Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  I was broke: my doctor’s bills had taken all the money I had with me. But I could borrow money. I borrowed it from my father and said goodbye to him at the Ferry Building. It was a sad farewell this time: he was getting old, and I was afraid that I would never see him again. And I think he was thinking the same thought as he gripped my hand for the last time.

  As the ferry boat took me across the bay to Oakland and the train to Seattle (I hadn’t borrowed enough money to finance a plane trip all the way back), I looked back to the lighted city. It was a wrench to leave my father, but I was happy to be free once more. “I’ll be darned,” I said to myself, “if I’ll ever return to that rat-race again.”

  My main regret, I reflected as the train headed north, was that I had been too broke and too sick to look for a wife. Well, maybe some new homesteaders would move into the area come spring, and maybe they would have one or two pretty daughters looking for husbands. You never could tell what might happen in a new year and a new season coming up....

  Two days later I was on the plane heading for Anchorage. It was a day flight, and I passed the long hours looking down on the rugged panorama of the spruce-covered coast, with its inlets and islands, of southeastern Alaska, thinking of my homestead and how it would look under a blanket of snow. Finally the plane landed at the Anchorage airport. I took a taxi into town and put up at a cheap hotel. On inquiring at the bus depot, I learned that the next bus to the Kenai Peninsula and Homer would leave on the following day. My money supply was running low—I still had some cash in the bank in Homer, but I wanted to save it for living expenses through the rest of the winter until spring, when I could earn some more—but there was enough for a few necessities. It was ten below zero in Anchorage and I decided to discard my thin city clothes and dress for the Alaska winter. Finding a war surplus store, I bought a new Army parka, a suit of long woolen underwear, a pair of jeans, wool socks, and a pair of paratrooper boots. Back at the hotel, after changing into my new outfit, I felt like a homesteader again.

  The old-fashioned, uncomfortable bus left Anchorage at 8 o’clock in the morning, heading down the highway that had been completed only the year before to connect the city with Moose Pass, the railroad stop at which I had arrived by train two years before. After a time I got into friendly conversation with my seat companion, who was the only other passenger on the bus. He turned out to be a U.S. Deputy Marshal and a very nice guy.

  The first mishap of our trip occurred about twenty miles out of Anchorage, when the bus broke down. After waiting in the little settlement of Girdwood until a relief bus came out from the city, we got started again and made it to Moose Pass without further incident.

  At Moose Pass, late in the afternoon, we were told that the bus to which we were supposed to transfer had left without us because we had arrived two hours late. Nobody seemed disconcerted: this sort of thing was expected to happen—and usually did. We drove to the seaport town of Seward, the marshal obtaining accommodations with the town marshal and I spending a sleepless night in a bed across the room from the snoring bus driver in the house of the manager of the bus depot.

  On the following morning, off we went again, meeting the Anchorage bus at Moose Pass, picking up a few more passengers and heading for Kenai. At Kenai the marshal got off after finishing the telling of his life story and making an offer of one St. Bernard puppy if I could come up to his home in Anchorage to get it. From Kenai southward to Homer, the bus stopped from time to time to deposit a homesteader beside the road to disappear down a lonely path leading through the snowy woods, or beside a snow-covered cabin set close to the highway with a light burning in the window to welcome him home. When we passed my homestead I didn’t get off, riding on into Homer instead. After spending the night in “Homer’s finest,” I got up early the next morning to greet Vern Mutch just as he drove up in my car to open his drugstore.

  “Howdy, Vern.”

  “Hello, Gordon. Glad to be back?”

  “You bet!” And I meant it.

  As I drove out to the homestead, I felt like pressing my foot down hard on the gas pedal, felt like yelling with excitement. Instead I drove a cautious twenty miles per hour. The highway was like glass, the glare ice threatening to spin the car around and send it skidding in the direction from which it had come if I lost control for a moment.

