For three years, Alex lived in a tent. He insulated the tent with moss and outfitted it with furniture he made—a bed, a bench, shelves, a table, a chair, and a woodstove. He didn’t even have a radio. “The last thing I wanted to do was to bring civilization with me,” he says now. Besides, he had a small collection of books—Hemingway, Mailer, Capote, Jack London, and Robert Service.
Alex grew accustomed to the loneliness, and other than occasional trips to Fairbanks and the village of Tanana and summers in town, he steered clear of people and romantic involvements. That is, until the summer of 1995, when he was studying for his Coast Guard license in Fairbanks, and friends set him up on a date. Nancy, his date, was an attractive, charming, adventurous woman from Alabama who’d come to Alaska with her son, Ethan, a child from a previous marriage, on a whim. Nancy was immediately attracted to Alex. He was a modern-day frontiersman, the real deal. He was civilized, too. He could use a knife and a fork and quote Robert Service—“Have you ever been out in the great alone?”
Nancy’s dream had always been to live in the woods, but shortly after marrying Alex, she realized that the loneliness and isolation were more than she’d bargained for, so they moved into a house that Alex had bought in the small village of Tanana. Alex had his pilot’s license, so sometimes they flew out to the cabin on the Nowitna. Often he went out on his own, trapping for three days and then returning to Tanana. In 2000, the Tarnais moved to Fairbanks permanently so that Ethan and little Alexander, who was born in 1996, could get a better education and Nancy could pursue a career as a reporter with the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Today Alex flies back and forth between Fairbanks and the Nowitna for a portion of the trapping season.
Though he no longer lives in the wilderness full-time, Alex still remembers the romantic notions that impelled him to spend a good chunk of his life far from the embrace of civilization. “When I came to Alaska,” he says, “I just went to the woods. That was real freedom.”
* * *
Randy Brown came to Alaska from New Mexico at the age of seventeen in 1975. “It was a deep-seated dream,” he says. “I wanted to build a cabin and live out in the woods. I wanted adventure.”
When Randy arrived in Alaska, he hoped to begin his life in the bush immediately, but soon discovered that someone else had already claimed the spot where he planned to build his cabin and trap. No problem, he thought, I’ll just move downriver ten miles or so. Randy was operating as if he were still in New Mexico, where ten miles of separation was a good stretch of country. But this was Alaska. Randy was informed that he’d have to multiply that number by five, and at fifty miles, he might still be too close.
Disappointed, Randy returned to Eagle, wondering what to do next. After several decades of low prices, fur demand was suddenly at an all-time high, and the country was full of people. Lynx brought as much as $600 a pelt, raw wolf skins $200, and wolverine $250. That winter, a friend mentioned that he needed help with his trapline, building a new cabin, hauling meat, and cutting firewood, and he asked Randy if he’d be interested in giving him a hand. It was a stroke of luck. Randy had found a mentor.
The following year, filled with confidence and a new set of skills, Randy struck out for the Kandik River with a friend. The Kandik was a remote river that fed into the Yukon from the north, halfway between Eagle and the town of Circle. He and his friend, Little John, met up with three others on the river, and together they lined their canoes upriver for sixty miles, a long, arduous journey that took them a full week. “It was hard,” Randy says with a laugh. “But we were young and tough.”
That winter, sixty miles upriver at Indian Grave Creek, Randy burned through the food supply he’d brought from Eagle. He was down to beans when he and his friend, who was thirty miles downriver at Johnson Gorge, teamed up and shot a moose. The moose tided them over while they slowly acclimated to the country and learned to hunt and trap.
For four years Randy lived alone, then, in 1981, he married. In Karen Kallen, a schoolteacher whom he met in Fairbanks, he found a woman who loved the woods. Karen had grown up in the sprawling suburbs of New Jersey, and as a young girl, she’d dreamed of living off the land. In 1981, they were married at the mouth of the Nation River. For their honeymoon, they went back up the Kandik River and built the cabin they’d call home for the next decade.
