Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  The tradesmen in Homer and Anchor Point looked up their charge accounts to see if Stoddard owed them anything. If he was planning to skip without paying his bills—well, they’d see that he was stopped at the border, all right. A man can’t get away with that sort of thing.

  My closer friends knew that I was trying to sell out all the land I didn’t need in order to raise money to better the farming land I would have left when I did. They knew, too, that I was nearly broke, and that I would have to sell something—anything in order to live. But the rumors continued.

  I didn’t care. I knew what I knew: that if I didn’t sell some land I would have to work on a construction job during the summer and leave the homestead, with its greenhouse and its verdant, growing fields, to fall into wasteful disuse. I had to sell some land.

  I put an ad in an Anchorage paper listing 80 acres and a cabin—the shack I had built during my first year of homesteading—for $2500. I also listed the property with a real estate agent in Homer for a short period to see what would develop. The ad brought no results. The listing with the agent brought no results. It looked as though no one wanted my 80 acres. Things looked awfully black at the Stoddard homestead.

  One day in July there was a knock on the door. The real estate agent stood on the threshold with a young couple in tow. “These folks,” he said, introducing them, “would like to look at your land.”

  While the couple was admiring the greenhouse, the real estate man drew me aside, “The time limit on your listing is up,” he whispered. “But I’m pretty sure I can make a sale. If I can, will you pay me the ten percent commission?”

  “Sure,” I whispered back. “But you’ll have to raise the price to take care of your cut. I still need $2500.”

  He agreed. And after spending the next hour walking over the land and examining, with particular attention, the shack near the highway, the people left, saying, “We’ll let you know.” Familiar words which often don’t mean a thing. But I had hopes. And in a further conversation with the agent, who had remained behind to talk, I happened to mention that I would be willing to add another twenty acres of creek bottom land to make a solid 100 acres and price it at $3000. “Great,” said the agent. “I’m sure these people’ll go for a deal like that. I’ll let you know.” More hopes.

  But when a few days had gone by and nothing had been heard from either the couple or the agent, my hopes died. And when there was a knock on the door I said to myself, “Oh, it’s probably just somebody to buy cabbage plants.” Nevertheless, I opened the door. There stood a young man I knew I had seen somewhere before.

  He stuck out his hand. “Bud May. Land Office. Anchorage,” he said.

  That rang a bell. He was the fellow who went around inspecting homesteads to determine if the applicants were proving up properly. Oh-oh. What had I done now? Maybe I had failed to fill out my filing papers correctly and didn’t own the homestead after all. What a horrible thought.

  But his next words reassured me. “I want to buy the 80 acres you have for sale,” he said. “As a government employee, I’m not allowed to homestead, you know. But I want some land. How about it?”

  “Come in! Come right in!” I croaked. “Here. Have a cup of coffee. Have a seat. Have a cigarette. Have anything I’ve got!”

  Pushing him into a chair, I rushed around collecting things to make him more comfortable, probably making him very uncomfortable, in the process. But I couldn’t let him get away. I think I would have shot him down like a dog if he had made a move toward the door.

  Getting down to business, I explained to him that the land for sale was now 100 acres. “I’ll show it to you,” I offered eagerly.

  “I’ve already walked over part of it,” he said. “But yes: show me the rest.”

  Returning from a grand tour of high land and low land, timber land and muskeg land, we were walking up the driveway to the house when we saw a strange car parked by the greenhouse. “That must be the people who were here the other day looking at the land,” said I, thinking quickly. “They’ve probably come back to close the deal.”

  “No you don’t!” cried May, growing excited. “I’ve got first chance at the land. Look. I’ve got my typewriter in the car. I’ll go get it and we’ll make out the papers.” After I had sold the owner of the strange car two dozen cabbage plants, I followed Mr. May into the house and we came to terms. The total price for the land was set at $2800, with $1000 down and the balance to be paid off, at the rate of $50 a month plus six percent interest, in two years. A 30-day option agreement was drawn up and $100 paid me for the option. Everything seemed shipshape and watertight. But as May was leaving he mentioned that he would have to talk the matter over with his wife. This parting shot left me with grave misgivings. Maybe his wife would say no. Maybe May would change his mind. If he did, and with the land tied up for 30 days, I might not find another buyer until late in the season. Or at all. Oh, woe!

