Correcting the Landscape (2 page)

She was quoting me: I couldn't live that remark down, and maybe I didn't want to. Years ago, when I was in the borough assembly, one of the members ordered a lockdown during a study session on her spending bill. I found a window in a hall outside chambers and climbed out. When a reporter cornered me later, those were the first words out of my mouth.

“As I see it,” I defended myself now, “a writer can get stuff firsthand you don't get on the phone. I feel called to be moving about. ‘As free and independent as the birds,'” I added, repeating the previous owner's masthead.

“Why don't you sell a few more ads while you're out there moving about,” said Noreen. “We're getting pretty close to the edge these days.”

She didn't even know the half of it. Finances were my department.

“Looks like we've got most of this issue sketched out,” I said. “What are you going to do tonight?”

“Oh…”

I knew what she'd do at five: pour a tumbler of that red wine
she kept in the refrigerator and turn on the news. Sometimes, if she didn't have a date, two tumblers. I didn't pry, but I wanted her to know I cared. It was important to extend myself a little bit in her direction, every day.

 

THE
FAIRBANKS MERCURY
HAD BEEN PUBLISHED OUT OF THIS OLD
home on College Road, at the base of University Hill, for several years before I took it over. When I heard the paper was for sale, I was just finishing a term on the borough assembly and probably could have overcome my aversion to regular hours and buildings I didn't especially want to be in, and found myself a real job, maybe even head of the Laborers' Union; but the notion of running a newspaper took hold of me like a flower blooming in my soul. I couldn't shake it. I was a debt-free single guy, with no family to support. It was the classic situation of volunteering for a dangerous mission into no-man's-land, except for the sweetness of it. The idea flooded my system with warmth.

I couldn't finance the purchase alone, so one evening I talked to a friend, then another, and within a week I'd put together a partnership of seven. This is what I was born to do, I thought; this is what I've been preparing myself to do in Alaska ever since I opened a copy of
The Grapes of Wrath
on the night shift up at Galbraith Lake Camp. I've been working toward this moment for years.

My half-dozen partners included several retired professors, one dentist, and one obnoxious entrepreneur, men I'd met running for office and working in local government except for the latter. He was a friend from pipeline days who somehow managed to make quite a few wildly lucky investments over the years. Except for him these guys craved opportunity for self-expression, longed to hear the rattle of their own opinions. They wanted a
chance to take an argument from start to finish in print without interruptions, and they were willing to pay for it. My friend Tad Suliman just wanted someone else to be doing all that while he bought and sold land, played with his boats and trucks, and made even more money.

I mortgaged my house and sold my mutual fund and put every penny I owned into this venture. Tad Suliman wrote me a check for ten thousand dollars right there in the Last Gravel Bar, just before he finished his final beer of the night and went out to drive his airboat home up Airport Way. That's another story. He didn't want to write a column, but he did want to nourish the tradition of alternative comment in Fairbanks that's been going strong for the past seventy years. I give him that.

Our partnership took shape. Hope felt real as meat. Noreen, at loose ends herself after the breakup of another love affair, offered to join the staff. It didn't take us long to attract a few journalism students down from the university to help out with proofreading, selling ads, writing theater reviews and the occasional lifestyle feature. The byline was useful to them; they didn't demand compensation, though I meant to pay everybody, eventually.

For instance, I told myself, if Gayle came up with something we could use, I'd certainly see that she got a check. Noreen, our chief reporter, grammarian, and office manager, so to speak, tolerated uneven pay just like I did, for the time being, our eyes on the future. Our columnists and our political cartoonist no longer expected compensation. Being overblessed with writers like most publishers, I may have undervalued them from time to time. Talented writers are like ravens around here—plenty of them, and the
Mercury
was a hopping place, with columnists and journalism students trooping through.

Things will fall into place soon enough, I told myself, the word'll get out, because we have the right instincts. That's how it
is in Alaska—when you hear the call you want to get in there, get your lock on that prize, line up the rest of it later on. And the
Mercury
was my prize, my adopted and true and only child, the thing that made my heart expand in my chest. More than anything I'd tried so far.

