The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  At the cabin door I kick the snow off my feet to something of a Scottish jig rhythm. I perfected the step while on the Old Crow, but since no one has picked up on it, I do it largely for my own amusement.

  The others have already eaten their breakfast, but they’ve left behind a large bowl of oatmeal for me. “Oatmeal or no meal,” I say, smothering it in honey and sitting down on a chair, a large tree trunk to which Edna has nailed a comfortable cushion.

  Heimo is paging through a book I gave him the previous evening— E. C. Pielou’s A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic. He points to the photo of the walruses on the book’s front cover and makes a hoarse barking sound like a dog with kennel cough. “Ayvuq,” he says. “Walrus. They call walrus ayvuq on St. Lawrence Island.” Edna corrects him. “Au-vuq,” she says, only her pronunciation is more guttural.

  “We used to hunt them when I was in Savoonga, continues Heimo. “You had to shoot them six inches behind the eye. It was the only place. The rest was solid blubber. Sometimes we’d hunt them in a fog. We couldn’t see them until we were almost on top of them, but you could hear the cows barking, and you could smell them. God, the stink, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  Edna is sitting on their sleeping platform and Heimo is lying in her arms while he tells the story. Even after twenty years of marriage, and enough tragedy to break up any relationship, there is an easy intimacy between them. Edna grabs Heimo’s belly and then rubs it. At forty-seven, Heimo is remarkably fit, so Edna grabs what she can. “More here than there used to be,” she says, teasing him. “Where?” Heimo asks, perhaps wondering if the push-ups and sit-ups he does four times a week are working. “Right here,” Edna responds, latching onto as much skin as she can. “Ouch,” Heimo yelps, and then bends his head back and kisses Edna on the underside of her chin.

  The girls are doing freewriting exercises and don’t seem at all distracted by their parents’ antics. “Finished,” Krin says, and hands me her story. Rhonda is still hard at work on hers, twirling her hair with her free hand, concentrating. This is dangerous territory; I am to tell Krin what I think of her writing. Krin, who is at work on a diarylike book called On the Banks of the Coleen, writes of an owl trying to make its way through swirling snow. I read silently. When I’m through with Krin’s story, Rhonda hands me hers. Rhonda writes of walking on a trail through a copse of willows—bear country. Though she has her 30.30 rifle, a gift from Fred Thomas, which she’s carried since she was ten, she is feeling uneasy. Aside from the occasional misspellings and grammatical mistakes, they are both good pieces of writing, detailed and evocative, and I tell them that. If they are pleased by my comments, though, it doesn’t show. Without a word, they take back their stories and continue writing.

  In spring, life here on the banks of the Coleen slows down. In winter, it was get up and go and try to get as much done as possible while there was still light. But in spring the light is nearly endless, and the Korths adjust their days to accommodate a new tempo. Trapping is over. Heimo has limited out on beaver. Though the wolf season is still open, their pelts are so mangy that Heimo is content to let them be. Most mornings, we just sit around and casually, or not so casually, visit.

  The girls call Heimo “The Reverend” because of his propensity for polemic. I refer to him as “The Puzzle.” He once expressed delight when I called his friend Keith Koontz, the hunting guide, a puzzle, but Heimo embodies many of the same contradictions. He is a gun-toting, park-hating, anti-animal-rights trapper with a soft side. Though he makes his living off the land, hunting and trapping, taking from it, he cares about it deeply. Fran Mauer, a widely respected biologist and a twenty-eight-year veteran of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, says, “I admire Heimo’s relationship to the land. He’s very respectful of the land and the lifestyle. He’s matured and he’s deepened since he first came into the country.” Don Ross, former assistant manager of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and pilot for the Refuge, concurs with Mauer. “Heimo’s the only full-time trapper left in the refuge who’s still living off the land. Most of the others have fallen by the wayside. He traps sustainably, and he has great regard for the land. I appreciate his love for the place and a lifestyle that is vanishing.”

