Genes De Large: An Alaskan Diary and Memoir

By Frederick J. Kent

This book was written in diary form to chronicle events during our annual stay at Chandalar Lake in the Brooks Range. Myself and two friends built a cabin on the lake shore in 1991. My wife and I spend one month there during the short arctic autumn each year. Its our piece of tranquility played out in a cabin by a lake on the tundra. The following is a sample diary entry.
September 13 Low cloud cover, calm all day, thirty-eight degrees in the a.m. It was fifty-six degrees in the p.m.
The snow has stayed back maintaining a hold only on the tops of the highest mountains. It waits patiently for its ultimate advance. In the meantime we have the arctic version of an Indian Summer and we love it. The birch, alder, and berry bushes have given up their blazing colorful dance of autumn and let their costumes fall, willing to wait for the rhythms of spring.
At the end of each diary entry there is a poem that corresponds to activities of the day or a historic quotation pertaining to the Chandalar area, Brooks Range, or Interior Alaska.. There are also short memoir pieces chronicling events from all over Alaska from territorial days to the present.
Memoir -- The Season
Preparing for the hunting season had been a concern of mine for a couple of weeks. No one in the village sold hunting licenses and it appeared that if you wanted one you had to send to Kodiak. This was not a popular idea. If one person had a license Fish and Game might want everyone to buy one. I could understand that you had a right to hunt without a license if no one sold them, but how did you find out when the season started and ended?
I had been seeing an old Aleut man with a shotgun coming home along the road at dusk every now and then. The kids at school told me it was old Custa. I stopped him on the road along the beach.
"Custa," I said, "When does the hunting season open?"
He laid down the Emperor Goose he was carrying, leaned on his rusty old shotgun and went into deep thought. The silence was punctuated by the boom and hiss of waves pounding and receding through the pebbles on the beach.
"Well," he finally said. "I try to get out about daylight and get home about dark."
He picked up his goose, placed his shotgun under his arm and shuffled on down the road.
I lived in the Aleutian Islands for a number of years and never asked another soul about hunting seasons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 30, 2005
• ISBN: 9781469112619

Frederick J. Kent

I was born in Lake County, South Dakota in 1933. My family moved to Washington State in 1941. I entered the army after high school. Upon leaving the army in 1955 I moved to Alaska to work construction. In 1957 I married, then entered the University of Alaska. After being employed in teaching and school administration during the winter and construction or commercial fishing during the summer for twenty-three years, I retired from education in 1983. A pattern of commercial fishing in the Aleutian Islands summers hunting and hiking in the Brooks Range in the autumn, and winter skiing in Anchorage exists to the present. We have four children and twelve grandchildren.

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Copyright © 2005 by Frederick J. Kent.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

Genes de Large

Chapter One

1994 Chandalar Lake Diary

Chapter Two

1995 Chandalar Lake Diary

Chapter Three

1996 Chandalar Lake Diary

Chapter Four

1997 Chandalar Lake Diary

Chapter Five

1998 Chandalar Lake Diary

Selected Readings

DEDICATION

To my daughter Laura who’s encouragement and

editorial review made this book possible.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank the following people for their support on the manuscript in process. Coral Kooser, Lucy Fisher, Beverly Mesehke, Marilyn Bekken, Gene Roguszka, Dennis and Susan Weston, and Jack McManus. A special thanks to my loving wife Jeanette who supported me through the years of toil.

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Introduction

My wife and I live on the north side of Chandalar Lake. There are three cabins on our side of the lake; however, we have seen people there only once and then just for a weekend. We come to Chandalar to relax and experience the change of seasons.

After spending our summer commercial fishing on a boat in the North Pacific, we have little need for isolation. We work in areas of the Aleutian Islands and the Alaska Peninsula that are more remote than Chandalar. Our stay here is to watch the landscape metamorphose from summer through a short colorful fall to an early winter. It feels good to wake up in the middle of the night and remember that you don’t have to check the anchor line on the boat. We watch the snow move down the mountains; when it reaches the cabin and before the lake freezes, it’s time to leave.

