Alaska (140 page)

'It can't be done,' Elmer said flatly, and Missy replied: 'In time of war, it can.'

On her map she showed him the results of Allied thinking about the highway that would forever link the United States and Canada, if it could be constructed: 'Canadians wanted it to be more or less a coastal road so it could serve their western settled areas, or so they told us at the briefing. The wild men who love the arctic, they wanted to follow that hellish route my man Murphy took in 1897, right up the Mackenzie River damned near to the Arctic Circle, then across mountains and into Fairbanks.

The square-headed Americans said: ”We'll take the middle way, the Prairie Route, where the airstrips are already in.”And that's the road you'll be buildin', Elmer.'

'Me?'

'You and your truck. Report to Big Delta soonest with a full kit of tools, and start construction from this end.'

'I don't know anything about road buildin'!'

'You'll learn.' And she was off to enroll the older Vickaryous, Vasanoja and Krull men.

In all, some four hundred Alaskan civilians were conscripted more or less forcibly into the work force that would build over a thousand miles of roadway in Canada, more than two hundred miles in Alaska. They were ordered to complete this gargantuan task in no more than eight months. 'We expect to have army trucks filled with battle gear coming over this road by October first,' the colonel in charge of Elmer's segment roared whenever anything went wrong. To make this possible, the Americans would provide nearly twelve thousand men in uniform, the Canadians as large a contingent as their population would allow.

The Alcan Highway it was officially dubbed, a roadway that had always been dreamed about by those in the north and one which might have come into being, under normal circumstances, sometime in the early twenty-first century, for the cost was horrendous and the obstacles terrifying. In war-852

time it would be built, incredible as it seemed, in eight months and twelve days.

When Elmer Flatch reported to army headquarters in Fairbanks he was told to deliver his truck to the central depot and take personal delivery of a huge Caterpillar tractor big enough to knock down trees or haul heavily loaded ten-wheel trucks out of ditches.

'I never drove a thing like that,' he protested, and the lieutenant in charge of the depot growled: 'Start now.'

Three of the regiments assigned to duty in the Alaskan sectors were all-black except for white officers, and a big, slope-shouldered black man who had operated dozers in Georgia was in charge of instructing civilians like Flatch in the intricacies of handling the behemoths that would be chopping a roadway through terrain that had hitherto seemed impassable. This huge fellow, Sergeant Hanks, gave concise, sensible instructions in a pronounced Georgia drawl which the Alaskans found difficult to understand: 'Learnin' gear shift, chir'n do that. Learnin' stay alive, some you surely fail, we bury you.'

Hanks said, with endless repetitions and illustrations; that a driver had to feel in his ass, not his brain, when a slope was too tilted to be negotiated by this dozer: 'Not up and down slope, even chir'n handle that.'

'What in hell is chir'n,' a Minnesota Swede asked, and Hanks explained: 'Chir'n.

Boys, girls. I got four chir'ns back home. How many you got?'

The perilous slopes that he warned against, the ones that killed careless men by the score, were those which tilted the Cat sideways, especially to the left: 'Cat fall right, maybe got a chance. Fall left, crush you ever' time.' He repeated that a driver had to feel in his ass, not his brain or with the aid of his eye, when the slope, left or right, was becoming too steep to be negotiated: 'You feel that message, back to hell out. And doan' try turnin”. Jes' back out like you back out from a dark room where you hears a ghost.”

Under Hanks's repetitious instruction Elmer Flatch, and other ordinary men like him, began to master the intricacies of the great Caterpillars, and after an indoctrination period that seemed perilously brief, they were sent forth to do the job. In early May, Flatch found himself ten miles east of the little town of Tok, where the road from Eagle drops down from Chicken, and he had been on the job only a few hours when a major hi the Corps of Engineers started bellowing at him: 'You, there. With the coonskin cap. Take your Cat down there and help pull the other Cat back on its tracks.'

And when Elmer obeyed, he came upon two machines bigger 853

than his own mired in mud as they strove to bring back, upright, a small dozer which had slid down a small slope.

When his Cat was attached by wires to the fallen behemoth, and all three machines pulled in unison, the creature at the bottom of the slope slowly righted itself, whereupon the major screamed: 'Hold it! You, there, get the body!' and Elmer remained with his wires taut, as medical corpsmen pried the shattered body of the careless driver free from the seat into which he had been crushed. Watching the gruesome process, Elmer said aloud: 'His ass didn't send him the message.' Pause. 'More likely it arrived but he didn't listen.'

