The termination dust crept down Paradise Peak first and had now appeared for the first time on Mount Benson, which we could see from our new home in the nearly empty fourplex. At the end of August, we had moved from the Tougases’ old house to this apartment about a block down the hill. It was just Rita, Julianne, and I now, until next summer. Rebekah had returned to Nashville to start her sophomore year in the honors program at Belmont University. Aaron was going to live in our house in Tennessee and feed the cows over the winter. He was a full-time student at Middle Tennessee State University, studying criminal justice. Our farmer neighbor Hubert Ward, who was retired from construction but had grown up raising cattle, was going to make sure that our cow herd did well. I told him he could cut the hay off our place. He said he was doing it for “no reason other than to be neighborly.” Brooke was going to get a new job and attempt to juggle the demands of single motherhood and self-sufficiency. Luke was going to be in the eighth grade, and Jed was going to be a junior in high school. They live with their mother. They had all made a big bunch of money in Alaska and had had a summer filled with thrills and challenges.
We moved to an upstairs apartment. Heat rises. I had not lived in a place this small, other than a tent, since college. There were two tiny bedrooms, a bathroom, and combined kitchen/living area. In the summer, it was used to house tour-boat captains, like Mike and Joe, and boat-crew members all who took people to see the orcas and humpbacks and puffins and glaciers. All summer we’d all burnt our own candles from both ends, lighting up our own skies with all of our own activities and time spent together. Now my candle was flickering—I missed the kids, and they seemed so far away.
When I met Alaskans and told them that I’d been here for the summer, the reaction was often “Yeah, so what?” Most would give me this look, which I didn’t at first understand, until Darien at Espresso Simpatico handed me my usual one morning the first week of October and seemed surprised I was still in town. A dog could lie down in some streets, the Bardarsons’ horses could graze on the corner, and there wouldn’t be enough traffic to worry about now. The ravens’ voices were the dominant sound again at the bottom of our hill.
“When are you leaving Alaska?” Darien asked. He looked up from his serving window in the coffee-cup-shaped structure toward Mount Alice. A fresh dash of termination dust was on it, like a light dose of powdered sugar on a well-done pound cake.
“We’re not,” I said.
“You’re staying the winter?” he said, sounding surprised.
“Yeah, how could you understand this place and not live here for a winter?”
“You know, winter is many Alaskans’ favorite time of the year. We just don’t advertise it.”
Darien looked at me differently from then on, as if I were one of them instead of one of those just passing through.
When you ask people who live in Alaska how long they’ve lived here, many answer with the number of winters they’ve lived through. I heard plenty of people say, “Fifteen winters” … “Eight winters” … “I came up for the summer, been here four winters.”
I was leaving town. I had an eventual destination, a musher’s place near Denali, but first I thought I would take a road trip and see what the coming of winter felt like. It was the first week of October. I would drive the road triangle. It was small for Alaska, big for anywhere else. This triangle is what almost everyone who drives anywhere in Alaska must ride on. Not that many people actually drive all the way to Alaska anymore. They either take a cruise ship through the island passage and never make it out of Southeast Alaska or take a longer cruise and end or begin in Seward. Before the road through Canada, the main way into Alaska for people other than Natives was to take a ship to Seward and the train into the interior.
The triangle is made up of Route 1, Route 2, and Route 3. Route 1 actually goes from Homer 554 miles northeast to the town of Tok. I’d take the road out of Seward until I connected with Route 1 at Tern Lake, then head up to Tok. Just about everyone who comes to Alaska and doesn’t stay in the southern strip of the state comes through Anchorage. Until June 2001, U.S. senator Ted Stevens was head of the Appropriations Committee; they pass out all the money. Some say he is the second or third most powerful person in the U.S. Alaska has more federal money spent on its roads per person than any other state. I’m sure that’s because it’s so expensive to build and maintain roads in Alaska. I heard more people call him Uncle Ted than anything else. I’m surprised there are not statues built in his honor everywhere.
