Alaska (136 page)

'Seat belt tight? Good. This could be pretty rough, but we've got to suppose it's level snow,” and with no further attention to his passenger, who behaved well, Flatch lowered his flaps, dropped the nose of the Cub, and felt a surge of triumphant joy as the skis struck the smooth snow that stretched in all directions.

When the plane skidded to a safe halt, Tom Venn unfastened his seat belt, leaned back, and asked quietly: 'So what do we do now?'

'Send a radio signal to let everyone know we're safe' which he proceeded to do' and then wait here till this storm 'All night?'

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'Could be,' and without further discussion of their plight, the two men settled down for a long wait.

They did have to stay overnight, and early next morning when the skies had cleared, a rescue plane flew over, dipped low to check whether Flatch and his passenger were safe, then flew in large circles while LeRoy revved up his engine, taxied to the end of what looked like a relatively level space, and in one-third of the distance it took the Cub to take off when its pontoons were on water, the skis attained a surprising speed, and the plane was in the air.

Perversely, Denali and its sister mountains stood forth in such clear beauty that Venn suggested: 'Let's stay up a while and see this area,' and LeRoy said: 'I have the fuel. I'd enjoy it,' so for about half an hour they surveyed that chain of remarkable glaciers which tumbled southward out of the massif, a sight thrilling and exhilarating to the spirit of anyone who loved nature. When Flatch finally brought his plane to rest on the snow alongside Venn's lodge in the lower hills, the Seattle millionaire congratulated him: 'You know how to , handle a plane, young man,' and when Venn's wife, Lydia Ross Venn, ran out to greet them, a handsome gray-haired woman in her early fifties, he told her: 'This is LeRoy Flatch, a most gifted pilot. You and I are going to finance him a fourseater and he'll be flying us in here regularly from now on.'

On this first trip LeRoy stayed with the Venns for three days, taking first one, then the other on exploration trips which enabled him to familiarize himself with the great mountains, and when the visit ended, Tom Venn asked: 'LeRoy, would you consider flying down to Anchorage to pick up our son and his bride? They're coming here for part of their vacation.'

'Glad to, you give me the instructions. But my plane only seats one.'

'Rent a fourseater. Try them all out and let me know which one suits this part of Alaska best.'

So LeRoy Flatch, in a rented Fairchild with only a few hours on it, reported to the air terminal in Anchorage and paged Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Venn, and as soon as the young man appeared, LeRoy knew he must be Tom Venn's son, for the resemblance was striking, but he was not at all prepared for Mrs. Venn, who was not a white woman.

She was nearly as tall as her husband, extremely slim, with very black hair, and he could not tell whether she was an Eskimo, an Aleut or an Athapascan, three tribes he was still trying to get organized in his mind, and he was too polite to ask. But young Venn solved the problem, for as he tossed their gear 828

into the plane he said: 'My wife'll ride shotgun. She wants to see this land. She's half Tlingit and this is all new territory for her.'

Since the subject had been broached, LeRoy asked: 'And what's the other half?' and Malcolm said: 'Chinese. Good mix. Very intelligent, as you'll find out,' and by the time the Fairchild reached the Venn lodge at the foot of Denali the three travelers were respectful friends.

'What's that crazy name for your father's place?' LeRoy asked as they unloaded the plane.

'Why didn't you ask him?'

'I thought it might be nosy.'

'You asked me.'

'But you're not head of the company. He is.'

'He named it Venn's Lode.'

'Does Lode mean what I think it does?'

'Yes. He said that in the old days men came here probing for gold ... trying to find their lode. He and Mother are here to find their own lode, happiness. He loves Alaska, you know. Tramped all through it in the old days.'

LEROY FLATCH WAS so BUSY IN THE FALL OF 1939 scrounging around to find a used fourseater that he could afford, even with help from the Venns, that he actually failed to realize that a major war had broken out in Europe. At the reasonable cost of three thousand seven hundred dollars he found a pretty good Waco YKS-7 which had been used in the Juneau district, and with it he discovered Alaska's hunger for aerial transport.

American soldiers suddenly appeared asking for transportation to strange places, and gold mines already in being called for new equipment. Road building experienced a spurt, new stores opened everywhere, and wherever commerce or new building flourished, bush-trained aviators like LeRoy were in demand.