The most useful member of the team at Tok was neither wise Sergeant Hanks nor hard-driving Major Carnon, but a short, stubborn Athapascan Indian named Charley. He had a second name, of course, probably something English like Dawkins or Hammond after some early goldminer who had married his great-grandmother up by Fort Yukon, but no one knew what it was. Charley's job was to grease the Cats and dozers and help install new tracks when the old ones jammed or broke or wore out, but his principal value lay in his eagerness to inform majors and colonels and generals from the Lower Forty-eight when they were about to do something which worked very well down in Oklahoma or Tennessee but which simply did not function up in Alaska. So when he saw well-intentioned Major Carnon preparing to build his road east of Tok the way he had done so often in Arkansas, he felt he must warn the energetic fellow that he was making one big mistake: 'Major, sir, down there, maybe okay strip off the topsoil, make solid base. Up here we don't do that.'

'Keep those dozers moving forward!' Carnon bellowed, whereupon Charley said quietly, but with some force: 'Major, sir, we don't do that up here.'

'Keep moving!'

So Charley bided his time, returned to his work area, and resumed threading a new track on a dozer which had shattered its right tread in trying to knock down a nest of trees just a mite too big for it to handle. With a sense of disgust, the knowing Indian watched as Major Carnon stripped away the topsoil until a firm base was reached, and when this desecration continued, he sought out Elmer Flatch, whose dozer he had often serviced: 'Flatch, you got to warn the major, we don't do that up here.'

Another dozer man, from Utah, hearing the warning, broke in: 'You always clear away the soft topsoil till you get a firm base. Then you build. Otherwise you got nothin'.'

'Up here we do it different,' Charley warned, but still finding no one to listen, he resumed his work, satisfied that 854

after the warm May sun did its work on Major Carnon's roadbed, the know-it-all white men would pay attention.

Charley's message was verified on the twenty-third of May. Early that morning, when Elmer reported to work, he encountered an amazing sight: his monstrous Cat had sunk six feet into the solid earth, leaving only the top of the cab visible. Well, the earth wasn't really all that solid; it had been, three days before when the topsoil was scraped off, laying bare the permafrost, but the sun had melted the frost at an alarming rate, turning what had been almost rigid soil ideal for serving as a road base into a quagmire. Not only had Flatch's Cat practically disappeared, but three others had begun to sink into the pit provided by the melting permafrost.

Three days of sheer hell ensued, for as the sun's heat intensified with the coming of summer, the permafrost continued to melt at lower levels, sucking the great machines down and down. Of course, where the topsoil had been allowed to remain in place, protecting the frost from the sun, the whole earth structure had preserved its solid nature, and this was merciful, because a contingent of smaller bulldozers could move in upon the still-firm ground and haul away at the stranded ones. But the suction of the mud, which seemed bottomless and determined to hold on to anything that fell into its maw, made recovery most difficult.

Cursing, swearing and groaning, the men of the black regiment struggled to rescue their precious Cats, and on some days they succeeded only in surrendering one or two new ones to the tenacious mud. Major Carnon spent three frantic days trying this trick and that to lure his great machines out of their viscous prisons and watching in despair as they sank always deeper into their glutinous graves.

On the third evening, when he seemed powerless to halt the devastation, he motioned Charley to sit with him: 'I didn't listen, Charley. You warned me. What is this stuff?'

and the Indian told him about the problems that permafrost presented to builders in Alaska: 'Not everywhere. Only in the north. Hundred miles down that way, none,'

and he pointed to the south.

'Why didn't we build down there?'

'Too close to the ocean. Japanese ships come, shell road, finish.' Careful not to gloat over the major's discomfiture, he added: 'This middle way definitely best.

Use permafrost right, you get damn good road.'

'What is the right way?'

Ignoring the question, Charley told of his experiences as a builder's helper in Fairbanks: 'Strange city. Permafrost line

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runs right through middle, I think. Houses here, permafrost plenty. Same street, down here, none. Very important to know, because suppose you got permafrost under your concrete slab? Heat from human bodies, you don't need no furnace, nothin', just people. It collects in slab, begins to seep down into permafrost, begins to melt, here, there, house winds up on a slant. Sometimes big slant. Sometimes maybe have to leave house.'

