The Final Frontiersman Read online

  Irene was nearly in tears. “Erich,” she screamed. “Are you crazy!” “Bist du verrückt! Sinnlos! We’re going home. Jetzt! Sofort!”

  By early evening Erich Korth had sobered up, though he was still looking for a fight. When Heimo walked into the living room where his father was sitting, Erich Korth reminded him that it was time for a haircut. Heimo was still furious with his father about the day’s events. “We’ll see,” he replied. That was all the provocation Erich Korth needed. He jumped out of his chair and grabbed Heimo by the back of the neck. Heimo cried out, and Irene came running out of the kitchen. “You’ll do as I say,” Korth yelled at his son. “You’ll do as I say, won’t you!” he yelled again. Irene was trying to insert herself between Heimo and his father when Erich Korth threw a punch. The blow caught Irene across the eye and her head snapped back. When Erich Korth saw what he had done, he stopped and stood there in stunned silence. Erich Korth had always reserved his anger for his children; he was never violent toward his wife. Heimo screamed at his father now, though Irene Korth insisted that she was okay. Her eye was never the same though. It always drooped a little after that.

  In addition to being a drinker, Erich Korth was also an autocrat with a temper, and growing up, Heimo got the brunt of his father’s rage. His father had a special belt that hung from a hook on his bedroom door that he used when he felt that Heimo was out of line. The beatings were sometimes savage and persisted for many years.

  The last beating Heimo ever got was a particularly fierce one. Heimo was sixteen, a sophomore in high school, and starting to fill out, his muscles toned now by daily swim team workouts. His father scoffed at his efforts, but Heimo enjoyed swimming, especially the butterfly, where he had the strength to propel his body out of the water with a swift dolphin kick and a vigorous, near violent thrust of his arms. Heimo also loved diving. He came alive on the diving board, an actor twisting his body into sleek, beautiful forms. He loved the feeling of lifting off the board, that last step, and then the drive of his knee. Next thing he knew, he’d hit the board with both feet, feel its spring, and then he was floating. Time seemed to stop.

  Heimo arrived home after swim team practice later than usual. His mother had kept his supper warm in the oven, and his father was sitting in the living room reading the paper. He had a Harvester cigar in one hand and a can of beer on the table beside him. As Heimo walked into the living room, he threw his gym bag on the floor and returned to the kitchen. Taking a seat at the table, he poured himself a glass of milk and drank it. “Two or three porkchops?” his mother asked. “Three,” Heimo answered, and dug into a pile of sauerkraut. His mother set three porkchops on his plate. From the living room, Erich Korth was listening. No one living under his roof would act like that. Erich Korth lay down his paper and came stomping into the kitchen.

  “Your mother kept your goddamn food warm for you, and you don’t even say please or thank you?” Heimo continued eating as if he hadn’t heard his father. “You son of a bitch,” his father yelled, but still Heimo wouldn’t acknowledge him. Erich Korth grabbed his son’s plate and jerked it from the table. Heimo got up from his chair and walked away, calmly, as if he’d finished his meal and was simply leaving the room. His father caught up with him in the living room. “You son of a bitch!” he yelled again, grabbing Heimo by the shirt collar and whirling him around. Heimo was as tall as his father now and they stood nose to nose. Heimo didn’t move. He could smell his father’s breath, the nauseating scent of beer and cigar. “If you want to stay in this house, get some manners!” Erich Korth yelled. Heimo was determined not to budge. For once he would defy his father. His father began to push him. Then came the fist across the forehead, a hit that sent Heimo to the floor. Heimo remembers seeing Angie, his sister, and her friends run from the hall into the living room. Moments later, they rushed out into the backyard. All the while, Irene Korth was screaming at her husband to stop.

  Heimo curled up and protected his head with his arms, and his father kicked at him viciously. Still Heimo didn’t say a word. He didn’t plead or fight back or scramble away, and this angered his father even more. Erich Korth had worked himself into a pitch and Heimo felt another blow across the side of his head, just above his ear. He curled up into a tighter ball and waited. Then everything was quiet.

