Looking for Alaska (33 page)

In 2000, the Permanent Fund dividend was $1,963.86 each and was received by an estimated 585,800 Alaskans. These Alaskans evenly divided up about $1.15 billion, every citizen, no matter whether he or she is a street person in Anchorage or a multimillionaire in Sitka. Many disciplined Alaskans plunk their kid's check into mutual funds each year. By the time the kid is eighteen and ready to go to college or buy her first boat, she has a nice chunk of money.

Every Alaskan newspaper is full of ads when the dividend is sent out across the state, around the end of December, to promote spending, which usually occurs in January.

Alaska Newspapers, Inc., owns seven local newspapers:
The Arctic Sounder, The Tundra Drums, The Valdez Vanguard, The Dutch Harbor Fisherman, The Seward Phoenix Log, The Cordova Times,
and
The Bristol Bay Times.
When the Permanent Fund dividend is paid, they run an insert called “The Alaska Bushmaster, a Shopping Guide for Rural Alaska.” The “What's Inside” index gives a succinct list of what is essential to survive in the Alaska bush. Some of the items listed: “Air Cargo.” (You've got to get stuff to you, and as you know by now, there is often no road.) “Beds.” (They take up too much space in air cargo; better to send them on a barge when the ice leaves.) “Cargo Sleds.” (The ad said, “I even haul my eggs in it … and don't break any. S.B., customer.”) A cargo sled, perhaps with options like a “rear gas-can rack,” is of major importance when you live, say, in the village of Akiak, on the Kuskokwim River, and you've just made a run on your snow machine to Bethel to buy gas, eggs, cases of Coke, and other necessities. “Caskets.” (The ad said, “Alaska Casket Co. caskets ½ price of Funeral Home cost. $700–$850 wood and cloth covered. $3,000 Copper. Shipped anywhere in Alaska.”) “Chain saws.” (Used for cutting wood for heat and logs for your cabin, it's one of the most important tools anyone in Alaska owns.) “Four-wheelers.” (In many busy communities in Alaska, people don't have cars or trucks, they have four-wheelers.) “Generators.” (For plenty of people, their own generator is the only electricity they will ever have.)

A highway sign let me know I was getting close to my destination: “Tok 10 miles. Canada 100 miles.” I'd done an Internet search before I left and planned to stay for the night at a B&B named Winter Cabin, which had a nice Web site. I was to turn left at the intersection of Highway 1 and Highway 2, driving northwest toward Fairbanks. The B&B was just a couple miles more, somewhere off this road.

I pulled down a gravel side street back into some woods and saw a sign for Winter Cabin. As I pulled in farther, I could see four or five log cabins in the shadows, a large garage, and stacks and stacks of cut firewood. A powerful-looking woman, with long red hair and freckles who looked to be connected strongly to the earth, yet gentle, walked out of the oldest-looking log cabin. I learned this was the owner, Donna Blasor-Bernhardt, a widow who was born and had lived the first six years of her life in Kansas. She told me later that she never wears sleeveless shirts because her arms are so muscled. Her husband, who died young from a heart attack, was named Dick, and everyone called him Big Dick because he was six feet tall and 280 pounds; Donna could beat Dick arm wrestling. She invited me into her cabin to show me around. I was the only guest at the B&B—there aren't many travelers coming through Tok in October. I would get my first snow in Alaska in Tok, a mild, quick-melting, wet snow.

DONNA'S LIST

On Donna's refrigerator was a “Before Winter” list, with all the things Donna needed to do every year to get ready for winter. Winter in Tok needs to be spelled in all capital letters, WINTER. Once it got really cold, which could be soon, Donna could not leave her cabin again overnight until spring. Her “Before Winter” list was not just the list of a compulsively organized person, it was a matter of survival.