As we watch the seasons change, we occupy ourselves by hunting grouse and ducks, and, sometimes, moose to supplement our diet. Mostly we hike, pick berries, chop wood, do watercolors, or read. When we are here, it’s hard to imagine being anywhere else.

I have inserted some pages from my 1993 diary that describe the people, places, and wildlife around us referred to in the main text. There are three families living on the south side of the lake clustered around the airport. They are from New York, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, but they have lived in Alaska for a few years or parts of a few years. They are friendly, but we see very little of them.

August 29,

Light overcast, threatening rain all day, but there were only occasional sprinkles. Thirty-eight degrees in the morning and sixty degrees in the afternoon.

I cut and hauled firewood while Jeanette painted the steps. I also fell a number of old dead trees. The chain-saw started OK, it would have started better if I hadn’t flooded it. The tree life here is peculiar; along the lake there are a number of old dead trees that make excellent firewood. Jeanette observed, however, that the trees seem to achieve a certain size, the maximum being around six to eight inches in diameter and, then they die. The dead trees, over time, fall and deteriorate into the soil. This process is undoubtedly an important, fragile, agronomic make-up of the arctic soil. We are, no doubt, altering that process in a small way. The soil loses, however, when measured against the effects of a cold cabin.

I have often referred to the term arctic in identifying our location. Even though Chandalar is sixty miles above the Arctic Circle, this area is technically classified as sub-arctic, primarily tundra, but sustaining marginal tree growth. Chandalar Lake is located on the south slope of the Brooks Range, and the area between the Brooks and the Alaska Range some three hundred miles south, is classified as sub-arctic. We live 1,800 feet up in the Brooks Range in our cabin, but we are on the south side.

August 30,

Heavy overcast, some rain and warm, thirty-eight degrees.

There are two families living and working for the FAA at the airstrip. Dave and Mary are Travis’s father and stepmother. Travis is nineteen-years-old, his father is around sixty-five, and Mary is around thirty-two. Mary has small children: a boy, five-years-old and a girl, two-years-old. The other family consists of a single father, Bob, with two children:, a girl, nine-years-old; and a boy, five. Bob has one contract to maintain the FAA generator and locator beacon, and another contract with the weather bureau to send in the local weather conditions to Fairbanks. Travis works for Bob, and as far as we can figure, Dave and Mary live off Travis. Bob let Travis build a log cabin on his property with the understanding that the property would be his after ten years. Dave and Mary moved in; Travis still lives in his tiny shack.

On the other side of the airstrip lives Jack McManus, a millionaire lawyer from Wisconsin who lives most of the year in Alaska and loves it. He jokes that he is here so he doesn’t have to pay Wisconsin state taxes. He still practices law part of the year in Wisconsin, but owns a home in Fairbanks and eighty acres of prime property near Chandalar Lake. He has a large log home and many small log cabins for guests. He keeps a million-dollar airplane, a Cessna Caravan, sitting in the willows by the airstrip. Jack’s property extends to include one-third of the airstrip, the one-third that allows access to the lake. Not just anyone gets to use it. He has posted No Trespassing and Keep Out signs on most available surfaces in the area and placed street signs near creeks and trails, designating them McManus Lane, Dorothy Creek, and so on. We like the signs, but the people who live around him, don’t.

Ten miles up in the mountains on the headwaters of Tobin Creek lives a miner named Del Eckles. He operates the Tobin Creek Mine. Everyone we talk to says that Del is a fine person, which is something when you consider that few of the people will speak to each other. We see Del coming and going in his small plane, but we have never met him.

This is the cast of characters that live on the south side of the lake, six adults and four children. This group constitutes the entire humanoid population of the Chandalar area other than Jeanette and me on the north side of the lake. There are no other of this species within a radius of one hundred miles and no roads to the outside world.

August 31,

Strong windstorm during the early morning. The winds whipped around, changing directions; it was almost cyclonic as it whirled around the valley.

