It is late January 2002, two days after our sledding adventure, and Heimo and I are traveling by snowmachine along one of his trails, which winds its way north along Krin Creek to a bald mountaintop. Heimo named the creek after his daughter, at her birth. Krin Creek is prime marten and wolverine country. However, when we go to check Heimo’s last snare, it, as the others, is empty. So we drive to the mountain, not in the hopes of finding fur, but to feel the sun on our backs and see its dim, salmon-pink reflection off the Brooks Range to the north. The valley below is still cloaked in a somber gray and will be for another month until the sun climbs high enough to shower it in light.
We abandon the snowmachine when we near the top of the mountain and posthole through three feet of snow, racing to see who can get to the top first. It isn’t much as races go. With each step we sink in up to our hips. We should be wearing snowshoes, but Heimo didn’t want to spend the time putting them on. Though there isn’t a cloud in the sky, he is worried about the weather. The weather in the Interior can turn quickly; it is moody, like a man who hasn’t seen the sun in almost two months. After the sun’s long absence, Heimo is determined not to miss a moment of it.
I am ten feet behind Heimo when suddenly he stops. Fresh caribou tracks. The caribou, it appears, came down from the ridge and wandered into the valley. Without a word, Heimo bounds back to the snowmachine, quicker this time, following our fresh trail. The sun will have to wait. With the winter meat supply running low, Heimo has been hoping to run across caribou.
I follow the tracks and see where they’ve crossed the trail twenty feet in front of where we’ve left the snowmachine. Heimo joins me, clutching his snowshoes and the .22 rifle. Surely, I think, he isn’t going to try and shoot a caribou with the .22. Heimo notices me looking at it skeptically. “A neck shot,” he says. “We’ll creep up, and I’ll take one with a shot where the neck connects to the skull. I don’t want to shoot it in the heart and ruin the ribs and the brisket or the heart. That’s the best part. Caribou can’t see good, so we can get close if we can come at them from downwind.”
The wind is out of the south, so we are in luck. We follow the tracks for thirty yards and then Heimo turns and holds out his arm, instructing me to stop. “Your snowsuit’s too loud,” he says. “You’ll scare them. Stay here.” I am glad for the reprieve. Without snowshoes, I am having a hard time keeping up.
Heimo disappears into the thick forest of head-high black spruce. Then I hear them—two shots, not in rapid succession, the second one nearly a ten count after the first. I wait for a shout of joy or another shot, and then I see the caribou wander out of the trees, their tawny coats outlined against the glistening snow. They are coming right for me, but there is nothing for me to do but watch. Heimo took both guns, the .44 magnum, which he always wears in a holster, and the .22 rifle. He emerges from the woods, following them. The caribou are moving slowly, stopping to paw away the snow with their hooves and graze on moss and lichens, as if their lives are not in imminent danger. Heimo raises his gun and takes aim. But before I hear a shot ring out, one of the caribou drops not more than fifty yards from where I stand. It falls to its knees and then rolls over on its side.
I struggle through the snow to where it lies dead. It shed its horns in December and would not get them back until April, but I can tell that it is a bull by its size. Heimo, panting and sweating from the exertion of the hunt, joins me. He rolls the caribou onto its other side, and shows me the two bullet holes, both of them neck shots, dead on target, separated by no more than an inch.
Heimo pulls out his freshly sharpened jackknife and kneels next to the caribou, as if he might pray over it, and then draws his knife swiftly across its neck. Dark blood pours from the cut, transforming the snow into red-colored crystals. Next, he severs the head, and then he begins to skin the animal. He cuts the hide on one side of the caribou and peels it back like a winter blanket and then he cuts off the front and back legs on that side. Next, he skins the other side and cuts off the legs. Though he usually uses the skin, this time of year it is almost worthless. The hair falls out like strands of straw, and the larvae of warble flies, which in summer burrowed down through the hair to lay their eggs, have transformed the hide’s smoothness into a series of irregular ridges.
Once he’s skinned it, he makes a long, vertical cut up the caribou’s midsection, stopping at its breastbone. He spreads open its belly, and steam rises from the cavity. “Hands cold?” he asks. “Put them right here and they’ll warm up fast.” I do, and am glad. The tips of my numbed fingers tingle with life again. Pulling out the guts halfway, Heimo cuts off the ribs where they attach to the backbone and the breastbone. Once he has one side of ribs completely off, he cuts the windpipe and the esophagus. Since the guts are no longer attached, he pulls them down and severs them from the pelvis. Then he digs out the heart, liver, and kidneys. “These are my favorites,” he says, wrapping the organs in the caribou hide. “We’ll bring them home with us, and Edna will fry them up tonight. You ain’t sqeamish about eating organs, are you?” Had he shot the animal in summer, near water, he would have taken one of the caribou’s four stomachs and eaten it raw. “That’s the real treat,” he tells me. “The ‘Bible.’ ”
The “Bible” is shaped like a football, but only half the size. Inside it is layered and looks, as the name would suggest, like the pages of the Good Book. Heimo explains how he would cut the stomach, making a long incision. Then he would wash out the moss and the lichens, carve out tender chunks, and pop them into his mouth as if they were pieces of watermelon.
When he finishes with the butchering, we stand over the steaming gut pile and watch a rare winter raven appear out of nowhere. Heimo scrubs his hands all the way up to the elbow with snow and then wipes them on a bandana. While he cleans off his knife with the same bandana he explains his plan for the meat. “I’ll find a place to cache it, and then if you want you can pick it up with the snowmachine tomorrow. Think you can find your way?” “Sure,” I answer, but he is already looking for a place to hide the meat and isn’t listening.
Nearby, the raven hovers. Though ravens are said to have thirty distinct calls, this raven is cannily silent, cruising over the site, hoping not to be noticed. We know, though, when it is overhead by the whoosh of its wings. It is keeping a safe distance, but it is clearly interested in the kill. Heimo glances at the raven again and tells me how most ravens, though supremely adapted to the cold, choose to spend their winters in Fairbanks, Fort Yukon, and the villages, scavenging food from dumpsters.
Heimo is scanning the terrain, looking for an inconspicuous spot to stash the meat, when the raven drops down for a closer look, making a faint gurgling sound. Heimo catches it out of the corner of his eye and whirls. “Yee-haahhh,” he yells, throwing his hands up as if trying to clear a dusty road of milling cattle or a campsite of a marauding raccoon. The raven spooks and croaks its displeasure. “Damn raven,” Heimo says, “he’s going to try to get at the meat.” Turning away from me, Heimo draws his knife across his pants and slips it into his pocket. Without saying a word, he walks back to the snowmachine, starts it, and carves a new trail to where the caribou lies. We load it onto the sled, and I clear out a spot where I can kneel between one of the hindquarters and the head. The sun has swung down below the mountains, and the land is now wrapped in a lambent light. I grip the side of the sled for balance and prepare for the jerk as Heimo pulls back on the throttle. But the jerk does not come. Heimo cuts the engine and swings around on his seat, facing me. “You know,” he says, looking at the sky, “never once, not even once, did the old man ever tell me that he loved me.”
I look away, not sure what to make of this sudden confession. “The old man was mean, you know.” Heimo takes his knife from his pocket, opens the blade, wipes it on his pants again, puts it back into his pocket, and then pulls a small, thin piece of drymeat from his coat. Sticking it into his mouth, he clamps down with his back teeth and tears off a bite. “Mom tried to make excuses for him.” His voice is soft now, a near whisper, as if he is concerned that someone might be listening. “She said it was the war that made him that way—but she knew it, too, and she protected us from him. He was mean and had a terrible temper to go with it. Not a good combination, huh?”