Most of her list had already been done and crossed off by the time I arrived. Winter in the interior of Alaska is an intensely serious property- and life-threatening experience. The silent, invading severe cold can wreak havoc, drive its victims insane. It can crush and kill the weak, people who would not be called weak anywhere else. Imagine having plumbing, water and sewer pipes, in places where it gets fifty below zero. When the temperature drops to zero degrees Fahrenheit or below, she turns
off
her freezers. When it is below zero, especially way below zero, the motors have to work too hard to “warm” the freezer up to the proper temperature. The consequences of not respecting winter in Alaska can be extreme. Consider not being able to leave your shelter from sometime in October until the end of March, even April if you heat your home with wood. It's the reason the dreamers who come to Alaska to live in the wilderness don't make it through the winter unless they are extraordinarily prepared or living in southern coastal places. It's the reason Donna spends months carefully carrying out and crossing off the “to dos” on her list.

Donna Blasor-Bernhardt “Before Winter” List

1. Gas in gas barrel.
(She couldn't afford it this year.)

2. Firewood, need 10 cords.
(Donna cuts it herself.)

3. Fill propane tank.
(It runs the cooking stove and propane lights.)

4. Caulk B&B logs.
(It's a never-ending job, keeping the spaces between logs sealed in the three cabins.)

5. Sand B&B logs.
(To accept the oil that preserves the logs.)

6. Oil B&B logs.
(To keep logs from rotting.)

7. 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel in bathhouse tank.
(The fuel Donna, her son, and his family need to heat hot water for showers, laundry, etc.)

8. Get Pea's medicine.
(Pea is Donna's old neutered male cat.)

9. Make wildberry jelly from rose hips, cranberries, raspberries, and blueberries.
(She made plenty of jelly, using everything except blueberries, because the bears beat her to her favorite patch.)

10. Clean out freezers.
(Of old moose and caribou. It's two years old, Donna will can it.)

11. Stop my roof leaks.
(This wasn't done yet.)

12. Stop B&B roof leaks.
(Done.)

13. Replace stovepipe.
(Done. One of the most dangerous things in an Alaskan winter is for a rusted-out stovepipe to catch a cabin on fire on some ten-dog night.)

14. Get monitor heater.
(No, she can't afford it this year, very popular in Alaska, and also quite expensive.)

15. Cut wildflowers and weeds on roof.
(There are two inches of self-hardening foam on top of her cabin roof. I've seen entire trailers coated in the stuff. Then on top of that there are six inches of dirt, where Donna has planted poppies, fireweed, and other wildflowers. The fireweed grows six feet tall. One winter she thought she'd leave them, like a huge dried-weed arrangement, but then a spark from the woodstove started a wildfire on her roof.)

16. Get cat food and litter.
(She got eight fifty-pound bags of each.)

17. Clean out floor fridge.
(In the middle of Donna's kitchen is a trapdoor, which opens to a naturally cold food-storage place.)

18. Pick all veggies in the greenhouse.

19. Stack firewood.
(There seemed to be a woodsful of neatly stacked wood.)

20. Get studded tires put on van.

21. Put new block heater on van.
(You must keep your engine warm or it will never start. In Fairbanks, where Donna goes for shopping and medical attention, people either leave their vehicles on or plug them in.)

22. Stock up on groceries, toilet paper, etc.
(The “etc.” cost hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars.)

23. Get winter supply of computer ink, paper, etc.
(Donna's a writer, too.)

Donna's survival depends on her ability to do much of the work herself, but to afford all the fuel and supplies, she must do well with her B&B in the summer, Alaska's harvest time. It takes all her income from her B&B, her Permanent Fund check, and more to keep her world going. She would have it no other way.

After Donna had shown me around her place, she invited me into her small cabin for tea. She sat like the mother of the earth in the corner surrounded by her collection of books and told me about moving to Alaska. She remembers it as if it were last night, though she was only six years old. One of her favorite people in the furnace that Kansas can be in summer was the iceman. He came once a week to deliver ice to her granddad. She'd sit on the brick front porch waiting for the iceman as heat came off the road in waves big enough for an imaginary surfer. When he opened the back door of his truck, she would rush around to feel that blast of cold air.

