The following spring I got ready for the king salmon season. My neighbors seemed to think that kings were the only kind of fish worth fishing for and I was anxious to try my skill. Using the same tackle I had used for the silver salmon and steelhead, I caught my first two kings on my first day of fishing in the Anchor River. They put up a magnificent fight in the rushing water, but I landed them in the end. The other fishermen there that day had scoffed at my light bamboo pole and my small reel with the 20-pound test line. “You’ll never catch a king with that flimsy tackle,” they had told me. “What you need is a short casting pole with a star drag reel and plenty of 60-pound test line.” “That’s a lot of hogwash,” I had rudely retorted—and proved it. What I had found out was sufficient to give me confidence: that the salmon would fight the bending, flexible pole instead of my arm, that the simple reel was easier to control than a heavy star-drag mechanism, and that the 20-pound line was heavy enough to land any salmon if handled properly. And while the other fishermen, with their short rods and heavy reels, used spinners with huge treble hooks baited with gobs of salmon eggs and wire leaders, I eliminated the leader and weight on my line and used only a treble hook baited with salmon roe. The weight of the bait was sufficient to keep it on the bottom, where the kings were lying, and I was able to catch them when the others couldn’t.
One memorable day I appeared at my favorite salmon hole, a long, deep hole in which the stream rushed swiftly over the rocks in an unbroken line. There were several fishermen ahead of me, but none of them had had any success. Starting at the head of the hole, I bounced my bait along the bottom. Within four hours I had landed eleven salmon and lost several others. And whenever I hooked a king and followed him downstream, I would look back to see another fisherman running over to the spot I had just vacated to cast frantically into the same water. It got to be funny. I was adding fish after fish to a growing pile and nobody else was catching a thing. “You lucky devil!” they said it to me, over and over again. I tried to explain that it wasn’t luck: it was the equipment I was using. But no one would listen. I was pretty unpopular that day.
After that I did most of my fishing in my own creek, leaving the Anchor River to the others. I will always remember my first king salmon experience with the Stariski. Two of my neighbors and I followed the creek to a point a mile above the bridge where there was a large hole dammed by some cooperative beavers. Throwing a rock into the pool, we watched the water churn and boil like a witches’ pot, and when one of my friends climbed a tree for a better look he almost lost his balance and came near joining the fish in the creek below. “There’s over a hundred kings in there!” he shouted.
For a short while we tried bait, but apparently the fish weren’t interested in eating. Then we switched to snag outfits. These are made by putting a large treble hook on the end of a line, adding a heavy sinker, then putting another large treble hook above the weight. I threw my line in, let it sink, then gave my pole a jerk. The pool boiled, and out of the turbulent water leaped a king with my hook in its back. Hitting the water again, it shot like a torpedo toward the creek bank, hit it, almost caved it in with the force of its drive. Then it headed for the opposite bank. Then back again. Then, either through breaking the line or tossing the hook, it got away. But I wasn’t disappointed. Snagged salmon put up over twice the fight of a fairly-caught fish—and give the fisherman over twice the thrill.
One of my friends couldn’t seem to get the hang of snagging fish. “I’ll snag one for you,” I offered. “When I’ve got one, I’ll hand you the pole and you can play it.” He stood right by my side while I snagged a fish, but before he could start winding up the slack line in the reel the huge king salmon swam up on the beach and landed high and dry between his legs. He was so disgusted he refused to try again. “It’s either too hard or too easy,” he complained.
That afternoon we carried the nine large kings we had caught back to my cabin, and that night we put them up into ten cases of pint jars—food for months.