It only took me a couple hours and a few spare minutes to get to Anchorage. From there, it was 328 miles to Tok (pop. 935). (Tok’s not a community established by hippies.) It is almost always the first Alaskan town anyone driving to Alaska comes to. When it’s fifty below zero in winter, the children of Tok don’t have to go to school, but most do anyway. It’s one of those kinds of towns where the school is the center of the community. From Tok, I was going to go to Fairbanks, 206 miles, then down the third leg of the road triangle back to Anchorage. That stretch, passing Mount McKinley and Denali Park, is 358 miles.
I was discovering the truth to the adage that Alaska, although the most formidable and intimidating place I’ve ever been, was really like a small town. A week before Rita and I had been having lunch at Resurrection Road House. It’s on the road to Exit Glacier. I thought I saw a couple mountain goats across the Resurrection River, pure white specks moving among the hard rock. Maggie Kelley, who worked there and had become a friend, came over to say hello. She asked how our Alaskan experience was going. She was one of the Alaskans who had come up to fulfill a dream and work for the summer but never went back home, in her case upstate New York. Maggie asked if we were finding everything we were looking for. I told her that we were finding so much more than we could ever have imagined. But I also mentioned that I was trying to find someone who was going to run the Iditarod, so that maybe I could train with him, follow him around, just absorb his world.
Maggie, whose eyes and whole face sparkle, but who is kind of quiet, said she knew a musher. Her first summer in Alaska, she dug ditches at a hotel around Denali Park, and her boss, who was doing maintenance, plumbing, and electrical, was a guy from California named Jeff King. Maggie said she’d call him; she did. He invited me, through Maggie, whom he trusted implicitly, to stop off at his place near Denali on the last leg of my October road trip.
Some said that fall in Alaska only lasted a week, and if I stayed gone that long, I’d see it all. Some said fall only lasted a day. Maybe for those overwhelmed by winter, it felt that way. I have always been able to sense group spirits, the combination of personalities that is a place. Some people think it’s weird, but when I was walking across America, I could feel the spirit of a place, say Dallas, before I got inside the city limits, within sixty, seventy-five miles of the place. I thought I could feel a sense of foreboding in the air blowing through the storefronts in tourist-centered towns that were already closed or would soon be. What must it be like for those who dread winter, who fear its influence and dark, cold powers? Especially for those who have no way out? It might be like knowing that a hostile army of one hundred thousand was advancing on your town, marching forward, knowing you would be powerless once they arrived.
I was on the Glen Highway section of Route 1, which went through Glennallen, on the way from Anchorage to Tok. I’d heard a few Alaskans trash the area around Palmer and Glennallen as being filled with Christian fundamentalists and gun owners who had several weapons each. Being “filled” is a relative term since on the roadway between Anchorage and Tok, 328 miles, the only town that shows up on my road atlas is Glennallen (pop. 451). This area north and east of Anchorage is “supposed” to be the home of survivalists and anti-government types, but I’ve quit judging people by groups.
I’d just come into Glennallen, which is over halfway to Tok. It is in an enclosed valley about one hundred miles wide by seventy-five miles long. Mountain ranges enclose it, the Chugach Mountains to the south
, the Talkeetna Mountains to the west, the Alaska Range to the north, and the Wrangell Mountains to the east. If you draw a circle two hundred miles in diameter around Glennallen, you would enclose most of the highest mountains in the United States. The chorus in Tom Petty’s spare, energy-laced song “Into the Great Wide Open,” sounded like the perfect sound track for this chilling land during this lonely time of the year.
Somewhere in front of Mount Drum I saw something amazing. There were two V’s in the sky, headed down the valley toward McCarthy. I pulled over and turned off the Explorer and got out. The flying V’s were white and stood out because a high layer of dark clouds was behind them. It was a flock of rare and elegant trumpeter swans leaving with this year’s hatchlings, finally feathered and keeping up. It was so silent and there was so much space, I could hear them. Their wings passing over the land were like a flying magic wand giving warning that soon the world would be as white as they are. It could be tonight.
