“In the late seventies when I was sixteen, my friend and I, we bicycled across the United States from the West Coast to the East Coast. We collected signatures on a petition from people who believed in putting this part of the country into wilderness,” he said. “Now I live here.”
He’d been inspired to do that by my book A Walk Across America, he told me. Rita and Vicky walked back from taking a pee, a big job with all these layers. I found myself feeling guilty for being so cautious. For the past couple of days, I’d been feeling like a wolf around a trap. Several things just hadn’t looked right. But now I’d shaken that feeling, and I felt relieved. We rode on.
We’d dropped down into the frozen wetlands of the upper Koyukuk. Arctic Village was less than a hundred miles northeast. When we ran through about eight inches of fresh powder, it flew up and parted like the lightest waves in the world. We created clouds of snowflakes behind us. It was a beautiful series of sensations, combining movement, sight, the cold air on my face with the warm heart and body of Rita holding on behind me. We rode as one. It felt so free, somewhere between riding smooth ocean swells and flying.
Eric and Julianne taking a break on the winter trail in the Brooks Range. PHOTO BY RITA JENKINS
Another couple hours and we were to the edge of Chandalar Lake. Eric stopped us right before we drove atop its two or three feet of ice, which was then covered by two feet of snow that had been sculpted by the wind into wavy ridges. He said that on this end of the lake there could be dangerous overflow, even a hole in the ice from a spring bubbling up in the shallows. We sped onto it and crossed the danger zone without running into overflow, staying to the center. We were like a little caravan and we hoped our arrival would be victorious—another trip down the winter trail with no breakdowns, no emergencies.
Seeing the lights of our snow machines, as I’m sure their boys could by now, after a few weeks of seeing nothing new may have been exciting. How many people in our world could go a week or two, or a month or two, without seeing a headlight, even if it’s just the headlight of a snow machine? Or Mike, Pete, and Dan might really enjoy being in the wilderness alone. When we were about a mile away, close enough to see their house and its blue roof, built up on a high bank, Eric stopped and waited for us.
“Julianne, congratulations. You’re the youngest girl to make it this far on the winter trail.” She was nine and a half.
“Oh,” she said, and smiled, though all that showed through her wool face mask was her mouth and bright blue eyes. “Thanks, it was fun.” Julianne, like her mother, is a woman of few words. Julianne had adapted quickly to riding with Vicky, moving as one. Vicky turned and patted her on the shoulder with a snow-covered mitten. We blasted the last mile and floored it up the steep bank of the lake to their home. Their home was no little log cabin; it was impressive, almost like a mirage in the desert. How could they have built that way out here?
The Jayne homestead on Chandalar Lake is twenty-five miles south of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, about thirty miles north of the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, and about thirty miles east of Gates of the Arctic National Park. Directly behind the piece of lakeshore rises a mountain over six thousand feet that is home to several snow-white Dall sheep. They like the windblown heights in winter.
The world around us for millions of acres, now our world, was different shades of white, in different shapes. The lake was supposedly flat, but the wind had created intricate waves and ridges atop it as its currents curved the snow precisely. They were symmetrical, as pretty as white on white can be; it almost felt bad to run over them on the snow machine. But the next wind would perfect its creation all over again. The wind was one of the rulers of our new world. The mountains all around were rounded as foothills and pure white. Their lines were smooth and beautiful like the curve from Rita’s thin waist to the top of her hip and down to the beginning of her thigh. The mountains here were not sharp and steep, but seductive, inviting. Of course, they weren’t actually welcoming. Go to them, alone, or even with someone experienced, this time of year, and risk dying. Even the horizon appeared silver-white, the lowering sun a cold yellow with white and silver rings around it. The sunlight here at this time of the afternoon was cold like fluorescent lights.
All three boys were standing outside waiting for us. Mike, the oldest, was the stocky one, like a young bull. Pete was maybe an inch taller at five feet nine inches, but wiry. Mike looked straight at you, while Pete snuck a look. They immediately began unlashing the cargo, which was coated with a crust of snow and ice crystals. Dan, nine, their adopted son, was small but obviously strong. He was standing off to the side until Pete told him, in a tough tone, to come help. It was nine below zero—I remember looking at their thermometer—and the three boys had on just long-sleeved, cotton shirts, no hats, no gloves. I guess everything, even below zero, is relative.
