The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  Tracking the history of the disagreement is messy. Alaska’s state constitution guarantees equal access for all residents to all natural resources; however, federal legislation awarded rural residents priority use of fish and game. So a conflict was born between federal law, which guarantees a “rural priority,” and the state constitution. After twenty-plus years of controversy, the federal government prevailed and since 1990 has managed wildlife on all federal lands in Alaska.

  Back at the goose blind, it is late afternoon when we finally abandon our hunt. The day has been a bust except for the brief visit of an immature rough-legged hawk, which displayed an interest in our decoys and the sound of a ruby-crowned kinglet singing in the distance. Heimo was almost beside himself with joy when he heard that. He closed his eyes as if listening to Enya. “Such a little bird with such a big song.”

  We slosh through the overflow in our hip boots like two little boys, splashing and running, but by the time we reach the river’s main channel, Heimo is serious. “We’ll have to be careful here. This time of year, the ice changes every second.” We walk tentatively. Weak ice spells danger, so we avoid the telltale gray spots. “Look for the dark blue ice; that’s the best,” Heimo says, as I try to ignore the strange, unnerving moan of the ice under my feet.

  Edna, Krin, and Rhonda are waiting for us on the riverbank. “Nothing today, huh,” Edna says. “Nothing,” Heimo replies. “Not a thing.”

  It has been decided; we will leave this weekend, Saturday, May 18, or Sunday, depending upon the weather. Yesterday a plane flew over. The pilot, it turned out, was a friend of the Korths. Months before, Heimo had made arrangements with him to pick us up, and he was flying over, scouting, checking on the weather conditions and the gravel bars. Using the handheld aircraft radio, Heimo talked with him and asked how things looked from the air. The pilot advised him to get out before the melting started and the river rose. If that happened, he said, we’d be on the river for at least another two to three weeks. That was all Heimo needed to hear. The two of them discussed a date and time, and Heimo said that we’d be ready.

  When I got the news that we’d be leaving early, I wasn’t disappointed. The prospect of springing out and not getting off the river until early to mid June, wasn’t one I was looking forward to. I had a family to go home to, my wife was six months pregnant with our second child, and I had already been gone for a long time. She needed my help, and my daughter missed her daddy.

  “Springing out” has been the final act in a yearly cycle repeated thousands of times over the last one hundred years, a tradition that is kept alive by the few remaining families that still call the Alaskan wilderness their home. For the Korths it means the end of nearly a year of hunting, trapping, cutting and splitting wood, cooking on a woodstove, sewing and patching clothes, schoolwork, hauling ice and water, and doing the dishes.

  For the last two weeks, they’ve been wondering: When will breakup come? When will we get off the river? Everyone has been looking forward to town. But now that the date is set, there is much work to be done—too much. The snowmachines have to be put away on three-foot-high platforms in case of flooding. But first Heimo has to run all the gas out of the tanks and carburetors and take out the spark plugs and put two-cycle oil in the cylinders. The house has to be cleaned and packed up, too. Clothes, boots, parkas, guns, ammunition, food, pots and pans need to be stored in the cache or in sealed 55-gallon drums. Finally, Heimo has to varmint- and grizzly-proof the cabin, screwing the door shut and boarding up the windows.

  Edna grabs a box and starts putting clothes in it.

  The girls roll their eyes and grumble, “Not yet, Mom.”

  Heimo pulls on his boots and starts to lace them up. “Forget the work,” he mumbles. “How about some hockey?”

  “No way,” Edna answers. “We got lots of work to do.”

  “C’mon, Mom,” Heimo says, “we can start tomorrow.”

  Edna continues packing clothes into the box, then she looks at Heimo and smiles as if she is up to no good. Rhonda and Krin are already running for the river.

  Ten minutes later all five of us are on the ice, ready to play our favorite game—hockey, played in boots instead of on skates—for what will be the last time this year. The ice is dark blue and as smooth as a pane of glass, but the warm-up that Heimo felt when we were hunting is now a reality. The wind is out of the south; the temperature is pushing the high 40s. By tomorrow night the river ice will be full of slush, splattered with small ponds of water and very dangerous.

