81 Days Below Zero

by Brian Murphy

  “You okay to travel, Lieutenant?” Ames asked the next morning.

  “Made it this far,” said Crane, still unsteady from diarrhea. “I’m not going to stall out now. Let’s go.”

  “Fair enough,” said Ames. “Your call.”

  That afternoon Ames steered his dogs past the empty Woodchopper Roadhouse, where Woodchopper Creek joins the Yukon River. Years earlier, the two-story boardinghouse—a bunk and meal for a couple of bucks—was the biggest and most elegant structure along that stretch of the river. Now, it stood as a silent monument to vanities built upon gold.

  The roadhouse was put up around 1910 by a German immigrant known as Valentine “Woodchopper” Smith. It became a port of call for gold miners, wanderers, sourdoughs, and steamboat crews loading up on cords of wood. It didn’t take much to impress this hard-bitten crowd. Smith, however, went the extra mile. He added touches such as rocking chairs, toilet seats covered in cold-beating caribou hide, and meals served with a knife, fork, and spoon. By roadhouse standards, these were five-star trappings. Smith garnered the reputation as the backcountry’s überinnkeeper. The competition was not much.

  Many other roadhouses across interior Alaska had a slapdash, take-your-chances quality in their best moments. Judge James Wickersham—the same justice who came up with the idea of naming Fairbanks after his Senate buddy—didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the hangdog state of one roadhouse, where booze boxes and milk crates were repurposed as chairs and the tavern door was a piece of clapboard nailed to wooden poles. The owner of another down-on-its-heels roadhouse was known to fire warning shots from her rifle at passing travelers who had the temerity to pass by in search of better accommodations.

  But the success at Smith’s establishment eventually brought imitators. Nearby, at the mouth of Coal Creek, a small-time miner named Frank Slaven put up his own place in 1932, investing the serious sum of one thousand dollars. His menu included fresh chicken and vegetables from his garden. He even lugged in leather chairs to give the main room a hotel-lobby feel. When the big dredge operations arrived in the midthirties, Slaven sold his claims along Coal Creek for a small fortune and spent his winters in decidedly milder Seattle.

  The Woodchopper Roadhouse story doesn’t end so well. By the midthirties, it had passed into the hands of an older couple, Jack and Kate Welch. Jack liked his booze, but held it together enough to keep the roadhouse’s doors open. Kate was the postmistress for several years and liked to keep up with local gossip by steaming open letters and taking just a wee peek inside. One miner who had a cabin on the Yukon advised a friend to use sealing wax on letters to avoid prying eyes.

  One spring the ice breakup bottlenecked near the roadhouse. The rising waters—fifteen feet or more—threatened to carry away the building. The Welches had just enough time to cut loose their dogs so they could scamper to higher ground. The couple retreated inside the roadhouse to make their stand. Table-size chunks of ice battered the log walls during a frightening night. Jack manned the windows, using poles to push away some of the ice slabs. By morning, the water receded. The first floor was ravaged—including Jack’s prized National Geographic collection, waterlogged beyond hope—but the place survived. The couple was just never the same after that harrowing night.

  Kate remained mostly bedridden with worsening rheumatism. Jack’s mental state, meanwhile, appeared increasingly unglued. One night early in World War II, he became convinced German troops where bearing down on the Yukon. He grabbed his rifle. In either a slip or suicide attempt, Jack ended up shooting himself in the side. Their nearest neighbor—the same man who urged for the wax-sealed letters—raced the couple to the nearby Woodchopper mining camp on a dogsled. The winter watchman radioed for a plane to take Jack to a Fairbanks hospital.

  It was all too much for Kate. She died while her husband recovered. Jack’s already precarious psyche then went off the edge. He simply couldn’t accept the news that he was a widower. He became convinced Kate was hiding from him. He returned to the now-idle roadhouse a broken man, wandering around and asking if anyone had seen his missing wife. One day someone noticed that Jack’s skiff was missing. Soon, there were reports from villages along the Yukon River of a mysterious, quiet man in a small boat riding the currents. Jack was never found, but local lore says he was last seen at the mouth of the Yukon floating out to the Bering Sea.