But after two years of fishing in Alaska, something sad happened to me. I was a changed man. No longer did I quiver and shake when playing a prize fish. No longer did I curse and break fishing rods if a big one got away. No longer was I the first one out in the spring and the last one to stop fishing in the fall. No longer did I send pictures of my catches home to my friends in the States: I didn’t even bother taking pictures. The thrill was gone. All I did was what was necessary. When the main king salmon run was on. I spent just enough days at the creek to fill up five cases of pint jars with what I caught, and after that I would lose all interest in fishing—unless I felt like a nice, fresh salmon steak for dinner. And even then, if I fished for half an hour without catching anything, it didn’t bother me: I’d just shrug my shoulders, open up a can of moose meat and make myself a pot of moose stew. And if I accidentally caught a steelhead—well, I threw it back.
Thus was accomplished the ruination of a good sport fisherman. Thus a man who had once lived to fish became a monster who only fished to live.
Chapter XXI—The Visitation
INTO EACH SON’S LIFE a little mother must fall.
I was excited when I received the letter from California: the letter that told me my mother would be arriving on a certain day in July and that I must be sure to meet her at the Homer airport. At last a member of my family was to view the results of all my labors, to see what I had accomplished in the past three years! At last I could prove that I hadn’t been lying in my letters about what a wonderful country Alaska was! I must get everything in readiness, in perfect order, for the great occasion.
Scrubbing, shining, dusting and sweeping, I put the house in tip-top Navy shape—good enough, at least, to pass a mother’s inspection (I hoped).
Then I turned my attention to the grounds. On the east side of the greenhouse, in the growing field, I wouldn’t have to do much besides spend a day with the rototiller, cultivating between the rows of vegetables and digging the fireweed into the soil. But the west side of the greenhouse was a different proposition: there was an acre of stumps and saw logs left from my clearing work of the early spring, and in the center of the acre, sticking out like a bum at a banker’s convention, stood the outhouse in all its shabby glory. I would have to hurry and clear out this blot on the landscape before my mother’s arrival.
Luckily there was a D-4 caterpillar tractor in the area. I hired its owner to remove the offensive stumps and push them out of sight over the bluff but instructed him to leave the saw logs untouched. Next, I told him to move the even more offensive outhouse to a spot under a group of trees on the edge of the bluff. Then, as an afterthought, I had him ditch my entrance road and make it wider, build a new road along the government survey line back to my northeast corner, clear me a couple of spots along the bluff in that direction for possible future cabin sites, and last, but certainly among the most important, dig me a trench from the greenhouse pit to the bluff to insure good drainage during the next spring thaw. These jobs took the operator three days and cost me a large sum of money, but my homestead, when he was finished, was a thing of beauty. Mother would be pleased.
The great day arrived. I shaved, pulled on slacks and a sweater—the Alaskan equivalent to full dress in the States—and drove into Homer. After having three months of growth cut from my shaggy locks (I often went without a haircut for longer than that because of the scarcity of barbers in the area), I was ready to meet my mother. The plane landed and I was striding quickly across the field calling “Hiya, Mom!” to the small, stylish figure descending the portable stairs.
My mother was dressed as though she had just come from a tea at the Biltmore, and she stood out among the other passengers milling around us in their windbreaker jackets and jeans like a bright candle among a lot of moths. So did I, in my slacks and sweater. Or so I thought, until Mother kissed me and said, “Well, darling. You look like a homesteader.”
Though in her middle sixties when it came to age, my mother was twenty ye
ars younger in energy. As we moved toward the car she excitedly told me all about her trip up in the plane and all the wonderful scenery she had seen on the way, and if she was tired she didn’t show it in her voice. And as we drove through Homer and out the highway toward my homestead, she also tried to relate all that had happened to her since we had last seen each other at Christmas. At the same time I endeavored to point out the scenes of interest we were passing, and the result was a rather jumbled, confused sort of conversation. Good old Mother: she hadn’t changed a bit. It was fine to see her again.
As we approached my place I cut in with, “Well, Mom, we’re almost there. There’s the old shack where I first proved up on my homestead. We are now crossing Stariski Creek, the creek that flows through my land. Here’s the road into my place. And there: there’s my house and homestead.” I stopped the car in front of the house. “What do you think of it?”
