The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  Looking back, Heimo thinks that his friends fled to protect him. Eskimo hunters occasionally entered Russian waters. Russian patrol boats would sometimes investigate, but that was usually the end of it. However, when the patrol caught sight of Heimo, a white man, it was suddenly more interested.

  “Spy,” Heimo says now. “They must have thought I was a spy, hoping to slip into the country through Siberia.” To this day, he is convinced that if he had been caught he would have had a tough time explaining to them that he was a simple walrus hunter.

  Shortly after losing the patrol boat, Heimo’s boat collided with an ice floe, ripping a hole in the boat’s side just below the gunwales. His friends hadn’t seen the floe in the fog, which covered the water like a thick wool blanket. He and his friends bailed frantically until it was obvious to them that they could not bail fast enough. Quickly, one of the men tore out one of the boat’s seats, which was nothing more than a plywood board. Then he tore out another. He held one of the boards over the hole on the outside of the boat while another man held a plywood seat over the hole on the inside. From a toolbox, which they always carried with them, another man grabbed a hammer, gathered a small handful of nails, and nailed the two boards together. The boards didn’t completely stanch the flow of water, but by bailing, too, they were able to keep the boat afloat. Five hours later they arrived in Savoonga, cold, wet, and tired, but alive.

  It is late July 2002, and we are sitting outside the Korths’ cabin on the upper Coleen River near their summer kitchen, which is nothing more than a small fire pit with an iron grate over it surrounded by lawn chairs and rough-hewn spruce benches. We have just finished our supper—boiled porcupine, or “quill pig.” This morning, not far from the cabin, Heimo killed it with an ax. He singed it over the fire to remove the quills, and then gutted and skinned it. Edna boiled it for two hours and then browned it on the grill. Knowing I’ve never eaten porcupine, everybody watches me take my first bite. “Delicious,” I inform them, which it is, though I think they were all hoping I’d retch with disgust.

  “Up here you got to eat what you can get your hands on,” Heimo says.

  “No,” I say, protesting. “I’m not kidding. I’ll never again look at a porcupine in the same way. When I see one I’ll think supper. It tastes like pot roast.”

  “Oh, yeah,” says Heimo. “Soon everybody will be serving it for Sunday supper down there. Ah, excuse me, would you please pass the porcupine.”

  Supper is over and Krin is doing the dishes. The night air has cooled, and after a week of utter rabidity, the mosquitoes have finally decided to give us a break. Heimo has just finished telling us the story of almost losing the boat, and their lives, to the ice floe. Edna holds his hand, fingers interlocked, a silent admission of how different her life would be had the walrus hunting trip turned out differently, had Heimo’s Eskimo friends not acted quickly to patch the hole in the boat.

  Heimo pulls Edna close and kisses her on top of the head. “You know those Eskimos,” he says. “They’re resourceful. They can fix almost anything.” Heimo’s comment is an informed observation, not a blanket generalization. During my winter visit, one of the snowmachines was running poorly, and Heimo cursed his inability to figure out what was wrong with it. “An Eskimo could fix it,” he said. “I’ve seen them take apart entire engines, figure out the problem, fix it, and put the engine back together in an afternoon.”

  “Mom can do that, too,” Rhonda yells from the hammock. “Mom’s the mechanic in the family.” Rhonda and Krin and Krin’s new husky puppy, Firth, which Krin named after one of the rivers in northeast Alaska, are all lying in the hammock together. The hammock was a gift from Fred Thomas to Krin for her thirteenth birthday. It sags under their weight. They swing back and forth only inches above the ground.

  “It’s true,” Heimo says, hanging his head in mock shame. “Edna fixes everything around here.”

  “Yeah, right,” Edna replies, as she often does to Heimo’s verbal taunts, jerking her hand from his.

  “That’s right,” Krin yells. “Mom’s better at fixing things than Dad.”