Like most Alaskans, Heimo Korth is from somewhere else. He came from the “Outside,” first as an emigrant to the United States and then to Alaska. Heimo was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on April 17, 1955, the oldest child of Erich and Irene Korth. Erich Korth wanted his son’s name to be Erich, Jr., but Irene insisted on Heimo (pronounced HI-mo, with a long i and a long o), a Finnish name she’d always been fond of. When Heimo was three, the family—by then including a brother, Erich, Jr., and sister Angie—emigrated to the United States, to Appleton, Wisconsin, where Irene’s oldest sister, Erika, had settled after marrying an American GI. Erich Korth resisted the move. He could hardly read or speak English. He and a partner were starting a plumbing business outside of Frankfurt, and he had high hopes for it, but Irene Korth prevailed upon him, and ultimately he agreed.
Appleton, like many of the towns and cities of the Fox River Valley, was a quiet, hardworking place, a city of 45,000 dominated by one of the Midwest’s leading liberal arts colleges and a paper mill industry that tamed the picturesque Fox River with a series of locks and tainted its waters with PCBs. Appleton had a flourishing downtown with two movie theaters and attractive storefronts and had not yet felt the sting of neglect that would come as the city expanded and businesses located nearer U.S. Highway 41, draining the downtown of its customer base. In fact, in the fifties, the city’s downtown was busy, particularly on Friday nights, when stores stayed open until 9:00 P.M. and area farmers came to town to do their once-a-week shopping. Appleton had a “good side” of the tracks and a “bad side.” However, the dividing line was not the railroad but the Fox River, which coursed through the city, creating a wide chasm with striking bluffs on either side. The Southside, by larger cities’ standards, was hardly bad, but it never quite measured up to its counterpart across the river. The Korths moved to Weimer Street on the Southside, only blocks from the pretty woods and expansive fields at the town’s edge.
Heimo grew up in a cream-colored old farmhouse with a large front porch that was trellised with grapevines. Five big horse chestnut trees shaded the yard, four in front and one in back. Two ancient apple trees, a crab and a Macintosh, which hung heavy with juicy apples in September, leaned over the sandbox in the backyard.
Behind the backyard was “Old Rosie’s field,” a large meadow of native grasses and wildflowers, strawberries, rabbits, bees, and butterflies during the summer. Old Rosie was a loud, surly woman, and she and Erich Korth traded insults and fought about whether or not the children had a right to play in her field. The kids ignored her threats. Heimo and his friends used it for playing army, tag, hide-and-seek, flying their kites, and shooting their BB guns.
Appleton was a good place for a young boy to grow up, particularly one like Heimo, who had a yearning to be outdoors, even if the hot summer winds sometimes brought in the sulfurous stench of the Fox Valley’s many paper mills. Tree-filled ravines fed the Fox River, and Heimo explored every one of them. He discovered which ravines had the most frogs and which creeks the painted turtles liked best, which wild trees had apples with the fewest wormholes, and where to gather hickory nuts in fall.
When he turned twelve, Heimo bought a spear at a local sporting goods store and made solo trips to the Fox River, where he prowled the tangled brush of the river’s banks like a young Huck Finn and speared spawning carp wallowing in the river’s shallow backwaters. He loved that river. Sometimes his friends joined him, but Heimo usually kept to himself, and he preferred it that way. He laughs about it now. While his friends flirted with girls in the park, he explored the river, testing his balance on logs and wading in knee-deep muck.
Despite his mother’s frequent warnings, he was playing on the train trestles that spanned the river, too. Every boy who played on the train trestles knew the dangers—one misstep meant a twenty-foot fall into the river’s powerful current—and he knew the stories. Once in a while one of the men who operated the locks would find the body of some unlucky kid who’d drowned bumping up against one of the lock walls like a bloated fish.
At age twelve, Heimo mustered up the courage to jump his first train. Although Heimo remembers the Fox River being full of floating logs, increasingly trains instead of the river were being used to supply the paper companies with timber. The train was ten cars long and slowly rumbled past the Riverside Paper Company and then over Lawe Street—an easy one, Heimo’s friends said. Many of them were older, and some of the boys had been jumping trains for two or three years. It was a hot July day, and Heimo could feel the sweat building in his hands. What if he jumped and his hands slipped? With all of his friends looking on, Heimo had no choice but to try. He picked the last boxcar, so that if he fell there wouldn’t be another car to roll over him. When he was certain that the brakeman wasn’t looking, Heimo made his dash from behind the building. He ran alongside the train at a good pace, but he didn’t have to sprint to keep up. Then he saw the ladder attached to the back end of the car. Grabbing on to one of the iron rungs with his inside hand, he jumped. Next thing he knew, he was traveling with the car. He rode it for one hundred yards, jumping off before the car reached the river, but when he hit the gravel he lost his footing. He had the presence of mind to tuck into a roll to protect himself. When he got up and dusted himself off, his friends in the distance cheered. He had jumped his first train, and he had scraped and bleeding arms and elbows to show for it.
After that, Heimo and his friends jumped so many trains that they started a competition, a test of bravery and skill—the one who jumped the most trains in a day was the winner. Heimo entertained kids at the local pool with his acrobatic dives, and soon it became apparent that he could use these skills—agility and balance combined with fearlessness—to win the train-jumping competitions. But train jumping was perilous, and it was only a matter of time until someone got hurt. Three years later, after jumping hundreds of trains, Heimo saw what happened to a friend. Chasing a boxcar, his friend mistimed his hop and fell. He was thrown under by the speed of the train, and Heimo was sure that his friend would die. Somehow, he scrambled out just in time. But the image stayed with Heimo. He swore he was finished. He never jumped again.
Heimo remembers aspects of his childhood with fondness—even the dangerous game of jumping trains—but there are some memories he’d rather forget. Erich Korth was a drinker. He was not a hard boozer, but he liked his beer, as the saying goes, and when he was drunk he could be mean.
Though Erich Korth had five children to feed on a plumber’s income, he refused to sacrifice his beer. Just about every half year, Erich Korth got into the family’s white 1965 Ford station wagon and drove to the Adler Brau Brewery in downtown Appleton. Putting the backseat down for more storage space, he loaded the car with cases of discounted beer. When he was down to his last two cases, he repeated the trip. Though he did most of his drinking at home, he made an exception for the annual plumber’s union picnic.
All year Erich Korth looked forward to this big summer blowout under the canopy of magnificent elm trees at Telulah Park. All the plumbers were there with their families. The barbecues coughed smoke; the air smelled of hamburgers, hotdogs, and cigars; the pop and beer flowed generously; and kids played games while their mothers looked on and played bingo and their fathers drank and talked shop. By late afternoon, the men were drunk, and then, as if on cue, the fights started. Erich Korth got as drunk as the next guy, and even as a young boy Heimo learned to recognize the signs.
Most summers, Heimo, too, looked forward to the plumber’s picnic. But in 1967, he was especially excited. In the past, he had to watch while the older boys played baseball, hoping for an invitation that never came. But in July 1967, he knew that things would be different. Twelve years old now, Heimo was the starting catcher for his Little League team, and when it came to choosing sides, he was determined not to be passed over. He had a good arm, a reliable bat, and the speed to beat out an infield grounder.
