“Keeping it simple is extremely hard work,” says Steve Ulvi. He and I and Stu Pechek, who trapped for a decade out of a cabin on Grayling Lake, fifty-five miles west of the Korths, are sitting by a campfire on a sandbar along Salchaket Slough, a side creek that feeds the Tanana River about an hour by boat outside of Fairbanks. We have just finished our dinner and a six-pack, and Ulvi is leaning back against a large dead-fall, eyes closed, puffing on his pipe. The smell of tobacco is sweet and pleasant and seems to work as a deterrent to the mosquitoes. “Simplicity was the unwritten code on the river,” Ulvi elaborates, a wisp of smoke rising.
It has been twenty-seven years since John McPhee wrote about him and the Yukon River experience that was such an important part of his life. At fifty, the good looks are still there, the shattered blue eyes, the dramatic droopy mustache, his hair no longer blond but dark and streaked with gray, his body still strong but no longer coiled tightly from toiling in the woods. Ulvi is genial and laughs easily, but there’s no mistaking the intensity.
“It was our religion. When we left the river, we had three power tools: a chain saw, a thirty-five-horse Evinrude on a homemade, welded thirty-foot riverboat, and a gas-powered ringer washer. To live in the bush for six or eight years, let alone ten or fifteen, let alone nearly thirty, as Heimo has, is damn difficult. On the Yukon, we had a sense of community. It came with its responsibilities and pressures, sure—the pressures to keep it simple were enormous—but, all in all, it was such a positive experience. There were people up and down the river who were willing to help out in a pinch. Heimo and his family are out there, way up there, by themselves. That adds another dimension to the experience. Their isolation is compounded by the fact that so few people are doing it anymore.” Ulvi stops talking and pokes at the fire with a long stick.
“More wood?” Pechek asks in his bass voice still tinged with the long vowel sounds of Minnesota’s Iron Range. “Why not,” Ulvi answers, smoke wafting from his nose and mouth. “Let’s settle in.” Pechek rambles off into the brush to collect more wood. Though I’ve just met him, I like Stu already. He looks as if he’s just come off the trapline with his split-rail-fence physique, all knotted muscle and bone, not a pound to spare.
“You literally can count them on one hand, maybe two” Steve continues, “the people that are still out there. And the numbers are shrinking. When we left there wasn’t a fragment of a doubt that we were doing the right thing. We got bored; we needed more intellectual and social stimulation; the kids needed a better education; they needed friends; we got tired of the isolation and the never-ending work. I admire Heimo, but there is no way I could have stayed engaged in that lifestyle for as long as he has.”
If anybody knows what it takes to make it in the bush, it’s Steve Ulvi. He and his wife, Lynette Roberts, and their two children lived on the Yukon from 1974 until 1984, honing their version of the simple life, and then they began a slow transition into Fairbanks, where they moved in 1991. After living on the river for a decade, it took Steve years to acclimate to the idea of being in Fairbanks. Had it not been for Lynette and the kids, he probably would have dragged it out another few years. But he knew it was the right thing to do, and he had a job, which made things easier.
In 1981, Steve took a position as a seasonal employee with the National Park Service to make ends meet. Then in 1984, he joined the Park Service full-time, and that’s when they made their move into Eagle. They lived in Eagle for two years and then bought seven and a half acres of a Native allotment outside of town and built a three-sided cabin with tarps for doors and plastic windows. They still lived off-the-grid, ran dogs, and raised rabbits.
Steve admits that it was a big deal when he went to work for the Park Service. Some regarded it as a kind of heresy. “Eagle,” he says, “was one of the hotbeds of opposition, and the Park Service presence wasn’t always greeted kindly. But I figured that I was a local hire. I felt like I could make a difference. Another guy from the river and I had a big impact on how the Park Service’s policies were implemented locally. We tried to fit in. Our first staff boats were nineteen-foot Grumman canoes with six- to fifteen-horse kickers [outboard motors]. In the long term, for Alaska and America, ANILCA was a good thing. But there was a price to pay. The old Alaska was transformed, but the land was saved. I’d love to be able to turn the clock back to 1952, but that just isn’t possible. I believe we’ve done the right thing. I thank my lucky stars, though, that I was able to experience life on the river. I can’t imagine what I’d be dreaming about or what I’d be like today had I not done it. But the truth is, this land that we’ve protected will be here for generations. The state and BLM lands will be crisscrossed with roads.”
His pipe wedged between his teeth, Ulvi pokes at the fire with a stick. “Our lives along the river in the 1970s and 1980s will one day be interpreted as history by the National Park Service, as it now interprets the gold rush and the era of the stern-wheeler. We’ll never see anything like it again. Our society in general suffers in small ways from that. The Alaskan and American sense of self suffers, too. We’re losing a sense of who we are as a people, and it’s not only because the land has been partitioned. The greatest threat to the bush experience is not the National Park Service, but the intense regulation of trapping, cultural homogeneity, and changing societal values. Does a wilderness impetus even exist? There are thousands of young men living on the outskirts of Bozeman, Montana. Montana’s beautiful; we’d all be there if it hadn’t been overrun. How is the rebellion manifesting itself these days? Where are the dreamers who want to turn the clock back?”
