We save as much moss as we can, planning to use it later, throwing it down onto tarps spread around the base of the cabin. Then we take off the old Visqueen and the layer of moss underneath it. When we finish that, we remove the old poles, pulling out the nails carefully to avoid bending them beyond repair. Heimo has brought out nails, but we will need to use some of the old ones. While we pull nails, Rhonda goes to the woods and gathers blueberries for lunch. At noon with the roof off, we stop for a ten-minute break and enjoy a piece of fry bread dripping with honey and freshly picked blueberries.
“Let’s get the new roof on.” Heimo sounds like a football coach trying to rally his team at halftime.
Rhonda, who has been inspecting the mess inside the cabin, says, “Man, that’s going to take a long time to clean. And guess who’s going to end up doing it?”
We climb onto the roof, and Heimo starts handing me the poles. I lay them down between the roof beam and the exterior wall, and Rhonda arranges them on each side of the roof, making sure there are no large gaps. She is also conscientious about laying moss under the poles along the exterior wall. Wood on wood means premature rotting. When Rhonda declares that the poles are set, I nail them, toeing them together where they meet at the top or nailing the ends to the main roof beam. Then I slide down the pole and drive in another nail, fastening the poles to the outside wall. After all the poles have been set and nailed, Rhonda and I fill in the gaps with moss.
“Why not just lay down the Visqueen?” I ask Heimo, who is watching our every move from below. “Why the extra step?”
Heimo answers abruptly, “Moss discourages condensation.”
After the gaps have been patched, Heimo hands us a large roll of Visqueen, which we spread out incrementally, two feet at a time, covering each section of plastic with moss, all the while treating the Visqueen with extreme care for fear of puncturing it. Puncture it, and the roof is going to leak. When we have spread out the plastic and mossed each side of the roof, Heimo is finally content.
“Good job,” he says, sounding relieved. “One day, twenty years from now, when Edna and I are grandparents, we’ll need another roof. You won’t mind coming up and giving us a hand, will you?” he asks me.
I don’t respond. After having jumped from the roof, lost my footing, and somersaulted in the direction of the solar fence, I’m busy trying to assess the damage to my elbows and knees. When I’m confident that nothing is broken or torn, I answer, “Not at all. As long as you never let me try that jump again.”
I am covered in spruce needles and dirt, a pathetic sight. “Don’t worry,” Heimo says. “I don’t want to have to see that again.”
It is early afternoon, and everyone is gathered in the cabin yard, including Edna and Krin, who flew in three days ago. Heimo is using his handsaw to cut up the old roof poles for firewood. Krin is lying in the hammock holding Firth, and Rhonda is sitting in a camp chair playing chess on the computer. The girls begged Heimo to let them run the Honda gas generator and play computer games. Initially, he flat-out refused—he didn’t want to waste gas—but they kept at him.
The dog, too, is something of a sore spot for Heimo. For years, he’s been adamant about not getting one. As far as he’s concerned, they’re more trouble than they’re worth, although the Natives of Fort Yukon say that a man should never live in the bush without a dog—a dog will alert you if bears are around. Edna and Rhonda finally prevailed, however. They convinced Heimo that when Rhonda left for school, Krin would need a playmate.
The computer is a gift from a teacher in Fort Yukon. The high school was getting new laptops, so the teacher gave the girls one of the old ones. It is hard not to be struck by the appearance of the computer here—the paradox. But Heimo is no purist, maybe never was. With two teenage girls, adhering to some ascetic notion of simplicity is impractical, if not impossible. He is a wilderness man, but a modern one, reluctant to shun something that allows him to make life better over the long haul. He struggles to keep it simple, but he feels no compulsion to fulfill anyone’s romantic notion of what he should be. Romantics never last long in the bush. Heimo knows this. You modify your canon as the situation dictates or you leave. Rhonda tells me that he agreed to let them have the computer for the same reason he let Krin have a dog. He thinks it’ll be good for Krin when Rhonda goes to Wisconsin. If Krin is happy, he’s happy. It turns out he might even be motivated by a bit of self-interest. Rhonda tells me he is something of a computer junkie himself. In Fort Yukon, during the summer, he sometimes plays computer games for hours a day.
