Four Quarters of Light (3 page)

Maybe the Final Frontier is an inaccurate description, for assuredly Alaska is the Frontier of Fable. The onion-domed churches of nineteenth-century Russian Orthodoxy still break up the skyline around Juneau, Sitka and Kodiak. Further north the Inuit peoples cling to their religious beliefs with their shamanism and an animistic respect for the natural world from which we all could learn much. And everywhere one still finds those curious, rugged, idealistic individuals who have washed up in this vastness, and perhaps it's the proper place for them, for here the emptiness is big enough to contain their madness. Only a place as immense as Alaska can properly contain a fevered imagination. This is the land that Swift, C. S. Lewis and Tolkien never discovered, as fantastical as a fairy-tale but undersewn with deep soul-searching.

I began to pore over maps of Alaska. But any map of Alaska is a Spartan illustration: railway lines and road systems are conspicuous by their absence and Juneau, the state capital, is accessible only by air and sea. The state is more easily measured in time zones than miles. It contains four such zones and a total population of just over 600,000, half of whom reside in Anchorage, Alaska's largest town and port; the rest of the population is spread out across this massive, seemingly endless state in communities that make the map look more like a join-the-dots picture such as you find in children's colouring books. But this is no childhood fantasy land. The incomprehensible hugeness of the place is something to be wary of. I remember a friend I had met during my first brief visit to Alaska saying, ‘Be careful when you're reading maps in Alaska. Names don't always mean places and named places don't always guarantee that people live there. There are some communities in Alaska where people live so far from one another that they are all but invisible. That kind of landscape doesn't only make you feel small, it can be very scary and very dangerous too.'

I thought over my friend's words as I scanned the place names spread out before me. The Inuit names scattered around the margins of the landmass were curious and almost unpronounceable; my tongue tripped over glottal stops as I tried to say them: Unalakleet, Koyukok, Umiat, Shungnak and Shageluk, Akhiok, Ekwok, Quinhaqak, Togiak and Yakutat. Then the curious European names that marked the commercial expansion and settlement: Russian Mission and Holy Cross, Valdez and Cordova, and the place names of the miners who had come in droves, desperately poor, dream-driven men whose rudimentary education made them believe their dreams and give names to places the way you would throw scraps to a dog. The names were simple, yet just reading them brought you very close to their world: Livengood, Sourdough, Chicken, Coldfoot, Eureka. Then there were the mountains, from Mount McKinley, the highest on the continent, to the permanently frozen Brooks Range, the most northerly. The Koskokwim mountains and the Wrangell mountains, and more mountains – the St Elias, the Kilbruck, the Taylor, the Talkeetna, the Asklun, the Romanof, the Shublik – and then the great ranges, the Aleutian and the Alaskan. There were yet more mountains that no-one had bothered to name because no human had ever set foot on them or ever wanted to. Obviously there were some places that refused admission to the human species.

But however brutal, imposing and empty, people had chosen to go there, and to stay. Most assuredly Alaska is not a place one simply stumbles upon. Even in the book of choices this forbidden, inhospitable emptiness would hardly rate in the top twenty of anyone's most desirable places to settle in. Yet native peoples make up only about 20 per cent of the population; the rest are immigrants, or perhaps more correctly self-inflicted exiles. Who were they? Why had they come? What were they running from? And, more importantly, what had they found? How the place had transformed them to make them stay was what I wanted to know. Was there really some kind of magic here, or had the stone-cold landscape frozen their souls and immobilized them? For after
Alaska there are no more choices, no more places to go. It is, after all, the Final Frontier.

Poring over maps doesn't answer questions, it only adds to them, and in the case of Alaska it only served to deepen the enigma of the place and my resolve to return. I was determined that my journey should take me through the four geographical quarters. First, the coastal south-east and the south-central region to hunt down Jack London's first footfalls; then south-west and the Bering Sea coast; then into that light-filled, enclosed world of the Arctic region; and finally into the interior, ranging out from Fairbanks on small voyages of discovery or displacement. I intended travelling only during the period of maximum light, from snowmelt in mid-May to snowfall in mid-September, for I have had more than my share of dark places, and anyway, Alaskan winters are not made for travelling great distances.

As I began to plan the logistics of trying to encompass this vast land, I was ever mindful of Jack London's advice about his Alaskan experience: ‘It was in the Klondike I found myself. There nobody talks, everybody thinks. You get your perspective. I got mine.' I remembered too the author's imperative about being prepared to forget and abandon many things, and concluded it would be impossible and a serious error for me to try to work out a detailed schedule and timetable. The country was too big to be reduced to a precociously planned itinerary. If any journey was simply a record in time of passage between two points then few of us would need to make such journeys; we could simply read the records of others. Rather, a journey is like a work in progress: you extract meaning and insight from the experience.

Alaska was calling me out to its wilderness. Would I be equal to it or would it be unequal to my dreams? There was only one way to find out.

Packing was a nightmare; the problem was as big as the landmass I was venturing into. How does one wind-and weatherproof two adults and two children against climatic conditions that vary between Arctic numb and Mediterranean wet, occasionally bleaching into the high hot days of an Indian summer? I looked
at the bags piling up: they too were mocking me. It would take a brigade of army engineers to move this lot or at least a string of pack mules. I intended travelling a lot and the idea of constant packing and unpacking was already defeating me.

I thought it through over and over again. Four time zones, climatic conditions so varied that nothing could be depended on. A road system, in a land of continental dimensions, that amounted to a few hundred miles rather than thousands of miles. I would have to fly long distances in tiny light aircraft, and those that know me know that my fear of heights is legendary. Also I cannot swim and much of the south-east and south-west peninsulas can only be explored by small boat. I was certainly no Grizzly Adams and the logistics of my fanciful expeditions seemed to be impossible. It was like a logarithmic problem that had its resolution somewhere in infinity, and that, seemingly, was where I was going too.

