The Final Frontiersman Read online

  Arctic Village, a Gwich’in Indian village of 170, lies 115 miles directly west of the Korth’s cabin. It is snuggled along the East Fork of the Chandalar River and is surrounded by postcard mountains and little lakes loaded with northern pike. Despite the solitude of its setting, Arctic Village has become a battleground in the fight to determine the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Residents are courted by environmentalists and oil executives alike. Publicly the residents of Arctic Village struggle valiantly against the threat of oil development on the refuge’s coastal plain, a place they refer to as Vadzaih Googii Vi Dehk’it Gwanlii, approximately “the Sacred Place Where Life Begins,” and the potential disruption of the Porcupine caribou herd’s calving and migration pattern. Privately a few of the villagers confess that the impoverished community, which opted out of ANCSA and the cash settlement for the right to retain their ancestral lands, could benefit from oil development.

  One hundred fifty miles to the southwest is Fort Yukon, which sits just above the Arctic Circle at the confluence of the Yukon and Porcupine rivers. The Korths have a summer cabin in Fort Yukon, where they live for one and a half months of every year. Like the generations of trapping families who came before them, they spend June and a portion of July there, stocking up on supplies, reconnecting with old friends, and getting a brief dose of civilization.

  Canadian traders from the Hudson Bay Company, who regarded the Yukon Flats as the richest fur territory in all of North America, established Fort Yukon in 1847. Two decades later, the United States purchased Alaska. The British fled, though Fort Yukon continued as a fur-buying center under American auspices. Later it became a stopover for hopeful shoe salesmen-turned-miners caught up in the madness of the Klondike gold rush. Today Fort Yukon is a town of 750, with a large Gwich’in Athabaskan Indian population. It is plagued by the kinds of disquieting problems that haunt Native villages all across Alaska: alcoholism and the attendant fetal alcohol syndrome; rampant drug use; health problems ranging from tuberculosis to diabetes to heart disease; a high suicide rate; and child abuse. Despite a host of alcohol-related problems, Fort Yukon has made a deal with the devil. It is a “wet” village, the most liberal designation in a three-tiered system—dry, damp, wet—meaning alcohol can be purchased in town. Of Alaska’s nearly 250 bush communities, it is one of only seventeen where booze can be bought legally. The town-owned liquor store, windowless and made of corrugated aluminum, with a thick metal door resembling that of a jail cell, is a source of considerable consternation. But even those who oppose the store don’t deny that it brings in a lot of money. The store was closed in 1985, but community revenues dropped so precipitously and bootleg liquor ran so freely that it was quickly reopened.

  Fairbanks (population 40,000) lies 300 miles to the southwest, and is the closest city. Downtown Fairbanks is a hodgepodge of bars, dime stores, jewelry stores, greasy spoons, seedy motels, cafés, government buildings, and now a Marriott Hotel with an upscale restaurant offering fine food and wines at Chicago prices. But despite its funky downtown and its natural beauty, Fairbanks is sprawling helter-skelter across the Tanana Valley, fueled by the Sam’s Club, Home Depot, fast-food scourge that has marred cities across the country.

  Fairbanks has an accidental quality about it, befitting its history. In 1901, after the Klondike had played out, eager, hell-for-leather miners floated down the Yukon, bound for Nome, on Alaska’s western coast, where gold had been discovered in the sand along the beach. A small group departed from the Yukon and made its way by riverboat up a large tributary, the Tanana River, with the intention of establishing a fur-trading post. When the boat’s pilot mistakenly turned up the Chena Slough, the boat got stuck on a sandbar and the captain was forced to unload cargo and passengers, too. Those left behind on the river’s banks bided their time by prospecting. Some struck gold, and soon after, word got out that another rich strike had been made in a place that was later christened Fairbanks. Modern-day Fairbanks still has that feel of a city dependent on booms, bonanzas, big strikes, and huge sums of federal money capable of kick-starting an ailing economy.

