The Great Alone (96 page)

“Look, Wylie.” Ace pointed out the aircraft to his three-year-old son. “Someday your daddy is going to fly a plane like that.”

But it was five years before he got his wish and found a pilot willing to teach him how to fly. After that, there was no stopping him. He took all the money he and Trudy had saved up to build a house of their own and borrowed the balance from Glory to buy a wrecked Wright-powered Stinson biplane and the parts to repair it. With Billy Ray’s help, he worked on it late into the nights, putting it back together. Sometimes, he had only two or three hours of sleep before going to work at the railyard the next morning, then doing it all over again that night. Trudy and young Wylie brought his meals to the shed where he labored on his beloved plane. Trudy often joked to Glory that Ace loved that plane more than he did her or Wylie, but she seemed to understand that at last he was fulfilling his dream, and she never objected to the hours he spent away from his family.

On a crisp autumn day in October of 1929, the stubby red-painted Stinson was ready for its test flight. The whole family turned out for the event, including Chou Ling. At the far end of the field, Billy Ray helped Ace turn the biplane into the wind and set the tail. Glory’s heart was in her throat when the plane came rolling down the field. Everyone else cheered when it lifted off the ground, but she breathed a sigh of relief. Twice, Ace buzzed the field, then wagged his wings.

“I wish he wouldn’t show off like that,” Glory murmured to Matty after his last low swoop, but there were tears of pride in her eyes.

“I have never seen him so happy.”

“I know.”

Within an hour, he was back, landing the plane as effortlessly as a bird. He taxied over to them and cut the motor. His expression glowed with pride and achievement as he climbed out of the cockpit.

“It handles better than anything I’ve ever flown before,” he insisted as they all crowded around to congratulate him. Considering his limited experience, that wasn’t the highest praise, but since he’d virtually rebuilt the plane from the wheels up, it said a lot for his ability. He singled Glory out from the others. “Come on, Mama. I’ll take you up for a ride.”

“Me?” She hung back, resisting as he tried to pull her closer to the plane. “No, Ace, you really should take Trudy first.”

“You own part of this plane, too, Mama. I think you should be first.”

“Go up with him,” Matty urged her. “It will probably be tame compared to other things you’ve done in your life.”

Glory let herself be coaxed into climbing into the plane, which was not altogether an easy task, her movements restricted by the tubular style dress and coat she wore. Ace made sure she was comfortably strapped in, then advised her, “Be sure and button your coat. It’s a bit nippy up there.”

Truthfully, Glory was nervous and excited at the same time as the biplane began its takeoff run. The aircraft bounced and thumped over the rough ground. It didn’t seem to Glory that the Stinson was traveling nearly as fast as when she had watched Ace take off in it alone. Then suddenly, they weren’t bouncing any more. She looked down and realized they had left the ground. She was flying. She was actually flying, despite the fact that there was hardly any sensation of speed. It was a peculiar experience to be moving—climbing, watching everyone and everything grow smaller—yet not feeling as if she were moving at all, with only the vibrations of the plane’s engine to tell her otherwise.

When Ace banked the plane away from the field, Glory felt her stomach lurch sickeningly. She grabbed hold of her seat, certain she was going to fall out of the plane—or that the plane was going to fall out of the sky. But Ace leveled out the wings and they were flying smoothly again.

“McKinley!” he shouted and pointed to the north.

Far in the distance, the mountain the Indians called Denali, “the high one,” dominated the sky, dwarfing the peaks that were closer. For once, its towering crest was free of the clouds that usually hid it. Glory was awestruck, never dreaming she would have such a grand view of the majestic mountain from the air. Below were the railroad tracks that led north—as of this year, all the way to Fairbanks.

Then Ace banked the plane in another slow turn and flew over the town of Anchorage. Glory couldn’t get over how different everything looked from the air. She didn’t even recognize the boardinghouse until Ace pointed it out to her. It was a whole new world—an exciting one. At last she understood her son’s passion for aviation. It offered more than a new town and a new start. It gave him an ever-moving horizon; he could never fly to the end of it.