“There’s damn little land left,” says Dean Wilson, a longtime fur buyer. Wilson and I are sitting in his office at the Klondike Hotel on Airport Way in Fairbanks, out of which he and his wife operate their fur-buying business. The room smells like a butcher shop and is cluttered with lynx, otter, red fox, and marten furs, dark and light brown wolverine furs, wolf furs stretched nine feet long, ranging in color from gray to tan to pure white to a deep, inky black. Danny Grangaard of Tok, one of Alaska’s old-time trappers, a former hippie who came up in 1965 with hair down to his waist, has just brought in a pile of luxuriant wolf skins. Grangaard is regarded as perhaps Alaska’s most skillful wolf trapper. “I’ll catch more wolves than marten this year,” he laughs, sipping black coffee, making light of the cyclical, but still disappointing, shortage of marten, whose population has hit a low not seen in many years.
Wilson is inspecting Grangaard’s wolf skins and talking at the same time. “The pipeline changed everything. But it’s not just the land deal. For fifty-six years, I’ve made my living by trapping, fur buying, hunting, mining,” he says, scribbling notes, as best he can, in a pocket-sized notebook. Wilson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s not long ago, and those trappers who have known him for his honesty and fairness say he’s gone downhill fast. “It’s a way of life that’s disappearing,” he continues. “It’s being phased out, choked out, by a culture that doesn’t understand it or like it.”
Federal export fees and regulations, including in-person inspections of furs, notwithstanding, trappers have a bigger battle to fight. The poor image of trapping is something that neither Wilson nor Alaska’s trappers can ignore. Sixty percent of the land in Alaska is held in federal trust. In other words, outsiders have the power to mold Alaska into their idealized image of what a frontier should look like, and public opinion in the Lower Forty-eight does not favor trapping. A trapper on federal land, though he may live in extreme isolation, like Heimo, cannot escape the heartfelt stirrings of animal lovers in Illinois.
Danny Grangaard leaves, and ten minutes later, Alex Tarnai, a trapper, who was born in Hungary and came to Alaska in 1976, walks in with his six-year-old son, Little Alex. Alex’s hair has gone almost entirely gray, but even at fifty-nine, he is heavily muscled. He has the build of a gymnast and the gentle voice of someone accustomed to reading bedtime stories to a child.
I am hardly surpised to see Alex here today. Dean Wilson’s office is like a local bait-and-tackle shop or a small-town diner, where folks wander in and out for much of the day just to shoot the breeze and catch up on the gossip. We visit for a while and Little Alex falls asleep in his father’s lap.
“What’s the state of trapping today?” Wilson asks Alex.
“What a large question,” Alex laughs. Then, like a man who is used to taking his time to get things right, Alex pauses before answering. “Well, you can’t do it like I did, but there are still opportunities,” he says, pointing to a sign hanging behind him that reads “Trapline for Sale.” “A young guy could come up and make it known that he wants to trap. He could come here and talk with some of the guys. There are any number of trappers willing to give up their lines. I’d give him one of mine, forty miles or so to start with. But nobody’s coming and nobody’s asking.
“It isn’t just the lands issue,” he continues, “but that certainly plays a part.” When Alex Tarnai speaks of the effects of ANILCA, he isn’t just relating stories he’s heard. He experienced ANILCA firsthand. The problem with the 186-page document is that portions of it are necessarily vague, subject to the interpretation of various agencies and agency managers with distinctly personal visions of how the act should be implemented. In Alex’s case, he hadn’t even heard of ANILCA until the assistant manager of the 1,560,000-acre Nowitna National Wildlife Refuge, in the central Yukon River Valley, showed up at his cabin door in brand-new Abercrombie & Fitch outdoor gear with a briefcase a full two years after the Lands Act was passed. There would be “changes, new regulations,” he told Alex, and proceeded to read some of those new rules to him. As the refuge’s only full-time resident, Alex was made to feel “like an outlaw whose presence in the woods was dependent on staying in the agency’s good graces.” He was told that it was a “privilege” to be there, one that could be revoked at any time. Despite feeling bitter about the experience, Alex maintained a good relationship with refuge officials until 1987. That year, a federal wildlife refuge planner, whom Alex had come to know, made plans to pay a friendly visit. The Nowitna’s refuge manager got wind of the visit and informed Alex that he was not entitled to have visitors because his cabin was a “work cabin” and not a “recreational” one. That’s ridiculous, Alex thought, and his friend visited anyway. The manager, however, feeling that his authority was threatened, harassed them, flying overhead with a camera and a ticket book to document their violations. Worse yet, while Alex was out on his trapline, the refuge manager entered his cabin, ostensibly to check on his stove. That was it; Alex had finally had enough. He sued the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service— many Fish & Wildlife officials later told him that they were sympathetic to his cause—claiming he was denied his constitutional right to associate with anyone he pleased and accusing the agency of illegal trespass. In a landmark case, U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Kleinfeld ruled in his favor.
