This was those people, and that time.
We worked as firefighters in the Kobuk River Valley for six summers—from the receding of ice and snowbanks in the spring, as on this day in May, to the September snowlines marching down the Cosmos Hills around us until the ground was white. There is a visual pun I could share with you: the huge British-made Argosy cargo planes we used were painted white and dark gray, with the white on top. I have a photo of N1430Z sitting on the Dahl Creek runway, exactly echoing the paint job on the September mountains around it. Unlike the mountains but very much like me, it would fly away.
I say we worked, but I was a puppy and didn’t know the difference between work and play: loading a helicopter or making a pie to take to someone in the village or singing songs until dark. Dark happened in August. My roots desperately wanted to be planted in this northern country that seemed so austere in its distances, smelled like sour fish and smoke in its warm houses. I would spend winters reading and studying the voices of elders and historic travelers through the Kobuk country. Like all wannabes, I would come part of the way toward the authentic life of the place, stitching the air to the ground. Trying to see beyond the apparent, I would constantly measure the depth of what might be below the surface—adding constantly to the ways I knew I was a stranger.
On this day I am the only person in the airplane besides the pilot, so the prized seat—front right—is mine. When you ride front right, the pilot gives you the other set of headphones and you can look at the sectional maps too. You’re not just a passenger anymore but a privileged confidant who can look down as you cross a little pass, at the next headwaters, and see the village places on paper and below you for real. You can peer through the cockpit window at the weather in the next valley that might make the airplane go around it or turn back. A respectful front right rider waits until the pilot is done talking to the tower and setting the throttle, waits until the altitude levels off to cruise. She waits for the pilot to talk, or takes the temperature of the silence before breaking it. If it feels warm between you—and there is nearly always an intimacy up there in front created by your common destination—you can ask for a life story framed special for you, told between radio transmissions.
Sometimes you just can’t stay awake though. Av-gas doesn’t smell good to me today, so very soon after the Cessna 402’s gear clunks up inside her, I retreat, letting the drone of engines draw my eyelids down into a deep, druggy, time-killing sleep. I am probably snoring, possibly drooling, undoubtedly happy, held tight like a baby on a cradle board until some traffic over the Koyukuk River statics through the headphones and wakes me up.
The disorientation I feel is familiar. I had a childhood idea that every time I went to sleep in the daytime, it would separate me from who I’d been when the day started, so that when I woke up I’d be with strangers in a different place. I’d “remember” them but with brandnew fake memories, like the fossil record nineteenth-century Christian fundamentalists believed God put in the earth to make it look old. My real family, my real house, would be back there somewhere I’d never be able to find again. This explained the feeling of loss I had each time I woke up, even sometimes after a night of sleep. Taking a nap in the daytime made it worse because I didn’t even get to finish one day in the same family.
Waking in the airplane today, there is no trace of where we’ve been—Fairbanks or the slate gray sky above it—but I don’t mind. The cloud ceiling has disappeared into a blue we could climb into forever. Below us the Koyukuk is running high and muddy, carrying a scattered cargo of ice and broken trees. I was sleeping as we flew over the Tanana and Yukon Rivers dumping their floods together. I started to wake up over the squiggles of the Tozitna and Melozitna Rivers north of the Yukon. They say you travel three miles to every mile you advance on a river because of all the turns, but the ratio in these feeder creeks must be closer to six to one. They are as loopy as Christmas bows and some are still frozen, little squiggles of white icing through the already bare tundra waiting for green.
We’re headed for a small plywood camp next to Dahl Creek at the foot of the Brooks Range, three miles from the village of Kobuk. This camp, established by the BLM’s Alaska Fire Service, is where my husband, Jim, and I, with a few others from our agency, work all summer extinguishing, diverting, or just watching lightning-started wildfires for the federal government. There are a hundred or so of us in little airplanes this week, headed for stations scattered around northern Alaska. We are mostly very young, in our twenties. In Fairbanks for our training classes, we’ve recently been reunited with friends from other summers, so of course we’ve been dancing and drinking beer every night, maybe falling in love, probably talking about what we are going to do when our pockets have money in them again.
At Fort Wainwright, where the BLM stages us for our training weeks, the smokejumpers and helitack crews are staying in shape, running alongside the roads on base. I run a little too, because there are also physical tests the rest of us have to pass, even if for me fighting fire means talking on a radio or riding in an airplane to look for fires. I like to run in the woods by the Chena, but I’m soon distracted by the beauty of the pussy willows coming out along the bank or a beaver working the narrow strip of water where the ice has melted back from the shore. I end up just walking, wonderstruck by the slow explosion that is spring in the Tanana Valley.
Not long after we get to Fairbanks, though, I’m anxious to get out to Dahl Creek because at Fort Wainwright we are just military folks “lite,” barely associates of the uniformed people running the gigantic army base and airfield around us. Though we have no ownership of the place, we are under the influence: we go to the officers club, we call the kitchen “mess,” we use the terminologies for gear and numbered codes instead of clear text (simple plain talk) on the radio, and we refer to ourselves as pogues and crew.
On the military base we sleep in one of the cloned barracks buildings, in a cloned barracks room with paper-thin walls and pipes that bang all night, where a much-washed wool army blanket can’t cover a person’s shoulders and feet at the same time. The room and even the water in the toilet is hot—you forget about this until you sit there for the first time—because boilers in these World War II–era buildings push hot water year-round through ancient pipes and radiators so that the Fairbanks winters won’t break them.
