Looking for Alaska (44 page)

Out of all fifty states, Alaska must have the highest percentage of population that does not own cars. Many Alaskans travel by four-wheeler, in all kinds of boats, in bush planes, on snow machines, by foot, by ferry. Though oddly, taxis are a big deal, even in some of the smallest Eskimo villages. The local taxi ad said, “Talkeetna Taxi & Tours, Inc. Weekly Wasilla shopping [Wasilla's the closest place with a big grocery store, north of Anchorage]. Every Friday throughout winter. $25 per person. Minimum 4, maximum 10. 733-TAXI.”

For any winter tourists there was “Talkeetna Air Taxi * McKinley Scenic Flights * Land on a glacier * Visit McKinley base camp * Since 1947.” And for those who “Can't bear to be inside. Cross-country ski rentals. Skis, boots, poles, $15/day. Carhartts. Insulated bibs. Mountain hardware. Thick fleece jackets and pants.”

For those Christmas shopping, there was this ad: “What your Santa wants for Christmas! A Stihl 018c chain saw. $199.95. At Talkeetna Arctic Cat.” Under John “Dancing Bear” Sally's ad for his custom knives, antler carving, and scrimshaw was this one: “THE MOSQUITO NET. Sign up before the year 2000 and get 2 MONTHS FREE. Internet Access Service 357-8967.”

Underneath the newspaper was an invitation on hot-pink paper. It said, “The Talkeetna Bachelors Society cordially invites ALL SINGLE LADIES (and other interested parties) to the Fourteenth Annual WILDERNESS WOMAN CONTEST. The Wilderness Woman Contest was added in 1986 to select the lady who best exemplified the traits most desired by a Wilderness Man. Single ladies demonstrate their proficiency at fire stoking, water fetching, snow machining, fish catching, moose dispatching, ptarmigan hunting, sandwich making, beverage opening, and other vital skills for daily living on the Last Frontier.… Saturday, December 4, 1999, in the Village Park, Talkeetna, Alaska.”

December 4 dawned a mild twenty-two degrees and windy. The Olympian contests soon to begin would pit some of the world's most beautiful and least politically correct women against each other. The winner would get a gold nugget and a handcrafted fur hat. First came the “fifty-yard dash to a simulated creek to fill water buckets, in full winter gear, returning with them full.” Each pail filled with cold, sloshing water weighed thirty to forty pounds. Many, many people in Alaska still haul their water from holes chopped in the ice of the neighboring lake or creek or river. This contest would weed the women down to five or six, based on their times. Event number one had the wilderness women panting and straining. There was no goofing around; these events were all about the serious, difficult, and essential skills required to survive in the Last Frontier.

Then came the wilderness woman obstacle course, a combining of normal winter duties. This included “driving a snow machine around a short course.” The hustling wilderness women in this event, either real ones who lived the life or wanna-bes, would “gather firewood and deposit it on a fire,” all on snowshoes. They would catch a simulated fish, then use a pellet gun to shoot a simulated ptarmigan, which were balloons on a piece of painted plywood. A twenty-something dirty blonde from San Francisco who had never shot a gun or driven a snow machine was doing amazingly well; she was athletic and had a sense of humor. It took her more than fifteen tries to hit the required balloons. “What would my friends think if they could see me now?” she was overheard saying.

Then the ladies would climb a tree to escape a simulated enraged moose, after which she had to dispatch the angry moose with a simulated rifle, a cutout piece of wood. Real Alaska women shoot 375s, 300 magnums, 30/06s. One of the bachelors, a guy born in New York City, now a local eighth-grade teacher, played the enraged and then dying moose, falling into the snow every time he was shot by a wilderness woman. After the charismatic, short-haired, very feminine contestant from San Francisco “shot and killed” the male in the moose suit, she leapt on top of him and kissed him right on his big moose lips. I heard a few locals say the bachelor in the moose suit should bring a high price at the auction because he was “cute.” Hearing the word
cute
in Alaska had the same impact on me as smelling rotted roadkill.

The best event for the young woman from San Francisco was the one in which she had to run across Main Street, make a sandwich, and grab a beer at a table laden with fixings, then sprint back to the deserving bachelor. The happily reclining man watched Sunday-afternoon football on a simulated TV. Points were not given for neatness, so most bachelors wore the largest black garbage bags they could find over their bodies to keep them from drowning in beer and being gagged by the sandwiches accidentally smashed into their faces.

This year a tall, stunning young woman, Hillary Schaefer from Ester, a hip, kind-of-artist community near Fairbanks, won for the third time. The woman from San Francisco came in fourth.

MALE ORDER CATALOG

When I walked into the VFW hall, people were everywhere, cleaned up and smelling of more cologne and perfume than I had experienced in months. The hall was filled with attractive women from their midtwenties to their fifties. A few had on sequined evening dresses, their hair teased and makeup applied artfully. There were three tall blondes, fashionably outdoorsy looking. None had been natural blondes since they were about six. They had on short, black, tight dresses; black stockings; they could have been at some art gallery opening in L.A. All kinds of ladies were here, some in jeans, some in custom-made fur coats made of mink, beaver, marten.

A woman with thick, wavy brown hair wondered aloud as she gazed at one of the bachelor bios and pictures on the wall, “Can we use our credit cards on some of these guys?”

One of the tall, outdoorsy-looking women in the black dresses answered, “Girl, you should hope so, because I brought a pile of cash and that one you're looking at is mine!”

It was body to body in the hall. I was one of the only men around; the bachelors were hidden somewhere, which aided in building great anticipation. One woman pressed herself against me. She seemed aroused by the feeding frenzy that was building fast in here.

She asked, “Do you know what they call a ten in Talkeetna?” But she didn't wait for me to answer. “A four with a six-pack.”

