Things rarely went that well again. Jason bent to pick up a board a few days later, gasped, and turned white; something in his back had given, a recurring injury of the sort that is common among Alaskans who have spent years working construction, bent over the roller of a longline boat in cold weather, stacking crab pots in heavy seas, or operating a skidder in a logging camp. He continued working, but between the pain pills and frequent doctor appointments the quiet pride of getting a job done grew more elusive every day.
Juneau was in the middle of a building boom, and experienced hands were hard to find. Carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians—anyone with a set of tools was booked months in advance. With the date for our wedding fast approaching, either I found help to finish the floor of the house or we faced last-minute changes to our plans for the ceremony. I felt lucky to hire an acquaintance of my wife’s, one of her rock-climbing buddies who ran an ad hoc crew of younger men. In the third week of July, two days before the wedding, the floor was down, the back and south walls of the first floor were framed up, and I was at the site until ten P.M., using a long-handled roller to spread a coat of water-resistant sealant onto the plywood subfloor so it could dry before the ceremony. From April to July had been one of the longest spells of uninterrupted good weather in Juneau’s memory.
The day of the ceremony was dry but cloudy. A squad of friends helped ready a large tarp in case it rained. A trio with carpenter skills built a sloping ramp to the deck so a neighbor confined to a wheelchair by Lou Gehrig’s disease could attend, then nailed gritty roofing material to its surface so the bride would not slip when she made her entrance. With no roof overhead, an unobstructed view of the mountains and the sea, and the borrowed chairs set out in curving rows, the freshly swept and cleared site had the feel of an open-air cathedral.
The ceremony went off without a hitch. Ed, with his thick white hair and beard neatly trimmed, looked proud as he gave the bride away; my brother stood beside me as my best man. As the morning progressed, the clouds got lower and thicker, but it did not rain, and at the moment of our vows the clouds parted and a shaft of sunlight lit the ridge, sparkled across the water, washed over the onlookers, and danced in the brown eyes of my bride. I had been told beforehand that it did not matter how the wedding was planned—what course the events took, who attended, or what kind of wine was served—because I would be oblivious to any part of it beyond the actual moment of binding, which proved true, because even now, as I try to record my feelings, it is all a blur, with the exception of the moment when I looked into the eyes of the woman I was marrying and saw them brimming with tears of joy. My heart, furled and stowed for much of my life, opened and lifted like a wind-filled sail.
It started raining the next day. A month later Hurricane Katrina rolled across the South, destroying tens of thousands of homes, and the prices of building materials started rising. The price of oil spiked and drove the cost of everything still higher. Every trip to the building-supply store or lumberyard brought a new shock, with increases of 10 percent, 14, 30, then 60 as the prices of the metal in nails and fasteners, roofing, the copper in wires, wood, paint, and anything that had to be shipped or had petroleum involved in its manufacture skyrocketed.
And still the rains fell. Through September and October a relentless monsoon settled in over Juneau, pouring so steadily out of a leaden sky that I was forced to drill dozens of holes into the plywood subfloor to drain the water away in order to allow the framing crew to lay out the remaining walls. Professionals will tell you that inclement weather cuts production by a third or more; it is simply harder and slower to work fully clothed in foul-weather gear and to always be trying to keep power tools and materials dry enough to use. A tremendous amount of time can be spent just covering things with tarps and then uncovering them, and the weight of unending rain or snow bears heavily on morale.
Progress slowed to a crawl. The new crew proved problematic; things kept having to be redone. The assembly of timbers and beams supporting the second floor went into place, then had to be removed and reinstalled. A simple pony wall in the kitchen area was torn out and rebuilt three times.* With winter rushing toward me, no roof overhead, and no other hands available, I felt I had no choice but to keep the fumbling crew on, even as I watched day after day of effort and thousands of dollars wash down the drain.
