Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  I thought about calling off our trip right now. I had a conflicting list in my head: Why should we go? Why shouldn’t we? Why: because Eric seemed kindhearted and giving. Why not: because if he was so kind, why would he subject his family to the risks of this kind of life? Why: Eric would now have a sled dog team, if Hugh could make it out. Why not: the dogs can’t make it through the deep snow pulling a sled any easier than a snow machine. Why: experiencing life in the bush was something we all wanted to do, we just wanted to make sure it was with someone who had their world in order. Why not: Eric drove a Dodge Neon in these crazy conditions. Why: Curt and Lynnette and Bernie and Uta, two proven wilderness couples, seemed to really like Eric and Vicky and their family. No matter how long I thought about it, there was no avoiding the fears, the doubts, and the concerns.

  A tiny dog, looking like a cross between a Pomeranian and a red fox, came trotting in as if she owned the house and the moment. Curt had been stationed in Kotzebue, the largest Inupiat community in Alaska. One of the villages in that territory was Kiana, on the Kobuk River, just up from Kotzebue. Kiana is many Alaskans’ favorite bush village. Because Alaskan villages in the bush are so remote, small dogs are easier and much cheaper to bring in; you could put a Pomeranian puppy in your pocket. Over the years, these dogs, especially the small breeds, have developed their own gene pool. They are too small to be crossed to the local sled dogs and too quick to be eaten by them. Curt and Lynnette had gotten their dogs in Kiana.

  “This is quite a bear dog,” Curt said, and smiled as he watched little Foxy check out each of us. The mother weighed about twelve pounds; the daughter, Kiana, a puppy, weighed maybe eight pounds.

  “When we got Foxy, she had never been inside a house before; she lived outdoors year-round, tough, tough little dog,” Curt said. “When a bear comes near our house, she will chase it as far as her little legs will carry her. You should see her catch rabbits, probably had to hunt to survive in the village she came from.”

  Eric picked up little Foxy. She had long red hair. Eric rubbed his two fingers on top of her head. Her eyes calmed, her breathing relaxed. Lynnette was moving a bit faster, her motions more animated; these were her little girls in the world of her four human males. Curt had gone to the back of the house and came out in a tight T-shirt with short sleeves that showed off his excellent condition and large muscles. He looked as if he could do fifty pull-ups.

  Lynnette cleared off the already clean countertop. Eric got out a needle and pulled in the appropriate amount of anesthesia. Lynnette and Curt were not leaving or going into the other room. They were both petting Foxy, exhibiting the great love and affection they had for her. I suppose some family members stay with their loved ones until the drug has had its desired effect, then they leave before the shaving, the cutting, and the exposure of internal organs.

  Foxy went completely limp, her little tongue dangling seemingly lifeless out of her mouth atop her sharp, white teeth. Eric, being such a sensitive and thoughtful person, always watching for a response, always aiming to please, looked to see what they were going to do. When they were clearly staying, he began. Vicky shaved the area on the belly where Eric would make the incision; Eric unrolled his kit of surgical tools, sterilized and shining. Lynnette stepped back a respectful distance, while Curt stood closer. I had seen my children Rebekah, Jed, and Luke born via C-section and Julianne come out naturally. As long as nothing went wrong, I thought, all would be fine.

  Immediately after the incision was made, Eric and Vicky looked at each other. They said nothing, but Eric began thumping with his fingers on tiny Foxy’s chest. Foxy had stopped breathing. Eric would later say that in his career he had spayed and neutered over fifteen thousand dogs, and two dogs had died, with one colossal difference: the owners were not standing there.

  “She then began doing something called anginal breathing. This happens with the brain’s realization that life is soon to end. Foxy began taking these last gasps,” Eric said later. At this point, I still hadn’t realized anything was wrong.

  “I knew instantly I must reverse the anesthesia, and I gave her a shot directly in the heart. Then there are different places that will stimulate the breathing reflex, a thump on the chest with your thumb, pulling the tongue, tickling the throat. I did all three,” Eric said. He sure did—that’s when I knew things were really wrong. Eric and Vicky looked to be getting sick to their stomach with concern.

