by Brian Keenan
‘You’ve got it made here,’ I said. ‘You can do pretty much as you wish.’
It was Mike and Laura’s turn to laugh. ‘Except for the snow and the cold and the dark and storms that seal up this place so tight that nothing can get in or out. And then there’s always this.’ Mike pointed out at the mosquito storm blowing up a gale outside our window.
Over the next five days I realized just how naive my utopian dream was and how persistent the plague of mosquitoes was. Visions of Utopia always solve the big questions of existence, maybe because they ignore the incidentals. Had Alfred Hitchcock replaced his birds with these insects in his famous film he would have been doing no injustice to his work. Our windows misted over with their buzzing blackness. But maybe the mosquitoes were an excuse. I was measuring myself against Mike McCarthy and found myself sorely wanting! Though we still managed some early-morning and late-night hikes we were more or less under strict curfew during the daytime. I didn’t mind much, though. I was enjoying my strolls through the deserted township. With Mike as a guide I discovered the remains of the hospital, the school, the grocery and the post office. There had been a library which I was sure must have supplied the older, mildew-stained editions in Mike’s own. There was even a room for a visiting dentist, and a functioning operating theatre for the hospital. But there was no bank and no jailhouse, for, as Mike explained, ‘company script’ had bought everything and miscreants were run out of town with exacting swiftness. Those who remained from the past were buried in a desolate graveyard behind the dairy barn. But it had been company policy that whenever possible the dead were sent ‘outside’ to relatives or stored in boxes over the winter until the ground was soft enough to bury them.
Maybe it was the emptiness, maybe it was the stillness and the silence fuelled by my reading through Mike’s library, but I felt a real sense of the thriving community that had lived here. It was as if you could see and hear the ghosts of babies crying in their mothers’ arms as they waited to collect milk from the dairy; nurses damping laudanum over a man’s nose and mouth as the doctor cranked some broken bones into place; a small floral bowl by the dentist’s chair rattling as the still bloody stumps of tobacco-stained teeth were dropped into it; children’s rhyming voices in the square of the schoolroom, now overgrown with alder saplings and forget-me-nots.
While picking through Mike’s books I had come across a memoir by someone called Sissy Lommel Kluh, who had moved up to Alaska with her family from Idaho. Sissy wrote with childlike wonder about her first sight of the glacier, reflecting blues and greys and shimmering silver. How different it was now as I looked out on it. But it made me think of my own children and how Jack seemed happy and full of questions about what appeared to him as one huge adventure playground. So Sissy Lommel Kluh became my confederate, and I told some of her story to my own boy, hoping it might make his stay here more magical. For me its magic was real because Sissy was very near.
I chose to believe that our cabin was her own. I could smell the cinnamon sugar bread and game stew her mother cooked. I could see her looking at the pictures in the big catalogue book her mother kept. Sometimes her mother made copies of the clothes in the pictures. But mostly Sissy loved the paper dolls her mother made from the pages of the book. She had names for them all and used to pretend she was the teacher.
One day Sissy lost her favourite doll, the one that Grandma in Idaho had sent her. Grandma had made it especially with her favourite colours. She called it Sissy too. She lost it in the snow and cried for days, complaining that Sissy would die from the cold. After a few weeks, as the snow was melting, someone found her doll and gave it to her. So she placed it in the oven of the range Mummy cooked on. It was warm there and Sissy would soon be better. Mummy sewed and repaired the doll and she was as good as new until one day she got very sick and worms came out of her mouth and Daddy had to bury her in the cemetery. Years after this incident, when Sissy watched the flat cars being loaded with heavy burlap gunny sacks full of ore for shipment, she thought of her doll.
Sometimes Sissy’s mother helped in the hospital. Sissy remembered taking some soup to her one afternoon. As she was leaving they brought in a man whose clothes were soaked in blood and his head swathed in bloody bandages. He died after a few hours. Later her father explained that the cold was so intense that it turned icicles into steel spears. Unfortunately the poor man had been passing underneath when several sheared off. He had too many injuries and had lost so much blood that the hospital could do nothing for him. But the mine would look after him until the summer. She often thought of the bloody man when her father packed glacier ice around the carcasses of dall sheep, ptarmigan and rabbit to preserve them.
