by Brian Keenan
When gold mining was at its height, parts of the great Goliathlike earth dredgers had to be manufactured on the spot. Steel was fired and turned here to precise dimensions every day. Huge locking bolts and nuts were manufactured and threads turned on them. Trying to pile iron and steel into the permafrost was a titanic struggle. The earth always won, for Alaska’s low temperatures snapped pig iron and machine steel like chicken bones.
John Reese was a giant of a man, not only in stature but also in his thinking and in his heart. ‘Jesus,’ I thought as I looked up at him the way a child looks up at an adult. ‘I’ve climbed up the beanstalk of the world. If he says “Fee fi fo fum” to me, he can keep his golden eggs. I’m out of here, pronto.’ My friend Pat had told me that John was rather wealthy with a few gold mines, some property and even a coffee plantation in Colombia. I was to learn later that this was a gross underestimation. But the man in front of me looked nothing like an Alaskan millionaire. He wore an old battered baseball cap whose peak had collapsed so that it fell over his face instead of jutting out above his eyes. His baggy sports trousers looked as if they hadn’t been washed in weeks. They hung off him as though they were two sizes too big, which, given the size of the man, would have been impossible – unless the trousers had been made by a sailmaker. To complete the ensemble he wore a washed-out T-shirt under a very worn fleece jacket, which dragged down in the front due to the amount of junk he had shoved into the pockets.
John’s face was as dissolute as his appearance. It was obvious that razor blades were not high on his hygiene agenda. He sported a huge walrus-like moustache that would have made Nietzsche look Chaplinesque. His eyes were hidden behind wraparound sunglasses that reflected a garish greeny blue, which created the illusion of his having the grossly protuberant eyes of a huge insect.
Surprisingly, our conversation was laboured. All Mr Reese’s wealth and stature had given him no advantage in conversation. At first he seemed brusque and uninterested, as if I had entered into his world like an annoying mosquito. But as I persisted, asking him about the machine shop’s history and his own life in Fairbanks, he slowly began to open up. I soon realized that it was reticence and shyness that had made him seem so dismissive.
As we walked through the workshop I asked why he had acquired such a redundant piece of industrial history. He told me he had bought it as part of the package in the portfolio of an old mining corporation that had long ago ceased operations in Alaska. ‘Thought I was just buying up property and mining rights,’ he explained, ‘but a whole big parcel of other stuff came with it, including this here workshop and a load of warehouses with more machinery in Pennsylvania.’ I asked him what he intended doing with it all. ‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘When I realized this came with the deal I had a notion to knock it down and maybe sell on the land. But I like it in here. It’s peaceful, and even pretty. Keep all the machines clean and in running order, though most of them have never been worked in twenty years or more. It’s like having your own private museum.’ But the way he spoke told me that this shabby, retiring millionaire was no museum caretaker. His manner could not hide the affection he had for the place. It was more like a private chapel than a museum, and I could imagine this giant of a man quietly polishing and tending the sacramental lathes and turning machines with loving adoration.
As we walked around I stared out through a cobweb- and grime-encrusted window. Wrecks of old cars and trucks dating back to the forties and fifties littered the grounds. The colossal bric-a-brac of the gold-rush era sprawled all over the place. It was a graveyard of rusting iron and inert man-made machine parts that in their day had busted open the spleen of this hard country.
Tucked away in one corner of the workshop I discovered real fossils. A pile of oddly shaped bones stood alone, and beside them three huge, arching curves of tusk. Then more tusks appeared as my eyes adjusted to the light. Some of them were wrapped with heavy-duty tape and others had clamped to them what looked like massive chrome jubilee clips. John explained that the bones and tusks were from the remains of a woolly mammoth he had unearthed in one of his mines. The tape and chrome clips served to pull the cracked and ruptured curve together once he had glued and sealed them. Some of them were more than fifteen feet long and impossible to lift. Even John’s huge frame had difficulty with them. Why he had a collection of mammoth bones and tusks was beyond me. I couldn’t resist asking him. He explained that mammoth remains could make big money in Japan; the larger and more complete the piece the more they would pay. Apparently, Japanese businessmen like to carry one piece of mammoth ivory carved with their own personal business stamp.
