Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  The only other instruction was on page 3. It ordered the roadkill recipient, “Save the front teeth (lower front jaw) from your moose. [A picture showed where to cut the jaw off right behind the teeth.] Bring the front teeth along with this form to Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Palmer, Alaska.” The state also wanted to know the sex of moose, exact location of kill site, and date of kill, and they wanted it all within ten days.

  What if we hit a moose on the way to Coldfoot? Why wouldn’t we get to keep the meat, especially after what it would do to the Explorer? If the state of Alaska let people who hit a moose have the meat, some guy with a shop behind his house and a welder would someday create a bumper that would kill a moose in the road and not hurt his truck. Then people would hear about it and start buying these add-on bumpers. After that, instead of having to take a full week off and go hunting far out in the wild, some cheating Alaskans could harvest meat while driving to work. It could become a full-time business for the welder. The design might look so techno, so hip, that people Outside would start putting them on their Land Rovers and Navigators and even Lexus SUVs, instead of African bush guards. They’d get a cool name, like Wilderness X Guards. There would be a flat-black model and a stainless one for California. But then, someone would use the Wilderness X to smash a police car in a high-speed chase and a good thing would have gone bad.

  I’d read half the application driving north. There was basically no traffic, although reading and driving in Alaska can cause roadkill. I put away my reading and then allowed myself to become nearly overcome by what was outside the vehicle. Most of the time we were alone on Route 3. I wanted to be to Fairbanks before dark, when sliding off the road into a gully or hitting a moose could be catastrophic. If there was almost no traffic now, at midday, except for the occasional semi pulling double trailers and a rare personal vehicle, at night there would be almost none.

  A WILD-EYED LOOK

  As we drove north, Mount McKinley showed its dominating 20,320-foot-high self, as it can with rare clarity in winter. The land had opened up around us, and the mountains of the Alaska Range had become dominating to the east and west of us. Rita had her Andrea Bocelli CD on, and the power of his voice seemed to match the potency and clarity of the perfectly snow-white mountains. The air was electric blue and charged with purity. We were a tiny satellite flying through space.

  Occasional ground winds flew atop the flat plains running up to the steep mountains, changing my visibility. Before the snow-filled winds swept across the flats, I had been able to see from Route 3 to the moon, but now visibility was only about ten feet ahead. Suddenly, driving inside one of these blows of wicked wind was a small, white car, a Honda Civic. Compared to the monster double trailers we’d been passing, it was like a rabbit in the road. Except it was a metal rabbit in a sideways skid, and its rear half was in our lane. Veer to the right, I thought. (No, there was no guardrail, just deep snow. It was sixteen below zero.) Slam on the brakes. No. I could see the Honda was full of people. Pull into the left lane, way over to the left. Go around it. No, just stay in the lane we’re in, stay straight, and don’t put on the brakes. The Honda fishtailed the other way, and we missed each other by about a foot. What if we’d hit them? There would have been major destruction to the cars and serious injury to the people. The awful part was, where would medical help have come from? How long would they have taken to get here? Could any helicopters have come to the rescue? What if Rita’s cell phone didn’t work?

  What if one of us had been severely injured? Did they have sleeping bags in their Honda? My first-aid capabilities would have been tested in the extreme. What if no one had driven by for a half hour, an hour, or longer? There was no walking to find help. And this was on one of a few major roads in Alaska that went somewhere. In our vehicles we were warm and cozy and shielded from the extremes outside, so fooled. Yet, if there had been a different skid, we could have been out in the killing cold and the coming deafening darkness.

  How far from help would we be out at Eric’s? I did recall Eric saying they had a satellite phone, and he was a vet. That’s almost like having your own doctor. Right?

  I’d had this same thought on my first flight to Alaska. It had been incredibly clear below us as we crossed British Columbia and Alaska. There were thousands of mountaintops and valleys, no evidence of anything human. The temperature inside the plane was perfect, no survival clothing required. Need a coffee or orange juice or snack or magazine or toilet, your pampered human urge was satisfied. Yet, to crash-land and survive, what a shocking transition would be needed.

