Gordon Stoddard

by Go North, Young Man

  The last crop to take in was the carrots. I had waited just a little too long and had to dig them out of two inches of frozen ground with a pick. Breaking their tops off, I stored them between layers of sand in the root cellar—almost 500 pounds of them. Then I shut the two cellar doors and heaved a sigh of relief: the field harvest was finished.

  But the greenhouse harvest was still going on. The big glass nursery, with the barrel stove supplying the heat, was still turning out tomatoes and cucumbers by the bucketful, and I was still selling them in Homer for a good price and would continue to do so for as long as they lasted: people, it seemed, were hungry for tomatoes and cucumbers. And although I had had trouble selling my other vegetables, I had proved to myself that I could grow almost anything that would grow in Alaska. Maybe next year I would have better luck, find more markets. Anyway, my season’s work was done.

  Chapter XXIV—Tourists

  IT WAS THE MIDDLE of October and the last tourist had disappeared down the road. It was quiet again. Boy, how quiet it was!

  Until this year I really hadn’t had much experience with Alaskan tourists. Always before I had been away from the homestead, working on construction jobs, during the tourist season. But now I knew all about genus tourist, and the memory made my head ache as though someone were using it for a tom-tom.

  Starting in May, the stillness of my peaceful woods had been shattered by a series of sounds. These sounds had had nothing in common with the familiar sounds—the call of a bull moose to his mate, the yip of a coyote at the moon, the howling of a malemute dog. And as the strange sounds had increased, the local sounds had seemed to die out. Had all the wild game fled to the hills—and my homesteader neighbors with them?

  You can imagine how Robinson Crusoe might have felt if a jet plane had suddenly buzzed his isolated island. That’s how I felt when the seldom-traveled highway began to roar with high-powered cars, the air began to vibrate with masculine shouts and feminine shrieks and the hinges on my cabin door threatened to buckle under repeated knocks which preceded repeated requests for water, gasoline, directions or “permission to park in your front yard.”

  As I got to know them, I began to divide the tourists into two distinct types—both of which made me think of packing up and moving much farther north—to the almost impassable Brooks Range, if necessary.

  I’ll call the first type the Motel Tourist. This species, a resident of the States or Canada, travels in a late-model car and brings his family—his wife, his mother-in-law and two or three kids—along with him. He’s more of a machine than a man: the main impression you get, as he drives by at a rate of speed inspired by his determination to see the greatest number of sights and collect the largest amount of conversation material in the shortest possible time, is of a guided missile whizzing past faster than sound.

  Though he’s the darling of Alaska businessmen like Fred Bailey who have the proper accommodations with which to trap him—after all, he must eat, drink and sleep—the Motel Tourist raises the mortality rate among the pet and livestock population of the homesteading country to an alarming degree. And even the homesteader isn’t safe on the roads: every time he drives down the highway he takes his life in his hands. The road has become almost invisible under the curtain of dust thrown up by the flying cars and his windshield is often shattered by the bits of gravel of which the dust is composed. And he has to be very, very careful on the curves: Motel Tourists are under the impression that there are no traffic laws in Alaska.

  When he visits his local general store to pick up some supplies, the homesteader finds himself pushed and jostled by hordes of strangers who are buying up all the fishing tackle he had planned to buy himself when he got hold of a little cash. Then he takes a look at the prices on some of the other goods and sees that, since the first tourist was sighted coming down the road, they’ve all been doubled. And worst of all: some Motel Tourist’s child with a chocolate-smeared face is apt to point at the homesteader with a grimy forefinger and say, “Look at that dirty, funny man, Mommie.”

  The unlucky homesteader who has erected his dwelling close to the highway is in for a rough time, as I soon found out. My house was located just 600 feet off the highway. There were trees between, and it couldn’t be seen by the most observant driver. But that didn’t mean that I was safe from invasion: my private road proved to be an almost impossible-to-be-resisted lure. Many’s the time I heard a car drive into my yard and saw it turn around again and drive off, the driver apparently realizing his mistake. But if I happened to be quick enough to get the front door open in time to look out, the Motel Tourists would stare back at me as though I were some kind of a freak, and how had I dared to build a house at the end of a road on which they had intended to park their car while they were fishing in my creek?

