Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  Jerry doesn’t like to be far from the farm. He raised his family in the farmhouse he was raised in, then he and Mom moved up the gravel road, still on their original 240 acres, to the corner of Moyer and Morrice Road, into the house Jerry’s dad and mom moved to when Jerry and his new wife had moved in. You look out any window of their house in spring, summer, fall, and you see either alfalfa growing, corn growing, or Holstein cows gazing. In winter the land rests. But Jerry is never idle.

  And that would make it tough on him as we waited around the lodge for our guide, Larry Fiedler, to come in from the wilds where he was with another client, Bruce from Wisconsin. They’d been gone over nine days to a spike camp on some lonesome lake on the edge of the Lake Clark Wilderness Area.

  My friend Kevin had been a hunting guide for Jim Harrower when Kevin was new to Alaska. I’d asked Kevin to suggest an outfitter who could take my father-in-law and me into the bush. Jerry has always wanted to hunt in Alaska, and since he’s a deer hunter, he would like a chance at the largest member of the deer family, the moose. Jerry’s a purist; he wanted to be as far out in the bush as we could get. He’d heard people did float trips, but he wasn’t interested. I told him that going into the bush could be extremely demanding, that there was no way we could do it without a guide; he said fine, get one. After I’d met Jim Harrower and one of his young guides, Arno, from Germany, I called Jerry. I explained that if we were going to go out as far as he wanted, we’d have to do some serious walking through bogs, swamps, tundra, up and down mountains through seemingly impregnable forest. There would be no bridges on the wild side of the Alaska Range, the west side, but plenty of rivers. These kinds of trips, searching for bull moose in Alaska, taxed the youngest and toughest Alaskans. The saying was too that the work didn’t begin until you got your moose because then you had to pack out all the meat on your back, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of it. The hindquarter, for example, could not be deboned; carrying just one out could be over 150 pounds. Jerry didn’t feel that he could carry one of those anymore, and I told him that I seriously doubted I could either, but that I’d be his secondary packer. Larry, whoever he was, would have to take the biggest loads.

  This, my last experience in Alaska, was meant to be a tribute to my father and my father-in-law. Jerry was the only one still alive. My dad had died on December 5, 1999, about six and a half months after we’d come to Alaska. Speaking at his memorial service was one of the most impossible challenges I’ve ever faced. I still pick up the phone and start dialing his number, but there’s no phone service where he is. Often, I felt like a parentless child, even though I wasn’t. I was so blessed to have all the family I did; I was just missing some anchors that I’d thought would never be gone. Since the death of my father, I was determined to give more, love more, be more available, sacrifice more. I didn’t expect perfection, I just wanted to do more for those I love.

  Jerry’d trained for this adventure for months, walking in his hunting boots, carrying his rifle, there on the farm in Michigan. He’d call us in Alaska, ask me how much exercise I was getting. He’d researched every type of clothing, worked up special loads for the bullets he would use at his own shooting range, using some machine that calculated velocity and all kinds of other things that were beyond me. So as we waited, I could tell Jerry was becoming frustrated. He began making comments that he’d never been so idle in his whole life. And that was true. He was ready to be out there doing what he’d planned for almost a year.

  Being a planner and list maker, for the first time in his life Jerry began keeping a diary. It helped click off the minutes and hours and days that we waited for Larry.

  On Sunday morning, September 10, Jerry wrote, “Eberhard Brunner and his German client arrived back in the lodge early last night. They hunted for moose at Grizzly Flats with no luck for 8–9 days. It is supposed to be a nice camp with good view and rolling terrain. Jim Harrower told Peter that will be our spot when Larry, our guide, is available. If weather changes, it should be good for moose.”

  After these long days of waiting, to hear that these two men spent eight or nine days and saw only one black bear way up on the mountain was not good. After all this planning and hoping, I surely didn’t want Jerry not to see the moose he’d come so far to get.