Heimo was the last boy picked, but at least he’d made the cut. His team took the field first, and he was stuck out in right field, where there was very little action. Still Heimo prepared himself for every hitter. But not a ball came his way. In the bottom of the third inning, however, he finally got his chance at bat. The opposing team’s pitcher, a sixteen-year-old Babe Ruth Leaguer, thought himself a hotshot. Although this was only sandlot baseball, he was throwing curveballs, sliders, and knucklers, and when the smaller boys took the plate, full-arm fastballs. Heimo hoped that he could just get his bat on one of the pitches, that he wouldn’t embarrass himself.
When the first pitch came, Heimo swung hard and missed the ball badly. Then the catcalls started. “This guy can’t hit! He’s a whiffer!” Heimo got his bat on the second pitch, but fouled it off into the backstop. He took the plate for the third pitch and was imagining a pop fly that fell into the hole between second base and center field when he heard a scream. “Heimo, Heimo!” He whirled around and saw his mother running toward the field. All the boys were watching, and he felt like hiding. “Heimo,” she called again, stopping to catch her breath. Heimo dropped his bat and ran over to her as fast as he could. The heckling of the other players followed him. “Better run to Mommy,” some of them yelled out. Heimo reached his mother and by that time she was breathing so heavily, she was unable to talk and could only pull Heimo by the arm.
They ran to the beer tent, and before Heimo got there, he saw what was happening. Erich Korth and another man were squared off, screaming at each other. A small crowd had gathered around them, but no one made an effort to intervene. In fact, some of the men were drunk and were encouraging the two to fight. Irene Korth shouted at Heimo to stop his father, but when Heimo saw how mad his father was, he refused. Erich Korth was threatening the other man. They were pushing each other, and Heimo thought his dad was going to throw a punch. Finally a group of men decided they’d seen enough and dragged the two men apart.
Irene was nearly in tears. “Erich,” she screamed. “Are you crazy!” “Bist du verrückt! Sinnlos! We’re going home. Jetzt! Sofort!”
By early evening Erich Korth had sobered up, though he was still looking for a fight. When Heimo walked into the living room where his father was sitting, Erich Korth reminded him that it was time for a haircut. Heimo was still furious with his father about the day’s events. “We’ll see,” he replied. That was all the provocation Erich Korth needed. He jumped out of his chair and grabbed Heimo by the back of the neck. Heimo cried out, and Irene came running out of the kitchen. “You’ll do as I say,” Korth yelled at his son. “You’ll do as I say, won’t you!” he yelled again. Irene was trying to insert herself between Heimo and his father when Erich Korth threw a punch. The blow caught Irene across the eye and her head snapped back. When Erich Korth saw what he had done, he stopped and stood there in stunned silence. Erich Korth had always reserved his anger for his children; he was never violent toward his wife. Heimo screamed at his father now, though Irene Korth insisted that she was okay. Her eye was never the same though. It always drooped a little after that.
In addition to being a drinker, Erich Korth was also an autocrat with a temper, and growing up, Heimo got the brunt of his father’s rage. His father had a special belt that hung from a hook on his bedroom door that he used when he felt that Heimo was out of line. The beatings were sometimes savage and persisted for many years.
The last beating Heimo ever got was a particularly fierce one. Heimo was sixteen, a sophomore in high school, and starting to fill out, his muscles toned now by daily swim team workouts. His father scoffed at his efforts, but Heimo enjoyed swimming, especially the butterfly, where he had the strength to propel his body out of the water with a swift dolphin kick and a vigorous, near violent thrust of his arms. Heimo also loved diving. He came alive on the diving board, an actor twisting his body into sleek, beautiful forms. He loved the feeling of lifting off the board, that last step, and then the drive of his knee. Next thing he knew, he’d hit the board with both feet, feel its spring, and then he was floating. Time seemed to stop.
Heimo arrived home after swim team practice later than usual. His mother had kept his supper warm in the oven, and his father was sitting in the living room reading the paper. He had a Harvester cigar in one hand and a can of beer on the table beside him. As Heimo walked into the living room, he threw his gym bag on the floor and returned to the kitchen. Taking a seat at the table, he poured himself a glass of milk and drank it. “Two or three porkchops?” his mother asked. “Three,” Heimo answered, and dug into a pile of sauerkraut. His mother set three porkchops on his plate. From the living room, Erich Korth was listening. No one living under his roof would act like that. Erich Korth lay down his paper and came stomping into the kitchen.
“Your mother kept your goddamn food warm for you, and you don’t even say please or thank you?” Heimo continued eating as if he hadn’t heard his father. “You son of a bitch,” his father yelled, but still Heimo wouldn’t acknowledge him. Erich Korth grabbed his son’s plate and jerked it from the table. Heimo got up from his chair and walked away, calmly, as if he’d finished his meal and was simply leaving the room. His father caught up with him in the living room. “You son of a bitch!” he yelled again, grabbing Heimo by the shirt collar and whirling him around. Heimo was as tall as his father now and they stood nose to nose. Heimo didn’t move. He could smell his father’s breath, the nauseating scent of beer and cigar. “If you want to stay in this house, get some manners!” Erich Korth yelled. Heimo was determined not to budge. For once he would defy his father. His father began to push him. Then came the fist across the forehead, a hit that sent Heimo to the floor. Heimo remembers seeing Angie, his sister, and her friends run from the hall into the living room. Moments later, they rushed out into the backyard. All the while, Irene Korth was screaming at her husband to stop.
Heimo curled up and protected his head with his arms, and his father kicked at him viciously. Still Heimo didn’t say a word. He didn’t plead or fight back or scramble away, and this angered his father even more. Erich Korth had worked himself into a pitch and Heimo felt another blow across the side of his head, just above his ear. He curled up into a tighter ball and waited. Then everything was quiet.
Heimo sat up slowly and realized that his father was gone. He could hear his mother outside yelling. He touched his head with his hand and he saw the blood. There was blood on the carpet, too. A chair lay on the floor. Heimo figured out what just happened. The hardest blow had come when his father hit him with the chair. Heimo took off his T-shirt and held it to his head. When his mother returned she took a tray of ice from the freezer. She broke the ice into a fresh towel, put it on the bleeding cut, and stroked his head with her other hand.
Heimo claims now that he’s come to terms with his father’s anger. “I love him, he’s my dad,” Heimo says. “But me and the old man, we just ground gears. He wanted me to join him in the plumbing business, but I hated the routine, eight to five. To me, that’s prison. He couldn’t understand that. For him it was the only way. The old man was rigid like that—his way or the highway.”
Heimo says now that perhaps his father was only defending his choices, that his anger might have been nothing more than fear. Perhaps he was looking for his son’s approval, for some confirmation that his life had been worthwhile, that his oldest son respected him. An aunt speculates that Erich Korth never recovered from the disappointment of having to leave Germany. “It was Irene who wanted to leave,” she says. “Erich’s plumbing partner in Germany became a rich man, and Erich had to start all over, learning a new language and everything. I don’t think he ever got over that.”
Mitigating circumstances or not, Heimo says, “If he was to come back to life, I’d give him a good chewing-out. ‘What was all that shit about?’ I’d ask him. For a long time, it really pissed me off. But later on he mellowed, and he tried to say he was sorry in his own way.”