  For three weeks I suffered. Every day in which I received no word from May was a day of pain. But finally, with only a few of the 30 days left to go, I heard from May. “Meet me in Homer on Monday,” he wrote. And on Monday the deal was closed, I put $1000 in the bank, the deed was placed in escrow and I bought a case of beer and some frozen frying chickens and went home to celebrate.

  Before I had any prospects for selling the land I had tried to borrow money from the Bank of Homer. But being a greenhorn when it came to doing business with a bank, I had gone about it in the wrong way. I had walked in one day, hunted up the president and put the question plainly. “How about lending me $3000?” I had said.

  The president had looked at me blankly. “Why, my dear boy,” he had answered. “Three thousand dollars is an immense sum. Three thousand dollars is our limit—our maximum. Who do you think we are: The Bank of America?”

  Then he had explained that I would have to have a very good reason for borrowing such a sum and an absolutely sure way of paying it back monthly. Besides, a 120-acre homestead wasn’t very good collateral: it practically wasn’t collateral at all. A bank would be taking a chance if it loaned as little as $100 on a homestead. In fact—speaking for his own bank—they’d really rather not have anything to do with a homestead.

  This was a blow. I had built my house as elaborately as I had—and it was elaborate, for that area—partly with the idea of some day being able to raise some money on it. I figured it was worth between three and five thousand dollars and that I would be able to borrow on it and repay the bank on a yearly basis—even at the eight percent interest the bank demanded. Who, in a country where year ‘round jobs were an impossibility, could pay monthly installments on a loan? “I know. I know,” said the bank president. “But we can’t afford to take such risks.” I had gone home discouraged and disillusioned.

  After my successful sale of the land, however, I thought I would try the bank again. The down payment I had received for the 100 acres wasn’t enough to pay for all the equipment I needed. This time I found the banker in a better mood to listen to my proposition. When I told him that I only required $1500 this time and that I had $50 coming in each month, he said he was sure he could fix me up. “However,” he said, “you’ll have to talk it over with one of our directors.”

  The director lived some distance north of me and I had to travel many miles to see him, but I felt it was worth the trip. He approved of “the idea” and promised to take the matter up at the bank’s next weekly meeting. He was in doubt about one point, however: he wasn’t sure that my homestead—the house and the ten acres that I would put up for collateral—would be enough. “Why don’t you come out and see my place?” I suggested. “I’m sure it will satisfy you.”

  A week later the director drove into my yard armed with a formidable-looking camera. He proceeded to aim it at the front of the house. I winced. The front wasn’t really finished: I had planned to cover up the upper story: which was still only rough lumber, with peeled slabs. It would look terrible in a picture. Frowning as he snapped, the
director muttered, “Hmmm. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “Let me show you the interior of the house,” I said, grabbing him firmly by the arm. I led him upstairs and downstairs, feverishly pointing out the wonderful view from the windows, the lighting and water system, the rug on my living room floor, the “modern conveniences.” Detaching himself from my grasp, the director made his escape.

  A few days later in Homer, the bank told me that “everything was all set.” It seems the director had been very much impressed. What he had expected to see was a tumbledown shack—the usual for a bachelor homestead-surrounded by heaps of tin cans and garbage. Instead, he found, “a really beautiful house, well equipped.” “Loan granted.”

  The loan was consummated, $1500 was credited to my account, the payments from Bud May were signed over to the bank for my monthly payments on the loan my household patent was put in a vault for safekeeping. Now, I felt, I was a true businessman, I had sold land, borrowed from a bank, had a mortgage hanging over my head like everyone else and was once more a man of means. I even carried fire insurance on my house, a requirement of the bank, I was a land baron with debts.