Krin coos at Firth and hugs and kisses the dog as if it were a baby. All the while, white-wing crossbills feed on spruce cone seeds high in the surrounding trees and discard the leftover cones in the cabin yard. The cones fall through the branches and hit the ground like heavy raindrops.
“Shhh,” Heimo says, interrupting his sawing. “Shhh.” We all look at him. No one is quite sure whom he is shushing. No one is talking. The generator continues to rumble.
“Hear that, hear that,” Heimo says. “It sounds like ‘Quick three beers.’ That’s an olive-sided flycatcher.”
Heimo is cross today. For the last two days, he’s been suffering from the flu. There’s nothing that galls him like being sick. Fortunately, he and the others are rarely ill. If they get sick, they have a well-stocked supply of antibiotics and other medicines from the Fort Yukon Clinic, which Edna and the girls get free because they are Native.
Heimo’s concern about his health borders on obsession. He has no insurance, but more important than that, he’s concerned about the slow deterioration of his body, as if each illness accentuates his growing vulnerability. And the weak don’t last, at least not in the Arctic. He gets a case of the sniffles, and he worries. His heart skips a beat, and he thinks he’s having a heart attack. So he does everything he can to protect himself. To avoid exposure to potential parasites, which cause many diseases— brucellosis, trichinosis, liver tapeworm cysts, tularemia, sarcocystosis—he insists that Edna cook all meat well done. Years ago, he renounced all domesticated meat and processed sugar, which he believes are the root of many physical ailments. Because he is often gutting animals or working with traps or fur, he is also concerned about germs. He soaps and scrubs his hands as well as any surgeon. He avoids sharing glasses or eating utensils with anyone, including Edna and the girls. And when working with wood—cutting it, splitting it, hauling it—he always wears goggles. “To lose my vision,” he says, “would be a fate worse than death.”
To forestall his inevitable physical decay, Heimo works to keep himself in tremendous shape. “I want to die out here, and to do that I need to be healthy,” he once told me, sounding disconcertingly like Yogi Berra.
Fred Thomas is his inspiration. At eighty-three, Thomas is still as active as a man half his age. So that he is still in good enough health to be out here when he turns eighty-three, Heimo does push-ups and sit-ups four times a week. He doesn’t enjoy skiing, and after years of covering his trapline on snowshoes, he refuses to snowshoe for exercise. What he does love is running, even in the dead of winter.
During my winter visit, after a day on the trapline, Heimo would often emerge from the cabin dressed in a fluffy powder blue sweatsuit, the pants too short, barely reaching his ankles, bound for a little oval track he’d cleared in the tundra. The incongruity of the two images—the rough trapper, his beard coated with small pieces of ice, his trusty sidearm strapped to his waist versus the health fanatic, wearing a sweat-suit that looked more like a cozy pair of pajamas—always struck me as part hilarious, part psycho. Who spends his day on a freezing trapline and then clears out a track in the tundra so he can stay in shape? Who in his right mind runs in the Arctic at 25 below?
Four times a week, Heimo walked out to the track, where he’d perform a few preliminary stretches. Then he’d put his head down and grit his teeth against the Arctic cold and the assassinlike winds that whipped the tundra. Having no interest in joining him, I’d watch him r
un. His vapor cloud, which hung in the air like thick smoke, followed him around the track. Set against the frosty peaks of the Brooks Range, with the alders and willows coated in hoarfrost, it was easy to imagine him as the last person on earth.
It is early evening and Edna has just finished making sourdough biscuits. She makes bread nearly every day, kneading the dough by hand, so her forearms are large and sinewy, like a woodworker’s. Now she is cutting up the fish I caught and cleaned this morning. Tonight, for supper, we’re having one of my favorites—fried grayling. Edna will fry them over an open fire, and the smell will permeate the nearby woods. When she sets them on our plates, the fish pieces will be brown and crispy, and the soft white meat will peel from the bone in perfect fillets.
She cuts up the biggest fish, talking as she works. “You know, Coleen would have been twenty years old. If she were still living, these girls wouldn’t be here today. Heimo and I were only going to have one. Then Rhonda came. It was the best thing that ever happened to me and Heimo.”
