guy with messed-up hair and a mustache sitting at the kitchen table. He was looking at some newspaper articles and wiping tears from his eyes. He didn’t see me at first. When he did, he pushed the newspaper clippings into a pile, handed them to me, and stood up. He seemed embarrassed, as I’m sure I would have been.

  “You must be Peter. I was looking over these family pictures, these newspaper stories from way back when I first married Donna, when I started mushing dogs taking loads up McKinley. When I first won the Yukon Quest and realized I might be able to be a musher. Donna and I looked so young. It just got to me. Here, I got these for you to look at. I’ll be back in a minute.” Their parakeet stood on top of its cage making some odd sound, and their only non–sled dog, a Border collie, came over and introduced herself.

  Jeff has the tightened energy of a wolverine. People who have seen wolverines in Alaska say they are always moving, working, running, thinking, calculating, hunting, plotting their next move. Jeff is that way. He naturally searches for your weakness, it’s the inborn competitor in him. He’s always been this way and it’s made him a kind of loner too. He warns everyone, because he is so aware of this intense trait, that he has little patience. He played a team sport in California where he grew up—football. As a 140-pound quarterback at Shasta Junior College, Jeff would take on at full speed a 230-pound linebacker. He would rather pit himself and a dog team against anything in primeval Alaska.

  Jeff moved to Alaska to be a bushman, to draw his living from nature, to build and gather and hunt what he needed. He never planned or dreamed about becoming one of the best dog mushers of our day. He first tried mushing not as a race but to haul equipment up Mount McKinley for mountain climbers. Knowing Jeff, I think he found it a major rush coming down the highest mountain in North America empty, holding on to that long sled as it whipped back and forth, powder flying in his face. He probably let out one of his howls of glee.

  When he first decided to try racing, his analytical, practical mind crunched the facts. He had two choices. He knew these long-distance races take years of experience for the dogs and the humans to succeed. He could start out with the Iditarod, already ten years old in 1984, or run the Yukon Quest and get in on the ground floor. Virtually the whole route of the Yukon Quest is accessible by road. Dog food and other supplies needed for the thousand-mile race are much easier to get to supply points, therefore the race is quite a bit cheaper to run. About half of the Yukon Quest is not only run through Canada but on the frozen Yukon River. Jeff felt running on the wide ice was boring, but it made the race feel shorter.

  Late one night on the Yukon River, during the 1989 Yukon Quest, Jeff and his dogs got as close to a major catastrophe as he’s ever been.

  Jeff has cat-quick physical reactions and yet also the ability to keep analyzing future possibilities in a kind of slow motion. I’ve seen him fall off a sled in training going over a frozen spring, roll in the air, and hit the snowy ground on his side so he can grab hold of the sled with his good hand and pull himself back aboard. One thing I didn’t realize in dog mushing: you fall off the sled, your dogs often don’t stop. They leave you where you land, and that can mean frostbitten body parts or freezing to death, depending on where you’re training. He did not foresee what would befall him this thirty-eight-degrees-below-zero night. On the trail, where Jeff and his team of athletes were in the lead, they ran into one of the hidden frozen black-nightmare dangers that lie in wait for those who move across the supposedly frozen far north.

  “It was the year after I froze my hand and had had to withdraw. The Yukon Quest is run in February; our house caught on fire that year in January. After all that, I was determined to run the race,” Jeff told me.

  What he didn’t tell me until later was that a couple years before this night, he’d been cutting out some stair risers with a circular saw at a construction site, and somehow the saw slipped. He almost cut off his left hand. He knew enough first aid to grip the wound in a kind of death grip with his other hand. The saw had cut everything in his wrist except the bones. He knew he had to hold that grip to keep from bleeding to death. One of the most powerful memories he has of this accident is that when they checked him into the clinic in Healy, they wrote down “musher” as his occupation. This was well before he knew if he was going to be able to make a living mushing. In the 1988 Yukon Quest, not long after the accident, he and his team had crossed a high, open part of the trail. The windchills were one hundred degrees below zero, and because of his considerable nerve damage and circulation problems, he couldn’t
feel his left hand and it froze. Jeff said it looked like something on a frozen corpse.

  We were sitting in the living room one evening, talking about the night in the 1989 Yukon Quest. “I was first team into Dawson City, which is in the Yukon Territory of Canada,” he continued. Above Jeff’s head was the tanned hide, including the head, of an interior grizzly. They are significantly smaller than the coastal brown bears, as there is not nearly as much to eat up here around McKinley. And they are more aggressive. This bear made the mistake of thinking Jeff’s dogs would make an easy meal. Eating one of Jeff and Donna’s dogs would be about as risky for a bear as trying to eat one of their daughters. Although they have eighty dogs, each one is part of the family. Without them Jeff couldn’t race and, therefore, support his family.

  “At Dawson City, there is a mandatory thirty-six-hour stop. When it’s done, you leave. At that point in the race I was ahead maybe a couple hours. It was cold and clear, the team had been doing some excellent running. My time to leave was eleven P.M. I was thankful to go out alone.”

  Jeff picked up a guitar that was on the floor and leaned it against the wall.

  “I knew there were a number of open leads on the river,” he said.

  “An open lead is a place where there is no ice on the river. When it’s as cold as it was, thirty-eight below zero, the open water creates a heavy fog. It makes it hard to see how to get around the lead. Obviously, getting wet at thirty-eight below could be a big problem.”

  Most people I know would not be able to deal with what Jeff King considers a big problem.

  “I was in a hyper state of awareness. I wound my way down the trail until we finally came out of the fog. I could see the stars; it was a brilliant night. The aurora borealis was bouncing in the sky. I knew up ahead there were a couple cabins; the mushers always wanted to know if there would be anyone at Forty Mile Cabin or Trout Creek or Woodchoppers Cabin.”