True Ground
“To do nothing, to be nothing: that would be a good life. Be still, like a stone in the sun.”
--- John Haines
A 7.1 earthquake struck Anchorage at 8:29 a.m. on November 30, 2018. As a long-time Alaskan, living in North America’s most seismically active region, I had experienced many earthquakes, but none had traumatized me quite as much as this one.
It was the second strongest earthquake impacting Anchorage since the Good Friday Earthquake of 1964, still the most powerful one ever recorded in North America, and the epicenter this time lay only ten miles north of Anchorage. I live alone and was working at my laptop when the first tremendous jolt hit. The house went dark immediately. Shockwave after shockwave rumbled through the earth, and I found myself outside on the front step, collapsed and curled into a ball, crying in fear.
Anchorage was spared major damage, due to stringent building codes, and not a single death was reported. But it was far from over. By December 3, Anchorage residents were subjected to another 170 tremors of magnitude 3.0 or greater. A total of five powerful aftershocks measuring M 5.0 further terrified people.
I found it difficult to return to normal. Scientists predicted seismic impacts could possibly continue for two more years. For a few nights, I slept fully clothed in a recliner close to the front door, with cell phone, parka, and Sorel boots at my feet, a daypack of important papers and documents ready to grab in a split second.
The earthquake created lingering side effects and sensations on my body, as if the force had caused a strange inner ear malady that continued to throw me off balance. So, when a surprise invitation came via a phone call from Tony Thacker, a new acquaintance who lived in Fairbanks, it made perfect sense for me to leave town to try and regain mental and physical equilibrium.
Thacker asked me to join him and his friend on a road trip to a destination above the arctic circle. The adventure would entail driving a risky 300 miles up the James Dalton Highway, also known as the North Slope Haul Road, in the dead of winter to a remote wilderness property located approximately 50 miles beyond the truck stop and former TransAlaska Pipeline camp of Coldfoot.
The offer to be in the company two men whom I barely knew, created a certain level of comfort and physical security deep down and when I needed it most, though I did not like to openly admit it. I woke at 3:00 a.m. on December 18, 2018, and—eager to ensure some geographical distance from the frightening aftershocks—I caught the earliest flight north.
***
When I arrived in Fairbanks, Tony Thacker met me in the baggage claim area and handed me a tall black coffee.
“I know this was rough,” he said, “but we gotta get on the road as early as possible, to have any daylight whatsoever for the long drive.”
Thacker, in his early sixties, of slight build and medium height, impressed me as the prototypical Interior man: tenaciously independent, an expert trap shooter, someone who enjoyed fall duck hunting trips with his buddies and fly-in getaways for more “bro” time. He liked to drive around searching and photographing Northern goshawks and cared little about current political news. Since divorcing ten years earlier and selling his home, he had moved out of the city. He now lived full-time in a puny, 288-square-foot dry cabin—one without indoor plumbing or running water—a cabin he built himself at a place called Lost Lake, about an hour south of Fairbanks. On the lower portion of his property, below his cabin, sat the shop he also built, which was four times larger than his year-round dwelling.
Finger Mountain, James Dalton Highway (North Slope Haul Road) on Winter Solstice. Photo by Tony Thacker.
“This will be a fun adventure and will bring you a dividend,” he said. “There’s no other reason, KT, but to just go and see this country. And you’ll have some people who really know what they’re doing to take you there. You get to be one of the guys. Hell, let’s just go check it out. It’s gonna spin your gears!”
We hurled my crammed daypack and four large bags into his open-bed, heavy-duty Chevy 2500 pick-up, pre-loaded with rubber totes full of extra supplies, dried foodstuffs, assorted tools, and ample safety gear. He had lived in the Interior for over forty years and once owned an automobile business, a front-end alignment shop.
“It’s up to zero degrees outside right now, but for zero, it does feel a bit cold,” he said with a smile.
Fairbanks has noticeably less winter light than Anchorage. Around 10:30 a.m., the reluctant sun gradually searches its way in a low angle over the frosty Tanana Hills and the frozen solid Chena and Tanana Rivers. Weather systems drive in cold air, which sinks and settles into the lower lying parts of town. Skies are frequently darkened by air pollution, caused by a thick haze of gray-brown woodstove smoke, mixed with heavy particulates from the burning of coal and vehicular exhaust. With little warmth to give, the half-lit orb slips away by 2:30 p.m., and a bitter cold darkness descends again.