  By the time Crane and Ames passed by, the Woodchopper Roadhouse was empty. Storms had knocked out windows, and animals were finding places to call home. Remnants of the roadhouse’s former glory, such as fabric wallpaper, fluttered in the wind.

  Ames pointed his sled upstream. They soon mushed into the mining outpost of Woodchopper. Here, too, was a place with its best days behind it.

  The war had effectively halted the two big dredges on Woodchopper and Coal Creeks, cutting off the main flow of cash and steady jobs. Gold was not a priority for Washington, which had wartime sway over what factories and mines produced and where equipment was allocated. Gold production across Alaska dropped more than 85 percent during the war years. At the twin dredges on Coal and Woodchopper, it was a serious blow. Since the midthirties, they had pulled up more than $3 million of gold based on a price at the time, which hovered near $34 an ounce. They were successful, but not wildly so.

  Fewer than two dozen people continued to stick it out in Woodchopper during the war. What kept Woodchopper alive—as with many other villages in Alaska’s interior—was the airstrip.

  After Ames fed his dogs, he learned their timing was good. A Wien plane was scheduled to arrive the next day for the very pregnant Evelyn Berglund, who was due in less than two weeks. She was one half of an interesting backcountry duo with her husband, Willard Grinnell. They later divorced, and Evelyn went on to write a memoir, Born on Snowshoes, that recounts her upbringing in a cabin nearly astride the Arctic Circle and her later years trapping and hunting with her two sisters. She was eleven years old when she saw her first bush plane, which seemed to her like it “came from another world.” She was fifteen when the family got a radio, which worked fine except when it rained.

  Ames led Crane over the frozen mud paths of Woodchopper. Crane asked about a place to eat.

  First, there is someone you have to meet, said Ames, knocking on the door of a simple log cabin.

  Lieutenant Leon Crane, Ames said with exaggerated formality, let me introduce you to Mr. Phil Berail.

  Word had already reached Berail that his cache had saved Crane’s life. A story like that, once Ames told the first person in Woodchopper, took only a few minutes to make the rounds. Berail, a big man with a voice to match, was already something of a living Yukon legend at age sixty-five. This just added to his fame.

  The Indiana-born Berail first drifted north in 1904. He had big appetites in all things and was ready for anything. He did a bit of logging before building a series of cabins in the Charley River basin. He learned the wilderness talent of getting by with whatever job came along. Berail prospected, but never got more than a pinch of gold dust. He did some mining, but got antsy at being underground. He eventually landed a position as hydraulic foreman at the Coal Creek dredge. In the winter when work shut down, Berail would head to his main cabin—the one that Crane found. Once in a while, he would rig up the dogsled to make a weeklong run to check on how the Coal Creek facilities were weathering the cold.

  Berail seemed cut from an earlier age. Modern ways often grated at him like sand in his soup. When Berail learned that the dredge had to deduct Social Security payments, he was appalled.

  “What’s this Social Security monkeyshine?” he asked the dredge chief, Ernest Patty.

  Patty explained the new law. Berail stormed out, grumbling about how America was turning into a nation of “softies.”

  “He always reminded me of a figure straight out of some northern myth,” wrote Patty years later.

  But what struck everyone—and was the sou
rce of endless story swapping—was Berail’s almost scary tolerance for discomfort or pain. Nothing seemed to make him wince. One day he came into the dredge office holding an oil-stained cloth. Inside was part of a finger severed on a machine. He refused to be put on a plane to Fairbanks for treatment. Instead, he said he would wrap the stump in a clean rag he had back at his cabin. His only concession was allowing some antiseptic and a real bandage.

  Another time, Berail broke his arm. Again, he refused an airlift to Fairbanks. He went home and made his own sling. The injury, to no one’s surprise, never healed properly. Berail had to hold his coffee cup with two hands after that.

  Ernest Patty’s son Dale once said Berail “must have had all his nerves disconnected.”