  Chapter XX—Ruination of a Sport Fisherman

  THE SALMON LEAPED HIGH out of the water, shaking his head in a frantic effort to dislodge the treble hook from his jaw. Falling back with a splash, he surged downstream, spinning the line from my reel so fast—whrrrrr!—that it burned my thumb.

  I let him go, waiting for his moment of exhaustion. When there was little resistance to my tug, I heaved up on my light nine-foot bamboo casting rod. Slowly I led him back to the pool on whose bank I was standing. He made a few more short, erratic runs, trying to cut the line on the rocks of the creek bottom. But gradually he became weaker and weaker. When the white of his belly showed—the white flag of surrender—I pulled him into shallow water. Reaching with my free hand into the hip pocket of my jeans. I pulled out a short gaff, placed it at a point an inch behind the feebly flopping fish’s head and gave a jerk.

  For several minutes the heavy salmon thrashed about among the willows on the bank, crushing whatever he came in contact with. Finally he lay still, and I was able to cut the hooks from his mouth and retrieve the gaff. He was a beautiful 38-pounder, his silver sides and back still greenish, the sea lice still crawling in his gills. A king salmon: king of Alaska.

  Dragging my catch up the 200 feet to my house, I dumped it at the back door and went in for a cup of coffee. I felt no excitement. This was only one of hundreds of salmon—kings and silvers—I had caught during my stay in Alaska. This was just another morning in another summer—just another job which had to be done if I was to have plenty of fish to eat in the winter. This salmon would be in the pint jars before the day was over, and I might go down to the creek again in the afternoon after I had watered the greenhouse and tilled the potatoes and catch another one. Ho-Hum...

  Catching fish hadn’t always been so easy for me, and there had been a time when it hadn’t been such a dull, joyless task. Four years before in California, I had been as enthusiastic a sport fisherman as you’d ever hope to find: a rabid stalker of rainbow trout in the high Sierras in the summer, a feverish follower of steelhead at the river mouths in the winter, a fanatic rock fisherman on the shores of the Pacific between seasons. I had lived for fishing ever since the summer vacation when, as a small boy, I had caught my first five-inch trout in the Eel River. Every Christmas after that my family, indulging my piscatorial interest, had given me bigger and better tackle, and every year I had managed to catch slightly larger fish. I had graduated into fly fishing at ten, discovered steelhead fishing at fifteen, caught my first steelhead on my sixteenth birthday, From then on I had haunted the rivers every winter, especially the Carmel River, near where I lived. I was the first fisherman out at the opening of every season and the last to leave on the final day. But in four years I caught only three steelhead. I had to do better than that.

  After the war and my discharge from the Navy, I had moved to Mill Valley, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. From there I had fished all the streams up the California coast: the Russian River, the Gualalla, the Garcia and the Eel. I had thrown away my short casting rod, bought a nine-foot steelhead rod, bought waders and became a bait fisherman. I learned how to cast with a small weight and let a gob of salmon roe bounce over the floor of a stream—where the steelhead lie—without snagging. I learned that when a steelhead takes the bait he’s as gentle as a nibbling trout, and that you have to know that nibble when it comes or lose your fish. But with all my expensive equipment and persistence, I caught only one steelhead during my last winter in California. I was disgusted. “There are too many fishermen in this state—and not enough fish!” I had complained to a friend.

  All the way to Alaska I had dreamed of the fishing I would find in the north country. And I was not disappointed. While working in the cannery at Kenai during my first summer on the Kenai Peninsula, I had driven up the highway to the upper reaches of the Kenai River before and after work to spend hours with my rod and reel. The fish I caught, one after the other, without half trying, would have been considered prizes in the high Sierras. Once I stopped by a little creek that ran under the highway through a small culvert. Standing on the highway, I tossed in my line. Its two trout hooks were baited with a single salmon egg apiece, and I really didn’t expect much of a result. As fast as I could pull them out I caught Dolly Varden trout. Inside of an hour my fishing basket was bursting with fish up to 20 inches in length. It was—funny to think of it now—one of the biggest thrills of my life.