  Rhonda sets the puck—a round plug of cottonwood coated in ice—between Heimo and me, and we simulate a ferocious hockey face-off, using our boots as sticks. Heimo pushes me to win the puck and is advancing toward our goal unimpeded until I catch him, tripping him with a hook slide. While he’s down I jump on him, giving Rhonda just enough time to steal the puck. “So you’re going to play that way, eh?” Krin says, making a beeline for Rhonda. I give Heimo one last push before I rush down the ice, moving my arms and legs as if I am cross-country skiing. Rhonda and Krin are battling for the puck. I slide in and take it away. Rushing toward Edna, I am dribbling the puck, struggling not to lose it, while still trying to escape Heimo, who is gaining on me. Edna crouches down in front of the goal. She has no intention of letting me score. Ten feet away, I decide to take it all the way in instead of stopping and shooting. Suddenly Krin catches me blindside with an NFL hit and sends me flying in the air toward Edna. I hit Edna at the ankles with an inadvertent cross-body block. Edna falls over me and then upends Heimo, who has been chasing the play. Krin jumps on Heimo, and Rhonda flops onto Krin. It’s one big pileup, and we are all laughing too hard to even think about moving. Then Heimo hears something. “Shhh,” he says, as a small flock of Canada geese flies overhead. “Shhh.” Heimo points his index finger to the blue sky. “Blam,” he says. “Blam.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Back-to-Nature Boys

  In 1975, when Heimo Korth left Wisconsin, leaving behind everything and everybody he knew, he was answering a universally familiar call—the yearning to escape home. When he went to Alaska, he put a uniquely American spin on the theme of escape. Mythologies are relevant to all countries, and in America none has been more enduring than the notion that in wilderness a person can escape the reins and restrictions of an insipid and often corrupt society and re-create himself in the boundlessness of the natural world.

  Daniel Boone, America’s protowoodsman, escaped his father’s brutal beatings by fleeing periodically to the woods. By the time he was in his midteens, he was already known as one of the most accomplished woodsmen in the Pennsylvania wilderness. The first of all the mountain men, John Colter, left Virginia for Kentucky in 1803 to join Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. Nearly three years later, when the expedition was on its way back St. Louis, Colter parted ways with Lewis and Clark and returned to the wilderness that he loved. Jim Bridger was bonded to a blacksmith in St. Louis, Missouri. When his five years were nearly up, a notice appeared in the Missouri Republican: Major Andrew Henry and Colonel William Ashley needed “one hundred young men” to join their Rocky Mountain Fur Company and its 1822 expedition to the headwaters of the Missouri River. At the age of eighteen, Bridger signed on and became the most famous of all the Rocky Mountain trapper-explorers.

  In America, the belief that wilderness can serve as an antidote to civilization, as a place of freedom and personal renewal, gave birth to a new and revolutionary literature, an authentically American narrative. When Henry David Thoreau escaped Concord and retired to Walden Pond to lead by example and live as an anchorite in the woods, demanding that people start their lives anew, he was not only passing judgment on the society of Concord, he was consciously enacting a peculiarly American story. When young American men, and women, both real and fictional, left home, they escaped to the wilderness to lose and, subsequently, find themselves. Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams returns home from the war and seeks refuge in the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsu
la. A.B. Guthrie’s Boone Caudill takes off for the Wild West after having it out with his father. Molly Gloss’s Lydia Sanderson heads to the Oregon frontier following the death of her husband. Hoping to escape the “damp, drizzly November” in his soul, Herman Melville’s Ishmael flees Manhattan and then New Bedford and goes not to the woods but to another wilderness—the sea.

  Gertrude Stein said, “In the United States, there is more space where nobody is, than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.” The poet Charles Olson echoed her words: “I take Space to be the central fact to man born in America. I spell it large because it comes large here. It is geography at bottom, a hell of a wide land from the beginning!” Though both Stein and Olson wrote decades after Frederick Jackson Turner eulogized the frontier (a word he often used interchangeably with “wilderness,”) in his epoch-making thesis The Significance of the Frontier in American History, the frontier metaphor was still a vital, psychic force, one that, even today, continues to determine America’s national identity, its sense of history, and its vision of the future.