I
HAVE A USGS MAP OF ALASKA TACKED TO MY
office wall, and before I went home I looked for Allakaket. I found it at a fork where two rivers, the Alatna and the Koyukuk, come together, this side of the Brooks Range.

The Koyukuk River was a familiar, fabled name. Robert Marshall, the famous naturalist, wrote about Koyukuk villagers and called them the happiest people he'd ever known. Maybe his statement was true in the 1930s, but times have changed. I hear that life is hard in the villages; oil money and the Native Land Claims have fueled huge problems even while relieving others.

I've never been to Allakaket. In fact, I didn't even get a good look at Fairbanks until I'd been in Alaska for several years. I came up here in the spring of 1974 with a story idea I wanted to pitch at the
Toledo Blade
about the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that was going to be built. On impulse I signed up with the Laborers' Union. The paychecks promised to be the size of skyscrapers, comparatively speaking, at least when seen from the vantage of a cub reporter in Toledo. The air was toxic with excitement. Life in Toledo couldn't
compete with this, even though the
Blade
was an appealing paper. I called my sister in Washington State, where she ran an arts festival on the Olympic Peninsula. “Why don't you get on up here, No,” I said. “This is it. There's money to be made.” And she did and we didn't go back.

We found ourselves that summer in a boomtown that all but concealed the actual community. Like oil burning on water, a temporary camp blazed above the older, quieter Fairbanks.

This one didn't belong to the big shots. Organized labor brought the oil wealth to every level of society in Alaska—well, almost every level. Everybody had a fighting chance this time because the unions had managed to work out agreements with the state and the pipeline company. Noreen and I signed up and socked it away. I'd go six, eight, twelve weeks up at Galbraith Lake Camp without spending a dollar, and very little when I was down on R&R in Fairbanks. The summer of 1974 brought confusion, chaos, and a flood of new energy to this town. I loved it.

“Teamsterism is ruining Alaska,” someone muttered behind me at the Labor Day picnic in 1978. That sentence leaped out above everything to my ears. It was the tune of our parade being struck. The good and the bad, the greed all around us, and the money flowing to masses of people who had never struck it rich before, not just a few people but the rank and file: this sure wasn't the Alaska of your childhood dreams, with log cabins and romance and Jack London heroes. This was an ugly Alaska with cement dust in the air and big-city problems bursting up in small towns, almost as if they'd been there all along, like seeds or spores waiting for a good rain. Money didn't make anyone into a better person. But you'd have to be some kind of elitist, you'd have to have your eyes sticking out the back of your head, not to acknowledge the justice of the rank and file getting their hands on some of it.

Thanks to the unions. That's how it appeared to me as time went by. My first stint was a night shift at Galbraith Lake Camp, monitoring waste disposal. I sat all night before a console on which lights and dials indicated the progress of the incineration. I initialed some figures in a logbook every hour, and I spent most of the night reading novels. It was like being in a good prison. And like a prisoner who puts his time to good use, I came out of there changed.

I found
The Sea Wolf
and
The Grapes of Wrath
in the rec room and they astounded me, both of them—books I'd heard about but never read. Later on I brought novels back to camp from the Fairbanks Public Library. I was scared to run out of pages on that job, so I chose books based on their size and density, and found myself reading about a class of people who lived without money, way to one side of the mainstream:
An American Tragedy, From Here to Eternity
, and Zola's saga of oppressed French miners,
Germinal. Huckleberry Finn, Invisible Man, Crime and Punishment
, and the
Portable George Orwell
. I read Leon Uris and Liam O'Flaherty, and
Don Quixote
. That book is about poor people, too—criminals, dreamers, and saloonkeepers. These were books I'd missed, growing up. Some I read twice. The thicker the better.

Digesting my steak dinner, earning twenty-five an hour to initial a logbook, I began to identify with an earlier time and with the underclasses. A sense of community made me look up from my pages in anticipation of future struggles.

