Four Quarters of Light (21 page)

I was not pleased. The idea of being stuck in the arsehole of nowhere with a wife and two young children and a ferry to catch was not something I wanted to think about. But I could tell from the man's expression that sympathy was not one of his finer points; neither did I think he was open to any kind of persuasion. A rifle propped against the door dissuaded me from letting the perverse bugger know what I thought of him, his seedy petrol station and his cowboy toy. I had not forgotten Mike's warning about the police and murder in these parts. I climbed back into the cab and roared off.

‘What's the problem?' Audrey asked.

‘God knows,' I answered. ‘The crabby bastard has obviously been sucking too many lemons all day.' It was pointless to try to explain as there was no explanation. I drove on.

Then there was the discovery of a burned-out encampment, replete with teepees and log shelters. It had been some kind of community spread over two and a half acres, but not one of the pyramid tents or the log cabins had burned down, though there were buildings that had been razed to the ground, or as near as
damn it. No natural fire spreads through any structures that are sited so far apart. The fact that they remained, blackened shells, the tents still hung with hide covers and the log buildings upright, were evidence to me that no natural catastrophe had occurred here. The fact that no-one had returned to rebuild it puzzled me, but only for a moment. The whole place just stood there in a state of semi-dereliction, begging too many questions. I would have loved to explore, but time was more pressing than my curiosity. Anyway, the sight contributed to the growing feeling that there was something unreal and uncomfortable about the place.

We were now getting near the sea and our jump-off point in Valdez. The sky was filling up with gulls and my ornithological studies at Denali helped me to identify the occasional arctic tern halfway through their twenty-three-thousand-mile annual migration. As we neared the ocean more and more birds presented themselves. I recognized harlequin ducks and the occasional low-flying V of some species of goose or swan that reminded me of Pat and Mary's debate on the Chena. Trumpeter swan or Canada or snow goose – it made no difference to me. But they did serve to remind me that where I was heading I would be alone, without the comfort of my own birds-of-a-feather.

I was beginning again to sense the omnipotence of water in the landscape we were driving through. As the fish started to move upstream to spawn they triggered havoc in the skies, screaming birds intoxicated with the fish feast below them. Sea and river vegetation also exploded, larval life and plankton multiplied and matured at incredible speed, and fish life with it. The sock-eye and king salmon were already shaking off their sea lice and making a move; sea otters, seals and sea lions would be waiting for them out in Prince William Sound. If they made it upstream, shore birds and birds of prey such as those circling above us would be waiting to take them. And every single fish that avoided these hazards had yet to face the bear and the wolf.

I knew now why Juan Varela Simo had worshipped the light the way he did. I did too, but I was still troubled by the sense of rejection I was feeling. I couldn't explain it. I just had this
horrible feeling that the
Pequod
and her crew were being chased out of the place. Something unnatural existed out there which was somehow out of sync with the light and the urgency of life. I wanted to be away from it, and I stood hard on the pedal of the
Pequod
.

Valdez is located at the end of the Valdez Arm, a long, narrow, curving fjord that reaches in from Prince William Sound. It reputedly has the most beautiful natural setting of any town in Alaska, mountains curving round it on three sides as if they had just shot up out of the sea. It is affectionately known to some as ‘the Switzerland of Alaska'.

In 1964 a huge earthquake seriously damaged the city of Anchorage over one hundred miles away. The result of this event in Valdez had been more drastic, for the quake was followed by a huge tidal wave that destroyed the town, claiming more than forty lives. It was subsequently rebuilt three miles from its former location. The job had obviously been done in a hurry without any thought for the magnificent scenery in which it sat, for the new Valdez was an unpretty mishmash of prefab homes, acres of trailer parks and the remnants of barracks-style housing erected by the oil-line contractors to house their workers and their families.

Apart from being the terminal port of the oil from Prudhoe Bay, eight hundred miles away on the Beaufort Sea in the extreme north of arctic Alaska, Valdez's other claim to fame is that in 1889 it was the site of the first hanging ever to take place in Alaska. A prospector named ‘Doc' Tanner, who murdered his two partners in a drunken brawl, was reported to have declared, with the noose already around his neck, ‘Gentlemen, you are hanging the best man with a six-shooter that ever came to Alaska.' While driving through the small town in search of the terminal booking office I thought that the planners who designed new Valdez should have suffered the same fate as ‘Doc' Tanner, for their crime was just as heinous.

There were plenty of fishing boats in the harbour and their multicoloured hulls and superstructures made a picturesque
contrast to the backdrop of snow-capped mountains and steely-blue sky. The salmon had not quite started to run yet so, like the town itself, they bobbed idly on the water.

The evening before our ferry departed I called in to some of the bars. They had a smart seventies look about them and had the appearance of a downtown bar in Manhattan. Obviously they were a hangover from the days when Valdez was full of construction and oil executives. But now that the pipeline was complete and the oil flowed into waiting tankers at the rate of a thousand barrels a day, the executives with their need for familiar comforts rarely came here. The bars were mostly empty, a few customers glaring at the three or four TVs that blared out, each of them tuned to a different channel. The noise drove me back out. Kennicott and McCarthy had been empty too, but even though Valdez had a hundred times more people living in it those ghost towns had more sense of life about them than this sterile terminal town.