“Sure, Dad was sorry,” says Angie Korth, Heimo’s sister. “Dad ruled with a heavy hand. Later on, I think he regretted that. He just didn’t know how to express his love. He never understood Heimo, but slowly he came to terms with Heimo’s lifestyle. Ultimately, I think he was very proud of Heimo, and he loved him, but he just didn’t know how to show it.”
Lisa Korth, Heimo’s youngest sister, adds, “It was Heimo’s dream to go to Alaska, but there were sacrifices. He missed part of our lives. And he didn’t ever really know who Mom and Dad were, especially Dad. Mom was always the loving caregiver, but there was more to her. And there was much more to Dad than Heimo ever knew. He’s a lot like Dad in some ways. He hates to hear it, but it’s true.”
In 1977 Erich Korth called up Heimo while Heimo was in Fort Yukon. “I have a proposition for you,” he said. “I want you to come home. I’ll buy you a farm in northeastern Wisconsin if you’ll come home.” Heimo couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The old man was offering to buy him a farm? Then the thought flashed into his head—the old man’s drunk. “Why?” Heimo asked. “I want you to come home,” his father repeated. But he wasn’t drunk; Heimo could hear that now. “You know I can’t come home,” Heimo answered. “Alaska, Dad, Alaska’s where I live.” His father struggled to find the words. “I just thought you might consider it.” Then there was a dial tone, not even a good-bye. Two weeks later a large package arrived in Fort Yukon. His father had sent up a brand-new set of tools.
In 1986, Erich Korth visited Heimo and his family at their cabin, and he stayed for a month. Heimo remembers the time fondly. “The old man changed so much, I couldn’t believe it. We shot a caribou, went berry picking, and fished for grayling. I never saw the old man so happy. He even helped me dig a new hole for the outhouse. When that was done he helped me put a new pole roof on the cabin. He was really willing to help, and we got along. I think he was trying to say he was sorry for all those years. We never talked about it. The old man wasn’t the type to say anything.” Erich Korth never visited Alaska again. He died eight years later.
Although Heimo cannot be sure what it was that caused his father’s hairtrigger temper—his nature, bitterness at having to leave Germany and start all over in a new country, never having achieved financial success, the horrors of World War II and the memory of a favorite brother lost at Stalingrad, a rough childhood at the hands of his own violent father, or some angry combination of events and emotions—he does remember seeking refuge in the woods. It was the outdoors, not his father, that would have the most enduring effect on him. In the outdoors, Heimo found both deliverance and self-discovery. Thoreau called it “the tonic of wildness.” For Heimo, it was the antidote to a bad situation at home—an escape to a simpler, more beautiful world—and early on Heimo cultivated his capacity for being alone.
When he was ten, Heimo and two neighborhood friends borrowed some longspring foothold traps that his friend’s grandfather hadn’t used in years. They set one of the traps in a field and baited it with corn, though none of them expected to catch anything. When they returned a few days later there was a half-eaten pheasant in the trap, tracks in the moist snow, and a hawk soaring overhead. “I was hooked after that,” Heimo says. “I don’t know why I was so interested in it. Something about being outdoors and the anticipation of it. My friends lost interest fast, and somehow I inherited the traps. I kept at it—and I enjoyed being alone. I started trapping pheasants and rabbits periodically. I’d bring them home and I’d be so proud, and the old man would just scoff, though he liked eating pheasants.”
Despite his father’s objections, Heimo was trapping during his free time and hunting with his uncles, which he remembers fondly. “I loved the hunting, but for the old man, if you weren’t out earning money, you were wasting your time. Later on I got really serious about it. I was hunting on my own and trapping muskrats in the marshes outside of town, especially after I learned that there was a fur buyer in Appleton that paid $2.50 per muskrat skin.”
The more Heimo retreated to the woods, the more resentful his father became, and Erich Korth expressed his displeasure, in part, by heaping praise on Heimo’s brother Erich, Jr., setting up a sibling rivalry that continues to this day. “Erich was his pride and joy,” Heimo says more than thirty years later, with a real hint of acrimony. “And Erich and I fought like hell. We never really got along.” Today Erich, Jr., owns his own semitruck trailer repair company. “He’s been very successful,” Heimo continues. “He’s worked hard. But that lifestyle, where you’re married to your job, it’s never been for me. I don’t care if it would have made me rich.”
The Korth family had been in America for only six months when, on January 3, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an edict admitting Alaska as the nation’s forty-ninth state, ending a decade-long battle about whether or not to allow Alaska’s entry into the union. Many were critical of the decision. Opponents of Alaska’s statehood wondered how the state’s economy could develop quickly enough to pay the bills a state government would inevitably accumulate, even though the War Department spent more than $1 billion in Alaska between 1941 and 1945 and was channeling more money into the state as a result of the Cold War. To combat this objection regarding the state’s ability to raise money, a provision was included in the Alaska Statehood Act, altering the Mineral Leasing Acts of 1914 and 1920. The Bureau of Land Management would thereafter be required to compensate the state with 90 percent of the revenues acquired from the extraction of coal on federal land in Alaska and with 52.5 percent of the revenues from oil and gas extraction.
Alaska’s detractors were ultimately proved correct. In February 1971, two and a half years after the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) announced that it had discovered oil on Alaska’s Arctic Coast, and only one and a half years after the Alaska Department of Natural Resources conducted its fourth Prudhoe Bay oil lease, Governor William Eagen testified at a hearing at the Department of the Interior. A trans-Alaska oil pipeline was urgently needed, he said. If it were not built in five years, he predicted, the state would “face bankruptcy.”
On December 18, 1971, a century after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, nearly twelve years after statehood, and only ten months after Governor Eagen’s appeal, President Richard Nixon, an unlikely ally of Alaskan Natives, signed an epic bill. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act—ANCSA, as it came to be called—attempted to resolve aboriginal land claims and legally paved the way for the Trans Alaska Pipeline.
With ANCSA, the Natives of Alaska—Alaskans, according to ANCSA, with one quarter or more of Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut blood—became capitalists overnight. Each Native person was represented by a village corporation and a regional corporation that had profit and investment motives. Thirteen regional corporations and more than 200 village corporations were established. Most Natives enrolled in both and were given 100 shares of stock in each. For the corporations, which quickly turned a blind eye to the longstanding traditions of communal land use and subsistence living—hunting, fishing, and gathering—it was a trial-by-fire experience. Now they would be required to post profits and to view the land as a commodity, since the land would be taxable after 1991. While ANCSA did not satisfy all Natives, and some communities opted out of the settlement entirely, the settlement was viewed by many as a model for the resolution of aboriginal land claims. The Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) approved the bill by a vote of 511 to 45. Alaska’s Natives—represented by the AFN—agreed to the extinguishing of their “aboriginal title … based on use and occupancy … including any aboriginal hunting and fishing rights.” In return, ANCSA awarded them nearly $1 billion—$462 million in federal funds over eleven years, and $500 million from a 2 percent royalty on oil leases— and 44 million acres, over one-tenth of Alaska’s total acreage. ANCSA gave Alaskan Natives an unprecedented opportunity for self-determination and a unique avenue into the national economy, effectively ending a 200-year-old policy isolating Natives from the business interests that drove America. By linking (cynics said “shrewdly” linking) the Native monetary settlement to the oil leases, many Natives were turned into enthusiastic proponents of the pipeline.