Wilson gets up when another trapper comes in with a bundle of marten fur. Alex remains seated, holding little Alex. “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service treated me shamefully,” he says. “But I don’t hold a grudge. That refuge manager is gone, and my relationship with the agency is now very friendly.”
It is late morning when I meet Bill Schneider in his office at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’s Elmer E. Rasmuson Library. Schneider has served as curator of oral history at the UAF since 1981. In that capacity, he has interviewed many Native trappers who are still living in the bush villages, as well as white trappers who once made the bush their home. I have just left Dean Wilson’s, and Schneider and I pick up on the subject of the last of the white trappers still living off the land. Schneider elaborates. “White guys trapping in the bush,” he says, speaking slowly and thoughtfully, “are an ‘endangered species.’ The Natives get a lot of support, but there is no organization besides the Alaska Trappers Association advocating for the rural white trapper.” He pauses and studies a large pair of headphones he’s holding in his hands. “Wilderness is both the source of, and a respository of, our national myths about who we really are as a people. Yet the people who are left out there, living the myth, are more out of touch with American life and values than ever before. Ironically, we have always held in higher esteem those who make forays into the wilderness than those who live in it. We’re creating an environment for ecotourism, but we’re eliminating a culture dedicated to living on, and working with, the land.”
“The lands issue dramatically changed Alaska,” Randy Brown says emphatically. He and I are having lunch at Soapy Smith’s Pioneer Restaurant, a Fairbanks institution situated a few doors down from the intersection of Cushman Street and 2nd Avenue. Two Street, as 2nd Avenue is often called, has been cleaned up in recent years, but it still has something of a reputation for drunkenness and decadence.
Brown is friendly, intelligent, and intense. Though he would surely resist the comparison, he looks a bit like Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson. He is still taut and fit and wears his copper-colored beard and hair slightly long, as he once did on the trapline.
What Brown says is true. The reapportionment of Alaska’s 375 million acres changed Alaska’s physical and psychic landscape. John McPhee was there while it was happening, while the lines were being drawn, but he never reported on the fallout. In 1976 and 1977, ANILCA was still an idea, legislation in the making; today it’s not. Every square foot of Alaska has been surveyed and conveyed to one group or another—the Park Service, the BLM, the state, Fish & Wildlife, regional corporations, Native villages, Native allotments, private holdings. The map of Alaska is now a color-coded mosaic, a patchwork of neatly delineated boundaries. On the ground, these boundaries are anything but neat; state land abuts National Park Service land, which adjoins Native land, and the division is often indistinguishable. Hunters and trappers can get confused trying to figure out what’s what.
For centuries, anyone who could use the land was welcome to it. Through the Homestead and Homesite Acts the government even enabled people to acquire land, free of charge, provided they “prove up,” making nominal improvements to it. In a place like Alaska, however, this stipulation was rarely enforced. The Homestead Act, which was enacted in 1862 and was terminated nationwide in 1976, provided that any person over the age of twenty-one could obtain free title to 160 acres of government land. Although the program had been marginally effective west of the Missouri River in the Lower Forty-eight, it was a bust in much of Alaska. The Homesite Act of 1927, which was established only for Alaska and provided free title to five acres of land under terms similar to the Homestead Act, wasn’t repealed until October 1986. Though it was more successful than the Homestead Act, the large-scale settlement of Alaska never occurred.
Randy Brown and his family experienced the partitioning of Alaska firsthand. In 1985, the land on which they were living was conveyed to Doyon, the largest of the regional corporations, covering the whole Athabaskan Interior and thirty-four villages. Doyon issued a trespass notice in 1990. Brown says, “We could have sued for grandfather rights, but how big of a place could we have sued for? Five acres, ten, one hundred— no amount of land would have suited our needs.
“After ANILCA, and before Doyon issued the trespass notice, we were working through a permitting process with a variety of different agencies. Dealing with the BLM was relatively straightforward. It offered ten-year renewable permits. Same with the state. However, on Park Service land, where we had our fish camp, the regulations were more complex; we needed a fish camp permit, a permit to cut wood. The frustrating thing was that the rules changed from administrator to administrator. Some of the people living on Park Service land just refused to abide by the process. Of course, the agencies were under no obligation to accommodate guys like me, but they did. Nevertheless, the land regulations precipitated an exodus, and now they prevent recolonization. If they were to allow people back in, the question is where to draw the line? Do you just allow limited colonization? At first, I think they’d be flooded, but a lot of people wouldn’t stay. It’s always been that way though. Lots came and few stayed. There are a lot of half-built cabins out there. People came to live forever and they left after a year or two.”
Randy takes a big bite of his hamburger but doesn’t stop talking. “I still get letters [Randy and Heimo were part of a 1992 National Geographic documentary called Braving Alaska] from people who are looking to get out into the country. I’ve heard the argument about society not making young men like us anymore, and I don’t buy it. There are adventurers out there. When they contact me, I tell them to go into a village and let it be known that they’re interested in going out to the woods. But to come out and jump off the way I did, that’s a thing of the past. Now the land can be accessed by airplane trappers and snow machine trappers who blaze out into the country for a week, even a day.”