Sissy accompanied me on my morning walks, her memories blowing through the clapboard ruins. But now it was summer and half a century had passed. The people of the mine had gone; only fireweed, Johnny jump-ups, forget-me-nots, lady slippers and columbine populated the place. Sissy used to watch transfixed as the men rode the ore buckets to four thousand feet above the camp, believing that up there she would see God through the rays of the sun, like the picture on her catechism book. One day she rode on the bucket, innocently telling the men that she was going up to see God. They all smiled kindly, and one man stroked her hair telling her there was no God up there, ‘just sweating, angry, thirsty, love-hungry men!’ Sissy didn’t really understand them at the time, but when she was older she understood every word . . . and she had only to go down Silk Stocking Road to find it!
A Moose Moment
In its heyday in the 1920s and the Depression, when the rest of America was on its knees, McCarthy was the kind of place where just about everything was available at the right price. Fresh oysters and Roquefort cheese could be had even in the dead of winter. One miner of the day complained that beer was served in whiskey glasses and diluted whiskey cost a dollar a shot, ‘and if we ever got any change from a dollar bill it was because they thought we were sober’. But he wasn’t the only inhabitant who complained. Margaret Harris, a teacher in the town, wrote, ‘If I keep my chin elevated at 120 degrees I find everything beautiful and inspiring. It is a place where every prospect pleases and only man is vile. There are 1,600 men employed in five big mines and everything that is outlawed on their private grounds thrives here in McCarthy to the shame of government. The big company insists that they must have a playground for their men! And 300 million dollars does not have to shout, it only needs to whisper.’ Demanding an increase in salary, she stated that the cost of living was higher than anywhere else in Alaska, and she continued her condemnation of the people of McCarthy with the words, ‘As to the character of the population, it is 90% bootleggers, prostitutes and gamblers, living as parasites on the Kennicott payroll. They toil not, neither do they spin.’
Margaret Harris might well have had cause to complain about her modest income in comparison with another resident, Rose Silberg, a Jewish prostitute murdered by her lover. She was found to have $20,000 locked in a safe in her cabin, and rumour had it that ‘the Jewish Rosie’ had a lot more stashed away in out-of-state properties and investments. Rose was only one of the inhabitants of ‘the Row’, a string of fourteen cabins along McCarthy Creek. Blanche Smith was a black woman and the first non-native to ply her trade in the Row. That Tin Can Annie could reputedly play music on anything makes the mind boggle (there must have been many music enthusiasts among the miners). ‘Beef Trust’, as her name might suggest, was a lady of well over three hundred pounds. The word was that anyone of whom she was enamoured and who could withstand more than a few hours of her passion need never be afraid again of wrestling with a giant Kodiak bear! Sweet Marie, Blue Lips, the Snake Charmer and the Tramway Queen were some of the other occupants of the Row, and it was understood by everyone who spent more than half a day in the town that five dollars would open their door and everything was negotiable after that. In payroll days you had to get to the Row early for the queue there was longer and noisier than the queue at the pay clerk’
s desk in Kennicott.
Kate Kennedy, a madam whose whorehouse wasn’t far from the Row, also ensured her trade was brisk and her girls and her customers were kept well satisfied. Kate regularly shipped high heels, cosmetics and other ‘fancy ware’ from the lower 48, the curious name Alaskans gave to the rest of the United States. But Kate was not a parasite, as Ms Harris would have described her: she was in fact more civic-minded than her detractor and was a supporter of several charities; she also ensured that the families of those men who were unable to work due to illness or accident never went hungry and always had clothes on their back. Even in Paradise Lost there were angels.
