Looking for Alaska

Eleanor went to college in Wisconsin, where she could major in photography and weaving. After graduation Eleanor became a commercial photographer for a large, multinational corporation located in Waltham, Massachusetts, and stayed in this familiar world for a few years.

  Every so often her dad, a stockbroker whose passion was Plimoth Plantation, would write or speak of adventure and inspiration to his daughter, who craved it and wasn’t finding it where she was. She looked up to her father. The Reverend Peter Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University and Minister of Memorial Church, said of her father in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, “It was Harry’s lavish investment of himself in all its wonderful and generous complexity that was his ultimate gift. In the extraordinary vitality of that institution in Plymouth, known the world over, we can see the life recollected of Henry Hornblower, II.” Eleanor read these things about her father, heard him speaking to her, and became determined that she would someday do something with her own life.

  Her radical change started when a friend from college sent her a picture from Unalakleet, Alaska. It was of a snowbank that almost covered entire houses. On top of this snowbank you could see a roof, some doghouses, and the face of a lone husky. Eleanor pinned up the picture in her office in Massachusetts, and eventually the picture and her friend’s invitation to visit pulled her to Unalakleet. Her friend worked for Head Start and lived in a cabin that was smaller than the pantries in the houses of the people with whom Eleanor had grown up.

  When Eleanor got off the plane in Unalakleet—just the trip must have been startling for a young former debutante—no one was around except a tall, “really good-looking” young man. He walked up and said he was her ride. His name was Johnny; her friend was up the frozen Unalakleet River and Johnny was to run her up there on his snow machine. Eleanor was prepared for Massachusetts cold, but it was way below zero here. Soon, on the river, she was frozen. What happened next may be one of the best ways I’ve ever heard to make an immediate connection with a person. Eleanor’s feet felt like blocks of ice, so Johnny, who had brought her to this place he loved, did all he could to warm them: he opened his parka and shirt and put her feet on his strong, angular body. They became a couple not long after that.

  Johnny is Johnny Sarren. He has a heart of gold, and his smile is half from the devil and half from God. Housing has always been tight in Unalakleet; just getting materials to build is incredibly expensive and difficult. Johnny and Eleanor first lived in a tent out on the river, then they moved the tent to the spit on the other side of the river’s mouth. A wind blew the tent away, including everything inside, such as Eleanor’s full set of Nikon cameras and their Coleman stove. Johnny did much of the cooking; he’s their son’s choice for cook, even now. They finally got a place to live above the Youth Center, which they ran. Eleanor never believed in too much furniture, mainly because it’s so hard to come by. She used an open drawer for both her sons’ baby beds. She had her family—it was a struggle, but there was much about it she loved.

  Eleanor loaded Rebekah and me into a friend’s truck for a ride out the road. Up on a hill, looking back, the ocean seemed so large, like space must be to a satellite. The land spread out before us too, the Nulato Hills to the northeast. Eleanor was enraptured when she spoke of the crunch the tundra makes when you walk on it. She collected Hudson Bay tea out here and remembered giving her sons insect nets to collect butterflies and other creatures. They built a cabin out on the river where they could go to escape the village, catch silver salmon. They lived out there for a while, but it became too difficult for Eleanor to snow machine their boys into school every day and back, nine miles each way.

  We turned back toward the outskirts of town. This side of town had the new homes, brighter colors, small, double-pane windows. I could see a woman with long black hair walking barefoot down the gravel road, away from us. As we got near her, I thought I heard crying, then a kind of desperate wailing. As we approached her, we had to slow down because she was oblivious to us. There were so few cars on the roads; year-round, most got around Unalakleet on four-wheelers or by walking.

  Eleanor knew who she was. Everyone who lived here knew everyone, but Eleanor, as postmaster, really knew everyone.

  “Oh, she’s been drinking,” she said.

  When the barefoot woman heard us and moved to the side, she clawed at her long black hair, wailed, and cried.

  After a minute Eleanor said, “You know, much of what goes on here is seen. Where I grew up, that same things went on, it’s just that you didn’t see the person walking down the street.”