There isn’t a great deal of color in the landscape other than green after the fireweed is gone. But the green doesn’t last long. The first show of white down here where humans live are these departing flocks of trumpeter swans and the seeds from the cottonwood soaring in the cooling air. I was feeling a bit intimidated by the empty spaces all around me.
The swans honked sporadically to each other, getting farther away from me with each strong wing flap. It was so silent out here that the sounds came to me even from so far off. I was startled when four swans flew right overhead; the sound of their wings passing through the air is what first alerted me. Maybe they were a family trying to hook up somewhere with the rest of their kind.
The trumpeter swans were actually some of the last to leave. Several of the charter-fishing guys I’d gotten to know in Seward had already flown south, and many other seasonal residents had left. The summer was over. Why did so many people look at me as if I were nuts for wanting to spend the winter here? Then again, why did so many show us no respect until we said we would spend the whole winter?
It was October 6. Today was, statewide, the happiest day of the year. It’s good timing to tell every permanent resident in Alaska how much money he or she will get from the state fund, right at the start of these postsummer blues. Let all those part-time Alaskans leave first, head for Hawaii or Mexico or Arizona. The Permanent Fund is what it’s called, and it’s supplied by Alaska’s share of the oil money, plus the interest it makes. This year, each Alaskan citizen would get a check for $1,768.84. If you were a family in Glennallen with a mother and father and three children you got checks totaling $8,844.20. Don’t even think about moving to Alaska just to get a check, you definitely earn it—you must live there one full calendar year, from January to December. So, for example, if you arrive in February, you will have to live there for almost two years.
In 2000, the Permanent Fund dividend was $1,963.86 each and was received by an estimated 585,800 Alaskans. These Alaskans evenly divided up about $1.15 billion, every citizen, no matter whether he or she is a street person in Anchorage or a multimillionaire in Sitka. Many disciplined Alaskans plunk their kid’s check into mutual funds each year. By the time the kid is eighteen and ready to go to college or buy her first boat, she has a nice chunk of money.
Every Alaskan newspaper is full of ads when the dividend is sent out across the state, around the end of December, to promote spending, which usually occurs in January.
Alaska Newspapers, Inc., owns seven local newspapers: The Arctic Sounder, The Tundra Drums, The Valdez Vanguard, The Dutch Harbor Fisherman, The Seward Phoenix Log, The Cordova Times, and The Bristol Bay Times. When the Permanent Fund dividend is paid, they run an insert called “The Alaska Bushmaster, a Shopping Guide for Rural Alaska.” The “What’s Inside” index gives a succinct list of what is essential to survive in the Alaska bush. Some of the items listed: “Air Cargo.” (You’ve got to get stuff to you, and as you know by now, there is often no road.) “Beds.” (They take up too much space in air cargo; better to send them on a barge when the ice leaves.) “Cargo Sleds.” (The ad said, “I even haul my eggs in it … and don’t break any. S.B., customer.”) A cargo sled, perhaps with options like a “rear gas-can rack,” is of major importance when you live, say, in the village of Akiak, on the Kuskokwim River, and you’ve just made a run on your snow machine to Bethel to buy gas, eggs, cases of Coke, and other necessities. “Caskets.” (The ad said, “Alaska Casket Co. caskets ½ price of Funeral Home cost. $700–$850 wood and cloth covered. $3,000 Copper. Shipped anywhere in Alaska.”) “Chain saws.” (Used for cutting wood for heat and logs for your cabin, it’s one of the most important tools anyone in Alaska owns.) “Four-wheelers.” (In many busy communities in Alaska, people don’t have cars or trucks, they have four-wheelers.) “Generators.” (For plenty of people, their own generator is the only electricity they will ever have.)
A highway sign let me know I was getting close to my destination: “Tok 10 miles. Canada 100 miles.” I’d done an Internet search before I left and planned to stay for the night at a B&B named Winter Cabin, which had a nice Web site. I was to turn left at the intersection of Highway 1 and Highway 2, driving northwest toward Fairbanks. The B&B was just a couple miles more, somewhere off this road.
