Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  Every day when we got back to Kenai in the truck, Howard and I would climb into my car and follow a routine we had been carrying out ever since I had been staying with him: we would drive to the nearest liquor store and purchase a bottle of Smirnoff Vodka—just about the cheapest potable you could buy in Alaska except for beer or wine. During the ten-mile drive to Soldotna, we would pass the bottle of raw, burning liquor back and forth, and by the time we got home we would be feeling sufficiently light-headed to have forgotten all about our day of grueling toil. The bottle would last us for two homeward trips, after which we bought another. Without it, we felt, we never would have had the strength to drive.

  Arriving at the cabin at our usual time—8:00 p.m.—we would try to put something in our stomachs before falling into bed. Our limited supply of dishes was always so dirty that one of us would have to wash a couple of plates while the other opened a can of beans. (The mailman brought our groceries from Seward once a week but by the end of every week we were always down to beans). After dinner we would just have enough energy left to make our lunches for the next day and crawl into bed. And since it was Howard’s cabin, he occupied the only real bed; I slept on the mattressless floor in my sleeping bag. At five a.m. that devil’s device, the alarm clock, would rouse us, and the whole deadly routine would begin once again.

  After a couple of weeks of this we made up our minds to start saving more money. We cut down on the relatively fancy food we had been buying and switched from vodka to beer. With these changes, each of us managed to save almost $200 a week. And in another week we economized still further: we switched from beer to gallons of cheap port. And that was about as low as we could sink. We were winos—filthy, dirty, capitalistic winos.

  In the meantime, Howard had been put on the brush crew and we had a new foreman. When we weren’t cutting willows we were piling up half-burned stumps and limbs and burning them down to ashes. The foreman was always at hand, never saying a word: just staring. Howard and I worked side by side and talked to make the time go faster, but the foreman didn’t approve, and he separated us as often as he could catch us. In retaliation, we would yell back and forth in high-school Spanish, often including the foreman’s name in our incomprehensible conversations. This drove the foreman wild, but it got many a laugh from our fellow laborers.

  At this time some of the workers were college students up from the States “working their way through school.” Howard and I liked to draw them into arguments about politics and other dangerous subjects until most of us were rushing around waving our axes in the air to prove our points. This was lots of fun—and dangerous to the foreman if he tried to break it up.

  Another form of amusement was riddle-asking. One of the laborers would ask the riddle and the brush gang would go around mumbling to themselves for days until one of them came up with the answer. This slowed down the actual production but made the days, for us, go faster.

  When the crew was all hard at work on the willows and the conversation had died down to zero, you knew that someone’s mind was far away. Suddenly there would be a scream, an axe would crash to the ground and a man would sit down in the ashes and pull his shoe off. Another toe gone! This happened fairly frequently and nobody seemed to mind, since it usually meant a free trip to the Seward hospital and plenty of compensation pay. In fact, Howard and I had talked it over and decided that, toward the end of the job, each of us would slice off a toe. Thus we could enjoy compensation checks all winter. I don’t know why we didn’t do it. I guess we lost our nerve after hearing about one unlucky fellow who, upon emerging after several weeks of happy hospitalization with one less toe, slipped and fell on the hospital steps and broke his collarbone.

  Well, the day finally came. No tears were shed, no one begged to be allowed to stay. Everyone just grasped his check in a soot-blackened fist and cheered. And as the truck took us back to town and freedom, I figured out what I had made: in five weeks and two days I had earned $1400, and I would return to my homestead with $1000 in my wallet.

  Oh, you crazy Alaska!

  Chapter X—Mansion in the Woods

  I FELT PRETTY GOOD as I drove down the highway toward my homestead. Now I had enough money to start building my house! I should celebrate—buy myself a beer, or something.

  Just as I got this thought I found myself passing Jackinski’s Ranch, a bar and liquor store outside of Ninilchik. I backed up, turned off my ignition and went in.