She was almost sorry when she saw the airfield come into view again and Ace set up for his landing and the wheels touched down with a bouncing jolt. When they stopped, Glory climbed out and let Trudy and Wylie take her place in the Stinson. Before the day was out, Ace had taken every one of the family up for a ride in his plane.

A week later, Ace quit his job with the Alaska Railroad, and the Ace Flying Service came into existence. Glory acted as his financial partner, Trudy kept the books, Billy Ray was his mechanic and ground crew. That same month, the stock market crashed and Wall Street was in a panic.

With the “outside” in the grips of the Great Depression, there was widespread unemployment. People who had left Alaska for the high-paying jobs in the States, started coming back. Rising gold prices made small-scale mining operations feasible again. The salmon industry improved.

Almost from the beginning, Ace was kept busy. Somebody always had someplace they had to go—whether it was miners, trappers, fishermen, engineers, or even prostitutes—and they usually wanted to get there in a hurry. Or if they didn’t, they had something they wanted to send or have picked up. Or there were supplies to be dropped or a medical emergency that required a doctor to be flown somewhere or the patient flown to the doctor.

In those first years, Ace hauled everything from a small gas tractor, diapers, frozen meat, and mattresses to Victrolas and phonograph records. His passengers had been whites, Eskimos, Indians, malamute dogs, and even a corpse or two. Drunk or sober, sick or healthy, crazy or sane, he’d take them wherever they wanted to go—or as close as he could get to it.

But the flights were rarely accomplished without incident. Most of the time, his landing fields were small sandbars in rivers, frozen lakes, or hilltops. He’d knocked off his landing gear, broken propellers, torn wingtips, busted struts, and half a hundred other things. Sometimes the plane was too damaged to fly out, and he’d either have to repair it on the spot with whatever was at hand or walk fifteen or fifty miles through wild terrain that in spring was sometimes a junglelike swamp to the nearest scrap of civilization and have the needed parts flown in to him, then repair the plane and fly it out.

He flattened his propeller blades for maximum power. On short-field takeoffs, he’d learned to wait until the very last second before raising his flaps to obtain maximum lift and angle of climb. In subzero temperatures, whenever the plane’s engine wasn’t running, the oil had to be drained to keep it from freezing. In the deceptive whiteness of snow-covered landing fields, he’d learned to feel for the ground. Surviving meant learning to crash safely. And like a lot of other bush pilots, as they were called, Ace often joked that his red Stinson was merely a collection of spare parts flying in formation.

Navigating in Alaska was no easy trick either. His plane was equipped with a compass and an altimeter, but he was never too sure how reliable either of them was. For all the beauty of Alaska’s mountain ranges, her glaciers and lofty lakes, or the mystical effect of her natural phenomena like shimmering sundogs above the snow or dancing northern lights, she could be cruel with her winds and fogs, her squalls and blizzards that could encapsulate a plane in a white-out that made the earth and sky seem one, with no up or down.

It was a trackless land without vast interconnecting road systems or telephone poles or railroad tracks to use for landmarks. Ace learned to recognize rivers and know one from another—no easy task, considering the thousands of rivers in Alaska and the equal number of streams that during spring thaw ran as swollen as rivers. Since a tree always falls downstream, he learned to tell downstream from upstream by watching for fallen trees. For him, every little twist and bend and branch of a given river was a road sign: Two turns after the fishhook bend and there’s Cosgrove’s cabin. Odd-shaped hills, distinctive peaks, peculiarly shaped lakes—he knew them all, whether they were on a map or not. There were times when he got lost, but not many. And he was never really lost, because he always knew he was in Alaska.

PART FOUR

Full Circle

CHAPTER LII

Anchorage

May 10, 1935

Twelve-year-old Lisa Blomquist looked around the crowded hall, twisting and craning her neck in an effort to see over and beyond the heads of people seated at the long tables.