But there were moments of splendor as well. On a rare sunny day my wife showed up unexpectedly and spent several hours helping sand and oil an immense stack of spruce planks that were to be our finished ceilings; on another she came by to help me clean, sweep, and cart away a truckload of sawdust and construction debris, and the sight of her covered in dust, with her silky black hair contained in a red bandanna, as she wrestled a large vacuum cleaner up a ladder to clean the timber roof trusses would have brought me to my knees had I not been simultaneously buoyed up by the near-unspeakable joy of believing we would be working together for the rest of our lives.
I went into the cabin of the Swift, poured a cup of water, and used it to wash down two aspirins. Then I went back on deck and sat in the sun again, sipping the water as I tried to lose myself in the silence of the bay and the knowledge that for now there was no rush to get moving. Dwelling on the frustrations of the building project had made me feel tense again, but the memory of those early, hopeful days with my wife tied a knot in my heart.
A lone gull drifted over the boat, cocking its head to stare down at me with one yellow eye before it tipped a wing and circled away. A second gull stroked by, and the first turned to follow. After it caught up, the pair flew side by side for a minute, then one or the other abruptly lifted and turned away. I took a last sip from the cup, then poured the rest over the side to hear it trickle into the salt water.
Shortly after our wedding my wife had gone away for more training and come home excited, and our dinner conversations had begun to revolve around her future plans. We volleyed back and forth the idea that with its view of the cove and quiet isolation, the small guest cabin I intended to build on a ledge below the main house would make an ideal place to work with future clients, until she called one day to say she had found a better space twenty-five miles away in downtown Juneau. After that an increasing number of late-night business appointments meant cooking and eating dinner by myself.
I took a deep breath and blew it out to push the thought away. The aspirin was kicking in, and I decided to get off the boat again; exploring Cenotaph Island might help clear my mind.
Chapter 11
Roughly Half a mile across, steep, heavily wooded, and a little over three hundred feet high near the center, Cenotaph Island is an interesting place. Lituya Bay was formed by the advance and retreat of glaciers through a series of ice ages, the blue tongues of ice slipping down out of the mountains to gouge and pry at the bedrock until they had plowed a trench that in places was over five hundred feet deep. Yet somehow the stony mass that is now Cenotaph managed to stay in place, like an abrupt 800-foot-high peak in the middle of a narrow valley. When the glaciers retreated and the sea level rose, the valley flooded, creating the island that would supply La Pérouse’s expedition, then myself, with a secure anchorage. For a while in the early part of the twentieth century it was also home to the only permanent white settler ever to take up residence along the entire 150 miles of coastline between Yakutat and Cape Spencer.
James Todd Huscroft first appeared in Alaska in 1915, when he worked as a miner in the town of Treadwell, on Douglas Island, across the Gastineau Channel from Juneau. All that remains of Treadwell today is a few stone foundations and a handful of stubbed-off pilings that mark where an extensive system of docks and wharves once stood, but at the time it was a booming place. Four industrial-scale gold mines and an array of thundering stamp mills that operated around the clock made it one of the largest communities in the territory. The mountains on the eastern side of the island were honeycombed with a web of mine shafts, and a complex of tunnels extended deep into the bedrock underlying the chann
el. On April 22, 1917, one of the shafts under the channel flooded and caved in, setting off a chain reaction that did not stop until three of the four mines had collapsed. It was a miracle that the disaster occurred just as the work shifts were changing; the only casualty was a single mule, drowned at the bottom of a shaft during the initial flooding. Nevertheless, hundreds of miners and laborers were immediately thrown out of work. Shortly thereafter Huscroft packed a meager kit and headed for Lituya Bay.
Stout, bald as a melon, and shovel jawed, Huscroft was almost a caricature of strength. He was described by one visitor, who marveled at his ability to knock a thick log into pieces in a matter of minutes with a handsaw, as “a stocky, tremendously powerful man with a sad, kindly face [and] arms the size of a normal man’s legs.” Little is known of Huscroft’s early years except that he was born in Ohio and that he claimed to have made and lost three fortunes, the last in a lumber business of some nature.