Beyond the barracks, there are hangars full of knobby airplanes that are here to protect us in general but don’t care about me in particular. I feel the blindness of the military clear across its great Alaskan reserves, an entity that touts the billions it spends in the state—but with the notable exceptions of the rescue units—does not live here. The Alaska military is a web of military operations areas, or MOAs, with radar running like celestial windshield wipers hundreds of miles long in the air above the landscape and rows of drab green aircraft—this one bristling with weaponry and another large enough to contain all the houses and boats of a small river village. The military’s Alaska is a map without rivers, without trapping prices and goose foot soup. Its collegial thousands associate predominantly with each other, live with their families on base, go to movies and to school on base. Arguably, they “occupy” more than “reside.” Even fire doesn’t touch the military unless smoke shuts a runway down or we wildfire people run out of helicopters. Often, a summer lightning strike will ignite the trees or tundra inside the miles of practice target areas where so much ordnance has fallen that the land is too “hot” for firefighters to enter. Dear old John Adams, never mind the Bill of Rights, we have finally garrisoned those soldiers in all of our sky above huge tracts of our “empty” land.
Outsiders to the military on base, we wildfire-fighting people are also strange to the permanent employees of our own agency, who regard seasonal workers an incongruity to put up with for a short time, like chicken pox. An agency manager once asked a roomful of fire-fighters in Galena how many of us would continue our careers by seeking year-round positions. Not a single person raised a hand, which of course was rude and would prove untrue but was likely payback for perceived slights by the “regulars.” Most of those in the room were spending the winters like gypsies, scattered on beaches around the world or in some little woods they’d found. They were already what they wanted to be when they grew up.
I’ve never been a good gypsy because I am always trying to dig in and have a neighborhood or a clan, stitching the aunts and uncles I know to the aunts and uncles I can find. I want to have coffee and hear the news and feel loved and love back, which is what I was used to growing up and what I expect everywhere I live. If it is human and small, I want to know about it. How did you make that? Will you show me? Where does this grow? How do you eat it?
I increasingly loved our mission at Dahl Creek, which we and our supervisors at Galena refined to an informal efficiency. With our boss, Brian, a durable and loved friend of those days, we learned to build ourselves into a busy miniature firefighting base in half a day after a lightning storm first spread its fires. The fires around villages and mines were our first concern. We expanded into twenty-four-hour coverage of dispatch and operations, with mess hall, staffed warehouse, camp areas for crews and bosses. Spotter planes were often Aero Commanders, and smokejumper airplanes were Volpars, converted from old Beech-18s. Cargo and retardant airplanes were World War II flyins to our airstrip refueling operation, with the PBY the strangest and most exotic of the bunch. Really it was all about the airplanes.
On the side, between fires, I installed new aunts and uncles from Dahl Creek, the Bornite mine, and the village people we grew close to in Kobuk and Shungnak. And I tried to garden. In the first year, we scratched out a nearly soilless garden that soaked in the cold breezes flowing down out of the Cosmos Hills drainages each night. Almost nothing grew, but I have the memory of six-foot-three Greg Podsiki bent over nearly to the ground, saying to a white crown sparrow, “Don’t eat those little seedlings or Mary is going to be mad at you.” Exploring abandoned mining camps with their old steam machinery and ditches for the water cannons brought us closer to the miners who still worked in the country. Sometimes they would come over for coffee and blueberry pie. Amazing to me, Jim has always been able to look at an old machine and know how it had operated: leather gaskets, rocker arms, pressure fittings. Growing up on a Wisconsin farm where he learned to fix machines alongside his dad gave him a deep interest in all things mechanical. He and our new friends talked hammer mills and steam donkeys until I could nearly see the old iron things too, clanging and chugging in the long-ago camps on the creeks.
In this clear weather, we don’t need the little pass between these rivers to find our way around Indian Mountain, pointing up above four thousand feet—the highest rock between the Alaska Range and the Kobuk River country. Pilots told me that Indian Mountain has a curious effect, caused by some hard or shiny magnetism in the rock that folds the electrons around itself, skews compasses, gives little airplanes a fling in the wrong direction.
In a clear sky like this one, the mountain is a friend, an unmistakable landmark meaning when we pass it we will still know where we are going. Seeing it on the way to the Kobuk, I try to look beyond it for the canyon of the Koyukuk below Hughes, for Hog River camp, the Pah River, the break in the Zane Hills where the Koyukon Athabaskan people sometimes went to trade with the Kobuk Inupiat people. Knowing that, looking for the storied places gives this view ghostly layers of time periods, each of the layers with its people traveling, their tales known and unknown.
We are coming down, through three thousand feet now, to land at Hughes. The slopes show bright patches of snow and an emerging dulled tapestry of last fall’s color. I press my fingers against the scratched plexiglass and imagine that I feel the mountain changing from the shape that tells us we are almost to the river to the shape that tells us we are above the river. What does “same” mean? It’s not the “same” mountain from the Tanana side, or from the sky here and there above it. Without a paper map, with only the moving map created in our minds, we recognize not things but relationships, like Mark Twain’s river pilot Bixby in Life on the Mississippi. Explaining navigation by landmarks, he says, “That’s the main virtue of the thing. If the shapes didn’t change every three seconds, they wouldn’t be of any use.”