  But by the time Mark Twain wrote of the mystical Mississippi and a young, bedraggled boy’s dream to escape the cruelties of his drunken and abusive father, “Pap Finn,” Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas, and later Aunt Sally and her attempts to “sivilize” him, there was little “Territory” left to “light out for.” Much of America had been tamed. The free lands of the West, as Turner declared them in 1893, were “exhausted.” But the frontier myth persisted, given new life by what remained—Alaska, a new world waiting to be discovered, an uncharted land that lay not west, but far to the northwest, a figurative frontier-wilderness, as well as the final material embodiment of American “Space.”

  When Heimo Korth came to Alaska, he wasn’t the only one. Other young men, and also women, eager to leave home, clinging to a dream of seeing what remained of the American wilderness, came, too. The young men of Heimo’s generation who headed to Alaska with the intention of immersing themselves in nature were cut from a different cloth than those they left behind. Some of them, like Heimo, had suffered at the hands of brutal, imperious fathers. However, they were not simply injured souls hoping to lick their wounds where no one would notice. Nor were they casual adventurers who just strolled into the bush or profiteers hoping to make money in the fur or oil boom. As a group, they were bright, wild, some of them bruised, for sure, vigorous young men with a sense of urgency and vision. Like the mountain men who came before them, they had the “ha’r of the b’ar” in them. They’d been influenced by experiences in the Boy Scouts; the Woodcraft wilderness tradition and its emphasis on trapping, hunting, guiding, and living off the land; Daniel Boone biographies and tales of the early mountain men; A. R. Harding’s series on trapping; Fur-Fish-Game magazine, Outdoor Life, Field & Stream; the television show Sergeant Preston of the Yukon; Jack London, Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Service, Ernest Hemingway. No airily platonic mama’s boys, they were determined to subject themselves to the rigors of living by their wits in the wild. What they could not abide was a life of routine, predictability, and quiet resignation. They were what John McPhee called “white Indians,” embodiments of a forgotten frontier spirit, intent on reclaiming the basic virtues and skills of an earlier era. Yet each one of them went to the woods to create his own version of the dream, knowing full well that loneliness and isolation were part of the deal.

  Like Heimo, some of the wilderness men—and women—who came to Alaska in the 1970s had the good fortune to fall in with an old sourdough who knew the ropes and took a notion to helping them out, pointing them in the right direction. Others just picked a spot on the map, jumped off, and hoped they didn’t get shot by some pissed-off old-timer like Ed Owens. For some, finding their way to the woods wasn’t quite as easy. They took temporary jobs—on the pipeline, even—hoping to make enough money to outfit themselves. Others tried, failed, brushed themselves off, and tried again. An overwhelming majority who made it to the woods lived in trespass in a state where trespass is a time-honored tradition. They built cabins, hunted, and ran traplines on land that had always been held loosely in federal trust, and many of them grew, as Jack London once said, “magnificently strong.”

  Ron Long, a respected Fairbanks trapper and fur buyer who’s helped his share of young men get their start in the woods, says in an Oklahoma drawl, “I called ’em woods hippies. They were real back-to-nature boys. There was money to be made, but more than anything, these guys came out for the experience of being in the woods.”

  Young men were coming to Alaska as they hadn’t since the turn-of-the century gold rush years or the 1920s and 1930s, when fur prices soared. Those who arrived hoping to make a quick buck far outnumbered the young men who came to the woods with the intention of settling there. Simply put, a commitment to a life in the woods was just too hard to be attractive to more than a handful of the most earnest young people. Most of the back-to-nature boys had no illusions about cashing in big. Their motivations were very different. They were there to put down roots, to become Alaskans, to learn to live off, and love, the land. Money was important to them only insofar as it enabled them to carry out their dream. And they didn’t need much. Four thousand dollars a year was enough for most of them to live on.

  Paul Jagow is a self-described “river rat.” When he dreamed of settling in Alaska’s Interior, he knew that he had to be on a big river—somewhere that was both remote and infused with the Native culture he admired. So he simply unfolded a map, studied it, and said, “This is it. This is where I’m going to live.”