  Some of the Motel Tourists went to all sorts of ridiculous lengths to fish in my creek without my knowing anything about it. One day, I remember, a car parked in my growing field and an entire family made a furtive dash across my vegetable garden, crushing cabbage plants underfoot as they ran. Desperately they tried to descend the bluff at the edge of the garden, but they got so tangled up in brush piles and fallen trees that they were soon whirling in circles looking for an easier way down to the creek. When they found one, they fished openly, boldly, moving downstream until they had collected directly below my house. Training a pair of high-powered binoculars on the courageous little band, I could see them looking up in my direction with expressions of triumph and scorn. “Boy, we sure put it over on that guy,” I could almost hear them say.

  “All you had to do was ask my permission and you could have walked down my path to the creek,” I muttered. A few minutes later my uninvited guests were in full retreat. Calmly I watched them stumble and fall through the willows as I cradled my hot, empty 22 in the crook of my arm. I had aimed over their heads, but my barrage had been enough to send them scattering, in terror for their lives. It takes a lot to make a homesteader mad—but very little provocation to make him lose his temper.

  And then there are the Litterbugs. These are the weekenders, the fishermen and hunters from other parts of the Territory who rush down to the Kenai Peninsula on the long holidays during the moose season and the salmon runs. Their object is to fish their fish and bag their game quickly—and with the least possible expense. They are armed with sleeping bags, Coleman stoves, bread, beans, beer and enough nerve to put a carnivorous brown bear to shame. Nothing is sacred to them, and no property is private. They camp along the highways in gravel pits, ditches, homestead driveways and homestead yards, and occasionally a homesteader will find that they have moved, bag, beans and beer, into his house. And when they leave—well, a garbage dump is what a homesteader could call the formerly untouched wilderness he used to call his home.

  When I saw the Litterbugs coming and heard about the damage they could do, I seriously considered locking up all my farming equipment, hiding my dog and cat in the cellar, putting my fishing tackle away for the year and departing for the north—and I was sure that the fish and the moose had beaten me out by a couple of weeks, at least. Instead I decided to take the line of least resistance, figuring that if I was nice to The Litterbugs, they might be nice to me. Asking only that he take his beer cans with him when he left, I gave anyone who asked for it permission to park his car in my yard while he joined the legions thrashing the creek with their poles below. And it worked pretty well.

  There were times, however, when I saw red. When I heard bullets whistling over the house and thumping into my log walls, I would crawl to the edge of the bluff facing the highway and trade shot for shot, emptying my heavy rifle and the 22 in the general direction of the trigger-happy target shooters to let them know that there were people in their line of fire. Sometimes that stopped them, but more often they fired back as though it were some sort of game, and I would have to give it up. And when, on quieter days, I dared to walk out to the highway to see if I had any mail, I would find my mailbox and business s
ign so punctured with holes that they looked like pieces of English lace.

  Once in awhile—a very great while—I invited a complete stranger, or a whole carful of them, into my house. This practice turned out to be a big mistake. One Saturday afternoon at the height of The Litterbug season three soldiers from Fort Richardson (Anchorage) drove into the yard and asked my permission, very politely, to fish. “Sure,” I told them. “Good luck.”

  That evening the soldiers came back with no fish and asked if they could put their sleeping bags on the ground near the house and stay the night. Since the mosquitoes were at their worst that day—and the Alaskan mosquito’s worst is worse than a bedbug’s best—I took pity on them, invited them to sleep in the house and told them that they could cook their dinner on my stove. They were a nice bunch of guys, and they were so grateful for my hospitality that when they departed, they left me with enough “C” rations to last me for a week. In the meantime, I had shown them my secret fishing holes and they had been able to catch their limit of salmon.