She didn’t see how her younger brothers could have disappeared so quickly. One minute they had been playing by their chairs, and the next they were gone. She had promised Mama that she’d keep an eye on them and make sure they didn’t get into any trouble. She didn’t understand how her brothers could behave like this when this grand dinner had been given in their honor.

Well, not exactly
their
honor, she corrected herself, since they were only children. But it was for the families who had come to build farms in Alaska at a place called Matanuska Valley. And she and Erik and Rudy were a part of the family, so it was for them, too.

The whole town of Anchorage had declared a holiday and turned out to meet the train when they had arrived that day. A band had played and everywhere flags had waved. She couldn’t blame her brothers for getting tired of the endless speeches. That’s the way it had been ever since they and the other families from Minnesota had left St. Paul, traveling by train to Seattle, then by ship to Seward, Alaska. All along the way, people had met them and newspapermen had asked them questions. “Colonists,” that’s what the newspapers called them—“colonists” and “pioneers” going to the great frontier of Alaska.

It was all a part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, a program of resettlement that would take farmers from lands on which they were unable to make a living and transport them to Alaska. Lisa didn’t understand it all exactly, although she had listened when the relief worker had explained it to her parents. She did know that the government had paid for the trip, provided the whole family with suitable clothes—the first she’d ever had that weren’t hand-me-downs, made-overs, or flour-sack dresses—and supplied needed furniture even to the extent of replacing that which was too old or rickety. Her mother had discovered they had a lot of furniture that wasn’t worth moving.

All the attention and excitement had been a little frightening at first. Lisa had always felt very self-conscious among strangers, but everybody she’d met on the long journey had made her feel so important—and brave. All of them were being treated as if they were special. Before they’d left Seattle, she and her brothers, as well as the rest of the children in the group, had been given toys—real toys. Lisa was so glad that her mother had encouraged her father to sign up to come.

As she was about to despair of locating her brothers, nine-year-old Erik came running up behind her and grabbed her hand, then started pulling on it to drag her with him. “Come, Lisa. I’ve gotta show you somethin’.”

“What is it? Where’s your brother?” Reluctantly she let herself be pulled along while she scanned the area ahead of them, looking for Rudy. “You were supposed to stay near the table, both of you. Mama’s going to be mad and then you’ll really be in for it.”

“But we found an Indian,” Erik whispered, his blue eyes rounded and shining with excitement. “You said there wouldn’t be any, but we found one.”

“That’s nonsense. I told you there aren’t any Indians in Alaska, only Eskimos, and they live way far up north in igloos where there’s ice and snow all the time—not down here where there’s trees and everything’s green.” An instant later, she spied her curly-, flaxen-haired brother rocking back and forth against a side wall, his head slightly turned so he could peer out of the corner of his eye at someone down the way. Erik pulled harder on her arm to hurry her along, although she needed no urging to confront her errant brother. “Do you realize I’ve been looking all over for you two, Rudy?”

“Sssh.” Even though he was a year younger than Lisa, Rudy always tried to boss her around.

Erik hovered close to his big brother and snuck a look around him. “There he is, Lisa.”

“Sssh,” Rudy hissed again. “He’ll hear you.”

“Stop it, Rudy,” Lisa declared impatiently, then looked to see who they were talking about. The boy was tall and broad-shouldered, although on the thin side, yet she doubted that he was much more than two or three years older than she was. His hair was black, and a little on the shaggy side. He tugged at the collar of his shirt where it buttoned at the throat as if trying to ease its tightness. “He’s no Indian, Erik. See the way he’s dressed in long pants and a jacket.”

“Yeah, but look at his black hair and eyes,” Rudy insisted. “See how brown his skin is. You don’t know everything, Lisa. Alaska’s a frontier and Indians live in the frontier and they attack settlers like us.”