Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  One of his grandmothers bought him a college graduation present, but died before she could give it to him. It was another piece of nylon rope. He knew what she meant by it—she meant it as inspiration, to remind Dean to follow his dreams. Getting that short piece of rope sparked some of his dreams all over again, especially the one about going to Alaska. That rope’s the reason he got this job teaching in Deering, and that rope has proved to him that sometimes your dreams can be even better when you actually live them in the daylight.

  Eric grew up in Salmon, Idaho. Growing up in a place named Salmon gives you a step up in Alaska on some guy like Dean, who grew up rarely wearing more than shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. Eric’s family is an influential and conservative family around Salmon; he grew up on a part of the family ranch. Salmon’s near Montana, about ninety miles north of Sun Valley, and has about three thousand people. Eric told me his family was strong and involved and included lawyers, judges, city council members. He said he decided that his role in the family was to take the place of his black-sheep uncle. His ideas for living involved perpetual fun and stretching mischief as far as he could. In a family that had short hair, he too grew his long. Eric’s got that sparkle in his face, that little-boy charm, that makes people like him right off. Both Eric and Dean could be classified as chick magnets, although obviously that ability was not one they wanted to develop or they would never have moved to Deering, where all the women are taken. Even if they weren’t, as a teacher you’re off-limits. Dean said he didn’t begin appealing to females until his sister, always the classy dresser, told him he needed to start tucking in his shirt.

  When Eric was locked in his room and grounded, he climbed out the window. When his car keys were taken, he took his dirt bike and a flashlight. He and his friends, the Salmon class of 1988, showed a creative side. When they wanted a day off, they marched through town protesting to get Martin Luther King Day off at school. Eric said there wasn’t an African-American for one hundred miles, but they succeeded. On a hill overlooking Salmon is a huge S, visible from town, with a number signifying the year. In 1985, a few of them snuck up there one night and changed S85 to SEX. There was a government teacher that Eric and a few buddies liked to torment; they spray-painted his pigs Day-Glo orange, green, and purple.

  Eric shocked a lot of people when he entered the army. He served in Desert Storm, and then right out of the army, he went to Boise State. He majored in Party 101 through 110; first semester his GPA was 0.0; second semester it was 0.25. He liked his psychology course, probably learned about himself. He ended up graduating from the University of Idaho, the family’s choice in higher education. Eric says that his rebellious days now help him to work with so many who are turned off by school, education. In college he met a guy whose dad and brother fished in seine boats in Prince William Sound out of Valdez. Eric became the skiff man. He’d sit out there, write songs, and think about what he was going to do with his life. Sitting there one day, Eric decided he would teach in Alaska. And that’s how Eric’s and Dean’s paths crossed and they came to live across the street from each other in Deering.

  There was a knock on the door—it was Reggie. Reggie follows Dean and Eric everywhere they go, which is simple to do in a place like Deering. It is impossible to hide, unless you take off on your snow machine looking for four or five thousand caribou, which we did, or go to the plateau above town and look for the musk ox herd, which we also did. Riding along with a caribou herd that numbered in the thousands across the snow-covered tundra was one of my most profound moments in Alaska. No matter how far we followed them there was never a fence, not for the hundreds of miles they roamed during their yearly migrations. To see the herd of musk ox with this year’s crop of baby musk ox protected in the center of the herd when anyone comes around was more inspiring than I had thought possible. Their long, flowing hair and their stocky, powerful bodies moved so forcefully atop the tundra. They like being up on the ridges and hilltops where the winds, not only friend to the Eskimo but to them as well, blew the snow away to make it easier for them to feed on the tundra.