Randy has fond memories of their years on the river. Every so often, there’d be a big river gathering, when all the families along the Yukon and its tributaries would meet for three days of festivities. They’d congregate at the mouth of the Nation River, fifty miles downstream from Eagle. People would come in their riverboats with their familes and dogs. “It was a sight,” Randy remembers. “Twenty people, including young kids, dogs, homebrew, endless storytelling, a sauna, and waterskiing.”
Though Randy never imagined he’d leave the bush, he and Karen and their two boys, Gabriel and Jed, came out in 1991 and moved to Fairbanks. “It was hard,” Randy says. “My whole identity, for more than fifteen years, was living in the woods.” Randy went back to school at the age of thirty-three and got a degree in biology. Later he finished his master’s degree in fisheries, and today he works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Fairbanks.
In Bovey, Minnesota, just twenty-five miles west of Hibbing, there were two things that boys cared about when Stu Pechek was growing up: music and the outdoors. Hibbing was the hometown of Bob Dylan, and it was hard not to get caught up in the allegorical implications of his fame—a hometown hero who hit it big. Stu played trumpet in a band. When he wasn’t practicing, he was traipsing around the forest hunting, fishing, and canoeing.
“I loved the North Woods,” says Stu, “but I always knew that there was something bigger and better out there.”
After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1974, Stu took a job with the Forest Service in Alaska. A few months later he was back in Minnesota again, but feeling antsy. Outside of working in the local iron-ore mines, there wasn’t much happening in Bovey, so he took off for Alaska again, winding up in Fairbanks. “It was 1975,” Stu remembers. “There were cowboys from Oklahoma and Texas with hundred-dollar bills falling out of their pockets and hookers everywhere.”
Stu put in his own three-year stint working as a construction surveyor on the pipeline to pay off college loans, and then he got fed up and quit. In Arctic Village, while waiting for a bush plane to take him into the Brooks Range for a backpacking trip, he met up with a trapper by the name of Richard Hayden. Hayden offered to help Stu out if he was serious about trapping. But Stu had other commitments. He’d already arranged to spend the winter of 1979-1980 trapping out of a wall tent near Lake Clark on the Alaska Peninsula. After the season, Stu returned to Fairbanks and discovered a letter from Hayden inviting him to come north. The letter said he could take over a cabin of his at Grayling Lake, near the East Fork of the Sheenjek River. Stu jumped at the chance. Grayling Lake was the Arctic—raw wilderness.
Though Hayden eventually gave Stu five of his reject dogs, and Stu learned to mush, initially he checked his traps by snowshoe with the help of his lone dog, Melozi. Stu used Melozi to pull a sled, but when the snow was deep and the sled weighted down with fur, Stu harnessed himself in, too. He wore a Kelty metal-frame backpack with a bridle of nylon rope and a brass snap at the end, which he attached to the trailing rope on Melozi’s harness. He still remembers that feeling of returning home at the end of the day, thoroughly exhausted—the sensation that he was the last man left on earth.
Stu trapped steadily until 1990, when he decided that he’d had enough. He loved the bush, but he missed traveling, people, female companionship, books, a daily newspaper. So many people had burnt out on the bush. Bored by the repetition, by the loss of the sense of discovery that fueled the experience and made the hardships tolerable, they pulled up stakes and vowed never to return. Stu was determined not to let that happen to him.
Today Stu is the prototypal Alaskan. He’s done it all—commercial fisherman, surveyor,
pilot, trapper, freelance writer-photographer, and even politician. In 1998 he made an unsuccessful run for Congress, emphasizing his real-life Alaskan experiences and the promise of fresh ideas. Recently he took a job as a land resource manager for the Alaska Department of Natural Resources in Fairbanks. He’s had his own plane since 1990, and he’s been back to Grayling Lake for a month at a crack, but it’s never been long enough, so he still dreams of one day returning for a winter or two. Though he and his longtime girlfriend, Marta McWhorter, have decided to tie the knot, neither of them has any illusions about Stu’s ability to stay away from the trapline. It’s simply what he loves.
On July 4, 1974, Lynette Roberts and Steve Ulvi left Oregon for Alaska with less than $100 between them in a 1951 Dodge pickup that Steve had overhauled for the trip. Steve’s younger brother, Dana, and two friends joined them. Three sat up front in the truck’s cab, while the other two rode in the bed of the truck.