The last bar I called in to was a bit outside the centre of the town. It was more like a trucker's café than a bar, and it had a lot more customers. They were all men, and none of them had the appearance or spoke the language of the boardroom. It was easy to start up a conversation. I was an early tourist, and coming from Ireland made me something of a rare bird. When I explained to a few men drinking shots of whiskey with occasional beer chasers that I intended to travel through the state for three or four months they were even more impressed. When I introduced a few more details about my travel plans I found myself amazed at just how little experience they had had of anywhere off the state highway system. Some of them had worked seasonally at Prudhoe Bay; some had been drivers on the five-hundred-mile ‘haul road' from Fairbanks to Deadhorse in the far north, the supply town to the oilfield at Prudhoe; but the oil industry was no longer the huge employer it had been. With the completion of the pipeline the demand for labour had been vastly reduced. The men were picking up work where they could, mostly in fish processing or timber felling, but such industries were vulnerable to seasonal conditions
and a variable economy. There was little indigenous industry to keep any of them employed permanently from year to year. As one of them jokingly remarked, ‘This is the take-out state. Everything Alaska produces is shipped out in its raw state and processors down the line make the big bucks. Oil, gold, fish, copper, timber – it's all shipped out.' The man wasn't angry, he was simply stating the obvious. When I asked him why he didn't move to the lower 48 for work, he answered in the same tone that life was different here and that there were plenty of compensations. In any case, he had no intention of working 365 days a year somewhere he neither liked nor could afford just to keep the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) in business. All of his friends were of the same opinion, and, I had to admit, so was I.

I told them I had just arrived in town after spending some time up in the mountains at Kennicott. They showed some surprise, but when I informed them that I was leaving my family in Anchorage to travel into the Arctic regions to live with the Athabascans for a week or so, they said I was both very wise and very foolish. It was wise to leave my family as my wife would most certainly have left me after a few days in an Indian village, and foolish because anyone who chose to go and live out in the Arctic wilderness was plainly insane and would probably not return. I laughed along with my new-found friends, hiding some unresolved anxieties about my intentions.

At least these men were open and friendly and there was no sign of any of the hostility I had felt en route to Valdez. I asked one of them who seemed genuinely interested about where I was travelling, and more importantly why, about the burned-out encampment and the unprovoked hostility from the petrol-station attendant. At first he was dismissive, then evasive; he said he had heard something about the camp and that it was probably a forest fire. But I explained that the teepees were erected well away from the tree line and, significantly, they were only partially destroyed. A forest fire would have razed everything to the ground. There had been several items left untouched as well, as if the occupants had left in a hurry and chosen not to return to
collect them. He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘It's bad country out there, and they just don't like strangers.'

‘Come on,' I said, letting him know I wasn't satisfied, ‘they have to not like strangers for a reason.'

One of the other drinkers cut across before his friend could answer. ‘Some people out there just don't need a reason. They have their own ways of doing things.' He finished abruptly, and I could see he was serious and was already looking for a way of explaining what he meant.

The man I had first been talking to saved him the effort. ‘A lot of weird people go to live in settlements back off the road. Some of them are the families of homesteaders who might be too poor to be sociable. But there's a lot of others who come up from the States to make a new life for themselves. The trouble is, most of them have a strange set of beliefs. Have you heard of the expression “the Churchers, the Birchers and the Searchers”?'

I shook my head.

‘There are a lot of cults that arrive in Alaska to set themselves up away from the kind of attention they would get in their own home states. Some of them are religious groups who call themselves Christian but who hold pretty extreme opinions and don't want any involvement with the world of sinners like you and me. Then there are the Birchers. You ever heard of the John Birch Society?'

I had, and answered, ‘Some kind of extreme-right-wing white supremacist anti-communist organization that wants to create a new republic of America. Something like the lost tribe of Israel, the Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan and the Archangel Gabriel all rolled into one.' My exaggeration silenced a few of the company. Obviously they weren't members of the secret society, but I got the feeling that I might just be standing ever so slightly on some-one's holy cows.

But my friend continued. ‘Then of course you have the freaks and hippies and long-haired weirdos who just want to do their own thing their own way.' He stopped to think for a moment. ‘If you think about it, that is the strangest bunch of believers to be
let loose in the wilderness. Basically, they can't stand each other. The longer they have been out there the worse their fanaticism gets. There's real bad blood out there, and some very ugly and very nasty things have happened to some people. The police are never invited in to investigate, and like your friend in McCarthy told you, they don't much want to go anyway.' He turned to me, as if something had just struck him. ‘You know, you were pretty damn lucky at that gas station. There was a time when a black family travelling in an RV like yourselves was refused service. The guy made a bit of a fuss about the matter and the whole thing got so out of hand that state troops had to be brought in. The man should have said nothing and driven on. He was lucky he and his family got away alive. There are more than a few stories of babies being burned in their beds and dead John Does turning up that no-one out there knows anything about – or so they say.'

Had I not driven through that place and seen and experienced the things I did, I would have put the story down to tall tales for the tourist. But I had no cause to disbelieve my companion and lots of circumstantial evidence to back up what he had told me. I took a long sip of my beer, then turned to my informant and remarked, ‘And you think I'm insane for going to live with the Arctic Indians!'

En route to the Arctic I stayed over in Fairbanks for a few days. I was beginning to think of the place as home. People lived here in this bush town not because it was the last city from here to Siberia but because they chose to. To me it was still a place of choice, whereas Anchorage was a city of settlement. Anchorage functioned in response to everything else and was there because of what happened beyond its precincts; Fairbanks had no precincts, but millions and millions of square acres of unimaginable emptiness, and people chose to live there because of that, regardless of the reasons that had brought them there.