  Reggie, a large and powerful young Eskimo, is in junior high school, but he has the build of a man. He remembers not only Eric’s and Dean’s birthdays but their parents’ as well. He remembers when Eric’s mother came to visit. Reggie wants to play the guitar and sing just like Johnny Cash. He comes over to their homes, often a couple times a day, to pick and grin. He never thinks twice about wanting to hang out with his teachers, any time of the day or night. Both Dean and Eric have big and caring hearts and never turn Reggie away; they give so much of themselves. When he saw my microphone and found out I was from Tennessee, he wanted me to record him singing Johnny Cash. I did. One night, Reggie’s mom and grandmother invited Dean, Eric, and me over for dinner. Reggie’s mom is the cook at school. Since the people of Deering, especially the kids, so seldom see a stranger, every time I walked down the one and only street that the houses are on, I had a parade of kids following me or calling out, “Hello, Peter Jenkins.”

  Of all the stories I heard and the people I met in Deering, the stories told to me by Millie, an Eskimo and preschool teacher, best illustrated the intimate relationship these people have with their world. The abundant life and the seasons that affect them are what rule Deering. I had to be around Deering awhile before Dean could get the people to tell me stories. They saw me at graduation, at the end-of-school picnic, their kids told them I’d spoken in their classroom. Everybody in town, especially the children, loved Rebekah; she had come before me and laid the groundwork. I couldn’t be too bad if I had a daughter like Rebekah. Right before I was to leave Deering, Millie told Dean it would be all right to bring me by her mother’s house so we could talk.

  Gladys Iyatunguk is Millie’s mother. Both have some gray hair, but I’m not sure how old either woman is. Both are totally alive and involved in living their lives as Eskimo people of the tundra and ocean and rivers and ice. Millie’s voice is like a whisper but has incredible strength. I think this Eskimo way of speaking, soft, slow, focused, and songlike, comes from being listened to and from living surrounded by so much beautiful silence and life.

  They told me about mouse trading. Gladys said the first part of September, they go into the tundra looking for where the mice have been gathering a root called mussu from a grass that grows in bunches. They look for slight disturbances in the ground where the mice have been building their caches, mouse-size, underground storage places where they store food for the long winter months. Mussu is a root from a grass with purple flowers, pretty flowers, Gladys said. In the fall the flowers and leaves drop and all you see is the stem. Gladys said when they find the grass growing in gravel, the roots are tough.

  The mussu has been gathered for hundreds of years for food. Gladys had learned from her mother and aunties when they went out in the tundra to pick mussu. Gladys said we needed to try some; she had some mussu in seal oil frozen in a plastic bag in the freezer. Millie pulled it out of the freezer, where it sat next to the Neapolitan ice cream. The roots were as thick as a pencil and white. Gladys said they are sweet; I thought they tasted like a raw or boiled peanut. Gladys liked them best soaked in seal oil.

  Gathering this mussu is called mouse trading. To me it illustrates the people’s fantastic appreciation of their environment. Most people would never see what they find. This illustrates how they observe the subtlest of details in nature and understand what it can do for the people. It’s called mouse trading because first they must find the mouse’s home. They gently open the cache, which shows itself as a bit of freshly dug dirt, to reveal what is inside. Gladys told us that some mice pick the mussu very clean and stack it neatly, while some are sloppy and don’t pick the roots perfectly clean of the little “hairs” that grow on them. All mice are not the same, she said, and smiled—just like people. Gladys’s eyes are bright and lively. As always in any Native conversation, the elder, Gladys, did most of the talking.

  “Sometimes you use your f
ingers to feel around in their burrow feeling for the cache and, eey, you feel a mouse.”

  As they are kneeling on the ground, gently entering the mouse’s house with their fingers and taking its mussu, they do not just take. They trade. Before they leave on their four-wheelers, Millie leaves cut-up potatoes and carrots and celery in the mouse cache so the mice will have something in return. To trade like this with such a tiny creature that has no way of demanding any equality or any fairness shows such concern that survival is tough around Deering, for mice as well as people.

  Normally Millie and Gladys gather about six quart-size bags to last for a year. It is not cooked, but eaten with seal oil or plain. Millie said she liked it best eaten with dried fish or boiled meat. After our mussu, Millie and Gladys served us some of the best food ever to come out of Alaska, a bowl full of salmonberries. Dean and I thanked them for their story and their time. I would try to integrate the concept of mouse trading into the way I lived, I thought as we walked across the street to Eric’s for tea.

