by Brian Keenan
John paused for a long moment. ‘And?’ I said, half screaming at him.
‘Well, there he stood, dressed in an immaculate tuxedo complete with white shirt and bow-tie.’ I was aghast, but John continued as if he hadn’t noticed. ‘In one hand he had a full cocktail glass with olives on a stick, and in the other a long, slim cigar. “My dear John,” he said, “do come and join me for an aperitif.” ’
The story was so unreal it was almost believable. ‘And did you?’ I asked, trying to deflate my storyteller’s imagination.
‘Did I shit,’ John answered, looking at me as if I was crazier than the man he was talking about. ‘I just mumbled something about people not having seen him about for some time and that if everything was okay with him I would head on back home, and you know what? He just said, “Gracious of you, John,” and closed the door on me. I can tell you, I charged back through the woods calling him so many names that ain’t in the dictionary. I stopped at a bar on the way back and downed half a dozen shots of Jack Daniels in double-quick time, asking myself if I had really seen what I had seen.’
As he finished I was asking myself if I really believed what I had just heard.
‘Have you ever asked him about it since?’
‘No,’ John replied. ‘There ain’t much point.’
I thought about it for a moment and half agreed with him.
Perhaps because the story had put it in his mind, or the whiskey-laced coffee at the mine had given him a taste for it, John stopped at a roadside store while we were still in the hills and told me he wouldn’t be long. He returned with two oneeighths of Jack Daniels in tiny hip-pocket-sized bottles and threw one on my knee, gesturing for me to drink. His fantastic story had whetted my appetite, so I did.
We drove languidly back towards Fairbanks, John occasionally pointing out features of the landscape and telling me more stories. One was about an old prospector out in the woods who lived off the frozen remains of a woolly mammoth he had discovered.
‘Come on, John, do you expect me to believe that?’
He smiled. ‘Well, I sold the whole package to the people who make Northern Exposure and they bought it.’
I had to smile as I swallowed another mouthful of Jack Daniels. ‘How rich are you, John? You don’t need to sell ideas, do you?’
Then John launched into a quantification of his wealth. ‘I only discovered what I had bought when I began to look at the title. Then I saw that the navigation floodlights for Alaska Airlines were constructed along my new property. So I told them they should reimburse me for the use of my land. Their response was that they never had to pay the original company and that they didn’t see why they had to pay me. Okay, I said, build a new airport because I’m gonna knock them down. You have fixtures on my land that you need to pay for, and it doesn’t lose me no sleep to remove those lights.’
I was enjoying the repartee the Jack Daniels had opened up. ‘So what happened?’ I asked.
‘Well, they argued it, said that the mining company that had previously owned the land hadn’t objected or cared. But I said to them, “So what? You have flightpath lights constructed on my land. Pay for that or move your airport.” There was all sorta arguments, but they paid up in the end.’
I laughed at the idea of Big John taking the airlines to task and winning. But it wasn’t the only case.
‘You know, I sold this idea to the oil companies of how they could soften their image and develop a tourist industry around the old dredges. We spent weeks talking about it and they seemed taken by the idea. Draw it out on paper, they said, and I did. The next thing was they went off with all the ideas and the blueprint I had given them and began to implement it. So I thought, “What the hell’s going on?” I contacted the oil company and said, “Give me a couple of thousand dollars for the work I put in, delivering these ideas.” ’ Big John took another swallow from his eighth of Jack Daniels. ‘I had given them the whole idea, displayed it on paper. They thanked me for my interesting ideas but said it wouldn’t work. Then up they get and do it themselves, exactly as I had suggested and laid down for them. So I said to them, “Come on, guys, this was my idea. Pay me a thousand dollars’ recognition and carry on yourselves.” Well, they denied I had put the idea to them. And when I insisted and threatened legal action they responded with a statement like, “Listen, we have got more money and more lawyers than you can count, so you need to think real hard before threatening us.” So I did think about it, and for their cheek I took them to court.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, laughing. ‘And what happened?’ I asked, enjoying every minute of the story.