After visiting with Brown, I call Alonzo “Lon” Kelly, an outdoor recreation planner for the White Mountains National Recreation Area for the Bureau of Land Management in Fairbanks. “I don’t buy it,” Kelly says. “I was the former realty specialist and later an outdoor recreation planner for the Fortymile River country with the BLM. I don’t know what the Park Service did. But I don’t put any stock in the accusation that it put people out. If people had wanted to stay, they could have. Living that life today is not out of the question. I’m not familiar with the exact agency guidelines, but if someone wanted to build a cabin on the BLM’s 72 million acres, or at least on much of that acreage, he’d be welcome to present a proposal to us. He’d have to have been trapping the land for a while though, and he’d have to document his use with fur sale receipts or something and prove that there is no existing conflict with ongoing subsistence or recreational users. Then we’d consider it, I think. It’s complicated, but in assessing the request, we’d follow the legislative framework of ANILCA and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.” Though Kelly is sincere, what he doesn’t say is that even if a person were to follow the prescribed steps, the chances of the BLM giving him the go-ahead are anything but guaranteed. Such a messy bureaucratic process would have been anathema to the Randy Browns and Heimo Korths of the world, and there is no reason to think that today’s would-be adventurers would react differently.
But it’s those modern-day adventurers that Kelly doesn’t see. “It’s a nonissue these days,” he says, unequivocally. “No one is interested in going out into the country.”
I am sitting in Roger Kaye’s house in the hills outside of Fairbanks, where Kaye surrounds himself with examples of America’s woodcraft wilderness tradition—Philip R. Goodwin sketches, old guns and traps, first-edition books of exploration and adventure. Outside, the temperature slips to 25 below. Inside, the handsome woodstove, which acts as the centerpiece of the living room, gives the home a generous, hospitable feel. Roger’s Japanese wife, Masako, has just prepared a delicious dinner of sushi, salad, and roast chicken. A friend of Roger’s, Tom Paragi, a wildlife biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and a part-time trapper, brings with him a surprisingly good beaver stew.
After dinner Roger shows us a photo album of his days on the trapline. He trapped for only a year on Beaver Creek, forty-five miles south of Fort Yukon, but that year was formative. Except for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, there seems to be nothing he enjoys talking about more. “I get great satisfaction knowing that there are still a few people in the bush toughing it out, keeping those wilderness skills alive,” he says, slowly turning the pages of the album.
Roger sips his wine and flips to a photograph of a wolverine. “It was a big one,” he says, obviously still proud of his catch. Then he closes the album and leans back in his chair. “You have to understand,” he says. “These bush rats would not have had this right in any other country. They came to the woods, built illegal cabins, and now they have the legal right to be there because ANILCA made accommodations for their life way. But ANILCA does not allow for the expansion of the bush rat experience. It couldn’t be done and still protect the values that the refuge and other places like it were set aside for. The refuge is a place for wildlife, particularly for species not tolerant of civilization; a place of scenic values and scientific values; a setting for recreation. The refuge has other meanings, too. It is a place of solitude, mystery, discovery, exploration, a place of restraint, even sacredness. Many Alaskans don’t think about the need to protect wilderness because we’re surrounded by it here. The scale is enormous, and people can’t conceive of it ever being diminshed. They don’t understand that Alaska is the last refuge for wilderness.
“That’s not to say that if someone wanted to come up and trap in the refuge, he couldn’t. In fact, he could as long as he didn’t put up a permanent structure. He could trap out of a wall tent. That’s permitted. In other areas of Alaska, a person could go through a realtor and buy land if he had that kind of money. Granted, it’s not the same experience as Coming into the Country, where you could go out and build a cabin and essentially do whatever the hell you want. Those days are gone.”
I leave Roger’s house near midnight, and it occurs to me that it would be interesting to get Roger Kaye and Bill Schneider, UAF’s oral history coordinator, in the same room. I recall my conversation with Schneider the previous week. We’d been talking about ANILCA, and the role of the governmental agencies. Schneider spoke vehemently: “I don’t think it’s justifiable for the lead agencies of preservation, which includes historical and cultural preservation, to discourage recolonization. There have always been people out there, living off the land. I often wonder what the constructors of our current wilderness ethic would say. Take Bob Marshall or Margaret Murie—these conservation icons all had local guides on their adventures in Alaska.
“In many ways ANILCA is a dead end for subsistence users,” Schneider continued. “As much as it supports subsistence activities for this generation, I think its framers had trouble fathoming that subsistence could be a lasting value. I don’t think they could imagine a young person choosing that way of life. They [the federal agencies] could glorify it, put up with it for a while, but I don’t think they could imagine future generations doing it. If we as Americans don’t create places and opportunities in our vast and bountiful land for people like this, whether they be Native or white, then we have lost important historical and cultural values. The argument, of course, is the land can’t accommodate it, but we’re not talking about large numbers of people.”
