Four Quarters of Light (17 page)

‘Jesus,' I said to Audrey as we drove off, ‘you'd have to hit her in the face with a four-pound lump hammer to crack a smile out of that one! This place is beginning to give me the creepy crawlies!'

When we eventually found the airstrip we saw a lone man walking around a small yellow plane pointed out along the runway for take-off. The tiny four-seater Cessna did not look encouraging, but Mike McCarthy, the pilot, was so relaxed and accommodating about our being one hour late that we loaded up the tail of the plane in relieved good humour, joking with Mike about his surname and our destination. Then we loaded ourselves: Audrey and the kids got in behind Mike and I went up front, which was not where I wanted to be.

I bit down hard as Mike fired the engine and within seconds we were scooped up into the air. Mike explained that our ascent would be bumpy as there were strong winds blowing up the creek. I whispered ‘okay'. I hadn't meant to whisper, but rising panic had choked my words. ‘How long?' I managed through clenched teeth, trying to sound calm.

‘Forty minutes or so, depending on the winds,' Mike answered, unaware that every time he mentioned the word ‘wind' he ratcheted up my panic levels. Though it was a several-million-toone chance that anything would happen during a half-hour flight my imagination created several scenarios for catastrophe. Fear is usually irrational, and if you cease to believe in it you can make it disappear. It's a matter of telling yourself lies and believing them.

We made it. After reloading our baggage into Mike's very dilapidated flatbed truck we rattled, bumped and collided our way along the last few miles of the old railway road I had considered driving on from Chitina. I concluded then and there that we would never have made it. The
Pequod
would almost certainly
have floundered, and us with it. I turned to acknowledge to Audrey that she had been right about flying after all only to witness her furious attempts at beating off mosquitoes. The cab was full of them!

I knew nothing about where we were going and had entirely open-ended expectations about what we might find there. Telling Audrey we were trying to stay ahead of the mosquitoes was a half-truth, and now she knew it. At least Pat Walsh had spoken highly of the couple we were going to stay with.

Outside the town of McCarthy the road bifurcates, and we travelled for little more than a mile up a steep, washed-out, boulder-strewn passage enticingly named Silk Stocking Road before we came into the town of Kennicott. Yet to apply the title of ‘town' to either McCarthy or Kennicott is more than a misnomer, for the permanent population of both rarely exceeded more than two dozen; Mike McCarthy informed me that during the summer months that figure quadrupled, swelled by hunters, hikers and the extended families and friends of its permanent residents. But that fact seemed insignificant set beside the name of the road we had bumped and swatted our way over to get here. A Silk Stocking Road joining up two ghost-town communities somewhere at the end of nowhere between the Chugach, Wrangell and St Elias mountains was an unexpected anachronism that tantalized more than the mosquitoes.

Within minutes we were outside our accommodation, a brightly painted, rusty-red and white clapboard cabin overlooking the terminal moraine of the Kennicott glacier. There were four of these cabins strung out in a line. Only ours, and Mike's next to it, were in a habitable condition. They were originally the homes of the mine managers and administrators and in their day had been real upmarket, privileged homes. Mike helped us unload our gear and gave me a quick rundown of the place while his partner, Laura, helped Audrey with the kids.

In 1900, a couple of prospectors named Jack Smith and Clarence Warner spotted a large green spot on the ridge between the Kennicott glacier and McCarthy Creek which proved to be mineral staining from a fantastically rich copper deposit. The copper discovery sparked the construction of the two-hundred-mile-long Copper River & Northwestern Railroad, which connected the mining camp to the south-coast town of Cordova. By the time the mine closed in 1938 it had produced over four and a half million tons of ore worth a reported $200 million, which in those Depression years was an astronomical sum of money. It was easy from this perspective to see how Alaska had translated itself into a fantastical dream place where paradise and untold riches could be dug out of the earth. This was the other lure of the wilderness – earthly reward, not spiritual salvation.

At its peak, six hundred people lived in Kennicott. The main settlement included all that was needed to mine the ore as well as houses, offices and stores, a school, hospital, post office, dairy and recreation hall. Just down the road, a second community eventually named McCarthy sprang up around 1908. A perfect complement to staid, regimented Kennicott, McCarthy played the role of sin city: among its most successful businesses were several saloons, pool halls, gambling rooms and back-alley brothels. In its heyday, some 150 people lived in McCarthy. But when the mine shut down only a few people stayed on.

The mine at Kennicott closed overnight, and within a matter of weeks the mining town was stripped clean of anything that was portable. Only ghosts and the red and white leftovers of the
mine's architecture of bunk houses, train depots, workers' cottages and the magnificent power plant, towering up hundreds of feet and looming over the Kennicott glacier, remain. Such places fascinate me. The emptiness echoes with stories and lives that more than a half a century of freezing mountain winters cannot eradicate. It is as if it holds them in cold storage for those who choose to find them. I could feel it already after only a few hours. Mike's brief résumé and the manner in which he told it suggested that he too had found something more than a ghost town here. I was beginning to understand why such places sometimes serve as a quintessential haven. You would never be truly lonely for the ghosts would befriend you.

We settled in for our first night in the mountains and already I was beginning to feel the same kind of snug comfort I had felt in our cabin in the hills above Fairbanks. Only one thing threatened to spoil it – the mosquitoes. Our flight into the mountains had not rid us of these perfidious insects, and over the next few days I was to learn just how many millions of them had come to welcome us.

It wasn't the constant light that awoke us in the morning but the silence, in which the slightest sound is amplified. One's sensual awareness of the surroundings becomes heightened. In the early morning, before anyone was awake (even the mosquitoes), I was up and out.