With Native land claims apparently settled, Alaska’s boosters hoped that they could finally begin selection of, and gain title to, the 105 million acres guaranteed to the state by the Statehood Act. Prior to ANCSA, this right was denied them by section 4 of the Statehood Act, which instructed the state to “disclaim all right and title to any lands … the right or title to which … may be held by any Indians, Eskimos, or Aleuts.”
Sixteen months after ANCSA became law, Heimo turned eighteen. Richard Nixon had already curtailed the draft, so instead of fighting in Vietnam, Heimo took a summer job with Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources at Camp Mecan, a summer work camp on the Mecan River. At Camp Mecan, Heimo learned forestry and game and fish habitat maintenance skills, all of which further confirmed his love for the outdoors.
Jim Kryzmarcik, who was raised on a farm near a small town in northern Wisconsin, also attended the work camp, and he and Heimo grew to be close friends there. Kryzmarcik recalls, “Compared to me, Heimo was a city kid. But he was into nature. He wanted to know about the plants and the birds. He was real interested in learning about it and how nature worked. Camp Mecan was the turning point in his life, I think.”
After Camp Mecan, the outdoors was indeed irresistible for Heimo, and he spent much of his time plotting his escape north after high school graduation. But graduation never came. Heimo explains, “Prior to my senior year, I was skipping a lot of classes, but by the middle of my senior year, I was skipping a lot of days. It wasn’t that I didn’t like school—I liked science and I really enjoyed geography—but I just hated the routine of it. You had to be there from 8:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M., or whatever it was, and I couldn’t stand that. So I dropped out in April of my senior year. A shrewd move, right? I had two months to go, and I left.”
After dropping out, Heimo was hired on as welder at Miller Electric, a huge welding plant headquartered in Appleton. Heimo had learned the basics of welding in high school shop classes, and he attended daily advanced welding classes while working at Miller, too. As far as Erich Korth was concerned, his son had finally taken up a worthwhile trade, and he was proud of Heimo. Heimo, however, was frustrated and angry, fearful that he had become, after all, what he hated—a regular working Joe, an eight-to-fiver, living for the weekends and dreaming of that far-off day when he might be able to retire. Heimo started drinking to relieve the boredom and the disappointment, and he became a five-to six-day-a-week fixture at a tough, dimly lit, bank-turned-biker bar in Appleton called Sarge’s.
Heimo had been drinking since he was fifteen, when his father got him drunk for the first time at home, but at Sarge’s he was doing a different kind of drinking, serious and self-destructive. “I drank because I was bored and pissed off and because I hated what I’d become,” Heimo admits.
Steve Laabs, Heimo’s childhood friend, says, “Heimo was there with us every night. But he was always a little different than the rest of us. He’d been different all his life. He was always dreaming of going north.”
One day in the spring of 1974, after nine months at Miller, intent on realizing his dream and following the needle pull of the compass north, Heimo quit his job and took off for the Northwest Territories. “Miller’s paid well and offered good benefits and would have been a good job if I was a different kind of guy, but it was driving me crazy,” Heimo says.
Roland Pruno, another childhood friend of Heimo’s, says, “Heimo was making respectable money at Miller, but he was bound and determined to leave. Heimo and I had the same printing class in the eighth grade. We made some stationery, and Heimo’s read, ‘Heimo Korth—Guide and Trapper of the North.’ He wanted to go to Canada and be a trapper and a guide, and Heimo was the only person that I ever knew that always did exactly what he said he was going to do.”
Sister Angie was hardly surprised by Heimo’s abrupt departure. “Heimo was always an individual,” she says. “Ever since he was a boy, his room was always filled with Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and animal and bird books. He used to take me into the woods and teach me to identify birds and animal tracks. I knew the factory job was only temporary.”
While Erich Korth had always bullied and degraded Heimo, Irene Korth had instilled in him a deep belief in the possibilities of life and the conviction that he could do something unique and different with his. Angie Korth says of her mother, “Mom was born too early. She would have made a great hippie. She was worried about Heimo, but she admired free spirits, and that’s what Heimo was; she knew that.”
Despite Irene Korth’s support of her oldest son, Lisa Korth remembers how hard it was on her mother when Heimo left. “She was very excited for him,” she says. “But she worried, too. I remember Mom crying a lot.”
In May 1974, Heimo packed up his Ford F150 pickup truck, which he’d outfitted with a topper, stuck $700 in his wallet, and took off for the Northwest Territories. Riding an adrenaline high, he reached International Falls, Minnesota, in less than eight hours—the 500 miles between Appleton and International Falls had been a blur. At the bridge to Canada, a customs agent pulled him over. Where was he going, the agent asked. When Heimo answered, “the Northwest Territories,” the agent asked him to leave his truck and escorted Heimo to an office where he interrogated Heimo. Where are you from? Why are you going to the Northwest Territories? What are you going to do for money? Then it dawned on Heimo. “Jesus Christ,” he thought, “I never should have answered honestly.” Canada had had problems with draft dodgers, and now that U.S. involvement in Vietnam had ended, Canada was being flooded with disillusioned veterans. Heimo had anticipated having a problem, so before leaving he’d made sure to shave and cut his shoulder length hair. Finally the customs agent asked Heimo to open his wallet. Heimo dumped its contents onto the table, and the agent counted the money slowly—$400, $500, $660. Heimo had paid for gas and food, but his $700 was largely intact. Confident that he had no intentions of relying on the charity of the Canadian government, the agent told Heimo to be on his way.
After the incident at the border, Heimo gassed up and ate, then he drove through the deep Ontario night. He stopped to sleep along a potholed country road outside of Kenora, Ontario. He was too tired to pitch his tent, so he just lay his sleeping bag under a tree. The following day he covered all of Manitoba, crossing at night into Saskatchewan, where he camped at Crooked Lake Provincial Park. Before dawn, he was on the road again. He pushed himself, arriving in Calgary, Alberta, just after sunset. Looking west in the direction of Banff National Park and the Livingstone Range—the first mountains he’d ever seen—he felt his heart leap. He pulled off to the side of the road and stared at the mountains, outlined by the gray-red sky, and knew he’d never again be happy back home in Wisconsin’s flatlands.
The next morning, he headed north, past Edmonton to Peace River. After nearly 500 miles of driving, he turned onto a gravel road, lay down on the front seat of his truck with a sweatshirt as a pillow, and woke at sunrise. Just west of Peace River, he went for a swim in Lac Cardinal in Queen Elizabeth Provincial Park. Then he headed north up the Mackenzie Highway, paralleling the Hay River just north outside the town of Meander River. By late afternoon, he was in the Northwest Territories. He camped that night near Hay River on Great Slave Lake. The next morning, he arrived at the Mackenzie River, but so much ice was rushing down from Great Slave Lake that the ferry couldn’t make the crossing. He slept in his truck that night, crossed the Mackenzie on day seven, and arrived in Yellowknife the following afternoon, 2,500 miles from Appleton.