Kirk Sweetsir, who owns Yukon Air Service, flew me out to the Korths’ upper Coleen cabin in spring. We were over the Yukon Flats, where the snowy surfaces of countless small lakes are accented by muskrat pushups and the tracks of peripatetic caribou. Sweetsir was punching the cabin’s coordinates into his GPS and talking at the same time. “The experience will be increasingly less available to guys without money,” Sweetsir said, “and more available to guys from Anchorage and Fairbanks. It’s unfortunate, but civilization continues to creep into the most remote parts of Alaska. Heimo has built his firebreak against it, and he’s trying to hold it off as best he can, though I think even he is aware of the inevitability of it—things will change.
“What gets to me is the somewhat unremarkable incrementalism that creeps up on people who are stitting still. All around them things are moving along and one day they realize that just because they’re not bothering anyone, it doesn’t necessarily follow that no one’s going to bother them. It all seems a bit of a tragedy. We have no reverence for a person like Heimo. He’s likely to die defending a vague idea of what his world ought to look like. Not long ago, he was one of many similarly situated people and they generated their own gravity. Now it’s down to him. He becomes more of an anchronism with each passing year.”
In mid-July, before going out to the river, I visit Harry Bader, director of Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Northern Region. Bader elaborates on Sweetsir’s idea. “People are moving out to the woods with all the capital that makes it comfortable. Their relationship to the land is very different from the guy who’s out there, barely scraping by, trying to make a go of it. I call ’em trust fund homesteaders, and their presence on the land is so much more consumptive. Those who are dependent on the land import far fewer resources—less fuel, fewer modern conveniences, less of everything. But the Alaska way of life, the age-old practice of living off the land, is bumping up against Lower Forty-eight values that say, ‘Watch the wolf, don’t trap it,’ and that changes the character of the experience entirely.”
Bader is familiar with life in the bush. “I did my time,” he laughs, making light of his experience. “I did it, and I enjoyed it. However, I was one of those just playing at it. At no time was I dependent on the land. I wasn’t forced to shoot a moose or a caribou to stay alive. And I wasn’t dependent upon trapping for my income.” Bader lived outside of Eagle for a year, though by looking at him, it is hard to imagine him running a trapline at 40 below. I know better than to doubt him, though. “Harry can do just about anything,” Stu Pechek told me before I met with Harry at his office in Fairbanks. Nevertheless, Harry’s looks are deceiving. He is a small man and has the fine hands of a pianist or a jewelry maker. He is also very much an intellectual. He used to teach wildlife management and environmental courses at the university in Fairbanks, has his J.D. from Harvard, and is finishing up his Ph.D. in Forestry at Yale, making the trip to New Haven, Connecticut, twice a year.
We turn our attention to a large map, where he shows me the land he administers, 45 million acres of the state’s 105 million total, a swath of country covering the crest of the Alaska Range north to the Arctic Ocean and stretching from Canada’s Yukon Territory border to the Bering Strait.
Having heard about the DNR’s land dispersal programs, I get right to the point. “Among those 45 million acres is there anywhere a person could just jump off and build a cabin, replicating, say, the experience of the guys who came up in the 1970s?” Harry reflects on the question, turning a pencil in his fingers, and then answers. “The simple answer is no,” he says. “And I feel kind of awkward about that because that thing you’re talking about is the defining attribute of Alaska and Alaskan culture, and I don’t necessarily believe it’s a good thing it’s over. So, let me restate my answer. It’s not entirely impossible for us to see something similar again. But the current regulatory and statutory system forbids that sort of going out.”
Harry points out that the DNR has two land-dispersal programs: a subdivision program of presurveyed parcels and one for remote residential parcels. Both are designed to get property in Alaska out of state hands and into the hands of individuals. Both also involve the purchase of land. Neither in any way resembles what the “back to nature” boys did in the 1970s. What’s closest to that perhaps is the DNR’s “Trapping Cabin Permit,” which allows a trapper to build and use a cabin on state land for temporary shelter while trapping. However, compared to the experience of guys like Heimo and Alex Tarnai, who simply picked a spot on the map, it is complicated, dispiriting. A trapper has to prove he uses the trapline on a regular basis. The trapline must also be long enough to warrant the building of a cabin. Additionally, a trapper must be able to provide tax returns reporting income from furs, receipts from fur buyers, and additional proof, such as receipts for tanning, if requested. Recently, very few people have taken advantage of this option.
“Unofficially,” Harry says, “we have some trespassers, people who are living off the land on state land. We are trying to figure out how to allow them to stay, how to legitimize them through some sort of permit system. To me, to tolerate that handful of people—and that’s all we’re talking about—who are seriously trying to keep that way of life alive is well worth it. Thank God most of us don’t want to be on the land; it couldn’t sustain us. I’m glad it’s just a few, but I fear it’s too few. In ten years, I believe, we won’t have any more people out there.”
Heimo and I are gathering summer blueberries for breakfast. Last night, Heimo promised us all pancakes. Edna does the dinners, but Heimo, he’s the breakfast man. It’s a role he’s grown accustomed to over the years. When he first brought Edna to the Coleen, she made one thing clear to him. She liked to sleep in later than 6:00 A.M., and she didn’t make breakfast.
Strangely, I have a craving for pancakes this morning. I say “strange” because when I’m home I rarely eat them. Heimo told me it would happen. “You need carbos up here,” he said a week into my earlier winter visit. Now, as we pick berries, I realize that I’ve been looking forward to eating pancakes for days.
