The Road to McCarthy (47 page)

We’ve been going a couple of miles when Jeremy tells me it’s my turn to drive. This could be his first big error of the day. We swap places, I whip out the anchor as instructed and we’re off. It’s even better standing than sitting. We’re on a straight, flat stretch, which is why he’s let me have a go, but it seems unlikely I’ll ever be able to stop this thing. “Hit the brake,” screams Jeremy. I drop my full body weight and the huge poundage of clothing onto a sawtoothed metal bar underneath my heel, and we slither to a halt. I fix the anchor into the ice feeling quite pleased with myself. Pete the Dogmusher. This afternoon I’ll practice the hill start and reversing round a corner.

We stop at Kennicott and take a look at the old mine buildings. The hundred-year-old timber structures still look solid, though roofs are missing, windows are shattered and paint is peeling. It’s recently been declared a national monument or some such, so soon it’ll be all done up and looking
like it’s just been built. I feel a keener link with the past seeing it like this. Everything all came and went so quickly. In 1900 there was nothing here; three decades of intense activity, and it was all gone again. The view has changed as well. Kennicott used to look out on a glacier so big it obscured the mountains behind it. Today the glacier is still there, but so much has melted that now you look down onto it, and across at mountains the miners never saw. On the edge of town someone has nailed a pig’s head on top of a post, but you don’t like to ask, do you?

Jeremy unleashes the dogs for a rest. They behave like drunken students, rolling round in the snow and eating mouthfuls of it, but show no inclination to run as fast as they can into the far distance as they’ve been doing all morning. They just frolic round Jeremy, staring up at him, because in their world he is a god. One by one he hitches them back up and they’re straining to go. They just can’t get enough of this running thing. We stop at the miners’ cemetery, its picket fence and wooden crosses peeping out over the top of the snowdrifts, then head back to McCarthy by a route that follows the old wagon trail through the woods. This is how the materials to build the town and the mine were hauled up, and parts of it are very steep. “You ready for this?” shouts Jeremy, as the dogs start racing hell for leather down a woodland equivalent of the Cresta run. The cold night means conditions this morning are fast. There’s a loud scraping sound from behind, because Jeremy has the brake full on to slow us down to an almost-safe speed so we don’t career off the trail and disappear down the glacier. It’s tremendously exhilarating. We reach the bottom of the hill and I just want to do it again. “More! Now! Action replay!” But the trail’s gone flat and stays like that all the way into McCarthy. Jeremy slows down long enough to roll me out in front of the hotel like a Mafia victim, then off they charge back to his tent, where the dogs will have a huge meal, then spend the rest of the morning smoking cigars and watching daytime TV.

I’m not cold apart from my cheeks and my ears, but the rest of me is tingling in a new and unusual way. I peel back the layers and spend a quarter of an hour in the hottest shower I can bear. Awapuhi shampoo with Hawaiian ginger infused with silk and panthenol has been laid on for the wilderness explorer who likes to keep that soft and natural look while he’s
roughing it. Afterwards I shave, a vivid, sensual experience zinging with imagined shades of deep-frozen aquamarine and crystalline blue. It’s time for breakfast, but I don’t think I’ll bother.

Just joking. I’m so hungry I could bite off Ozzy Osbourne’s head and eat it if there was brown sauce to dip it in. I head over to the lodge and join Jeremy and the other site workers in their attempt on the world blueberry pancakes and maple syrup record. Jeremy has to work a nine-hour day in the cold, but I may allow myself a brief sit-down on the generously padded sofa in Ma Johnson’s lobby. I feel great. I wish every day started like this.

When I wake up
, the photo album Neil gave me last night is on the coffee table by the sofa. I pick it up and take another look. It was a lot to absorb in one go. “To our Neighbors here at McCarthy,” says a note in the front. “Our Pilgrimage has been long and full of hardships and pure joy. We’ve left a beautiful homeland to follow our Vision which we know is Glory Bound. Examine our Souls—the simplicity and love that years of Mountain Living has brought, and also sent us here. We also have brought a Lot of True Love with us in Jesus.”