  Paul Jagow grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He went to Friends Seminary in New York City from first grade on and later enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied anthropology. After graduating, he landed on a commune in northern Maine and then, in the late spring of 1974, he came to Alaska. “I’d made it to the Maine woods,” he says, “but pretty soon I was dreaming of the real woods—Alaska.”

  He arrived with a Klepper folding kayak, linen sails, leeboards, and 300 pounds of gear. By June he was paddling north along Behm Canal between mainland Alaska and Revillagigedo Island. “Greedy for the wind,” he built a boom, but when a storm hit, he knew he was in trouble. He made a break for shore, running with the wind. The boom broke and the kayak rolled. He straddled the kayak’s hull and paddled it upside down to land. Although he had saved himself and recovered his gun and some fishing equipment, he’d lost all of his food and much of his gear. He lived off the land for the next six weeks, foraging for wild plants and berries and fishing for snapper, halibut, and flounder. His luck changed when he ran into some hunters from New Jersey and flew out with them.

  For the next three years, Paul worked on the pipeline. The money was just too good to pass up. And then one day he walked away from it all—literally walked, 200 miles. He left the Prudhoe Bay complex and headed south in the general direction of Arctic Village. Half a year later, after a trip back home to New York, he came back to Alaska, outfitted himself with a twenty-foot, flat-bottomed riverboat, food, supplies, and a dog team, and motored up the river of his dreams, a greenhorn in America’s last great wilderness.

  He taught himself how to trap and skin animals, using anthropologist Richard Nelson’s book Hunters of the Northern Forest. It became his how-to bible. And he lived by Thoreau’s economic model: “Self-sufficiency is preferable to social organization; the least commerce with others is best; consume only what you produce.” It was a good, rewarding, but lonely life.

  In 1993, after being more or less on his own for a decade and a half, Paul married Dawn, a woman from the Bronx, who had been handling dogs for a musher in Fairbanks, where they met. When Paul described his life on the river, Dawn decided to accompany him and give it a try. There they fell in love.

  The Jagows have two children now, a seven-year-old girl, Joanna, and a boy, Charlie, who’s nine. They have struck a balance between life in the bush and life in town; they spen
d part of the year on the river—July through January—and the remainder in Fairbanks.

  Despite the fact that he no longer lives in the bush year-round, Paul is still in love with the land and the bush lifestyle. “You really have to enjoy being out there,” he says, attempting to explain why he and his family haven’t left for good. “On top of all the other problems, it’s become a disaster economically with the low fur prices and the new export regulations and fees. It’s harder than ever now to make a living.”

  Seven years after the communist government confiscated his family’s farm, Alex Tarnai fled Hungary. First he went to Yugoslavia and then he jumped the border to Austria. A year later, he went to the American embassy in Vienna and requested asylum.

  At the age of twenty-three, Alex was living in New York City and making frequent forays into New England’s backcountry to camp, hunt, and canoe. But it was a visit to an Upper East Side bookstore, where he purchased a tattered copy of Roald Amundsen’s North West Passage that would change the course of his life. He read it cover to cover, and after finishing it, he bought a large map of Alaska, laid it out on his apartment floor, and pored over it, searching for a place “at the end of the earth.” Two years later, after receiving his citizenship, he was heading north up the Alaska-Canada Highway (the Alcan) bound for Alaska, determined to make his dream a reality.

  By late May 1977, after a season in the high country around the Tyone and Maclaren Rivers, north of the town of Glennallen, he was bound for the Nowitna, the river he’d been imagining since he scoured the map of Alaska in his Manhattan apartment. The Nowitna was a big, beautiful river that carved out a canyon between steep, densely wooded, 2,000-foot hills. At the one hundred-mile mark, he encountered a Mormon family. In the four years that they had been there, they’d seen an occasional group of floaters, but never anyone who intended to make his life in the woods. Alex assured them that he’d keep his distance, so he went another eighty miles upriver, near the Big Mud River. It wasn’t the end of the earth, but it was close—150 miles from the nearest village.