  Jerry’s back was beginning to bother him. I fired up the sauna for him a few times and we took some walks on a trail beside the Stony River. Every so often Jerry would stop and sit on a stump. He is a man of such pride, and of course he vividly remembers when he was in his prime. What a prime it was; he was tough and stoic and tireless. I walked at his pace, which was fine, but tried not to seem as if I were slowing down. Jerry often commented on what a walker I was, and that his feet were his weak link. Most farmwork requires upper-body strength, your hands, your arms, what’s between your ears. Don’t ever think today’s farmers are dumb; they are some of the most intelligent, capable, productive, efficient people on earth. Since being Jerry’s son-in-law, I will never wish for perpetual sunshine again either.

  To come on this trip he had begun his hill walking on the annual July 4 trip to their cabin in the upper peninsula of Michigan, known as the UP to some of us. He and Dorothy, who have one of the best marriages I’ve ever known, began walking about two miles a day. I think Dad decided that when he turned seventy, he would spend that year preparing for and having one of the biggest adventures of his life. A few years prior he’d begun pumping down the herbs, which Rita had got him interested in. By herbs, I’m talking antioxidants and the like. Then he devised a walk two miles up and down hills in the UP, and then on the family farm. He carried a twenty-pound pack and then increased it to thirty. He carried his rifle, wore his new boots. The other days he did aerobic treadmill and stretching. He changed his diet and lost thirty pounds. He knew Alaska was a supreme challenge at any age, and he was right, as he usually is, in a humble way. He did his own Jerry Jorgensen Boot Camp, Drill Sergeant Jerry Jorgensen, Private Jerry Jorgensen.

  And here we were with Jim Harrower, world-renowned Dall sheep hunter and Alaskan bush outfitter, and we’d been here seven days, looking at some of the world’s most dramatic stone mountain peaks dusted with snow, my second termination dust. Below them were foothills burning with the deep reds of blueberry bushes. Looking through a spotting scope, we could see several black bears feeding. Below them were the yellows and oranges of Alaska’s quickly passing fall. In five days, I’d seen changes. And always the silver-green Stony River rolled by, all this was good for sitting, meditating; taking pictures is not Jerry’s thing. Action is, following through on a plan of action. I was here to see that it all came to pass. I could not be frustrated by anything Jerry said. This was all about him.

  On Thursday morning, September 14, Jerry wrote, “Chris, the camp pilot, who usually flies for FedEx to Russia, has already made two trips by 9:45 bringing Harry, who is the hunter we’ve been waiting for to get his moose. Chris has gone to get Larry (our guide) now. Hopefully we will fly out in the P.M. if Larry gets ready to take two more hunters, ‘us.’ Peter has sauna fire started for therapy for my back. Harry, from northern California, got his moose. I took my 2-mile walk along the river while Harry was in the sauna. After a walk and my sauna, my back feels much better. The word seems official that ‘author guy’ and ‘the old farmer’ are heading out today. If so, I’ll have a gun in hand tomorrow.”

  GRIZZLY FLATS

  That evening Jerry’s diary recorded the good news, “Don just loaded our gear in trailer behind ATV and headed for landing strip. It’s 3:25 P.M. and put us on 1-hour notice to fly.” There’s always good with the bad. Chris flew Jerry, Larry, and a bunch of our gear over to Grizzly Flats, a flat spot halfway up a mountain with a valley below, the bare mountain above. They would have to land on a field of blueberry bushes and brush. Jerry was ready to land on anything, after all that waiting, as long as it wasn’t a crash landing. Chris made a second trip to fly me in.

  “We landed on tundra in blueberries and low
bush cranberries. Peter came on 2nd trip with rest of gear with Chris in Super Cub about 6:00 P.M. Larry got water out of a fast stream about 50 yards down from our tiny cabin. After being there about an hour, Larry spotted a 55–57'' bull moose wandering along ridge 250 yards from camp. We couldn’t shoot him because you can’t shoot the day you fly in. We had a Spam-and-cheese pizza for supper. We organized our gear and made plans for tomorrow’s hunt, which means trying to find the bull. Time to turn in, it’s 10 P.M.”

  Our new guy-home was dug into the side of a hillside, just under the top. At one time this little hut, about eighteen feet wide by twenty-eight feet long, was on top of the hill, but some storms blowing in from the former Soviet Union or the Bering Sea exerted their dominance over this man-made trifling combination of two-by-fours, plywood, windows, and insulation. It would have blown away but it was held down by cables. Now the backside of it was dug into the hillside. The front had five eighteen-by-thirty-eight-inch windows. Our tiny, narrow shelter faced almost straight south into a colossal valley that seemed to spread out into forever. This could not have been a more perfect home away from home for Jerry. We had shelter, it could snow, it could rain almost continuously as it had on Eberhard and his German client. The wind could try to blow us away. We had clothing to handle all this, but living in a small tent for a week was not what Jerry deserved for his biggest adventure away from Jorgensen Farms.