‘Well, it went to court and the jury ruled in my favour. It was a case of the little guy against the big guys. They ruled forty million in my favour. But the oil company immediately appealed it. I’m not bothered. They owe me forty million and they can appeal all they want.’
I was loving this story. Big John was probably worth more than that several times over, but his lawsuit was about the theft of ideas, intellectual property rights, and he had won.
‘So you’re an intellectual entrepreneur!’ I said.
John just drove and sipped from his bottle, which I could hardly see behind his massive hands. ‘I wouldn’t even know what those words meant,’ he said.
So we descended towards Fairbanks with John telling stories about the city dump and how if anyone wanted to know about the town they need only go there. ‘On Saturdays or Sundays it’s like a church gathering. People come just to see what everybody else is throwing out, and instead of being embarrassed about taking someone else’s throwaways they have coffee and sandwiches. The conversation is amazing. Everyone is talking and looking and waiting to grab something before anyone else does. You know, I could do a masters degree on a sociological study of the dumpsters and it would be the most brilliant piece on life in Alaska.’
I laughed as I sipped from my own bottle, thinking that Big John was more of an intellectual entrepreneur than he thought.
He dropped me near my cabin with the parting remark from me that it had been a good day and that he was a fabulous liar. Big John just smiled and insisted we meet again when I was back in Fairbanks. He called out, ‘I got your book off Amazon!’ and drove off. I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to imply, but a line from Jimmy Dean – ‘everybody knew you didn’t give no lip to big John’ – emerged out of the ether. I liked Big John Reese, and I knew he liked me. I didn’t believe half of what he told me; I believed everything.
On our way back through the hills on a road that had been cut through the tree line, a young wolf had padded unconcernedly across our path. John had just been saying that a person could walk five miles into the bush and be lost for ever. The wolf passed across the roadway without feeling the need to slow or stop. ‘I have been here half my life and I have never seen that,’ John stated, genuinely astounded. ‘Wolves never, never, ever come this near anything that smells of man. You have just witnessed a rare thing, and so have I.’
That night I went to bed thinking about Vladimir and Mark, John Luther Adams, John Reese and the wolf that had crossed our path. Maybe it was the Jack Daniels, maybe it was the big raven that watched me walk up the path to my cabin, or maybe it was all the other maybes these few weeks had thrown up, but I was sure about no sense of reality. I opened my notebook and began with another maybe: ‘Maybe I’m on the Yellow Brick Road with the lion, the tin man, the scarecrow and whatever else the kingdom of Oz might throw up.’
I had time only for a brief rendezvous with Debra about our trip into the Far North. I already accepted that she was a woman of exceptional gifts, with powers beyond my understanding. When she explained that during my travels she too had been travelling in the spirit realm, everything looked good around me. She informed me that her own ‘helpers’ in the spirit realm were encouraging for her also. I couldn’t question her on this as I was in the dark about the physical journey we were intending to make as much as I was about the spirit world I h
ad been dropped into.
We quickly agreed dates, and Debra described a loose itinerary west from Fairbanks to Kotzebue on the Bering Strait and then south down the coast towards Nome. In Kotzebue we would meet up with some local Eskimos who would take us by boat through a network of sea inlets to find and stay with Charlie and Lena, an old shaman and his wife. ‘Eskimos are very laid-back about things so don’t expect everything to work out to a prearranged schedule,’ Debra warned. I was okay with whatever she said. She was the guide, and I was more than an innocent abroad. I made a list of equipment and clothing that she suggested I should bring.
‘Won’t your family miss you while you’re gone?’ I asked.
She replied that her husband would be more than happy to see her go. As for her son, he was a very mature fourteen-year-old who loved being alone with his dad. That prompted me to think of my own family, whom I had left to their own devices in a mobile home.
‘What’s your son’s name?’ I asked automatically.
‘Keenan,’ she replied, her face and voice passive as poured cream. Which was exactly the opposite of what her answer had caused in me.