  We pulled into a gravel road—all the roads were gravel—near Eva’s house where we were planning to meet up with Eva again. I detected the marvelous smell of wood smoke coming from someone’s fish house. Eva and her daughter Linda were standing out by their drying racks and smokehouse. By their feet were twenty-one king salmon. They were holding their ulus, curved knives, and there was much work to be done, cutting these kings into strips, hanging them to dry, then smoking some of them. One of Eva’s nephews came by, wanting some salmon stomachs, an early-season delicacy. We all watched Eva’s masterful cuts with the ulu, perfection with every cut. No wonder one of her sons is an orthopedic surgeon.

  Eleanor needed to get home, see about her youngest son, who’d been tubing on the river with his friends in their wet suits. Her older son had already left for California where he was going to college.

  “You know, one of the reasons I’ve stayed here this long, and who knows how long I’ll be here, is because life here is so out in the open. I like it better that way.” Eleanor hugged both of us and went home. We hung around Eva and Linda for a couple hours until they finished cutting up all the king salmon.

  As Rebekah and I walked the hundred feet to the little fishing lodge where we’d rented a room, Rebekah spoke up. She had been quiet but attentive all afternoon, which is her way.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, honey.”

  “I changed my mind. I want to be like Eva and Eleanor.”

  22

  Landing on a Roof

  I had second thoughts when I saw the mountains in front of us. It was the Alaska Range and we were flying toward it in a plane that seemed about the size of a lawn chair. I’m not much for keeping track of dates and times, but I know exactly what day it was—September 7, 2000, and we’d taken off at 1:08 P.M. It was now somewhere around 1:30 P.M. I’m sure of this because I was in the plane with my father-in-law, Jerry Jorgensen. Jerry keeps exacting lists and records; he’s a farmer and must know exactly what day it is. He needs to know how much rain fell in this rain gauge from year to year in the fields by the Kubiaks or the Chamberlains and everywhere else. He must know how many bushels of corn came from each acre, and which variety of corn, was that Pioneer or DeKalb? I didn’t know there were so many types in the world. He needs to know precisely how much fertilizer to apply on this field and that one. Since corn sells for about the same money as it did twenty years ago, but nothing else in farming does, it’s imperative to be a detail person, to crush every penny, to work every moment, in order to succeed.

  The first few miles of this flight was nice, the first few minutes, that is. To begin, Jerry just doesn’t like flying. And if he knew where we were going right now—if I did—we might be turning around. In life, sometimes it’s better not to know. Then we were over Cook Inlet, though as we looked down, it looked more like an ocean. Flying over, I’d seen white, angelic-looking beluga whales here before. As much as I’d flown in Alaska, I don’t know why I was so nervous. So far the sky was clear, the wind moderate. We were headed toward a gigantic mountain range. Maybe it was that this was my last trip before leaving Alaska and I didn’t want to test my standing with God or fate or another aircraft engine, even this Cessna 185.

  Or my apprehension could have had something to do with being responsible for Jerry. When you picture Jerry and me together, think of the Odd Couple. He recently turned seventy, a
nd he’s the most precious cargo in the world to my mother-in-law, Dorothy (which is Julianne’s middle name), and to my wife and the rest of his six children and his twenty-seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Jerry was sitting in the copilot seat. Twenty minutes later, I didn’t think that was the wisest choice.

  Once we crossed Cook Inlet, we were flying low over small lake- and pond-dotted wetlands. I was looking for brown bears and saw one running at the edge of a lake. I saw a pair of trumpeter swans, flying elegantly below us. I looked forward and noticed Jerry was looking straight ahead at the mountains capped by snow and ice rising sharply to over seven thousand feet. Either he could not move his head from fear, or he had a stiff neck, or he was enraptured by the view! From sea level to over seven thousand feet happened in less than fifty miles—quite dramatic, as a proper English person might put it. Some of my more irreverent friends would have burst out the unprintable.

  Our pilot was John Clark. He was tall and serious, to comfort us, until he started “entertaining” us with stories of his adventures. Beluga Lake was to our north. Did the beluga whales come up from Cook Inlet into that lake?