  Heimo sat up slowly and realized that his father was gone. He could hear his mother outside yelling. He touched his head with his hand and he saw the blood. There was blood on the carpet, too. A chair lay on the floor. Heimo figured out what just happened. The hardest blow had come when his father hit him with the chair. Heimo took off his T-shirt and held it to his head. When his mother returned she took a tray of ice from the freezer. She broke the ice into a fresh towel, put it on the bleeding cut, and stroked his head with her other hand.

  Heimo claims now that he’s come to terms with his father’s anger. “I love him, he’s my dad,” Heimo says. “But me and the old man, we just ground gears. He wanted me to join him in the plumbing business, but I hated the routine, eight to five. To me, that’s prison. He couldn’t understand that. For him it was the only way. The old man was rigid like that—his way or the highway.”

  Heimo says now that perhaps his father was only defending his choices, that his anger might have been nothing more than fear. Perhaps he was looking for his son’s approval, for some confirmation that his life had been worthwhile, that his oldest son respected him. An aunt speculates that Erich Korth never recovered from the disappointment of having to leave Germany. “It was Irene who wanted to leave,” she says. “Erich’s plumbing partner in Germany became a rich man, and Erich had to start all over, learning a new language and everything. I don’t think he ever got over that.”

  Mitigating circumstances or not, Heimo says, “If he was to come back to life, I’d give him a good chewing-out. ‘What was all that shit about?’ I’d ask him. For a long time, it really pissed me off. But later on he mellowed, and he tried to say he was sorry in his own way.”

  “Sure, Dad was sorry,” says Angie Korth, Heimo’s sister. “Dad ruled with a heavy hand. Later on, I think he regretted that. He just didn’t know how to express his love. He never understood Heimo, but slowly he came to terms with Heimo’s lifestyle. Ultimately, I think he was very proud of Heimo, and he loved him, but he just didn’t know how to show it.”

  Lisa Korth, Heimo’s youngest sister, adds, “It was Heimo’s dream to go to Alaska, but there were sacrifices. He missed part of our lives. And he didn’t ever really know who Mom and Dad were, especially Dad. Mom was always the loving caregiver, but there was more to her. And there was much more to Dad than Heimo ever knew. He’s a lot like Dad in some ways. He hates to hear it, but it’s true.”

  In 1977 Erich Korth called up Heimo while Heimo was in Fort Yukon. “I have a proposition for you,” he said. “I want you to come home. I’ll buy you a farm in northeastern Wisconsin if you’ll come home.” Heimo couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The old man was offering to buy him a farm? Then the thought flashed into his head—the old man’s drunk. “Why?” Heimo asked. “I want you to come home,” his father repeated. But he wasn’t drunk; Heimo could hear that now. “You know I can’t come home,” Heimo answered. “Alaska, Dad, Alaska’s where I live.” His father struggled to find the words. “I just thought you might consider it.” Then there was a dial tone, not even a good-bye. Two weeks later a large package arrived in Fort Yukon. His father had sent up a brand-new set of tools.

  In 1986, Erich Korth visited Heimo and his family at their cabin, and he stayed for a month. Heimo remembers the time fondly. “The old man changed so much, I couldn’t believe it. We shot a caribou, went berry picking, and fished for grayling. I never saw the old man so happy. He even helped me dig a new hole for the outhouse. When that was done he helped me put a new pole roof on the cabin. He was really willing to help, and we got along. I think he was trying to say he was sorry for all those years. We never talked about it. The old man wasn’t the type to say a
nything.” Erich Korth never visited Alaska again. He died eight years later.

  Although Heimo cannot be sure what it was that caused his father’s hairtrigger temper—his nature, bitterness at having to leave Germany and start all over in a new country, never having achieved financial success, the horrors of World War II and the memory of a favorite brother lost at Stalingrad, a rough childhood at the hands of his own violent father, or some angry combination of events and emotions—he does remember seeking refuge in the woods. It was the outdoors, not his father, that would have the most enduring effect on him. In the outdoors, Heimo found both deliverance and self-discovery. Thoreau called it “the tonic of wildness.” For Heimo, it was the antidote to a bad situation at home—an escape to a simpler, more beautiful world—and early on Heimo cultivated his capacity for being alone.