I got up early to check on the area after the windstorm and found that the skiff was sunk. I couldn’t pull it up far enough to bail, so I had to get Jeanette out of bed to help. The two of us were able to pull the bow far enough up the bank so that I could bail water out faster than the waves could fill it. The going was slow, but we made enough progress to lighten the boat and pull it up more, then bail more. It didn’t help that both outboard engines were on the boat. Fortunately, the engines never did go under water and all the gear was still there, just floating.

We examined a single birch tree to see up close why they are so colorful. From a distance, the birch appear to have white trunks marbled with black streaks, but on close examination, the bark is a light ash gray and the black steaks are a charcoal gray. The yellow leaves, although they later change to gold, are now a brilliant light, almost tender yellow. On one side, the leaves are a darker shade than on the other. So when you lie back on a mountainside during a warm sunny day and watch the breeze rustle the leaves, they change color from gold to yellow as they sway. No wonder the white birch plays such a prominent role in Russian literature and folklore.

The flagstones we brought from across the lake for the new steps are terrific. We installed them just in time to keep us out of the mud. Our warm, cozy, little cabin on the tundra by the lake is the focal point of our lives. On overcast days, it is easy it is easy to feel we are the only people in the world. You can go outdoors and work or play as long as you want and get as tired and wet as you want and still return home to a warm cabin. What more can you ask of life? Does Rockefeller or Getty find more than this when they return home at night? I think not. And poor Queen Elizabeth has to go home to that cold drafty palace.

September 3,

Low overcast and rain on the lower slopes. The snow rained off the mountains yesterday, but crept halfway down during the night.

We are keeping watch for a very strange porcupine, or at least one with strange tastes. When we arrived here this fall, we discovered that, in the outhouse, a porcupine had eaten the bench section where the toilet seat rests. That is, he didn’t eat the plastic seat, although he did take a couple of bites, only the plywood around it. So you have to be careful when you sit down because your weight could break the seat section, and create, what could realistically be called a shitty situation. We are not sure if we are dealing with a porcupine that has exotic tastes or an advanced sense of humor, but either way, he is on our hit list. The word is out that we shall not tolerate outhouse-eating-porcupines. We have named him Otis. We don’t want to kill all the porcupine in the area, so we need a way to identify the right one. We decided that it should be easy because Otis, our outhouse-eating-porcupine, will have yellow teeth.

September 4

Low overcast and rain mixed with snow in the morning. The lake level is still rising. In the afternoon, the clouds cleared and we were blessed with clear sky and sunshine.

The Japanese gold prospector, Frank Yasuda, is said to have lived in the cabin across the lake from us. Yasuda was involved in the discovery of the Chandalar Gold District. He did it the old-fashioned way by walking from Pt. Barrow with his Eskimo wife. Then he continued on to the Yukon River and founded the village of Beaver. Yasuda was loved and respected all along the Yukon. When World War II broke out, he went to Fairbanks to surrender himself. The government shipped him to a concentration camp in California. His wife ran their store while he was gone. He returned after the war and died at Beaver.

The Japanese made a movie about his life and came to Chandalar to visit the cabin. No one is sure which cabin it was, Bob showed them the one across the lake. The roof has fallen through and the logs are rotting. All these old cabins have their stories and faded dreams.

At dusk, we saw a moose again, but we couldn’t tell if it was a cow or bull. The hunting season opens tomorrow, so we will take a closer look then. However, the thrill of hunting large game animals diminishes proportionately with our aging process; cutting and packing out a moose is extremely labor intensive. We agreed that we wouldn’t kill a moose unless it came right up to the cabin and presented itself.

September 5

Heavy frost and twenty-two degrees. It’s a beautiful fall morning with a clear blue sky.