  From then on the word was out. Friends of the three original soldiers—more soldiers—showed up every weekend during the fishing season, and gradually my homestead took on the appearance of a servicemen’s rest camp, with pup tents sprouting in my fields like a new kind of crop. It looked as though I would have to take that trip to the Brooks Range, after all. Fortunately, however, the fishing season ended before I could take any sort of drastic action, and when it did, peace and quiet descended once more. The Litterbugs were gone for another year.

  There’s a third type of tourist which invades Alaska in the summertime—the Rich, or Millionaire Sportsman—but luckily this type sticks pretty close to the towns, and I had no experience with one on my homestead. The only one I ever met was the one I encountered during my first summer in Alaska, when I was a guest of Vern Mutch’s in Homer. A wealthy lawyer, he wore a gaudy Hawaiian sports shirt, Palm Beach slacks, a Panama hat, two-toned shoes and a “Alaskan” belt bought in a souvenir shop in Anchorage, and he was armed with an expensive moving picture camera and enough money to hire someone else to do all the tasks he might find too onerous—such as changing 16-mm. film or baiting a hook. He turned up in Homer one day, checked in at the best hotel and expressed to Vern a desire to “see the sights.”

  Vern is a friendly man and a strong Alaska booster besides. He put himself—and me—at the lawyer’s disposal. “How would you like to dig some of our giant razor clams? The beaches about thirty miles north of here are famous for them,” Vern said.

  “Let’s go!” enthused the lawyer.

  When we arrived at the beach the tide was out, but not far enough out to insure good digging, and Vern and I didn’t expect to get our regular quota of ten gallons apiece. Nevertheless, we showed the lawyer how to use the short-handled shovel, how to look for a hole in the sand no larger than a penny, how to dig a single scoop of sand away from beside the hole, how to reach down and grab the fast-disappearing neck of an eight-inch clam before it got away. But the lawyer soon lost his enthusiasm for the sport: his stomach protruded so far that he couldn’t bend over fast enough to catch the elusive bivalves.

  Meanwhile, while he was straining and grunting and cursing, Vern and I each dug about ten good-sized clams and decided to call it a day. “Wait a minute,” puffed the lawyer, as we started to collect our gear. “Somebody’s got to take a movie of me digging clams.”

  I loaned him my shovel while Vern stood ready with the camera. But after a few minutes of fruitless digging, the lawyer gave up. “I’ve got a better idea,” he said to me. “You bury your clams in the sand and I’ll pretend to be digging them. My friends in Kansas City’ll get a kick out of that.”

  “But it won’t look realistic,” I started to protest. “You have to pull the neck—”

  “Oh, nobody’ll know the difference,” the lawyer scoffed, somewhat annoyed. Then he put on a winning smile. “Come on, let’s try it.”

  The camera whirred, the lawyer stood on the spot where the dead clams were buried, he pointed down to the spot, he dug his shovel in and proudly lifted ten clams from the sand with one asthmatic heave. Grinning, he looked toward the camera without a trace of shame on his bland, round face. I fervently hoped that some of his friends in Kansas City were expert clam diggers and would be able to see through the little farce.

  As we were preparing to leave, Rex Hanks, the homesteader whose land we had crossed to get to the beach, left his water-powered sawmill and came down to say hello. After awhile the talk—led by the lawyer—got around to gold.

  “Want to try panning some gold in my creek?” offered Rex. “I’ll show you how.” Scraping some sand out of a crack in the coal ledge beside the stream, he carefully, slowly washed it out in a gold pan he produced. In a few minutes he showed us the pan with three tiny specks of gold in the bottom. “Give me that pan!” cried the lawyer, grabbing it unceremoniously out of Rex’s hands. And “Start the camera!” he yelled at Vern.

  Kneeling by the water, he began to swish the gravel and sand around in the pan with great energy and inefficiency, and before the little play came to an end the gold Rex had panned was lost forever in the bottom of the creek. But that didn’t seem to bother the lawyer at all—nor did he apologize. Instead, he spent the next half hour posing an enraged but still polite Rex Hanks in the various motions of running a sawmill, causing him to lose much valuable working time and ruining—because Rex was no actor and posing made him nervous—much of his hard-to-come-by lumber. The only reason we didn’t allow the lawyer to pretend to be running the sawmill himself was that we all hated the sight of blood.