  “When they start getting reversed, coming out of the anesthesia, they begin to blink. Foxy wasn’t blinking. Curt and Lynnette have been so nice to us. The last thing I wanted was for anything to go wrong with one of their dogs. I’d rather my own die. It was awful watching their little girl Foxy die,” Eric said.

  I saw Eric’s lips moving as he gave Foxy a shot directly into the heart. He later told me he was praying, fervently, and Eric doesn’t pray about much. He is capable of handling so many situations. He said if Curt and Lynnette had not been there, he and Vicky would have been screaming, “Breathe, breathe, breathe.”

  Foxy revived; she’d been shot in the heart with yohimbine, made from the bark of a tree in Africa. It’s a central-nervous-system stimulant, makes the subject hallucinate. Eric had even overdosed her. Now Foxy was wigging out; her big brown eyes almost seemed to be spinning around inside her head. She was barking at imagined intruders, she was panting fanatically, she was jerking her cute little head around in a completely out-of-control way. I practically expected her head to spin around. She reminded me of this man from Brooklyn who’d taken three hits of LSD at Woodstock; it took four of us to carry him to the medical tent. We found him writhing around on the ground—he thought he was a snake. Lynnette held Foxy tight and took her into her sons’ room, which was smaller and less brightly lit. Julianne and Rita went in with them and they petted her until she came down from her wild trip. Then it was Kiana’s turn.

  Curt picked up Kiana; she was quite a bit smaller. We were all looking for some smooth sailing on this spay, considering Foxy was only the third time in Eric’s fifteen thousand plus spays there had been any trouble. They laid her down on the kitchen counter. Eric unrolled another surgery setup and put her to sleep. I could see his lips moving before anything happened. Everything went smoothly for Kiana, although Eric said she had a double wall of stomach muscles, something he had never seen before. Kiana was opened up, closed up, and began waking up. Her eyes were blinking a bit and she was breathing well. Then she stopped breathing. Eric gave her some yohimbine in a muscle; it seemed to help and then she wasn’t blinking her eyes.

  “She was dying fast,” Eric remembered, “so I gave her a shot in the heart too.”

  She started breathing and woke up. Now there were two little red dogs tripping their brains out and being helped through it by Lynnette and Curt. Mother and daughter dog were almost fully recovered when we left a few hours later. They were no longer hallucinating and no longer capable of being bred. Curt and Lynnette wished us a safe trip. After watching Vicky and Eric relating to Bernie and Uta and Curt and Lynnette, and watching them handle the life/death/life situations of both Foxy and Kiana, I decided for sure that we would go with them in the morning. I still didn’t think Rita had any idea I’d been wavering and wondering about going.

  15

  The Winter Trail

  That night in our tiny, hot motel room with cheap brown paneling and threadbare towels that were too small, we laid out our winter gear for the long journey in. They kept the heat so high all winter that the survival clothing we’d brought seemed absurd. Why did we need the boots rated to keep your feet warm from thirty-five to one hundred below or the superinsulated Cabela’s Iditarod suit I’d purchased to train with Jeff King? It didn’t seem that Rita and Julianne would really need their extreme-exposure snow pants and parkas from REI or the mittens or the fleece layers or the polypropylene long underwear or the wool socks. I’m not sure I’d ever seen such a pile of clothes that would be worn all at one time by three people, one of whom was a child.
Oh, how we would need those clothes.

  The morning was radiant, the sky electric blue, the sun sunflower yellow, and the snow virgin white. It was thirty-something below zero when we crunched over in our car-driving shoes to get our last meal cooked by someone other than Vicky or Rita. Rita is such an excellent cook that no matter where we go, she always at least assists in the kitchen. Rita made our last phone call inside the truck stop restaurant; she called her folks on the family farm east of Lansing, Michigan. Her dad said that if the weather held, they would be planting corn and soybeans in a week or two. You could never plant corn or soybeans here.

  When I got out of the breeze and held my face toward the sun, I could almost imagine some warmth was associated with it. Otherwise, this image of a fish market in Tokyo that I’m sure I’d seen on TV kept replaying in my head—I felt as if I were walking around in a huge freezer filled with gigantic, rock-hard bluefin-tuna bodies.

