Looking for Alaska (54 page)

Hugh and his dog team were not here yet. Eric thought he might spend the night on the trail and wouldn't worry about him until tomorrow sometime. Hugh had run the Yukon Quest this year with a few of the dogs he was mushing now; he could handle the winter trail.

The downstairs room wrapped in insulating plastic was Eric and Vicky's, but they let us stay in there. They stayed on a mattress on the floor in a downstairs room the dogs and Tyler usually slept in. The dog hair in there was thick. The house was neat and organized, it just wasn't finished on the inside. No paint, no trim yet, no vacuum. There was a TV in one of the kids' rooms for watching videos, but there were no networks or cable channels or talking heads coming into their home from NBC or CBS or ESPN or HBO or C-SPAN. The invisible microwave signals from the satellites could not even reach them. No one could call at dinnertime, or any other time.

Eric was not worried about Y2K. He is not a religious fanatic, although he is possibly the most balanced human I've ever met, a combination of the spiritual and practical. Eric and Vicky are similar; they appreciate life in the wilderness with their animals. Eric is not living out here with his family because he expects the world to end, and he is not looking for gold. If he found a vein of it, gleaming out of the side of some mountain peak he and the family had hiked to one summer afternoon, he would probably never mention it to anyone, but instead die with the secret. He's not running from the feds or taxes or the law.

In his high school yearbook in Des Moines, it said he would someday end up in Alaska. As a child, he had maps of Alaska on the walls of his bedroom. He read classic books about the great white north and was smart and practical enough (that farm-belt Midwestern thing) to realize that Alaska is like nowhere else. It requires more than many have to give. You find a person who can survive in the bush of Alaska for several years, and thrive, not gradually go insane or physically deteriorate, and you have found someone extraordinary. These distinct people cannot, however, be judged by their looks, their clothes, their appearance, their degrees, and their pedigree.

The boys banged the encrusted snow off our bags and carried them inside and set them on the floor near the kitchen table. Any piece of furniture out here was like a jewel-encrusted throne in a museum. The effort needed to get a kitchen table here was enormous; imagine a four-poster bed, an antique oak wardrobe. All the dogs came up and sniffed our stuff; the part–basset hound seemed the most intelligent. His name is Fred. I hoped they weren't going to hook him up to any sled. The oldest cat was on a stair, out of the way of children's feet, but in the hot air. Sit down and it was in the forties; stand up and your head was in the low sixties. We kept our fleece and coats on inside almost all the time except when we were sleeping. Quickly Rita and Julianne learned from the behavior of the cats. Sit on the stairs, heat rises.

Not long ago, Eric had built a separate room on the north side of the house and assembled a Canadian-made wood furnace that he had hooked up to ductwork. Living out here, I would learn that much of the best cold-weather equipment and gear is understandably made in Canada. Before Alaska was connected to the rest of the United States by road during World War II, many Alaskans had more of a connection to Canada than the United States. Many Alaskans have always felt they were a separate country, like Texas, and some Alaskans, including major state leaders, would like to be.

Eric asked Pete to start the generator. Their bank of huge batteries was losing its charge; the lights were dimming and soon it would be dark. In the summer, the endless daylight and sometimes-bright sun provided them with almost all the power they needed. Eric had a small windmill that generated some electrical power as well. He could read an article and look over the diagrams in
Popular Mechanics
or
Mother Earth News
and build it. So could Pete. Mike told me one of his dad's hobbies was fixing up old houses. Mike and Pete had been able to do “the easy stuff” in building since they were eleven or twelve, such as framing up walls, and lately, hanging Sheetrock. This freed up Eric to do the more complex stuff. That's why Eric didn't mind leaving the boys out here to fend for themselves occasionally. Pete could fix about anything Eric could; Mike was the entertainer, the “gourmet” bush cook. All this had taught them independence.

