The Road to McCarthy (48 page)

Neil and Doug have laid out food and soft drinks on the breakfast table because the family will not set foot in the bar. “None of the kids has ever drunk alcohol. Pa says they’ve never smoked dope,” says Neil. “Never seen TV, watched a movie or listened to a CD either, as far as I know.” The kids have spotted the cheese and fruit and cake and cookies, but make no attempt to eat until someone offers the food around. A couple of them have bare feet. I’m not sure whether they took their boots off at the door or whether they walked down here in the snow like that. They take the instruments out of their cases and sit in a semicircle. There are twenty-six people in the room, and sixteen of them are Pilgrims. Pa makes a little speech of welcome, and then they start playing. It’s electrifying, moving and raw. Elishaba, the eldest, alternates lead vocals with nineteen-year-old Joshua as they trade licks on their violins. They have powerful, cutting voices, strengthened by singing outdoors, and sound like themselves rather than imitations of anyone else. Thirteen-year-old Jerusalem is a ferocious mandolin player, standing to take instrumental breaks then taking her seat again as her brothers and sisters, and Ma and Pa, continue the vocals. They’ve already written two songs about McCarthy, and they play them both tonight. At one point they put all the instruments down and sing a cappella in multipart harmony. Neil calls out a title, and they start doing requests. By now the three tiniest girls are holding hands and dancing in a circle, and the only ones not involved are two of the boys, about seven and nine years old at a guess—I think it would be hard to keep track even if you were their dad—who are lurking at the back. Suddenly they charge forward and start clog-dancing for all they’re worth, legs jiggling and big boots flailing beneath wild grins as the whole room comes alive with them. It’s been a special evening. It’s hard to believe they’ve only been playing for four years, and it’ll be no surprise if in years to come some of these kids are earning a living playing in brighter lights than McCarthy can offer. By the time they finish, we are indeed in hillbilly heaven.

Afterwards Pa tells me about the land they’ve bought, in a valley on the
McCarthy Creek twenty miles out of town. Some of the locals are saying it’s so remote and the trail so inaccessible they won’t be able to get the vehicles up there, especially in these freeze-thaw-freeze conditions. “We’re gonna be okay,” says Pa Pilgrim. “Don’t make it in one day, we’ll take two. Don’t make it in two, then three. Whatever it takes. We got ropes, winches, all kinds of stuff. These kids can do most things.” As if to prove the point a woman has come in looking for help because it’s dark now and the headlight on her snowmachine has failed. “I can do that,” says a small boy, who may possibly be eight-year-old Job, but they’re moving round so fast it’s difficult to keep track. “I’ll take the light off one of ours, fit it onto hers.” And he goes outside into the snow and the dark, and he does.

Before they leave Pa invites me to come and stay with them up at the Creek next time I’m in town. I have a fleeting vision of lasagne, jam and a big wooden cross, and fear I won’t be able to cope, but say Yes anyway. Neil takes them across the gleaming sheet ice to see the work Doug has done on Ma Johnson’s, of which he is touchingly proud. Doug and I adjourn to the bar for a drop of the devil’s brew. He sees me looking at one of the framed photos on the wall. “That’s my mom outside the lodge hugging John Denver.” I thought it was.

It’s almost midnight when I head across to Ma Johnson’s to go to bed. Pa Pilgrim and Country Rose and Neil are sitting in the lobby talking, with a selection of children asleep in chairs and sofas all around them. They pick up a couple of the smallest kids, and the big kids pick up some of the medium-sized ones, and they say goodnight and head off into the darkness to their makeshift camp. I wonder how things will turn out for them and the town of McCarthy? Whatever happens, it seems unlikely to be dull. Seventeen people can’t fail to make an impact.

Next day
there’s a fax for me from a National Park historian in a place called Copper Center. He has a little more information about James McCarthy. He staked a major claim, known as the Valdez Lode, above Nugget Creek in 1905; and he drowned while fording the Tonsina River in 1910. And at a time when most prospectors were searching for copper,
gold, silver or any damn thing that would make their fortune, McCarthy specialized only in copper.