  When he was ten, Heimo and two neighborhood friends borrowed some longspring foothold traps that his friend’s grandfather hadn’t used in years. They set one of the traps in a field and baited it with corn, though none of them expected to catch anything. When they returned a few days later there was a half-eaten pheasant in the trap, tracks in the moist snow, and a hawk soaring overhead. “I was hooked after that,” Heimo says. “I don’t know why I was so interested in it. Something about being outdoors and the anticipation of it. My friends lost interest fast, and somehow I inherited the traps. I kept at it—and I enjoyed being alone. I started trapping pheasants and rabbits periodically. I’d bring them home and I’d be so proud, and the old man would just scoff, though he liked eating pheasants.”

  Despite his father’s objections, Heimo was trapping during his free time and hunting with his uncles, which he remembers fondly. “I loved the hunting, but for the old man, if you weren’t out earning money, you were wasting your time. Later on I got really serious about it. I was hunting on my own and trapping muskrats in the marshes outside of town, especially after I learned that there was a fur buyer in Appleton that paid $2.50 per muskrat skin.”

  The more Heimo retreated to the woods, the more resentful his father became, and Erich Korth expressed his displeasure, in part, by heaping praise on Heimo’s brother Erich, Jr., setting up a sibling rivalry that continues to this day. “Erich was his pride and joy,” Heimo says more than thirty years later, with a real hint of acrimony. “And Erich and I fought like hell. We never really got along.” Today Erich, Jr., owns his own semitruck trailer repair company. “He’s been very successful,” Heimo continues. “He’s worked hard. But that lifestyle, where you’re married to your job, it’s never been for me. I don’t care if it would have made me rich.”

  The Korth family had been in America for only six months when, on January 3, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an edict admitting Alaska as the nation’s forty-ninth state, ending a decade-long battle about whether or not to allow Alaska’s entry into the union. Many were critical of the decision. Opponents of Alaska’s statehood wondered how the state’s economy could develop quickly enough to pay the bills a state government would inevitably accumulate, even though the War Department spent more than $1 billion in Alaska between 1941 and 1945 and was channeling more money into the state as a result of the Cold War. To combat this objection regarding the state’s ability to raise money, a provision was included in the Alaska Statehood Act, altering the Mineral Leasing Acts of 1914 and 1920. The Bureau of Land Management would thereafter be required to compensate the state with 90 percent of the revenues acquired from the extraction of coal on federal land in Alaska and with 52.5 percent of the revenues from oil and gas extraction.

  Alaska’s detractors were ultimately proved correct. In February 1971, two and a half years after the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) announced that it had discovered oil on Alaska’s Arctic Coast, and only one and a half years after the Alaska Department of Natural Resources conducted its fourth Prudhoe Bay oil lease, Governor William Eagen testified at a hearing at the Department of the Interior. A trans-Alaska oil pipeline was urgently needed, he said. If it were not built in five years, he predicted, the state would “face bankruptcy.”

  On December 18, 1971, a century after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, nearly twelve years after statehood, and only ten months after Governor Eagen’s appeal, President Richard Nixon, an unlikely ally of Alaskan Natives, signed an epic bill. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act—ANCSA, as it came to be called—attempted to resolve aboriginal land claims and legally paved the way for the Trans Alaska Pipeline.

  With ANCSA, the Natives of Alaska—Alaskans, according to ANCSA, with one quarter or more of Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut blood—became capitalists overnight. Each Native person was represented by a village corporation and a regional corporation that had profit and investment motives. Thirteen regional corporations and more than 200 village corporations were established. Most Natives enrolled in both and were given 100 shares of stock in each. For the corporations, which quickly turned a blind eye to the longstanding traditions of communal land use and subsistence living—hunting, fishing, and gathering—it was a trial-by-fire experience. Now they would be required to post profits and to view the land as a commodity, since the land would be taxable after 1991. While ANCSA did not satisfy all Natives, and some communities opted out of the settlement entirely, the settlement was viewed by many as a model for the resolution of aboriginal land claims. The Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) approved the bill by a vote of 511 to 45. Alaska’s Natives—represented by the AFN—agreed to the extinguishing of their “aboriginal title … based on use and occupancy … including any aboriginal hunting and fishing rights.” In return, ANCSA awarded them nearly $1 billion—$462 million in federal funds over eleven years, and $500 million from a 2 percent royalty on oil leases— and 44 million acres, over one-tenth of Alaska’s total acreage. ANCSA gave Alaskan Natives an unprecedented opportunity for self-determination and a unique avenue into the national economy, effectively ending a 200-year-old policy isolating Natives from the business interests that drove America. By linking (cynics said “shrewdly” linking) the Native monetary settlement to the oil leases, many Natives were turned into enthusiastic proponents of the pipeline.