After breakfast, Heimo and I pack for our hunting expedition. Though Heimo has been glassing Mummuck Mountain for the past several days, he hasn’t spotted a single caribou. “Maybe they’re down in the valleys north of Mummuck Mountain,” he says. “We’ll see. It don’t matter really. I’m just tired of doing nothing. Don’t get me wrong—I like sitting around as much as the next guy—but now I gotta move.”
In early August, before the caribou come, there’s not much that needs doing, and life along the river takes on the characteristics of a summer vacation. The new roof is on, and Edna has finished the loads of laundry. So the Korths pick berries, fish, take short hikes, glass for caribou, sharpen tools, play volleyball, and sit around the fire at night and exchange stories. The pace is relaxed, leisurely.
But today, Heimo is tired of relaxing. He needs to walk.
At the river, we throw our gear into the canoe, strap on our life vests, and are about to shove off, when Edna comes running toward us.
“What is it?” Heimo says, slightly annoyed.
“I forgot to kiss you,” Edna answers. Heimo smiles now and they kiss. “Please be careful,” Edna entreats us when Heimo starts the motor.
The idea of motoring upriver, though, is a fantasy; the water level is too low. A half mile up, we lay our paddles in the canoe and walk. We trade off lining. I begin, and while I line, Heimo studies the gravel bars, looking for tracks.
I’m trying to navigate a long stretch of riffles, when Heimo yells. I can’t make out what he’s saying, and then he yells again, “Wolf tracks!”
I clear the choppy water. “What’s all the excitement about?”
“This time of year the wolves are following the caribou,” Heimo explains. “I don’t see any caribou tracks, but I bet we run into them up ahead.” Sure enough, on the next gravel bar, while Heimo is lining, I spot some and call out to him. Heimo pulls the canoe onto the sand.
“A gob of tracks.” He smiles. “They must have passed through here yesterday. When the caribou are migrating, wolves eat like fiends. The wolverines eat well, too. They gobble up what’s left.”
It is noon by the time we reach the base of Mummuck Mountain. We tie off the canoe and change from our hip boots into hiking boots.
Before beginning our climb, we traverse a boggy area. In Alaska there are three types of tundra: wet, moist and alpine. Wet tundra is a morass of tussocks and stagnant pools. Moist tundra is a maze of tufts and tussocks minus the pools and the sloppy sogginess of wet tundra. The tussocks in this stretch of moist tundra get the best of me, and Heimo easily outdistances me. He is waiting on the other side of a bog when I finally make my way out.
“Black-tipped groundsel,” he says, pointing to a pretty yellow flower at the bog’s edge. Panting, I consult my book.
“Yup, black-tipped groundsel.” Yesterday Heimo and I identified the flower for the first time. I’m surprised that he’s already committed its name to memory.
Now we begin our ascent through another long stretch of moist tundra. The walking is easier, though I still struggle to keep pace with Heimo. The moist tundra gives way to alpine, patchy areas of mosses, herbs, lichens, and shrubs, and then we ascend a series of benches. The underbrush turns to scree and large rocks are speckled with white, yellow, and black lichens. Heimo stops for a moment and kicks at the ground, scattering pellets. “Moose crap,” I say, though I can’t believe that a moose would be up this high.
“No, musk-ox,” he answers. “I’ve never seen it up here.”
The Inupiat call the musk-oxen umingmak, “the bearded ones.” In 1969 and 1970, sixty-three musk-oxen were shipped in wooden crates from Nunivak Island in the Bering Sea to the North Slope of Alaska in an effort to reestablish the population. The total herd now numbers close to 400 animals. Twenty thousand years ago, musk-oxen roamed the Old World as far as southern France; cave paintings testify to their presence there.
Glad for the rest, I look back in the direction of the cabin and notice for the first time that the leaves of the balsam poplar have already begun to turn yellow. Out of the north, where the trees that creep up the Coleen River valley give way to an ocean of russet-colored tundra, a dry wind blows. Heimo zips up his jacket. “Almost fall time,” he says. “Let’s keep moving.”
What Heimo loves to do more than anything else in the world is walk. He calls it “coverin’ country.” He moves effortlessly, hardly winded, all the while naming rocks and birds as he goes. “That’s schist,” he says, naming a metamorphic rock. “See that? American golden plover. There’s a horned lark. And that one’s a harrier. You can tell by the white rump.” Skipping around a rock outcropping, he stops. “If I could come back as any animal, it’d be a Dall sheep. God, I love to hike in the mountains.”
Fifteen minutes later, we reach the top of Mummuck Mountain, and Heimo takes off his pack and sits down near a benchmark erected by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1972. “We’ll stay here for a while and glass.” I sit down next to him. “Frigid arnica,” I say, pointing to a hardy yellow flower that hangs on for dear life between two large rocks, springing up out of a cupful of soil. But Heimo is no longer interested in flowers. He is glassing now, studying the mountains to the north and west, which look remarkably like the rugged moors of Scotland. “Sometimes,” he says, “there are caribou everywhere. I wish you could see that.”