  I began looking forward too. John had said we’d go through the mountains in one pass or another, or turn back. There was no way to go over these, some of the giants of Alaska. The passes have localized weather coming off the glaciers and valleys and mountaintops, and everything can change, requiring quick turnarounds, or worse. I didn’t want to hear about worse; I’d already heard from Hobo and other friends who were pilots. I hadn’t said a word to Jerry about it. John didn’t let us down, so to speak; he told us a story through our headphones about landing on someone’s roof.

  It seems John was coming into Anchorage for a landing one day. It is the busiest private-plane airport in the world. Floatplanes are landing in the lake all over the place, Cessna 180s and Piper Super Cubs and Twin Otters coming and going constantly, especially in the summer and fall. John’s single engine died on the way in. At this point, I thought about reaching up and pulling the plug on Jerry’s headphones, or turning the volume knob on it near the side of his head. From so many years on tractors and combines, especially before they had cabs, Jerry’s hearing isn’t the best. Maybe he wouldn’t ask John to repeat himself.

  Before I could decide what to do, John readjusted his mouthpiece, so we could hear him even better. John said that he was losing altitude fast, and below him all around were planes, white birch trees, some spruce, some houses. Like all fine Alaska bush pilots, he looked for the best place to land. To you and me some of the places they land seem insane. He realized, he told us, he wasn’t going to make the runway. He looked for anything level, away from the trees. One idea he had was to fly between two trees and take the wings off first, which he did because the fuel tanks are in the wings. What he did then was find the flat roof of a two-story house. He brought the plane down “gently,” didn’t even break through into the bedrooms. The house belonged to a family of Korean Americans; the only one home was the grandpa, and he didn’t speak much English. Whoops, I thought, taking father-in-law into Alaskan bush, not starting out too well. Bad story choice, John.

  Then we flew over Chakechamna Lake, which is more than ten miles long. On our left there were long and narrow glaciers, unnamed, growing between the mountaintops of the Neacola Mountains. With steep mountains less than a mile away on either side of us, the winds were focused, banging us around. At least it was clear here. John seemed much more focused. We were headed for Merrill Pass, one of the most treacherous in Alaska. Something like thirteen planes have crashed in here. I didn’t mention that to Jerry. It was so narrow—how could a plane ever turn around in some of these spots if weather ahead blocked them? All this was flying by sight; there’s no instrument-flying here.

  I’m not sure where we were and Jerry wasn’t taking notes. His powerful right hand had a hold of a handgrip. It’s fortunate Cessnas are made with the toughest materials. I think we were near the headwaters of Another River. I wondered who named it that. Somewhere before or after Goldpan Peak, 7,450 feet in elevation, John began talking again. The mountainsides were so close together I hoped for stable air. It was like flying into Shangri-la. John told us that this was the most dangerous place in one of the most dangerous passes in the world because it was so narrow. About halfway through it made a turn to the left. If the clouds socked in this area, turning around was a bad idea, and going forward even worse. John said to look down; I expected to see some wildlife, but instead saw two planes that had crashed and never been recovered. Wonderful, I thought. Jerry had relied on me to take him to a place where he could live out one of his lifelong dreams. I don’t think peering down on two completely wrecked planes on the floor of some wicked mountain valley was part of it.

  Then we made the sharp turn, and everything below us and above us and beside us was snow, ice, glaciers, wild waterfalls, gray steep stone, sheer rock walls. Horrible places to crash. John seemed delighted. This guy is nuts, I thought. No, it was just such a relief to be able to see. When you’re flying through this pass, you don’t know what the conditions are until you get there. Can you imagine flying in here without being able to see 50 percent of what’s waiting and unforgiving?

  He pointed to our left. After a tall, sharp peak, there was a flattened mountaintop. Lying atop it far above the valley below was another wrecked plane.

  “Now there, look.” His voice came in too clear, the rough air was smoother. “That guy almost made it.”

  There atop a snowfield, atop a mountain, was a crashed plane, looking innocent.