  When I arrived at my snow-choked driveway, I parked the car in a drift, jumped out with my suitcase and, stumbling and falling through two feet of snow, aimed for my home. And when I saw my house and the greenhouse still standing though weighted down by their winter coats, I felt as though I had been away for years—not just five short weeks. I felt like a soldier returning from the wars.

  Unlocking the front door, I walked inside and put the coffee pot on to boil.

  Chapter XVIII—Spring Fever

  THE MIDDLE OF JANUARY, 1953. The snow was piled three feet deep all around the house and the temperature was dropping to thirty degrees below zero every night, it wasn’t exactly the ideal season for working in Alaska, but there were certain jobs I was determined to finish before the snow began to melt in April. In my flimsy, windswept garage, I was up to my knees in midnight oil.

  I had ordered a lot of thin-cut boards from Keeler to build 200 greenhouse flats to hold the 20,000 assorted set plants I planned to set in the spring. The job seemed endless. After cutting the boards to the proper size, I nailed them together and stacked them on an ever-growing pile in a corner of the garage. In a couple of weeks the garage was so full of shallow boxes that there was no more room for me. But that was all right: I was finished. In totting up my accounts, however, I discovered that the flats, not counting labor, had cost me almost 25 cents apiece. Knocked-down flats in the States would have set me back only 15 cents apiece. Oh, well. Live and learn.

  My next scheduled job was to pile up a huge supply of wood to fire the greenhouse stove when the time for firing arrived. Since the sawmills were always trying to figure out what to do with the piles of slabs left over from lumber-cutting operations, I knew this would be easy to get. All I had to do was find a neighbor with a large truck. This I did, and soon ten big loads had been dumped on the snow not far from the greenhouse door. Disconnecting my garden tractor from the power line, I moved it out to the slab pile and put on the arbor saw attachment. It didn’t take me long to find out that I could cut quite a considerable number of the slabs into five-foot lengths and stack them neatly in a day, but it was several weeks before I had amassed a big enough stock pile to think of quitting.

  During this same time I decided to start clearing another acre of land on the west side of the house. Each day I would set myself the task of falling at least ten trees. When they were lying on the ground, I limbed them, then piled the brush in neat piles and burned it. All through the last part of February and the month of March I kept at this job until there remained only an acre of stumps and about 200 recumbent saw logs. The trees which were too small or too crooked to be made into lumber I had cut and hauled to one side to be cut up into firewood later on.

  On the first of March I planted my first seeds. The snow was still deep and the weather still cold, but my house was relatively warm, and that’s where I put my first ten flats. Using the kitchen table to hold them, I moved it close to the big kitchen windows so that they would catch all the available sun. I planted tomato and celery seeds first, following with head lettuce. The soil I used was dirt I had scraped out of the cellar—the only place the ground wasn’t frozen to a depth of two feet.

  From then on, my function was that of a vestal virgin. To keep the house as warm as possible, I had to see that the fires never went out. The greatest danger period was in the early hours of the morning, when the thermometer would start to drop toward freezing and I would have to spring out of bed to build the fires higher and higher to save the flats from going frigid on top. Your doting father walking the floor with the baby at night had nothing on me.

  When shoots of green began to show in the flats
my next headache began. I would have to thaw the soil in the green-house so as to be able to plant my other seeds. For two weeks I fired the barrel stove with the five-foot slabs, keeping the fire going day and night. An inch at a time, the dirt in the bottom of the benches began to thaw. I covered the top of the soil with rolls of tarpaper so that when the sun hit the greenhouse the black paper would absorb the heat and melt the surface soil, at least. The thawing continued. Finally, the foot of soil in the benches was completely melted, but it was nothing but mud. More fire. More sun. At the end of two weeks the soil was dry enough to work. Building a screen from quarter-inch chicken wire, I proceeded to the lengthy, tedious task of screening the dirt in the benches, at the same time mixing it with sand. Then I filled the flats. When all 200 were full, I put them on boards laid across the benches. Now I was ready to sterilize the soil. Using a solution of water and formaldehyde, I soaked down the flats and left them for a week to dry out.