  The city, like much of Alaska, compromises outdoorsy, warm, generous, but tough-minded, independent people for whom the frontier is more than a distant memory. In Fairbanks, people build their own cabins and homes. They trap, hunt moose to put up winter meat, tend summer fishnets, mush dogs, heat with wood, live without indoor plumbing. Despite the fact that they live in the populous North Star Borough (population 85,000), many seek to honor values of self-reliance and simplicity. Yet, like Alaskans in general, many have struck an uneasy alliance between their ethic of individualism and their annual Permanent Fund Dividend check, a yearly gift from the state based on interest payments from oil royalty investments. In 2002, each of Alaska’s 591,537 residents (those who could prove they had been there for two full calendar years) received a check for $1,540.76, only the second time in the Fund’s twenty-five-year history that the dividend check was less than that of the previous year.

  Fairbanks is something of an end-of the-road town—a college town, too, with just enough university types, left-leaning liberals, and libertarian zealots to make it interesting, the kind of place where bumper stickers abound: Alaskans for Peace; Free Tibet; No Nukes North; Secede; Vote Freedom First—Vote Murkowski; Charleton Heston Is My President; Alaskan Girls Kick Ass. While sprawling Anchorage—or “Los Anchorage,” as many Alaskans call it—325 miles south of Fairbanks, looks to cities like Seattle and Portland for its cues, Fairbanks dispenses with the pretense. It has earned the sobriquet “Gateway to the Interior.” Anchorage is protected by the Alaska Range, the Talkeetna Mountains, and the Wrangells, while Fairbanks gets the Arctic’s cold full blast, and winter lows of 20 and 30 below sometimes rival those of Fort Yukon.

  If it is true that we are shaped by the landscape we inhabit, perhaps this explains why Heimo, from the very beginning, exhibited little of the bravado I’d expected. The Frigid Zone, which lies above a latitude of 66° 33′ North, a theoretical line called the Arctic Circle, is an unforgiving region that doesn’t tolerate recklessness or excess of any sort; it must be approached modestly.

  There are few cowboys in the Arctic. An old saw about Alaska’s bush pilots goes like this: “There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots.” The same could be said about residents of the Arctic Interior. Humility is the first virtue one learns in the high latitudes, a sense of one’s inherent vulnerability, a realization that at any time nature can deliver a bad deck of cards or a fatal blow. In the Arctic one never achieves freedom from fear, because so much can go wrong—Jack London wrote that there are 1,000 ways this place can kill a man—especially in winter. For outsiders, frostbite immediately comes to mind, but few who live in the Arctic worry much about minor frostbite. Most are resigned to it, an ear or a nose or a finger, a little nip each winter.

  The prospect of literally freezing to death is more real and is heightened by the combination of extreme cold and distances. But the rules to avoid this fate are axiomatic: Dress in layers; drink lots of water; don’t push too hard or you may overexert and freeze to death in your own sweat; keep your core warm with calories; and beware of overflow, that insidious layer of water seeping over the ice, which is the bane of every trapper’s life. Get caught in overflow, especially if it’s deep, more than a few miles from the cabin, and your only choice is to build a fire, fast.

  Another concern is a chimney fire, a creosote buildup in the woodstove’s metal stovepipe that sets the whole cabin ablaze. Consequently, many trappers clean their chimneys compulsively, once every week, and keep a backup tent in which they can ride out the winter in case of emergency.

  Snow blindness is a worry in March and April, particularly on open lakes or tundra, when the sun is strong and is reflecting off snow. Snow blindness is hard to treat—the Gwich’in once used boiled Labrador tea to soothe burned retinas. Whiteouts are a worry, too. They can obliterate every landmark in sight. In a whiteout a person on
ly has two choices: Dig a hole in the snow and hunker down and wait or use the wind as a guide and hope that it doesn’t suddenly switch.

  Starvation is always a possibility, though less of one now than when the Gwich’in and Inupiat families wandered the land. Trappers haul in staples—flour, cornmeal, noodles, canned vegetables, powdered milk—which should carry them through in a pinch. Yet every bush family worries: Will the caribou come; will we get our moose; will the fish come up the rivers to spawn; will it be a good berry year; will we trap enough fur in winter to make our life possible, to pay the bills?