  Except for his family, the land is the thing Heimo loves the most, and he translates that love into a knowledge of the natural world that is nothing short of astounding. Though Heimo never made it through high school while he was in Appleton, during his first year on the Coleen River, he decided that a diploma was something important to him. He studied at night, after checking his lines, and completed his diploma through the high school in Fort Yukon in May 1980. His grammar is still often rough and unpolished, but what he lacks in such skills, he more than makes up for with his knowledge of the Arctic. He could teach a college course in Arctic ecology or natural history. As for his family, he hugs and kisses his girls and tells them he loves them at least a dozen times a day. “My mom loved us up,” he says, “and I try to do the same with Rhonda and Krin.” Like many teenagers, they sometimes bristle at his affection, but more often than not, they return his tendernesses—an unexpected hug, a kiss on the cheek before bed.

  Although Heimo has been called a pioneer, he strenuously rejects the notion. He does not see himself as the advance guard of a civilization certain of its own righteousness. He is not committed to inspiring acolytes or finding a new route to the Promised Land, either. Nor is he an evangelical proponent of some life-changing back-to-nature doctrine— to hell with spreading the gospel. He has no interest in reviving America’s moribund frontier spirit. In fact, the fewer people he sees out in the country, the better, though if you push him he’ll admit that there’s some power in numbers; in other words, he wishes there were a few more trappers helping him to carry on the wilderness tradition, albeit at a safe hundred-mile distance. His is not an ascetic experiment, either. Though he has been living in the remote bush for almost three decades, he was alone for only six of them, and those six years were enough. Six years alone in the Alaskan bush will undo almost any man. “The mind needs people,” Heimo says. “I craved people. Nobody’s a wolverine. A wolverine is a strict loner.”

  In the mornings, lingering after breakfast, Heimo rails against waste, excess, consumerism, comfort, and the softness of American society like a dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist reformer, yet he has little patience with the movement itself. Cambridge-educated bush pilot Kirk Sweetsir understands Heimo’s distaste for environmentalists and a brand of environmentalism that doesn’t appreciate his presence on the land. “They are all too blatant about their bourgeois intellectual tourism, and it is just too trivializing of his world for Heimo to stomach them,” he says.

  Heimo believes that environmentalists (and Democrats, too) are out to eradicate his way of life. They’re antiguns and antitrapping. He calls most environmentalist do-gooders “greenies,” practically spitting the word, though he and the environmental movement have more in common than he’d like to admit—the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for one. Heimo does not want it developed under any circumstances, and he is emphatic in his defense. With the impending state budget crisis (Alaska’s Constitutional Budget Reserve, a $1.9 billion savings, will be exhausted by 2004), his is an unpopular opinion in Alaska these days. Oil royalties mean money for the state. Oil’s enthusiastic champion is Frank Murkowski, Alaska’s former prodevelopment senator and now its newly elected governor. In his State of the State address, Murkowski made it clear how he intends to solve Alaska’s impending budget debacle. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in his address in Juneau on January 23, 2003, “in a single word, it’s oil.” Meanwhile pro-oil legislators are seeking to exempt pipeline permits from court challenges initiated by environmental groups and authorized under the National Environmental Protection Act.

  Oil, it seems, is the only answer in Alaska. Although the cupboard is nearly bare, Governor Murkowski and most of the state’s oil advocates refuse to discuss an income tax as a possible solution to the imm
inent deficit pinch. Taxes are for liberal Eastern states like Connecticut and “Taxachusetts,” but not for Alaska. Some suggest that this attitude reflects a crude and suspect form of frontierism, a deal sealed with the “Alaskan handshake,” hand held out and palm turned upward—taxes bad, oil extraction good. Reading Donald Worster, who is an environmental historian critical of the United States’s exploitative history, one might be tempted to draw comparisons between Worster’s arid West and Alaska today. Worster writes: “The hydraulic society of the West is … increasingly a coersive, monolithic, and heirarchical system, ruled by a power elite based on the ownership of capital and expertise.” Worster points out that despite the West’s image as a region of hardy, antigovernment individualists, corporate control of water actually has subverted, and continues to jeopardize, small-scale democracy and individual freedom. The same might be said of Alaska today, where a rhetoric of frontier individualism often bumps up against an economic reality of ongoing and monumental fiscal shortfalls (nearly $1 billion in 2002). Since 80 percent of the state’s revenues come from taxes and royalties on oil and gas—Anchorage Daily News columnist Mike Doogan jokes that “There’s nothing more Alaskan than having an eye for a fast buck”—it’s probably safe to assume that despite the regulation of the industry, big oil wields a corresponding influence over Alaska’s internal affairs.