  Another old Yukon hand, Gordon Bertoson, affectionately described Berail as a skookum, a multipurpose word in Pacific Northwest jargon that can describe extraordinary toughness. “He could walk for hundreds of miles, that guy, if he wanted to,” said Bertoson. “Tough, tough.”

  “I don’t know what to say except thank you,” Crane said to Berail. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t come across your cabin. I owe you my life.”

  “Bah, think nothing of it,” said Berail, holding up his hand with the missing finger. “This is why it’s there. By the way, how did the place look? Everything holding up?”

  “To me it looked like paradise,” said Crane. “But, yeah, everything was perfect. I did, however, knock out the skylight frame to use on a sledge.”

  “You had dogs?”

  “Nope. Pulled it myself.”

  Berail shook his head. And people think I’m tough, he must have thought. The idea of a city-boy pilot walking out of the wild would be talked about for years in Woodchopper. Drinks, meals—whatever Crane wanted—were on the house. He was the hero of the moment. His money was no good. This was convenient, because he had none.

  “Glad that old cabin was of use to someone,” said Berail. “I’m not sure I’ll ever get back that way anyway. Getting on in years a bit, I guess.”

  Ames cut in. He wanted to get moving to Circle, the next big town downstream on the Yukon River. Crane handed Ames two handwritten notes for the radio transmitter in Circle operated by the Army Signal Corps. The messages were relayed to Canada and then sent as telegrams. They probably wouldn’t make it out for days at best, but Crane couldn’t pass up the chance. Who knew what could happen between Woodchopper and Ladd Field? One telegram was to his family. Am safe. Stop. Heading back. Stop. Call soon. Stop. Love, Leon. Stop. The other went to Colonel Russell Keillor, one of the commanding officers at Ladd. Or at least he was the last time Crane was there.

  Crane stayed in Woodchopper as a guest of Berail. They talked into the night. Crane’s gut was still out of whack, but it couldn’t easily beg out of Berail’s hospitality. For such an occasion, Berail broke out his beloved 180-proof rum, which he used to have shipped in by Yukon River steamer. He made sure to order enough for the winter before the first freeze. Nowadays, he put in orders with Wien pilots, who weren’t supposed to transport alcohol but made an exception for Berail.

  The next morning, a single-prop Stinson V77 outfitted with skis whined out of the clouds and onto the snow-covered airstrip in Woodchopper. At the commands was veteran bush pilot Bob Rice, who had joined up with Wien Alaska after years of freelance flying to any place with a flat patch to put down a plane. Sometimes it was so cold on an overnight stop that Rice resorted to an old bush-pilot trick: drain the plane’s oil and take out its battery to keep warm indoors.

  You the missing pilot? Rice asked Crane.

  “Not anymore.”

  Ha, right, said Rice. Well, we’ll be on our way soon.

  Nearly everyone in Woodchopper, including Berail, watched the Stinson leave with Crane sitting alongside Willard Grinnell, the pregnant Evelyn, and their two-year-old son, Dick.

  Halfway to Ladd Field, Rice flicked on the radio to the Wien frequency. He asked the operator to call the base.

  “They will care about this,” said Rice when questioned by the Wien operator. “I’ve got a passenger I think Ladd Field will be very interested in.”

  Eighteen

  March 14, 1944

  Fairbanks

  A few minutes later, pilot Bob Rice listened to the radio message relayed from Ladd. Rice turned to Crane and flashed his big smile.

  “They want to know if you are dead or alive, Lieutenant.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the question from Ladd when Wien told them I had you on board. Are you alive or dead?”

  “Hell’s bells,” said Crane. “Guess I’m still alive.”

  Rice went back to the radio. “This is Bob on the inbound Wien flight from Woodchopper. Concerning Lieutenant Crane, tell Ladd that he’s very much alive.”

  For about a minute, they heard only static as Rice set a course southwest over low hills covered in snow. Then the airline operator came back: “Roger that, Bob. They say there are a lot of people waiting to see him.”

  Rice, a wiry man who seemed blessed with a perpetually good mood, gave an exaggerated grin in Crane’s direction. This should be interesting, Rice thought. He’d seen a lot flying the bush. But nothing could match bringing back someone pretty much given up for dead.

