So it became a simple matter for LeRoy to borrow from all of them, fly down to Seattle, pick up his bright new Cessna-185 with permanent skis and retractable wheels, and fly it back to Fairbanks, where he became the busiest courier in the Prudhoe operation.
With all maintenance and fuel costs covered by the company, he netted $165,000 the first year.
One night as Hilda Flatch totted up her family's income, which she banked for them, she broke into laughter, and when her husband asked: 'What's so funny?' she replied:
'Remember how they warned us when we were starving in Minnesota? "If you go to Alaska, you'll never grow nothin', and the polar bears'll eat you"?'
Salaries like these lured workmen from all over the United States, and Fairbanks was filled with the babble of strange accents as gape-mouthed laborers from Nebraska and Georgia paid $12.50-plus for a breakfast of one cup of coffee, one pancake, one egg and one strip of bacon. Dinner, of course, ran into the high twenties. Not many of these hastily imported workmen would remain in Alaska when the twin Golcondas of the oil field and the pipeline ended, but those who did remain added enormously to the vitality and excitement of Alaskan life. They tended to be outdoorsmen who loved the Alaskan patterns of life and served as the twentieth century version of the frontiersmen. They were welcome additions.
Oil riggers, bulldozer drivers, welders for the pipeline, lawyers with vivid imaginations such men continued the tradition of the gold-field immigrant, the daring men who built the first towns and the sailors who served on the Bear under Mike Healy, and once more Alaska created the impression that it was a land for men. But there were also women who sought their fortunes in this wild frontier, just as in the old days: nurses, wives, dance-hall girls, fugitives like Missy Peckham, and a few daring souls who simply wanted to see what Alaska was like.
In these years one young woman in particular experienced the lure of Alaska, and her coming north set many wheels in motion.
A FLAMBOYANT MAYOR OF NEW YORK ONCE OPPOSED censorship by saying 'No girl was ever seduced by a book,' but in 1983 a young woman in Grand Junction, Colorado, was deceived by a magazine cover. Kendra Scott, twenty-five years old, was teaching her geography class about Eskimos of the Far North, when Miss Deller, the librarian, came to her room with two books Kendra had requested:
'I've checked these out in your name. You can keep them till April.'
Kendra thanked her, since good material on Eskimos was not easy to come by, and Miss Deller added: 'And I've brought you our latest copy of the National Geographic, the February issue, but you can have it for only two weeks. We have another request for it.'
Since Kendra already knew what was in the two books, she looked first at the magazine, and when she did, she was lost forever. On the cover was one of the most ravishing pictures of childhood she had ever seen. Against the white background of a blizzard in northern Alaska, a little girl or it might have been a boy, for only the eyes were visible was walking into the blowing snow, covered from head to toe in the colorful dress of her people: big fur slippers, blue denim trousers double thick, colorful smock edged with fur, bright beaded belt, two caps, one of white wool, the bigger one of heavy quilted corduroy edged in wolverine fur to repel ice and snow, and an enormous brown knitted scarf wrapped around her head three times. Her hands were protected in brightly decorated mittens, and Kendra could only guess that underneath the smock she must have had three or four more layers of clothing.
But what made the child adorable, and Kendra had convinced herself that it had to be a girl, was the resolute manner in which she pressed forward into the storm, her little body fighting the blizzard, her determined eyes, all that could be seen, staring ahead at the goal to be achieved despite the driving snow. It was a glorious portrait of childhood, a depiction of man's will to survive, and Kendra's heart went out to that child battling the elements.
And for a protracted spell she was not in a comfortable elementary school in Grand Junction but on the northern slopes of the arctic, and her class did not consist of middleclass white American children with a few interesting Mexicans thrown in, but a group of Eskimos living in darkness half the year and in bright sunlight nearly twenty-four hours a day the other half. Kendra had been taken prisoner by a little fur-bound child on a magazine cover and she would never again be the same.