The truth is that two and a half years after Coleen’s death, the Korths almost lost Rhonda, too. It was 1986, and Edna was three and a half months into her pregnancy when she started bleeding. Believing at first that it was a miscarriage, she and Heimo were disappointed. But then the bleeding persisted. What should they do, they wondered? Should they wait to see if the bleeding stopped? It was too risky, they decided, so Heimo went out to a gravel bar, the same gravel bar where they had waited after Coleen’s death, and scratched SOS into the sand, filling in the furrows with sparkling sheets of tinfoil. They’d give it a day, and if no one responded to the SOS, they’d trip the ELT.
An hour later a plane flew by; however, the pilot didn’t acknowledge the SOS. Perhaps, Heimo and Edna hoped, he’d return by the same route later in the day. Sure enough, the plane flew over again, and this time the pilot responded to the signal. He landed and unloaded cans of gas to make room for Edna, and then flew her to the clinic in Fort Yukon, where medical care workers diagnosed the bleeding as “placenta previa,” the condition in which the placenta attaches low and partially covers the cervix. Edna had lost a lot of blood. Realizing that they weren’t equipped to care for her, the clinic workers sent her to Fairbanks. The doctor in Fairbanks diagnosed it as a more serious condition— “placental abruption.”
With placental abruption, the placenta separates from the uterine wall before birth. There is often hemorrhaging, but the greatest danger is to the unborn child, who is deprived of oxygen. The doctor told Edna bluntly that her child would probably be born with brain damage and prescribed extended bed rest. Against her doctor’s wishes, Edna flew back to Fort Yukon. Three weeks later, Heimo and Millie flew to Fort Yukon, where they waited out the rest of Edna’s pregnancy. Millie went to school. To make ends meet and to keep from dwelling on the doctor’s prediction, Heimo worked as a house parent at the Vocational Education Center. On February 19, 1986, Rhonda was born.
“The doctor was wrong,” Edna says. “I held Rhonda and knew that she was okay. A mother knows.”
In another setting, Edna never would have told me this story. It’s the sort of intimate story that she only trusts her family with and, sometimes, her small circle of friends in Fort Yukon. But tonight, surrounded by Heimo, Rhonda, and Krin, feeling secure, perhaps, she’s much less reserved than she normally would be.
“You can see,” she says, nodding in Rhonda’s direction, “Rhonda turned out okay. But Rhonda was tough from the beginning—really tough. The summer Krin was born, that was our first year on the Old Crow. Heimo flew out early to set up a tent camp. Rhonda, Krin, and me flew in near the end of July, and Heimo walked to the drop-off lake to pick us up. It was a seven-mile walk to the tent camp, through tundra, but Rhonda walked the whole seven miles alone, over niggerheads, and she was only three and half years old. Heimo carried our gear and I carried Krin. We didn’t arrive at the tent camp until 6:00 A.M. the next morning. There was no wind that night and the mosquitoes ate us up, but Rhonda didn’t cry. She didn’t even complain.”
Tonight Edna is surprisingly at ease in my presence, so I risk a personal question. “How do you think Rhonda will do in Wisconsin? Are you worried about her?”
Rhonda overhears me and comes over and teases the fire with a long stick, pretending to tend to it. “So what do you think, Poop?” Edna says, calling her by her nickname. “How do you think you’re going to do?” Rhonda shrugs her shoulders, returning to Krin and the chess game, disappointed perhaps that her mother didn’t answer the question.
Edna shrugs her shoulders, too, as if she were mimicking Rhonda. “I don’t know how she’s gonna do. Good, I hope.”
Edna’s seeming indifference catches me by surprise, though it shouldn’t. For the last few days, I’ve been struck by just how little is being said about Rhonda’s departure, though it is imminent. It is as if both Heimo and Edna, but Edna in particular, having already lost one daughter, have neither the strength nor the will to discuss the possibility of losing another.
Supper is over and Rhonda and Krin are snacking on fish tails, which they let cook on the grill until they’re a crispy brown. A log cracks, and an ember flies out and rests on my leg. I brush it off. “Must have thrown a spruce log in there by accident,” Heimo says. “Sorry. That’s why when the Gwich’in made fires in their caribou skin tents they used only cottonwood. Spruce likes to explode.”