  We passed the town of Cantwell; it was like a wind tunnel with a supercharger, this late in the afternoon. The surging wind was like the sharpest knife; it blew down the tight valley from the mountains that surrounded us. We passed the deserted entrance to Denali National Park, in summer as filled with travelers as it was now devoid of them. Rita reached over and put her left hand on my thigh. Her gentle touch startled me first, then thrilled me; then for no apparent reason I began to worry again about Eric and his family. I’d met Eric Jayne a few months before, with his eldest son, Mike, eighteen, at the Fairbanks public library. As a writer in residence with the University of Alaska, I often spoke at local schools, libraries, and campuses, promoting writing, reading, books, and communication. Earlier that day, I’d spoken at a state juvenile lockup, where some of the most serious underage offenders in the state were housed. I told the young men that if I had taken one more step a few times in my anger-laced youth, I could have been in a place just like this, and that they could recover from their mistakes. Later I spoke at Lathrop High School; Howard Lake Academy, an alternative school; some classes at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, campus; and now the library. The crowd was large, including some professors, a few families that homeschooled their children, some college students, some retired people, and Eric and Mike. I didn’t notice them until after I was done, when they stood at the end of a small line of people wanting to say hello. In front of them was an aggressive German woman, a writer, who lived alone in a log cabin; a history professor and his elegant wife; a bubbly young mother who had read some of my books in high school in Idaho; and two coeds from the cross-country ski team. Then at the end of the line were two brown-haired men, Eric and Mike.

  There was something unsettling to me about them, or was it just that they were painfully shy? Mike looked at the ground when I glanced his way. He had the wide-eyed look of a tribesman who rarely saw strangers, who had no mirror to look in. Their flannel shirts had a few holes in them; their pants had some permanent stains. They clearly worked outside somewhere. Then the line of people was gone and it was only Eric and Mike left. Eric had a wild-eyed look, as if his spirit was too large for his body. I couldn’t tell if his hair and beard had been combed. His voice was soft; he laughed nervously and was oddly precise when he spoke. Maybe he was just nervous, yet he seemed aggressive in an odd way.

  Eric was about five foot ten; he shook my hand and was stronger than he looked. Mike was shorter and built like a battering-ram fullback. They didn’t look alike, but they stood on the earth the same way. My paranoid side wondered if they were really father and son. My trusting side countered that they had similar builds. There were long pauses in Eric’s speech; Mike said nothing. Eric explained that he’d always wanted to live in Alaska, that he’d grown up in Iowa; his father is a Methodist minister. Eric had established two veterinary practices in Iowa. He told me he’d read my book A Walk Across America and that it had inspired him to live out some of his dreams. He wondered out loud, after his longest pause, if I’d like to come visit him and his family in the bush. Mike had walked off. Was he bored, or had this separation from Eric and me been planned to give us privacy? Eric saw Mike could not hear us and mentioned that his children, of whom Mike was the oldest, were “bushy.”

  I must have looked perplexed by the word bushy, because Eric explained that living in the bush, being around only each other, not seeing strangers sometimes f
or months at a time, made them uncomfortable around people they didn’t know. They felt unsettled in any town, even relatively small Fairbanks (pop. 33,000). They were so comfortable with each other, yet so uncomfortable with everyone else. They were unaccustomed to talking period, yet they were at home in the deep silence of the frozen world of the roadless Brooks Range.

  I asked Eric to give me a way to reach him, automatically asking for his Email address. He didn’t have one. He had a phone number here in Fairbanks; he did spay and neuter clinics here at bargain prices. He said I could probably reach him through that number. He had a satellite phone, but he wouldn’t give me that number. I wondered why not, but didn’t ask. He said mail was hard to get and sometimes they didn’t get it for a few weeks or longer since they had to come to Coldfoot sixty miles on a snow machine to get it. I told him I’d get in touch if I was coming his way. Eric seemed almost too inviting, yet if he’d really read my books, any of them, he knew me. He never did say anything that would have proved he had read anything of mine.