  At this stage of the game I ran into serious trouble. The spring thaw had started, and as the snow level lowered each day under the sharp spring sun, the melted snow trickled into my greenhouse pit, rising there to a level of two full feet. Then the water entered my stove and put the fire out. From then on it was The Battle of the Bucket Brigade. Every morning I started out with a pail in each hand, filled them from the pit, climbed out of the pit, hauled the full buckets over to the bluff and dumped the water out. After repeating this operation at least half a hundred times I would have emptied the pit, but there would always come a time when I would have to bail it out again: the next morning. It seemed as though all the snow in Alaska were melting and heading for my greenhouse. What I needed, I could see, was a drain, and every time I emptied the pit of water I would try to make one by picking away at the frozen ground in front of the stove—the lowest spot—to make a hole through to the thawed ground below. After a week of bailing and digging I at last managed to break through the frost layer and the water drained through. At that point I made a notation in my little black book to hire a cat in the summer to cut a trench from the greenhouse to the bluff. I wasn’t anxious to go through all that misery another year.

  Planting my vegetable seeds was a job I enjoyed. It was easy, and it was nice to work in the greenhouse when the sun on the trans-o-glass had heated it up to many degrees above the temperature outdoors. I seeded about fifty flats with cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and lettuce. Later on I would transplant the seedlings until all 200 flats were filled. As an afterthought, I planted a couple of packages of radish seed and several pounds of onion sets in one of the benches to see what would develop.

  Weeks later I began the transplanting. When I was finished I had 100 flats in cabbage and the balance in other vegetables. All that was required now was to keep the flats watered and the greenhouse at the proper temperature.

  By this time the snow had disappeared entirely, the ground was drying and I was ready to start putting an acre of previously-cleared land in shape to plant—the acre that had been lying fallow ever since I had cut down the trees to build my house. The Extension Service, a government agency which functioned to help farmers, had paid me $40 for clearing the acre and it expected me to use it for farming, but it had never felt the bite of a plow. It had grown, however, a two-feet-tall crop of weeds, and these would have to be removed.

  The Keelers brought over their new John Deere tractor one day and plowed and disked the field, turning up thousands of tree roots which had to be picked up—by hand and by me—and thrown over the bluff. When the job was done, the field certainly looked nice: all that good, freshly-turned volcanic earth, ready for planting.

  When I subjected the acre to a slightly closer inspection on the following day, however, it didn’t look as good as it had at first glance: with its hundreds of holes and hills, it looked more like the highway during spring thaw. Raking the entire field over with a garden rake for a week, I managed to level it out to a certain extent and start it draining toward the bluff. Then I put my rototiller attachment on the tractor and went over the whole acre again, fluffing up the soil to a depth of six inches.

  In Homer I picked up half a ton of commercial fertilizer and 300 pounds of seed potatoes. Spreading some of the fertilizer over a quarter of the acre, I mixed it into the ground with the tractor. Now I was ready to start planting. Cutting the potatoes into small pieces, with at least two eyes to a section, I planted them eighteen inches apart in the rows and placed the rows three feet apart, being careful to leave the seeds as close to the surface of the ground as possible so that they could get full benefit from the heat of the sun.

  Next I planted my own, private vegetable garden next to the greenhouse—peas, Swiss chard, beets, radishes, green onions and mustard greens. There were lots of other vegetables which would, I knew, grow in Alaska—practically everything but corn—but the ones I chose were the ones I liked. Why should I grow a lot of stuff I wouldn’t want to eat?