After dinner, we were relaxing when Jeanette saw the moose we had been watching at dark the last few evenings. It was out on the sandbar at Biro Creek. We watched it for a while and discovered it was a young bull. So the hunting season is open and a legal bull is about a mile away, too far away to get excited about—or, should I say, for me to get excited. Jeanette, on the other hand, was picturing piles of steaks and roasts. I returned to my reading, reminding her of our pledge of killing a moose. In about an hour, Jeanette, who had been watching the moose, shouted, Fred, he’s on the Kitchen Sandbar! She is definitely not going to let me read, so I looked. Sure enough, the bull had continued along the lake shore and was now only a quarter mile away.

Fred, we gotta get him, we gotta get him, Jeanette mutters. Think of all the sausage we could have made.

She whispers this to me inside the cabin, a quarter mile from the moose, I guess to keep from scaring it or maybe to excite me. It didn’t work. The moose was still too far off and could disappear into the trees at any time. I atttempted to return to my reading; Jeanette is standing by the window, field glasses in hand, with all the focused attention of a bird dog on point.

Fred, he’s still coming this way. I see him.

When I got up to look, I didn’t see him. The moose had entered a thicket of brush from which he could exit anywhere and we would never see him, except for one small area.

Jeanette now emits a controlled scream, Freeeed, I see him! and leaping off the floor, high enough to be the envy of any high-school cheerleader, runs to the ladder. I’m going upstairs to get a better look, let’s get him, she mutters, ascending the ladder to the bedroom in a single bound. Cool under pressure she is not. There will be no reading soon.

Freeeeeeddd, Freeeed! It is right there! came echoing down the ladder. I looked again and I’ll be damned, my view from downstairs is not good, but through the brush, I can see a patch of brown skin less than 150 yards away. This suicidal moose is going to walk right up to the cabin. Echoing down from the ladder above, I hear Frreeeeeeddd! There he is, right there, get him, get him.

It is never good to ignore a message from above, plus I assume I would lose any argument about 150 yards not being close to the cabin, so I grabbed the rifle and headed outdoors. Now I can see the moose, but I will have to shoot through a hole in the trees. "Crack, I shot, but missed. Then a strange thing happened: the suicidal moose didn’t move, didn’t run, didn’t walk, didn’t even shift his weight. His gaze was fixed on the apparition in the upstairs window. This apparition jumped up and down shouting, Get him! Get him! Get him!" "Crack." The moose went down, but I swear that, as he went over, his eyes were still looking at the upstairs window. I’m sure he thought that his being struck down so young in life had something to do with the apparition from above, and he was right.

It was a good, clean shot through the neck with no meat wasted. However, I could have saved the bullet and cut his throat because he was so close, and his attention was so focused on the upstairs window. Now we have a thousand pounds of meat lying in the brush; it’s getting dark, and I’ll not be returning to my book any time soon. Jeanette appears and is delighted with her prize. I do want to emphasize her prize. If the choice had been left to me, we would have had only large tracks in the tundra to mark the passing. And I would say something like, It was probably a cow anyway.

September 6

Light rain in the early morning, but cleared up and became warm, eighty degrees in the afternoon.

We got up early, ate breakfast, and headed for our day’s work gutting and hauling in Jeanette’s moose. We have plenty of experience at this task. The weather was pleasant, the moose was lying in a dry location, and we progress right along. I think that the Kooser clan must have been very hungry at some time in the past; Jeanette is happpiest up to her elbows in moose meat, skinning ducks, canning fish, or marching across the tundra, bucket in hand, in search of the last berry on the mountain. We make a good butchering team and are finished with the pieces packed to the cabin by 1:00 pm.

The problem is whether or not you can hang on to the meat long enough to get it out of the country before the bears get it. We now have a tasty gut pile 150 yards from the cabin and a pile of moose meat in our front yard that would put a smile on any bear.

The moose meat tasted outstanding. I cut a section of back-strap and Jeanette fried too much simply because we have so much. We were sitting at the table eating moose meat and looking across the lake when I saw a cow moose wading into the water on our beach about thirty yards away. Trying to be funny, I said, Jeanette, what’s that strange thing in the water? She jumped up and ran for the camera. Passing the east window toward the outhouse, she said something like Wow. This was followed by the sound of something moving through the brush. A large bull moose burst into the yard. He had a magnificent set of antlers that would approach sixty inches in width, a trophy bull. This mighty bull of the woods had eyes only for the lovely cow. We were silent. They stayed in our front yard for at least a half-hour, during which time we shot a roll of film. Their lovemaking was so quiet and natural that we felt privileged to view them so closely and somewhat voyeuristic. It made us feel good to watch them disappear into the trees.