  Edna leans back to turn on the radio for the morning weather report, but the radio responds with nothing but static. “Shut that thing off,” Heimo grumbles. Heimo is mad—they haven’t been able to get a clear message for nearly a month. Actually, what he’s really ticked off about is that the station has decided to drop its report for the southern foothills of the eastern Brooks Range—upper Coleen River country.

  Heimo’s anger passes quickly, and then he nuzzles his face against Edna’s cheek. Edna shrieks. “You need a shave,” she says, pushing him away. “Do that again, and you’ll be sleeping in the cache tonight.”

  Sending Heimo to the cache for the night is Edna’s favorite threat. Wives in the Lower Forty-eight might threaten their husbands with an evening in the doghouse, but that has little currency up here. The cache is a threat Edna can make good on since the Korths have two of them.

  The cache—French for “hiding place”—is a fixture in the Alaskan bush, where animals, particularly marauding bears, can threaten anything within reach. The Korths store everything they don’t want torn apart or eaten—the canoe, food supplies, decoys, skis, snowshoes, clothes, etc.—in the cache. The cache is a freestanding tree-fortlike structure built on four sturdy spruce legs. The Korths have built wooden ladders to each of their two caches under the assumption that even surprisingly agile and intelligent grizzlies can’t climb ladders. One cache is open-air and two-tiered with coffee cans wrapped around its legs to discourage squirrels and marten. The top tier is nearly twenty-five feet off the ground. The other cache is built like a fortress with thick log walls. It stands about fifteen feet off the ground. An animal would have to be plenty smart to get inside.

  “Whose turn is it to do the dishes?” Edna asks. Krin responds immediately, “It’s Rhonda’s. I did them last night.” “Heck you did,” Rhonda replies. “I did.” The girls bicker, and finally Edna settles the matter. “Krin, you’ll get the water, and Rhonda, you’ll do the dishes.” Rhonda grumbles.

  Fighting over who is going to do the dishes is a scene that takes place almost on a daily basis. I could set my watch by it. The girls are best of friends, but when it comes time to do the dishes, they are ready to do battle. It doesn’t make sense to me, since hauling the water seems the harder of the two jobs, but the girls fight about it as if doing the dishes were the worst of all possible fates.

  Heimo asks me to escort Krin to the river. “Take my shotgun,” he says. Heimo spotted fresh bear tracks two days ago on the island that separates the river’s two channels, and he’s not taking any chances. He hands me the gun and four shells, two slugs and two buckshot.

  Unlike the creek at the Old Crow cabin, the Coleen doesn’t freeze to the bottom, so getting water is hard work, but not the undertaking it was on the Old Crow. The water hole is a quarter-mile walk upriver to where Heimo has chopped an opening in the ice. The current rushes below, occasionally slopping over the edges of the hole. Staring down at the river, I realize just how indifferent the natural world is to our presence. If the ice were to break, I’d be gone in a second, swept a hundred miles downriver to where the Coleen dumps into the Porcupine River—“kissin’ the ice from the bottom side,” I’ve heard it called. Not a pleasant thought, but nothing to obsess over either, though the danger is real, particularly as breakup approaches and the ice is getting thinner and weaker.

  Krin finishes tying her shoe and joins me at the hole. “It’s safe,” I say, to which she says nothing. Krin and Rhonda are sometimes a puzzling pair. With me they are alternately mischievous and sweet, guarded, unfriendly, and sullen. Their inconsistency is what gets to me, since their moods seem to have almost nothing to do with my behavior. Sometimes it’s simply my being here that seems to bother them. I try to put their attitudes into perspective. I am an outsider—they see very few visitors—and as far as they’re concerned I am the biggest rube ever plopped down in the Arctic. I invade their lives for a month at a time and then subject them to my ineptitude, photographs, and meddlesome questions.

  Krin kneels beside the hole and dips the five-gallon bucket into the river. Then she gets to her feet and struggles to lift the bucket to her shoulder. At five-feet nine inches, she really has to hoist it. “May I help you with that?” I ask her, and she glares at me and starts to walk back to the cabin. “C’mon, Krin,” I say, “let me give you a hand.” “I’m not a weakling,” she replies, and doubles her pace. The last thing she needs is my help.