I had not yet been to Thacker’s cabin, and although we were headed north, not south, my ears had perked up immediately when he mentioned he lived off the Richardson Highway around Milepost 68. I remembered that John Meade Haines (1924–2011)—the most honored, influential, and nationally celebrated writer Alaska has yet produced—had found his “dream place” about the same distance south of Fairbanks.
It was there, on 160 acres of pure wilderness, that Haines listened intensely to the land’s mutterings, a favorite word of his.
***
I met John Haines when he was 84, during the last few years of his life, shortly after the Sewanee Review had awarded him the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. A prominent arts organization sponsored a few of John Haines’s visits to Anchorage in 2009, and I moderated a panel featuring him and three other writer laureates for a public program held at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Haines’s first book of poetry, Winter News (1966), had helped establish him as an original voice in American literature. An NEA fellowship followed in 1967. By the time I met him, his literary legacy had substantially increased and included two Guggenheims, fourteen poetry books, and six books of prose. He had served as Alaska Poet Laureate (1969–1973). Critics referred to him as one of the great solitaries of American literature, another Robinson Jeffers or Henry David Thoreau, though in various periods wives and girlfriends came and went.
The example of Haines’s unconventional, subsistence-based life in the extremes of Alaska’s Interior had grown more important to me since his death in 2011. He felt a genuine reverence for the land, not only for its beauty, but because, over time, it would lead him to an irreducible and hidden part of himself.
Through his writing, often exuding a melancholy, sorrowful tone for days gone by, the poet had often referred to the fabled myth-journey of humanity. Haines saw that in our confused and polarized age, the impulse to return to an ancient, half-forgotten rhythm of life, to a more intimate and harmonious relationship with nature, was necessary. His statement, “We are all born with the desire to return to the wild,” was one I never forgot.
As a long-time Alaskan, I had spent a lot of time dreaming, thinking, and experiencing “the wild.” Alaska is where I came of age and is most likely where I will die. Though I do not trap, hunt, or fish to live, I have longed to speak a shadow language with the landscape, as Haines had done during his homestead years. But where were the myth-journeys of women over time to guide me?
I knew that in my innermost self, I have also shared desires to drop out of sight from the expectations and pressures of regular society, to live as a wilder, freer soul on a bigger plot of land closer to wild animals, as John Haines had done. But what had stopped me?
Heading to the Interior on my first-time arctic road trip triggered these ponderings and got me dreaming again about archetypal images I have often seen in northern paintings and illustrations: the solitary Inupiaq seal hunter and his sled dogs peering across stark horizons; the courageous British sea captain and his crew facing icebergs and hackling seas; the daring Italian alpinist and his large expedition party traversing ice fields to summit Mount Saint Elias—tiny black specks in the snow under forbidding peaks. Females were noticeably absent.
***
Thacker had never heard of John Haines, but I gladly shared a few biographical details with him, especially how Haines’s old homestead, I guessed, was probably only ten miles south from Thacker’s cabin in Lost Lake down the Richardson Highway.
“Wait a minute. This guy Haines, didn’t you say, too, that he was a poet?” Thacker asked incredulously. “Well, excuse me for saying, but usually, I think of poetry as something sissified.”
“Haines hunted and field-dressed moose,” I said. “He handled shotguns, regularly set traplines for marten and lynx, split and piled wood, knew how to read snow. He was your kind of man.”
Better to focus on their mutual interests, I thought, than to speak about the poetry that came out of Haines’s homestead years.
We left the Fairbanks airport and drove across town to pick up one of his closest friends, Todd Strong.
Todd, who did not own a car, had been forced to stay in the city off and on to undergo rounds of chemotherapy treatments for prostate cancer, something he had been battling for sixteen months. He desperately wanted to return to his remote cabin in the Arctic, his year-round home for the past dozen years, and this was the primary reason we were embarking on the adventure—to help him out by solving his transportation problem.
The absence from his arctic property and the heavy reliance on friends had left Todd irritable, visibly impatient to return to the solitude and freedom of his “hermicile” as Thacker affectionately called it. Todd’s two arctic cabins, old Conex, two-stroke 1979 Yamaha motorcycle, trap lines, snow machines, 1959 Airstream trailer, and his Bobcat, had been left unattended.
Todd hopped into the truck’s back seat and squeezed next to Thacker’s loyal companion, Stubbie—a 13-year-old, ailing female Cockapoo in doggie diapers.
Todd was dressed in black bib overalls, heavy boots, and a large parka patched in one spot with some duct tape. Occasionally, he asked Thacker questions related to engine mechanics, but otherwise appeared shy around me and occupied himself by petting and talking to Stubbie.