September 9

Cloudy and cool, thirty-six degrees with occasional rain.

The moose meat is cooling out fine, but every time it rains, we have to dash out and cover it. In a few days, we are going to bone it completely to lighten the load going out.

We are still remaining close to the moose and have more or less given up on long hikes and adventures down the river. We still take short hikes, but our lifestyle is definitely altered. We call it the moose’s revenge.

Jeanette painted one side of the loft floor and I painted the exterior eaves. We are accomplishing a lot of work around the cabin. I changed the oil in the generator and cleaned it up. We are armed to the teeth with rifles—I never did understand that statement; maybe it has been passed down from the caveman days and means, I’m only carrying a medium stick, but I can bite like hell!—watching the horizon for the first sign of a ferocious marauding bear. Alas, we are being attacked not by a 1,200 pound hairy monster, but by a five-ounce furry field mouse. The last two nights, the mouse penetrated the outer defenses and had eaten his fill of moose. Luckily, it doesn’t take much to fill him up, so we hope he overeats and gets sick. I’m sure he is moving all his furniture to get closer to the moose meat for the winter. A mouse with a moose—must be a story in there somewhere.

September 10

We hiked into the hills behind the cabin. The blueberries are falling off the stems; the cranberries and rose hips are shriveling. Life blossoms, fruits and withers on a tight schedule at this latitude. While there are still beautiful colors on the slopes, the hues change daily and the ubiquitous fallen leaves are underfoot.

In the ongoing epic of the mouse that got the moose, Jeanette spied the culprit at the crime. Freed!, Come here, I see it! she screamed. I’m sitting in the outhouse some forty yards away, but I know that stressful cry, so I come running with my pants down. When I arrive on the scene, she hands me a stick and says, Get it, pointing to a beautiful weasel, sticking his head out from under a ribcage of the moose. I’m standing there with my pants half down and stick in hand, staring at a weasel that is staring back at me. All hell breaks loose. Basil the Weasel panics, probably at the sight of me without my pants on, and races around in the mosquito netting looking for an exit. I’m running around the outside of the meat trying to get a good whack at him. Suddenly he gets tangled in the game-bag cloth and is an easy target. He isn’t going to go gracefully; however, he spits and cusses. Alas, I couldn’t do it. He was too pretty, and we have lots of moose meat. I let him go to continue on his way to becoming a seasonal ermine.

So, Morris-the-Mouse learned that if you reach for too much, you may lose it all, but hey, it’s worth a shot. Basil-the-Weasel will never give-up. He will be here to fight toe to toe with us against a bear if one shows up.

September 12

Light frost, twenty degrees in the morning. It stayed calm with cool temperatures all day, forty-six degrees in the afternoon.

The squirrels are driving us nuts, or at least one of them is. It is definitely a liberal-leaning rodent that believes everything he owns is his and everything that is ours is to be shared. We call him Clinton or C. We screened the eaves so he can’t get in the house to live. That made him angry, so he is pulling mouthfuls of fiberglass out of the floor and carrying it to his house. He got accustomed to living in an insulated house last winter, so now he is building his own out of our material.

So this is the cast of characters, both animal and humanoid, that live in the Chandalar area.

Genes de Large

The Geographic Dictionary of Alaska, 2nd Ed.1906, the official guide to the correct pronunciation of names on Alaska maps, says of the origin of the name for the Chandalar River, that it is said to have been named after John Chandalar, a factor of the Hudson Bay Company. Has also been called Gens de Large. A very careful inquiry has been made to ascertain whether the official statement is correct, and it has been found out by an examination of the Hudson Bay Company’s records that no man by that name was ever employed by the company as factor or otherwise. The name Chandalar is only the Anglicised form of the French Canadian pronunciation of Gen de Large—Zhan-da-lar.