The rugged and valleyed shape we are passing doesn’t look much like the little elevation dot on the aircraft sectional on my lap as the land shifts in my view. Still, I have to believe in a map that lets me count the drainages running away from each mountain. Because of the map, I can locate myself on the airy, imaginary lines cartographers use to grid the earth, then recognize the actual place as we pass above it. Now there’s another way: Earth stations talk to sky and radio signals to triangulate with satellites to find us within this space. Above Indian Mountain, the Global Positioning System display in the instrument panel reads out: “n66 04.12w153 39.50,” word to flesh. But I like my old boss’s advice: “Don’t forget how to use the map.” I can find us if I count drainages and contour lines and compare those with the gigantic rocky pyramid out my window. I recognize this mountain and this place on paper, even though all I really see through my eyes is the approaching and receding shapes of ridges and slopes. A map is more than coordinates; it teaches a place to me before I see it. It allows me to recognize where I am, a place I’ve never been, as I see it out the window. “Oh, there you are!” This is an abstraction, an equation, and a human magic.
In the summer, usually June but sometimes later, the tundra can dry out and be touched off by any lightning bolt that reaches clear to the ground or one that starts in the ground and reaches clear up to the dark blue bottom of a cumulonimbus. Then the brittle dead branches at the bottom of the black spruce will lead fire up to their crooked crowns. After the fires start and especially if a fire grows too fast in the direction of a village, we will look down into flat maps as if they are oracles. The fires will run up those paper contour lines, slow down on the bare ridges, back themselves into the daily wind that will arrive by 10:00 a.m. We’ll lean close over the paper to look for drainages and little ponds and then send the pilot out to see if that green on the map signifies spruce or hardwood or if that pond has become grass since 1956 when this old quadrangular survey map was made. When we are fighting fire, we call trees and brush and grass “fuels.” Villages, even the aunts and uncles, flatten out to a plan, a place to protect, a system of hose lays. A big enough town might have a trained crew we can hire. They have been waiting for this day. We’ll know which crew and how many crew members are there. In the excited, noisy-with-propellers, and routinely dangerous days of fighting fire, our chunk of Alaska will transform to its avatar the plan, a busy one-dimensional map.
At Hughes we drop off groceries. Despite the mud, a crowd meets the airplane, mostly Native youngsters and some grandmothers on wheelers. One white guy picks up the groceries for the school in a pickup that doesn’t have any dings in it. The pilot starts into a conversation with a man I recognize from the fire crew, so I get out and stretch my legs, grin at the kids, and ask them to tell me about the fishing. “There’s no fish now,” a tall boy says but points at a girl who caught one a few days ago. The girl looks down and the other kids giggle. “Through the ice?” I ask, and they say no, “By the ice.”
I remember what they mean: the way the ice comes away from the bank before it goes out and the grayling run up the margins looking for their creeks. An early photo in the collection of missionary nurse Amelia Hill from the Episcopal mission at Allakaket, called St. John’s in the Wilderness, features some miners sitting on the bank very near here in the early springtime, little piles of grayling beside them.
The miners weren’t old then. It was nearly a hundred years ago, and just like now half of the people in the world were younger than the other half. There was fiddle music here and mission boats and supply barges on the river and long black stockings like the ones my mother told me she wore when she was a girl in western Idaho. Sometimes when the manifest destiny mood falls on me and this country of rivers and lakes seems empty—or seems to belong to me in any way—I remember how many times it has been opened up and lived in. I think of Bob Marshall staring at his horizon of peaks and declaring the country empty of names—at his airy level this would have seemed true. All the countries of peoples in his view, each with place names and camps, were invisible. Later on, in Coming into the Country, John McPhee declared that no white man before himself had stood on a certain ridge near the Salmon River, proximal to Dahl Creek, one of a plethora of Salmon Rivers in Alaska, but who’s counting. The BLM had firefighters on that ridge the summer before McPhee walked there.
If you cannot claim to be the first man to be somewhere, then it is an interesting fallback measure to name yourself the first white man to be there. My husband and a village fire crew had used a very noisy Mark 26 pump to put out a fire on the ridge that McPhee mentioned, but the activity left no human trace. When Jim came to the place in the book where McPhee describes the ridge, he started laughing. He said, “I wondered the same thing! Was I the first white guy to walk around there?” An answer: who knows but maybe not, given the exploration and mining and the incessant wandering around of the last two hundred years—but the question is troublesome. When you think about it, that kind of first is a “first in breed,” like we were at a dog show. What about women. What about redheads. What about the nearsighted. The question is irrelevant, mistaken. It isn’t the country that’s new, when we first look at it. It’s us—the great hopeful makeover of ourselves, courtesy of the remote, the awesome, the seemingly empty.
Tucked up alongside the upper slopes of Indian Mountain, the mining district called Utopia comes into view. Hughes village, on the river at the base of the mountain, was at one time a place where the little horse barges could bring supplies to those miners. Now the USAF calls their station Utopia. I think this is probably a little joke for the Air Force people stationed here, although some may mean it. I wonder if it was a joke when the gold-seekers named it, maybe to the ones on the bank in the springtime with the cranes already back and the ice melting off all the pay dirt.