  “I’ll fix you,” Heimo shouts, and jumps up out of his chair. The girls see him coming and scatter. Firth scampers after Krin, yapping and biting at her heels; Krin runs for the woods. Rhonda makes a break for the cabin, but reconsiders and dashes for the tent, which Heimo and Edna have been sleeping in since returning to the river because it’s cooler than the cabin. Heimo chases Rhonda around the tent until she sprints for the cabin, ducking under the volleyball net, which is tied tightly between two black spruce trees. Heimo follows, but forgets to duck. He is on his back now, having lost the battle with the net. Nobody inquires to see if he is hurt—instead we all laugh hysterically.

  After his brush with death while walrus hunting, Heimo might not have been allowed to return to his cabin on the Coleen had he and other rural Alaskan trappers not been accommodated by a large and controversial piece of legislation called the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.

  “What is to be the fate of all this land?” John McPhee inquired in 1976 in his book Coming into the Country. McPhee was referring to the vast lands that had been held in public trust from the time the United States acquired Alaska in October 1867, and more recently, those supervised loosely by the Bureau of Land Management. With statehood in 1959, Alaska was guaranteed 105 million acres. With the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, Alaska Natives received 44 million acres. Besides 2 million acres of private property, what remained was 224 million acres, a chunk of federal land larger than any other state in the union, though almost a quarter of that federal land had already been protected as national forests, parks, and refuges.

  Nearly five years after Coming into the Country was published, and prior to his final trip to Savoonga, Heimo was asking the same question: What would happen to the land? More important, what would come of the land along the Coleen River? Would his way of life be tolerated or would it be expunged with the stroke of a pen? Dare he dream of one day raising a family in the place he loved? One thing was for certain: Because of a promise included in the Native claims legislation, conservationists would get their due.

  When ANCSA was passed, an Alaska planning group was formed to examine a variety of management possibilities on “d-2” lands, which had been withdrawn from state selection. All of the agencies involved— Fish & Wildlife, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management—scrambled to make their selections and meet a congressional deadline of December 18, 1978.

  It all looked as if the issue would be settled by the summer of 1978, but in October the Ninety-fifth Congress adjourned without enacting the appropriate legislation. When it became evident that the December 18, 1978, “d-2” lands deadline mandated by Congress would not be met, Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus exercised his authority under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) and withdrew 110 million acres from state and mineral selection. Two weeks later, President Jimmy Carter used the authority granted to him by the obscure Antiquities Act of 1906 to give national monument status to fifty-six million of those acres, incensing countless Alaskans. Alaska, many claimed, was being “locked up.” Some citizens of Fairbanks burned Carter in effigy, and a secessionist movement was born.

  Nowhere was this land withdrawal greeted with greater antagonism than in the bush. Every suspicion, every resentment harbored about government and the outside world was confirmed. Rumors had been swirling for years, passed on by word of mouth or crackling over the radio, fueling a general sense of paranoia, a feeling among trappers, miners, and residents of bush communities that, whatever happened, their interests were not going to be considered.

  I asked Lynette Roberts, who homesteaded on the Yukon with her husband, Steve Ulvi, how the land debate was greeted along the river, and she replied without hesitation, “With great hostility. There was this general sinking feeling that life as we knew it was over, which had everything to do w
ith the fact that almost everybody was squatting, trespassing.” Because of the proposed Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, the section of the Yukon River between Circle, Alaska, and the Canadian border, including Eagle, was ground zero for the protest movement. The joke was that the Park Service knew how to manage only scenery and not people. It would come in and, if need be, forcibly remove homesteaders from the land. (A few years later, it would pay them as seasonal employees to dress up as trappers, don the garb of homesteaders, build fish wheels, and hang fish for the tourists who would flock to the area to catch a glimpse of what life along the river was once like.) Trappers all over the state were alarmed. Some heard that their presence, which had always been tolerated, was said to conflict with the “necessary and appropriate” use of the land and that subsistence living was incompatible with wilderness preservation, albeit nominally. Others heard that they were being belittled as nothing more than neo-pioneers, engaged in a social experiment or playing a game of wilderness survival as a lifestyle choice. Then there were the horror stories, some based firmly in fact, of pompous, briefcase-toting Bureau of Land Management agents, the first symbols of the new order, jumping out of helicopters to assert the government’s sovereignty over the land, delivering threats and eviction notices.