  The smoke-filled room was full of commercial fishermen celebrating a successful salmon season and several homesteaders celebrating nothing at all. “Hiya, Stoddard!” called one of the latter. “Join me in a brew.”

  The man I sat down with was a homesteader I had met at Greasy Grogan’s on several occasions. “How’s old Greasy making out?” I asked him, to open the conversation.

  “Haven’t you heard? The old——was found dead three days ago.”

  I stared at him, unbelieving, as he told me some of the particulars. Greasy had been doing a lot of drinking while I had been gone, and all of his neighbors had gone out of their way to avoid him. When he hadn’t made an appearance on the local scene for over a week someone had dropped in to investigate. He was lying on his bunk, an empty whisky bottle in one inert hand. On his chest sat his cat, gazing hungrily into the blank, unseeing eyes.

  I didn’t stay to hear any more. I had had no love for Greasy, but this——! I gulped down my beer and raced for the car.

  Arriving at Red Freimuth’s house to pick up Ski, I heard the rest of the story. Greasy had been buried two days before—in a simple box made of rough spruce boards—on a hill overlooking Cook Inlet across the road from Red’s place. Red had officiated as one of the gravediggers and had given Greasy his last ride, using his old Army truck as a hearse. After the funeral, bottles people had been saving for a special occasion were brought out of hiding and everyone drank to Greasy’s demise. You could hardly say that I mourned the passing of Greasy but I knew that I would miss him and his own particular Alaskan brand of hospitality.

  Returning to my shack with Ski, I set up housekeeping again, and after a few days’ rest I was ready to start work on my building project. But before I could begin, I would have to clear the clearing of stumps and take my sawlogs, somehow, to the mill.

  I rented a farm tractor in Anchor Point and hired its owner, Flem Clemson, to drive it. Together, we began to pull the building logs from the clearing and stack them off to one side. It was hot work: in Alaska, where your blood thickens during the long, cold winter, temperatures like 85 degrees seem almost too hot to bear. And it was 85 degrees, that day.

  We had only stacked about a hundred logs when I felt the earth shaking and heard the rumble of a Caterpillar tractor coming down the highway. “Oh, no!” I said to Flem. “I hired a Cat for tomorrow to push out the stumps. We’re not ready for him yet.”

  I ran out to the road and flagged the Cat down. The driver told me that he had finished his work on another homestead down the road earlier than he had expected and “might as well do your job right now.” At fourteen dollars an hour I couldn’t keep him waiting. Showing him the start of a road I wanted him to punch through the woods 600 feet from the highway to the clearing, I rushed frantically back to the clearing to get the rest of the saw logs out of the way before he arrived. I figured it would take at least half a day for a D-6 Cat to make a road and that if we hurried we’d have plenty of time. But, within two hours, the clankety-clank-roar of the Cat and the crashes of falling timber, coming closer all the while, told us that the huge tractor was almost upon us. And it was: suddenly, knocking a large spruce tree into the clearing, the Cat came charging through.

  “What do I do now?” inquired the driver, shutting his throttle down.

  I told him to begin on the stumps but leave the saw logs. Starting up the Cat, he made a rush at the nearest stump, bumped into it, lifted it clear from the ground. Then he moved on to the next stump, and the next. Then, pushing them around until he had collected them
into a neat little trio, he nudged them ahead of him and shoved them over the edge of the bluff.

  Flem and I watched, fascinated. Then we shook ourselves and got back to the business of pulling the saw logs out of the way of the Cat. At this point Red Freimuth showed up and, like the good neighbor he was turning out to be, offered his services. With mightier muscles than mine, he lifted the smaller logs and carried them by hand to the edge of the clearing. He was a great help. By afternoon the stumps had disappeared and the logs were piled and ready for hauling to the sawmill. But before 1 paid off the Cat operator I had him dig a cellar for my house. This he accomplished in an hour flat, charging me $150 for the whole day’s work. Boy, I thought, remembering the last time a cellar had been dug on my land and the mosquitoes and whitesox and no-see-ums that had made it such a terrible job. Boy, what a little money can do!