  Tyler, their helper, had brought another snow machine into Coldfoot. Now all three of theirs were here. Tyler had been staying out at the lake with his twenty-something girlfriend, a cute Alaskan wilderness woman, and Eric’s three sons, Mike, Pete, and Dan. Their other two machines had been here for over a week. Would they start after being left that long in this cold? How did they charge a battery out at their place on the frozen lake? The boys were left alone until we arrived, with no way out except for walking. Eric obviously, or hopefully—I guess I didn’t know him well enough yet—had supreme confidence in his sons’ ability to survive. We ate and went back and put on our polypropylene long underwear, layers of wool socks, fleece jackets and vests, snow pants and jackets. We walked as stiffly as astronauts did in their boots and space suits.

  Eric had us bring our gear and pile it up on a snow-covered, plowed-off area by a workshop. Their pile was diverse and massive, most of it fuel, food, and supplies. There were two fifty-five-gallon metal drums filled with gas, flexible sacks of flour, cases of tomato sauce and vegetables. There were some boxes of spare parts for life-supporting equipment. Just about everything they had was life-supporting; there was little in their home, at this point, to be used for leisure, to pass the time, to escape the pressures of the crowded world. They’d already taken care of the escaping thing, although Eric did not consider their lifestyle an escape, but a fulfillment of a dream. And Eric didn’t need to look the part of the rebel or act it or talk about it or get anyone’s approval, he was doing it. There were generator parts, pieces of snow machines. If just one bolt breaks somewhere on the snow machine that is required for it to run, what do you do? The closest parts store is three hundred miles away and there’s no phone booth on the winter trail. What if one of the snow machines broke on the way? They are notoriously difficult to keep running when used hard. There would be no way to add another person onto the one or two that ran. I guess we could drop our load and put the two people from the broken machine on the sled. Eric and Vicky had piles and piles of stuff. Eric had two white plastic sleds, flexible, strong, and thin. He lashed everything to them carefully, since packing balanced loads was crucial. Tyler and Eric packed while we stood around banging our cold feet on the snow, wondering what lay ahead. Hugh, the guy with the sled dogs, had just pulled the hook that held his team and mushed by us. He looked like someone you’d see at a poetry slam, someone who could do three of them in three separate cities, three nights in a row, without sleep. Hugh must have been hell on substitute teachers.

  “See you all on the trail,” he shouted over his barking, hyper team.

  “Dad, this is going to be fun, isn’t it?” Julianne said, watching Hugh disappear into the spruce woods. We could hear the barking long after he was out of sight.

  “Yes, honey. I think so too. Can’t wait to get going,” I said. Julianne would ride behind Vicky.

  Elizabeth would ride with her dad. They both had on beat-up brown Carhartt overalls. Rita and I would ride together. Vicky walked over and instructed Julianne in a gentle way how to ride behind her. Just hold on tight, especially uphill, she said, especially on sharp turns and down steep slopes crossing frozen rivers. She told Julianne the snow machine would sometimes get sideways on the edge of the trail and they might tip over. Vicky said tipping over in four feet of powder snow was fun. She appeared to be a sensitive soul, shy, discerning, and honest. When Vicky and Eric had met, she was working at Iowa State University. She had her own little “zoo” of animals and Eric was her vet.

  Eric and Tyler had everything packed. Eric looked like Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers, before he went prematurely gray. Eric had some gray hairs in his beard now and around his temples, but mostly it was bushy and brown. He pulled the eight-foot-long, plastic sled in behind our snow machine and hooked it up. Then he started it. Bing, bing, bing, a sound that a cold snow machine makes, filled the silence of our frozen world. It started immediately, though, and it was the biggest, most powerful machine. (Rita and I combined weighed the most, all because of me, of course.) We were about to do some advanced snow-machining and I had almost no experience. I’d gone a few miles down a frozen road and a packed dog-mushing trail at Jeff’s and that was it. Eric told me to follow him and just do what he did. Sounded simple enough. For Eric, no challenge was a big deal—obviously, otherwise how could he live out here as he did?