  “Five more to go,” Heimo says. “This is number seventy-nine.” Heimo gestures toward a pile of spruce poles. There are eighty-four of them in all—Heimo has numbered them—trunks of dead trees, which Heimo cut down and hauled to the river before I arrived. The cabin’s pole roof is eighteen years old, and Heimo’s intention is to replace it with these new poles.

  For the last three days, Heimo and I have been using a drawknife to peel the bark off the poles, because bark makes the inside of a cabin look like a dark cellar, and because it contributes to rot, and Heimo wants a roof that will last at least another eighteen years, preferably more. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “Edna and I will grow old out here, and then when it comes time, she and the girls can scatter my ashes over the upper Coleen.” Peeling poles is not exactly grueling work, but it takes time and requires some arm strength. Alone Heimo can do ten a day. Together we’ve almost doubled that. Heimo does the ends of the poles, which require some finesse, and I do the rest.

  I am standing in a pile of peelings, straddling one of the poles, working on a knot, and cursing it for resisting my attempts to shave it. “Hold on,” Heimo says, and chips it out using the ax. “Now, go over it again with the knife.” Getting every bur is essential to ensuring a waterproof roof, since one of the roof’s four layers will be a sheet of Visqueen. A hole in the Visqueen spells trouble once the mid-August rains arrive. In other words, you can’t be careful enough.

  Though it is May 6, the temperature last night dropped to 15 below. I lay awake in my tent listening to the river ice snap in the cold like the sharp crack of a small-caliber rifle. Sometimes the ice sounded like a chorus of crickets. But now, at the river, in the early afternoon, the sun spills everywhere, and the temperature has risen to the low forties, and the ice is silent though slushy.

  I am working in a long-sleeved micro fleece shirt, and I am dripping sweat. Perched on a tree beside us, Heimo has a small tape player with a bird tape in it. He’s preparing for the spring songbird migration. He listens to the bird’s song and before the man on the tape identifies it, Heimo announces its name: “ruby-crowned kinglet, varied thrush, American robin, rusty blackbird, Bohemian waxwing, dark-eyed junco, Amer
ican wigeon, red-necked grebe, trumpeter swan.” Heimo doesn’t miss a song. “I like birding more than just about anything.”

  For nearly the last week, Heimo, Edna, and the girls, who have inherited their father’s love of ornithology, have been awaiting the return of spring’s birds. They have been watching the sky, listening for the faintest song, but spring has been slow to progress and the winter birds are all we see and hear—boreal chickadees, gray jays, pine grosbeaks.

  In spring, when the snow in the cabin yard still registers eight inches on the snow stick and nighttime temperatures still fall below 0, life on the Coleen River can take on a quality resembling drudgery. The Korths have had enough of the cold and the snow. So they wait moodily for the announcement of winter’s end, for the first signs of spring: the golden eagles followed by snow buntings, and then the ruby-crowned kinglets; hatches of caddis flies and mosquitoes on which the birds depend for food; willow buds, which show up like small miracles of color among the shrub’s bare, nearly white branches; a hint of overflow coming down from Bear Mountain; the first patches of open ground. Then suddenly, spring snaps, the dramatic quickening begins, and it seems as if the entire bird world is following the Coleen River corridor north. The ice moves out with a great roaring. The river carves out new channels at will, defying the land to hold it back. Trees are torn from their roots as if they were nothing more than weeds.

  “I can hardly wait,” Heimo says as I put the finishing touches on our second-to-last pole. I know enough now not to ask what he’s waiting for; in fact, I have the spring bug myself. “C’mon, spring,” I say, tossing the finished pole onto the pile. Just then, I catch Krin out of the corner of my eye doing a flying leap from the river’s bank down onto the pile of spruce shavings. And it’s no mere hop. It’s a jump of at least six feet. She lands on her feet, stumbles a little, but doesn’t fall. Heimo just shakes his head. “Don’t you have schoolwork?” he asks. Krin ignores him. She picks a young willow bud and chews it and then skates out onto the ice in her boots. “I’ve got cabin fever,” she finally replies, skating back to us. “You always have cabin fever,” Heimo says, dropping the drawknife, and wrapping his arms around her. “My crazy Krin.” “Tigger,” I correct him quietly, but Krin hears and scowls at me.