She put her arm around me and got her face just a bit too close to mine. “Where is your picture and bio?”

“I'm not for sale.”

“So what are you doing here then?” She didn't seem disappointed at all; she was a player.

“I'm writing a book about Alaska, traveling all over the place. I get to observe all this.”

“Really.” She squeezed my waist. “Well, I'm from around here, just became available again last month when my boyfriend moved back to California.” She leaned her head on my shoulder. I didn't say anything. “Okay, then; well, answer this: What does a Talkeetna bachelor use for birth control?”

“I have no idea.”

“Personality.”

If in the middle of the United States you were a woman who was considered average on the physically attractive scale, in Alaska you would, if you wanted, have long lines vying for your attention, your companionship. You could feel like a goddess. There is a major shortage of available women in Alaska, especially in the bush. Alaska actually has a magazine whose whole purpose is to promote available Alaskan men. There are unfulfilled, masculine males loaded with testosterone, bouncing off every snowbank and mountain peak, howling from every remote village and fishing port. For all these lonesome men, though, most women who have taken advantage of their amazing Alaskan popularity seem to come to the same conclusion. I heard this saying at least fifty times, referring to Alaskan males: “The odds are good but the goods are odd.”

Tonight, all this rational thinking about the odd goods, and good odds, would be thrown into the closest yellow-stained pile of snow. Hope, among other things, filled the air.

A different blond woman, her hair short, her gaze intense, opened the door into the auction room and said, “Okay, you all can begin to come on in and be seated.” The place was decorated with cutout snowflakes. On the stage were a podium and the flags of Alaska and the USA.

Two men, original members of the Talkeetna Bachelor Society, walked up onstage. One was the bachelor called Grog, the other was Gary. Grog had long hair with natural blond highlights and a long brown beard. He had on a clean, fringed suit made of moose hide and looked as if he could run out into the wilderness anywhere in Alaska with a hatchet and survive for a year. His face had a glow, either natural or induced. If a person could have stayed at Woodstock since 1969 and kept the festival going, that person might have the same expression as Grog. He was handsome if you liked the mountain-man look, and he was obviously a character, used to living his own way.

Gary, who said he was fifty-plus, has those eyes that stare into you and want to bring something back with each look. He was bear-size and slow-moving. His beard was so thick that it could only be trimmed with hedge trimmers. He answered the question “What do you do for entertainment?” with “Love, listen, and rescue women.”

Grog and Gary were here to tell the story of how the auction had come into being. They had been sitting in the bar together in 1981, and after a while, someone looked around and asked, where are all the women? Someone suggested they should have a party or maybe even an auction to bring some fresh females to town. Grog flashed way back to that instant and said, “Wow, man, it was like we suddenly realized maybe we could actually get some woman to pay money for us. Whoa, man. That was cool.”

A few rows of women behind me suddenly howled, clapped, and whistled. Longtime bachelors Grog and Gary instinctively knew not to waste the desire as it rose.

“Hey, let's get this party started, huh, Gary?” Big-bearded, sad-eyed Gary nodded and they both walked off the stage.

The president of the society, Robert, the guy originally from Iceland who entertains himself, and Ed, the vice president, who had been in the moose suit during the Wilderness Woman Contest, came out dressed in tuxes. They were trim and classically handsome. The way these two looked they could have been walking out on any stage anywhere in the world to accept their awards for being leading corporate managers. That they were here at Talkeetna's Bachelor's Auction in Alaska showed how really deceiving looks and first impressions can be.

A woman in a red-sequined, tight-fitting dress in the row behind me told her friend loudly, “Ed's mine.”

Robert and Ed delivered some polite official greetings. They both appeared shy, and Robert stuttered slightly. Before they could get out from behind the podium, some female yelled out, “Wow!” from the back.

Someone turned on a song, a tune that would give even Al Gore the flexibility and rhythm of James Brown.

“My son is going to kill me for being here,” said a lady, at least fifty-five, sitting directly behind me.

I turned to see one of the bachelors, dark-haired Daryl, thirty-two, covered only by tattoos and foxtails, making his way—no, snaking his way—into the room. His tattoos were Native American designs, his foxtails from a gray fox. He weaved through the women; some petted his foxtail. They were ready to bid, but he was just the first of this entertainment meant to raise as much money as possible for charity.

A local folksinger named Steve Derr wore a once-preppy sports coat. Instead of leather as elbow patches, there was gray duct tape. He came out and sang a few songs. One was “Wilderness Woman,” which went something like this:

She leaves man-sized tracks. She has a double-bit ax.

She has a house of logs. She has thirty-six dogs.

She's rough and ready and safe and clean.

Don't mess around no more, she's got a .44.

Most Alaskan men want their women to be good with firearms. One never knows in Alaska when a whole year of meat—a moose—might become available or when a bear might break into your cabin or try to eat your dogs.

Daryl attempts to stimulate the auction crowd in Talkeetna.
P
HOTO BY
P
ETER
J
ENKINS

After Daryl's shimmy, the women wanted the bachelors brought to the auction block as quickly as possible. A hundred women seemed to be in this room.

The auctioneer was Robert Forgit, the weatherman for an Anchorage TV station. A weatherman?

“Let's get it on,” someone with money to spend yelled out.

The president of the club, even in his tuxedo, went for only $35. Maybe he came across as too shy.

The next guy went for $38. A man with a gray beard, the local refuse collector, went for $65. The woman next to me said, “Oh, he is such a nice man.”

I was surprised at the low prices these men were bringing, based on the lusty bragging I'd heard from women as they looked at the pictures and read the answers of the bachelors. Especially since all the money goes to the Valley Women's Resource Center. But I suppose it was like any auction where flesh is for sale—get what you can for as cheap as possible.