Flying over Utopia—“UTO” on the sectional map—Norutak Lake will come into your view at the far right, over several folds of hills. From here, it is a shiny coin on the old portage between the Alatna River country and the Kobuk River. For people whose families have lived here for centuries, places along that trail have songs and stories that belong to them, waving in memory like flags.
On a tape I listened to at the university, I remember that interviewers asked a Koyukon elder if she knew a certain place, and she said no. “But,” objected her interviewers, “we know you camped there.”
“Well, yes, I camped there,” she said, “but I don’t know the stories that belong to that place.” After that, it seemed to me the interviewers took special care to explain themselves when they used the word know.
And if you know the story, you still may not get the joke, because you are not listening in the dark, as the Koyukon people once listened to their winter stories, or because your memory does not provide you with the same map of the land.
One of the stories I remember was from a very old category of tales, in which animals interact with each other like humans, setting up initial relationships in the world that can be told to teach us how to behave. It is about Wolf and Otter trying to build cooking fires for each other, but the damp wood Otter brings can’t cook anything for the wolves. Wolf finally has to go out and get some dry willows to start a fire. Otter then wonders out loud what kind of fire this is that Wolf has made and says his children are going to freeze to death.
This is a funny story, and the teller laughed. I think about this over and over, and I finally start to get it. My expectations of fire and water turn over slowly. I think of the story, or the story thinks of me: Otter is stranger to me than Wolf. Can my children be warmed by the stories of another people?
My understanding of the people who have fed me and told me stories at their tables sometimes seems less intimate to me than these recorded voices, listened to in solitude and then carefully stroked, a few at a time, onto white paper where they will hopefully live long and prosper, or better yet, drive the reader back to the voices. If there’s a pause after a question—why the pause? A voice raises, it softens. An odd side comment becomes clear later, or forever covers a thought that is never shared. Listen again, make a note. I was no one to the storyteller but a ghost from the future, an eavesdropper. But Wolf and Otter live in me like grafted branches.
When we are back in the airplane and in the air again, off the gravel strip at Hughes and over the bluffs, I begin to see places I’ve touched with my feet, though I know only a few of the stories that belong to them, and, of course, only in a lone way, like the bear who has no community. According to some elders, that’s the danger of the bear—not his claws or teeth but that he acts and lives alone. Just saying the name of the bear or looking in his direction can drive his anger and aloneness into the womb of a woman, tear apart the sinew strings that a woman sews—with food, with husbands and children, wood and water and stories—to hold her people together.
I see the gap where the tea-colored Pah goes through. I recognize it from standing in the river on the other side of that hill. We were at the mouth where it flows into the Kobuk. In the low water of fall we stuck the boat on a gravel bar and climbed out to push. Cussing and laughing, we scooted the johnboat, a bit lighter without us in it, into a deeper current. I watched the ribbons of green Kobuk water and brown Pah water flow together around my legs. Just up the Kobuk is a cabin built by a white guy who liked to trap in this country. He built his cabin a little late in the century—past the federal homesteading act that closed in 1976, past the mining claim time. “Owning” the land along the river was still a new idea to many people in Kobuk, so a trapping cabin was no big deal at the village, but the Native corporation and the National Park Service seemed to think the fellow had a lot of gall. Before he built the cabin, he had made himself a pit house built down into the ground like a traditional ivrulik, with a sleeping shelf around the fire pit and sod walls sloping up to a smoke hole.
After we pulled the boat off the gravel bar, we explored the bank to find the old pit house and see what it was like. It was damp and cold and empty, with only a little light coming down through a piece of dirty plexiglass boxed into the thick dirt of the ceiling.
Before the cabin, we heard about a hired cabin-sitter living in the pit house one winter and taking care of a little dog team. He was going crazy from being alone and living in a hole in the ground. Harold Lie told us he flew up from Dahl Creek and pulled the unfortunate caretaker—a stinking matted hairball of a human being—out of there. “It was a good thing it was so cold,” Harold said, “or I couldn’t have stood the smell of him in the airplane.” He said the dogs smelled better when he brought them out.
Louise Woods told me there is a graveyard on a bend just down river from where the Pah comes in, on the Brooks Range side, but now it is overgrown and as invisible from the river as it is from the air. But invisible things were once real. Louise is a Baptist now, but she says before Christianity came to the Kobuk “it was danger,” an “evil time.” A shaman was jealous of the power of one of her ancestors, a successful trader. The shaman said all the men in her family would die young and so they did. Jesus superseded the power of shamans, said Louise, but Jesus couldn’t change what happened before he arrived on the scene.
This is something quite different from the typically western idea that the clear light of science, or Christianity, or any other kind of explaining that can illumine all the way backward and “solve” the past. In the culture I grew up in, ghosts get explained as marsh gas or perhaps Christian ghosts, allowing us to revise and correct those earlier ignorant or pagan folks (please do read irony in that). In Louise’s view, and the views of some others we talked to or read about in the Native north, powers are exchanged only at the point of introduction. Rules and retributions are in effect for those who believe in them, at the time they believe in them. In her Tales of Ticasuk, Eskimo writer Emily Ivanoff Brown said of the Ogre baby crying in the caribou herd, “And when the Gospel came, the crying ceased forever.” Or of different supernatural events, an elder says, “We have noticed that these things do not happen anymore.” Even more carefully, one elder often reminds her listeners, “That was those people, that time,” which is a very considerate thing to say. The storyteller refuses to tread on what was true for the others who came before her.
