The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  When the current slowed, Heimo was aware enough to realize that it might be their only chance. He struggled to his feet and shouted to Tom, “Pole, pole like hell!” This time Tom struck bottom. Tom poled the raft closer to the riverbank, and then Heimo saw his opportunity— he jumped back into the river. It was only waist deep, and he leaned into the raft and pushed while Tom poled. When they reached shallower water, Heimo grabbed the bow rope and scrambled out of the river and up the bank. The current was tugging at the raft, but he was able to wrap the rope around the trunk of a large tree. He tied it off and then ran into the river to get Tom. Lifting Tom from the raft, he carried him to the bank. Then he rescued the supplies. Ten minutes later, after he had hauled everything to the riverbank, he took inventory. They’d lost only a .22 rifle and a fishing pole.

  Heimo recalls the incident with horror. “Here my mother trusts me with my thirteen-year-old brother and I almost get him killed,” he says. “It was a dumb cheechako thing to do. I should’ve just waited for the water to go down. I was sick for three days after that. After I got everything out of the raft, it started to rain. We built a big fire, but it still took me three days to stop shivering.”

  When Heimo finally recovered, he knew that their work had just begun. He and Tom had a cabin to build, and now that he had his strength back, he worked like a man possessed. He and Tom spent three days cutting and limbing trees for the cabin walls. Heimo wanted the cabin to be a sturdy one—Keith Koontz had taught him that—and he was fortunate that the upper Coleen River had one of the northernmost outposts of white spruce in the polar north. When they finished cutting logs, there were forty of them, each one ten to twelve inches in diameter. Heimo then used his ax to smooth out flat surfaces so that they would fit together tightly when laid on top of each other. Then he carved out saddle notches near the ends of each log, reminding himself to lay the notches down so that water would not be able to collect in the grooves and weaken the walls. Though he tried to match the logs as closely as possible, there was little uniformity, and many of them didn’t fit as snugly as he had hoped. The spaces between them would have to be chinked with lots of moss.

  Two weeks after they’d begun the project, Heimo and Tom confronted their biggest challenge yet—they had to set the cross member. The cross member had to run widthwise, perpendicular to the roof poles. Since it had to support not only the weight of the moss, but also the poles and the three feet of snow that would collect during the winter, it was very large and heavy. Heimo and Tom rolled the log to the corner of the cabin, where they both lifted up one end and propped it up on the cabin wall. Then they struggled to lift the other end. The log was so big they could not get the cross member higher than their waists. They tried several times and wore themselves out in the process. Frustrated, Heimo insisted they take a break.

  Sitting against the cabin wall, wiping the sweat from his face with a handkerchief, Heimo came up with an idea. He grabbed his chain saw and walked over to where he’d cut the wall logs and cut a large tree stump off at its base. Heimo hoped that he and Tom could lift the end of the log high enough to rest it on the stump. If they were able to do that, and if Tom could hold it in place, then maybe, just maybe, Heimo could squat underneath and power it up, using his leg strength. They tried twice and failed. On their third attempt, they got it on top of the stump, but the log rolled off before Heimo could get underneath it. Then on their fourth attempt, they did it. Tom was able to balance the log long enough for Heimo to get underneath and lift. Heimo was standing now and Tom jumped in to help. At the count of three they both jerked the log over their heads and pushed it, so that the log was suspended between the cabin’s south and east walls. Although they’d gotten the cross member up, their job was far from being over. The log was balanced precariously, and it wouldn’t take much to upset that balance. If the log fell, they’d have to begin again.

  Heimo climbed and straddled the wall. His job was to muscle the cross member to the north wall and then roll it into place. There was little Tom could do now but watch and hope that cross member didn’t tumble back, that Heimo didn’t take a bad fall. Half an hour later, Heimo finally got the cross member set. Though it was hardly noon, both Heimo and Tom were worn out from the effort. Rest wasn’t an option, though. They needed to lay the roof poles.