‘Is it hard to find?’ I queried.
He explained that there was a lot of fossilized bone being dug up. But it was unusual to find whole tusks now. Probably in the past the miners would have discarded these finds without another thought, but today mammoth ivory was worth lots more than gold. He fumbled in his coat pocket and produced a piece of tusk that he had sanded and polished on one of the machines. It glowed with a deep earthy brown and ox-blood colouring. It was neither cold nor hot in the hand but its shiny surface had a deeply sensuous feel. It was curious to think that here I was, holding a piece of a gigantic animal that was millions of years old, and now it had been transformed into the personal talisman of some wealthy business samurai. As I rubbed my fingers on it I felt as if I was rubbing away millions of years of history and touching something elemental that centuries and centuries of evolution had not eroded.
Big John gave me a rough fragment of tusk as a keepsake and we arranged to meet up in a few days’ time to drive up into the hills and visit a few of his gold mines and the men who worked them.
‘How many mines do you own anyway?’ I asked as I was about to drive off.
‘Don’t rightly know, maybe three dozen or so,’ he said as he walked back into his magical museum.
Over the next few days I visited a few other citizens who had settled in this town at the edge of nowhere. I had already noticed that Fairbanks had more than its share of creative people. I thought I could understand why. The wilderness made you challenge yourself and your perceptions, and I wondered how others who lived here felt about this.
Vladimir was a Russian emigrant who had lately arrived from Provedentia in Siberia. He lived in a studio above a very nondescript pub in the worst part of downtown. It would take a strong character with lots of determination to live there. My first impression of Vladimir was that he did not seem the type to survive in this dreadful part of town. That was before I learned he had been a prison guard back in Siberia for much of his working adult life before coming to Alaska. I looked at his tight-cropped hair and beard and his lean muscular stature. Only for a brief moment could I see him as a prison officer. There was something very open and uncomplicated about his face, which was the perfect mirror for his personality. He felt more like a young monk to me. He was immediately talkative and friendly. Even though I had only been in his home a few minutes he spoke to me with the easy-going assurance of someone who had known me for many years.
Vladimir insisted I share his meagre lunch of bread, cheese, tinned ham and pickles, which we washed down with raw vodka flavoured with horseradish and garlic. This in turn was washed down with refreshingly sweet water, which was made from sugary resin drawn off the silver birch trees that were in abundance.
Though Vladimir lived on the edge of penury he seemed untroubled and content. He had acquired quite a reputation as an ice sculptor and I was impressed as he leafed through a photo album of his work. Vladimir was unbothered by the temporary nature of his work. He felt that it was appropriate that these images in ice melted away and were lost for ever. It added a dynamic to his art. It prevented complacency. Ice was so fluid; you could do things with ice that you could not with other mediums. You had to work fast, and that kept your thinking sharp. I remembered watching an ice sculptor at work during my visit years ago. The essential tool was like a broad wood chisel attached to a short spade ha
ndle. The speed and precision with which an expert can evolve the most fantastical images was truly amazing.
We drank more of the horseradish-flavoured vodka, then Vladimir walked me to his studio and displayed his ice-carving implements. They were like a cross between a blacksmith’s tool kit and a medieval surgeon’s operating instruments. Vladimir poured more vodka as he laughed at my description. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said through his guffaws. ‘Only it is much colder and there is less blood!’
I was about to ask him where he had learned his skill when I noticed a large unfinished painting mounted on an easel near the window. It was of a herd of bull walrus sunning themselves on a rocky outcrop. Now, male walrus are ugly and aggressive creatures, but not my Russian painter’s walrus. They lay in sublime repose and looked out of the painting, inviting you to join them. I could see why ancient mariners had mistaken them for mermaids and mermen. Each of Vladimir’s walrus looked the same, yet each expressed its own personality.