For some time she had been aware that she ought to change, that her life was heading into such sterility that unless she made a radical shift, she was destined for a desolate, picayune existence. The responsibility was hers, that she admitted, but her mother, a distraught and frightened woman who lived with Kendra's father in Heber City, Utah, some thirty miles northeast of Provo, was a contributing factor. The Scotts were not Mormons, but they shared the stern discipline which that religion imposed, and when Kendra graduated from high school they enrolled her, without any input from her, at the respectable university in Provo, Brigham Young, where young men were taught to be FBI agents and young women to be God-fearing and obedient wives.
At least, that's what Mrs. Scott believed.
'The good part about Brigham Young,' Mrs. Scott told her neighbors in Heber City, 'is that Grady and I can drive down most weekends to see how Kendra's doing.' And this they did, wanting to know what classes she was taking, whether her professors were 'decent, God-fearing men,' and checking particularly on her roommates, three girls with such disparate backgrounds that the elder Scotts had to be suspicious of at least two of them. One was a Salt Lake City Mormon, so she was all right, but another was from Arizona, where anything could happen, and the third from California, which was even worse.
But Kendra assured her parents that the two outsiders, as Mrs. Scott called them, were more or less respectable and that she, Kendra, would not allow them to corrupt her. This phrase, corrupt her, loomed large in the Scott set of values, for Mrs. Scott saw the world as an evil place, more than three-quarters of whose citizens were bent on corrupting her daughter, and she was morbidly suspicious of any men who hove within her daughter's orbit:
'I want you to tell me about any man who approaches you, Kendra. You simply must be on your guard against them, and a young girl is not always the best judge of a young man's character.'
So during her weekly visits to Brigham Young, Mrs. Scott pumped Kendra for a detailed report on any young man whose name surfaced during her long interrogations of her daughter: 'Where's he from? How old is he? Who are his parents? What business are they in? Why is he studying geology? What do you mean, he spent last summer vacation in Arizona? What was he doing in Arizona?' After eight or ten such grillings Kendra summoned up the nerve to ask her mother: 'How were you ever able to find a husband, if you had such endless suspicions?' and Mrs. Scott saw nothing impertinent in the question, for she felt this was a major problem for any young woman: 'Your father was raised in a God-fearing family in South Dakota and he was not contaminated by going to any college or university.' Kendra thought:
Nor was he contaminated by anything else like books or newspapers or talk in a corner saloon. But as soon as she voiced this opinion to herself, she was ashamed of it.
Grady Scott was a fine, trustworthy man who ran a good hardware store in Heber City, and if he lacked the courage to stand up against his wife, he had the character to run his business and his life honorably. During these long interrogations of his daughter in the Brigham Young dormitory, he rarely intruded.
In her four years at college, Kendra dated only two men, and they were so similar that they could have been twins: slight of build, washy-blond of hair, hesitant in speech and awkward in movement. The first young man had asked her out three times; the second, seven or eight. But the evenings were so painfully boring and unproductive that Kendra deemed them hardly worth the effort, especially when her mother asked at least fifteen questions about each young man and ended up by actually driving the forty-two miles south to Nephi to investigate the parents of the second young fellow. Mrs. Scott was most favorably impressed with the couple, classify
ing them as 'the best of Mormon society, and that's high praise.' She gave Kendra vigorous encouragement to pursue her friendship with the young man, but both he and Kendra were so embarrassed by the entire procedure and so little interested in each other that what Mrs. Scott called 'Kendra's courtship' ended with neither a bang nor a whimper. In fact, it didn't end at all. It just sort of tailed off like a slow groan.
Kendra graduated at age twenty-one with a B-plus average in education, and her choice of four or five good public schools in which to teach, and now came the first crisis in her life, for one of the schools was in Kamas, Utah, less than twenty-five miles from home, and both the elder Scotts felt that this was where Kendra should teach, at least for the first five or six years of her career, because, as Mrs. Scott pointed out: 'You could come home for weekends.'
