Looking for Alaska (53 page)

If they hadn't been rescued, just maybe one day after they'd died some Native men from Venetie, downriver on the Yukon flats, would have discovered their tortured little cabin. And maybe there would have been the remnants of a starved body, or two starved bodies, depending on if one had reverted to cannibalism. That is if a wolverine or grizzly hadn't found the bodies with meat still on the bones. There would have been some of their equipment left depending on how many years it took for anyone to venture this deep into the wilderness. But if had been another winter or more, the sod roof of their cabin would have fallen in. That would have hidden the things they'd brought with them from Las Vegas and wherever else. If the young man Jon Krakauer wrote about in the book
Into the Wild
took a No. 5 level Alaskan risk, these fools took a No. 9 level risk. A No. 10 risk would be to jump out of a jet somewhere before Anchorage from thirty thousand feet with a pillowcase for a parachute.

They had done little research besides having read some books, and they didn't have any winter survival skills; they'd come from Las Vegas. Coming to Alaska to make your dream come true and expecting to plunge in as deep as these men had is the mark of a true fool. The leader, Thomas, fifty-two, had tried Alaska in the summer once before and couldn't make the wilderness thing happen by himself even then. This time he brought Ray, thirty-two, with him. Ray didn't have the anchor of family keeping him connected to any place. Thomas dreamed of finding gold, getting rich beyond his most deluded fantasies. Ray must have been an easy sell, or perhaps desperate to disappear. They were sixty feet from the bedrock, which is where gold is; they only had two gold pans and a hand sluice box and no other way to get to it. How are you going to mine gold when it's forty-five degrees below zero?

Getting dropped off where they did, when they did, with the supplies and skills they had, was an elaborate, slow-motion suicide plot. How could anyone be so arrogant about nature's power? They had no—zero—mining experience; there was a million percent better chance of striking gold in Vegas at the quarter slots. They weren't more than fifty miles from Eric and his family, but they might as well have been separated by an ocean. These men hadn't brought in a snow machine, nor a set of snowshoes or a pair of skis. They could not have come to a place of greater desolation and difficulty. There was not one way to get out once they were snowed in. They did bring with them six heavy cases of fruit in metal cans, to fight off scurvy, when all they needed was a pound of vitamin C pills.

The first time Curt met them, in September, he analyzed their setup. He didn't want their deaths on his soul. The first crazed mistake they'd made was to have covered the roof on their log cabin with moss and dirt. A medium wicked wind would have blown it all away, and if not that, the ice would have broken it in on them. Curt told them they needed to build a sod roof, about a foot thick, by laying sod on top of spruce poles as a foundation. They had even brought with them two tiny windows.

Thomas, the fifty-two-year-old, was the apparent leader. He lost sixty-two pounds in the approximately six months he and Ray survived in Alaska. They were living out there illegally, not unusual in the Alaskan bush, but couldn't afford to charter a plane out, even if Curt arranged it for them. Plus they didn't think they were in any danger. They had this wilderness-pioneer, gold-miner, trapper, live-off-the-land dream. Alaska makes people hallucinate, it takes hold of you, it makes some believe there is no gravity. They can enter the power and purity of it and be uninjured, jump from a mountaintop and not land on the rocks below. These two men didn't know until Curt told them that there was almost no game where they “homesteaded.” They never saw a moose, even a rabbit, in over six months. They also hadn't bothered to find out they had settled into a place so cold that seventy below zero wasn't unusual, even one hundred below in that paralyzingly cold valley. When Curt flies, he checks the temperature at two thousand feet, where it is warmer than it is on the ground. One day at two thousand feet it was twenty below over Coldfoot and forty below over the basin where these men who dared frozen death lived.

Envision living in their fourteen-by-fourteen-foot spruce-log cabin, built near the river. The lower down in the basin the colder it was. Windows are covered with layers of plastic and so provide only a little escape, diversion, and if there's nothing moving outside, maybe even a bit of inspiration, even if it's the adrenaline-based fight-or-flight response. You're shut inside the log cabin, the cracks chinked with moss and mud, except you didn't know what you were doing and for who knows what reason, the chinking falls out. You could have read a book about cabins in arctic conditions, but you didn't. When the mud falls out of the cracks, it is frozen, unusable like a brick. The moss is covered with deep snow, and besides it's too cold some days to even go out. The cold attacks your hands and toes, wants to flash-freeze them. You stuff the cracks that let in the unrelenting invasion of killer cold with scraps of clothes. You don't have extra clothes, though. The unbelievable cold is tracking you down; it's invisible but finds you anyway and steals your tiny bit of comfort. You get these feelings—you know at first they are silly—that you want to kill the cold, or whatever causes it. You think about loading up your rifle and shooting at it. But you can't kill winter; no one can change the tilt of the earth. So you blame your dilemma on Thomas, the guy who sold you on this deranged dream, a frigid, fiendish nightmare.

Speaking of Thomas, the one who lost over sixty pounds, he wakes up because the woodstove can't heat the place. No matter how much wood they burn, it's around zero inside. He's lying there thinking about how little food is left. Plus, no one knows if that state trooper will ever be back. You haven't seen anyone but each other for so long you wonder if he was ever really here. Even if he said he would check on us, he might be a masochist and just let us starve to death. Or he could die in a plane crash; there are plenty of those in the Brooks Range. That trooper, he seemed too nice, really; no one's that nice anymore.