“Why, it’s all very nice, dear,” she answered in what I felt was a slightly disappointed voice. “It’s not exactly as I pictured it, but it looks as though you’ve done a great deal of work.”
Not permitting her to say any more, I caught her hand and led her through the house, the greenhouse and the garage, then out across the fields. She exclaimed at most points with appropriate words of praise, but finally she said, “Son, do you mind if I take off my best coat and change my shoes? I’m afraid these high heels are making big holes in your potato hills.”
Cursing myself for my selfish enthusiasm, I gave my mother a little time to unpack her bags and get settled a bit. Then, thinking she would be hungry after her trip and anxious to show off my well-stocked larder, I said, “What would you like for dinner, Mom? You can have your choice of canned moose meat, rabbit, bear, spruce chicken, clams or fish. For vegetable I can offer you fresh-out-of-the-garden broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, swiss chard or mustard greens.”
“Well.” She hesitated. “If you don’t mind, Son, I’d just like a cup of tea and some toast. I had a good meal in Anchorage when the plane stopped there.”
I was disappointed in her reaction to my menu, but I tried not to show my feelings. Across the table from my plateful of moose meat, fried potatoes and boiled mustard greens, I eyed her cup of tea and wondered, sadly, if she would ever get used to homesteader’s fare. Maybe I should have put in a supply of canned corned beef hash or boned chicken or something. Maybe. Oh, well; probably the clean, fresh air of Alaska would improve her appetite....
After dinner Mother gave the house a second scrutiny. “My, this floor is dirty,” she commented. “Don’t you ever clean it, Son?”
“Sure, Mom. I sweep it every two days. I gave it an extra lick in honor of your arrival.”
“Why don’t you mop it?”
“I don’t own a mop. Besides, you can’t take the time to keep a house perfectly clean when you’re working out of doors all day long.”
She frowned, meditatively. “I suppose not. But tomorrow I’m going to do something about it. You can buy me a mop in that town we passed through. Living in the wilderness shouldn’t mean that you forget the way you’ve been brought up. You never saw our home in California looking like this.”
“No, Mom.”
Later in the evening Mother expressed a desire to take a bath. I filled a bucket with water and put it on the stove to heat, saying, “Bucket bath coming right up, madam!” She looked at the bucket. “Well,” she said, “I guess I won’t take a bath tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”
The outhouse was also a shock. When she returned from a late-evening trip, she remarked. “At least you could have built the toilet a little closer to the house, Son. I nearly got lost in the dark, trying to find it.”
When it was time to go to bed, I fixed Mother up on an iron cot with my thickest mattress and warmest blankets. Knowing that a comfortable bed had always been one of her prime requirements in life, I was dubious about the whole arrangement, but it was all I had to offer. And all night long the cot squeaked and groaned as she tried to find a sleepable position. “Poor Mother,” I thought, as I listened. “She’s going to have a hard time, roughing it up here with me.” I pounded my pillow, buried my head in it. “But then,” I told myself as I sank into oblivion, “a sourdough was never made in a day.”
In the morning Mother offered to take over the cooking, as I had hoped she would. She was an excellent cook, and my mouth was already watering with the thought of tasting some more of those good meals I had loved as a boy.
And I would have tasted them, I’m sure, had it not been for my coal cookstove. Mother had never seen one before—or, at least, not since the days of her own childhood—and she was aggrieved when it turned on her like a big, black monster. First it was too hot. Then it was too cold. I would start it up and have it working normally by the time I left the house for the fields, but the minute Mother found herself alone with it she would lose all control. “I can’t understand it,” she would cry. “I watch this little gauge in the oven door, but the oven doesn’t act at all like my gas oven at home.” She was right: it didn’t. All the meals came out overdone or undercooked. And, irritated over her failures, Mother begged me to buy a better stove. I explained to her that though a butane stove would give better results, a coal stove was more practical in a country where coal was free, and it would have to do. Thereafter, the coal stove stayed solidly in place—as did all of Mother’s meals in my stomach.