  With Native land claims apparently settled, Alaska’s boosters hoped that they could finally begin selection of, and gain title to, the 105 million acres guaranteed to the state by the Statehood Act. Prior to ANCSA, this right was denied them by section 4 of the Statehood Act, which instructed the state to “disclaim all right and title to any lands … the right or title to which … may be held by any Indians, Eskimos, or Aleuts.”

  Sixteen months after ANCSA became law, Heimo turned eighteen. Richard Nixon had already curtailed the draft, so instead of fighting in Vietnam, Heimo took a summer job with Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources at Camp Mecan, a summer work camp on the Mecan River. At Camp Mecan, Heimo learned forestry and game and fish habitat maintenance skills, all of which further confirmed his love for the outdoors.

  Jim Kryzmarcik, who was raised on a farm near a small town in northern Wisconsin, also attended the work camp, and he and Heimo grew to be close friends there. Kryzmarcik recalls, “Compared to me, Heimo was a city kid. But he was into nature. He wanted to know about the plants and the birds. He was real interested in learning about it and how nature worked. Camp Mecan was the turning point in his life, I think.”

  After Camp Mecan, the outdoors was indeed irresistible for Heimo, and he spent much of his time plotting his escape north after high school graduation. But graduation never came. Heimo explains, “Prior to my senior year, I was skipping a lot of classes, but by the middle of my senior year, I was skipping a lot of days. It wasn’t that I didn’t like school—I liked science and I really enjoyed geography—but I just hated the routine of it. You had to be there from 8:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M., or whatever it was, and I couldn’t stand that. So I dropped out in April of my senior year. A shrewd move, right? I had two months to go, and I left.”

  After dropping out, Heimo was hired on as
welder at Miller Electric, a huge welding plant headquartered in Appleton. Heimo had learned the basics of welding in high school shop classes, and he attended daily advanced welding classes while working at Miller, too. As far as Erich Korth was concerned, his son had finally taken up a worthwhile trade, and he was proud of Heimo. Heimo, however, was frustrated and angry, fearful that he had become, after all, what he hated—a regular working Joe, an eight-to-fiver, living for the weekends and dreaming of that far-off day when he might be able to retire. Heimo started drinking to relieve the boredom and the disappointment, and he became a five-to six-day-a-week fixture at a tough, dimly lit, bank-turned-biker bar in Appleton called Sarge’s.

  Heimo had been drinking since he was fifteen, when his father got him drunk for the first time at home, but at Sarge’s he was doing a different kind of drinking, serious and self-destructive. “I drank because I was bored and pissed off and because I hated what I’d become,” Heimo admits.

  Steve Laabs, Heimo’s childhood friend, says, “Heimo was there with us every night. But he was always a little different than the rest of us. He’d been different all his life. He was always dreaming of going north.”

  One day in the spring of 1974, after nine months at Miller, intent on realizing his dream and following the needle pull of the compass north, Heimo quit his job and took off for the Northwest Territories. “Miller’s paid well and offered good benefits and would have been a good job if I was a different kind of guy, but it was driving me crazy,” Heimo says.

  Roland Pruno, another childhood friend of Heimo’s, says, “Heimo was making respectable money at Miller, but he was bound and determined to leave. Heimo and I had the same printing class in the eighth grade. We made some stationery, and Heimo’s read, ‘Heimo Korth—Guide and Trapper of the North.’ He wanted to go to Canada and be a trapper and a guide, and Heimo was the only person that I ever knew that always did exactly what he said he was going to do.”