The house was not a log cabin, the easiest structure to build out here. Eric and his sons had built a frame house. The siding was made from cedar shakes from Oregon, and its reddish orange color drew me to it, everything else was so white-cold. And it was not a little bitty space but appeared to have quite a bit of room. Four dormers came out of the blue roof, indications that Eric was a talented carpenter. He had made his living as one before he was a vet.
Every nail, every window, each door, the Canadian wood furnace, every tube of caulking, each screw, every piece of roofing, every inch of electrical wire, they had transported to this spot. The same went for every tub of Sheetrock mud, the toilet, every piece of blue metal roofing, every four-by-eight-foot piece of easily broken Sheetrock. All of it they had hauled here personally, almost all of it on the winter trail on a snow machine trip like the one we’d just made. Some of it, not much, had been flown out in a Beaver with floats and boated over in their little outboard. Why would anyone want to do such an extreme amount of work just to live here? It’s a huge undertaking to build your own home five miles from a Home Depot. Eric and his family, apparently, had a rich mix of skills and talents, daring and courage, and a deep need for the uninhabited deep-white silence of the Alaskan bush.
A NO. 9 LEVEL RISK
It’s not enough just to have a need for Alaska; to make it you must have a rare blend of many abilities. Near here last fall two men had been dropped off in search of their vision of the wilderness life. They thought they had what was required to tame it, or at least survive in it. They’d chartered a bush pilot and his Beaver, the Alaskan workhorse. The pilot flew them and their supplies in and landed on the north fork of the Chandalar River. No one knows why, but they’d chosen a spot seven miles upriver from a long-deserted mining camp called Caro. For some insane reason they chose a basin of landscape that trapped the cold. Since they were squatting, they may have just seen a spot off the river that the pilot thought he could land on and said, “Down there.” Surely they didn’t know it was one of the most frigid places on earth, thought to have reached one hundred below zero. Certainly they didn’t think the spot they chose was void of all edible life in winter, but it was. There was nothing to hunt that whole fall, winter, and spring. They must have been dangerously mistaken since they had so much ammunition and guns to hunt with.
You can be a hundred yards off a road in Alaska and break a leg and never be found. Where these men went, between Thazzik Mountain and the Hadweenzic River, there was no hope of being found. How did they ever expect to get out? They even brought in a woodstove that weighed over two hundred pounds. They would be dead by now if State Trooper Curt Bedingfield, the one who had rescued Eric by breaking trail, had not spotted their green canoe on a routine flyover while checking on wilderness moose hunters. They had no way to communicate with anyone. If Curt hadn’t flown over that fall afternoon, there was basically no chance he would have flown over that spot again in his seventy-three-thousand-square-mile territory. If their canoe had not caught some sunlight, if Curt had been concentrating on something in front of him, he would never have known they were there. They
had made the ultimate mistake: they had not contacted Curt before they’d headed into the best or the worst Alaska can offer.
If they hadn’t been rescued, just maybe one day after they’d died some Native men from Venetie, downriver on the Yukon flats, would have discovered their tortured little cabin. And maybe there would have been the remnants of a starved body, or two starved bodies, depending on if one had reverted to cannibalism. That is if a wolverine or grizzly hadn’t found the bodies with meat still on the bones. There would have been some of their equipment left depending on how many years it took for anyone to venture this deep into the wilderness. But if had been another winter or more, the sod roof of their cabin would have fallen in. That would have hidden the things they’d brought with them from Las Vegas and wherever else. If the young man Jon Krakauer wrote about in the book Into the Wild took a No. 5 level Alaskan risk, these fools took a No. 9 level risk. A No. 10 risk would be to jump out of a jet somewhere before Anchorage from thirty thousand feet with a pillowcase for a parachute.