The book is their introduction to the people of McCarthy. There are sixteen in the family: Ma, Pa and fourteen kids, with another one on the way. “I am called ‘Pilgrim,’” writes Pa next to a picture of himself wearing a cowboy hat, playing a guitar and leaning on a tree. “I am a stranger here on this earth, but only for a short season till my Lord comes. I came from Texas and a life of Riches and Pride. Country Rose was young and confused when we met in the deserts of California, having lived her childhood in the glitter of Hollywood’s Neon Fame …. together we set out on our Pilgrimage.” There is a picture of Country Rose holding an upright double bass. A raven called Shadrak is standing on the end of it.

The album tells their life story. For nearly twenty years they lived in a remote part of New Mexico, adding to their cabin as more children were born, raising goats and horses, and erecting an enormous wooden cross. They tanned their own leather and made their own buckskin. One day they went to a bluegrass music festival and were inspired. They bought a load of
secondhand instruments, then drew lots to decide which family member would play which one. When hikers and tourists began to discover their homestead they hit the road, learning their instruments as they traveled and adopting the name Heaven’s Hillbillies. For three years they wandered around Alaska in search of a new home, and a few months ago they happened on McCarthy. And yesterday they moved in.

The photographs that accompany the story might have been taken in the sixties, or the Depression, or the nineteenth century. They show settlers heading for a new frontier with their hats, their goats and their Lord. The children, whose ages range from one to twenty-six, have names from a biblical epic relocated to the American west: Elishaba, Job, Psalms, Jerusalem, Hosanna, Lamb. Nobody in McCarthy knows where they plan to live.

I take the album back over to the lodge, where a photograph has arrived by e-mail from Anchorage. “Copper Nugget—Copyright Miles Bros., 1903,” says a caption. Five men are standing by a huge rock, looking like characters from a John Ford western, or the Pilgrim family album. They have hats, whiskers and vests, and need to visit a laundry. The rock is a three-ton copper nugget, one of the biggest ever found. The smallest of the men, fourth from the left with his hand on one hip, hat tilted back, and sporting a bushy walrus moustache, is fixing the camera with a serious, narrow-eyed gaze. This is James McCarthy.

Today is mail day
, when the plane that connects McCarthy with the outside world arrives and the townspeople assemble at the airstrip. It’s a luminous, glistening morning, cold but dazzlingly bright. A handful of people are gathering packages and letters from the pilot when a pickup truck arrives carrying sixteen people and three St. Bernards, and the Pilgrim family step out to meet the town. I see Pa Pilgrim shake hands with Rick the grizzly-slaying pastor, and wonder how compatible their versions of Christianity will be. I wait till the plane has gone before introducing myself to Pa. The kids gather round, all ages and sizes, men and toddlers and teenagers and young women, listening to everything Pa has to say. “We’ve been wandering like Abraham, but the road to McCarthy was the road God
intended us to take.” He has a warm smile and extremely bright eyes. To survive the Alaskan winters on the road with fourteen kids takes considerable skill and resources, and is so far removed from most people’s experience, and what I could ever achieve, that I’m keen to know more. He squeezes my arm, and says he’ll catch up with me later in the week. He picks up one of the smallest children and they all head off to the truck. Before they leave, one of the boys comes back over with one of the St. Bernards, which nearly knocks me off my feet. He asks if I’ll be in town this evening, and I tell him I have no plans to be anywhere else. We’ll come at seven then, he says. Or maybe eight. He smiles, and thanks me—these kids have impeccable manners—then climbs back into the truck and they head off.

Back at the lodge I have one of those defining, line-in-the-sand experiences that teach you an unforgettable lesson about who you really are. It’s lunchtime, and the guys come clattering down from the roof to eat. It’s the kind of climate that encourages a healthy appetite, and the two large trays of baked lasagne that looked as if they would feed three times as many people are soon empty. There’s a happy buzz of conversation, though it doesn’t involve Guy the generator guy, who hasn’t spoken since breakfast the day before yesterday, though to be fair he made a joke then and it might have worn him out. Bagels were being served, and Guy doesn’t like bagels. Someone remarked how good the bagels were in New York. “Yes,” said Guy, in a Stan Laurel deadpan, “bagels are very good in New York.” There was a moment’s pause while we absorbed his meaning: that the best place for bagels is thousands of miles away from him, in New York. The applause was fulsome and enthusiastic.