  Two of the snow machines warmed up, but Eric seemed to be having a problem with the third one. He could not get his started. He pulled and pulled. He lifted up the hood, looked around, and came over to us.

  “I’ve got to fix something that’s broken,” he said. He had that look on his face he had had the previous night when Foxy was dying and he was thumping her chest. He was just slightly frustrated. Eric had the same kind of almost-never-flustered, Midwestern-farmer temperament my brother-in-law Aaron has, and Rita. I’ve calmed down 100 percent, well, more like 300 percent, compared to the way I was when I grew up in the Connecticut suburbs of New York City.

  Eric took some substantial-looking part out of the engine compartment and laid it on the twenty-five-below-zero ground. He went inside the garage of the truck stop and, twenty minutes later, after borrowing some of their tools, had the machine running. It seemed to me that it sputtered, but they all ran differently. He returned the tools and we were off. It was thrilling, the first mile or two; the trail was well used. Eric would later tell us that he was worried about at least two of the snow machines because “there were broken things on them.”

  We moved with ease along a creekside through evergreens, then over the creek, up a hill. We came into some open flats at the base of a range of four-to-five-thousand-foot-tall mountains. They were smooth, rounded-off, and white.

  We traveled like this for hours, single file, gunning it up narrow mountain passes with steep drop-offs, across frozen open swamps, through passageways into the cold-stunted woods. It was so severely cold that what trees could grow here did so slowly. Eric would stop before especially steep slivers of winter trail and come back and tell me to be sure to accelerate as fast as the snow machine would go. If I got stuck with this heavily loaded sled, it would be a major hassle to get both the snow machine and the sled back down the hill. On the first one, we made it, then slowed down substantially. Even if Rita fell off, Eric told me, just keep going. She could always walk up these steep inclines.

  Then we came to possibly the worst piece of the trail, across a creek with steep, almost vertical, banks on both sides. Eric had already said twice that this spot was dangerous and difficult. First it was tough getting down without crashing. If you went too fast down the bank and then hit the flat, ungiving ice, it could be a bad wreck. You could break a ski, break some bones flipping the snow machine and sled and metal, fifty-five-gallon drums loaded with gas on top of you, the two-foot-thick ice below.

  Worse, this creek at this crossing point was susceptible to overflow. What creates overflow is that, early on, the creek or river freezes over. But springs and other water sources continue to feed the creek, so more water is flowing unde
rneath the ice than there is room for it. So, the water breaks through somewhere and flows on top of the ice. Often the overflow is camouflaged by fresh snow. Say you stay out of it but your snow machine sinks into the overflow a foot or two. You can’t move the snow machine. It gets colder and colder, the overflow freezes. It is already a granular slush and can soon harden like concrete. If you do make it through the overflow, then you must hit the bank on the other side and rocket out without flipping the snow machine over on yourself. We made it, we all made it. The overflow was just to our left; Vicky and Julianne hit a bit of it, but they were light and powered through it. I let out a small yelp when we were all on the other side and had stopped to get instructions from Eric on the next obstacle. Eric told us that a long, narrow section with a tight trail lay ahead. Whatever you do, he warned, stay right on the trail I make. We did that section with no apparent problems.

  Right before we crossed the south fork of the Koyukuk River, we took the halfway-point break. It was not far north to the headwaters of the south fork and Horace Mountain (elev. 5,446 feet). Eric got off and flopped backward into the deep snow alongside the trail. In all directions all we could see was hundreds of miles of undefiled snow. Eric made a snow angel. I fell in on the other side of the trail and did the same, as did Julianne. Vicky and Rita walked down to get some cover from the riverbank. Elizabeth sat on the snow machine. How many snowflakes lay on top of each other in this country? Never had I been around snow like this. I could drop a quarter into it and it would drop through the snow to the bottom.

  Eric was excited about having a dog team at their house. I couldn’t believe they wanted one. Where would the food come from? There wasn’t much game out here; it was too cold for much to survive, much less thrive. I lay still on my back in the perfect snow, the sun soaking into me with its faraway power. I opened my eyes to find Eric standing over me.