I was filled with anxiety about making this journey in winter, but there was also something exhilarating about it, to be off on a road trip into the unknown, to a region so unfamiliar—the arctic abyss. I had visited Nome and Kotzebue, staying in small hotels. This arctic trip was nothing like that, as Todd did not live in a town or settlement. Todd explained he lived alone on almost 100 acres off the northern half of the North Slope Haul Road, close to the 68th parallel, at a higher latitude than Nome. I worried about the rashness of the choice, too, and what I was doing with these two men—headed hundreds of miles north to such desolation and killing cold.
“Don’t worry, we have everything you need in arctic gear,” Thacker said to create calm. He knew I was still stressed about the M7.1 earthquake and now additionally worried about my cold weather survival chances, should anything go wrong.
“We packed extras but in men’s sizes. We have another parka for you, plus the smallest pair of bib overalls we could dig up. Oh, and a Balaklava, some military-style boots, which will be too big, of course. And the black snowmachiner’s mittens we have will probably cover your entire arms.”
Todd’s voice broke in from the back seat to address me directly. “No joke, I own the largest private piece of land from the Yukon River bridge to Prudhoe Bay,” he said. “The Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve, borders my place, in the foothills of the Brooks Range. It’s America’s northernmost national park, in case you didn’t know.”
The Haul Road, built to service the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, was notorious for its ice storms, blizzards, black ice, avalanches, snow drifts, and temperatures, stuck at forty below for weeks. Most people, even locals, would consider our winter travel foolish, especially since we also pulled Todd’s 26-foot flatbed trailer loaded with a four-wheeler and a snow machine cargo trailer. Given the unpredictable weather and precarious road conditions on the “most dangerous road in America,” as the reality television show, “The Ice Road Truckers,” called it, we definitely took chances.
An estimated eight to nine hours of driving treacherous roads faced us, Thacker predicted. Provided we did not experience any major whiteouts, if we avoided mechanical mishaps, and if we did not jack-knife and land in an ice-encrusted ditch—something he had previously experienced on other vehicle-bashing trips he had been roped into. About the only travelers we expected to encounter were North Haul truckers who drove 18-wheelers—double oil tankers—with the finesse of NASCAR drivers. They were “a special breed of bad ass men,” Todd said. Four or five times a week they make the trip between the Port of Valdez and Prudhoe Bay, a one-way distance of roughly 700 miles, through all seasons, in any kind of weather. Our central concern, however, was to avoid swerving into the path of one of those speeding 18-wheelers carrying 9,500 gallons of highly flammable fuel.
Todd lived without a computer or cell phone—one that would come in handy whenever he was trying to plan any of his supply or medical trips into Fairbanks. If he needed to get through to anyone, he had to walk eight or more hours to the closest DOT maintenance camp at Chandalar, or hitchhike into Coldfoot fifty-two miles south to borrow a cell phone. He gave up his driver’s license five years earlier.
“I’m used to it. It’s not like I don’t have any contact with the outside world. Sometimes on the A.M. radio, I can pick up a station from Australia or Cuba.”
I wondered what Todd thought about me, the female tag-along, who might be more of a burden.
***
Everybody yearns to find their dream place.
In reflecting on his arrival in the Alaska Territory in 1947, Haines said, “I had come to find and to know some part of the American ground, and in that quest, to know myself (Gradual Twilight, 211).
In the immediate aftermath and spiritual devastation of the Second World War, the enormous cataclysms and atrocities on a scale never before witnessed, young veterans everywhere tried to make existential sense of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Some, in need of inner solace, fled to monasteries. In the backwoods of Kentucky, at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Thomas Merton had reflected in his journal about how overcrowded the monastery had suddenly become. Men were entering the priesthood and monastic life in numbers not seen since.
A Washington Post article about how the U.S. government was giving away free land in Alaska to returning GIs captured Haines’s attention. Haines, who had served aboard a destroyer in the Pacific, talked a fellow Navy veteran into accompanying him north. They drove out of the East Coast, across the country, through Montana, Canada, and northward up the mud-and-rut-filled Alaska-Canada Highway, covering roughly 5,000 miles. All he knew was that he wanted to search for a piece of land where he might settle down, make a life of quiet rebellion against a new Buick in the garage and a pretty wife in an apron.
Alaska symbolized the land of the fresh start, especially after the trauma of the war. The far north allowed men a refuge to figure things out, to find a piece of wilderness, to recover some sense of a long forgotten, primordial existence, as Haines would discover.