For Steve, heading for Alaska was part of a complicated rebellion, fueled by counterculture ideals, revulsion at the rampant taming of the Lower Forty-eight, a burgeoning environmentalism, a need for wild country, a belief in the values of self-reliance and simplicity, and a reaction to the bankruptcy of American culture.
Lynette, on the other hand, hardly knew where Alaska was. She had no firm plan to do much of anything; she was taking life one day at a time. She wasn’t the outdoors type either. But one thing was for certain, if Steve was going to Alaska, she was going, too.
Their destination was the Wood-Tikchik Lakes area north of Dillingham. At McCay’s Hardware in Anchorage, someone informed them that if they really wanted elbow room, they should go to the Interior. So they turned back east, hit the Taylor Highway, and drove into Eagle.
“Hey, how the hell ya doin’?” The friendly voice of Sarge Waller was the first one they heard when they arrived in town. They told Waller of their intentions to homestead along the Nation River. Waller responded that the Nation had been a blank spot on the map until that very day. He had just returned from taking two couples there.
Steve, Lynette, and Dana eventually settled on a place twelve miles upriver from Eagle, about a quarter of a mile from the Canadian border. It was Native land and they had a letter of nonobjection from the Han Gwich’in chief of Eagle Village.
The three of them lined Grumman canoes upriver and worked feverishly to build a cabin before winter. But simplicity was their goal, so even with winter approaching fast, they worked with axes, handsaws, bucksaws, chisels, gouges, and sledgehammers. They used candles for light and moss for toilet paper.
That first year was tough. It was brutally cold, and they were broke, eating nothing but pancakes, beans, and oatmeal every day. By the spring of 1975, Lynette was fed up. She was homesick for Oregon, determined to make some money, and tired of her support role. She left the river, but got only as far as Tok, Alaska, where she picked up a job as a waitress for two weeks. Steve never expected her to return, but return she did. “The country had already gotten into my blood,” Lynette says. Steve and Lynette were married the following fall.
It took three years until they felt really rooted. They raised rabbits, made their own clothes, built their own dogsleds, and canned much of their food for winter—vegetables, ducks, salmon. They also had a big garden, fertilized with fish guts, two plastic greenhouses, fish wheels, and gillnets. And by 1977, they had a daughter, too. Lena was the first child born to a member of the Yukon’s growing river community, a universe of people that stretched 163 miles downriver to Circle and ninety-two miles upriver to Dawson in the Yukon Territory.
It was after the birth of Lena that Lynette became completely committed to the lifestyle. While Steve was off with Dana, hunting or exploring new trapping territory, Lynette hauled wood, drove the dog team, washed clothes and diapers in cold water with a hand scrub board, gathered berries, shot a bear in the yard with Lena on her hip.
By 1979, when Eli, their second child, was born, Steve had exorcised much of his wanderlust. “Lynette was the grounding influence,” he says. “Settling in became far more important to me than being what I call a country eater, the guy who always has to go over the next mountain. Lynette created a home, and I learned the importance of family.”
* * *
For those who came to Alaska’s Interior, Eagle and Fort Yukon were the primary jumping-off spots. Of the two, Fort Yukon was more closely associated with the fur trade.
In 1847, Alexander Murray of the Hudson’s Bay Company followed a river route down the Porcupine pioneered by John Bell, a company predecessor, and founded Fort “Youcon,” the first Hudson’s Bay Company trading post in Alaska. Considering Murray’s initial impression of the Youcon, it’s a bit surprising that he chose it as a site. Writing in his journal, Murray said, “As I sat smoking my pipe, and my face besmeared with tobacco juice to keep at bay the d---d mosquitoes still hovering in clouds around me, my first impressions of the Youcon were anything but favourable. I never saw an uglier river, everywhere low banks, apparently lately overflowed, with lakes and swamps behind, the trees too small for building, the water abominably dirty and the current furious.” Nevertheless, Fort Youcon lay in the middle of one of the richest fur-trapping areas in all of North America, and Murray knew that. Following the establishment of the Hudson’s Bay post, the British and the Russians on the lower Youcon competed for the trading allegiances of the Natives until both were forced out after America acquired Alaska in 1867. Just over thirty years later, the U.S. Congress amended the Customs Acts of 1868 and 1879 to allow non-Natives to trap, too, setting the stage for a tradition of white trappers coming into the country.