‘Keenan?’ I exclaimed, although the word hardly came out of my mouth for my throat was dry with sudden nervous confusion. ‘How? Where from?’ The words fell out of me like a blind man feeling his way along a cliff edge. I knew of only one other person in the world who had had Keenan as a first name, an old Hollywood actor named Keenan Whynne. ‘Why?’ I insisted. ‘You have no family connections to the name, in your or your husband’s history.’
‘No, none,’ she confirmed, that same stillness in her voice.
‘But why, then?’
‘It was given to me,’ she said.
There was silence between us. I looked at the woman, knowing that I didn’t need to ask from where she had been given it. I did a quick calculation. At the time I would have been locked up in Lebanon doing my own travelling in the ether of the imagination, tumbling through planes of existence and finding myself looking down on extraordinary landscapes and places that both baffled and consoled me. I said nothing of this to Debra, but thought to myself about how people’s lives are tied together across time and space without their knowing.
I left Debra bemused by the strange things that happened whenever we met, and part of me was swallowing down some apprehension about where it was all going to lead.
That evening I took out my notebook again. The comparison of the Land of Oz with Alaska wasn’t as far-fetched as it appeared. Dorothy, the lion, the tin man and the scarecrow were all creatures in search of something that they hoped would be granted to them by the magnificent Wizard of Oz. In a similar way, I felt that in the past few days I had met some people who had come to Alaska in search of something. Each of them in their different way had been spellbound by the place and all of them had been ‘enchanted’ by the landscape. I mean ‘enchanted’ in the medieval sense of being bewitched or under a spell. All had decided to remain. Each of them had found something liberating, enriching and healing in their relationship to the wilderness. The composer was granted a unique creative energy. Big John lived life with ebullience and gusto. Behind all his bravado was a huge sensitive heart, richer than all his accidental wealth. Even Mark with his fathomless eyes, bluer than the bluest Alaskan landscape, was about to bury his troubles in the cold earth and be at peace with himself and whatever ghosts and fantasies reside in his outback home. Each of them was an outsider in his own way and ‘the Big Lonely’ had befriended that part of them and had shaped it, giving it a meaning and context, and had even drained the hurt out of it. They had found their home place and were happy with it. I paused for a moment from my speculations, and smiled to myself. Did I really see Debra as another Dorothy, dancing me along the yellow brick road? And although I had not met him yet, Charlie, the Eskimo shaman, could not be another Wizard of Oz!
Arctic Inua
I was acutely aware that the Far North Arctic coast was something I was unprepared for, so in the few days I had before catching a flight with my guide Debra I tried to glean some information that would make me feel more comfortable. But even as I attempted to read books on the Eskimo people, I realized how little I knew. I had to start from first principles. Debra explained that Inuit was an umbrella term, like its English equivalent, Eskimo. All Eskimos were Inuits. But the Inuits in this part of Alaska had a regional name, Inupiat. In another region they might be called Yupik.
I began to discover something of the cultural complexity of Alaska, and to learn the importance of affiliation and ancestry. In a formal situation, I gathered, a native Alaskan might introduce himself by outlining his English name, followed by his tribal name, then the moiety (say, eagle), then the specific clan. This would be further elaborated by the house to which he belongs (say, iceberg house and iron house). Then he would declare his crest, e.g. bear, iceberg and porpoise. In this elaborate introduction is encoded a wealth of history, myth and legend. When I considered this, I thought how impoverished my own reply would sound. My frenetic reading was throwing up other details that intrigued me, such as how to make Eskimo ice cream by whipping bear, moose or caribou fat then leaving it until it cools. It is flavoured with seal oil, meat or fish and sweetened with honey, sugar or berries. The thought of such a delicacy did not excite me, but it did highlight just how little I knew.
And I discovered another curious fact. One of the many stories that has been collected out of the ‘Eskimo’ folk tradition is described as the longest story ever told. The Epic of Quyaq chronicles the journeys of a young man. It’s a mythological tale which originally took over a month to narrate and is more than a thousand years old.