As I slipped back into the kayak and paddled away from the Swift, I started thinking about how my own life savings had evaporated under the pressure of rising construction costs. Working for wages as a hard-rock miner was certainly not a path to a fourth fortune, and I wondered if the rise and fall of Huscroft’s finances, combined with a brush with death during the mine cave-in, had inspired a decision to spend the remainder of his life on a small island in a remote place of incomparable beauty. He was forty-five years old at the time.
In one of the few photographs of Huscroft I’ve found, taken in 1933 by the well-known mountaineer Bradford Washburn, he is older, in his early sixties, and stands foursquare and solid, suspendered in heavy pants, wearing a frayed shirt worn through at one elbow, and holding a pan of potatoes grown in a garden that met the bulk of his needs. In his other hand is a shovel, and there is something in the way he looks at the camera, with his head tilted a few degrees and his forehead faintly wrinkled, that is tentative, yet open and kind. The picture was taken on a sunny day, and Huscroft squints as he waits for Washburn to trip the shutter. But there is patience in the way he stands with the pan of potatoes resting on one hip and the handle of the shovel on the other; it seems to say that he could—and would—stand there all day if that was what the photographer wanted. Everything about the image makes me think James Huscroft was a softhearted man, and everything I’ve learned from other sources agrees with this impression.
“The man was obviously a hermit in the extreme,” wrote the climber and writer Dave Bohn, who explored Lituya Bay in the 1960s, “but an extraordinary one, for all who met him were struck by his generosity and kindness.”
“Jim Huscroft was the kindest man I have ever known,” said Robert Bates, another climber who met Huscroft in 1932 when he went to Lituya Bay to reconnoiter an approach for an upcoming expedition to Mount Crillon. “[He] would give away anything he had and was always thinking of other people’s problems.”
Bates described in a letter to Bohn how Huscroft would walk down to the beach to meet anyone coming in by boat or seaplane and be waiting, watch in hand, to greet them with the words “I make it out to be 11:20; what do you make it?” After adjusting his watch, Huscroft always invited the guest up for some of his home-brewed beer or a meal. The one exception Bates noted to Huscroft’s timely greeting came during a visit he made in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, when Huscroft met him with a plaintive “Say it ain’t so, Bob. Say it ain’t so.” When Bates asked what was wrong, Huscroft’s reply was that he had heard that “the kids in New York City is eating out of garbage pails! I’ve been thinking about it all winter . . . There’s all those salmon in the bay and goats in the hills, an’ if I could just get some cans I could help some. Tain’t right for kids to be eating that way, you know, an’ I want to help ’em out. Been thinking about it all winter.”
Huscroft made one trip to town a year, usually by hitching a ride on a passing boat headed for Juneau, where he would first buy a tub of salt mackerel and eat one or two, saving the rest to take home. Next on his list was enough snuff—or “snoose,” as miners called it—to last a year. After checking off the rest of his shopping list, he would head up to the Elks Club, where the bartender had saved up an entire year’s worth of newspapers for Huscroft to take back to Lituya Bay. Like a character in a Somerset Maugham story, Huscroft disciplined himself to read only one newspaper at a time, each one on the date coinciding with the one on the newspaper, from a year earlier. “It don’t matter which year it is,” he told Bates. “The news is all the same anyway. Only if I peeked ahead, it’d take away the fun.” But he had been worrying about the New York urchins for nearly a year.
Forty years later, when I was a teenager just setting out to explore the sprawling beauty of Alaska, there were still a few of the “old-timers” scattered around the state, miners and trappers like Russian Mike at Nancy Lake, north of Anchorage; Tiger Olsen at Taku Harbor, down near Juneau, and Stan Price, who lived among a couple dozen tame grizzlies on Admiralty Island. These lone, aging men were inevitably tagged as hermits, but none seemed to fit the crotchety, socially inept mold of the true recluse, being to a man fond of company and generous to a fault. Almost all were deep thinkers and devourers of books. A few, like Tiger Olsen, had a monkish bent for the gnostic and metaphysical. None, however, had quite as notable a reputation for out-and-out kindness as Huscroft, whose greatest delight, according to Bates, was helping others. “Take it,” he would say, no matter what the request. “I got lots more.”
