Four Quarters of Light (18 page)

Breakfast was finished with gusto, and over coffee Audrey and I discussed how different our hosts' personalities were from others we had come across en route here. They were so welcoming and open; they'd even shared quite intimate details of their lives as if
they had known us for ever. In comparison, the locals we had met in the café at Chitina and the roadside teahouse were frozen, withdrawn and uncommunicative. The impression they had given was that they were intimidated and annoyed by our presence. But up here in the mountains, we felt at home.

But comfortable feelings proved short-lived. Whatever plans we'd had for the day were quickly aborted. We had planned a short hike through the alder and spruce woods that backtrack along the course of the McCarthy River. The gradient wasn't too steep and we hoped to get high into the hills without too much strain. Audrey had Cal papoosed on her back while Jack and I led the way. But we didn't lead much further than a few hundred yards. Mosquitoes were everywhere, and the nearer we got to the river the more their numbers seemed to multiply. Audrey had made a point of soaking all of us in the mosquito repellent Deet; we had been warned not to go anywhere in Alaska without it. Everyone swore by it – it was the only thing that would protect us. But obviously the mosquitoes of McCarthy were of a different species, somehow immune to the power of Deet, and within fifteen minutes we were scurrying back to our cabin for refuge.

It was not an unpleasant confinement. The cabin had been tenderly restored with white walls and polished wooden floors that gleamed in the sunlight. A low shelf skirted the whole dining area displaying a collection of various shaped bottles, blue, brown, green, ruby and curious lavender-coloured ones that had contained medicines and chemicals from the mine's infirmary. On the window ledge, a small set of child's building blocks spelled out its own intimate welcome. It was obvious that everything in the cabin had been repaired and salvaged from what had remained as the mine fell into disuse. Apart from his many other skills, Mike had a craftsman's hands, and his attention to detail suggested someone who enjoyed what he did and took his time doing it. My envy of the man deepened.

There was neither a TV nor a radio in our cabin. I suspected that as we were holed up in the hollow of a mountain neither would have worked anyway. Instead, Mike and Laura kept a small
library of books mainly about Alaska. The small living room held the real treasure: an old glass cabinet with glass shelves, sitting on a small table. It too was an item looted from the remains of the infirmary. I could imagine it filled with small shiny instruments for looking into throats, ears and noses. It would have housed small bottles of all sorts of evil-smelling things, tins of greasy ointments, a selection of thermometers, a stethoscope and various emergency odds and ends of a medical era long since past. But all these supposed things were not to be found. Instead, the cabinet and the table it sat on were filled with animal skulls, teeth and bones. I was just as fascinated with them.

Later, Mike and Laura called to invite us to supper with them. A friend had delivered some fresh salmon and there was more than enough for us all. They also brought over an old incense burner with a handful of anti-mosquito tablets to burn out on the porch. Mike noticed my interest in his collection and he named each of the skeletons for me – brown bear, black bear, wolverine, wolf, lynx, a collection of goose skulls too numerous to name. Outside, as we set up the burner, Mike pointed at several racks of antlers piled inside his chicken coop. ‘We're allowed to take four moose a year, though I've never shot that many in a season. Ain't got a big enough freezer, and people here generally share their surplus from a kill.' He further confessed that his bone collection was only partly related to his hunting skills. The wolverine and the lynx had been given to him, and he was adamant that he would not have shot either of them even if they had been staring him in the eye. Having already got to know the man I didn't need to ask why, but by way of explanation he remarked that they could be more trouble than they were worth, and anyway, there were some creatures you just left to themselves.

‘A hunter as well as your other attributes, Mike!' I said.

‘Well,' he replied, ‘it saves a lot of money to hunt your own food, and the hides and the horn supplement your income.'