McCarthy was a law unto itself. When other American towns and cities were collapsing under the strain of economic depression, McCarthy residents were throwing money around like confetti at a wedding. It was awash with alcohol and snubbed its nose at prohibition. Nine hundred gallons of water, fifty pounds of sugar, ten pounds of corn and the colour from dried peaches could make a fine whiskey in a few days. And it wasn’t only the bootleggers who were undermining the law – the whole town was behind it. Brewing was endemic, and everyone made money from it. Engineers on the trains blew a special code to declare that revenue agents were on board; even the telephones and telegraphs were monitored to ensure agents could not operate. Any arrested moonshiner was bailed out of jail by the mine-workers. ‘Old Slippery’, brewed in the woods, ‘aged 3 days, bottled thin, tastes like sin’, continued to be sold. Law enforcement was a minor irritation but ‘Old Slippery’, as its name implies, had many ways of evading it.
But that was then. McCarthy today is the well-preserved ghost town I’ve already described, comprising a dozen or so dilapidated cafés spread along a couple of dirt-track roads. The remains of old mule-drawn wagons and a few vintage trucks lie rotting in the streets, and the Row and Kate Kennedy’s whorehouse have long since been washed away by the constantly flooding McCarthy River. Yet something of the old town’s spirit remains hanging in the air. McCarthy’s bawdy libertinism has mellowed, but Old Slippery, bottled thin and tasting like sin, has finally come of age. The place is friendly and upbeat, still an end-of-the-road community where people mostly do just what they want. The fact that a few days after our arrival the bridge across the river washed away, stranding the whole community, bothered no-one.
That evening we went for pizza with Mike and Laura. The girl serving us repeatedly answered ‘ain’t got none, hasn’t arrived yet’ as we selected several items from the sparse menu. The place was the worst-constructed building I have ever sat in. It looked as if it was thrown together each summer from whatever spare piece of timber and debris had been left over from the winter. No-one seemed bothered, though, and Mike laughed at my fears about our safety. He explained that there wasn’t much point in building anything more permanent. There weren’t enough people for such a venture, and with winds that could get up to 150 miles an hour there wasn’t much point in putting up something that may not be there in six months’ time. To illustrate his point he explained how the Copper River railway that used to service the town had a heavy ball and chain hanging out from the side of the engine; if the chain stuck straight out in the wind, no trains would leave the depot. Sometimes they had to take sledgehammers to the horizontally frozen chain to make the laws of gravity work again! He pointed to several beaten-up trucks parked near the café. They were in an unbelievable state of disrepair. Dust storms could strip the paintwork in a season, and any moveable parts such as doors and bonnets were likely to last only another season before the winds yanked them off and tossed them a few blocks away (if you were lucky). So we made do. The homemade pizzas were delicious, and the homemade lemonade, laced with something that could have been Old Slippery, added to the ambience of the place.
Intending to go for a stroll down to the river, Audrey began oiling the boys with the famous Deet repellent. It was Mike and Laura’s turn to laugh and issue a warning: the insect oil was apparently so strong that if you drove with it on the palms of your hands the shiny surface of the steering wheel would be corroded in the morning. What it took the wind to do in a season to your car’s paintwork, Deet could apparently do overnight. It wasn’t advisable for young skins, and most adults only sprayed the stuff on their clothes. ‘Covering up is better than rubbing up,’ Mike recommended as we walked to the river.
There was no sign of the bridge and the river was in full swell, sucking huge boulders out of position and rolling them like marbles into its roaring current. Jack was in his element, tossing stones and sticks into the water’s edge. Mike was ever watchful. He explained that several people over the last few years had been lost or had almost died trying to cross. The waters were so cold you went numb in minutes; even if you could fight off the iciness, the silt in the water seeped into your clothing, multiplying your body weight until it was impossible to swim and the river just dragged you away, breaking your bones in the process.
What with the life-threatening river, the winds and the ice that cut you like a butcher’s blade it seemed as if the winters in these mountains were fit only for the animals that inhabited them. I was even more deeply drawn to the whores and the hard men who had survived here. If they broke all the rules of civilized society, fine, for beyond here you were outside civilization. The wilderness required you to make new rules and to survive with whatever comfort came your way.