  Randy Brown, who spent fourteen of his sixteen years in the bush along the Kandik River, where he and his wife, Karen Kallen, eventually raised two boys, remembers the time well—the consternation and the confusion. “Reapportionment was inevitable,” he says. “But this was a land grab of dramatic proportions. There was surveying going on everywhere, I mean everywhere—federal officials drawing up park boundaries, mineral surveys, timber surveys. They came in by helicopter to the upper Kandik, not too far from our cabin, to do timber surveys. Everybody was making claims—Native Corporations, the state, the BLM, the Forest Service. It was a crazy time, and we were caught in the middle of it, unsure of what was going to happen to us and the way of life we’d chosen.”

  Roger Kaye, then a biological technician and land use planner with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, was one of those federal officials with the unenviable task of traveling throughout the bush and arranging meetings to explain, as best he could, the coming regulations to bewildered trappers and villagers. He and his boss, Lou Swenson, barnstormed across the countryside, visiting seven villages in twenty days. “We did a conscientious job of trying to help them understand what was going to happen. There was a lot of misinformation out there.” Lou Swenson, who later served as manager for the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, adds, “The new regulations tried to maintain the status quo, and we tried to help people understand that. It was a completely new idea of refuge management. We didn’t act like big bad government guys. Everything was authorized unless prohibited rather than the other way around. Refuge managers in the Lower Forty-eight would have heart attacks. But Alaska was a very different situation. People in the bush were relieved to find out that little had changed—they could still use snowmachines and dog teams, hunt, fish, cut wood, you name it.”

  Finally, years of rumor, innuendo, and provisional meetings came to an end, and the trappers, at long last, had a general idea of where they stood. In the waning days of the Ninety-sixth Congress, the “d-2” land reform was consummated with the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), and on December 2, 1980, President Carter signed it into law.

  ANILCA placed 104 million acres, 28 percent of Alaska, under some form of federal protection, replacing the monuments with wildlife refuges, forests, wild and scenic rivers, and wilderness preservation systems. With a stroke of the pen, the nationwide preservation movement that was launched on behalf of the Alaskan wilderness was validated and rewarded. ANILCA more than doubled the size of the country’s national parks and wildlife refuge lands and tripled its wilderness preserve acreage. Living Wilderness called it “the strongest, most daring conservation action … in American history.” The Sierra Club called it “the last great first chance.” Time magazine labeled it “a masterpiece of compromise.”

  This is not to say that conservationists were entirely satisfied. Many lamented the lack of restrictions in the 23.5 million-acre National Petroleum Reserve, adjacent to the Prudhoe Bay complex, which occupies more than one-half of Alaska’s North Slope and was established in 1923 during the Harding administration, when the Navy switched from coal to oil. It was a strategy that seemed sound in 1923—set aside oil reserves to ensure national security—but conservationists argued that it was no longer practical in light of the country’s enormous energy needs, which only Persian Gulf sources could satisfy. The decision to set aside Section 1002 (referred to as ten-oh-two)—a 1.5 million-acre chunk of Arctic coastal plain and the last section of Alaska’s 1,000-plus miles of Arctic coast not reserved for development—for assessment of its oil and gas reserves was particularly galling to conservationists.

  Conversely, many Alaskans—particularly politicians, businesspeople, and the Alaska congressional delegates—denounced ANILCA and the conveyance of de facto wilderness into the protective and restrictive hands of the federal government. It was a land grab, they contended, without precedent in U.S. history, a conspiracy hatched and orchestrated by Lower Forty-eight politicians, most of whom had never even been to the state.

  From the moment he set foot in Alaska, Heimo had been living with an uncertainty about what would become of the land. Being a newcomer, and feeling powerless in the face of inevitable and cataclysmic changes set in motion by the discovery of oil and, subsequently, the building of the pipeline, he did the only thing available to him: He went about his life and hoped for the best.