They had done little research besides having read some books, and they didn’t have any winter survival skills; they’d come from Las Vegas. Coming to Alaska to make your dream come true and expecting to plunge in as deep as these men had is the mark of a true fool. The leader, Thomas, fifty-two, had tried Alaska in the summer once before and couldn’t make the wilderness thing happen by himself even then. This time he brought Ray, thirty-two, with him. Ray didn’t have the anchor of family keeping him connected to any place. Thomas dreamed of finding gold, getting rich beyond his most deluded fantasies. Ray must have been an easy sell, or perhaps desperate to disappear. They were sixty feet from the bedrock, which is where gold is; they only had two gold pans and a hand sluice box and no other way to get to it. How are you going to mine gold when it’s forty-five degrees below zero?
Getting dropped off where they did, when they did, with the supplies and skills they had, was an elaborate, slow-motion suicide plot. How could anyone be so arrogant about nature’s power? They had no—zero—mining experience; there was a million percent better chance of striking gold in Vegas at the quarter slots. They weren’t more than fifty miles from Eric and his family, but they might as well have been separated by an ocean. These men hadn’t brought in a snow machine, nor a set of snowshoes or a pair of skis. They could not have come to a place of greater desolation and difficulty. There was not one way to get out once they were snowed in. They did bring with them six heavy cases of fruit in metal cans, to fight off scurvy, when all they needed was a pound of vitamin C pills.
The first time Curt met them, in September, he analyzed their setup. He didn’t want their deaths on his soul. The first crazed mistake they’d made was to have covered the roof on their log cabin with moss and dirt. A medium wicked wind would have blown it all away, and if not that, the ice would have broken it in on them. Curt told them they needed to build a sod roof, about a foot thick, by laying sod on top of spruce poles as a foundation. They had even brought with them two tiny windows.
Thomas, the fifty-two-year-old, was the apparent leader. He lost sixty-two pounds in the approximately six months he and Ray survived in Alaska. They were living out there illegally, not unusual in the Alaskan bush, but couldn’t afford to charter a plane out, even if Curt arranged it for them. Plus they didn’t think they were in any danger. They had this wilderness-pioneer, gold-miner, trapper, live-off-the-land dream. Alaska makes people hallucinate, it takes hold of you, it makes some believe there is no gravity. They can enter the power and purity of it and be uninjured, jump from a mountaintop and not land on the rocks below. These two men didn’t know until Curt told them that there was almost no game where they “homesteaded.” They never saw a moose, even a rabbit, in over six months. They also hadn’t bothered to find out they had settled into a place so cold that seventy below zero wasn’t unusual, even one hundred below in that paralyzingly cold valley. When Curt flies, he checks the temperature at two thousand feet, where it is warmer than it is on the ground. One day at two thousand feet it was twenty below over Coldfoot and forty below over the basin where these men who dared frozen death lived.
Envision living in their fourteen-by-fourteen-foot spruce-log cabin, built near the river. The lower down in the basin the colder it was. Windows are covered with layers of plastic and so provide only a little escape, diversion, and if there’s nothing moving outside, maybe even a bit of inspiration, even if it’s the adrenaline-based fight-or-flight response. You’re shut inside the log cabin, the cracks chinked with moss and mud, except you didn’t know what you were doing and for who knows what reason, the chinking falls out. You could have read a book about cabins in arctic conditions, but you didn’t. When the mud falls out of the cracks, it is frozen, unusable like a brick. The moss is covered with deep snow, and besides it’s too cold some days to even go out. The cold attacks your hands and toes, wants to flash-freeze them. You stuff the cracks that let in the unrelenting invasion of killer cold with scraps of clothes. You don’t have extra clothes, though. The unbelievable cold is tracking you down; it’s invisible but finds you anyway and steals your tiny bit of comfort. You get these feelings—you know at first they are silly—that you want to kill the cold, or whatever causes it. You think about loading up your rifle and shooting at it. But you can’t kill winter; no one can change the tilt of the earth. So you blame your dilemma on Thomas, the guy who sold you on this deranged dream, a frigid, fiendish nightmare.