Watching the rivers run together from the air, I wish to learn to be this careful, as if I could feel the distance between the air and the ground as voices, as if my feet could know the distance between the surface of a sandbar and where the river ran before.
“I love white people,” Louise says. And I love her back, since I am “white people,” and I always have tea with her at her cabin in Kobuk before the fires come and again afterward, just before the snow. I shot a caribou for her one fall and rammed my ego directly into the culture cutbank. Louise pushed her little knife into the top of the rump and pronounced the bull a poor animal, “not much fat!” Maybe noting my fallen face, her footnote comment was, “Good for my dog!” Her big grin healed the status of my gift.
The sky is so seamless it is no place at all, and it is easy to forget that you have a body, that you have friends or family. Like an astral projection, all your strings are cut; the obligation to bring a pie to the potluck supper is officially discontinued. I am slightly afraid of small airplanes, which make occasional unplanned contact with the tundra, but this fear goes away as soon as the plane leaves the ground. Anywhere starts to be familiar, even the near-touching of flying in airplanes. The mind wishes to recognize a pattern, a story so big that it not only locates by triangulation but looks into the intersecting histories and explains the present moment.
When we came to work in Dahl Creek in 1978, there weren’t any maps with the miles gridded off, just unmarked 1:63,360 quadrangular survey maps, some of them from the lovely colored topographic relief series the USGS discontinued after the 1950s. We were making our station sign for Dahl Creek out of big expensive redwood boards, routing out “Northernmost Fire Management Station in the U.S.” in the spring of 1979 when the USGS brought in a survey crew to fill in the lines on the quads. The survey crew lived in Harold Lie’s cabin, so Harold had to spend most of the summer at Kotzebue, his other home. We missed his stories and the vaudeville Norwegian accent he put on for us every time we walked in. We missed the pot of coffee that was always sitting on the oil stove. It wasn’t much fun to go over to Harold’s cabin that summer because, besides the fact that Harold wasn’t there, the USGS crew had a cranky helicopter pilot who hated the cook, so the place was always full of sarcasm or swearing or sulky silence.
In one of the odd coincidences that happen so often they aren’t really odd, the crew chief was a man I’d been in love with back in Oregon when I was eighteen, a sweet-natured and reclusive person too many years older than me, last seen flashing mirrors from ridge to ridge in the Owyhee Desert. This should not happen in a regular world, that people you have cared about can start popping up in front of you thousands of miles away in remote river valleys. At Dahl Creek he always looked tired and sad. Besides having to manage a fractious crew, a task he hated, his technical job was to compile data that would finally lay section lines over landscape that had never had them before. He spent hours bent over his notebooks in the cabin, turning the asbestos spires of the western Brooks Range into numbers, numbers. I know he would have rather learned the names.
Names can save you, when the ceiling is low or the sky is all smoke and you are with a pilot who hasn’t flown in that country. One time we flew out of Fairbanks into scattered layers of fog and clouds. It was getting darker and the weather seemed to be closing in behind us while it was still lighter ahead. But as we approached Indian Mountain, the weather started to come down and I felt the pilot freezing up beside me, nervous hands moving over his gauges, watching the little craziness in the compass from the mountain below us, unseen now. He kept asking me, “Do you see anything you recognize?” And occasionally I would, a twist of water or the edge of an old forest fire burn whose shape I recognized because I’d drawn it with different-colored markers as it burned outward, day after day.
We turned around once, but the route looked worse, less familiar, so we headed back north and I could just barely see a layer of the Kobuk country far off, lighter than the sky we were in, with the Brooks Range riding across the northern horizon behind it. I showed the pilot the gaps where the rivers and lakes pushed down through the foothills range, chattering a litany of names to him from the USGS maps—Koliaksak, Koguluktuk, Cosmos, Ruby Creek—twisted orthographies from Native place names alongside the names of miners and explorers, names of the lovers and financiers of miners and explorers. I was a person who could see the road but couldn’t drive; he was a driver who found himself suddenly blind, having to trust the directions of his passenger. I borrowed the power of names, the iceberg tips of stories, to help him: “A little left, that gap beside where the mountain looks flat on top, that’s Cosmos, that’s where the runway is.” And so we “lucked out,” as Grumman Goose pilot Jim Pickering used to say, meaning that we’d gotten where we were going. I saw the pilot a few times after that and we smiled at each other like we’d once danced a slow one.
In a July fire season, I was in a Cessna 207 with another pilot hired by our agency to deliver several of us to country he had never seen. We entered a cloud of smoke when we came into the Kobuk Valley. Incredibly, the pilot turned right when we flew over the Kobuk River, heading upriver and away from the airfield at Dahl Creek. I was in a seat behind him, more of a passenger than the privileged copilot seat would have made me. He took us through the pink haze, flying low over the river and following one bend at a time. I touched him on the shoulder and pointed behind us in the direction of Dahl Creek, but he looked in my direction only briefly—and through me—then went back to his task of following the turns of the shrinking river. Through the smoke I could see the shapes of salmon in the clear water. I saw Daisy’s fish camp and then Vera’s. We were so low that Vera waved to us. My friend Gil was riding front right so I leaned up to him and told him where we were, now far upriver of where we wanted to be, and eventually he and I together convinced the pilot to turn around. To convince him, we each had to name names to prove he could trust us. The names of rivers and names of rivers that run into rivers are like collateral if you want to turn a plane around or tell a story. They say you can afford the risk. They say you know how to go somewhere.