  Setting the roof poles, which were green and heavy, proved to be even more difficult than lugging and lifting the wall logs. It took all the strength that Heimo and Tom had to hoist the roof poles and roll them into place. By early evening, they’d set all forty roof poles. They went to bed that night without supper and woke early the following morning with hunger gnawing at their bellies. Heimo knew they needed a good meal to keep their strength, so he fried up caribou steaks and made bannock, using flour, powdered milk, water, and baking powder.

  After breakfast, they went to collect moss for the roof. The roof would have four layers: the poles and then a layer of insulating moss, followed by a big plastic sheet of Visqueen, which in turn would be covered with another layer of moss. Heimo had hoped that moss would be easy to find, but finding it in the woods, gathering it, loading it onto the tarp, and lugging the tarp to the cabin took them a good portion of the day. It was evening when they finally put the finishing touches on the roof, smothering the Visqueen in a six-inch blanket of moss.

  The entire project had taken them nearly a month. Looking at the cabin, Heimo knew that it was not a thing of beauty. It had a flat roof and a five-and-a-half-foot ceiling, but Heimo was willing to sacrifice comfort for function. He deliberately built the roof a full six inches shorter than he stood. In winter, at 50 below, when the heat of the stove was trapped in the cabin, he would be grateful. Thinking back, Heimo laughs that the only time he was ever able to extend his six-foot frame was when he was sleeping.

  Heimo and Tom rested and fished for two days, and then they walked five miles upriver, near the mouth of Marten Creek, and built a flat-roofed line cabin. Though it was smaller than the first, only ten by ten, and roughly constructed, that cabin took a full week to build. The line cabin was an essential trapper’s trick. It allowed the trapper to expand the size of his trapline. For Heimo, it meant that he could trap farther upriver and also lay out side lines, confident that if he were too tired to make it back to the main cabin, or if he got caught in rough weather, he could always overnight at the line cabin. Ideally, he would have built one even farther north, fifteen or so miles upriver instead of only five, but he’d already pushed Tom to his limits. Though Tom was stronger than most thirteen-year-olds, a five-mile walk through muskeg, carrying a full load of gear, was about all he could muster.

  In mid-July, two days after they finished building the line cabin, Heimo and Tom woke and realized that there had been a hard freeze. Ponds had frosted over in the night, and although Heimo was worried, because he hadn’t even begun to cut firewood, he was seduced by the weather. The sun shone brilliantly and the freeze had come with its own blessing; the bugs that had menaced them for a month and a half were gone. Heimo would cut wood when he returned in September. For the last two weeks before the plane came to get them, Heimo and Tom fished and explored up and down the river, living completely in the moment, the way young men and boys can.

  CHAPTER 6

  Spring

  Kirk Sweetsir tips the wings of the plane, waving good-bye, bush pilot style. Heimo and I wave back and wait until the plane has disappeared and we can only hear the far-off buzz of the Cessna 180 engine.

  Heimo turns to me, sniffing at the air. “You smell like town,” he says.

  “And you look like a ski bunny,” I say, retaliating. Heimo has shaved off his winter beard, though he still wears his sideburns long in modified muttonchops, and his face is now deeply tanned as if he’s spent the two and a half months since I last saw him skiing the slopes of Aspen. “You’ll look the same way when you leave here,” he says. “Tan from the neck up with rings around your eyes from your sunglasses. You did bring a pair, didn’t you? Yo
u’re gonna need ’em.”

  I look around. The land is luminously white, and I can’t imagine how it can ever be spring. A month past the vernal equinox, and the temperature is still 5 below. The black spruce labor under the weight of snow and the frosted willows tremble in the raw breeze, producing a strange musical sound, like a jazz drummer lightly brushing his snare drum. We are still in the grips of winter, but the shadows are gone. The polar world has tilted toward light—for the last month, the Korths have been gaining more than ten minutes of sunlight each day—and the sun is shining as if it is another season. I lift my face to it. Though it offers little warmth, it is dazzling, and I have to shade my eyes.