Eric was so humble, so self-effacing, so hardworking, so generous, in a way sort of godlike, that it would be difficult to disobey him. Often when he asked his kids to do something, he would say, “Sorry, but would someone start the generator” or “Sorry, but whose turn is it to sweep the downstairs?” Eric's courage to tackle this world with his family, to be radically different from most people today, must have been somewhat inspired by his father, a Methodist minister. He is no normal minister, although there is really no such thing. Eric's dad is a lobbyist for the Methodist Church to the Iowa legislature. Eric joked that Iowa could be considered somewhat conservative, but that his father is called the “white Jesse Jackson.” He lobbies for equal rights, abortion rights, gay rights, liberal ideals. Eric said his father does not back down but is not obnoxious about his stands, just committed to them with his heart. He gladly rocks the boat, respectfully, in a place not known for rocking the boat. Iowa has every nuance of the human condition; it is just not as evident as in, say, New York City, being camouflaged as it is by the veneer of “normalcy.” In Iowa, you stand above, beyond, or below your fellow man mostly by your actions. Eric's father not only encouraged him to ride across America on his bike at sixteen, he told him he thought the trip would enlarge him.

Elizabeth, seeming much more relaxed, had combed out her thick, dirty-blond hair, which had been stuffed under a worn wool hat on the way. She and Julianne were headed outside to record the temperature. It was an Alaskan homeschool project Elizabeth was doing. The sheet she used said, “NOAA Record of River and Climatological Observations.” Here at the Jayne home on January 1, the high was –20°, the low –32°F. On January 2, the high was –28, the low was –42. On January 4, it heated up to –1 and cooled to –22. The second week of January must have been like living in a freezer with the lightbulb burned out. January 8 gave no indication of the killer cold to come: it was –2 high, –20 low. Then January 9, the high was –26, low –36. The low on the tenth was –39; the high on January 11 was –37 and the low was –44. On the twelfth, the high—there has got to be a better word—was –40 and the low was –45. On the thirteenth, the high was –41 and the low was –48. The last week of January, Pete and Mike probably went snow-machining in T-shirts: the highs were between 9 and 23 and the average low was about 5 degrees above.

The girls came back inside, and so did all of the dogs. The sounds of all their claws on the plywood, six sets of paws, echoing around the cold house, is one I'd not heard before and one I will never forget. The fluctuation of these temperatures and the Jaynes' lack of advance warning, such as the Weather Channel or government recordings, make planning activities always a risk. Even cutting wood, which they do ten miles away, cannot be planned until the day or hour in question.

Mike decided to go check on Hugh, to see if he'd made it to the lake yet. Pete sat down at the table with Rita and me. Vicky was making some large pepperoni pizzas and had already finished some homemade dough. Eric was doing something in the workshop, off the kitchen. Just a few minutes before he'd told Mike and Pete they'd have to go get water in the morning. They'd chopped a hole in the thick, thick lake ice and covered it with canvas and cheap tarps. They'd probably have to chop open the hole wide enough to fit the five-gallon buckets, I thought. Eric was concerned that they'd burned so much of their supply of wood; he said there would have to be a trip to cut more, hopefully tomorrow.

As Pete sat at the kitchen table, it took quite a few minutes for me to get him talking. Out here for four months without going to Fairbanks, he was bushy. His skin was white, his hair black, and his cheeks red. He looked like a choirboy, the kind with a sixth-degree black belt and three girlfriends.

“When did you first come out here?” I asked him.

His smile was subtle and made me feel confident. “About four years ago I first came here—this was when we were living in a small town in Washington.”

I'd asked five or six questions before this one, and he'd just answered, “Yes.” “Not really.” “Kind of.” “Okay.” I had decided to wait until he got used to us.

“Dad and I, we came here right after Thanksgiving. It was so tough coming in here; we had to break trail and it was twenty-five below. It was so bad we left our sled with our supplies back on the trail. It kept getting stuck.

“Then when we got here, there was nothing here. I was eleven, really I just wanted to go home. Dad had built a food cache: a shed built off the ground, high up so animals can't break in and eat all your food. It might be eight feet by ten feet, maybe ten feet off the ground.”

Pete exhibited superior self-confidence, especially when he was not around his two brothers.