The 402 bumps down again, this time at Hog River, to bring supplies to the miners at the dredge. I am glad to be on the milk run, glad to come into the country one little airfield at a time.
Dan Egan still runs this place, though I hear someone else bought out his Alaska Gold Company, and he is just keeping this operation going for them as only he can do, with a crew of fifteen men or so eating Spam and beans and barely maintaining the ancient noisy dredge. The dredge clatters and chews and digests the rocky ground in the creek bottom. Egan is one of the more famous misers of the Interior. No alcohol allowed, precious little variation in the food, and the minimum of tools and parts, a real baling-wire outfit is how the story goes. A Hog River camp foreman I once talked to said that if there was an ancient Ford Tri-Motor airplane still in one piece in the country, Egan would hire it to fly in Hog’s food and mail and supplies.
To say “Hog River” is a little confusing. Hog River isn’t really a river. It’s a mining camp named after the Hogatza River, and calling it “Hog” is the result of the shortening and the laughing and claiming that people do, we do, to make the unfamiliar ours. The miners and traders made the shortened name, and knowing about it makes me an insider in a comfortable way. But the resulting confusion means that you will sometimes hear a young adventurer from the Lower 48 say that they want to “float the Hog River.” This is dreadfully incorrect, and if there is an old-timer around, I have the right to catch her eye and share a nice camaraderie. But if you’ve been around a few years, it’s okay to say, “I was in the Hog River country.” There’s a difference.
The layer of names and history that mines and miners live in is a different web of map over the Interior, attached at the points of little runways, old dredges, corrugated steel and new-but-castoff ATCO trailers bought cheap from dismantled Alaska pipeline construction camps. From the air, the ATCOs are little white bricks with yellowand-black borders.
This particular universe is full of misers and the men who work for them and bitch about it. This is light years away from the Alaska of Prudhoe Bay, where there are recreation rooms and gleaming cafeterias serving ice cream and steak. This Hog River country is where everything you need to make, from furniture to lathes to stovepipes to pipelines, can be made from Blazo boxes, coffee cans, and fifty-five-gallon drums. This is the country of the hiss of the Coleman lantern. Mining is not an invisible enterprise from the air. There are mounds of yellow shat-out creek bottom wherever the dredges have been or still are, their factory-like forms rusted and rotted in squares and rectangles.
Before the dredges there were the little placer operations like the ones up Dahl Creek, where we still find iron nozzles. The mounds of gravel there are smaller, willowed over after more than a hundred years. A Swede named Johnson, the partners Ted Tromsted and Sig Goodwin, and Louis Lloyd were up there just before the turn into the twentieth century. All of them would go down the several miles to Kobuk to trader Harry Brown’s place for Christmas—Louise Woods has old pictures of the miners and Kobuk villagers in their holiday clothes: white shirts and high lace collars. Harry Brown, a white man, was married to Mabel, an Inupiaq woman, and their daughter May still owns the store. Harry wanted to name the village of Kobuk “Long Beach,” for a long sandbar that curved in front of the village, much longer than it is now. The story goes that the federal postal service headquarters said there already was a Long Beach, so he had to give it up. That story has the flavor of one that has grown out of a smaller story, perhaps just a joke or passing comment someone heard from Harry Brown long ago, but someone told me and so I tell it, like any good listener on a street corner or a sandbar.
Harry’s grave is on the road to the boat landing, his own small hill of caribou moss and birch with a white picket fence around it. There is a real stone marker engraved with the entire Twenty-third Psalm. In the summer you can see green pasture and birch, still water and cotton grass on every side of him.
A new red Ford pickup comes out to meet the airplanes at Hog River and pick up the cases of supplies we’ve brought. This is a surprising indication of affluence for Hog. The old red truck must have met an irreparable death for Egan to consent to this newfangled thing. These miners will hook wheels up to the last moving part of a Model T or ancient Allis, making strange hybrid conveyances that never die, only change shapes. But life hasn’t changed so much. Joe, a dredge mechanic who rode down to the runway with the cook, quickly looks through the boxes we brought and sees that he didn’t get any cigarettes. “Damn Egan,” he says.
When we leave Hog River, we skirt the left shoulder of Angutikada, which would be the right shoulder if you were looking southeast from Dahl Creek. All summer, it is the most prominent shape on our southern horizon. The radio repeater is there on top, not thrown down the mountain by a grizzly bear this year or torn apart by winter storms. Seeing its fiberglass box and antennas intact means our local “brown” radio frequency should work this summer, allowing us to talk to fire bosses and little camps up and down the Kobuk from our dispatch. Like a lot of the names on the map, Angutikada doesn’t mean anything except the tin ear of a USGS employee, trying to transcribe the Inupiaq word for “Old Man Mountain,” according to Beulah Commack. Beulah was our cook for the one summer they let us have a cook at Dahl Creek. On the slow days, she tried to teach us some upper Kobuk Inupiaq, sometimes the wrong word for the thing—for instance the word for “penis” when we meant to say “house”—so that we would get ourselves in trouble. Then there would be laughter, the real goal of communication. Beulah enjoyed it when I showed her USGS-attempted place name orthographies on the big dispatch map. “Oh, they were mixed up, I guess!” she laughed. “Have you got any more like that?”