A copper man, with a West Cork name. Judging from the photograph, he’d have been born around 1870, which would coincide with one of the great waves of Irish emigration. Maybe his father was a mining man who came out from Beara, and James was born out here; or perhaps he even came out from Ireland himself. It’s become a puzzle, and now I’m hooked.

Who was James McCarthy?

I call Copper Center, and they tell me they’ll check the Alaska records for the census of 1900, and see if anything turns up. In the meantime I decide to take a look in the little museum on the edge of town. It’s been closed since September and won’t open until summer, but apparently the door at the back is only held shut with a piece of wire, and I can let myself in if I tie it again when I leave.

It’s cold outside, but colder in the museum. According to the book I’m the first visitor for seven months. There’s a lot of dust and cobwebs, and I feel like a detective shaking the place down for clues as I search for any mention of James McCarthy. There are some fine panorama photographs by J. P. Hubrick, whose studio was converted into the McCarthy Lodge in 1954 by local pilot Mudhole Smith, so called because he once made a mistake and landed in a mudhole. They never let you forget, as I’m sure Moosefondler George will testify.

Another picture shows a bear on its hind legs looking through the window of a fragile-looking wooden building not dissimilar to the one I’m in now. There’s an old barber’s chair, a cash register and a copper still like the one that dripped on Slim Lancaster’s head. Doug told me he has Slim’s original, and plans to install it in the new bar when it’s built. There’s no mention of the man the place was named after, but I do find a newspaper cutting to brighten my day. It’s from the
Kennecott Star
of 1938, underneath the headline new shipment of 30 cases of eggs, biggest ever:

I suppose sometimes the solitude gets to you and there’s just nothing you can do about it.

“Hey, dude
. Who’s that, like, third guy on your shirt, man?”

“I dunno, man. Aerosmith. It’s a cheap shirt.”

It’s early evening and the bar is packed. There must be about ten or eleven of us. Sun is streaming through the window, people are playing pool and noisy rock’n’roll is on the stereo. There’s that feeling of unbounded optimism you sometimes get at the start of a lively drinking session, before it all goes wrong and people start arguing about things they’d never intended talking about in the first place. There’s a mood of rapidly escalating euphoria as people order back-to-back rounds of beer and tequila from the bartender.

I am the bartender.

It’s a fairly straightforward job. No money actually changes hands. There are just ten or eleven little pads on the bar with ten or eleven names on, and you run a tab until the end of the month. Jeremy’s just confused me by ordering what I thought was a soft drink. So what is Long Island Iced Tea, if it isn’t something that a nondenominational pastor would drink with his moose stew?

“Shot of tequila, shot of vodka, shot of gin, shot of rum, shot of triple sec, just a splaaaash of Coke. Spirit salad, man!”

He laughs, and somewhere between here and Anchorage there is a small avalanche. Meanwhile someone has managed to worm their way behind
me and sneak Queen’s
Greatest Hits
onto the stereo. “Arright! Greatest rock’n’roll band in the world,” shrieks Jeremy. “Pink Floyd,” claims someone else. “The Who!” shouts someone from the next room.

“They’re all English,” I protest. “Get your own rock bands. You invented it, didn’t you? C’mon, who’ve you got?”

“Led Zeppelin!” comes the reply.

It’s a long time since I worked behind a bar, and I’d forgotten what a grandstand seat it gives you for earwigging other people’s conversations.

“I see one this year, I’m gonna kill it. I want me a bear rug. Just my luck if I don’t have my rifle with me when I see one. Still, I’ll always have a pistol. That’s the thing with those 45s, that whole Rambo thing. They feel so good to shoot.”

The speaker is the young woman who serves breakfast and lunch.

“Last year I went camping? Wanted to see one so much I left a bowl of beef stew out on a log, still didn’t get to see one. Bummer.”

Someone chips in with a story about her friend who came home from school for lunch one day when she was eight and saw a dog sniffing round some groceries on the porch. She smacked its butt and went in and told her mom. Mom went out, then came back and said, “Honey, it’s a bear. That’s it. You’re having glasses.”

The breakfast lady tells us about the fight she had to break up last night between two of her dogs—“Had to kick it in the face, split its nose”—and now everyone’s joining in with their own hideous dog anecdotes.