  I thought about going to their place, but I had reservations.

  Then a few months later when I was at the end of the Iditarod in Nome, there he was, as if he’d materialized, as if he were following me. Of course, he wasn’t. Come on, Peter. This is just what happens in Alaska, you meet someone and you run into him or her all over the state. He had that overflowing smile and his hair was matted down by an old sleeping bag. I really felt I had to experience the Alaskan life in the bush, it is so foundational to the unusual and original world of Alaska. This might be the perfect situation. But I wanted to check out Eric more. I offered to buy him lunch.

  We went to a local Mexican place a few blocks from where the Iditarod ends at a burled-wood archway. Eric told me he’d taken his first trip to Alaska soon after his wife died tragically. He and his four children came up to Alaska and canoed down the Yukon River. They ran out of food, money, had to be assisted by Athabascan Indians who live in the villages along the way, took some major chances, but survived, stronger for it.

  There was no pompous air around Eric. He reminded me of a mystic, a holy man from India who had taken a vow of poverty. Being around him was at times like being on nitrous oxide at the dentist—there were no big problems, no pain, smile, be happy. He might have had a personality that would make him an effective cult leader, though I couldn’t tell. Eric was a mystery to me, and I don’t meet many of those. Eric said if we could come and visit, he and his wife, Vicky, would meet us in Fairbanks and we could follow them to Coldfoot and then ride snow machines the sixty miles into their homestead.

  Coldfoot was 255 miles up the Dalton Highway, once called the Haul Road, Eric told me. They’re in the middle of the route. It’s then 252 miles farther to Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean on Alaska’s north coast.

  Eric laughed and said that there would be plenty of food as long as we didn’t get snowed in. The trail was covered with powder, as it had been earlier in the winter. They had become dangerously stranded until the local Alaska state trooper had come and saved them. I kept getting the feeling there was more Eric should or wanted to tell me. Why? Was he afraid to say too much, that he might scare me away? Was he setting some kind of trap? I didn’t think so; I’ve watched too many Court TV crime stories. I decided after our meal that we’d visit them, and I told him so. He looked at me as if he had heard that before. He had said that no one had visited since they’d lived there.

  As I walked down the frozen streets of Nome back toward the official finish line of the Iditarod, I wondered about trust and fate and people’s intentions. I grew up trained to be suspicious of others, always questioning their intentions. Walking across America in the 1970s, into places as odd and unusual to me as a foreign country, I’d learned from hundreds of encounters that strangers could actually have good intentions. I’d learned to trust my first reactions about strangers and strange places. Often I didn’t need a great deal of information or time with someone to decide to accept an invitation into his or her home. So why was I so worried about going to Eric’s wilderness homestead? Was it something about him that I’d picked up on that made me anxious? Was it just because Julianne and Rita were coming along?

  Back on the road, I was still thinking about emergencies. If something happened, what would we do? If Julianne or Rita was injured, how would we reach out for help? The only way was the satellite phone Eric had said they had. Even then, if there were a blizzard or windstorm or some other weather interference, no rescue plane would be able to land on the frozen lake. State troopers were far away. What if someone cut himself or herself with a chain saw, was bitten by one of the sled dogs, fell through the ice, broke a leg in a snow-machine accident? What if Eric and his family had evil plans for us? I was angry at myself for even thinking it, yet I couldn’t stop the what-ifs running through my mind. There were no pay phones, no food except what they had, only their house for shelter, and guaranteed temperatures of ten, twenty, thirty to forty below zero. We would be as isolated as any of us had ever been, dependent—totally—on a family, the head of which I’d met only twice.

  We dropped out of the hills and entered the cold-holding valley that is home to Fairbanks. Eric and his family had a small log cabin in town for when Eric comes in from the wild to do vet work in Fairbanks and in the surrounding towns, especially for mushers. The trip into town is at least a four-day trip for them, and they’d found they needed a place to stay other than a motel. So they had rebuilt the small log house to suit their needs.