Edna is looking through my book of Alaskan wildflowers. “The minister didn’t know anything about flowers until I met him,” she says, nudging Heimo, who is sitting next to her with his arm around her. Edna catches herself. “I mean the reverend. I taught him about crowberries and cloudberries. You can eat this one raw or in a salad,” she says, pointing to a photograph of brook saxifrage. “And you can eat the roots of these two—wild celery and what the book calls Parry’s wall-flower.”
“Damn mosquito,” I say, slapping my calf loudly, interrupting her.
“Kill one,” she says, without looking up, still paging through the book, “and all the rest show up for the funeral.” Then she finds the page she’s been searching for. “This one is just wild spinach,” she explains, showing me the photograph of Arctic dock. “And this one—roseroot— you let it ferment, and it’s really good.”
Suddenly Heimo jumps up.
“What’s going on?” Edna asks, startled by Heimo. “A bear?”
“No,” Heimo says, tired of hearing about flowers. “Let’s do something else. Let’s get the phone book and let Jim try to pronounce the Eskimo names in Savoonga.”
“Good idea,” the girls shout. “I’ll go get it,” Rhonda offers.
This was something we did a few weeks into my winter visit, and the Korths remember it well. The way Siberian Yupik words are spelled often has little bearing on how they sound, so despite my efforts, I made a mockery of the language. For Edna, Heimo, and the girls it was nothing short of hilarious.
Ask Edna to spell a Siberian Yupik word, and she shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she’ll say. I thought this was unusual until I learned that Siberian Yupik is primarily a spoken language. It wasn’t until 1910 that a white man, Edgar O. Campbell, a medical missionary and Presbyterian minister, developed the first Yupik writing system. When Edna was in school though, it was English or nothing. She was scolded for speaking Siberian Yupik. And she was never taught how to write it.
The Siberian Yupik language is ideally suited to the world of St. Lawrence Island, a landscape of ice and snow. Siberian Yupik has almost sixty separate words for ice: siku, ice; duvaq, shore-fast ice; iighwilnguq, drifting floes of ice; genu, slush ice; saleq, new ice; laaq, ice run; meghaat, open water on pack ice; kagim leghwaaq, crushed ice. Heimo told me how sometimes Edna will caution the girls: “Watch out, that’s wet water!” or “Walk there, that’s frozen ice.” They find it endlessly amusing, but for Edna it is anything but redundant.
Rhonda turns to the Savoonga section of the phone book, which is only a page and a half, and hands it
to me. “Edna is related to everyone in there except for the Bs, the Ds, and the Js,” Heimo chortles.
So I start. “Annogiyuk, Kinegeekuk, Mokiyuk, Pungowiyi, Waghiyi.” By the time I reach the final name, Edna and the girls are doubled up with laughter, holding their stomachs, as if the gesture is choreographed, and Heimo is pounding his knee. He sounds as if he is sobbing.
“Tell him,” Heimo says, trying to catch his breath. “Show him how.”
Edna opens her mouth to speak. “I can’t,” she pleads. “I can’t.” A minute or so goes by, and she is finally ready to try again. “AnA-gai-yuk,” she emphasizes the second a. “Kinekuk,” long e, guttral k.“PungaWI,” she says, swallowing the g deep in her throat, then accenting the last syllable. When she reaches Waghiyi, she breaks up again. “That’s enough. Please, no more.”
“Here, try to say this,” Heimo says to me. “Bee-nick-took nukloo.”
I try to repeat it. Edna can no longer restrain herself. She is sprawled out in Heimo’s lap.
“What does it mean?” I ask, hardly able to get the words out myself, but neither Heimo nor Edna can speak.
Finally, Heimo squeaks out an answer. “Nice ass,” he says. Then he looks to make sure that Rhonda and Krin haven’t heard. But they have. They roll out of the hammock and into the dirt. Firth hops between them, barking and licking their faces. Edna jumps out of Heimo’s arms and runs toward the trees in the back of the cabin, still wracked with laughter. “I can’t stand it,” she yells. “I have to pee.”
Two weeks later and a long way from the Coleen River, Rhonda and I are sitting in the airport in Seattle, when she shows me her BIA card. It reads: “Department of the Interior—Bureau of Indian Affairs—Certificate of Indian Blood—This is to certify that the person named on the reverse is listed as or is a descendent of a person on the ANCSA roll, an official record of this office.”
The Final Frontiersman Page 28