I pulled down a gravel side street back into some woods and saw a sign for Winter Cabin. As I pulled in farther, I could see four or five log cabins in the shadows, a large garage, and stacks and stacks of cut firewood. A powerful-looking woman, with long red hair and freckles who looked to be connected strongly to the earth, yet gentle, walked out of the oldest-looking log cabin. I learned this was the owner, Donna Blasor-Bernhardt, a widow who was born and had lived the first six years of her life in Kansas. She told me later that she never wears sleeveless shirts because her arms are so muscled. Her husband, who died young from a heart attack, was named Dick, and everyone called him Big Dick because he was six feet tall and 280 pounds; Donna could beat Dick arm wrestling. She invited me into her cabin to show me around. I was the only guest at the B&B—there aren’t many travelers coming through Tok in October. I would get my first snow in Alaska in Tok, a mild, quick-melting, wet snow.
DONNA’S LIST
On Donna’s refrigerator was a “Before Winter” list, with all the things Donna needed to do every year to get ready for winter. Winter in Tok needs to be spelled in all capital letters, WINTER. Once it got really cold, which could be soon, Donna could not leave her cabin again overnight until spring. Her “Before Winter” list was not just the list of a compulsively organized person, it was a matter of survival.
Most of her list had already been done and crossed off by the time I arrived. Winter in the interior of Alaska is an intensely serious property- and life-threatening experience. The silent, invading severe cold can wreak havoc, drive its victims insane. It can crush and kill the weak, people who would not be called weak anywhere else. Imagine having plumbing, water and sewer pipes, in places where it gets fifty below zero. When the temperature drops to zero degrees Fahrenheit or below, she turns off her freezers. When it is below zero, especially way below zero, the motors have to work too hard to “warm” the freezer up to the proper temperature. The consequences of not respecting winter in Alaska can be extreme. Consider not being able to leave your shelter from sometime in October until the end of March, even April if you heat your home with wood. It’s the reason the dreamers who come to Alaska to live in the wilderness don’t make it through the winter unless they are extraordinarily prepared or living in southern coastal places. It’s the reason Donna spends months carefully carrying out and crossing off the “to dos” on her list.
Donna Blasor-Bernhardt “Before Winter” List
1. Gas in gas barrel. (She couldn’t afford it this year.)
2. Firewood, need 10 cords. (Donna cuts it herself.)
3. Fill propane tank. (It runs the cooking stove and propane lights.)
4. Caulk B&B logs. (It’s a never-ending job, keeping the spaces between logs sealed in the three cab
ins.)
5. Sand B&B logs. (To accept the oil that preserves the logs.)
6. Oil B&B logs. (To keep logs from rotting.)
7. 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel in bathhouse tank. (The fuel Donna, her son, and his family need to heat hot water for showers, laundry, etc.)
8. Get Pea’s medicine. (Pea is Donna’s old neutered male cat.)
9. Make wildberry jelly from rose hips, cranberries, raspberries, and blueberries. (She made plenty of jelly, using everything except blueberries, because the bears beat her to her favorite patch.)
10. Clean out freezers. (Of old moose and caribou. It’s two years old, Donna will can it.)
11. Stop my roof leaks. (This wasn’t done yet.)
12. Stop B&B roof leaks. (Done.)
13. Replace stovepipe. (Done. One of the most dangerous things in an Alaskan winter is for a rusted-out stovepipe to catch a cabin on fire on some ten-dog night.)
14. Get monitor heater. (No, she can’t afford it this year, very popular in Alaska, and also quite expensive.)
15. Cut wildflowers and weeds on roof. (There are two inches of self-hardening foam on top of her cabin roof. I’ve seen entire trailers coated in the stuff. Then on top of that there are six inches of dirt, where Donna has planted poppies, fireweed, and other wildflowers. The fireweed grows six feet tall. One winter she thought she’d leave them, like a huge dried-weed arrangement, but then a spark from the woodstove started a wildfire on her roof.)
16. Get cat food and litter. (She got eight fifty-pound bags of each.)
17. Clean out floor fridge. (In the middle of Donna’s kitchen is a trapdoor, which opens to a naturally cold food-storage place.)