  The sound of Kirk’s plane trails off into nothing.

  In the last half century, the bush plane has dramatically changed the Alaskan landscape, unlocking the door to a wilderness whose sheer breadth would otherwise be unapproachable. Cubs, single-engine Otters, Beavers, and tail-dragging Cessnas like Kirk’s, fifty-year-old planes that have been rebuilt by resourceful pilots, are standard fare in the Alaskan bush. By some accounts, these “flying coffins,” as Alaskans with a flair for black comedy call the bush planes, have been a gift to those eager to experience Alaska. By others, the bush plane has been a great spoiler, rendering areas that were nearly unreachable within the grasp of anyone with a pilot’s license or any Tom, Dick, Harry, Susan, or Jane with enough money to hire one. The prevalence of planes in the bush is sometimes alarming, particularly during the summer backpacking, floating, and big-game hunting seasons, when pilots take advantage of the midnight sun and hustle like big-city cab drivers, running clients to and from the farthest points on the map.

  The plane has been a mixed blessing for the Korths. Sounding like Daniel Boone, who moved with his family from western Virginia to Missouri because he needed “elbow room,” Heimo says, “The Old Crow cabin is unreachable by water and almost impossible to get to by land, which is just the way I want it.” The plane, in other words, has made their life in the bush possible. It allows them their isolation. It is also their connection to the world outside. Friends who own planes bring in supplies, food, and mail, and shuttle the Korths from one cabin to another in spring and from the bush to Fort Yukon and back again every summer. Without the help of good friends, the Korths would be hard-pressed to live the way they do. On the other hand, the plane also poses a threat to their lifestyle, allowing hunters, backpackers, and river floaters access to Alaska’s most remote wilderness areas, including the Coleen River and the Old Crow drainage.

  “That’s Bear Mountain,” Heimo says, slipping on his sunglasses and pointing north at a massive peak. “And way over there,” he continues, gesturing to the southeast, “those are what we named the Strangle-woman Mountains.” The scene is that of a minimalist painting: the mountains, snow-covered and white, set starkly against a robin’s-egg-blue sky, the peregrinations of the icy Coleen River outlined by the dark trunks of tall white spruce trees.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say, putting on my own sunglasses. “Yeah,” Heimo agrees. “I love it here at the upper cabin, especially in spring.”

  Heimo and Edna have been “springing out” at one of their three cabins ever since they were married, twenty years ago. “Springing out” is an old-time bush term meaning to spend spring in the bush all the way until after breakup and only then to head for town. Rhonda and Krin have been “springing out” all their lives. They know nothing else.

  Spring is a joyous time in the bush, but waiting for breakup can be tough psychologically. There’s a sense of eagerness, an anticipation that builds, that begins to weigh on a person. Everybody is excited to get to town and wonders when breakup will come. When the timing is perfect, breakup happens around mid-May, a week or two after the songbirds and ducks and geese have appeared. However, sometimes breakup is late; it can stretch into early June. When that happens, even the most stable psyches are challenged.

  When the Korths leave their cabin for town, they head to Fort Yukon. They’ve been going there for six weeks of “town life” every summer, replicating the historic movement of families out of the woods. Town was always part of the cycle of bush life. Fred Thomas, Heimo’s good friend and the traveling companion of Edward Hoagland in his story “Up the Black to the Chalkyitsik,” recalls, “Families came out in early June to sell their furs, to visit friends, and to stock up on supplies. Sometimes the men would hire themselves out for summer labor. Then in August, they’d load up their boats and head back up the rivers for home.”