Donna and her largest chain saw in Tok.
P
HOTO BY
P
ETER
J
ENKINS

“I was six years old, and I ran out to my granddad's carpentry shop and said as excited as a six-year-old could get, ‘Granddad, guess what? We're moving to Alaska!'” Donna's green eyes seemed to open as wide as they must have then.

“Grandpa let out a terrible sigh and said, so very slowly, his voice lowered, ‘You … are … going … to … the … end … of … the … world.'”

Donna's big cat, Sweet Pea, climbed up in her lap.

“I wanted to go to the end of the world, although that scared me just a bit—only until I saw my first northern lights and mountains. It took us seventeen days to get from Pittsburg, Kansas, to Anchorage. I was in love with Alaska before we ever got here.” Donna's voice contained wisdom and warmth in equal measures.

Their old truck, which her dad had bought out of a farmer's field, had holes in the floorboard and the heater didn't work. Her feet were the only ones in the family that stayed warm, because the family dog lay on hers. They left right after Christmas 1950 and arrived in January 1951. The road to Alaska hadn't been open long, and she remembered that the grades and curves were wicked. A couple hills were so steep that they had to get out of the truck and walk partway up.

Donna met her husband while both worked at the post office in Anchorage, and in 1964 they married and subsequently had two children. In 1977, while Donna was out exercising, some weirdo tried to grab her and pull her into his car. She and her husband had wanted to live out by themselves; that incident gave them the reason. That whole summer of 1977, they traveled like gypsies, looking for a place to settle. They loved the area around the Taylor Highway toward Dawson, in the Yukon, but no land was available. They didn't want to go back to Anchorage; the idea of living out in the wilderness had captured them. Somehow they found out land was for sale around Tok. They drove there and discovered that land cost $50 down and $50 a month. They bought a plot, just off Route 2 in some flat land covered in cold-stunted spruce.

They cut some trees, made a clearing, and set up an army surplus canvas tent that measured sixteen feet by thirty-two feet, just like in the TV series
M*A*S*H.
It had no liner. They were kidding themselves that it would be warm enough, but while they were building their log cabin to live in, it was the only choice they had. Alaska in the summer in the interior can be so warm, so sunny, so blue-skyed, and so perfect it can seem like a time of ease and relaxation. Even some Alaskans who should know better become seduced. How could it be seventy-five or eighty-five degrees in Tok in July and be minus forty degrees three or four months later? Somehow, they survived the winter.

Donna and Dick loved their new land and life even if the only income they had was cutting firewood. They put up a paper plate at the local grocery store, a few miles away, that said, “Firewood for sale. Cut, split, delivered, and stacked. $65 a cord.” Interested people would write down their names, and Donna would call them from the store's pay phone.

One night in January, it was sixty below zero outside the tent. They had down sleeping bags and a roaring fire, but the heat didn't last. Dick had been to the outhouse; now that's an experience, especially if you have to sit down at sixty below zero. They got their first outhouse from the government, a “worn-out” one with a metal seat. No one wants to imagine a metal seat and bare buttocks at forty below, much less sixty below. Two-hundred-eighty pound Dick came back into the tent overwhelmed. Donna wondered if something had happened outside.

“Dick told me to come outside. I thought something was wrong. Our bunny boots crunched real loud on that snow. He pointed up, but he didn't need to. The northern lights were unbelievable. There was a big moon too. The northern lights are usually green, but these had pink shooting through them. It was magic looking up through the black outlines of the spruce to the dancing, darting lights. They washed across the top of the sky like wave after wave. I could feel the hair on my arms stand straight up. Dick grabbed me and we danced under those lights. I cried, it was all so wonderful.” Donna's eyes teared up all over again.