  Renting Red’s old four-wheel-drive Army truck and borrowing a flat bed farm trailer from another neighbor—what would a pioneer in any wilderness do without neighbors?—I got to work on the logs. I had realized that I couldn’t accomplish the task alone and had hired Red to help me. It was a simple job, but a laborious one. Maneuvering the trailer alongside a pile of logs, we would roll them, one at a time, onto the bed, and when we had accumulated a load of eight or nine logs of from eight to 24 feet in length we would head for the sawmill 2½ miles away. Rolling the logs off at the mill, we would then turn around and go back for more. It was a good day when we could complete four of these trips, but at the end of the week all the logs were at the mill and we had begun to take the finished lumber back to the clearing.

  Previously, I had given the sawmill owner a list of the total lineal feet of three-sided house logs I wanted—three sides cut, one side with the bark left on—and the dimensions of the other lumber I required. I had paid him seven cents per lineal foot for cutting the six-inch house logs, $25 a thousand board feet for the lumber; and when all of it was piled next to my cellar pit it seemed to me that I had gotten my money’s worth—particularly since the use of my own trees had cut my lumber bill just about in half.

  Before letting Red’s truck get away, I dug up several loads of sand and gravel from a spot near the highway—more free material!—and hauled it to the cellar pit for use in the concrete foundation. All was in readiness for the hardest stage of the game: the actual construction of my house.

  The Blazo lantern burned night after night in my shack as I pored over the plans I had drawn. I changed them, changed them back again, changed them again, finally decided that my original plans were the best, after all. The house I had in mind would be 16 by 24 feet, with two stories and four rooms—a living room and kitchen downstairs and a bedroom and storeroom above. It would be the biggest bachelor house within 22 miles. For a guy who had hardly ever built anything more pretentious than a chicken coop, it was going to be a tremendous task. But there’s a saying in Alaska: something to the effect that a homesteader is never satisfied until he has built his third house. And here I was on my second. There was only one way to find out the truth of the saying: get going.

  It was a little hard to start. I looked forward to the sense of accomplishment that would come, I knew, from watching the house take shape, but before that there would be the groundwork—the dirty work—to do: in the cellar. Sighing, I reached for a shovel.

  First I had to dig the loose sand out of the bottom of the cellar pit until I reached solid gravel, which would serve as a base from which to build my foundation forms. This I did. Then I made the pier forms, setting them eight feet apart along the sides and ends of the pit and placing two log pilings in the middle, the piers, when poured, to be a foot in diameter and extend from the gravel base to a foot above ground level. Then I built a wall form to connect all the piers; a six-inch concrete wall, I hoped, would insure a solid base for my plate.

  Using a mortar box I had contrived for cement-mixing, I poured concrete into all of the forms. This took me two days. Then, while the concrete was still wet, I laid 2ʺ×8ʺ planks all the way around to serve as plates and outline the shape of the house, driving spikes into the wood and through the cement to hold them tight. While the concrete dried, I used the time to peel the bark off the 1400 feet of house logs.

  When I had stripped the foundation forms, I was ready to start the more satisfying job of raising my logs. They were, of course, still green, and it was difficult to get them into place. I dragged them in easy stages and set them on the plate, leaving two inches of plate jutting into what would be the inside of the house to set my floor joists on. When I had the first round of logs on and nailed onto the plate, I put some more plate across the two pilings I had previously placed in position in the cellar. That center support would hold up the middle of the sixteen-foot floor joists. I then cut the floor joists and placed them on the plate, nailing them 18 inches apart. Finally I placed enough boards on the joists to make a base for putting up the rest of the logs.

  Laying logs horizontally at the rate of three rounds a day, I had my walls up to ceiling height in five days. Each layer of logs was spread with a mixture of tar and asbestos before the next layer went on, and each log had been fastened to the log beneath it with ten-inch spikes. Openings for doors and windows had been left, and the whole thing was beginning to look like a real house.