I looked out towards the Chugach and Wrangell mountains, telling myself that the flight had not been so bad after all. Then another thought set in: those same mountains that looked so scenic and serene were also the impenetrable walls that held us here. But that was the old me already translating newness and undiscovered things into insignificant insecurities. I consoled myself that the ghosts would protect me as I walked out of the enclosure of our mining encampment. I found the skeletal remnants of human occupation intensely comforting in the roaring mountainscape that confronted me.

I was standing in a landscape that was fifty million years in the making. In a bygone age a series of warm interglacial periods had
interacted with colder periods, thrusting massive rivers of ice through these mountains. Like teeth on a rake they gouged out the land, depositing millions of tons of rock and silt in glacial basins. I was looking out on the results of this ancient cataclysm as the first strident notes of birdsong echoed around me like Chinese wind chimes. The Kennicott glacier was a hideous moonscape of rubble, rock, earth and the fossilized trunks of prehistoric trees that looked like so many broken matchsticks littered around the ashes of a burned-out city. And if it wasn't the moon it could have been Dresden or Coventry after wartime bombing; it could have been the decimated outskirts of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It was huge and ugly and repulsive, but contemplation of the power and persistence of it made those catastrophes seem pathetic. No human hand was at work here and that huge, cratered surface stretching out in front of me was living still, moving and melting and changing everything.

I remembered that Mike had explained how on one occasion the road from the airport had completely washed away in one night, and that thousands of tons of earth and broken timber had been deposited. It was useless to attempt to clear it and the residents of the two townships had worked for months to clear a dirt road around it. I admired their community spirit and laughed when I thought of the man in Talkeetna who had complained about having shovelled more snow in twenty-five years than was on the top of Mount McKinley. Here was evidence, if I needed it, that the wilderness bends to no-one's will. Yet another passing thought made me laugh again: if I was the set designer for the Pandemonium conclave of Satan's disciples from Milton's
Paradise Lost
I would set the scene right here on the grisly surface of this glacier, with the blood-red altar of the towering Kennicott mine as a perfect backdrop.

Mike's crowing rooster back at our cabin recalled me to my senses. I was deep in the biggest national park and reserve in the world, contiguous with the national park reserves of Tetlin, Kluane in Canada, Tongass, Glacier Bay and Admiralty Island, all of which constitute a world heritage site of some thirty million
acres. And here I was standing on a hill, dizzy with contemplation of it all and imagining
Paradise Lost
being staged on a glacier! Well, if my imagination was running riot, so be it, for the inconceivable immensity of the wilderness in which I had dropped myself demands you abandon all preconceived notions of space and size.

Back at our cabin, everyone was making ready for the day. Mike and Laura had arrived with a wonderful breakfast of fresh eggs, homemade bread, biscuits and rich, dark coffee. Mike had arrived in McCarthy several years earlier after drifting around doing several jobs that offered themselves to him. He had spent almost twenty-five years as a commercial fisherman working out of several ports in the Gulf of Alaska, but mainly Homer. He was originally from Wisconsin and had drifted up to Alaska in search of some kind of adventure that Wisconsin could not offer. Laura had been born and had lived in Alaska all her life and had worked as a law librarian. I suggested it was a big change from surviving off the sea to surviving in a mining ghost town.

‘The ocean is not so far away,' he said, pointing out that in a light plane he could be in Cordova or Valdez on the gulf coast in a few hours, and probably less, depending on the weather. Anyway, he continued, he enjoyed the pace of life here and preferred looking after his chickens to gutting halibut all day long.

‘He doesn't just prefer his chickens, he adores the creatures,' Laura put in. ‘I wonder he has any time for me at all!'

But a few egg-laying chickens and a couple of dogs are hardly a good reason to retire into the hills, I ventured.

‘Well, he does have me as well, you know,' Laura countered with a chuckle, ‘and we have three boys between us.'

The words ‘between us' seemed a little odd and I didn't know how to receive them. Mike relieved my curiosity: he and Laura had previously been married to different partners; he had one fourteen-year-old son and Laura had two boys. Mike was quietly candid about the break-up of his marriage, and his love for his son was evident as he spoke. It became obvious that his decision to settle in McCarthy had had a lot to do with his son. The boy had
chosen to live with his father, and Laura's children also spent the summer and most of the year with them.

‘What about school?' Audrey asked.

‘All the kids here are home-schooled,' Laura explained. ‘The state education system supplies everything we need – books, work manuals, stationery, teaching guides, computers and anything we request.'

I looked at Mike. I had already decided I liked the man because of his ease and openness, and the air of gentleness about him. Jack had also taken to him immediately, and Cal, who was now beginning to walk, trotted into his outstretched arms without hesitation.

‘A fisherman, a backwoodsman, a pilot and a teacher?' I said to him with unconcealed admiration and no small amount of hidden jealousy.

He smiled and answered quietly, ‘Things happen as much by chance as necessity.'

For a split second I thought about asking him which had played the greater part in bringing him here, but decided against it. I was sure he wouldn't know, or if he did he wouldn't want to analyse it. Mike half answered my question anyway as he and Laura left us to our breakfast. ‘The kids will really love it here,' he said. ‘It's a pity you can't stay longer. We'd love your kids to meet ours.' I followed them out onto the porch and called after them that we would meet up later.

I'd entertained confusions about the dual nature of wilderness that Grimm's fairy-tales had taught me and how I felt places to be a perfect haven for recluses, but Mike and Laura were making me think again. He had no such confusion about the remote area he had come to live in and his affable nature was not what one associates with being reclusive. But I was equally sure he had found some sort of sanctuary in this derelict ghost town.