The war veteran had established his 160-acre homestead near Mile 68 of the “Old Rich,” as the gravel road was then known. The original dirt trail, connecting Valdez to the Interior, dated from 1903.
After his traveling companion returned to Lower 48 “civilization,” Haines endured his first ominous winter alone in an abandoned trapper’s cabin, a one-room log shelter with low ceilings to retain more heat, a cabin he had arranged to be moved onto his wilderness parcel. Eventually, he would build a 12 x 16 foot dwelling out of squared timbers left over from an old bridge that crossed Gasoline Creek next to his homestead. The windows he installed provided views of the Tanana River and peaks in the eastern Alaska Range—Mounts Deborah (12,939’) Hess (11,940’), and Hayes (13,632’).
***
Born in different eras, and with opposite educational backgrounds, John Haines and Todd Strong shared a few traits: a spiritual affinity for the land, and for as long as practically possible, a dogged independence and determination to cling to the original life we have done much to deface and destroy. It was getting rarer to meet someone like Todd Strong in the Alaska of the 21st century, a man John Haines would have easily related to.
I thought about how it was all perfectly normal for someone like Todd to have lived for so long on the margins, on the fringe of a fringe, away from cars, sirens, interstates, box stores, drab architecture. In the immense solitude that few have experienced, he came face-to-face with his own insignificance each and every day. Nothing but a gnat in the Brooks Range. A dust particle on the surface of Trident Glacier. But in this disappearance of ego, he felt more keenly alive.
As Haines reminisced in In Living off the Country (1981), “Anyone who does not get his food, clothing, and shelter directly from the land and the sea by his own labor is beholden to others who must do it for him. It’s not difficult to appreciate the disdain, mistrust, and contempt of many working people for the intellectuals, the professional managers of life in corporations and universities who have not had their hands soaked in blood and gritty with soil.”
In searching the American ground, Haines had covered his share of tundra, icy game trails, tussocks, and footpaths quickly buried in virgin snow. He understood that humanity, periodically, must be returned to its original sources, to its primal condition. If you dwell long enough in nature and in solitude, a mythological pastness, an essence unspoken nevertheless echoes, as if the flora, fauna, the mountains, streams, and rivers share an awareness with humans.
In his memoir, The Stars, The Snow, The Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Northern Wilderness (1989), Haines admitted that the trails he made outward into the hills and swamps, led inward also: “I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing—to put thought away forever, and all the trouble it brings.”
What he hoped to do was to take the trail, to set his foot down with real passion, and not look back. “Let the rest of mankind find me if it could.”
***
After nine hours of harrowing driving up the North Slope Haul Road, we arrived exhausted at Todd’s place 135 miles above the Arctic Circle in the pitch-black night.
Todd worried we would find a ton of snow at his cabins, and he was right. The lower part of the access road, Strong’s “driveway” sat on a Trans-Alaska Pipeline’s corridor easement. Legally, no other mechanized equipment or vehicles are permitted to park on either side of the five-mile corridor. But with the deep snow that met us, Thacker’s pick-up truck got stuck, making it impossible to drive in any closer.
Todd Strong's arctic guest cabin, 50 miles beyond Coldfoot, Alaska, December 2018. Photo by Kathleen Tarr.
It was more than 25 degrees below zero, Todd guessed, and he directed us to put on our face masks. The only visible light anywhere—that which shone from our headlamps.
We geared up and each of us grabbed some bags and started to trudge towards the cabin through snow three feet deep. Todd had to venture first to check the ice’s stability, to see if there was any overflow.
“Every day the Dietrich River is different,” he warned. “You might think the whole thing is frozen, but it can dam up once a heavy snowfall collapses the ice layer. That can create plugs and cause any water trapped underneath to suddenly appear.”
Lugging duffle bags, totes, boxes, suitcases of food, we followed Todd as he somehow found the strength to post-hole for 330 yards across the frozen Dietrich River. It took Thacker four trips of 15 minutes each to unload all the equipment. I made two trips and Todd, feeling the effects from his last round of chemotherapy, managed only one. Nothing could remain in the truck in such intense cold.
I wore leggings underneath the bib overalls, a camisole layered with a sweater and a North Face hoodie, under the borrowed men’s parka. I pulled a wool stocking cap on top of the Balaklava. Into each mega snow machine mitten, I stuffed an open packet of Megawarmers. I wore men’s snow boots with two pairs of wool socks.