I held on to my own money and eventually paid cash for a three-room A-frame house on Bad Molly Road, outside of Fairbanks. The neighborhood was in a nice little rough-cut subdivision on the slope behind the university. We all had three-acre lots and little oil-burning stoves. I got involved in politics, spent a few years in Juneau working for the Department of Labor, ran for the
borough assembly in Fairbanks and won. I served two terms-longest time I've put in at one job, anywhere.

When I found out the
Mercury
was for sale, it all came together. This was my call to address all manner of wrongs, serve the people, accrue a bit of glory, and entertain myself at the same time. And it didn't have the boring parts, which let me assure you the Department of Labor and the borough assembly have plenty of. That so many people wanted to help, either with money or subscriptions or writing stories, proved to me—at the time—that I was making the right decision. Proved to me, convinced me, or fooled me: take your pick.

Meanwhile I followed my instincts and learned on the job how to get a twenty-four-page newspaper to press week after week.

Wednesday afternoons I chased loose ends. It was on a Wednesday afternoon, after inspecting Dr. Leasure's altered view of the riverbank, that I drove several miles in the other direction, into downtown Fairbanks to find the bead store that Gayle mentioned.

The lady behind the counter was helping others, so as I waited I studied the inventory: beaded moccasins, wallets, gloves, and dreamcatchers, which interested me—spiderwebby constructions you'd hang in your window to stop the bad dreams from coming in, or maybe the good ones from leaving. There was a sweet, smoky aroma of tanned moosehide. The customers around me were beaders, pulling open little drawers, studying the trade beads of all sizes and colors that were for sale. All this gentle, repetitive activity mesmerized me. By the time the shop owner was free, I was in no hurry to leave.

I introduced myself but was careful not to take out a notebook and start scribbling. I tried to set it up as a chat. Times I've been interviewed myself, it's amazing how the reporters have tried to lead me, as if they'd already started writing the story and needed
me to fill in their paragraphs. I understand that deadline pressure, that need to focus, to get the job done. It can be offensive, though, to be drilled that way.

“Gayle Kenneally suggested I ask you about Mr. Stonington,” I finished up.

She thought for a minute. I looked to one side and waited.

“Mr. Stonington,” she said with a smile. “Well, I tried to see he had a sandwich now and then, whenever I could.” She shook her head, stopped smiling, pressed her lips together. “Walter didn't have schooling. He wasn't able to solve all his problems. He was…” She hunted for words. “He was not smart. Couldn't help himself. I looked out for him because he was right outside my door half the time, and he could have been me.”

“Yeah?”

“Without my family around, that would have been me. Drinking could have done that to me. Walter, he never had family around, not here in Fairbanks.”

“You sound like a human being,” said a customer nearby, studying a tower of earrings. “Not like some folks.”

She shrugged. “His day came, when he needed everything they got in that ambulance to make it through the next hour. Someone who could take blood pressure and knew how to put in an IV might have saved his life. But they sent the van instead. It's not the driver's fault; he picked Walter up too many times already. ‘Walter,' I told him once, ‘you live this way you're going to die out here.'”

We were silent for a few minutes.

“I like your store,” I said.

“Everyone shops here,” she said. “Local people and visitors, everyone. We make things to order. You let me know if you're interested in something.”

I walked up Second Avenue and cut across a parking lot to the
river, up to the plaza and the big bronze statue of the Unknown First Family, thinking about her bringing Walter Stonington into her shop for a sandwich. Extending that gesture of humanity, largely unwitnessed.

For just a second I had a sense of everything that was taking place in the city on one afternoon, like those photo essays called “June 4, 1978, in Australia” or something, that show a guy shearing sheep, schoolgirls flirting, a doctor in a surgical mask, a newsboy on a bike, a welder in a helmet, a whore with bad teeth, the nun in civilian clothes who's opened a halfway house to rescue that whore—and it's all happening at roughly the same time, in roughly the same place, and you have a view of all it takes to make a community.