  We found a room for the night and I called Eric at the cabin. Some young female answered, his teenage daughter. I tried to joke a bit with her, but she responded with silence, answered my questions in one or two words. Eric was out shopping with Vicky, she said; she would tell him we had called. I wondered if she even knew we were coming to stay with them. I hung up, wondering about her tone of voice, if she was just shy. Her response definitely did not alleviate my concerns, concerns that I had not mentioned to Rita. Eric seemed too nice, yet too guarded; his daughter seemed anxious. I made myself sick that night thinking about all the bad things that could befall us. And I’d hung up without giving Eric’s daughter, Elizabeth, our phone number at the motel. I called back and gave her the number; all she said was “Oh.”

  Eric called back a few hours later. He said that he and Vicky and this musher friend had been to Sam’s Club buying dog food and supplies. He gave me directions to their place, said to meet them at about 8 A.M., then we’d drive the 250 miles to Coldfoot and spend the night there. He mentioned something about spaying someone’s dogs that evening.

  In the morning it was dry, windless, and the snow crunched under our feet. An ambulance went by us on the street; I’m not sure why, but it’s difficult for me to reconcile extremely cold weather with blood, high emotion, and passion-motivated injuries. In cold weather all things seem frozen, stiff, slowed down, hibernating, even the terrible things people do to each other.

  We drove to Eric and Vicky’s little cabin, only a half mile from where we’d spent the night. Julianne, Rita, and I had each taken long, hot showers; we were quite sure there would be no running water, much less hot water, out at their homestead. I was having a problem imagining where any water would come from out there in the Brooks Range where it was normally twenty-five to thirty below zero, and quite a bit colder at times. I doubted they had a well—that took electricity. The ice on the lake would have to be a couple feet thick. How could you get through it, and if you did, would it instantly freeze over again?

  As we pulled into their street, I saw a small log home with a truck parked out front. How did that thing even run? I thought. In the back were five or six sled dogs, young and thin. A dark-haired, slender guy was leaning into the back of the pickup, lifting one of the stiff-legged huskies out. A young woman held on to the collar of this dog and another, crouching on the below-zero ground. Both of them wore double flannel shirts and jeans; the guy’s outer flannel shirt appeared to have been attacked
by a chain saw that spewed oil. They either lived out in the bush and hadn’t washed their hair in a few weeks or were going for the Jamaican wanna-be look.

  Now I remembered that Eric had mentioned to me that a friend of his, a young musher who’d just run the Yukon Quest, was loaning them some of his dogs. Eric would doctor them, fatten them up, and his kids could use them to learn mushing. Eric had said last night they were going to send the dogs on a truck that hauled freight to Prudhoe Bay. The trucker would drop the dogs in Coldfoot.

  I pulled in behind them and got out. The guy, whose eyes flashed, “I’m an Alaskan wild man and that’s my gig,” walked up and held out his hand. I’m not sensitive to dirt, I live on a cattle farm, but I wondered if I’d ever seen such a dirty hand. A germ fanatic would have driven back to Seward right then. His hand looked as if he used it to shovel ash from his woodstove; in fact, the best smell emanating from him was wood smoke. He had dog hair all over his clothes; maybe he had had a six-dog night last night. Who knows if he and the girl live out in the bush—they may have slept in the truck using the dogs as living blankets.

  “My name’s Hugh, you must be Peter.”

  “Yes, I am. This is my wife, Rita, and out daughter Julianne.” I felt guilty that I was so repulsed.

  Rita and Julianne are both very clean; you won’t see dirt on them for long. Julianne even carries a plastic bottle of waterless antibacterial hand soap. Julianne went over, diplomatically avoiding his hand, and petted the dog he was holding. I could tell she was thinking, “What is Dad getting us into?” I avoided Rita’s eyes.

  “Did Eric tell you what happened?” Hugh asked. He was a slight, supercharged guy, full of energy.

  “No,” I answered, not being able to read him well enough to determine if “what happened” was a good thing or bad.