Yellowknife itself was a disappointment to Heimo, nothing more than a jumble of buildings, jerry-rigged in the 1930s after prospectors discovered veins of gold in the local quartz. Intent on getting out of Yellowknife as soon as possible, Heimo started asking questions about trapping in the interior, in that great, wild stretch of boreal forest west of Yellowknife. The answers he received discouraged him. He was told that only Canadian citizens were allowed to trap. In a bar, Heimo met an old miner, who confided in him that there were men out there trespassing and laying low when necessary. Heimo hung around Yellowknife, debating whether or not to say the hell with the law, but a month later he returned to Wisconsin. Heimo knew that his father would gloat, and he was determined not to give him the pleasure until he had a few drinks under his belt, so instead of heading home to the inevitable “I told you so,” he stopped in at Sarge’s. Heimo started drinking in the afternoon, one Budweiser after another. By the time the mill crew arrived, Heimo was already drunk. He was sitting on a barstool when his friend Roland Pruno walked by. Heimo pulled Pruno toward him and wrapped a heavy arm over Pruno’s shoulders. “I’m going again,” Heimo said, nearly whispering. Later that night, Pruno remembers, Heimo told him and anyone else willing to listen, in a loud voice, that he wouldn’t be in Wisconsin for long, that he had the guts to leave once and he’d have the guts to try again.
I am two weeks into my January visit. It is 6:30 in the morning when I hear Heimo walk by, the snow cracking under his feet. By now I know his routine. He rises at 6:15 to stoke the fire and warm the cabin and then he takes the honeybucket to the banks of the creek bed, where he dumps it. Afterward he checks the weather, reading the two thermometers that NOAA has provided him.
Despite the fact that Heimo is no longer punching a factory clock, he leads a ritualized life. Structure, he says, is essential in the bush, where at times it is so cold that getting out of bed, much less going outside and subjecting oneself to winter’s cruelties, requires an act of will. It is easy to be listless in winter, particularly in January, when a person is craving the return of the sun.
Heimo is standing outside my tent now. “Ya, der, you awake or ya still snoozin’?” he asks, improvising a heavy Wisconsin accent. I try to be enthusiastic, to sound as if I’ve had a good night of sleep on my army cot, as if I am looking forward to bundling up against the cold. The last thing I want Heimo to think is that I am a soft city boy. “Ready and rarin’,” I say, trying out my own Wisconsin accent. “Let’s give ’er.”
“Ooooh, Christ,” Heimo continues, drawing out the long O. “I spent too much time at da tavern last night wit da boys. She was a late one, and I got a hangover. Aw Jeezus, da wife, she’s pissed.”
“Ya, der, I’m feelin’ er, too. My frickin’ head is poundin’,” I answer. “Oooh, ders gonna be hell to pay wit da missus dis mornin’.”
Heimo laughs. It has been a long time since he’s been in a Wisconsin tavern, or any tavern (he hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since the fall of 1981), but he loves this routine. For two weeks now we have subjected Edna and the girls to our Wisconsin schtick. For them the humor has worn off, but Heimo loves it.
We eat a breakfast of oatmeal—“oatmeal or no meal” is Heimo’s refrain— and then I return to the tent to dress, layering against the inevitable cold. By 8:30 Heimo is outside with the snowmachine and the sled. “Taxi’s waiting and the meter’s running,” he shouts.
I get myself situated in back of the sled, using my day pack as a backrest. Today we’re carrying only Heimo’s pack, a few leghold traps, the ax, the .22, and two marten carcasses, so I’m able to stretch out and extend my legs. When I’m settled Heimo kisses Edna and the girls goodbye. Each morning they come out to see us off regardless of the temperature. Edna is a worrier; from experience she knows how fast things can go wrong out here. “Don’t forget the plan,” she says. “If you’re not back by suppertime, I’ll come looking for you.” “Oh, Mom,” Heimo replies, trying to soothe her, “we’ll be okay.”
Today we plan to check Heimo’s longest line, a trip that will take us eight hours or more. Fortunately it is only 26 below. The temperature will be bearable, at least five degrees or so warmer once we get into the hills where Heimo has his marten sets.
Heimo has noticed significant weather changes in Alaska since he arrived in 1975. Though he expresses skepticism about the urgent warnings of a worldwide warming, his observations would probably coincide with global-climate-change models. “The winters are not nearly as cold as they once were,” he tells me, wiping the snow from the #1 longspring leghold trap on his first poleset. “Years ago, forty, fifty below was common, but it’s rare today. No question about it, though, the winters are longer now. They come earlier and stay later. But I can handle that. It’s the snow that ticks me off. There’s a lot more of it than before, and it makes my life hard. These traps get too much snow and they won’t fire properly. And it’s hell on my trails.”
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms and expands upon Heimo’s observations: more cloud cover, more frequent snowstorms, more moisture in the air in general, and stronger winds, which pick up moisture from the thawing ice fields of the Arctic Ocean and transport it south. A 2001 report from the panel indicates that global warming is far worse than earlier estimates, with Alaska, Greenland, and Arctic Canada witnessing warm-ups significantly higher than the rest of the world. Over the past thirty years, winter temperatures in regions of the north have risen by ten degrees compared to a worldwide average of one degree, and Arctic ice is 40 percent thinner than it was in 1960. Despite the naysayers who adhere blindly to Le Chatelier’s principle—that the earth is capable of recovering on its own from devastating changes—many climatologists anticipate increases by the year 2100 “without precedent during the last 10,000 years.” In other words, the earth will encounter the kinds of dramatic global climate changes that it has not seen since the last Ice Age.
By the time Heimo and I reach the fifth poleset, he is shaking his head, more puzzled than discouraged. The polesets have been empty, and he’s seen very little marten sign. “There should be marten all over this hill,” he says. For most trappers in Alaska’s Interior, the marten is their bread and butter. It’s what allows them to pay for the bush flights and their food and fuel bills. The other animals—the wolf, wolverine, lynx (or “lynk,”), fox, beaver—they’re “gravy,” as one old Fort Yukon trapper told me.
Heimo shuts off the snowmachine. “I’ll probably catch seventy or so marten this year,” he says. “At $40 or so a pelt, that’s only $2800. Not much of a year unless I do well on wolves this spring. Did I ever tell you about Fred’s best year?” Fred Thomas is Heimo’s good friend and one of Alaska’s legendary trappers, the subject of Edward Hoagland’s memorable essay “Up the Black to the Chalkyitsik.” Fred Thomas calls Fort Yukon home. At eighty-three, he still takes his boat up the Black River, 300-plus river miles from Fort Yukon, where he picks berries and hunts moose at his camp. He still successfully traps seventy-five miles of line around Fort Yukon, using a snowmachine, and still cuts all his own wood. “The winter of 1979-1980,” Heimo continues, “Fred and his brother and son trapped 315 lynk,” Heimo says the number as if it is inconceivable, the same way he might react to news of Bill Gates’s net worth. “Do you wanna know what they got for each pelt? $350,” he says. “$350!” Trappers in Alaska talk about the price of fur like Midwestern farmers discuss milk, corn, and soybean prices, and I knew it was the kind of payday Heimo had never seen and, considering the dismal state of the fur market, maybe never would. “With that kind of money, I’d put a chunk in the girls’ college fund and then I’d buy a new snowmachine and some Alaska #9 wolf traps,” he muses.
Heimo doesn’t linger long over the thought. He tells me to sit down in the sled, pulls the starter on the snowmachine, lets it warm up for half a minute, and then gives the machine some gas. Every trapper has to have a bit of the gambler in him, a sense of anticipation that keeps him going in the cold, that impels him to check the next trap even when the prospects look gloomy. It isn’t the same kind of mindless hopefulness of someone playing the slots, but rather the sense of expectation that a diligent blackjack player might feel. He studies the cards and knows that it’s only a matter of time before he wins.