  Cabin fever isn’t talked about much, if only because it’s far more common than people like to think. But cabin fever has been known to undo even the most stable trapper. One trapper told me that it can grip like superglue and suffocate the mind. Though most think of winter as the season when psyches collapse, spring also claims its share of victims. In winter, Alaskans enjoy an ease of travel, providing it’s not too cold to leave the cabin. It is in spring before breakup—a period that may last a few weeks, when the sun has melted all the snow and the land is oozing water, and skis, snowshoes, snowmachines, dogsleds, and riverboats are useless—that one’s freedom of movement is severely restricted and one’s mind starts to seriously wear. Trappers can get very “bushy” in spring.

  There are also snowmachine problems. The most likely scenario is that a snowmachine becomes mired in overflow or bogged down in a wind-packed drift. Though Heimo carries a come-along, sometimes called a power pull, to winch his snowmachine out of deep drifts, in much of this country, a come-along is worthless; there are seldom any trees large enough for him to chain up to and crank out a 400-pound machine. Another possibility is a drive belt problem; a drive belt can break just about anytime. At 40 below or more, a whole assortment of things can go wrong. Steel can snap like kindling—a ski, perhaps; an axle; a clutch; bearings; a shaft—even the snowmachine’s handlebars.

  That’s what happened to Heimo in mid-March 1990—things went wrong when he was driving from the cabin on the Old Crow drainage to the cabin on the upper Coleen River. It was spring and time to move again. A bush plane had already transported the girls and Edna and all of their belongings.

  In an effort to let the land and its animal populations rebound from their seasonal presence and to ensure a steady supply of fur, the Korths are seminomadic, moving each spring to one of their three cabins in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and each summer to Fort Yukon. They do this not for a change of scenery or for recreation, as someone who escapes to a summer home, but out of necessity, employing a practice of land stewardship once common among small farmers in the Midwest—letting a field lie fallow. They relocate even when they feel like staying put.

  Heimo’s job was to bring the snowmachine overland, a journey that would take him across a 2,500-foot divide that separates the two drainages. Though Heimo had assured Edna that there was nothing to be concerned about, privately he knew that the reality was different. At the divide, southerly winds had lathed the snow into three-foot drifts, which were, for the most part, as hard as pavement. What Heimo had to watch out for were the soft spots where a heavy snowmachine could break through and become mired. Though black spruce circled the mountain at lower elevations, on top there would not be a tree in sight other than whip-thin dwarf birch and alder, so his come-along would be ineffective.

  Heimo set off early in the afternoon. He brought a book of matches, his ax, his snowshoes, and an extra drive belt, just in case. At first, he traveled comfortably on a meandering creek bed, and he dreamed of the cabin on the upper Coleen, the one he always referred to as “home.” He dreamed of breakup and May waterfowl hunting on the newly exposed gravel bars; of the taste of a white-fronted goose slow-boiling in a cast-iron pot; of sweet, cold river water; and of the return of the songbirds. He made it to the mountain and the dense spruce forest without incident and resisted the temptation to relax. Instead, he stood up on the machine and supported himself with his legs, as a horseback rider preparing for a log jump, and carefully maneuvered through the narrow alleys between the trees. The land was still in winter’s bitter grip, and mounds of snow clung to the boughs of the black spruce trees, bending them double under their weight.

  When Heimo reached the divide, the sun was shining brightly, and he stopped long enough to enjoy its light and to rest his legs and his throttle hand, which had started to cramp. He looked back at his trail and noticed how the hard-packed snow had easily supported the weight of the machine. Then he gazed off into the distance, across the radiant white tundra to the dark outline of trees that marked the Old Crow drainage, and said good-bye. He would not be back again for another three years. He pulled the hood of his parka and the wolverine ruff tightly around his head and face and gave the snowmachine some throttle.