French explorers in Canada called the endless herds of caribou, the world’s most efficient walkers, La Foule—“The Throng.” To see La Foule, as I had the previous summer, while camped on the Kongakut River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with my friend Burns, is to be awestruck—there are so many caribou that an entire slope looks as if it is undulating. As they near, a chorus of grunting and clicking hooves accompanies the dramatic choreography of their movements. The Gwich’in used to intercept these migrating herds, trapping the caribou inside fences, which were often miles long. Snares were set inside the fences, and when the caribou were corralled, they became entangled. Gwich’in hunters then finished them off with spears or bows and arrows.
Much like the old Gwich’in hunters, who depended on the caribou for many of their needs, when the Korths shoot one almost nothing is wasted. They eat the meat and the organs. The tongue and cheeks, the meat on the face, the fat behind the eyes, the brain—these are delicacies. They also keep the head, which they will roast or use for headcheese. To make headcheese, Edna boils the head down to a thick broth, adds spices, onions, red peppers, and vinegar, and sets the broth outside to harden. By the following morning the soup has the consistency of soft, gelatinous cheese and will taste like, as Heimo describes it, “peppered jello.” Although the Korths primarily use high-tech sleeping bags now, they’ll make the hide, depending on its condition, into a blanket, for added warmth in winter. Edna uses the leg skins for kamiks, the sealskin-lined boots that she, Heimo, and the girls wear throughout winter; she boils the hoofs and bones for soup, and uses the leg bones and attached meat for stew. This leaves only the horns, which Heimo often sells to a Fairbanks horn buyer for $200 to $250.
Mummuck Mountain has always been one of Heimo’s favorite caribou hunting areas. During the summer, the animals take refuge in the high elevations to avoid the constant menace of botflies, warble flies, and mosquitoes. Today Heimo hopes to kill only one caribou, but how many he takes for the year will be determined by whether or not he gets a moose. Legally, his family, including Krin and Rhonda, is allowed to take forty caribou a year, ten each. If Heimo gets a moose, they’ll take four or five caribou at the most. If he fails to shoot a moose, which is unlikely, they will take ten or twelve. This year, he plans to shoot only a bull caribou. While he was in Fort Yukon, Fran Mauer, a former Arctic National Wildlife Refuge biologist, came through town. In the course of their conversation, Mauer reported that there’d been a significant calf die-off, and Heimo is determined not to risk taking a cow of breeding age, which might drop a calf again next year.
Though Heimo used to hunt with a large-bore rifle, a Marlin .444, which he brought up from Wisconsin, believing that it took a big gun to bring down a big animal, after his experience on St. Lawrence Island, he learned the art of bullet placement. He now uses a 22.250, a small rifle with excellent ballistics. He calls it the flattest shooting gun made. The added bonus is that it doesn’t blow a big hole in the animal, therefore little of the meat is ruined.
After ten minutes or so, Heimo sets down his binoculars. “Old Crow Flats,” he says, directing my attention east. “It’s full of lakes and swarming with mosquitoes. The Indians who lived in that area used to be called the Rat Indians because they took so many muskrats off the lakes every spring. Over there,” he continues, motioning to the northeast, to a small creek that feeds the Coleen River, “that’s where I want my ashes scattered. Edna and the girls know that. It might sound corny, but this land has given so much to me, when I die, I’d like to give something back.”
Heimo leans back and closes his eyes. I close my eyes, too, and doze off. I wake up to the sound of his voice. “I’d be disheartened-would that be the word?—not to see caribou here because of oil. They can’t tell me that oil development in ANWR [Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] won’t affect the herd. That’s a bunch of lies. I’d be sad to see that disrupted. I know what it can look like. This whole valley can fill up with caribou. Take away the caribou and you lose something. I don’t want ANWR to be like the North Slope.”
What Heimo is talking about are the drill pads, drilling rigs ten stories high, hundreds of miles of service roads, flow stations, pipelines, reserve pits holding millions of tons of drilling waste, with high concentrations of heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and other toxic chemicals, smokestacks, parking lots, and workers’ barracks that characterize the North Slope oil development area.
Proponents of development (including the state of Alaska, oil’s biggest promoter) argue that the disputed 1002 area (referred to as “ten-oh-two”), a 1.5 million-acre chunk of Arctic coastal plain, was exempted from refuge status for precisely this reason—to allow for the possibility that oil could one day be extracted.
In the early spring of 1989, it almost was. President George Bush the elder was prepared to sign the bill giving the go-ahead. Then, on March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil, leaving an oil slick that deluged 1,200 miles of beaches, effectively smothering the hopes of those who wanted to get at the coastal plain’s oil deposits.
While the 1002 area was indeed placed in a special category by ANILCA, the legislation specified that the area’s oil and gas potential would have to be weighed against the impact of development on the environment. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has determined that oil drilling would be incompatible with the purposes of the refuge. Big oil’s boosters, however, hope to waive provisions in the National Wildlife Refuge Administration Act and National Enviromental Policy Act in order to circumvent this clause and allow drilling.