  For my downstairs ceiling or upstairs floor joists (take your choice) I used some of the longest house logs, laying them on the top round of logs and notching the ends so that they fit exactly between the walls and held them firmly in place. I placed them two feet apart and hoped that they would be strong enough to support my upper floor.

  Now I had to put my floor boards on. Before starting the job, I looked them over. Some of them were an inch and half thick at one end and half an inch at the other, and all of them were very green. If I wanted an even floor, I realized, I would have to take them back to the sawmill and have them planed.

  For two days I shuttled back and forth between the mill, taking small loads of boards in my car, having them planed to a standard thickness and bringing them back again. Nailing them down, after that, didn’t take too long. I was ready to start in on the top half of the house.

  I built the four upstairs walls with rough lumber. Then I built the peaked roof, using 2×4’s for rafters. I should have used 2×6’s instead, but I didn’t think of it at the time. On each side of the upstairs room I put in a dormer section to be made up of three windows apiece—a small concession to looks which would break the monotony of the roofline. When I had finished, the whole “attic” looked messy: rough, green lumber, I knew, doesn’t make the smoothest interior in the world. But as I turned from that task to another I promised myself that I would cover up all the defects with “something nice” later on.

  Now that the shell of the house was done, I started seeing all the mistakes I had made in its construction. But at the same time I couldn’t help feeling proud of myself for doing as well as I had. And at this point there wasn’t much more I could do until the windows, roofing, back door, screen door and cookstove I had ordered from Montgomery Ward’s in Portland weeks before arrived in Homer by boat. But, oh yes: a front door. Every house must have a fancy front door. I made one of three planed 2ʺ×12ʺ’s with plenty of knots to give it character and affixed three short peeled slabs as crosspieces.

  Two weeks later a boat docked at Homer carrying, as its most precious cargo, the balance of my building materials. Red hauled it all out to my homestead in his truck and I continued where I had left off. The upstairs windows went in easily, but the downstairs windows were something else again. I had learned from other homesteaders in the area that it takes at least two years for the logs in a log house to shrink and settle into permanent position, and that if you put in your windows to stay you’ll regret it later. With this in mind, I placed the windows with only nails to hold them and left a two-inch space above them filled with chinking cotton and caulking rope.

  Hanging the back door was only a matter of moments, and w
hen I had hung the screen door outside it to keep out the mosquitoes, no-see-ums and whitesox, I stood back to admire the effect. It looked pretty good, and with the back door open and the screen door shut I would have air, since none of my windows were the kind that opened.

  Next I moved the cookstove—Montgomery Ward’s finest wood and coal burner—into the kitchen with Red’s help and put the stove pipe up. At the same time I brought in a new barrel stove with a ready-made door and placed it in the living room, putting up its stove pipe, too.

  All that was left to be done before I could move into “the fanciest bachelor home on a homestead on the Kenai Peninsula”—as people had begun to call it—was to cover the roof with 90-pound roofing. Red Freimuth came to my assistance, agreeing to help me with my roof if I would help him with his. Struggling up the steep, pitched roof, we laid the rolls of green paper from the bottom up, holding on with one hand, two feet and lots of extra nerve. The tacks were pounded in every four inches, the edges were trimmed, the hot tar was applied on the overlaps—and we were through.

  The next day Red helped me move all my belongings from the old shack to the new mansion. The house was still just two big rooms, bare of furniture, bare of the partitions which would eventually make it a four-room dwelling. The wind whistled through numerous unseen cracks and holes, the walls creaked and groaned and the barrel stove balked at every attempt to start a fire in it. But it was mine—all mine—and I was proud of it.

  After a few days of feeling like a property owner and patting myself on the back at every opportunity, I began to worry about earning some more money to get me through the winter and pay for finishing the interior of the house. I would need plenty of cash to put insulation on the walls, cover the floor with something to keep the air from coming up through the already widening cracks between the boards, build partitions and do all the odds and ends that would have to be done. The house wasn’t finished by a long shot.