Читать книгу First Wilderness, Revised Edition - Sam Keith - Страница 15

CHAPTER 5

Local Color

Curiosity rather than need prompted me to take the base bus into town. At the main gate, I casually appraised the marine sentry. He looked lean and unwrinkled in his cut-down shirt, and he had the haughty bearing of one impressed with his role. A braided cord looped from his shoulder and ended in the butt of his sidearm.

He still feels it, I mused. It didn’t last too long for me. I lost it somewhere when I began to feel too owned.

The bus droned along the road, swirling up a thin dust that dissipated into the spruce boughs heavy with cones. In red letters a sign blared SLIDE AREA. Soon we swept along a shelf in the side of a mountain, and the tires spun stones over the guardrail. I looked up. I could imagine boulders toppling from the outcroppings, growing larger until the slope was in motion like a wave. I looked almost straight down at the sea. It flurried white against the brown cliffs. Gulls milled above the kelp patches.

We descended into the clutter and sprawl of buildings that was Kodiak. What caught my eye was the church with its bulbous towers, like spikes growing out of bright onions. The Russians had left their mark. Every other establishment on either side of the muddy main street seemed to be a barroom or a liquor store. Twenty-five cents for a bottle of Coke. Three-fifty for a haircut and shave. That was double the price of back home. There was the smell of fish and salt air, the crying of seabirds, and at the far end I could see the masts of the fishing boats spearing from the harbor.

I wandered out on a pier, stopping now and then to look down at the pilings, at the large sea anemones sprouting big-stalked out of their sides like mushrooms on trees, at mustard-colored growths on a bottom speckled white with shells. Here a starfish … a moonfish; there a flashing of minnows as they chased the teeming organisms I couldn’t see. My eyes swept over the boats, big and small. Where had they been? Had it been a good season? What about commercial fishing next summer? I had a long time to think about it.

I strolled along, peering into shop windows, going inside to browse. One of the heavy woolen shirts in Donnelly and Acheson’s would be something Dad would appreciate. In Kraft’s, I priced a pair of ornate mukluks. Much more than I intended to pay, but I ordered them anyway to be picked up later on. Deena would be in her glory wearing those to school. I saw other things that would complete my Christmas package.

An Alaska Native man rocked unsteadily before me as if trying to decide on the most comfortable place to fall. His black hair stood up like the bristles on a paintbrush. I tried to imagine him in a skin boat, whirling his two-bladed paddle, his eyes glittering in the glare of the sea, but when I saw him suddenly pitch into a sodden heap, my picture vanished.

I felt ashamed of what my race had introduced. He had been better off in his cleaner world. I didn’t linger long in the atmosphere of commercialism.

THE FIRST HOT ROLL IN KODIAK got underway, and I was part of the paving crew. We worked seventy- and eighty-hour weeks to beat the frost. The paychecks were fat, but the days off were lean. I had to content myself with what I heard and saw on the job.

Wrapped in the stink of hot asphalt and the vapor from its 300-degree heat, I stole glances at the long-tailed ducks. Out in the shimmer of the bay they were feeding, swimming proudly, and sailing in tight circles. The tails of the drakes were sharply pointed. The black-and-white-splashed bodies dove, making rings on the water that scrambled into each other, and then the surface was lonesome without a ripple. Soon it began to dimple again as heads popped up like frogs. The air resounded with their high-pitched Canada goose calls.

While I sipped coffee during a break, I watched an eagle spread against the sky, rocking on the air with stiffened wings, his primaries separated into great dark fingers. He rose lazily, drifted past a cloud, and I saw his shadow slide over the high slope. I was cruising the sky lane with him.

My eyes followed him until he was a speck above a far peak. What was he seeing that I wasn’t? As I squinted after him, I felt my heart beating against my shirt. No one else seemed to have noticed him at all.

Each morning was a repetition of the last. I rolled tiredly out of the blankets, washed up, and trudged to breakfast. One of the waitresses was a woman who always started the long day off right. She stood to one side of the grill, her arms folded across her big breasts, her round, happy face flushed from the heat, barking our orders to the cook.

“Short stack!”

“Fry two!”

“Two in the water four minutes!”

“Fry four on two!” She always had time in between for her bright-eyed comments: “Cheer up, Sam, the first hundred years are the hardest.” “Come on, Andy, get with it. You look like you’re walking around to save funeral expenses.”

Whenever I could, I sat with “The Historian” in the cafeteria. He always wore a perfectly knotted tie. His clean scalp showed through his white hair, and the expression in his bulging, pale eyes gave him the quiet dignity of a basking turtle. With the air of a schoolmaster, he was always ready to dispense his vast knowledge of Alaska and its history.

“The Katmai eruption was back in 1912,” he said, fingering the folds of flesh beneath his chin. “Katmai is just a hundred miles north of here on the Alaska Peninsula. She literally blew her top. They say the first explosion could be heard all over Alaska. It caused a blackout for more than two days and must have seemed like the end of the world. They say the rain stung like acid. You’ll have to see Katmai National Monument and the Valley of the Ten Thousand Smokes. That peninsula still boils and rumbles. I’ve felt earth tremors here. It’s no secret. This country could go berserk.”

This was country I had to see for myself, not just through the eyes of The Historian.

Over the weeks, I slowly made acquaintances other than on the job. Many of the boys had been to other parts of Alaska and had played roles that fired my imagination, like “Skunk Bear.”

Skunk Bear had trapped along the peninsula and on the mainland. I loved to listen to his tales. He had a reddish beard and dark brows. Even though his face cracked and his body shook when he laughed, his eyes held the glitter of a cornered animal’s. He had a violent temper when drunk, and men gave him lots of room.

“I had me a sixty-mile trapline on the mainland with a cabin or lean-to every ten. I used to bring rice, lots of sugar, and Karo syrup to mix with berries. I could live fine on fish and rice every day,” Skunk Bear said, advancing his hard-earned knowledge of trapping.

“You have to be able to read sign. Two fellers trapped an area one winter and caught one mink. They didn’t know mink travel under the ice in winter. What they thought were mink tracks were really marten tracks. They set in the water and you don’t catch marten in the water. Now, you don’t get many wolverine. They’re travelers. They don’t make their own kills. They have to cover lots of country to make a livin’ off the leavings. His problem’s appetite. That’s more powerful than his brains.” When he had run out of trapping advice, Skunk Bear waxed on about the glories of the Far North.

“I been up and down this lonesome land. Seen sunrises and sunsets most as pretty as four ladies in a hand of draw poker.”

Skunk Bear gave me a big bear tooth. I drilled a hole in it, passed a piece of rawhide through it, and wore it as a watch fob.

My stomach was flat and hard again. My hands were ridged with calluses. My fingers felt thick and strong. I wore my red hat, grayed with dust, and the brim turned up in front.

When I pulled out my bear-tooth watch fob, I felt that if I wasn’t fast becoming an Alaskan, I was at least playing the part of one.

September 7, 1952

Dear Dad, Molly, & Mrs. Millet:

I’m anxious to weigh myself to see if I’ve lost any weight. I’m afraid I haven’t. At least what I carry now is solid. My arms are rock hard from the heavy work I’ve been doing and my stomach feels as though it is reinforced by something other than a belt. I eat like a horse. Now that we have a new cook, I’ll probably eat even more. The grub was pretty poor for a while, but this new fellow seems to have awakened quite a few dormant appetites.

So long, love to all,

Sam