The inside temperature of Todd’s glaciated guest cabin registered minus 29 F. In these temperatures, the propane lights would not work. Hours later, the oil-drip stove kicked in and we could remove our thick layers of outerwear to sit more comfortably in our polar fleece, thermals, and down vests.
We resorted to using tea candles, LED candles, and a lithium battery task light until the propane lights finally warmed up. Remembering that Christmas was only eight days away, I unpacked a decorative bouquet of fake, frosted twigs full of mini-LED lights to provide some holiday atmosphere in the one-room guest cabin. Todd seemed especially happy about the extra lights, pleased to see the big batch of frozen homemade beef stew, though it would probably take more than 36 hours to thaw.
I thought again about what women’s primordial memories involved, beyond serving as the loyal helper at man’s side, as I seemed to be reinforcing here. Do we females carry deep memories and images within us of chewing and sewing animal hides, mending blankets, smashing seeds, stirring gruel over the open fire? Giving birth under a Baobab tree, in a Neanderthal cave, in mud-covered hut, or on the taiga? Within the female-only version of the Jungian collective subconscious, was it possible, too, that outer landscapes have also changed the contours of women’s neglected interior selves through time? Of what shadow language does our inner wandering spirit speak? How often have women secretly longed to be explorers, or did that instinct only manifest itself among the few, select, rare, and privileged women?
A few years before, in 2015, after I found myself a soon-to-be divorced woman of a certain age, in drastically changed financial circumstances, I wasn’t sure whether to remain in Alaska or to leave, given its high cost of living.
I fantasized about trading my urban house, building a small cabin of my own on a chunk of land surrounded by birch, aspen, or Sitka spruce, overlooking a great braided river. Maybe it would have patches of prickly rose, red currants, pink fireweed. Views of mountains like snowy nails. Mountains that rise up, grab your heart, stop your breath, start your dreams.
But this was totally impractical. I had clearly been muttering to myself. A wild fantasy. I was ill-equipped, unknowledgeable, inexperienced, and too dependent on conveniences and technology and others to try and mimic Todd’s more physical way of life, or anything resembling the Richardson unorthodox homestead experience of John Haines.
I was no Nellie Cashman (1845–1925), who fled Ireland’s potato famine in 1850, and worked in mining camps in the American West, where she knew Wyatt Earp. She walked the Chilkoot Trail at age 54 on her way into Alaska. In 1907, at age 60, she lived and worked in the farthest north placer mine, located in Nolan, on a tributary of the Koyukuk River—30 miles south of Todd Strong’s place. Neither Todd nor Thacker had heard of her.
The few other women around Interior Alaska in the early part of the 20th century taught school, worked as seamstresses, ran hardware stores, boarding houses, and brothels. They cooked sourdough hotcakes for the goldminers and prospectors and took jobs in village post offices. Lois McGarvey had boarded a steamer in Seattle in her early twenties, sailed almost 3,000 miles solo to Nome and St. Michael in 1911. She then took a shallow-drafted sternwheeler, up the Yukon River until it joined with the Tanana River, taking her into Fairbanks.
As she recounted in her memoir, Along Alaska’s Trails, the industrious McGarvey said ideas grew on her like pin feathers on a chick. She bore one son to her husband, Frank McGarvey, and eventually made a big name for herself during the gold rush era buying and selling “furs from the frozen north,” mink and cross foxes.
I could not recall any well-told stories of women without husbands who had turned themselves into solo Alaskan homesteaders or hermits, though. None who had lived continuously for over twenty years mostly alone, without routine assistance from men. I recognized women also have this latent part of self that dreams of being the solitary explorer, the adventurer, the pilgrim-wanderer. Yet, historically, because of the caregiver roles biology and society automatically imposed, this part of the female psyche was often ignored or left unexpressed, physically.
***
I enjoyed a good night’s sleep in the toasty loft, while Thacker took the cot below, close to the oil drip stove, his dog Stubbie resting inside an old camouflage jacket. Todd, who slept in his other cabin, got up before us, and in the “dawn” of the dark, by 11:00 a.m., in the pale light, he was off somewhere riding his snow machine.
I understood how challenging it was to survive an interminable arctic winter, to sustain your life through the oppressive darkness. As Thacker said, “The sun rises for twenty minutes, and then it sets.” To thrive in it seemed insurmountable, yet somehow Todd had acquired a special tolerance for it. To help make ends meet, he trapped lynx and wolves. For his daily subsistence, he relied on hunting caribou.