  Another time I hiked up to a mountain lake which was supposed to contain an abundance of trout and, by casting from the shore with a short casting pole and a spinner, was able to land two huge, green-colored Mackinaw trout weighing a total of thirteen pounds. I lost most of my equipment in the process, besides falling into the lake a couple of times, but I considered the day an immense success.

  The Anchor River, seventeen miles north of Homer, was my first salmon fishing heaven. I discovered it shortly after my arrival in town while I was a house guest of Vern Mutch. At that time, I was told, the king salmon run was over but the silvers and steelhead were still heading upstream to spawn. “Steelhead! Salmon!” I cried as I rushed down to the mouth of the river early one morning.

  I had rigged up my outfit in the way I had always done for catching steelhead in California, using a gob of salmon eggs for bait. I gave my nine-foot pole a heave and cast my line far out into the center of a beautiful little tide pool. Almost at once I hooked a fish. With trembling hands and pounding heart, I played it up to the three-foot bank on which I was standing and tried to lift it. The weight was too much for my ten-pound leader: the silver salmon fell back into the water, taking my leader with him. The still morning air rang with my curses, and if there had been anyone around to hear me—well, I would have been considered a bad prospect for Alaska, for sure.

  I calmed down when I took another look at the pool: it was literally boiling, swirling with fish. Wading across the stream to a sand bar, I tossed my line in again. At noon I stopped fishing—but only because I was exhausted. Lying on the sand were twelve salmon and eight steelhead, lined up from the smallest—five pounds—to the largest—fifteen pounds: more fish—and considerable more poundage—than I had ever caught in one session in all my life in California. Truly, Alaska was my natural home!

  There was only one thing missing: there were no envious fishermen to crowd around me and congratulate me on my luck, no one to admire the shining beauty of the rows of fish, no people at all. Carrying the fish to my car, I drove into Homer, parked in front of Vern’s drugstore and opened up the baggage compartment so that everyone could see my catch. Of all the passing people who glanced at it only one man stopped to comment. “Been fishin’, huh?” he said. “You gonna sell ‘em or can ‘em up for the winter?”

  I gaped at him.

  “Say, that reminds me,” he continued. “I got to get busy an
d catch fifty of them pretty soon or my old lady will tan my hide.”

  In dismay I offered him my fish. “Well, thanks,” he said in a tired voice. “That will save me a little work.” He disappeared, then, but in a few minutes he was back with a gunny sack, which he proceeded to fill with the salmon. “Don’t you want the steelhead?” I asked him.

  “Not on your life. They’re not good for anything. Around here, we just throw them in the bushes when we catch them. The bones don’t cook up in the canner. They’re not even good for dog food,” I stared after him in horror as he trudged away with his heavy sack.

  From then on I changed my attitude toward steelhead—toward any fish smaller than a salmon. I spent almost every day on the banks of the river, catching silvers by the dozen. I got a kick out of catching so many, and it tickled me to think that if a game warden passed by he would have nothing to say: at that time there was no limit in Alaska. Besides, I had learned the law of the land: that fishing, besides being a sport, is one of the prime ingredients of survival in Alaska, and that every single fish that isn’t eaten fresh goes into a jar. (I was giving mine to Vern Mutch, and he was canning them up as fast as I caught them).

  When I finally found my homestead, one of the things that helped me decide on that particular location was its proximity to the Anchor River (six miles) and the fact that the land itself had a good fishing stream running its length: Stariski Creek. Just the thought of having my own private fishing stream had made me dash off a series of letters containing snapshots of strings of weighty silver salmon to my frustrated fishing pals in the States. And on the backs of the pictures, laughing with maniacal glee, I had written, “Just a typical morning’s catch in Alaska.”