The bronze statue of the Unknown First Family loomed above me, rising from a huge rock pedestal. They stood back to back, a man, a woman, two children, two dogs, squared off as if defying a blast of arctic wind—although why any sensible pioneer or native family would do such a thing is not clear. Parka hoods obscured their faces. They stared away from each other, out to the horizon. They'd loomed above Walter Stonington, too, as he made his own rounds, as he made the decisions that led up to his last night in Fairbanks.

I'd been living in Juneau when they raised money for this new park and the statue in the middle of it. It wasn't a decision I'd taken part in, and like a lot of people in town I didn't like the thing one bit; it was outsize and heroic and portrayed a senseless behavior. You don't defy the cold up here, you adapt to it, as many letters to the editor pointed out when the statue was first cemented in place. These shrouded giants were heroic in the way larger-than-life monuments are. As if to demand credit for simply being so big, standing up to the imaginary blizzard that's flapping the parka hood to one side. Myself, I preferred the new kind of
statue you'd see here and there in some cities, a guy in ordinary clothes who could be anyone, reading next to you on a bench. Takes you a second look to realize he's made of bronze.

The Unknown First Family, however, was a throwback. But by God, it was a landmark. No overlooking this thing.

When I got back to the office about seven, with a deluxe burrito-to-go from the Conscious Palate, Noreen had gone home, leaving a message on my desk: Library director called. Book controversy is heating up. Call
A.M.

I was alone and it was quiet. I liked this part. We went to press in twenty-four hours, so I started tweaking stories here and there, and blocked out a space for whatever might happen tomorrow—challenged book vs. freedom to read, or clear-cut riverbank? Before I knew it, it was eleven P.M. and dark outside, this time of year—the equinox had just passed us by. Twelve on, twelve off. Heading toward dark days, but you don't notice for a while. It doesn't get bad until November.

 

THURSDAY MORNING WITH MY COFFEE OUT ON BAD MOLLY ROAD
, I read a short piece in the big daily on the offensive book, with a photo of the complaining parent, and it looked like that story might get interesting. Especially if people in Fairbanks started taking sides, as they tend to do. The library staff had voted to keep the book, so the issue was being bounced up to a board meeting. I decided to hustle down to the library and read the thing, which was temporarily being kept on reserve. No one could check it out, but anyone could read it.

I thought there'd be a demand and a queue, but the assistant handed it right over. Turned out to be what they call a graphic novel, a new form of adolescent literature, which shot me right back to classic comic books. At thirteen
I devoured Lorna Doone
and
Last of the Mohicans
this way. Hard to believe there could be a fuss about this.

But when I read the thing, I laughed out loud at how these pen-and-ink drawings must have shocked some people. It was a spy novel, and on one page Soviet prisoners were stripped naked, their skinny bodies rendered in naturalistic detail. Ribs, abdominal muscles, private parts, even pubic hair. In another scene our young hero tracks a bad guy through Times Square, hunts for him in a sex show, and then ends up straddled by a blond girl, both of them naked.

The deeper story was surprising, I thought, given all this contemporary color—it was about an effort to preserve Orthodox symbols and traditions under Soviet oppression. At the climax, Indian ironworkers take the hero to the top of the New York City skyline. Vivid stuff indeed.

Well, I didn't think I'd ever read it again, and a couple of the frames were certainly unexpected, but that story was simple and kind of sweet, even. It was of no concern to me that the
Mercury
had been scooped by the daily. Our role, most of the time, was rather to provide a little depth and reflection. We had the luxury of a few extra days, or I could stick a short piece in the issue that was going to press tonight. Why not? I interviewed the director briefly on the facts, looked at the letters of complaint, including one from the Catholic bishop, which I personally would have balled and flung across the room if it came to me. I guess this guy wasn't raised Catholic, though; he took everything in stride.

At the office on College Road I smelled the hot wax machine warming up as Noreen trimmed and adjusted a little copy, made last-minute repairs. This week's columnist was at a computer deleting bits and pieces, trimming down his essay to meet our word count. “You can do it yourself, or I'll do it for you,” Noreen would tell them; that forestalled any argument.