The Road to McCarthy (45 page)

First impressions of a bar are crucial. It’s like buying a house, only more important. And if you’re going to spend a week in a place that’s in the middle of nowhere but not so central, you’ve got high hopes riding on the only bar in town. Right now I’m feeling very relieved. If all else fails—if the
weather closes in and the planes don’t fly, if the road washes away and I’m trapped for a month; if all the books in town catch fire and there’s nothing left to read—then at least I know I’ll be able to come and sit in here and be happy. And if they move the beer off the table we might even be able to shoot some pool. All in all, I’ve been in worse spots.

On the other hand, with a population so small, what happens if I don’t like them; or worse still, if they don’t like me? If you upset somebody in such a remote place I shouldn’t imagine they’d bother with the formality of burying you under a patio. So far the signs are good. Kelly’s a diamond, the drinkers in the bar seem friendly enough and the two guys who own the place have been charming. That’s six accounted for. There must only be another dozen or so to meet. “People here are pretty tolerant, even if they don’t agree with you. Places in Alaska can be a lot more redneck than this,” says Doug, one of the owners, over dinner. We’re eating pork, sliced into thin fillets, rolled and filled with pistachios and cooked in coconut milk and spices. It’s served with homemade poppadoms, lemon rice, oriental pickled vegetables, and salad with honey mustard dressing. The merlot is excellent. My expectations of moose stew and pork’n’beans punctuated by the sound of lumberjacks belching and cowboys farting have turned out to be wide of the mark.

The accommodation is even more of a surprise. Instead of a spartan bunkhouse with too-narrow wire frame beds and a jug of water that freezes in the night so you have to break the ice before you can pour it over your head, I’m in a meticulously designed pioneer-style room with patchwork quilts and one of those knock-me-down hot showers that European plumbers ought to be sent to America to study. I’d had visions of living like a brute for a week, then dumping my clothes in an incinerator back in Anchorage, hosing off the moose shit and going looking for food that didn’t come out of a can. Instead I have been dropped into the Alaskan edition of
Homes and Interiors
. Doug and Neil have done a fine job. There are few more comforting experiences for the traveler than to journey great distances through unfamiliar and threatening landscapes, anticipating an austere and possibly squalid destination, only to discover that catering and interior design are not in the hands of heterosexuals.

As I snuggle down for the night under the crisp linen and embroidered counterpane and cast an eye over the antique lamps and hand-tinted photographs, I realize that if I ever tell anybody how nice it is here they’ll all want to come, and it will spoil it; so instead I pull the threadbare bloodstained blanket up to my chin, arch my back against the broken springs, and listen to my teeth chattering above the drunken snoring of Liver Eating Johnson from the rusty toilet bucket on which he collapsed a little while ago. I’m gonna have to be tough to make it through a week in this hellhole, but if I grit my teeth I’ve a feeling I just might pull it off. Sissy city folk, though, should stay away.

“You’re the first visitor
to come through here since that Israeli guy a few weeks ago,” says Jeremy the Dogmusher over breakfast. It’s seven o’clock, and I’m dining with the half dozen construction workers who’ve been working through the winter to fix the town up before the snow melts and the visitors start arriving.

“At least you knew McCarthy was here,” says Neil. How else would you find it? I wonder. It’s not as if it’s on the way to anywhere.

“Except oblivion.” Jeremy grins. He’s about thirty years old with long brown hair and beard, piercing eyes that I think are gray but appear to keep changing color and a manic laugh that lights up his whole face, and the rest of the room, like Jack Nicholson on helium. “This Israeli guy, man, didn’t know this place existed. Drove all the way out the McCarthy Road, when it was frozen solid, in a rented Escort. A fuckin’ Escort!” He shrieks with laughter, and somewhere in Costa Rica a howler monkey looks round to see what all the noise is about. “He was trying to get to Valdez, but made a left at Chitina, took a whole day to get here. Didn’t even know there was going to be anyplace out here, because the asshole didn’t have a map.” He’s banging the table with delight now, and the pancakes are bouncing up and down.

“He said he didn’t have enough money for a room,” says Neil, “and could he sleep on the floor in here.” He raises an eyebrow, which I imagine is the same answer the Israeli got.