Speaking of Thomas, the one who lost over sixty pounds, he wakes up because the woodstove can’t heat the place. No matter how much wood they burn, it’s around zero inside. He’s lying there thinking about how little food is left. Plus, no one knows if that state trooper will ever be back. You haven’t seen anyone but each other for so long you wonder if he was ever really here. Even if he said he would check on us, he might be a masochist and just let us starve to death. Or he could die in a plane crash; there are plenty of those in the Brooks Range. That trooper, he seemed too nice, really; no one’s that nice anymore.
Thomas’s thinking, “If I get up and eat some food, will Ray hear me? What if I just kill Ray? Think how much more food there will be, but then Ray cuts and hauls a lot of the firewood and is strong, hauls water.” The cold has already made the skin on Thomas’s hands crack open. He covers his head from the cold and thinks, “Let damn Ray get up and stoke that damn woodstove that can’t keep us warm.” Why did they make the cabin so big? By now they had cut it in half, by hanging wool blankets that they could have been using to keep warm, to seven feet by seven feet. As Thomas lies there, being slowly tortured, he turns and an air space opens from his sleeping bag and the awful cold comes in to try to rob his body of warmth, of life.
At times sleep is unwanted because the thought comes back about creosote building up in the stovepipe and catching fire. Creosote is an oil generated by burning wood, and it builds up in a crystalline layer on the insides of stovepipes. If the pipe gets too hot and catches fire, the cabin will almost surely follow. Then they would be without shelter, except for a small tent. What if the wood-stove was crushed by the burning cabin as it fell in on itself, the ammunition all went off in the fire, the guns were burned up, and you only got out with the clothes you slept in? Then you couldn’t even kill yourself with a bullet.
A day for these men, knowing the cold was outside waiting to get them in the forever silence and white isolation, was an immense exercise in maintaining sanity. You could scream for a week yet no one would hear you. You could try to shoot at a jet flying over, but your bullet wouldn’t reach. You cannot call anyone, there is no road, no trail; five feet of snow closes you in as if it were a thousand-foot-deep ocean. You begin hitting the spruce tree with an ax while you cut firewood, trying to kill it because it is looking at you.
It’s too cold to go out but you must, otherwise there’s no wood, no water, no life. Maybe that would be better. Isn’t it true that before you freeze to death you get warm all over? You haven’t bathed
in months, you stink, and your clothes are now mostly ash gray.
Why do people put themselves in places like this? Why did Eric?
By the end of November when Curt went back to check on them, they had no food left, just $37. He knew they’d be low on food, so he brought them a hundred-pound sack of flour, some beans, sugar, and rice. He bought these goods with his own money in Fairbanks; he hauled them 250 miles to Coldfoot. Curt wondered before he went back to check on them in November if maybe one would have killed the other in a fit of cabin-fever rage. But they didn’t try to kill each other until the end of the winter, which is when the most domestic violence happens in Alaska. Would-be explosions controlled by discipline are controllable no more.
Thomas and Ray get another visit from their guardian angel around Christmas. He brought them a turkey and some sweet things as he dropped out of the sky and landed on skis by their cabin. Curt made one more drop of food to them one clear day in February. Right before Curt got there, almost terminal cabin fever had set in. Ray had attacked Thomas with a butcher knife because he thought he was eating too much food. Maybe Thomas stole two of the molasses cookies that Ray, the good cook, had made; they were to be eaten only on Sundays. They had been burning kerosene but had run out. They got some dim light from burning one candle at a time, and then those were gone too. After that there was fuzzy, dim daylight, and then too soon every day came the awful, silent, freezing dark. Solitary confinement in the worst prison in the United States would have been like a pleasure compared to their miserable months.
Once they began depending on Curt, they had to worry about whether the bad weather could settle in and stop his flying. Their failure was crushing them. What promises had Thomas made to Ray? When did the younger man figure out this Alaskan dream lined with pocketfuls of gold nuggets was a ridiculous idea, maybe even a malicious lie? Many Alaskan dreams have had foundations of sand like Thomas and Ray’s.
Looking for Alaska Page 39