In an act of defiance which startled and alarmed her parents, Kendra accepted, without discussing the matter with them, a job at the school that was farthest from home, in Grand Junction across the state line in Colorado, but even this was within striking distance of Heber City, and during Kendra's first autumn in her new school, Mrs. Scott drove the two hundred and fifty-odd miles on six different weekends to discuss with her daughter the problems she was facing, the women teachers with whom she was associating, and whatever men in either the school or the town she had come to know. It was Mrs. Scott's firm opinion that the men of Colorado were much more dangerous than those in Utah, and she advised her daughter to steer clear of them: 'Why you turned down that nice young man from Nephi, I will never know.'
'I didn't turn him down, Mother. I never had the opportunity. Nor did I seek it.'
Aware that their child was developing headstrong tendencies, the bedside prayers in Grand Junction now began to take subtle shifts: 'Almighty God, keep Your daughter Kendra mindful of Your precepts, protect her from arrogant and hasty judgments, and with Your constant supervision, help her to remain pure.'
THE LIBRARIAN, Miss DELLER, HANDED KENDRA THAT copy of the National Geographic on a Tuesday morning, and during the next three days the little girl heading into the blizzard haunted the younger teacher. She did not turn the magazine over to her students, but kept it on her desk through Wednesday and Thursday, where she stared at it from time to time. On Thursday night she took it home with her, and studied it with great intensity before going to bed. On Friday she rose early, placed the magazine beside her mirror, and compared herself with that extraordinary child. In the glass she saw herself clearly and with neither exaggeration nor denigration; but whenever she compared herself with that child heading into the blizzard, she had to admit with great pain that she came off second best:
I'm intelligent, always got good grades, and I know how to contribute to group projects.
I mean, I'm not a dope, nor a recluse, nor anyone sick in the head. And although I'm not a cover girl, I'm not repulsive. Men do stare at me now and then, and I think that if I gave them encouragement... Well, that's neither here nor there.
Good complexion, good posture, hair sort of blah but I've got to get rid of those braids, no cavities, thank God, not overweight, no disfiguring blemishes. Not much of a smile, but maybe one could be engineered. And I am liked by my students, I really am, and I think by the other faculty members too.
And then, with the child beside her, she broke into convulsive sobs and uttered words which shocked her as she said them and appalled her when she remembered them later:
'I'm such a horseshit fucking failure.'
Recoiling as if someone had struck her across the face, she stared at herself in the mirror, clapped her hand across her mouth, and mumbled: 'What did I say? What possessed me?' And then, when her passion subsided, she knew exactly what she had said and what had impelled her:
In comparison with that child I'm a shameless coward. Disgustingly, I've allowed my mother to dominate me. I believe in God, but I do not believe that He sits there with a magnifying glass watching everything that an elementary-school teacher in Grand Junction is doing. I've been afraid even to go out in my snowfall, let alone my blizzard.
She grabbed the magazine, brought it to her lips, and kissed the little Eskimo girl in her heavy clothes edged with fur: You've saved my life, little one. You've given me what I never had before. Courage.
Dressing hurriedly, she marched boldly to Terrence's Tresses, the leading hair boutique of the region. Plumping herself grimly in the chair, she said: 'Terrence, you've got to cut off these damned braids.'
In some shock Terrence said: 'But, mam'selle, no one around here has braids as lovely as yours,' but she rebuffed him: 'My mother uses them to strangle me.' Since this obviously baffled Terrence, she added: 'Whenever she comes to visit me she insists on plaiting my braids sitting me on a chair before her ... to reinforce my captivity.'
'But what will mam'selle do to replace them? What style, I mean?' and she said: 'We'll settle that later,' and as the scissors snipped away she cried exultantly: 'Now I can breathe.'