I was curious about the horn, and asked him about it. He informed me that many people in Alaska like to keep a personal hunting knife or a fancy skinning knife, hunters especially, so
Mike would collect moose antlers and sell them by the pound to the knife manufacturers. ‘You go into these places, pick out a piece of antler or bone, make a drawing of the knife you want and they make it for you. They can make them as fancy as you want. But you generally find that genuine hunters don't go in for fancy. There are some people who like to have them hanging from their belt.' I remembered the men at Talkeetna. I had admired their bowie knives and had priced several when we were buying our gear in Fairbanks. Boy, was I now glad I hadn't given in to the temptation. As I was thinking this, Mike added that he didn't do much hunting now. Winter was the best time, but he was finding the winters more difficult to endure, and when he could he cleared out during the worst of the weather.

I was curious about the hunting economy and pursued Mike about it. Most people in the area hunted for food. It was a low-income area and its remoteness made the cost of living excessive. Hunting was not a pastime, it was essential to survival. Twenty-five per cent of people lived below the poverty level, so harvesting natural resources was as much a matter of your personal economy as it was for the big timber and fish processors. Mike and Laura still picked berries in the lard pail, with a can full of rocks – one for the berries and the other to keep the bears away!

I pointed up at the huge mill building then waved my hand towards the derelict outbuilding. ‘Is this what happens when we get too greedy?' I asked.

Mike's answer was ambiguous. ‘Sure, some people got very, very rich and still are from this operation, but the others who worked here, well, they had a job, a home, an income, they had a school and even a hospital. Whole families were born and raised here. The only thing that didn't work too well here was the church.' Mike laughed. ‘Anybody who was walking down Silk Stocking Road after a hard day at the mine wasn't thinking of his soul.'

By this stage it was blizzarding mosquitoes and we both dived inside the cabin. Mike's dislike of mosquitoes was matched only by Audrey's. He complained bitterly that for the past three years
Kennicott had been relatively free of mosquitoes but now it was like a biblical plague. ‘We came hoping to stay ahead of them,' Audrey volunteered, ‘and now look what you've done. You've brought them with you!' Laura ribbed us, making a mock expression of desperation and anger on her face. All of us laughed together while looking out of the window at the clouds of mosquitoes swirling frantically in the warm afternoon air. It could have been a scene from a Hitchcock film, only this time the waiting predators were insects, not birds, our nervous laughter confirming how helplessly trapped we were. ‘Mosquitoes have got to be worse than the snow,' confessed Mike. ‘At least you can work in the snow, but these things bring everything to a halt . . . except insatiable itching!'

Mike's distress made me ask what happened in the towns of McCarthy and Kennicott if someone was seriously hurt. ‘In a medical emergency people can be medivacked out by air very quickly,' he explained, but when I asked about crime and policing both he and Laura laughed. ‘There isn't any crime. It's a very small community and nobody has much to steal, and even if they did, where are you going to go with it? As for the police, it's a known fact that they refuse absolutely to come here unless there has been a murder and the assailant is in custody, chained to a tree with a handwritten confession as evidence.' Audrey and I expressed our disbelief but Mike re-emphasized the matter, assuring us that the police would not come unless there were bodies and someone was being held for the crime. ‘The moral dictates of the Church stop more than fifty miles across the mountains, and they don't seem in any hurry to come here.'

‘You've got it made here,' I said. ‘You can do pretty much as you wish.'

It was Mike and Laura's turn to laugh. ‘Except for the snow and the cold and the dark and storms that seal up this place so tight that nothing can get in or out. And then there's always this.' Mike pointed out at the mosquito storm blowing up a gale outside our window.

Over the next five days I realized just how naive my utopian
dream was and how persistent the plague of mosquitoes was. Visions of Utopia always solve the big questions of existence, maybe because they ignore the incidentals. Had Alfred Hitchcock replaced his birds with these insects in his famous film he would have been doing no injustice to his work. Our windows misted over with their buzzing blackness. But maybe the mosquitoes were an excuse. I was measuring myself against Mike McCarthy and found myself sorely wanting! Though we still managed some early-morning and late-night hikes we were more or less under strict curfew during the daytime. I didn't mind much, though. I was enjoying my strolls through the deserted township. With Mike as a guide I discovered the remains of the hospital, the school, the grocery and the post office. There had been a library which I was sure must have supplied the older, mildew-stained editions in Mike's own. There was even a room for a visiting dentist, and a functioning operating theatre for the hospital. But there was no bank and no jailhouse, for, as Mike explained, ‘company script' had bought everything and miscreants were run out of town with exacting swiftness. Those who remained from the past were buried in a desolate graveyard behind the dairy barn. But it had been company policy that whenever possible the dead were sent ‘outside' to relatives or stored in boxes over the winter until the ground was soft enough to bury them.