“I hate it when you have to force their teeth apart.”

“Like with pit bulls?”

“Right.”

“I’ve been bit more times with dogs fighting than any other time.”

“Don’t be afraid to use a hard object.”

“Baseball bat?”

“No. Might kill ’em. A shovel is perfect. Hit ’em with the handle; that don’t work, use the metal end. Still won’t kill ’em.”

“And if it does, you can always dig a hole with it.”

A geeky guy in a Ramones T-shirt who could double as a character from
Northern Exposure
has just turned up. He orders a beer, I mark his tab, then
he says, “Bears are awake.” There’s a stunned silence—not in the bar, where everyone’s still yattering away—but inside my head.

“The little four-year-old kid, plays out on the skis all day? Saw one today behind their house, on the edge of town. Said the bear just ran away. Lucky kid.”

Did I mention that I’m leaving in the morning?

The word is
that the road is just about passable. Two women from town, Ali and Chris, are driving to Anchorage in a Toyota pickup to collect supplies, and they can give me a lift. As we leave after breakfast the Pilgrims are preparing to head up to their mountain valley. I say my goodbyes, and we walk the mile to the truck, which is parked on the other side of the river. As we go I’m weighing up the situation, wondering if I could outrun either of them if it came down to it. This bear anxiety is getting out of control. We reach the truck and I get in, wondering why on earth anything would want to eat seats like these.

It takes three hours to cover the sixty miles to the paved road at Chitina. It’s a tough drive through ruts and potholes and glacial debris, but I hope the Alaskan authorities never upgrade it. Easy access would change McCarthy forever. I can’t imagine how the Israeli made it out here in the Escort. Ali says that last year a friend of hers found a rental car in a ditch. The doors were open and there was a bottle of Jack Daniels on the seat. A couple of miles farther on he found a Japanese tourist pulling one of those suitcases on wheels with an extendable handle. “He’d seen some strange things out here, but that was the strangest.” He gave him a lift into town, and the tourist paid Kelly to fly him to Anchorage. “Just left the car right where it was.”

We stop for a break at the bridge that used to have no sidesjust wooden planks, slightly wider than a vehicle, across a 300-foot drop. “Two guys bought a pig, were bringing it back to town, they bungeed it off here.”

They what?

“They bungeed the pig down the canyon. Pig kinda liked it, and it gave them the idea to bungee some people. To attract business, they offered free
jumps to any Alaskans who would jump naked, but there were so many takers they had to stop.”

At the end of the road we pull over to look for the Worst Road in Alaska sign, but the road’s so bad we can’t find it. Then we hit the highway, and they let me drive through countryside so magnificent it makes Montana look like the Chelmsford ring road. Each time you think the mountains have ended, more appear like a mirage.

As we get close to Anchorage we start to see other cars and people, which feels rather alarming. If you stay in the wilds for years at a time you must get a terrible shock when you come to town, especially if you walk into your hotel dazed and confused after a ten-hour drive, as I have just done, to find thirty women with big hair in the lobby wearing emerald-green velvet evening gowns and singing a barbershop-harmony version of “Something” by the Beatles. The place is packed with hundreds of other women, many of them with even bigger hair. Three are in powder-blue cowboy shirts, but most have opted for frocks made of upholstery fabric. What in God’s name is going on?

“The Sweet Adelines,” says the porter in the lift.

Who?

“A convention of close-harmony singing groups. Two thousand of them in town for the weekend. And the crown princess of Thailand is checking in later, with forty bodyguards.”

Of course she is. She probably comes to Alaska all the time. Will she be singing too?

“I really couldn’t say, sir. But the Sweet Adelines are performing a melodrama in the ballroom later tonight.”

And so it is that just before midnight, in a hotel at the end of the world, I find myself watching twenty-five Dustin H
offman-in-Tootsie
lookalikes in tassels, polka dots, wigs and rouge sing a barbershop version of “God Bless America.” Most of them are big women and proud of it, but the one on the end is so thin in comparison with her colleagues that she looks like some kind of optical illusion. The melodrama has just ended, and I am shell-shocked. When I handed in my ticket a woman gave me a bag of popcorn. “I don’t eat popcorn,” I said.