The rallying cry of the energy policy of the current Bush is that the U.S. needs to tap coastal plain oil reserves in order to relieve our dependency on foreign oil and to solve the accompanying national security issues. What’s often neglected in this argument is that the oil contained in the coastal plain amounts to a mere drop in the bucket when measured against the United States’s monumental needs, which are now at 19 million barrels a day, or 6.9 billion barrels a year. Christopher Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute likens trying to stem our reliance on Middle East oil with coastal plain production to “trying to stop a major fire with a teacup.”
U.S. Geological Survey estimates of the coastal plain’s oil production potential were first spelled out in a report submitted to Congress by the Department of Interior in 1987 called ANWR: Alaska, Coastal Plain Resource Assessment. Based on a $33 per barrel standard, this document established a mean estimate of 3.2 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil. In other words, the coastal plain would meet the United States’s energy needs for less than six months. Over a 25-year field life, it would produce an average of 351,000 barrels of oil per day, amounting to less than 2 percent of our 19 million barrel-per-day domestic consumption requirements. USGS updates of those estimates in 1998 and 2001 did not materially change the mean estimate. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, improving automobile fuel efficiency by just three miles per gallon would save one million barrels per day. At that rate, in less than ten years, we would save more oil than would likely be pumped from the Arctic Refuge. And the oil savings would continue long after that.
What’s also overlooked in the argument to develop coastal plain oil resources is the time involved in getting that oil to market. Terry Koonce president of exploration and production for ExxonMobil, estimates that, based on the usual three-to-four-year permitting process, it will take ten years to get the oil into the existing Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
Opponents of drilling maintain that because the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is only one-tenth the size of the coastal plain in the central Arctic (the site of Prudhoe Bay), there would not be sufficient space to accommodate the foraging and calving of the 126,000 Porcupine caribou herd. Unable to seek relief in the coastal waters from the insects that plague them, the caribou would be driven into the Brooks Range, where they would encounter high predation risks. In addition, after surviving the winter on “caribou moss”—little more than lichens—they would be deprived of the protein-rich cotton grass of the coastal plain, an environment that Fran Mauer, former refuge biologist, calls “the best place in the world for raising calves.” Although the caribou have become the environmental symbol, the cause célèbre, in the battle to save the refuge, the lives of many more animals are at stake: polar bears, hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, musk-oxen, wolves, moose, wolverine, Arctic fox, and Dall sheep.
Despite the claims of the oil industry and many of Alaska’s politicians that its impact would be localized, a mere “footprint” on the land, the U.S. Geological Survey says that oil on the coastal plain is scattered into many separate pools. In other words, the effects of development realistically could not be contained even with revolutionary technology such as directional drilling. Drilling rigs would be spread across the land.
The National Petroleum Reserve Area (NPRA), an environmentally sensitive area lying just west of the current North Slope oil fields, is the industry’s newest target. “They’re making a real run at getting all of it,” says Allen Smith, Alaska senior policy analyst at the Wilderness Society. “Not only are they pressing for oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, they plan to lease more land in the NPRA in the next couple of years than they’ve leased in all of Alaska in the last fifty years. It is a scandalous giveaway of America’s Arctic that will needlessly sacrifice millions of acres of our natural heritage.”
Bear Mountain lies directly north of Mummuck Mountain, where Heimo and I have been sitting, glassing, and talking for the last hour. The original 8.9-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Range was established in 1960, under the Eisenhower administration, to preserve the unique wildlife, wilderness, and recreation values of this area, and Bear Mountain was its southern border. “Thank heavens, this is a refuge,” Heimo says, standing up, his arms outstretched as if he is greeting God. “If the BLM or the state owned this, there’d be roads and mines, you name it. Look at the Red Dog Mine,” he says, referring to the world’s largest supplier of zinc and its most northerly mine, which lies just west-northwest of here, outside the Noatak National Preserve, one of the earth’s largest watersheds. “Look at all the problems they’re having. Rick [a friend from Fairbanks] accuses me of being a NIMBY—not in my backyard. It’s not true, but even if it was, you gotta remember—my backyard is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, nineteen and a half million acres.”
Heimo grabs his backpack and his gun and bounds away. Though earlier he was discouraged that we hadn’t seen any caribou, he is in good spirits now, even if there are no caribou. We’re walking, covering country again. “They’re going to come,” he says. “That’s almost for sure. I just hope you get to see it before you go back home.”
We dip down into a creek bed, and Heimo lies on his stomach and slurps the water right out of the stream. Then he cups his hands and splashes it onto his face. “God, that feels great,” he says. “Go ahead,” he says, seeing me hesitate at the lip of the creek. “Dunk it. It ain’t that …” Before he can finish his sentence, I plunge my head into the water. Two seconds later, I come up screaming bloody murder. It feels like someone has taken a chisel to my temples.
“Damn cold, huh?” Heimo laughs.
We ascend another hill and Heimo is glassing west now in the direction of the Sheenjek River valley. Minutes later, he lowers his binoculars as a trans-Arctic jet rumbles high overhead. “Are you bothered by that?” I ask.
“Heck,” Heimo answers, skipping down a steep slope like the Dall sheep he loves. “Those I can take. Besides, sometimes it’s just good to know that the world is still going.”