‘It is a fabulous piece, Vlad,’ I said, suddenly using the familiar diminutive of his name. ‘Would you sell it?’
‘No,’ he said firmly. Then, in a softer tone, he explained, ‘I cannot, because it is not finished. I have been working on it four and a half months but I think it will be maybe a year old before I am finished.’ I declared that his painting was superior to his sculpture and he looked from me to the painting and back to me again. ‘You are right, of course, and you know why?’
‘No.’
‘Because they remain with you longer.’
I wasn’t sure if I was able to take this debate on the arts any further and declined another top-up. Vladimir was not drunk, but he enjoyed stimulating conversation and I was interested in how this ex-gulag guard who had the soul of a saint had found himself in Alaska. His answer was surprising, but exactly what I should have expected. ‘It is too confusing, and more importantly it is wasteful of time,’ he began. ‘People here spend too much time doing things to save time so that they can do the really important things. But they never have any time to do these things. They sleep for eight hours, they spend three hours eating and drinking, then another two hours on insignificant things. Why do they not do what they want to do?’ I was listening intently, but the complex mechanics of what he was trying to say were baffling me. He finally got to the point. ‘The spiritual dimensions of people’s lives are hidden from them. Life,’ he said, pointing his finger towards the heavens and then at his heart, ‘has little meaning without it.’
I left his apartment as he had to go and collect his wife, who was a Russian teacher. I took a last glimpse at the sparsely finished room and the studio packed with half-finished paintings, photos of ice sculpture, brushes, hand-made ice-shaving chisels of every description, and a table full of charcoal sketches and photos of his wife and his family taken somewhere in Siberia. Vladimir hadn’t got much, but his room was full to bursting.
My next port of call was with John Luther Adams. The name suggested an eccentric revivalist preacher or an attorney of law from somewhere in New England who could trace his ancestry back to the Puritan founding fathers and whose own father had written a book on religious ethics and the history of religious dissension. John Luther was nothing like this. He described himself as the most northerly composer in the world. Inside his meticulously maintained cabin in the woods, John spoke with single-minded passion about Alaska, and particularly the Arctic region, as an inspirational place. Here was a man who was used to being alone. I supposed that was in the nature of being a composer.
I spoke with him of my book about the blind harpist and mentioned my mysterious correspondent and her confiding to me that the composer I was writing about was a ‘Dreamwalker’; for some reason I didn’t mention that I had met this woman again. The word seemed to knock down the awkwardness between us. I had come to ask this man about what brought artistic and creative people to this extreme land. I never needed to ask the question. My book about the Irish composer Turlough Carolan had done the trick.
John was about my age and had come to Alaska when he was twenty-two. He was, as he described it, ‘looking for a home place’, somewhere his creative energies would be liberated. The minute he arrived he felt that the landscape resonated with something that commanded him to stay. This was home! I had already discovered that when I asked people why they came to this northern extreme, or indeed why they stayed, they spilled out in front of me a tea chest full of ready-made reasons. Yet all they seemed to do was obscure the essential answer I was looking for. John Luther Adams, like everyone else, had his own reasons for leaving the lower 48. He admitted that after thirty years he was still discovering what kept him here. He also admitted to finding the bleak, dark winter dreadfully frustrating. He drowned himself in sun-lamp therapy to hold back the SADs, the debilitating depression that descends every winter that Jane Haigh explained to me while describing her need to become a ‘snowbird’. Did John feel the same compulsion? ‘Sometimes,’ he confessed, but he never acted upon it. He was too obsessed with the extremes of ice and rock, light and dark, the roaring aurora and that incredibly mesmeric white silence.