In an attempt to reassure myself and to keep my worst fears from my wife and family, I turned again to my mentor Jack London and considered how he would have handled all this. In a letter to one of his friends he writes of his first encounter with the infamous man-killing Chilkoot trail, which had to be negotiated to enter into that wildness that so fascinated the author and myself.

‘The sands of Dyea resemble an invasion beach. Everywhere men bartered with Indian porters, trying to persuade them to haul their food at reasonable prices. Jack's ageing partner Shepard took one look at the glittering white wall of the Chilkoot Pass and decided to turn back. Within weeks, he would be joined by thousands more. In retreat, they would find abandoned kit littering the coastline for forty miles.' Despite the Chilkoot Pass's back-breaking nature, by the autumn of 1897 twenty-two thousand men and women had reached the other side. Jack was among them. But only after a struggle which tested his stamina to the limit.

Crippled horses littered the trail, ‘broken-boned, drowning, abandoned by man'. They died ‘like mosquitoes in the frost. They
snapped their legs in the crevices and broke their backs falling backwards on their packs; in the sloughs they sank from sight or smothered in the same, men shot them, worked them to death and when they were gone, went back to the beach and brought more. Some did not bother to shoot them, stripping the saddles off, and leaving them where they fell. Their hearts turned to stone, those which did not break, and they became beasts, the men on Dead Horse Trail.'

I looked again at our mountain of luggage and the sparse map, mulling over all the what-ifs that were niggling at me. It seemed I was contemplating my own Chilkoot Pass without having set foot in Alaska. I certainly do not possess the same ‘will to power' that was so much part of London the man and the writer but I suppose I had a soul hunger akin to his, and if he could survive on that perhaps I could too.

However, no matter how I dealt with the difficulties, most of which were imagined, there were two real problems that would not go away. I was having sleepless nights about the smallest of the inhabitants of this land where everything was big, namely the mosquito and its near cousins the black fly and the suitably named ‘no-see-ums', whose bites are far more annoying precisely because you cannot see the creature.

Permafrost was another problem. Its constant presence just feet below the surface ensured that plumbing was more than a luxury. In many places it was impossible to install simply because it would never work. I did not dwell on this subject too much with Audrey, but simply explained that she should expect things to be very primitive in some places.

The mosquitoes eventually won out. My Alaskan friend Pat Walsh had warned us not to underestimate their number or their size. To emphasize her point, she sent me a miniature penknife, no more than an inch long, with one small double-sided blade like a paring knife. When I thanked her and queried the purpose of such an ornament she answered curtly: ‘It's not an ornament, it's for skinning mosquitoes!' I decided to change the order of my travels, visiting ‘the Bush' first, before the insects got too thick on
the ground, then moving on to the Bering Sea coast and the south-east and south-west peninsular regions, where my expectation was that the open space and coastal winds would keep the bugs at bay.

Trying to solve problems before you encounter them is frequently a wise precaution but it can also be a debilitating one. Having convinced myself that it was better to confront the enemy in his own back yard, we headed north to the last frontier, come what may!

Fairbanks is known to many of its inhabitants as the Golden Heart of Alaska; the welcoming signs at the airport declare it with proud abandon. The origins of this accolade stem from the goldrush industry; it also, in a self-congratulatory manner, refers to the spirit of the place and people who live there. The boom-time economies of gold and oil that created it have all but gone away and the town remains shabby but unbowed. Our taxi driver advised us not to be taken in by the remark. ‘In the summer this can be the sweetest town in Alaska,' he said, ‘but the winter is when you need a place and people to be sweet. In the winter Fairbanks can be the coldest, bleakest bitch of a place. It's like a woman that's suddenly gone frigid. Man, it can get as cold as a witch's tits up here!' I liked the driver's iconic, careless manner. He was totally oblivious of the presence of Audrey and the children and gabbled on colourfully to me alone. I detected a hint of southern drawl in his voice, and when I asked him where he was from originally he confirmed my suspicions and added, ‘Been here more than thirty years and only been back once, when my mom died. Picked up what was coming to me and hightailed it back here faster than a fox after a hare. Hardly
remember the place I come from now, don't want to neither.'

I enjoyed the man's garrulous conversation and was intrigued by how everywhere else was simply referred to as ‘outside'. For Alaskans, I later learned, everywhere that is not Alaska is ‘outside'. In part it perhaps explained why he never went home, for as creatures we are seldom drawn in great length to what is ‘outside' our experience. ‘Outside' hints at something that is alien to our experience, and I was beginning to feel that ‘outside' was a place you should only visit once. So what was I doing here? Was this my ‘outside'? And would once be enough?

As suddenly as the question arose it dissolved, and I asked the driver, ‘Just how cold does it get?'

‘Well,' he replied, ‘it's been known to hit minus fifty and more here. And when you come out of a big cold like that, there's usually less people around.'

‘How come?'

‘Some die, some take off, some freak out completely. The freak ones you have to watch out for. At first they seem normal as they always were, then one day they start acting funny, doing things and saying things that ain't like them. Then they're back to normal again as if nothing happened. You forget it once, maybe even twice, but when it gets more reg'lar than that, you know they're gone and the old dark cold has got them. They'll be gone for ever, or enough so's they don't make much use anyway. It's always the loners that go first. Man needs a woman in the wintertime. Beg your pardon, mam!' he suddenly interjected, realizing finally that Audrey and the boys were in the car.