Heimo has the heart of a blackjack player. All of his marten traps are polesets. Before the season begins, he spends weeks surveying hundreds of miles of country, searching for marten tracks and the kind of terrain marten love. He’s a good student, careful and observant, and even in low marten years he does well. Once he’s finished scouting, Heimo lays out his lines, constructing his polesets before the season begins. The polesets are spaced fairly close together because trapping is about probabilities—the more traps you’re willing to set and check, the more success you’ll have. To build a poleset, Heimo locates a dead spruce tree and cuts it down at the point where the trunk begins to taper off, usually three feet above the ground. Then he notches the trunk and rests the other part of the tree, the pole, in the notch, making certain to wipe off the pitch, which can spoil a fur. Using his ax, he cuts a small, flat indentation in the pole, which will eventually contain the trap. Just before the season begins, Heimo will boil the traps in spruce boughs to take away their scent and then he’ll haul them out with the snowmachine and the sled. He uses one trap per poleset, fastening the trap’s chain to the pole, so that once the marten is caught it can’t run off with the trap. At the end of the pole, he attaches a piece of string to which he ties bait, usually moose skin, the skin of a spruce grouse or a ptarmigan, or the fur of a snowshoe hare with the entrails wrapped inside. The bait dangles high enough from the ground that the marten can’t reach it. In an effort to get at the bait, the marten will use the pole as a ramp.
We have left the polesets behind and now we’re bound for a side trail to check some of Heimo’s leghold traps. A quarter of a mile down the trail, Heimo stops the snowmachine and points to fresh tracks in the snow. “Wolf,” he says. “Looks like a loner, traveling east. An adolescent male, I’d say,” he explains, showing me the seven-inch paw prints. “He’s probably after the caribou that were bedded down on the lake.” Heimo steps from the snowmachine carefully. I get out of the sled. “Try to stay on the snowmachine trail,” he warns me. “I don’t want any fresh tracks in the snow.” We walk along the trail on top of the packed snow for about one hundred yards. The wolf’s tracks parallel the trail, but never once does he get closer than two feet. “Wolves are so damn smart,” Heimo says. “See how he won’t even step on the trail. He wants nothing to do with it.”
Though wolves have ranges over 600 square miles and rarely use the same trail, Heimo thinks that this one might be coming back and decides to set two Bridger #5 longspring wolf traps in a clearing. Wolves, he tells me, are more likely to let down their guard in a clearing. First, he breaks off a rotten spruce tree at its base and pushes it into the snow so less than two feet is sticking up and sprays it with coyote urine that he orders from Fur Country Lures out of Jordan, Montana. This is the scent stick, or the “peepost,” as Heimo calls it. Before setting the traps, Heimo puts on his special cloth wolf gloves, which he only uses for setting wolf traps so they won’t carry any other scent, animal or human. As he prepares the wolf traps, he explains how they work. The traps have offset, rounded jaws, rather than square ones, that act like handcuffs. Rather than breaking bones or tearing into flesh, they leave a small gap, which is less painful for the wolf. Heimo sets the traps and arranges the guide sticks, then collects a film of snow on the head of his ax and gently sprinkles it over the trap lids.
“If there was wind here,” he says, “I couldn’t do this. I’d use a block of hard snow to hold the trap down. But you got to taper it with your ax, so there’s not much snow over the pan. Otherwise the trap won’t fire right.”
Before leaving, he wipes snow over the chains to conceal them and then uses a small spruce bough to dust the snow clean of our footprints.
He’s happy with the set and is eager to check another one a mile down the trail, where we saw fox tracks a week ago. I am hardly in the sled when he takes off. He is driving faster than usual, and I’m holding on with one hand and fending off spruce boughs with the other. When we arrive at the trap, Heimo throws his arms up as if signaling touchdown. “Got ’im,” he celebrates. “A red fox.” It’s the same one, he says, that was prowling the hillside only eight days ago. We walk up to the fox, and unlike the wolverine, it doesn’t hiss or lunge at us; it slinks low to the ground and trembles, and I feel a pang of guilt. Heimo lifts his leg and steps on it heavily, collapsing its lungs. The fox looks at me, and I turn my head and look away. “Are you okay?” Heimo asks. “Sure,” I say. As he puts his weight into it and pushes the air from the fox’s lungs, it emits a long, high-pitched sound like an asthmatic’s wheeze.
Heimo pulls apart the jaws of the #4 double longspring trap and gives me the fox to take back to the sled. Sitting down, I hold it in my lap. I take off my mitten and glove and rub my hand along the soft, cherry-red fur along the fox’s back. Though I am a hunter and have shot deer, rabbits, and countless grouse, pheasants, and waterfowl, I feel vaguely uncomfortable about the fox’s death, as Aldo Leopold did when he shot a wolf and reached it in time to see a “fierce green fire” dying in its eyes. I stroke the fox and watch Heimo reset the trap. He returns to the snowmachine, straddles the seat, then turns around, facing me.
“I know,” he says simply. “Sometimes it’s hard.”
Had Heimo been allowed to go out into the country west of Yellowknife, he would have become a fox trapper. The Northwest Territories had an abundant supply of red fox, cross fox, and Arctic fox, and their habitat was not going to be affected by oil development. While Heimo was in Yellowknife, he had learned, for the first time, of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a joint venture of the oil companies holding Prudhoe Bay leases. The pipeline’s fate had been sealed the previous year when Vice President Spiro Agnew broke a tie vote in the Senate authorizing its construction. Though the Canadian government petitioned hard for a route through Canada via the Mackenzie River valley and into the Great Lakes, the pipeline became an all-Alaska endeavor.
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline was to be an engineering marvel. Traveling 800 miles over public domain, from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope, across the 150-mile-wide Brooks Range, south to Valdez, a small fishing village on the Prince William Sound with a fjord deep enough to accommodate large oceangoing tankers, Rogers C.B. Morton, who was Nixon’s second Secretary of the Interior, equated it with the Egyptian pyramids. For conservationists, the prospect of a pipeline was like staring into the face of the apocalypse, a scenario of industrial expansion into the far North that Bob Marshall, mountaineer, author, founder of the The Wilderness Society, and impassioned defender of the Arctic frontier, had prophesied nearly forty years earlier. Henry Pratt, Governor Keith Miller’s advisor, was unmoved by their objections. Summing up what many Alaskans felt, including those in Governor Miller’s administration, he said, with frontier bravado, “Hell, this country’s so goddamn big that even if industry ran wild, we could never wreck it….” For prodevelopment Alaskans, wary of the state’s budget problems, the pipeline represented a figurative shot in the arm for the Alaskan economy. The first oil flowed south on June 20, 1977, pumping 700,000 barrels of oil a day (its capacity is two million) and millions of dollars into the foundering Alaskan economy.
For decades prior to the discovery of oil, geologists were convinced that there were significant deposits on Alaska’s north coast. Early European explorers of Alaska’s north coast wrote of oil seeping from the ground. After World War II, the U.S. Geological Survey was issued a directive to locate formations favorable to oil, and it produced a grid cut across the Alaskan landscape to aid in aerial surveys. Following the surveys, the federal government issued oil companies cheap leases to encourage exploration. The Israeli-Egyptian war in 1956, which shut down the Suez Canal to shipping, including all oil tanker traffic, convinced British Petroleum’s executives that the company would have to search for more reliable oil supplies elsewhere. Noticing the topographic similarities between the North Slope and Iran, BP’s exploration chief was confident that there was oil to be found. How much was the question.
When oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay, talk turned swiftly to a pipeline. Robert Anderson, the chairman of the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), declared that “pipeline and transportation studies would begin immediately,” and the land claims issues of Alaskan Natives suddenly catapulted to national prominence. With the discovery of oil, Native claims had become much more than an Alaskan issue; they became a national one. When Arab countries cut off oil supplies to the U.S. in 1973, proponents of the pipeline used this opportunity to claim that fuel shortages and accompanying economic and national security issues made North American resource development imperative. What they failed to say is that the oil would do nothing to ameliorate the country’s short-term crisis.
Shortly after oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay, Robert Anderson, ARCO’s chairman, and other oil company executives who had contributed handsomely to the Nixon campaign were pushing Nixon to appoint a Secretary of the Interior who would support their interests. Nixon came through, naming Walter J. Hickel, Alaska’s prodevelopment Republican governor, to the Interior Department’s top position. However, Stewart Udall, President Lyndon Johnson’s outgoing Secretary of the Interior, had a trick up his sleeve. Three days before leaving office, Udall, who was determined to delay the pipeline and the land-selection process until Native land claims were settled, signed Public Land Order 4582, referred to as the “super land freeze.” This order removed a whopping 262 million acres from “selection, settlement, location, sale and entry” until December 31, 1970. Udall’s action pleased conservationists, who, when they realized that the subdivison of the Alaskan landscape was inevitable, set their sights on sizeable sections of the Alaskan land pie, as did Native leaders.
Prior to the discovery of oil and the ensuing land grab, the Alaska wilderness was open to anyone who wanted to line a boat up a river, peel logs, build a cabin, set up a fish camp, hunt for food. Though the land was public, few restrictions had been placed on what people could and could not do. The prospect of a pipeline set in motion an irreversible force that would end that historical freedom.
ANCSA itself was a business transaction, motivated by profit. It was an attempt by the U.S. government to satisfy the land claims of Natives, which, if left unattended, had the potential to block the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Conservationists were so outraged by plans for the pipeline and by the prospect of Native lands being administered not by the federal government but by Native corporations forced to post profits that they demanded significant conservation provisions be written into ANCSA. One conservationist summed it up this way: “You can’t run a pipeline up the middle of a wilderness and still think of that place as wilderness.” Congress responded, because the environmental movement, which had steadily been gaining strength since the early 1900s, was now too powerful to be ignored. Included in ANCSA was a pivotal paragraph, 17(d)(2), instructing the Secretary of the Interior to set aside 80 million acres of national interest lands, henceforth called “d-2” lands, for possible federal protection.
Disappointed but undeterred by his experience in the Northwest Territories, Heimo was back in Appleton by the end of June 1974, welding combines, hayrakes, and other farm machinery at Fox Tractor. He had tried to get on at Miller again, but they weren’t interested in hiring him. Two and a half months later, Fox laid him off.
Erich Korth, Sr., had been laid off, too, and the prospect of his getting back to work soon was slim. Heimo was doing nothing but hunting, drinking, and coming home late, which only made Erich Korth more irritable. Heimo and his father hardly spoke. Mostly, they just tried to ignore each other.
Heimo was watching television one day when his father walked into the room. “He reeked of beer,” Heimo remembers. “I said, ‘Jesus Christ, Dad, you’re drunk again?’ ” Erich Korth couldn’t contain himself. The hypocrisy of it—his drunk of a son scolding him, telling him to lay off the booze. He balled up his fist and drove his knuckles into Heimo’s head. Heimo had a choice—he could either lash out at his father or he could restrain himself and walk away. Heimo walked away, leaving Erich Korth standing in the middle of the room. “ ‘Come on, hit me,’ ” Heimo remembers his father screaming. “ ‘Just try to hit me.’ ”
Heimo was tired of it. By mid-January 1975, things were about as bad as they could get between Heimo and his father, and Heimo knew he had to get out of the house. One evening he and some friends had plans to drink at Sarge’s. While Heimo waited at the kitchen table for a friend to pick him up, he paged through the classifieds in the January issue of Outdoor Life. He came upon a section for Alaskan hunting guides. The first ad he read was from a guide by the name of Keith Koontz, who was advertising hunting trips in Alaska’s Brooks Range. Heimo decided he would write to him. He asked Koontz if he needed a helper, someone to do the camp stuff—prepare meals, wash dishes—and pack out the animals the hunters shot.
It was a biography of Daniel Boone that had planted the seed. After reading that book in his early teens, Heimo was filled with the idea of losing himself in North America’s last remaining wildernesses. Early on, he had settled on Canada’s Northwest Territories. But his experience there changed all that. While in Canada, he had heard about another mountain range in Alaska’s inhospitable Interior—the Brooks Range, ultima Thule. From the moment he left Yellowknife, getting to the Brooks Range was his primary ambition.
Three weeks passed, and Heimo had given up all hope that Koontz would reply when a letter came. The guide expressed interest in hiring him as a packer, but he needed references. Within a few days, Heimo sent him what he wanted.
Heimo says now, “I wish Mom was around to tell the story. She was so excited for me. But she was always my ally. I watched for the mail like a kid waiting for Santa Claus. When the letter finally came, and I got the job, I was elated. I was jumping up and down. Finally, I was leaving for Alaska.”
Jim Kryzmarcik, Heimo’s friend from Camp Mecan, says, “God, Heimo was excited. He called me up and said he was leaving for Alaska. I thought he was crazy, but there was no stopping him. It sounded like a great adventure, but I didn’t think he’d last. I thought I’d see him back in six months, to be honest with you. But he had the desire big-time. He used to walk around with a heavy backpack to train for being a packer in the Brooks Range.”
Steve Laabs confirms the story. “We were shooting a lot of skeet and trap at the time—Heimo was determined to be a great shot before he left for Alaska—and Heimo would walk out to the gun club. It was eight miles from his house. He’d load his backpack with rocks. He’d walk there, shoot, and then walk home. We always offered him a ride, but he never took it.”
Roland Pruno says, “I always knew he’d do it. But I was worried about him, too. He was still afraid to go into the woods at night. I knew he’d have to get over that quick.”
Eight months after sending his intial letter to Keith Koontz, on a 95degree day in early August 1975, with the air hanging heavy with humidity, Heimo left for Alaska to seek what he’d come to believe was his destiny. He and his father had had a ferocious argument that morning. Though Heimo can’t recall what the argument was about, he does remember how mad his father was. “The old man was pissed. God, was he pissed. But that wasn’t unusual. He was always ticked off about something. I was so happy to be getting away. I knew I wasn’t coming back.”
Irene Korth kissed and hugged her son, wished him luck, told him that she loved him and was proud of him, and dabbed at her tears with a tissue. She’d bought Heimo a round-trip ticket just in case something went wrong. Secretly she hoped that he’d have a change of heart. Heimo hugged his little brother, Tom, who at ten understood only that his big brother was leaving for Alaska and was excited by that. Angie, Lisa, and Erich, Jr., had said their good-byes the night before. But Erich Korth wouldn’t budge. He sat on the couch reading the paper, stewing in his anger, and didn’t so much as say good-bye. When Heimo left, his father didn’t even look at him. To hell with him, Heimo thought. I’m outta here.