  In the meantime, the set plants in the greenhouse had been growing so fast that, if I wasn’t careful, the midnight sun would make them split their flats. Twenty-two hours of daylight in the spring gives a rather alarming impetus to plants in Alaska. The stove hadn’t been burning for a week and I had let as much air into the greenhouse as I could so as to harden the plants off and get them ready for sale and for setting out in my own garden. As the first of them became “done,” I prepared the ground in the field and planted 500 broccoli plants, 1000 cauliflower plants and 2000 cabbage plants, pressing the dirt firmly around each plant. This, I had learned from my neighbors, was the best way to get the plants growing: the light volcanic earth, when firmed, would draw all available moisture.

  But there was still a great deal of ground left unplanted. Hating to see it go to waste, I bought a pound of carrot seed, mixed it with fine sand, and planted a large plot next to the potato patch. Then I was done. All that remained, for the moment, was to prepare to sell my remaining set plants to whoever came along.

  I painted up a big sign and set it up next to the highway with an arrow pointing to the homestead. Decorated with a crude picture of a greenhouse surrounded by spruce trees, it read: “Stoddard’s Greenhouse. Set plants and garden vegetables for sale.” Now I was ready for the hordes of customers who would undoubtedly beat a path to my door. My receipt books were ready, my greenhouse was ready and I was more than ready.

  The first customers trickled in. They were mostly other homesteaders who had ordered plants when I had first started to build the greenhouse, and they bought only enough to assure themselves of a summer’s supply of vegetables for their tables. Most of them went heavy on the cabbage plants and lettuce but light on the other plants. Some bought by the dozen but a few wanted whole flats—especially those with several mouths to feed. The money in my cash box gradually piled up and more and more flats were emptied, but there was still a large supply of plants going begging.

  In the last part of June business picked up. Customers came from all the little towns up and down the road. But by this time the plants were getting much too big for the flats and I realized that I would either have to sell them faster or throw them away. One day, just on a hunch, I took a few flats into Homer with me, leaving them at a hardware store. “Sell ‘em if you can,” I told the woman owner on my way out. Before I got out of town she had sent a small boy after me. “She says she’s sold ‘em all and wants you to bring her some more,” he said, breathlessly. To my surprise the hardware store sold 3000 plants in less than a week.

  When at last my customer list had dropped to zero, however, I still had close to 5,000 set plants on hand. It was plainly a case of supply exceeding demand, and of the markets being too far away. Maybe next year I would sell more. I hoped so. As it was, there was nothing to do but transplant another 2000 cabbage plants from the flats to the field and throw the rest away.

  In the meantime, the hundred tomato plants I had set out in the benches were doing fine with the help of lots of water, sunlight and some goat manure given to
me by Looie The Goat Man. I had also planted some cucumber and squash seeds, together with a few watermelon seeds, to see what would happen.

  The vegetables in the field were doing well, too, and I was already selling radishes and green onions to grocery stores in three different communities. Broccoli was the next crop to start coming in. I cut it, weighed it up in pound bunches and took it to Homer. It sold like hot-cakes—for awhile. Then the population of the isolated little Alaska town—a population which, you’d think, would be hungry for taste after taste of fresh vegetables—decided it had had enough of broccoli and stopped buying. In a way, I didn’t blame them. Broccoli for dinner every night for a month can become a little boring. Anything can: I had found that out with salmon.

  With each dollar I took in on vegetables three more were going out for expenses. I had discovered that there was much more greenhouse equipment to buy, and many more tools for the garden. My mistake, I decided, had been in not backing myself up with a large hunk of cash for operating expenses during my first year of being in business For myself.

  From then on I concentrated on raising money, money and more money. The only thing to do, I had concluded, was to sell part of my land—land across the creek which was covered with timber and would never be any good for farming, anyway. Yes, that’s what I would do.

  Chapter XIX—Land for Sale

  THE WORD WAS OUT that Gordon Stoddard of Stariski Creek was trying to sell part of his homestead. Some of his neighbors shook their heads sadly, knowingly. Eighty acres: the beginning of the end. Another bachelor giving up and going back to the States. Too bad, too bad. But what can you expect, of a bachelor? A man without a wife can stand the life just so long. Too bad. Too bad.