  On the far side of the divide, with the tall white spruce of the Coleen River in sight, he flushed a covey of willow ptarmigan. White as the snow that hid them, they burst from the ground clucking their disapproval. Suddenly the machine fishtailed, and Heimo struggled to keep it from going over. When it fishtailed again, he took pressure off the throttle, and the machine lurched, throwing him. Heimo landed in a sitting position with his legs extended, buried up to his chest in snow. He could only watch as the snowmachine tipped over on its side and stalled. He struggled to get out of the snow, but with nothing to hold on to, he was unable to stand up. So he rolled onto his belly, dug his arms shoulder high into the snow, and pushed. Eventually he got to his knees. Then he rocked back and forth until he was finally able to stand up. He brushed himself off and cursed his luck. Approaching the machine, he wondered if it would start again. Then he pulled the manual start, and to his surprise, the machine responded. He was fighting to muscle it back onto the trail when the handlebar snapped like a thin twig. His handlebar had broken before. In the past, though, there had been a stem to which he could attach a vise grip so he could still steer the machine. Not this time. He would have to leave the machine and come back to get it another day, when he had the tools to fix it. Heimo was fifteen miles from the Coleen cabin, and it was five in the afternoon. He knew that he had no other choice than to strap on his snowshoes, whose bindings he had remembered to repair the previous evening, and set out for the Coleen. Normally, a fifteen-mile trip would be nothing to be overly concerned about, but under the conditions it was bad—he would have to struggle through the deep snow, breaking trail for almost the entire way in the dark. And he would have to hustle. Edna would worry, so there was no way he could split up the trip into two days, walking half the distance, building a small snow shelter, and finishing the hike to the cabin the following morning. What with Rhonda, who was four, and Krin, who was not even one yet, Edna had her hands full. It wouldn’t help matters for her to have to be concerned about him, too.

  Shortly after he set out, he was up to his thighs in snow, despite the snowshoes, trudging across a mountaintop that he knew few people in the 10,000-year human history of the region had ever seen. Fortunately, the wind had shifted earlier in the day and was now at his back. Once he got off the mountain and into the treeline, the snow was shallower, only knee high. Although the temperature was well below zero, the sweat was draining out of him. Ice crystals had formed on his beard, eyebrows, and eyelashes. Two hours into the hike, the sun set, and Heimo was tired and wet. He managed to stay calm, though; he had been in tough situations before.

  Not long after the sun slumped below the horizon, Heimo recognized Arcturus, a red giant of a star, and he regarded it as a good omen. Three hours later, the aurora came out, too, illuminating his way. Heimo watched it build in the west, lighting the sky with its shimmering braids of color, and then slowly it vanished. By the time he reached Doghouse Creek, which flowed into the Coleen, he checked his watch again—nearly 11:00 P.M. Still five miles from the cabin, he was soaked in sweat and nearly falling over with fatigue. He knew he was in trouble. He’d broken one of the cardinal rules of the woods—never overexert.
/>   He cleared out an area in the snow and gathered kindling from a copse of willows and chopped down a dead black spruce with his ax. The kindling and the tree were dry and when he set a match to them a fire crackled quickly. Then he pulled another spruce tree out by its roots and threw it onto the fire. Crouching down, he blew on the fire until it snapped and popped again. Once the fire was blazing, he ate two biscuits that he had brought along. Thirsty, he resorted to melting snow, holding his cupped hands as close to the fire as he could without burning them. Then he drank the few drops of water that had collected in his cupped hands. Though he was tired and drowsy, he resisted sitting down because he knew that it would be hard to get up again. Instead, he stood by the fire, hopping up and down to keep the blood flowing and stave off hypothermia, but he was still shivering. His core temperature had dropped so low that the fire failed to warm him, and he knew that he would have to keep walking to stay alive.

  Heimo walked on the tundra. Though the snow was deep there, it was even deeper where it had accumulated in the creek bed. He pumped his arms and legs as if he were marching, in order to get the feeling back into his limbs. Still he was shivering. “Don’t stop walking! Don’t stop walking!” he repeated to himself. Since the creek ran into the Coleen above the cabin, he didn’t have to worry about finding his way in the dark. He knew that he wouldn’t find water, though, because the creek was frozen solid to the bottom. Once he made it to the river, there’d be water, but by that time there’d be no sense in stopping; the confluence of Doghouse Creek and the Coleen was only a half-mile from the cabin.