'What's going on?' he asked men who lounged about the airstrip, and one night in the winter of 1940 he found out. Friends hauled him off to a meeting at the schoolhouse in Palmer, where a trim young bullet-headed officer from the Army Air Corps gave a clipped lecture that brushed away the cobwebs: 'I'm Captain Leonidas Shafter, and I can lick any man who laughs at that first name. My father was West Point and he named me after the Greek hero of Thermopylae. Lost his entire contingent and his head. I propose to do better.'

Aided by maps that had been converted by photography into color slides which, when projected, filled a large section of blank wall behind him he gave his audience of pilots,

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bulldozer operators and ordinary workmen fresh understanding of the war in Europe and Alaska's possible relation to it: 'The war over there may have subsided into what they humorously call the Sitzkrieg, with each side trying to outwait the other. But believe me, it's going to explode soon enough, and if past history is any guide, we'll be drawn into it.

'I cannot predict when or how our participation will come, but in one way or another it will have to involve Soviet Russia. The Communists are at present allies of Nazi Germany. This can't last long, but whether it does or not, can't you see how whatever Russia does will involve Alaska? Here at the Diomede Islands, the Soviet Union is a mile and a half from Alaska. All right, they're tiny islands and they don't matter.

But across the Bering Sea from Russia to Alaska is trivial for a modern airplane.

Contact is almost inescapable, and when that contact comes, your Alaska will be right in the middle of the war.'

A flier who had spent time in the Air Corps asked: 'Are you speaking of Russia as our enemy or our ally,' and Shafter snapped: 'I haven't said because I can't guess.

The way things stand tonight, she's our enemy. But things won't continue as they are, and then she could become our ally.'

'Then how can you make plans?'

'In a case like this you plan for every contingency, and I'm certain that whatever happens, you good people will adjust to it.' To emphasize his point, he slapped the area where the Soviet and American frontiers met, and with that, he moved into the heart of his surprising talk:

'Look, please, at this map of North America and the eastern part of Siberia. Let's suppose that the Soviet Union continues to be our enemy. How can they most effectively strike at cities like Seattle, Minneapolis and Chicago? By streaming right across Alaska and Canada, a straight line to their industrial targets. The first battles, the ones that could decide everything, would be fought in places like Nome and Fairbanks and over the airfield on which we're sitting right now.

'But let's suppose that the Soviets turn on Hitler, as they should, and become our allies. How will we help

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supply them? How will airplanes built in Detroit get to Moscow? I think they'll fly a modified great circle route, across Wisconsin and Minnesota to Winnipeg, then, within six months, maybe over to Edmonton, Dawson, Fairbanks, Nome and into Siberia.

Gentlemen, you could very well be using this gravel strip as an emergency landing field for huge bombers.'

While the men stared at one another in amazement, he showed a beautifully drawn map of the region between Edmonton and Fairbanks, and said: 'Whether the Soviet Union turns out to be enemy or friend, what we ought to do right now is build a highway capable of handling military equipment from here and he pointed to Dawson Creek, northwest of Edmonton where the railroad ends, right through this morass to here.'

And, ignoring the terrible terrain, he marked a sweeping line across Canada and into the heartland of Alaska at Fairbanks. 'Don't tell me such a road has been tried before.

Don't tell me it would impose all sorts of difficulties. Listen to me when I tell you it must be built.'

When a pilot asked 'Why?' Shatter grew impatient: 'Because the life and death of a great republic is at stake. Two great republics, the United States and Canada.

We have got to move war equipment from Detroit and Pittsburgh to the shores of the Bering Sea.' And then he said something strange and prophetic, a stray idea that would always be remembered by the men who heard it. 'We've got to be prepared to drive off anyone who comes at us from Asia.' When this challenge was greeted by silence, he laughed at himself, slapped his right leg, and said jovially: 'They tell me the original Americans, Eskimos, everyone up here, they all came across the Bering Sea when it wasn't a sea any longer. Just walked across. Maybe the seas will drop again.

Maybe they'll be coming at us across some land bridge. But they'll come, gentlemen, they will come.'

IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED, LeROY FLATCH Ig nored the progress of the war in Europe and the frightening predictions of Captain Shafter, because he now had two planes to look after, the old two-seater Cub and the relatively new fourseater Waco. He kept pontoons on the former and berthed it at a nearby lake, and perfected a speedy way for switching the fourseater first to wheels and then to skis. With this two-pronged attack, which he used creatively, he was able to probe the center of Alaska about as effectively as any bush pilot then operating, for despite his youth, he had 831

acquired a mature appreciation of what his airplanes would do if he kept them in good shape and filled with gas.

In any twelvemonth period he would certainly land one of his planes on the following surfaces: wide macadam at an official airport like Anchorage, narrow bumpy macadam at a rural port like Palmer, gravel at one mining camp, loose gravel and dust at the next, grass at some strip beside a hunting lodge, gravel bank beside a river, mud and gravel beside some stream, ice, snow and very dangerously ice covered by a thin layer of snow, grass covered with sleet or grass covered with snow, sleet and light rainfall. He would also alight on lakes, rivers, ponds and other bodies of water too limited in length to permit a subsequent takeoff; then he would haul his plane onto dry land, walk out, and get some other daring aviator to fly him back in with a pair of wheels to replace the pontoons and some tools with which to chop down small trees and smooth out a runway.

And sooner or later he would also land in the branches of some tree; then he would scramble down, wait for a replacement wing to be flown in, bolt it carefully to the undamaged stub, and be off again. He was constantly in danger, considering the routes he flew, but with remarkable foresight he saw to it that any of the unavoidable accidents occurred with his old two-seater and not his new fourseat job.

His most enjoyable assignment came whenever he received a telegram asking him to meet one or another of the Venns at the Anchorage airport, for this always meant renewing acquaintance with this exciting family. He liked all of them: the cool, reserved father who ran an empire; the spirited mother who seemed to make many of the decisions; the young man who would one day inherit that empire; and especially the young wife, so pretty and secure in what she wanted to do. 'She's certainly not like any of the half-breeds you read about,' LeRoy said to his fellow pilots. 'Any man would be proud to have such a wife.'

'Not me,' an old-timer growled. 'Half-breeds, native women, sooner or later they all lead a man to hell.'

On pickup trips like the ones to Anchorage, LeRoy could never be sure just when the incoming plane would arrive; schedules in Alaska were subject to instant change, sometimes involving whole days. For example, when Bob Reeve flew his crazy planes out to the far end of the Aleutians, you were never certain when he would land on his return trip, because the weather out there was so unpredictable. One Reeve pilot told LeRoy: 'I kid you not, we were flying a normal route over Atka when a williwaw come up off the Bering Sea, calm one minute, tempest another, and turned us 832

exactly upside down. Dishes, stewardesses, customers, all up in the air and me too, if I hadn't been strapped in.'

'How long you fly that way?'

'About half a minute. Seemed like two hours, but the next blast of arctic air straightened us out.”

'I'd like to fly those islands with you someday.'

'Be my guest.'

On the long layovers, LeRoy liked to read accounts of the old bush pilots, the ones who had pioneered the routes he covered, and while the best stories dealt with the young men who flew out of the settled places like Sitka and Juneau, the most fascinating, it seemed to him, were about the men who brought aviation to the center of the country Fairbanks, Eagle, the little settlements along the Yukon like Nulato and Ruby and especially those intrepid pilots who carried the mail to the really minute villages on the southern and northern flanks of the great, forbidding Brooks Range Beetles, Wiseman, Anaktuvuk and the camps along the Colville River.

Those guys really had guts, LeRoy thought repeatedly as he read of their exploits, but the tales had a mournful similarity. Harry Kane was about the best of the bush pilots. First man to land at a dozen different sites, field or no field. Loved riverbanks if the sand and gravel were not rippled. But if they were rippled, he landed anyway.

Helped three different women have their babies at nine thousand feet. Never took chances. Always a bearcat for safety. You'd fly anywhere with good old Harry Kane, the best of the lot.

And then in the last two pages of the chapter you learned that one night, in a blinding snowstorm, good old Harry, best of the lot... kerploo
ie.
Just once, LeRoy reflected, I'd like to read about someone who was the greatest of the bush pilots and who died in bed at the age of seventy-three.