  What Heimo and other Alaska trappers eventually got was a 186 page document that articulated a less restrictive approach to wilderness management that was in keeping with Alaska’s unique circumstances and that enabled Heimo and some of the trappers to remain on the land. ANILCA explicitly allowed for the continuation of subsistence practices by Alaska’s rural residents in most of the national interest lands, including the expanded Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where Heimo lived, acknowledging that those living in the Alaskan bush “may be the last remnant of the subsistence culture alive today in North America.” It also granted rural residents the right to use snow machines, motorboats, and other methods of transportation that had “traditionally been employed … by local residents.” Significantly, in a section titled “Use of cabins and other sites of occupancy on conservation system units,” it articulated a limited tolerance for backwoods cabins. ANILCA clearly spelled out the National Park Service’s policy: Those who built cabins on federal land after 1978 were out of luck; ANILCA made no accommodations for them; they would lose their cabins. Trappers who built before 1978, but after 1973, could apply each year for one-year permits; those who came before 1973 were ordered to renew their permits every five years. National Wildlife Refuge regulations were slightly more liberal. They granted renewable five-year permits to anyone who built his cabin before 1978, which meant that Heimo, had he deliberated longer about coming to the Coleen River, would have missed qualifying for permission to live in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. ANILCA further stipulated that permits could be transferred only to the immediate family and were rendered null and void with the death of the “last immediate family member of the claimant residing in the cabin.” Finally, applicants were required to acknowledge that they had no interest in the property on which the cabin stood.

  When Heimo decided to go to Savoonga in the spring of 1981 and wrote it off to adventure only, he was not being entirely truthful with himself. He also went to celebrate. While in Fort Yukon for the holidays, he had heard the news about ANILCA. The details were vague, but for the first time since he came to the Coleen in June 1978, he was certain that he could come back and lead a life that was no longer imperiled by prohibitive legislation. He could keep his cabin and continue trapping as long as he abided by the permitting process. He didn’t like the new regulations, but he was w
illing to do whatever was required of him for the chance to live out his dream. But more than anything else, he came to Savoonga because of the presence of a pretty girl by the name of Edna Rose.

  Heimo met Edna Rose, or Miti Dowin (her Yupik name), for the first time in the winter of 1975. He saw her often after that. He was friends with her father, Emerson, and frequently stopped by the house to visit. He was also a friend of her uncle’s, Jackson Mokiyuk. Jackson trapped fox, and it was he who taught Heimo how to prepare furs, how to make the proper cuts so as not to damage the fur, how to care for the fur once the animal had been skinned.

  Edna was a year older than Heimo. She was attractive, there was no doubt about that, and available, too. But Heimo had promised himself that he would not get involved in a village romance. Savoonga was just too small. In such a small village, gossip was a kind of pastime, and Heimo was determined not to fuel its fires. Although he hadn’t come to Savoonga in search of a wife, Heimo had to admit—on the trapline, he was often lonely. And he hadn’t had a girlfriend since high school. There’d been other women, but they were brief flirtations, not relationships. Wouldn’t it be nice, he thought, to share the beauty of the river with someone he loved?

  One of Heimo’s favorite stories concerns an evening in the spring of 1978 when he was sitting with Emerson in the living room of Emerson’s house. Heimo hadn’t seen Edna since the previous spring, and when he arrived she was there. He tried to conceal his excitement, chatting with her as casually as he could. But he couldn’t fool Emerson. When Edna left, Emerson went to the kitchen and returned. “Heimo,” he said, “would you like something? Coffee maybe?” Heimo answered “No.” “Tea?” Heimo answered “No” again. “Juice? Water?” Heimo shook his head. “A wife?” For a moment Heimo was taken aback. Then he chuckled. “Sure, how about Edna Rose?” “Edna Rose?” Emerson replied, “Not for ten million dollars.”