Chapter One

1994 Chandalar Lake Diary

The life of everyman is a diary in which he means

to write one story and writes another, and his humblest

hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what

he had vowed to make of it.

—Mathew Arnold

August 18

Jeanette and I left Sand Point on August 12 for our home in Anchorage, after a confusing commercial fishing season. The price of salmon was very low, eighty cents per pound for reds, fifteen cents per pound for pinks, and only forty-five cents for kings, but we caught almost one hundred thousand pounds. The weather was rainy, foggy, windy, and generally miserable, but the fish liked it.

After a whirlwind five days in Anchorage, organizing, packing gear and supplies, we left for Fairbanks at 7:00 am on route for our annual fall stay at our cabin in Chandalar. The roads were crowded with tourists driving every imaginable type of motor vehicle. Each year, there are more and more tourists desperate to find something to do. They are killing themselves at a record pace this year in airplanes, boats, and Winnebagoes. Bears also get a few. We arrived in Fairbanks in good order around 3:30 pm and unloaded our supplies at Wright Air. Then we finalized our departure date for Chandalar on September 20. Our goal is to keep the combined weight of our gear and supplies beneath the 1,200 pound limit so everything, including us, will fit into a twin-engine Navajo airplane.

We checked into the Riverside Bed-and-Breakfast located on the banks of the Chena River. The flowers are colorful and fragrant, the lawns lush and green. It’s restful and a change to hear boat traffic instead of auto traffic. We spent an enjoyable hour visiting with a couple from New Zealand that were staying at the bed-and-breakfast. They are traveling by car through North America. We don’t envy them; driving from Anchorage for 357 miles to Fairbanks almost did us in.

August 19

Seventy-four degrees at midday, with sparkling sunshine.

We spent the day going from grocery stores to lumber yards, then finally hauled the third and last load to Wright Air around 4:30 pm. We are dividing the load between food, camping gear, and lumber. I hope our gear and supplies are not over the weight allowance forcing us to charter a larger and more expensive plane.

August 20

Our worst fears are confirmed when we step out to go to the truck: rain. It’s difficult to stage our gear at Chandalar in the rain. We had to do this the past two years. It’s uncomfortable and difficult to work in the rain; we have to wear rain gear that’s hard to move in, then gear and supplies must be placed under tarps to keep dry, while we ferry a load across the lake to our cabin on the north shore.

When we arrived at the airport at 8:00 am, there were many flights scheduled to depart that morning, so our 9:00 am departure was pushed back to 10:00 am. We stayed near the plane and the front desk, wanting to know if our gear and supplies were over the weight allowance. If the weight is over, we plan to leave some supplies to be brought in on our pickup plane. You run the risk, however, of leaving essential items like tomato juice or toilet paper that you won’t have until the following year. I try to communicate this to the cargo handlers. They smile, placate us with cordial words and continue loading cargo. So we sat and stew.

The two-hour wait in a Fairbanks’s small plane-departure lounge is not uneventful. A rotund and toothless Athabascan woman explains to us that she had to come to town from her village to get birthday cakes. She proudly opens one of the boxes to show us a large mass of white frosting decorated with scalloped blue edges. This is an ugly cake. She appears to have no other luggage.

This is a small waiting room where everyone becomes fast friends, whether you want to be or not. A very old Athabascan woman, Auntie Sophie, makes repeated trips to the counter to change her ticket. She bought a ticket to fly to her village, but she now wants to go to another. However, the plane is loaded and scheduled nonstop to the original destination. Auntie Sophie is not used to being ignored. I would guess she is a power in her village. She goes to the counter every ten minutes. Just before her plane is to depart, Auntie Sophie is informed that they will make an unscheduled stop for her. She nods her head in agreement.