I got in trouble with Beulah for jumping into the Kobuk River to fish out an empty Coke can she’d just tossed in while we stood talking on the bank. “Why do you do that?” she asked me, really angry. I had a precedent for this, having jumped out of a moving jeep to pick up the beer can my father had tossed into the desert. He, too, was furious at my self-righteous act. I say without irony that I didn’t have the right to fetch either of those cans. And that I’d probably do it again. After a swirl or two passed, Beulah shrugged her face at me, resuming her characteristic patience with us interlopers.
We cross over the ridge into a swale where you can see the Selawik zigzagging off toward the coast at your nine o’clock. At your eleven o’clock you can see the Pick River looping one of its angles up to meet the Kobuk below Shungnak. At the top of the swale just below us is a hot springs, another place where Athabaskan people from the Koyukuk and Inupiat from the Kobuk used to come together to trade and fight, according to Louise. The Wheeler Creek side, behind us and south, coming up from the Koyukuk, she still calls “Indianside.” The Kobuk River flows east to west through the valley. Sheep and caribou hides used to go down to the coast while seal oil and other sea plunder would come back up to these hills, she says. But now all that remains along that route is the habit of winter travel, of checking in with who you are as a person who can move around the country, easier and quicker now on a snogo than it was by foot or dog sled.
People still meet down at the hot springs in winter, driving fifty miles from either direction to get there, but the sense of nation meeting nation has diminished. The travelers are more likely to be just people who know each other.
On the map of a certain people at a certain time, these are the trails from story to story, along these creeks and rivers where the old people lived, different old people all the time, winter and summer back as far as you can listen, yet there aren’t very many marks left from the old people that can be seen from the air. The Inupiaq trails are less visible than the miner’s scratching with Allis-Chalmers in the 1920s and ’30s or the gravel roads that struggle out from every modern village.
The trails that stand out most vividly below me now—coming up into the Kobuk Valley from the south to lace the woods and gravelly tops of hills—belong to the caribou’s back and forth, not the humans’. From the air I can see that these trails do not go anywhere in the human way—to town or cabin. Still I trace them with my eyes with the expectation that they lead somewhere, just as I follow them with my feet when I am down in the woods. I feel that old excitement of being on any trail, of following, and the intention of making some discovery, finding some terminus. But the caribou trails are braided like rivers and don’t go toward any warmth or any stopping place that is familiar to me. If I were high enough, higher than the geese fly, higher than any airplane can fly, could I see a pattern to follow? Or do rivers and caribou and all the mines and all the stories and all the maps make a kind of randomness I can never get outside of to find my way by their changing shapes?
When we disperse the last of the cargo and the mail in Ambler, I’m the only cargo left. Looking down on the rough rotten ice of first the Shungnak and then the Kobuk Rivers, we are west of Dahl Creek now and heading back to land there.
Later this spring the Shungnak, which means “jade,” will run the color of jade—greener than the blue Ambler—its riffles from the air so exactly like the lovely imperfections in the rock it is named for, the rock you can pull from its banks. This is a strangeness unattributable to ancient astronauts, too funny and too metaphorical to be the work of the God I grew up with: that a river, from the air, looks like the rock it runs through. I think I’ll save this idea as a joke to tell Ivan Stewart when he brings his crew up to Dahl Creek to cut jade boulders in July. He probably won’t think it is funny, but he might. He tells me the same joke several times each summer, the one about how the environmentalist found the beautiful trout in the tailing pond. If I shared Ivan’s ambivalence about the scientists and government people and outsiders that to him represent an intrusive new order, then I’d feel the jolliness of his joke too. What I can appreciate is how much he enjoys telling it to me.
One year the fire season was slow so I took off work to go with Ivan and several of his crew to the Shungnak River from Dahl Creek, twenty-seven miles overland at two miles an hour on a sled made of roughsawn planks on log skids. We were pulled along by an Allis-Chalmers cat so old that Ivan’s faithful “Blackie,” Francis Black, was continually making parts for it and welding it when it broke, which it often did. The old tractor and its tracks were one big weld. On the trip, Ivan fed us rancid bear meat and the ends of loaves of bread and other things nobody had consumed at his Dahl Creek camp when there was anything better to eat. He did bring a plastic bottle of “jade juice,” his special concoction of lime Kool-Aid mixed with water and Everclear. We stopped often to winch ourselves out of bogs, especially in the places on the old trail where earlier expeditions had exposed permafrost and turned swampy grass into muddy lakes. I picked handfuls of blueberries as we rattled along, or I walked alongside like some pioneer woman trailing her wagon.
Halfway to the Shungnak, we stopped overnight at a corrugated steel shack that the ubiquitous north-country pilot and miner Bill Munz—the Munz Air founder from Nome—had hauled to Cosmos Creek before Ivan bought mining claims from him. Being the only youngster and the only female, I got the privileged bunk—the upper one—with twelve or so inches between the thin mattress on the plywood bunk and the ceiling, so that once you wedged yourself onto the bunk you could not turn over onto your back. If you wanted to turn over, you had to get out of bed and get back in, and you could not do that because the floor was full of old men and you would step on them. They’d gotten a good fire going in the stove to warm us up, and it was pungent in there, with the old plywood and two-by-fours of the shack sweating off a summer’s moisture and all of us sleeping in our sweaty long underwear.