  Our first day was sunshine and even at forty-five degrees the windows let in enough solar energy to warm up the place. There were four bunks. Larry and Jerry took the bottom ones. Larry decided after seeing me attempt to squeeze into the one over him that he should switch with me. He said something about thinking I was considerably younger than I am, so he’d given me the top bunk. Larry was a charming person you liked immediately. He was thirty-three, powerfully built, about five feet ten inches tall, 185 pounds. When he was in junior high, he won awards in the national Junior Olympics for weight lifting. Part of the concept of spending a few days at Stony River Lodge, other than waiting for your guide, was for Jim Harrower to check out the hunters he didn’t know. He could quickly analyze a person’s physical capacities, mental toughness, and shooting ability, everyone sighting in his rifle under Don’s watchful gaze. Jim had put us in the perfect spot. We could sit on this knoll and literally gaze over several hundred square miles of country. Above us was open tundra-laced mountainside, rising to over five thousand feet. We were at about two thousand feet. Larry hoped we’d see moose below us. The land dropped off steadily over a thousand feet in elevation to the Stony River, which we could clearly see winding along. A couple times we saw distant smoke on some sandbar where wilderness hunters or adventurers were floating the river maybe five miles away. In certain directions we could probably see fifty miles or more.

  Larry was our boss, Jerry was the reason we were here, I was the “do-whatever.” Larry told us we’d be sitting on the knoll above the hut, a 360-degree vista. We would spend several hours every day with our binoculars to our eyes, glassing the little marshy openings and open tundra. Larry said sometimes if the sun was out, a bull moose’s extremely wide antlers would reflect the sun and show up in the eternal green below like someone holding up a white T-shirt. It could show up as a tiny speck three miles away, larger if it was closer. It was doubtful one would come close as on the night we’d arrived. Bull moose use their concave antlers and large ears to hear the slightest noise, the way a radar dish focuses radio waves. Jerry wore two hearing aids; he’d already lost one on one of our walks. We’d have to whisper a lot, Larry said; that would be quite a challenge. I’ve always had excellent eyesight and am good at noticing the slightest movement. The first day we spent several hours sitting on the ground, kneeling, just watching. I spotted a golden eagle soaring up a slight valley behind us. A couple caribou were a couple miles up in the tundra. A small owl flittered over, hunting. Two female moose were in a lake three miles or so below us. Larry, who’d grown up in Kansas, told me that although Jerry was in outstanding shape for a seventy-year-old, we’d have to locate a moose within a mile, no more than two miles; if Larry thought it was right, we’d stalk it. From around 7 A.M. until midmorning we glassed the wilderness.

  I’m not sure what the correct definition of wilderness is. That’s one thing about sitting on a rock and staring into the wild: you can think about these things. The wild is a place where the balance of nature is about attempting to survive. Predators prey on weaker, slower, smaller predators. The wilderness is not the Garden of Eden, it’s about taking and creating life. We humans are no different; some of us are so far removed from the killing part that we’ve lost perspective.

  Some past hunter or guide had left a National Park Service publication out here under my foam mattress with some other reading materials. After a while you read anything, even the back of Spam cans. The publication said:

  To most of us, the vast stretches of forest, tundra, and mountain lands in Alaska constitute a wilderness in the most absolute sense of the word. In our minds, this land is wilderness because it is undisturbed, pristine, lacking in obvious signs of human activity. To us undisturbed land is unoccupied or unused land. But in fact, most of Alaska is not wilderness, nor has it been for thousands of years.

  Much of Alaska’s apparently untrodden forests and tundra land is thoroughly known by people whose entire lives and cultural ancestry is intimately associated with it. Indeed, to the Native inhabitants, these lands are no more an unknown wilderness than are the streets of a city to its residents.