  We load my gear into the sled, but before going upriver, Heimo quizzes me. “Can you figure out where the Old Crow cabin is?” he asks. I don’t balk. Instead I point confidently in the direction of some rounded, glacial hills, feeling like Heimo’s sister Angie might have when she tried to name tracks in the woods near their childhood home. “Over there,” I say. Heimo follows my outstretched finger, roughly northeast. “Not bad,” he replies, moving my arm six inches to the north, like a piano teacher readjusting a student’s hands. “Twenty miles that way,” he says.

  We pull up to the cabin, and I admire Heimo’s woodpile. He’s already cut, split, and stacked nine cords of spruce wood for the following winter. “I was hoping that you left some of that work for me,” I tell him, and then I bound to the door and stomp my feet—remembering my winter lesson—to announce that I am coming in.

  Inside the cabin, the girls are hard at work finishing up their studies for the day. Rhonda is clutching her pencil and staring at a long algebra equation, and Krin is working on her spelling. “Meteorology,” I hear her say as I walk in. Edna is sitting in front of the cabin’s only window tending her plants—an apple, a pear tree, and watermelon seeds. She’s placed the plants and seeds in a large plastic bowl filled with dirt. Next to the bowl is an avocado pit soaking in a glass jar half full of water.

  Edna rises and hugs me, and the girls smile mischievously. “Uh-oh,” I say. “What are they up to, Edna?” “You know them,” she answers, looking at the girls, who are giggling over their notebooks. “They’ve been plotting. They have a whole month of pranks in store for you.” “Ah, fresh meat,” I say. “I should have known.”

  Heimo walks in and catches the tail end of our conversation. “Jeez,” he says, “you’re not even gonna give him a chance to get settled in, are you?” Rhonda and Krin both drop their pencils and beam. “No way!” they shout. “Don’t worry,” I say to Heimo, who is scowling. “I know what to expect from the Merry Pranksters.” On my winter trip, the girls so tormented me with their practical jokes that I’d taken to calling them the “Merry Pranksters.” This time, by the looks of it, they are determined to outdo themselves.

  I walk out to the sled, grab my gear, and lug it to the orange Arctic oven tent, which Heimo has pitched in an opening near the outdoor fire pit about fifty feet from the cabin. There is a sign taped to the tent, decorated in bold black letters: “Welcome to Another Nightmare.” I pull the sign from the tent and turn to see who is watching me. Rhonda and Krin dive through the cabin door, and Edna jumps back from the cabin window. I set down my bags to unzip the tent’s rain fly and I realize that I can’t find the zipper. For a moment I am puzzled. Have I forgotten how to get into the tent, my home away from home? Then I realize—another prank. I walk around the tent and discover that the girls have rearranged the rain fly so that its door is at the back. I unclip it and twist it to the front.

  I enter the tent warily. What next? Before I know it, I am tangled in something. I throw open the tent door and rain fly to let the light in, and then I know. The girls have strung a spider’s web of invisible nylon thread throughout the tent. It is wound around my neck and arms and legs. I can hear wild laughter coming from the cabin. I have fallen into their trap like an unsuspecting marten, and the girls are cackling loud enough for me to hear.

  Before heading back to the cabin for dinner, I set up my cot and stove, slip in my stovepipe, and notice that the girls have stuffed it with tinfoil. It is a fortunate disco
very. A clogged stovepipe would have smoked me out five minutes after I started the fire. It isn’t dangerous, but it would have made things uncomfortable on my first night back in the bush since late January. Fishing the tinfoil out of the pipe, I imagine the girls’ glee had the prank succeeded—me retiring to my tent for the night and then rushing out, coughing and cursing and barefoot, into the subzero temperatures and a foot of snow.

  “Heimo, Edna,” I say, kicking the snow from my boots before ducking into the doorway “Your girls are a bunch of incorrigible mischief makers.” Krin sweeps the cabin floor, and Rhonda is getting the plates and silverware ready for supper. Both answer in unison with mock innocence, “Who, us?” They are listening to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, their favorite tape, so they reply in their best English accents. “Yes, you,” I say. “Mischief makers, just like their father,” Edna interjects. “That’s where they get it.”