We are called to depart, and to our amazement, our gear and supplies, plus us, hit the weight allowance perfectly, actually thirty-five pounds over, but that’s allowable. So we climb over the lumber and gear inside the plane to find our seats. Jeanette is strapped in between a sixteen-foot extension ladder and an outboard motor. It’s perfect for her since she is usually asleep before the plane reaches the end of the runway. I sit in the copilot’s seat. Jay, our pilot, is an experienced Alaskan pilot. He lifts the plane off the runway, ascends it to ten thousand feet, places the instruments on automatic, then reaches behind his seat and rips open a large bag of prepopped microwave popcorn, smiles, and says, Breakfast. The plane flies over mountains, valleys, rivers, and miles of open tundra while Jay eats popcorn. In exactly one hour, the plane is over Big Creek and Del Eckel’s mine and then descends into the Chandalar Lake region. Standing the plane on edge, Jay flies a pass over our cabin for us to see how it survived the winter. The cabin looked fine. The plane landed on the airstrip, and it wasn’t raining.

Bob and his kids came down and helped us haul the lumber and gear to the lakeshore. Mary has gone to Fairbanks with her kids. We are not sure if she is returning.

We pumped up the Zodiac boat and crossed the lake to survey the cabin. Everything was in good condition. Jeanette’s time and effort storing items so that no wildlife got into it was well spent. She stayed at the cabin while I crossed the lake in the large skiff to retrieve the rest of our gear. I loaded it all in one trip, great hauler that skiff. About halfway through carrying the lumber up to the cabin, it started to rain, and we have to move fast to keep the wood dry and clean. We are installing one-by-six-inch knotty pine on the interior walls this year.

Memoir—A Sense of Place.

The thermometer on the bank registered ten degrees below zero. I parked the truck across the street from the bank. Three long weeks, I had been traveling the Alcan Highway in the winter of 1956; Fairbanks was to be my new home, and I was here at last.

Just beyond the Co-op Drugstore, I could see a man lying on the sidewalk. Blood from a cut in his head ran down the icy sidewalk. People stepped around the body; some stopped for a moment, but all finally moved on. I stood there wondering if I should do something and what that something should be, when a black-paneled truck pulled up to the curb. Through the dirt encrusted on the side of the truck, I could read Police. Free pickup and delivery was inscribed in cursive letters below Police. The policemen wearing heavy wool coats over their uniforms, joking and humming, picked up the bleeding man and placed him on a stretcher, then loaded him in the truck and drove away.

Stepping from the sidewalk into a bar, I was hit with the smell of the wood stove and cigarette smoke. I could feel the warmth of the air beginning to seep into my bones. Then I heard a deep baritone voice, Twenty-seven minutes. People shouted and cheered. When they reach fifteen, you’re out of here. Molly—you hear me?—fifteen and you’re out, said a nervous bartender. A chorus of boos and hisses followed his voice.

Sitting at the bar was a petite woman in her twenties dressed in men’s work pants and a large flannel shirt, the outfit was completed with a fur hat and bunny boots. Even through the bulky clothing, I could see the full curve of her belly. A .357 magnum pistol was strapped around her belly, and in her hand, she held a railway pocket watch. Looking at the watch, she was timing her labor pains.

I was going to like Fairbanks. After a long winter drive, I was home.

August 21

Cloudy and forty-eight degrees in the morning. The sky cleared in the afternoon, sunshine and sixty-two degrees.

We woke to the sound of raindrops drumming on the roof. Sleeping in the loft under the roof puts us in close audio contact with nature but didn’t inspire us to get up.

The knotty pine tongue and groove goes on the west wall, so all the spice racks, pot and pan holders, sinks, and cabinets have to be moved away from the wall. Between rainsqualls, we cut and install wallboards. In preparation, we staple up insulation and then visqueen as a moisture barrier. The cabin is a mess with pine boards and tools plus all our household belongings piled in the middle of the floor. Hopefully, we can complete this task in a few days.