  * * *

  In a couple of days Dean, Eric, and I would be leaving Deering. Eric has an old Volkswagen bus; and he and Cody and Eric’s daughter were going to spend the summer on one long road trip. Dean was going to take the year off; he wasn’t sure what he was going to do. He would try to strike up a relationship with an old girlfriend in Tampa; if that didn’t work out, maybe he would go to a wooden-boat-building school near Seattle. I thanked them both for what they’d done for Rebekah and me and for introducing us to their world. I left the day after Eric and Cody did. Cody is such a large Alaskan malamute it might cost more to fly him to Anchorage than me.

  19

  Hobo Night

  It was Hobo night at the Yukon Bar in Seward. I had heard a couple college students who worked at Icicle Seafoods call it “the church of Hobo” since he played every Sunday night. The Yukon is about three blocks from Resurrection Bay. Hobo Jim, Alaska’s rebel folksinger, has made his living for a couple of decades playing the saloons, festivals, and fairs in every fishing village, town, and city in Alaska. He came to Alaska as a hitchhiker, looking like Che Guevara. In the seventies his shoulder-length hair and full beard were as black as a Greek fisherman’s. His last name is Varsos; his father is of Greek descent, his mother Scottish. His beard may be mostly gray, but he can still outperform just about everyone, playing before five thousand or seventy-five. He is such a gifted entertainer that listening to his CDs isn’t enough. He enchants people; the audience has more fun than they can remember, even when he’s yodeling. I’ve seen him sing and play guitar for three hours straight, threatening to take a break but never doing it. Before the night’s over, he’ll probably be singing from on top of a table.

  Some people followed Hobo around in Alaska the way people Outside followed the Grateful Dead. Wherever he was playing, Homer, Soldotna, Palmer, Seward, or some biker bar near Girdwood, they showed up. Some people have been going to his shows since they were eighteen-year-old cannery workers just planning to summer in Alaska. Now they’re in their late thirties, they never went back to wherever they came from, and they’ve been fans of Hobo’s all this time.

  We had Julianne and Luke, Rebekah and Aaron with us. Almost everyone from our family was back in Alaska now, except Jed and Brooke. Jed was in Governors School in Tennessee studying theater and Brooke was planning her wedding. The Yukon Bar’s ceiling is covered with dollar bills that people have autographed with the town or city they’re from; I’d put one up right over the front little round table where we always sat. We got there early so the kids could hear him do some songs; they’d make requests before they had to leave. As usual, Julianne would request “The Iditarod Song.” Hobo was running a bit behind tonight; he’d got caught in some construction traffic. We sat and watched him unpack his amp and speaker. He slung his trusty guitar over his shoulder. That motion made me remember the time Hobo and his friend Mike Sipes took me, Rusty Jones, and Rusty’s friend Gerry Fatzer on a walk in the wilderness.

  It was in 1996, and we’d made a “guy trip” to hang out with Hobo. That brief walk challenged me, and my tame world. Not far down the trail, it terrified me. We were staying at an isolated log lodge on Lake Tustamena owned by two of Hobo’s friends, Mike and Linda Sipes from Soldotna. Hobo had written some of his most famous songs on napkins at their former restaurant. Linda is a gourmet cook; she and Mike are both wine connoisseurs. Mike, an intense guy, is originally from California and reminds me of a Special Forces colonel I once knew. You would never ask Mike about his life, but you would trust him with yours. I would be doing that shortly. I would never have thought as we took off from their lodge near the banks of Bear Creek that some of us might come back wounded, or worse.