Thomas's thinking, “If I get up and eat some food, will Ray hear me? What if I just kill Ray? Think how much more food there will be, but then Ray cuts and hauls a lot of the firewood and is strong, hauls water.” The cold has already made the skin on Thomas's hands crack open. He covers his head from the cold and thinks, “Let damn Ray get up and stoke that damn woodstove that can't keep us warm.” Why did they make the cabin so big? By now they had cut it in half, by hanging wool blankets that they could have been using to keep warm, to seven feet by seven feet. As Thomas lies there, being slowly tortured, he turns and an air space opens from his sleeping bag and the awful cold comes in to try to rob his body of warmth, of life.

At times sleep is unwanted because the thought comes back about creosote building up in the stovepipe and catching fire. Creosote is an oil generated by burning wood, and it builds up in a crystalline layer on the insides of stovepipes. If the pipe gets too hot and catches fire, the cabin will almost surely follow. Then they would be without shelter, except for a small tent. What if the wood-stove was crushed by the burning cabin as it fell in on itself, the ammunition all went off in the fire, the guns were burned up, and you only got out with the clothes you slept in? Then you couldn't even kill yourself with a bullet.

A day for these men, knowing the cold was outside waiting to get them in the forever silence and white isolation, was an immense exercise in maintaining sanity. You could scream for a week yet no one would hear you. You could try to shoot at a jet flying over, but your bullet wouldn't reach. You cannot call anyone, there is no road, no trail; five feet of snow closes you in as if it were a thousand-foot-deep ocean. You begin hitting the spruce tree with an ax while you cut firewood, trying to kill it because it is looking at you.

It's too cold to go out but you must, otherwise there's no wood, no water, no life. Maybe that would be better. Isn't it true that before you freeze to death you get warm all over? You haven't bathed in months, you stink, and your clothes are now mostly ash gray.

Why do people put themselves in places like this? Why did Eric?

By the end of November when Curt went back to check on them, they had no food left, just $37. He knew they'd be low on food, so he brought them a hundred-pound sack of flour, some beans, sugar, and rice. He bought these goods with his own money in Fairbanks; he hauled them 250 miles to Coldfoot. Curt wondered before he went back to check on them in November if maybe one would have killed the other in a fit of cabin-fever rage. But they didn't try to kill each other until the end of the winter, which is when the most domestic violence happens in Alaska. Would-be explosions controlled by discipline are controllable no more.

Thomas and Ray get another visit from their guardian angel around Christmas. He brought them a turkey and some sweet things as he dropped out of the sky and landed on skis by their cabin. Curt made one more drop of food to them one clear day in February. Right before Curt got there, almost terminal cabin fever had set in. Ray had attacked Thomas with a butcher knife because he thought he was eating too much food. Maybe Thomas stole two of the molasses cookies that Ray, the good cook, had made; they were to be eaten only on Sundays. They had been burning kerosene but had run out. They got some dim light from burning one candle at a time, and then those were gone too. After that there was fuzzy, dim daylight, and then too soon every day came the awful, silent, freezing dark. Solitary confinement in the worst prison in the United States would have been like a pleasure compared to their miserable months.

Once they began depending on Curt, they had to worry about whether the bad weather could settle in and stop his flying. Their failure was crushing them. What promises had Thomas made to Ray? When did the younger man figure out this Alaskan dream lined with pocketfuls of gold nuggets was a ridiculous idea, maybe even a malicious lie? Many Alaskan dreams have had foundations of sand like Thomas and Ray's.

Curt was able to contact Thomas's family, and they sent him a plane ticket to come home, defeated but lucky to be alive. Curt could only find Ray's father, who was bedridden and, someone said, couldn't speak. Ray ended up at a homeless shelter in Fairbanks.

On March 12, Curt flew them out in the Super Cub one at a time. They had to leave almost everything behind, as so many shattered Alaskan dreamers have done before, whether they were almost totally unprepared and thought they could survive because they had a book about someone else doing it, or prepared, indomitable, but ran out of luck and angels.

LAKEFRONT PROPERTY

Standing there, looking at Eric's home, having spent the last few days with him, Vicky, and Elizabeth, having seen him operate and relate to people, I felt better about the firmness of the foundation of his Alaskan wilderness dream. Before we even opened the door to their house, I heard a strange sound coming from inside, a kind of rapid tapping, like hitting a screwdriver, or several of them, against a wood floor. Tap, tap, tap, tap.

Elizabeth opened the handsome, handmade door into an arctic entry. Beyond the entryway, the house opened into a large two-story room, with a freestanding wooden stairway to four small bedrooms, the children's. The floors were plywood, usually considered a subfloor, although I couldn't imagine carpet with all the animals. Because that's what the tapping came from, their six dogs, several they brought with them from Iowa. One was a red husky. These dogs lived inside with the Jaynes' six cats. The first thing I thought, or the first two things, were that I couldn't believe they hauled food out here for all of them, and that Rita and I are allergic to cats. Eric, being a vet, probably never thought to ask.

Mike takes the dog team for a little run near the Jayne house in the Brooks Range.
P
HOTO BY
P
ETER
J
ENKINS

There was a room about twelve by twelve feet framed in and covered with plastic, sort of a room within a room. Elizabeth, who was now talking more and smiling, explained that when she had first moved out here, a year ago, the whole family had lived in that room, with its own small woodstove that burned short pieces of wood. I hoped they were careful about burning dry wood with little creosote. Curt had told me about another wilderness family who lived between here and Arctic Village. They had an extra cabin built, fully stocked, well away from the one they lived in, just in case. There would be no putting out an established fire, and it would be forty-five below and dropping. And all your clothes would be burned and you'd have gotten out with just what you slept in. I'd never thought about a fire out here. There were so many circumstances I could not even imagine. If a fire burned down the Jayne house, there was a meat cache built up on a ladder a few of us could get into and a few summer cabins across the lake.