The first thing we noticed missing when we arrived at the cabin was the moose antlers we had hanging in a spruce tree. I had wired them up about nine feet to cure out over the winter. A bear probably got them. A number of holes penetrated the tarp covering the wood. Judging from the size of the holes, it was a large bear. The bear had also torn up our stacks of plywood, I’m sure he smelled the blood from the moose we had stacked there last fall.

With the missing antlers and destroyed tarp in mind, we ventured over to last fall’s kill site where we left the moose skull, hide, guts, and lower legs. Nothing remained. Every bone, hoof, and scrap of skin was gone. The only evidence of a carcass was a few hairs. Amid lush green moss and blueberry bushes was a twenty-foot circular dug-up scene of devastation. The original butchering site was so ripped, torn, and dug up that it looked like a bomb had exploded. No plant life was growing. Whatever had worked over this area, bear or wolves, had done a thorough job. We were worried last fall about having a gut pile so close to the cabin and a pile of meat in our front yard, now we know those fears were justified. Knowing something out there eats bone, hair, and hooves makes a trip to the outhouse after dark an act of courage. I’m going to make a run to the outhouse, becomes a literal statement.

There is a small critter living under the cabin that comes and goes at odd hours, emitting noises that don’t sound like they come from a small animal. Our nerves are already on edge, so every sound gets our attention. During our short stay here, we probably won’t get rid of him, but we hope to persuade him to keep down the noise and keep better hours.

In the evening, we hiked a short distance into the hills behind the cabin to check on the berry crop. The blueberries are ripe and plentiful again this year, maybe even better than last year. There are also many cranberries, but they won’t be ripe for a few weeks, and in addition, lots of crowberries.

I nailed a large thermometer to a tree so that it could be seen from inside the cabin. Then from outside the cabin, I asked Jeanette if she could see it from inside. She said she could see it but couldn’t read it. I yelled back that she should be able to read it. An argument ensued in which I said I could and she said I couldn’t. I came in the house, picked up the field glasses, and read the temperature, thereby winning the argument. Jeanette claims I didn’t win because I cheated. Such is life at Chandalar Lake where events big and small go into making a day.

In my youth, said his father, "I took to the law,

and argued each case with my wife;

and the muscular strength, which it gave my

   jaw,

Has lasted the rest of my life."

—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

August 22

Thirty-three degrees in the morning with dark clouds and snow. Rain in the afternoon, temperature increased to forty-one degrees.

The weather kept us inside close to our coffee cups and books most of the morning. One of our daughter Laura’s side jobs was purchasing textbooks from university students at the end of the semester. She keeps us supplied with reading material. On inclement weather days instead of feeling claustrophobic in our little cabin, we can choose from the world’s best literature. You can isolate the body but not the mind.

Between rainsqualls, I finished paneling the west wall, and Jeanette painted where I am going to build in the kitchen cabinets. The generator is working fine, but I hate to run it when I’m using the skill saw so seldom. It seems like a waste of fuel.

We didn’t go anywhere all day. Jeanette, however, did walk near the cabin picking blueberries. The interior cabin is still a mess with remodeling, and we need to finish the project to restore order. This will probably take a few more days.

Chandalar Lake viewed out our front window is seven miles long and approximately a mile wide in most places. There is a sharp dogleg midway down the lake, so only half of it is visible. The North Fork of the Chandalar River flows into the north end of the lake and flows out at the south end. The lake is actually only a wide stretch in the river gouged out by a former glacier. The U-shaped valley carved by the glacier is where we live. The lake surface is at 1,800 feet elevation. At five hundred feet above the lake surface, on either shoreline, are well-delineated lateral moraines. Standing on the moraine in back of the cabin, you can easily see the extent of the former glaciation. It’s impressive. The valley is now a late-summer deep green with a hint of the season’s age in the red shades of the tundra bushes. The green is poised to change to the reds and browns of autumn, then to the white of winter within the next thirty days.

I could hear a flock of geese calling in the snow clouds but couldn’t see them. I thought the birds would fly over our side of the lake. If they flew overhead, I would try my luck at shooting one for dinner. I called Jeanette out to help me locate them as she has better hearing than I do, but the geese circling in the clouds