  There were five of us. Shafts of sunlight broke through the swaying spruce and sent spikes of angelic light to the forest floor. It was possible that no human had ever set foot in parts of that forest before. The bouncing beams of sunlight highlighted isolated spots of the wilderness. The trail brought us to the middle of a meadow filled with tall grass and wildflowers. On either side of it were deep, dark evergreen woods. About fifty yards off to our left was a small stand of slightly bent white birch trees, and amid the trees stood a mother moose. She moved nervously, looking down at the ground below her, then behind her into the dark forest. Suddenly, a newborn stood up, unsteady on its long, spindly legs. She nudged her calf into the light and out into the natural meadow, surprisingly, toward us.

  The grass on either side of the trail was neck high. The temperature was perfect, low sixties, and wildflower and spruce scents sweetened the air. Mike slowed down and pointed to a fresh trail that intersected ours—at a ninety-degree angle—coming through the middle of the high grass.

  “The brown bears are in here right now. They cross this trail going to the creek, which is just about fifty yards off to our left, to feed on the salmon. When they get enough, they go back into the woods to sleep in the shade.”

  “Really,” Rusty said.

  Right then I could feel my nerves jumping a bit. We walked about fifty feet more and reached a big circle of bare ground, like a small bomb crater, about ten feet in diameter. What had once been deep, thick grasses were gone. An indentation in the surviving grass on the edge of the crater marked where something had lain down, and a hole about two feet wide and three feet deep had been dug in the crater’s middle.

  “What happened there?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing much,” Hobo answered. “Some brownie dug that up looking for the yellow jacket nest in the ground. They like to eat the larvae.” That was when Hobo swung his “elephant gun” off his shoulder into his hands the same way he’d just swung his guitar.

  “How can they stand getting stung by those wicked yellow jackets?” I asked.

  “They have outrageous pain tolerance,” Mike answered. “You can’t imagine what they can take.” I did not want to imagine. Mike mentioned that first the black bears come to this creek seeking the salmon. Then the supreme creatures, the brownies, come and chase the blackies away. Or eat them, whichever the blackies prefer.

  We passed several more of the brown bears’ trails intersecting ours. What if we met one face-to-face? Although the largest brown bears can be ten feet tall and weigh over a thousand pounds, if one was walking in the tall grass alongside us, we wouldn’t see it until it was right on top of us.

  My short-lived state of nature-induced nirvana was gone. We passed several more bear-made craters. Inside two of them the dirt was still damp—they had just been dug.

  “Mike, what is the worst thing that can happen to us out here as far as these bears are concerned?” Rusty asked, worst-case-scenario lawyer that he is. We were only about three-quarters of a mile from the cabin, and Mike had said we’d hike about five miles up and back.

  Mike stopped and gathered us around. He had some Italian-made shotgun over his shoulder. Hobo and Mike were definitely not the lie-down-and-play-dead types or the bear-bells types; most Alaskans know bet
ter.

  “The worst thing is coming up on a big, old male brownie lying on a kill. They will kill a moose and let it lie there until its gets rank. They are so strong they have been seen carrying a dead eight-hundred-pound moose off the ground slung over their back.”

  I got hung up on the thought of how powerful and fast a brown bear must be to be able to kill and carry a moose.

  “They get real protective over their kills. They probably think humans are there to take it away from them.” Suddenly two huge black ravens cawed at each other; I nearly jumped up into the tree next to me.

  “Probably the next worst thing that could happen is to come across a mother bear with twin two-year-old cubs. The two-year-olds are big enough to kill a man or two and act like curious teenagers. They might run up to you, take a swat at you, maybe just testing you or wanting to play, but one swipe with those powerful claws and they can rip your head off.”

  “I hope we get to see some bears,” Rusty actually said after that. He’s been a successful lawyer too long, I thought; you cannot outnegotiate a brown bear.

  “It’s doubtful we will see any bears,” Mike said, “but if we do, you three stand behind Hobo and me. They usually smell us and take off before we see them. They have an excellent sense of smell and not very good eyesight.”

  We came to a part of the trail that went up on a narrow ridge, into a dark hemlock woods.

  About halfway through it we flushed some grouse. The sound of their flapping wings as they rocketed out of the dense hemlock was a new sound to me, and I didn’t think of benign little birds when I first heard it.