“So I told him I’d rent him tent space and a sleeping bag,” says Jeremy.

Tent space? Does this lunatic live in a tent, in Alaska, in the winter?

“And he says, ‘You mean, you sleep outside?’

“‘Yeah,’ I told him. ‘Sleep outside, live outside, work outside, run the dogs outside. It’s an outside kind of a deal.’ Gave him a warm suit, two sleeping bags, and a lesson in how to minimize heat loss and stay alive. I woke up next morning, and he was just sitting there, with the warmest bag pulled down over his head, rockin’ and kinda makin’ a noise.”

There’s a mournful-looking man sitting at the far end of the table. He’s got another one of those long beards, and a nylon cap printed with a slogan for an electrical supplies shop and a picture of an electric motor. He hasn’t uttered a sound since he walked in half an hour ago, but now he looks up and begins to speak in a low-key drawl.

“I usually find ….”

The others have stopped talking and all eyes are on him.

“I usually find if I can keep both ends warm, the middle part takes care of itself.”

There’s a momentary pause, then everyone applauds, bangs on the table and whoops. Then they get up and head out to work. There’s just Neil and me left at the table. “That’s Guy the generator guy,” he says. “Fixes our power supply. The first three months he was here he didn’t say a word to anyone. I guess he’s really coming out of his shell now.”

“Will some Intelligent person
show us why McCarthy is not going to make a Butte …. we have more Copper in the Immediate vicinity than all Montana holds.”

So said the first issue of a newspaper called the
Copper Bee
in 1916. mccarthy bar, proclaimed an ad in the same edition. finest wines and liquors. The paper only survived for three issues, but you know what? It was right. They may have called Butte the richest hill on earth, but the one outside McCarthy was even richer, if rather less conveniently situated.

Until the late 1800s few white men had penetrated these remote and forbidding regions. It was not until the Klondike gold rush that prospectors and miners arrived to fulfil the prophecy of local Native American legend
that one day their hunting lands would be lost to a new people with pale skin and yellow hair. In the winter of 1898 many prospectors died in the Wrangell Mountains from hypothermia or falling into crevasses, having arrived unprepared for such extreme conditions. A U.S. government expedition led by Captain William Abercrombie reported of the prospectors that “over 70 percent of them were mentally deranged.” I suppose that would explain why they turned up in a place like this wearing thin woolly gloves and threadbare overcoats.

One of Abercrombie’s men was sent to explore the Chitina River, but ran into difficulties and out of rations. He was fortunate to stumble upon the camp of a prospector, who lent him horses and supplies. The soldier expressed his gratitude by naming a creek upriver after him. The prospector’s name was James McCarthy.

A year later, in 1900, a pair of chancers called Clarence Warner and Tarantula Jack Smith—they never seemed to come up with dull nicknames like “Smithy,” did they?—stopped for lunch by the McCarthy Creek. “Looks like a good place for sheep,” said Warner, pointing to a green patch high up on the mountain. “Don’t look like grass to me,” said Tarantula Jack, throwing away his bear sandwich and striding excitedly towards the mountain. What they’d spotted turned out to be ore with an astonishing 70 percent copper content, the richest in the world. They lost out to Butte on quantity, but the quality couldn’t be beaten. By 1906 the railroad that now forms the McCarthy road had been laid, and the Bonanza Mine was in full swing.

The mine itself was five miles up the hill at Kennicott, a town owned and run—thanks to a spelling mistake by a clerk—by the Kennecott Mining Company, which maintained an austere regime involving table tennis and hymns. McCarthy flourished as a provider of the service industries essential to the physical and spiritual well-being of hundreds of wild-eyed miners stranded in the wilderness on top of a frozen mountain. “If we got any change out of a ten-dollar bill, it was because they thought we were still sober,” said one ex-miner.

Alcohol was illegal in the early days, but bootleggers thrived and even got free publicity in the local paper. “There is some beverage on the market
in our fair city this week which has a great effect on its consumers,” announced another short-lived organ, the
McCarthy Weekly News
, in 1919. The engineer on the train played a special warning on the whistle if there was a federal agent on board. In 1922 the appositely named U.S. Commissioner Coppernoll wrote to his superiors: “this place is too tough for me …. 70 percent of the population make their living directly or indirectly through the medium of illicit traffic in whiskey.” One popular brand was named Old Slippery. “Made in the woods,” read the citation on the label. “Aged three days, bottled thin, tastes like sin.”