Shorn of her burden, she and Terrence studied a score of photographs showing varied styles, and finally he said: 'If I may be so bold, mam'selle, that Dutch-boy bob would be perfect for you, clean and neat like your personality,' and she said: 'Go for it!' Deftly he applied comb and scissor and spray, producing a result which made Kendra look more sophisticated but at the same time more youthfully adventurous.
'I like it,' she said as she hurried off to school, skipped down the hall, and burst into the library: 'Miss Deller, I'm going to be very bold'
'Kendra! I hardly knew you. What a marvelous hairdo! But what about those lovely long braids?'
'Thanks, but my problem is something quite different, and I'm embarrassed, really I am, to bring it up.'
'Shoot! I'm a good listener.' Miss Deller had short bobbed hair and a brusque manner of speech and movement; she came, Kendra thought someone had said, from Arkansas.
Kendra sat down, took a deep breath, and said: 'On the weekends, some weekends, that is, you go over to that lodge in Gunnison, don't you?'
'Several of us do. Special rates to teachers. We come from all around Salida, Montrose.'
'What is it, exactly?'
'A kind of seminar. We invite lecturers from universities. People show slides of Arabia, Uruguay, that sort of thing. Sunday morning most of us go to church, and then we come home, refreshed.'
'Do you have to go ... with a man, that is?'
'Heavens, no. Some do. And sometimes a teacher from here meets a keen guy from Salida, but that happens as the dice happen to roll.'
Taking a deep breath, Kendra asked: 'Could I go? I mean this weekend?'
'Of course! Some of us wondered about asking you before, but we felt you were rather ... What shall I say? Aloof, maybe.'
'I was.' She said thanks so simply and with her head so low that Miss Deller, who was eight years older, left her desk and put her arm about Kendra's shoulder: 'What is it, kid?'
'My mother. She comes on so strong, like maybe a neutron bomb, new improved economy-size.'
'Yes, some of us have noticed.'
'I want to go with you to Gunnison. I'll leave a note on my door that I'm off for the weekend.'
'Tell her you've headed to Kansas City with a truckdriver.'
'Now wait, she's basically a good woman.'
'I'm sure that every neutron bomb is convinced that it's basically good and that whatever it does is for the betterment of mankind. Tell her to go to hell. Don't ask, just tell her you're going. We'll be expecting you."
For just a moment Kendra feared that in asking for help from Miss Deller, she was getting in over her head. What did she know about the librarian? Was she, as her mother would have phrased it, 'a nice girl'? And what went on at the lodge in Gunnison?
But Miss Deller, as if she knew what Kendra was thinking, squeezed her shoulder and said: 'It's never as bad as you think it's going to be, except when it's lots worse.
If you ask me, Kendra, you better break loose.' Returning to her desk, she snapped her fi
ngers and said: 'I do believe you had the right idea. Just leave a note. Do that four or five times and she'll stop coming over.'
At the lunch break that Friday, Kendra ran home and typed a neat note, which read:
Dear Mother, I've had to attend a school seminar in Montrose. Sorry. Very unexpected.
Kendra After hurriedly packing two changes of clothes, she gathered up her snow gear and hurried back to school, where she taught with verve about Eskimos.
FOUR TEACHERS DROVE THE BEAUTIFUL HUNDRED AND thirty miles of mountain road to Gunnison together Miss Deller, a woman science teacher, an assistant football coach and Kendra and they were a lively lot. The coach was married, but his wife had been to the Gunnison lodge and had small liking for snow sports or heady discussions, so she stayed home. After an analysis of what was wrong with the administration of the Grand Junction schools and a castigation of western Colorado politics, talk turned to national affairs, and all agreed that President Reagan represented a healthy turn to the right. Said the coach: 'High time we got some discipline in this country. He's on the right track.'
To Kendra's surprise, the other three were acutely interested in what a Mormon university was like, and since she had enjoyed Brigham Young she gave a good report, but the coach asked: 'Do they still discriminate against blacks? You know, you can't have a decent football team these days without them.'