  As time went on, the lawyer further endeared himself to the local populace by chartering a plane to fly up to the Caribou Hills in back of Homer and shooting himself a moose and a brown bear with the assistance of several experienced guides—then bragging all over town about what a terrific feat he had accomplished singlehanded. The moose rack and bear hide, after being proudly displayed to sourdoughs who had bagged twenty like them in their time, were sent back to the States to grace the lawyer’s pine-paneled trophy room, and the meat—as it usually was with Millionaire Sportsmen, I heard—was wasted.

  After that, I took to departing by the back door whenever I saw the lawyer barging through the front door of Vern’s drugstore. The last I heard of him, he was trying some salmon fishing at the Anchor River, the salmon were co-operating marvelously and a cameraman was recording the scene for posterity and Kansas City. Since then some of my friends have informed me that “all rich tourists aren’t like that—some of them are real sportsmen.” But how should I know? He’s the only one I met...

  Yes, the tourists were gone for the year, driven away by the approach of winter. And luckily for us homesteaders, there would be no winter tourists in our part of Alaska: the skiing wasn’t good enough on the Kenai Peninsula.

  But as I stood listening to the silence, I was struck by a sudden thought: what if I should build some tourist cabins some day, and make some money during the annual invasion? Would I like the Motel Tourists and The Litterbugs any better then? Would I welcome them with an open hand? You bet your life I would!

  Chapter XXV—Fire! Fire!

  AS I TURNED the truck off the highway into my road, I noticed a layer of blue smoke hanging low over the creek valley. It looked kind of nice, kind of pretty, and it was a couple of minutes before its awful significance penetrated my tired brain. When it did, I went cold all over. “My God!” I yelled. “The house is on fire!”

  I rattled into the yard and brought the jeep to a sickening, lurching stop. Then I just sat there and stared. It wasn’t the house: it was the greenhouse.

  Smoke was pouring out through ripped holes in the plastic glass. The front half of the structure had caved in. The flames, having done their dreadful business here, were now licking hungrily toward the garage. Too late. I had arrived too late.

  I tottered out of the truck, peering through one of the holes in a side wall. The benches h
ad all collapsed, and those charred, blackened, twisted masses were the tomato plants on which I had lavished so much tender care. And the sound—the sound was like an inferno. Above the crackling and popping of the flames themselves I heard a high, whistling, sizzling noise—something like the sound a tomato makes when you hold it over a gas jet to loosen its skin. Sure, that’s what it was: only there were hundreds of tomatoes losing their skins.

  I turned away to see Attu the puppy and Happy the cat, their forefeet tucked neatly beneath them, calmly watching the show—an enthralled audience of two. The sight of them brought me out of my shock. Yelling, “Got to save the garage!” I raced to it, took a quick look at the 100 gallons of gasoline and cases of appliance fuel stored there, and started the power plant. From there I ran to the house to start the water pump. Not waiting for the pressure to build up, I rushed to the greenhouse to see if I could turn its water faucet on. The faucet was buried under a pile of glowing ashes and the hose which had been attached to it wasn’t there any more.

  Dashing back to the house, I found another hose in the cellar, carried it outside, dropped it. Finding a bucket, I filled it at the kitchen sink and ran back and forth pouring water over the ember-covered faucet in the greenhouse until it was cool enough to attach the hose. I had the fire under control in a matter of minutes.

  Then I inspected the damage. My whole crop of tomatoes—about 500 pounds of them—was lost beyond recall. Half of the greenhouse roof was gone. All the benches were ruined. In two short hours—I had been gone from the homestead just about that long—I had lost a business. The uninsured greenhouse would cost hundreds of dollars to replace. I was broke. It was late in October. I had been counting on the money I would receive from the sale of my tomato crop to carry me through the winter. Now I would have to depend upon the stored cabbages, carrots and potatoes—and who knew how much they would bring? From where I sat on my doorstep, my prospects looked pretty bleak.