Back at our cabin, when the evening sun had submerged everything in its clear, soft light, I thought about Mike and Laura, the only inhabitants, apart from ourselves, of this mining town. At this time of the day it all seemed perfect. They lived a subsistence lifestyle, surviving as best they could from what the wilderness offered them. They hadn’t much in material terms, but the wilderness striking out for hundreds upon hundreds of miles around them was theirs. It was priceless, even awe-inspiring, and they could take possession of its riches whenever they wished. Their snow machine and their four-wheel motorcycle gave them access to an almost limitless landscape. Above where I was sitting on our porch, eagles circled and scanned the ground for prey. It was all too perfect. I was convinced there had to be something more to it than this. But what it was eluded me, and it was beginning to make me edgy and uncomfortable.
I thought of the jigsaw Audrey and I had been doing with the boys to occupy them while the Stygian infestation of mosquitoes imprisoned us. There was one piece missing, but still Jack was delighted. The missing piece was irrelevant to him, though it silently irritated me, and I didn’t understand why. It was only a children’s jigsaw after all. My own child could not have got any more joy out of completing it even had the lost piece been there. Maybe the greater jigsaw I was trying to piece together about this wild landscape and its power to enrich your spirit and uplift your soul had a missing piece too, and I was more concerned with what wasn’t there. But surely you can imagine the missing piece once you’ve put all the others in place? I remembered Freya Stark and her sense that whatever she encountered, whether it was an exquisite moment just before sunrise in the mountains, the sensuous wonder of the desert’s silence, the noise and colour of a souk or the innocent conversation of a shepherd’s wife and child, each of these moments was sufficient recompense for her travels for in each of them there was a small pearl of enrichment to be found. Maybe that’s what it was all about – simply accepting the revelation and insight of each moment as it happens, and at the end of one’s journey placing these moments together and taking from the collective experience what you choose.
Mike and Laura’s contentment impressed me more than I’d first thought. They were happy with what they had, even though it was a constant struggle and in the depth of winter they had to leave the place for a few months. I looked again at the map of Alaska spread on my lap and laughed. It too looked like a piece in a jigsaw. Maybe that was it. Alaska was the missing piece, but not simply a piece in a child’s jigsaw that you can simply imagine into place. Alaska was what it gave to you, like the simple quality of life Mike and Laura had. Sudde
nly I was thinking again of Jack London’s words: ‘It was in the Klondike I found myself. There nobody talks, everybody thinks. You get your perspective. I got mine.’ Yes, I thought, heading for sleep, Alaska sure makes you think – and very, very tired! At the cabin door before entering I took a last look. We would be leaving soon, and sadness was mixing into my weariness.
The day before we left, Mike called on us in the early morning. A moose and her cub were feeding in an alder thicket just a fifteen-minute hike from the cabin. Did we want to go and have a look? While we were preparing, Mike warned us about the dangers of viewing moose. They are extremely unpredictable animals, especially when with their young, and could charge through the bush faster than his quad motorcycle could race up Silk Stocking Road. He told me he would bring a sheathed gun so as not to frighten Jack but to scare off the animal in the event of a charge. I said nothing, but felt uneasy as we set off.
After what were easily fifteen minutes Mike’s silent gestures, first to his mouth, then to our feet, then pointing out in front of him, informed us we were near. The willows and alders shot up like leafy fencing foils over our heads. In low, dramatic whispers I stressed to Jack that he must be very, very quiet; thankfully he was at an age where he listened and obeyed without question. Audrey emphasized the need for absolute silence. ‘The mummy moose is with her little baby, and if she sees us she might think we have come to steal it and she would be very angry with us and try to chase us away.’ Audrey’s calm explanation instilled just the right note of caution. But as we waited for Mike to call us forward, I thought, ‘How could I protect us if a huge moose charged?’ Mike’s hidden gun gave me little comfort. In fact, it served only to make me more aware of my vulnerability.