So everybody’s chatting away, speculating on where the Pilgrims might have bought land and whether the kids have ever taken a boyfriend or girlfriend home to meet the parents, when I look up to pour a glass of water. And there, right across the table from me, Jeremy is eating lasagne and bread and jam at the same time. So it’s not just John the part-time park ranger. They’re all at it! It’s an
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
moment, as I realize that these people share a dark and sinister secret, and I am not part of it. I’m half expecting the room to go quiet and Neil to pour jam on my pasta. I will look in turn, in big close-up, at each of their stubbled, self-sufficient,
weather-hardened faces. “Go on,” Guy the generator guy will say. “Eat it.” And now I know that I couldn’t do it. This is what it takes to survive in the wilderness—for all I know, a plate of curry and Victoria sponge cake may be next—and I’m just not made of the right stuff.

After lunch
I drive the snowmachine out across the frozen river and along the first stretch of the McCarthy road to visit Jim, who I met at the mail delivery this morning. He moved to McCarthy in 1954, and has lived here longer than anyone else. There is a long straight snowy drive up to his house, which turns out to be his runway. In his garage are four planes, three of which he built himself. There’s a little local runaround for shopping, a bigger one so he can take friends out, a tiny one on which he’s doubled the capacity of the fuel tanks so he can fly to Oregon and another two-seater he sometimes uses to collect the mail, though usually he prefers the three-mile walk.

Building, maintaining and flying your own plane must be the ultimate vote of confidence in your ability to look after yourself. If something breaks out here, there’s nobody else to fix it. He built the house, the outbuildings and the aircraft hangar himself, and installed the solar heating system. He built a water wheel driven by a stream—when it isn’t frozen—to power his domestic appliances. We go inside and take off our boots in the tool room he has built onto the house. There are vices, woodplanes, benches, welding goggles and hundreds of tools, each sitting snug in its own special place. You could build a Viking longship, or a space shuttle, in here, and for all I know he already has. For a non-handyman like me, to whom a socket set is as mystifying as the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is an intimidating place.

Inside the house Jim introduces me to his wife. They take out some maps and start showing me the wilderness beyond the wilderness. “McCarthy is just the beginning. It’s really kinda tame. You get into some of these regions”—he points towards coastline and mountain ranges where there are no roads or place names—“well, it gets real big. And empty.” I think it’s empty enough for me right here, thanks all the same. I’m starting to understand my limits. Wherever you go in the world, there will be people
to tell you it’ll be bigger, stranger, better, more authentic if you take the time to go somewhere else instead; but if you go there, you won’t be here. You can only be in one place at a time, and sleep in one bed each night. Sometimes it’s good to know where you are when you wake up. But I understand Jim’s point, and take his word that McCarthy is where the wilderness really begins, even though to me it feels like the heart of it.

“This area here—now this is real remote. Sometimes we’ll fly down there, hop around a bit, stop on beaches, maybe pick wild strawberries. There’s one guy lives down there, a recluse called Brad. We call and see him if we’re in the area. Last time, I noticed he had a skull on his mantel, so I asked him, ‘What’s that, Brad?’

“‘The last tourist,’ he said.”

You could mistake Jim for a fit, recently retired professional from the suburbs rather than a hermit or a backwoodsman, but this is his place, and he loves it. It’s warm in the house—he’s just finished building a sunroom with a hot tub—and I’ve taken off two or three outer layers. When it’s time to leave, I put on a green fleece that Neil has lent me to cut back the wind chill on the snowmachine. I try to zip it up, but it catches, so I try again. This time the zipper gets wedged on the teeth. I pull and tug it, almost break it, and it comes free. The third time, I can’t even get the wretched thing started. I’ve never been good at zippers. I look up, and Jim and his wife are watching me with expressions of quiet pity. I was hoping they hadn’t noticed.

“What’s the matter? Can’t you zip your jacket?”

No, I’m afraid I can’t. You can build airplanes and water wheels and pick strawberries where no other man has ever trod, but I can’t even zip up a fleece. It’s another lasagne-and-jam moment. I wouldn’t last five minutes out here.

The room
gets a little darker as the Pilgrims appear at the top of the road. The whole family is walking down towards the lodge in a tight-knit group, like a scene from
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
, except they’re not carrying any weapons. It’s almost eight, but the sun’s so bright it feels like late afternoon. They reach the door and come inside in a flurry of
Hi’s
and
Howdys
. I was wrong about the weapons. Pa’s wearing a gun in a holster on his belt. The kids are carrying fiddles, guitars, banjos and mandolins, though sadly there’s no sign of Shadrak or the stand-up bass.