'How do you avoid it?'

'Like on your road. Leave topsoil in place. Don't move nothin'. Far over to side, dig some more topsoil, pile on top road, high, high. Pack down. You know that thing they call

sheep hooves?

'Yes. Lots of little iron knobs, packs earth like sheep walking over it.'

'Pack down the extra, tight, tight. You get yourself good roadbed.'

As soon as Carnon heard the solution he saw the problem: 'How far from the roadbed would we have to go for our topsoil? Too close, the whole area would melt down.'

'Ah ha, Major Carnon! You one smart man. Some dig too close, everything melts. I like to go about a hundred yards.' He considered this for a while, then asked: 'You got lots of wire rope?'

'Never enough. But yes, we got some.'

'Tomorrow morning, put your good dozers way off the road. Solid footing maybe. They pull out the stuck ones.'

So in the morning three good dozers were placed about fifty yards from the muddy road where the stricken Cats lay buried, and long lines of wire cable were attached to one of the vanished giants. It happened to be Flatch's and he helped supervise the operation, satisfying himself as he stood almost waist-deep in mud that the wires were properly fastened, then moving back as the three pulling dozers began to apply their strength. Slowly, and with vast loud cracking sounds as the Cat broke loose, Elmer's machine began its magical climb out of its prison.

Men cheered as its superstructure became visible, and Major Carnon ran here and there, directing this dozer or that to tighten its pull, and after about an hour of mortal struggle, Flatch's gigantic machine crawled back to life. Caked solidly in mud, it was barely recognizable as a bulldozer, but there it was, ready to be washed down, its vital parts still serviceable.

That night, when all the machines were back in operation, Major Carnon had his scribe draft a report to headquarters in Anchorage requesting that letters of commendation be

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forwarded to the civilians Elmer Flatch and Charley ... Here he dispatched a messenger to find out the Indian's name.

IT WAS A SUMMER THAT THOSE WHO WORKED ON THE

Alcan would never forget. One black man with a science degree from Fisk University, who served as a private in the 97th Regiment, wrote to his fiancee in Atlanta: Our ship put us down in Skagway after one of the most magnificent voyages you could imagine. Great mountains coming down to the sea, glaciers throwing icebergs at us, beautiful islands left and right. But the best part of all was getting on a rickety old train at Skagway and riding right through the biggest mountains you ever saw to a place in Canada called Whitehorse. Come peace, you and I are going to take our honeymoon on that railroad. Save your money and I'll save mine, because there is nothing else like it in the world.

That was the end of the good times. From Whitehorse we moved west to a section of the road you would not believe. Mosquitoes as big as saucers, swamps without bottom, whole forests to knock down with bulldozers, then on to the broken stumps with saws, and to bed in tents, with never a hot meal for days on end. Can you believe that in such circumstances we build four miles of road on a good day, two miles even if it's raining up to your armpits?

I miss you. I long for you, but almost no one up here bellyaches. It's a road that must be built. Someday it could save the nation.

Elmer Flatch was one of those many Alaskans who did not bellyache about the terrible conditions under which the Alcan Highway was being built, for he better than most appreciated its significance.

At the height of the summer there were seven work groups spotted along the emerging highway at widely separated points, and each had half its force building to the east, half to the west, so that from the air, when work pilots like LeRoy Flatch's successors flew over, the Alcan looked like an endless succession of inchworms, each moving out in studied leaps to meet its neighbor. There were really fourteen separate roads being built that summer.

For Elmer Flatch, forty-five years old and beginning to feel 857

the passing of the years, July and August of 1942 were the closest to hell that he would experience on this earth, for his fifteen-and sixteen-hour days were spent in an exhausting routine: drive through that copse of trees in a straight line, flattening evergreens big enough to produce spars for ships, attach wire ropes to the stumps and yank them out, push in topsoil from the surrounding areas, level the whole, ride back and forth in the interminable dust to compact the surface, fight mosquitoes all day long and especially at night, eat lousy food, and with the help of the able black troops and their efficient white officers finish off four miles before turning in to an exhausted but sometimes sleepless night.