As he was talking, he referred to his life in Alaska as a sojourn in ‘the Big Lonely’. It held him in its bone-numbing, icy grip and would not let him leave no matter how he might rage against it. He spoke of years spent walking in the wilderness and listening to the ‘Arctic litanies’ that sounded to him out of the earth and air. From the time he’d first arrived in Alaska he had been acutely aware of the ‘presence’ of the place. It was something I too had felt. This sense of a ‘presence’ in the landscape had deepened as the years passed. It had propelled and challenged him. It was, for him, ‘the measure of everything we do and are’. By way of explanation, he talked about a piece of music he had worked on for six years, until he was content with his composition and even sure there was real quality and merit in it. One morning he pulled back the curtains, looked out on to the Alaska Range and realized how insignificant the work was.
But he remained working and living in the wilderness. ‘The sonic geography of Alaska is so rich it requires a lifetime’s devotion,’ he declared, and put on some of his CDs. Birdsong and the noise of wind, water and thunder floated around the room. Obviously John was no conventional composer, nor was his music melodic in the classical European sense. His harmonics were stark, disturbing and deeply penetrating. Inuit voices spoke from behind the music, calling out their native place names. The music was like the names the natives had given to the land – void of elaborate description yet full of the experience of the place. The ghostly voices resonated with ancestry and myth. As I listened, totally overwhelmed, John spoke about the ‘salvation of silence’, that great mysterious quiet that wraps around you in the bush. I knew it from my own night on the lake. And when he spoke about music as a metaphor for silence I was with him all the way. There is a quality about silence that suspends time and makes every sound clear and precise. The composer’s music was an echo of and a portal into that silence; it was not a representation of the place. It was its own landscape; it had moved beyond external reference. You didn’t just hear the music, and it didn’t throw up images of the wilderness, you felt it resonating from somewhere deep inside you. Describing landscape in words or music is limiting work. Like the Renaissance idea of perspective, it sets us at a distance from the object, detaches us from its organic being. It is a two-dimensional thing that misses something elemental.
I was becoming intoxicated with our talk, and with the music which elaborated on the words. But what was this ‘sonic geography’? Even as John was trying to define some kind of extraterrestrial terrain, somewhere at the crossroads of imagination and place, I was suddenly blasted into that place by the forceful, trance-like, driving rhythms of the drum. John’s mountain music exploded at me like the first sight of the mountain ranges. It penetrated through my bones and rooted me into the stone as if I were petrified flesh. It was scary; I felt I could not escape it. Like the mountains, the te
rrifying noise of the drums was everywhere around me.
The music was removing the necessity for conversation, but when the composer spoke about the timeless place of forgetting and unknowing I knew what he meant, for that’s where Alaska is, and John Luther Adams’s music can take you there.
John had begun our conversation by trying to explain why he had come to Alaska. He was looking for a home place. But I felt he had discovered that home was within, and that home was also in his music. I left him sitting in the corner of his minimalist white room, gnome-like, his knees bent up to his chin, his long arms and fine-boned hands draped over the arms of his chair.
Big John arrived in a big, powerful 4 × 4 half truck that had the same roughshod appearance as its driver. I could hardly have expected anything else. We drove into the hills, exchanging easy conversation about Ireland and Alaska.
Big John didn’t have the erudite intensity of John Luther Adams. However, like Adams, he had hitch-hiked up from Florida, where he had been studying with a swimming scholarship, in his early twenties. He had come to Alaska for a ‘bit of an adventure’ and hoped to pick up some money along the way. He never made the return journey and by his own admission had picked up a lot more than a few dollars. He really wasn’t sure how much land he owned, but he knew it was a lot more than anyone else. He leased out several of his mines to local prospectors, and the ‘rental’ on the lease was one tenth of the value of gold they extracted. How did he know how much each mine produced? ‘One thing you need to learn fast about miners,’ he informed me with a serious expression. ‘Never ask them too many questions, never ask how much they are digging, and absolutely never ask about the quantity or quality of the gold they process.’