Munz had hauled another cabin like that one to the Shungnak River, our destination, with more room in it for the top bunk. I noticed this potential roominess immediately when we got to the camp, but Ivan said there were fewer bears around the Shungnak so we should set up tents and sleep outside. He probably just wanted to save on firewood. We spent a week there, working across the Shungnak River on Promise Creek, a small tributary. I wasn’t much help because they brought me along to cook, but there wasn’t much fresh food. All that week, we winched pieces of jade out of the creek, even boulders the size of sofas. But there were two boulders so gigantic we could only look at them. They were beauties, in some places showing us their translucent greens through the water of the creek flowing over their slick sides. The creek had polished them until they looked like they were revealing the heart of the world, showing itself here for a few yards only, a secret interior made of wet, green glass. Ivan had prodded the hillside to determine the sizes of the boulders. He thought the biggest one would weigh about fifty thousand pounds. He wanted them badly, so conversations were all about hiring D-9 Caterpillars and heavy-lifting Chinook helicopters and how to bring them to the Shungnak. These were resources and complicated distances beyond hope, representing amounts of money unimaginable to a man accustomed to cobbling together or inventing every tool or machine he used.
We are flying over the hills of that old trip, approaching Dahl Creek from the Ambler side. When we fly over Cosmos Creek and its tiny tin shack, I can see the brown and white scratching of the Promise Creek trail running back to Dahl Creek ahead of us. The messy trail runs perpendicular to the mountain streams flowing down to the Kobuk. It cuts across those drainages as if it was a contour line from the paper map in front of me made real on the land. Finally, the warehouse, generator shack, and bunkhouses of Dahl Creek come into view and then the kitchen and shower house. The dispatch roof sprouts a scraggly bush of antennas and the bright red numbers I painted there several summers ago, announcing our air-to-ground radio frequency—127.45.
Scritch of wheels on gravel and the 402 is on the ground. Engines shut down and props slow to stillness. Now I can hear the puh, puh, puh of the Witte generator, our summer’s heartbeat. Pretty soon, for the next few months, I’ll belong here because I am hired to be here. Better yet, I won’t be a stranger but a host: offering food, an emergency radio link, some ancient magazines, and an outstretched hand. If you misjudge the runway and your Super Cub flips over on its back, I’ll help you find three long ropes, five or six guys, and we will dig a hole into the tundra for the nose of your plane to rest in for a moment as we turn it back over onto its wheels. That way, your prop won’t get any more curly than it already is.
I’ll visit Guy and Faith Moyer’s house in Kobuk. Since Guy had eye surgery, his postmaster job has been taken over by his Inupiaq wife, Faith, whose other name is Tulagaq (raven). A desk in their cabin is devoted to the post office, with fifty or so little cubbyholes stacked above it for sorting letters. The parcels lean up alongside the desk, waiting to go to the airstrip or waiting to be claimed. Guy told us he came from Pennsylvania in the 1930s. He was headed for the Hogatza River and a prospecting venture when his plane, probably a Norseman or a Gull Wing Stinson, got lost in the fog and dropped him off at Norutak Lake instead. Norutak is about forty miles northeast of Kobuk. He spent the next fifty years in the Kobuk Valley as miner, trapper, storekeeper, postmaster. Now he is old and sits in his chair with one kid or another on his lap, perhaps the tiny Tulagaq, a granddaughter. He has a round white face and a shock of wild white hair. His skin is smooth and ruddy in the cheeks from long years in the weather, and his eyes glint narrowly above them, taking in everything. He has read widely, defied the latitude to raise verdant riverside gardens, welcomed countless strangers, raised a flock of children, put his Witte generator to use as the village’s electric company. He’s hauled tons of Ivan’s burlap-encased jade rocks over the circuitous back paths to mail planes waiting on the little Kobuk airstrip. Worried about the D-2 land changes in the Brooks Range that would soon result in new national parks, Guy asked us to bring the visiting secretary of the interior, James Watts—known as an advocate of the mining companies and not the parks—down to the village so that he could have a word with him. Not accustomed to popular acclaim, Watts and his wife were wary and then pleased as Guy shook Watts’s hand and told him “good job.”
In the spring when we come down to Kobuk to visit him, Guy says, “Well look who’s here.” And in the fall he asks, “It’s time for you to go, isn’t it?” He would say something this matter-of-fact to a flock of cranes riding a thermal into the sky.
Before the fires start, we’ll be invited down to the Kobuk school that’s about to be let out for the summer. We’ll eat goose foot soup. People will bring us their questions and puzzling pieces of correspondence from the government they’ve been saving for us all winter, because besides ourselves we are also a connection to that far-off officialdom, one that might help: “Your letter was sent when?” “Your father filed for this site when?” “I will find out who you can talk to.” I will do what I say I will do, and there will be a bond between us to remember. Usefulness is a kind of belonging I cherish. Chameleon, starling, I start to resemble each role I am given, just as I answer each call from a passing airplane: “Oh, about fifteen hundred feet. I can see the top of Cosmos.” “Nope, it was his sister who died. I have the phone number if you want to call.” People in airplanes always need things from people on the ground, particular things like food or gas or what the weather is like on the way to the next stop. We’ll see people from all the villages, berry pickers, hunters, pilots, miners. When the weather is bad outside, they will each set a story down with us like a pack leaned against the wall by the door. I am always eager to be the person there to listen, the person on the ground.