Maybe it was the emptiness, maybe it was the stillness and the silence fuelled by my reading through Mike's library, but I felt a real sense of the thriving community that had lived here. It was as if you could see and hear the ghosts of babies crying in their mothers' arms as they waited to collect milk from the dairy; nurses damping laudanum over a man's nose and mouth as the doctor cranked some broken bones into place; a small floral bowl by the dentist's chair rattling as the still bloody stumps of tobacco-stained teeth were dropped into it; children's rhyming voices in the square of the schoolroom, now overgrown with alder saplings and forget-me-nots.

While picking through Mike's books I had come across a
memoir by someone called Sissy Lommel Kluh, who had moved up to Alaska with her family from Idaho. Sissy wrote with childlike wonder about her first sight of the glacier, reflecting blues and greys and shimmering silver. How different it was now as I looked out on it. But it made me think of my own children and how Jack seemed happy and full of questions about what appeared to him as one huge adventure playground. So Sissy Lommel Kluh became my confederate, and I told some of her story to my own boy, hoping it might make his stay here more magical. For me its magic was real because Sissy was very near.

I chose to believe that our cabin was her own. I could smell the cinnamon sugar bread and game stew her mother cooked. I could see her looking at the pictures in the big catalogue book her mother kept. Sometimes her mother made copies of the clothes in the pictures. But mostly Sissy loved the paper dolls her mother made from the pages of the book. She had names for them all and used to pretend she was the teacher.

One day Sissy lost her favourite doll, the one that Grandma in Idaho had sent her. Grandma had made it especially with her favourite colours. She called it Sissy too. She lost it in the snow and cried for days, complaining that Sissy would die from the cold. After a few weeks, as the snow was melting, someone found her doll and gave it to her. So she placed it in the oven of the range Mummy cooked on. It was warm there and Sissy would soon be better. Mummy sewed and repaired the doll and she was as good as new until one day she got very sick and worms came out of her mouth and Daddy had to bury her in the cemetery. Years after this incident, when Sissy watched the flat cars being loaded with heavy burlap gunny sacks full of ore for shipment, she thought of her doll.

Sometimes Sissy's mother helped in the hospital. Sissy remembered taking some soup to her one afternoon. As she was leaving they brought in a man whose clothes were soaked in blood and his head swathed in bloody bandages. He died after a few hours. Later her father explained that the cold was so intense that it turned icicles into steel spears. Unfortunately the poor man had been
passing underneath when several sheared off. He had too many injuries and had lost so much blood that the hospital could do nothing for him. But the mine would look after him until the summer. She often thought of the bloody man when her father packed glacier ice around the carcasses of dall sheep, ptarmigan and rabbit to preserve them.

Sissy accompanied me on my morning walks, her memories blowing through the clapboard ruins. But now it was summer and half a century had passed. The people of the mine had gone; only fireweed, Johnny jump-ups, forget-me-nots, lady slippers and columbine populated the place. Sissy used to watch transfixed as the men rode the ore buckets to four thousand feet above the camp, believing that up there she would see God through the rays of the sun, like the picture on her catechism book. One day she rode on the bucket, innocently telling the men that she was going up to see God. They all smiled kindly, and one man stroked her hair telling her there was no God up there, ‘just sweating, angry, thirsty, love-hungry men!' Sissy didn't really understand them at the time, but when she was older she understood every word . . . and she had only to go down Silk Stocking Road to find it!