  The fact that we identify Alaska’s remote country as wilderness derives from our inability to conceive of occupying and utilizing land without altering or completely eliminating its natural state. But the Indians and the Eskimos have been living this way for thousands of years. Certainly then, theirs has been a successful participation as members of an ecosystem.

  We pick up Jerry’s diary: “After lunch we walked north on the ridge on centuries-old game trails. Some wolf and moose tracks along the way, plus scrubbed-up trees. It’s obvious with all the wolf and grizzly sign, their dropping loaded with caribou and moose hair, that the moose and caribou are under pressure. Larry said he’s only seen 5 moose calves the last two years, a bad sign. We crossed three creeks and stopped at the Hell Hole about a mile and a half from camp.”

  I’m sure Larry wanted to take Jerry and me, with small packs and rifles, walking through this country on this ridgeline to see what Jerry could do. If it came time and we saw a bull moose below us, Larry wanted to know how fast Jerry could move. This trail was a wild-animal highway. They used it for ease of travel. Predators such as wolves could do the same thing we were doing: see a moose in the open, go and try to get it. The winter caretaker at Jim’s lodge, Arno, said that the worst time for these moose is when they calve. The bears and wolves follow the cows and grab calves almost as soon as they hit the ground. He has found several fresh scat piles with baby moose hooves in them.

  As we walked the trail silently, some past predator’s spirit came upon me. In terms of history, it hasn’t been long since my ancestors, covered in fur clothes, walked trails like this in what is now Europe searching for something to kill to feed their families.

  Jerry: “I hope we will see the bull we saw last night, again. This country separates the men from the old men. Peter and Larry are both good walkers. They haven’t had to carry me in yet. It is truly a great experience just being out here. It is down to 36° already at 9:30 P.M. Time to go to bed. For the third morning in a row it is 26°. However we have a sprinkle of snow and a very cold wind. I guess the windchill index is near zero. There was no need for towels, washcloth, and soap on the list, baby wipes are the standard option. Larry and Peter are freezing on the hill, where they are looking for moose, one or the other is coming down every half hour to warm a little. We started kerosene heaters for the first time.” Larry had told us he does not like to start heaters; he keeps things spartan so hunters will not get too comfortable and not want to
go out.

  “About 11:30 (freezing still), Peter spotted a bull moose about ½ mile below us and moving left to right through the trees. We all get to see him but he was moving too fast to intercept. We are spending fourteen-plus hours a day glassing.”

  It had now been about four days of looking and searching the wetlands below, hoping to catch a bull moose move in the dense evergreens, hoping that there would be one coming along the trail. We’d passed several bushes and small, cold-and-wind-stunted trees that a bull moose had trashed with his antlers. They do this to clean off the velvet when they first appear, and to mark their territory. Right now the rut was either in or close, and bull moose were gathering up as many cows as possible. Larry told us stories about the loudest sounds one could imagine when two equally matched bulls had fought to gain control over potentially breedable females. Larry said the same thing goes on at some bar in Anchorage called the Bush Club. Jerry didn’t hear that one.

  Jerry: “We didn’t see anything on the evening watch. There can’t be many animals here.”

  Fortunately both Jerry and I greatly enjoy living like this. That night there was another dinner with Spam chopped up in freeze-dried noodles. It was time for a bit of humor; Jerry was getting a bit discouraged, which for a farmer is a hard place to get to. I told him how I sometimes called Rita “Jerita” and Julianne “Jerrianne,” because they reminded me of him. That fell with a thud. It had worked before. Larry was writing a letter to his wife and new baby daughter back in Girdwood where they lived. I told him about a skit I’d seen on Saturday Night Live about Bill and Hillary watching TV. That one bombed. Dad watched sports, news, and probably more than anything the Weather Channel. I picked up a can of Spam. Jerry had said, without any levity tonight, that his wife would never serve him Spam. On the back of the can, there was actually Spam marketing. It said that it cost $15 to join the official Spam Fan Club for one year. For the fifteen bucks you get a “members only” Spam Fan Club T-shirt, membership certificate, membership card. (Can you imagine pulling that out when a state trooper pulled you over for aggressive driving?) They actually had recipes, a quarterly newsletter, and a number to call, 1-800-LOVE-SPAM. Larry was listening, he laughed. And so did Jerry.