In fact, Huscroft had very little. Shortly after his arrival on Cenotaph Island, he and a partner had tried their hand at fox farming, but a trapper working the area had asked to store his furs in Huscroft’s cabin, and a wolf pelt infected with a lethal mange had spread the disease to the foxes and wiped them out.* For years visitors were amused by Huscroft’s two remaining foxes, pets he called Grandma, who would ride on his shoulder, and Tuffy, a blue fox who played constantly at his feet.
After the collapse of the fox-farming enterprise, he scraped along by salting away a few kegs of salmon to sell in Juneau, trapping a bit in the winter, or prospecting for gold. The latter never amounted to much, in spite of a persistent rumor that he had a “secret barrel” buried in a stream nearby that yielded nuggets on demand. Other than the bit of hard-earned cash needed for his annual supply of staples—flour, salt, sugar, tea, coffee, and, of course, snoose—Huscroft’s mainstay was what Alaskans call subsistence and others call living off the land. Salmon, mountain goats, seals, sea lions, bears, and wild greens were all elements of his diet, and to this day the forelands around Lituya Bay are carpeted during the summer with wild strawberries whose flavor is so rich and intense that it renders the domestic version of that fruit pale and pulpy by comparison. Blueberry and huckleberry jam added a sweet touch to the thick, skillet-sized sourdough pancakes he enjoyed for breakfast 365 days a year.
But Huscroft’s true wealth was in his garden, a patch of deep, rich soil that yielded a root cellar full of potatoes, carrots, cabbage, kale, and other crops that fed him year-round. Fertile soil is virtually nonexistent in the glacier-scoured regions of the coast, but during the years Huscroft lived on Cenotaph Island, he patiently built his own, mulching skiffloads of laboriously gathered kelp into a mound of sand and silt and enriching it with a compost of salmon carcasses and clamshells. With twenty hours of daylight during the summer growing season, the garden, though small, was remarkably prolific. In the photograph the growth is lush to his knees.
I had made a photocopy of the picture before leaving Juneau, and I stuck it in my pocket before getting off the boat, thinking I might be able to use the outline of the hills behind Huscroft to decipher where his garden had been. Paddling north of the island, I passed the spot where La Pérouse had anchored, and at a stream where Huscroft had probably harvested salmon to feed his foxes, I stopped to watch a young grizzly dig at something behind a large drift log. The bear had its head down when I first spotted it—all I could see was the brown line of its back and the rise and fall
of the hump between its shoulders as it dug—and I thought for a moment of maneuvering quietly toward shore in a way that would allow the current to drift me into a better viewing position, but no sooner had I dipped the paddle than the bear lifted its head, sniffed at the air, and bolted. Quick as a cat it was gone, disappearing into the sheltering woods with a light crackle of underbrush.
Ten minutes later I was pulling the kayak ashore on a shingled point on the west side of the island. Not wanting to outrage the pinched nerve in my neck again, I raised the rudder and locked it, then pulled the kayak up the beach by the bowline. It slid easily over the water-smoothed stones. Where the beach leveled out above the high tide mark into a carpet of dead grass, I pulled the picture of Huscroft from my pocket and looked around. There was nothing to indicate where his cabin or garden had once been, though I knew from old charts and hand-me-down accounts that I was in approximately the right location. When he’d first come to Lituya Bay, Huscroft had lived for a while in the remains of an Indian shelter on the southern shore near the entrance, then had built a small cabin on the northeastern side of Cenotaph. It had been a choice, I presumed, inspired by the spectacular view toward the head of the bay and Mount Crillon. But it had not taken long to figure out that the west side of the island offered more protection from the winds that roared down off the glaciers in the winter. In his diary Huscroft had noted that during the twenty-eight days of February in 1934, the wind had howled from the head of the bay for twenty-six days in a row, then shifted and blown out of the north for the other two. Nor would he have had any exposure to what little precious sunlight made its way into the bay on rare clear days. Within a year or two he had rebuilt on a sunny, level spot above the western point I was standing on.
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 10