Poor Mother: there were so many things that bothered her about life in Alaska—about life, particularly, in the Stoddard homestead cabin. For one thing, she was afraid of the cellar. I had made the mistake of telling her the story about the ermine who had occupied it one winter and snarled at me every time I went down to get some supplies, and of how I hadn’t shot it because it kept down the hordes of mice and shrews which lived there, and that did it, I guess. I assured her that the ermine was gone, now, but she argued—most reasonably, I’ll admit—that the mice and shrews were still there, and she flatly refused to set foot in “that hole.” As a consequence, she called me in from the fields several times a day to fetch cans of food for her. This bit into my working time and annoyed me a little, but I really couldn’t blame her, I told myself, for not wanting to meet my little cellar friends.
Mother’s only vice was ice water. When she learned that I owned a spring that supplied five gallons of ice water every minute of the day, she was overjoyed. And from the way in which she raved over the coldness of the water and its flavor, I knew that at last there was something on my homestead that pleased her. She insisted on my going down the hill to the spring every evening before dinner and bringing back a pitcherful of it. On certain days when I was tired from a tedious day’s work I would try explaining to her that I had gone to great trouble and expense to put a water system in the house in order to eliminate the hill-climbing, and I assured her that the water which came from the kitchen faucet was exactly the same as that which came from the spring. “But the spring water is colder,” she would inform me. So off I would go, down the hill like Jack to fetch a pail of water.
It was mid-July, and the weather, to my mind, was warm. During the days the temperature would often rise to as high as 80 degrees. To an Alaskan who is used to sub-zero temperatures, this seemed as hot as a blast from a furnace. It seemed warm to Mother, too, but when the temperature dropped to what I thought of as a still-warm 70 degrees at night, she would begin to shiver. “Build a fire in the barrel stove, Son,” she would say.
“But Mom,” I would protest. “There’s plenty of heat coming from the cookstove.”
“It’s not warm enough for me,” she would reply, pulling her sweater over her shoulders.
Then I would build a small fire, and for the rest of the evening I would suffer in a sweat-dripping undershirt while Mother, in a thin house dress, would sit as close as she could to the stove. I watched, with some dismay, the dwindling of my winter’s wood supply, knowing that I would have to build it up again before the snows came. But I understood: Mother and I were in
habitants of two different worlds, now, and never the twain would meet.
After Mother had been with me a week I decided to drive my car up to Anchorage and trade it in on a jeep truck. Leaving the greenhouse in the care of the Keeler boys, Mother and I started out, heading north. Our progress was slow. Mother had brought along her 35-mm. camera, and every few miles or so she asked me to stop so that she could take a picture. I didn’t mind, but as the day wore on, I began to worry about reaching the city before late at night. The Sterling Highway, even in the daytime, isn’t very safe to drive, and at night there’s always the danger of hitting a moose or skidding off some sharp curve. I pleaded with her. “Mom,” I said. “We’ve still got 150 miles to go. If we stop any more for pictures we’ll never make it.”
She seemed to understand, but at the next point of interest she said, “Just this once. Please?”
And so it went. Alaska is cluttered with scenery—too much of it, to my way of thinking—and besides, I was familiar with it all. But to Mother it was “magnificent, breathtaking, awesome.” I tried to see her point of view, but it was difficult. This was a business trip for me, and I wanted to get to Anchorage as soon as possible and back to the homestead even quicker. As it turned out, we made Anchorage at about 9. p. m. without mishap, except for one flat tire and three broken valve springs.
On the following day, after stopping in a hotel overnight, I ran around town looking for a good trade-in on my car while Mother investigated the shops. I was finally able to get a 1950 jeep in poor condition by turning in my car and $600 in cash. I also bought a new short block for the jeep-just in case the other motor wasn’t any good—picked up Vern Mutch’s chain saw, which had been repaired, and bought a Buick axle for the Keelers. Then I met Mother at the hotel. “I want to see some sights,” she said.
Gordon Stoddard Page 17