  “That pilot realized too late and at too low an altitude he wasn’t going to make it any further west into Merrill Pass, so he tried to make it over that, but obviously didn’t. You must be thinking in here all the time,” John said.

  That was the problem right now, thinking.

  John crammed us through the pass and we were over the headwaters of the Merrill River. The tiny, steep valley widened, then widened some more, into the Lake Clark Wilderness. Then we popped into the Stony River valley, lush, swampy, green—prime moose habitat. The next mountains with names on the other side of this valley even deeper into the wilderness were the Revelation Mountains. On either side were mountains called Babel Tower, the Angel, Golgotha, Mount Hesperus, and the Apocalypse. Somewhere back in that pass Jerry may have thought we were in the Apocalypse. Almost no one, even Natives, lived out here full-time. The only village anywhere nearby was Lime Village (pop. 47).

  No matter how closely I searched the land below, I could see no evidence of anything man-made. There were natural meadows, stretches of blackened tree trunks where forest fires had been called burns, mountains that shot up like rockets, a river dividing itself at times around gravel bars, deep, dark forest. John said as many wolves and other predators lived down there as anywhere in Alaska. Then finally I saw a couple cabins, one with smoke trailing out of it. We flew lower and lower directly over the river, lower still, slower, slower, lower, and then landed gently on a sandbar on the side of the river. We had arrived at Jim Harrower’s Stony River Lodge, and like everyone who comes through that pass for the first time, we were delighted to be here. Jerry, being a man of the ground, seemed especially happy to set his feet on the solid stuff.

  A couple people stood near the runway. Don, a former guide, was now basically manager of this place. Patrick had just pulled up with a four-wheeler and a cart to haul gear. We could see a small tractor and some elevated fuel tanks. How did they ever get any of that out here? They had taken the tractor completely apart and flown it out piece by piece in the small planes that are the lifeblood of this wide-open world. These guys who flew around the Stony River drainage, in sight of the Revelation Mountains and the Apocalypse, over Tundra Lake, landing on bodies of water that would shrink your underwear to one-third its size, were some of the best bush pilots in the world. Since Jerry wasn’t even a big fan of flying big commercial airlines, it was good that it would be a few days before w
e took off again. We were planning to go into one of the most isolated places in Alaska I’d ever been.

  A trail led into the woods and away from the landing strip, and at the end was a collection of wood cabins with rough-cut siding. The oldest-looking one was a log cabin. Some of the buildings were built in the style of a Western saloon. How did they build places this nice out here? Jim Harrower and his people had hauled in a portable sawmill and everything else they needed, each large thing taken apart, flown in, and reassembled. Jim’s an exacting and precise man; he’s a dentist, a renowned bush pilot, a Dall sheep hunter, a world-class outfitter who also offers eco-tourism. I’m not sure which of these things requires more precision, but Jim’s life involves doing extremely daring things precisely.

  We were here because I had called an Alaskan friend of mine, Kevin Delaney, and told him that my seventy-year-old father-in-law—“the old farmer,” as he called himself—had a wish, and Rita and I wanted that wish to come true. Jerry farms many acres near Lansing, Michigan. He began farming for himself right out of high school and married my mother-in-law in the early 1950s. Their first child was Rita—we’re both the eldest of six children—three boys and three girls. Under the definition of work ethic, you might find Jerry Jorgensen. He would be embarrassed by that; a Midwesterner and on top of that a farmer, he doesn’t like to draw attention to himself. I’m proud of him, so I guess I can. I wouldn’t want him to get aggravated with me and throw up his dukes, but I think I can outrun him, possibly, as long as he’s on foot. I’ve been hunting with him in Wyoming, and when he’s on a four-wheeler, you need God on your side to follow him. Deer hunting is one of the few things Jerry does for the sheer joy of it. I take that back—he gets great joy out of plowing the earth, harvesting a high-yielding field of soybeans, or seeing a healthy newborn Holstein female calf born at their dairy, Ri-Val-Ree Farm. Ri is Rita, first daughter, Val is after Valerie, second daughter; and Ree is after LeAnne Rennee, third daughter.