From the very beginning, Natives didn’t know what to make of the white man’s tradition of going to the woods alone. Joe Carroll, a Fort Yukon Native, whose father, Jimmy Carroll, was a trapper turned fur buyer and store owner, witnessed the wilderness revival of the 1970s and called the young men who went out into the country on their own “queer ducks.” Ron Long, whose wife, Elaine, is Gwich’in, explains, “You have to understand. It’s a difference in cultures. Most of these guys went off without wives or families. A Native would never do that. The Natives regarded that as weird and antisocial.” In his book Main Currents in American Thought, Vernon Louis Parrington expands on Ron Long’s observation, putting the bewilderment of the Natives into perspective. He writes, “For the Indian the wilderness was home, the locus of the tribe that was the center of his metaphysical universe as well as his social existence. The white hunter was an alien, paradoxically achieving a sense of relation to the world through an ordeal of profound physical, moral, and psychological isolation from society. His destiny was personal rather than tribal; his moral obligation was only to himself… .”
Many of the young men who came to Fort Yukon and Eagle were impelled by a very different cultural ideal than the one Natives knew and understood—one that celebrated the struggles of the heroic individual alone in the woods. Nevertheless, many of the white newcomers, including Heimo, eventually established friendships that tied them to the Native community, and the Natives, for the most part, came to respect them. Paul Herbert, a Fort Yukon Native who was a young man when Heimo and others like him gathered in Fort Yukon before heading out to the woods, says, “Hell, yeah, I admired them, trying to make a living out there.” Still there was occasional resentment, particularly among some of the young Natives, newly empowered by the Native claims victory, who regarded going to the woods as their cultural and historical prerogative and who viewed the intrusion of the young white men as a form of cultural poaching.
Yet as early as the late 1970s, Richard Caulfield noticed that it was this generation of young white men who were keeping alive the ancient Native traditions. In his 1979 study “Subsistence Use In and Around the Proposed Yukon-Charley National Rivers,” Caulfield noticed that it was the white woods hippies who were intent on learning the traditional Native skills and leading a subsistence lifestyle, while many of the young Native men seemed unintere
sted. This trend, which Caulfield noticed in and around the Eagle area, was also characteristic of what had occurred in Fort Yukon, where many Natives had already been lured out of the bush and their seasonal cycles by the presence of village schools and government aid.
Though our culture romanticizes the simple, lonely life of the woodsman, the reality of isolation for many of the back-to-nature boys was sometimes in stark contrast to the myth. David Schlesinger floated into Fort Yukon from Whitehorse on a raft he’d built himself and headed out into the country. “The sheer space is awesome,” he says. “You look around and say, ‘Okay, this is my country. That forest is my kitchen and these 300 square miles are my living room.’ It’s great, but after a while, it can really get to you. You can’t imagine how lonely it can be.”
Ron Bennett, who trapped the Yukon Flats on and off for fourteen years, says, confirming David Schlesinger’s impressions, “It was a lonely, hard-luck life, so goddamn reclusive. Looking back, it’s hard not to think that it was a colossal waste of time. I have a saying—the only guy dumber than a fisherman is a trapper. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t wish a woman would appear from the woods.” Every year Bennett would come out of the bush for the summer and every year he’d promise himself that he wouldn’t go back out to the trapline. Yet, come August, he’d get the itch again, the same itch that had brought him to Alaska in the first place. “I was maladjusted,” he says. “I should’ve been out chasing chicks, but there was just something about going back out to the woods.” During the summers, when he was off the trapline, that’s exactly what he would do—chase women. When August came around and it was time to head back out, he and the rest of the trappers would plead with their summer girlfriends to join them. “The smart ones said no,” Bennett tells me. “But occasionally one of us would convince a gal to come out. She’d hang around for a while, and then she’d leave and never look back. It takes a pretty unusual woman to tough it out in the woods.”
The Final Frontiersman Page 19