So here I was trying to absorb the culture of a people which had explained itself from the complex mythology of Quyaq’s epic to the curiosity of Eskimo ice cream. This was indeed a long way from igloos on ice floes and men in bear-skin parkas peering patiently into holes in the ice waiting to catch a seal for supper. Against these ice cream and myth makers my own experience seemed a lot less colourful, maybe even mundane. It was useless to attempt to become acquainted with this alien cultural repository; I would just have to take it as I found it, and they would have to take me as they found me.
Kotzebue was our point of arrival, and, I suppose, our point of departure into the Inupiat wilderness. The village is almost directly in the path of what is known as the Bering Land Bridge, a thousand-mile-wide ridge of dry land that is thought to have existed between Asia and North America during the ice age (it is now submerged). According to the land bridge theory, humans followed migratory animals from Asia into North America thousands of years ago.
I wasn’t sure what to expect an Eskimo village to be like, but whatever it was, Kotzebue was not it. What you see, after flying over millions of acres of tundra, is the end of a narrow spit that looks as if it has been levelled with a bulldozer and then constructed on a street grid laid on poured gravel. Kotzebue is estimated to be the oldest settlement in Alaska, but it is also a modern technological miracle. You land on an airstrip, for example, that floats on a six-inch layer of Styrofoam-type material over permafrost that is 2,240 feet deep. At first glance, as the plane taxies down the runway, the place more closely resembles an industrial park or a labourers’ encampment than a town.
We had to wait for our boatmen to arrive and take us by skiff across the Kotzebue Sound, then up through a mosaic of sloughs where the Noatak River breaks out into the sea. Debra could not be specific about where we were going; only the boatmen knew. When I enquired how long we might have to wait for them, she informed me again that only the boatmen knew. She did, however, know a relative of Charlie and Lena’s who lived in the town so we could wait at her cabin until the boatmen collected us.
Fanny Mendenhall was in her early nineties (she wasn’t sure exactly), but she looked twenty-five years younger. She lived alone in one of the prefabricated wooden cabins that the whole town seemed to consist of. Even in her old age Fanny was alert and an abl
e conversationalist. There was another passenger who had been on our flight in Fanny’s house when we arrived. I assumed she was a relative, and sat quietly in the Eskimo home as Debra, Fanny and the other visitor chatted. Fanny did not know the woman any more than she knew me, but as I was learning, strangers are never made to feel unwelcome in an Eskimo home. The inbred ethic of respect for all beings is effortlessly upheld without ceremony or affectation. The Eskimo will share their home, their food and their company as if they had known you for ever.
Fanny’s living room would easily have been big enough for us all except that it, like her kitchen and hallway, was overflowing with clothes, boots, magazines, books and cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes. I put it down to her age: it must be difficult for her to pack things away. Debra again corrected me. Order and tidiness is not a prerequisite in the Eskimo way of life. Things are valued for what can be done with them and how they assist in making life easier. Where they are left or how they are stored is of no consequence. The Eskimo has a visual capacity far superior to a white person’s, but ‘they don’t see clutter!’ Having spent many years treating Eskimo people during her time as a nurse in Nome, Debra knew much about their day-to-day life.
There was a cloying odour of fish hanging in the air, and the whole house felt like an oven. I said so to Debra and remarked that I might go for a walk around the town. She walked me to the door, explaining that Fanny and the other woman were talking about Fanny’s home. Fanny was complaining that she had never been warm since she moved into it. She had apparently spent her young life growing up in a sod and whalebone home, part of which was underground. She always remembers being warm there. The cabin let in too many Arctic draughts and winds, even though it was centrally heated by oil. I remember the two women laughing as Fanny joked that before the Christians came the Inupiat people lived underground, where it was warm, and buried their dead on the surface, where it was cold. ‘Now the Christians have us all living up here with our long-dead ancestors,’ she quipped.