“We had to live in that food cache. We brought a small woodstove to put in it. It had no windows, there was not much room. We hauled logs from across the lake to use as foundation supports for the house.”

One of the four-legged cats leaped onto the table. Pete immediately but gently threw it off.

“It's really intense when I've been out here for a few months and go into Fairbanks. There are so many people I don't know. All these cars. So much moving all the time. Too much noise and confusion,” Pete said, his bright eyes glowing with self-awareness.

Suddenly the dogs all started barking, with more barking outside. Hugh had mushed the sixty-plus miles and was here. He was so tough and energized, he bounded in as if he had just been out for a half-mile walk. He ate some of the fantastically tasty leftover pizza and we all went to bed.

16

Life at the Homestead

In the early morning, the kids' chores began. Eric wanted Mike and Pete to go across the lake about two miles. I went along to help; we were going to retrieve some doghouses to keep the team in. Over there was their only neighbor, a Vietnam vet, a caretaker of a few cabins owned by a man from Fairbanks. It was a weather station for NOAA. Mike and Pete told me that the depth finder on their boat, which they used to catch lake trout, showed that the lake was more than four hundred feet deep. Their depth finder only goes to four hundred feet. In the summer, they set a subsistence gill net offshore from their house and catch fish to eat.

We took two snow machines across the lake and one of the long, flat Siglan sleds. Big Dave, the caretaker, who never left because he had to make weather readings every few hours, seemed glad today to see someone, anyone. He was the Jaynes' only possible winter visitor and lived with his Siberian husky. The caretaker across the lake, and there had been several, was always the subject of much conversation at the Eric Jayne homestead. If the current one, Dave, was a bit grumpy one day, he'd try to tell Mike and Pete how to snow-machine the winter trail, except he'd never done it. When it was clear and the northern lights shook the sky and wiggled in purple and green, they were often right over the top of the caretaker's cabin. If the Jaynes happened to be watching the dance of the lights, they might see him circling round and round and round on his snow machine on the lake. They interpreted this to mean something was bugging him; maybe it was a way to think through his past. They could only guess. If he was in a mood to be around people, they'd hear a knock on their door, something so unexpected as to be unimaginable. If you want to live where no one will ever come to your door to sell you something or try to save you, move to the Alaskan bush. If Dave was in a good mood, the outside light of his cabin was on; if not, just a dim glow came from inside. Where there is little human interaction, one notices little things like this.

In Alaska, most people don't delight when others are broken by life in the last frontier, but they do have a refined vocabulary to describe it. Some seem almost to enjoy observing the downward spiral. Another caretaker across the lake, two before Big Dave, was so anxious to leave, so determined not to spend an extra minute here, that he chartered two planes at once, dueling charters, all the way from Fairbanks. Apparently he made them think there was an emergency. You never know if a charter will have the weather conditions to come, or the incentive, so when you're about to lose your mind, you make sure someone's coming.

“It's interesting about some of these caretakers,” Eric said. “A lot of people like to blame others for their problems, but out here there's no one to blame. People run out of blame, then they realize it has to do with them, and it really gets to some people when they realize that. It's hard to deal with. People think, maybe, they come out here and they will escape all that's wrong with their lives, and they get here and seem to find out it's the same problems here as wherever they come from.”

Eric told us about Stuart, who'd arrived just to fill in for the “full-time” caretakers who were taking a vacation, but they'd bolted and never returned. There was no wood, no snow machine. He was about forty-five, reclusive.

“Stuart never became unhappy,” Eric said, his voice becoming intense for him, which wasn't very intense. “It's just the longer he stayed, the more messy the place became. I guess it shows that some people stay clean and keep clean because of peer pressure or job requirements, because this guy spiraled on the cleanliness and order scale. It was gross. There was old food rotting all around the cabin. Clothes rotting, inside and out, lying in piles. He was pretty ripe. He wasn't even doing the weather. Sometimes we'd go over there at one o'clock in the afternoon, in the
summer,
” Eric emphasized, “and he'd still be in bed.”