Many bootlegging stories have been recorded for posterity—including the time Slim Lancaster was denying everything to the marshal when the still upstairs boiled over and started dripping through the ceiling onto his head—but my favorite concerns the Four-Eyed Kid, and not just because of his name. The Kid was caught bang to rights with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He was locked up, and the booze was put in the marshal’s safe to be produced as evidence; but the locals broke into the safe one night, drank the whiskey and replaced it with water. The case collapsed in court when the Kid’s lawyer took a match to the alcohol and tried to ignite it.

Legitimate businesses also flourished, under the stewardship of local shopkeepers like the Crooked Swede and Too Much Johnson. Brothels were a boom industry, and prostitutes were welcomed as respectable members of mainstream society, or at least as respectable as anyone else who’d made it out here. A photograph of the red light district, the Row, shows a huddle of primitive wooden cabins that look so cold the miners would have needed a blowlamp to get their longjohns off. The working girls gloried in such names as the Tramway Queen, the Snake Charmer, the Beef Trust—she weighed in at over 300 pounds—and Tin Can Annie, who “could play sweet music on anything” if we can believe her publicity, and I think we can.

Copper prices dropped after the First World War, and by the 1930s Kennicott was on the skids. The last train ran in November 1938, at less than a day’s notice, and mines and homes were abandoned like the
Marie Celeste
, only colder. The bridge was washed away in 1939, leaving McCarthy isolated, and in 1940 a fire burned down the hotel, the post office and the drugstore. Knowing a good opportunity when they spotted
one, the bears then ripped up the railway line. By 1943 only four residents remained.

But who was James McCarthy? And why is so specifically Irish a clan name to be found out here, in a place much handier for Siberia than Skibbereen? The simple answer is that nobody seems to know. I’ve spent my first day leafing through every book, historical document and antique newspaper I can lay my hands on, and it’s turned up next to nothing. Accounts agree the creek and the town were named after him, and that’s where the information ends. He was just a prospector. When you come from a part of Europe where name and place origins have been recorded and traced for centuries, it’s a shock to discover that recent history can have wiped its tracks so quickly. It’s actually possible that there are people still alive who met him; after all, if John the Yank had grown up in Alaska instead of Montana, he would have been a kid when McCarthy was a man.

And then I remember something the Yank said to me when I was sitting in his apartment a few days ago watching the snow drift down.

“Wherever you find copper in North America you’ll find the Irish. Especially Cork Irish. Beara Irish.”

At the moment it’s still a hunch, but if you follow the connections you never know where they might lead.

“The thing with bears is
, you gotta know which kind you’re dealing with. A grizzly is meaner, more inclined to attack, but if you play dead, there’s a chance he’ll leave you alone and walk away, although there’s also a chance he’ll crush your skull with his paw. But with a black bear, you have to fight back. Try and play dead, they’ll just start right on eating you. So it helps if you can tell ’em apart.”

It’s always stimulating to visit new places, acquire fresh knowledge and expand your portfolio of nightmares. In a place where there are far more bears than people, it would be foolish not to consider what you would do if you were confronted by one; but try as I may, I can’t see myself coming up with much besides the weeping and the incontinence. I understand that my life may depend on being able to identify the bear so I know whether to lie
down or start punching it, but I’m afraid the only one I’d recognize is Winnie the Pooh, and it seems unlikely I’m going to run into him out here.

“Grizzlies have a kind of a hump between the shoulder blades.”

That’s not the kind of thing you’d want to point out, though, is it? They probably get really mean if they start feeling self-conscious.

“Don’t worry, Peter. People don’t see grizzlies that often. And they’re a protected species, remember. That means you can only shoot them if your life is threatened.”

“So you’ve never had to kill one yourself?” I ask.

“Sure I have. Four in two years.”

I’ve no reason to disbelieve him. After all, there’s one pinned to the wall just above the fireplace.