  Rice made friends easily. Within a few minutes, he was swapping stories with Crane about managing the tricky skies in Alaska. Rice would have made a good military aviator. He was meticulous in the cockpit. He never went in for the cowboy style of some other bush pilots. Everything was checked and double-checked and, just to be sure, triple-checked. There was no glory, he would say, in crashing.

  Rice’s decision to come to Alaska, however, was a rare snap call. He was racking up flying miles in his native Washington state by taking friends around the countryside and on the occasional run to Seattle for some nightlife. He seemed content. Then someone came into his father’s grocery store with wide-eyed tales about the bush-pilot life in Alaska. Rice was soon packing.

  He literally helped map out Alaska from the air. He arrived in the days before most planes had instruments. Rice compiled “situational awareness” logs. They identified landmarks such as rivers and power lines, giving pilots reference points and an idea of the visibility. As an apparent good-luck charm—and conversation piece—Rice kept the polished bone from a walrus penis. It was as long as his forearm.

  As the plane bounced toward Fairbanks, Crane turned to chat with Willard Grinnell. Crane was deeply intrigued by the backcountry life since finding Ames and his family. It was so different—so free-form—from anything he had known. To Crane, Grinnell seemed to be a bred-in-the-bone woodsman after more than a decade trapping to the east of the Charley River near the Canadian border. Grinnell surprised him, though.

  I was once a total tenderfoot myself, Grinnell told Crane over the noise of the plane.

  What? said Crane. You’re serious? You mean you learned how to live off the land?

  Well, I learned a lot from Evelyn, of course, said Grinnell, giving a quick nod to his wife. She is the real expert. Let’s just say I had some hard on-the-job training in the early days.

  It was—like with Crane—a live-or-die proposition in Grinnell’s first days in the wilds. In October 1933, Grinnell was wedged into a bush plane with some trapping gear, a few provisions, and a fellow named Ben Moreland, who described himself as an out-of-work schoolteacher in Fairbanks. Grinnell and Moreland planned to make a go of trapping. The plane landed on a gravel spit on a river, dropped them off, and headed almost immediately back to Fairbanks. The two men watched in silence as it disappeared over the hills. That night, it dropped down to minus thirty. They had a woodstove, but no tent. “We built a brush lean-to on the bank and, in kapok sleeping bags, hugged the stove—one on each side,” Grinnell wrote in a letter decades later. The next morning, they got to work on a cabin, even though neither had any experience notc
hing logs or making a roof. “It was build or freeze,” Grinnell wrote. “So we built.”

  As soon as the river ice was strong enough, the schoolteacher decided he had had enough. He hiked out and eventually found a seat on a plane back to Fairbanks. Grinnell stayed. The bush was, he would say, in his blood even if he had a lot to learn. His father was among the first prospectors to reach Nome in the winter of 1898–1899 before heading back south with a lot of stories but no riches.

  Rice’s Stinson banked left over Ladd a little before seven. There was still forty-five minutes of daylight. Crane could see Hangar 1, the metal roofs of his barracks, and the runway where the Iceberg Inez took off. At the same time, cars were racing toward Weeks Field, where Rice was instructed to land. It was within sight of Ragle’s house.

  An ambulance and staff car were waiting. So was a group of airmen looking like a gaggle of reporters gathered for a celebrity arrival. Crane looked the part with his dashing new mustache and still dressed in his ragged flight suit. Crane figured he should return to base in uniform as much as possible. In the crowd were some of the guys from the overtime poker game that got Crane off to a late start eighty-five days before.

  “The plane landed and out popped old Crane,” Maine airman Arthur Jordan wrote in his diary that night. “What a thrill that was. We grabbed him and rushed out into the field. En route, he told us the beginning of an unbelievable struggle for survival.”

  Questions were fired from all sides. But he had some of his own first.

  Any news of Pompeo? Hoskin? The rest of the crew?

  Crane was crushed to learn there had been no word on anyone since the crash. The search missions never even spotted the wreck, he was told. Crane thought about his first days lost, scanning the sky for a plane near his spruce-branch SOS. No one ever came close.