Hours passed before we finally saw Todd again. He had no choice but to drag himself for two miles in frigid temperatures through snow up to his knees, with no plowed trail to walk upon. He was markedly weaker than we had seen him the day before.
“It’s his own damn fault the machine’s engine quit,” Tony complained. “He didn’t bother to clear the snow off the machine, the engine ran too hot, and it seized up.”
Thacker quickly gathered all his requisite layers of survival gear and boots, and out the two of them went. A few hours later, the roar of the snow machine could be heard. After butting heads over mechanics and logistics, the men made the repairs and were eager to warm up. Todd, however, was in no mood for socializing with guests. He grabbed a few cans of Miller Genuine Draft and dragged off to his cabin. We did not expect to see him again until the following day.
Relaxed, there was no reason to fuss with cosmetics, comb my hair, or to change out of my black polar fleece leggings and thickest hiking socks. I poured Thacker and myself generous glasses of red wine and was happy when Todd regained some stamina and joined us for bread and bowls of re-heated stew.
I wanted to know how Todd had managed to live all alone without a roommate or a single neighbor until reaching the village of Wiseman, 35 miles away. Todd lived in more remote isolation than even John Haines once did.
Todd looked at me, as if I had asked a very dumb question.
“I have never been too cold, too hungry, or scared up here,” he said with emphasis. “To me, a good winter day is anything that’s below 20 degrees.”
“I’m not faking anybody. What you see here is real. Authentic. Point is I’m not deceiving anybody. Not playing social games. I have to roll with nature, live or die. Nobody comes to save my ass.”
I curled a blanket over my lap. How many trails had Todd, the lean walking machine, as Thacker called him, made in this whiteness?
***
Day Three in the arctic cabin, around 2:00 p.m. The men were off looking at the Bobcat and arguing about the finer points of operating machinery in frigid conditions. Todd insisted the Bobcat which he had recently sold, needed to be transported down to Fairbanks.
“No way I’m driving that effin’ thing back,” Thacker said. “I’ve taken enough chances getting the three of us here.”
There was very little outside light. It looked like dusk already. For hours, I read and wrote by flashlight, drank mugs of tea, and tried to make myself more useful while the men argued.
I grabbed the shovel to try and move some of the snow off the cabin’s porch. I shoveled some more, then gave up. The deep snow was too hard and crusty, and I had not made a dent in it. All I could do was make the narrow path to the door a bit wider.
Time to answer Mother Nature’s call. I slipped on my snow pants, men’s boots, a men’s bulky jacket, oversized mittens, a wool cap, and headlamp to make my way to the outhouse.
“There could be lynx lurking out there,” Todd warned, as I zipped my parka up to my nose.
At the outhouse, I peeled down my bib overalls again in record speed to squat over a Styrofoam cut-out loosely covering a plywood box and hole. It was a wide-open, no-door, outhouse, where I could pee in a balmier, minus 15 temperature. I stared up at the ghosted outline of a peak Todd had named Todd’s Mountain, at the far eastern part of the Brooks Range.
In no other Alaskan outhouse had I been this cold, nor seated in such a position that I could be treated to sublime alpine views while relieving myself. Todd built his door-less outhouse specifically with this artistic effect in mind. Todd’s Mountain, as he called it, lay right before me, in hues of eye-soothing, midnight blue. From roughly December 1st until February 1st, the winter sun did not crest above Freight Train Mountain. Todd lived in darkness most of the time during winter months with only a few hours of twilight, unless the Aurora Borealis, “pale gossamer curtains of light,” as Barry Lopez described, danced across the sky.
Around 5:00 p.m., Thacker suggested the three of us take a short walk across the flat snowfield in front of the guest cabin. The men’s gear I wore staved off the arctic air momentarily. Standing on what I hoped was the frozen Dietrich River in minus 30 numbed my eyeballs and froze my eyelashes. The piercing cold created a strange effect in that I was not shivering; it was as if my body had decided to skip that stage.
We were the only humans anywhere, nobodies in the nowhere in the pitch of night. For a few minutes, we stood in complete quiet, too cold for conversation. In this part of the arctic, far from the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea, from the sounds of grinding pack ice, pelagic birds, or commercial jet noises, there is a frightful silence.
Whatever inner agitations I had brought with me to the arctic were forgotten. A gibbous moon hung over the whole scene like a Japanese lantern, casting welcome light upon the snow. Radiant stars twinkled between clouds in the blue-black skies.
The next day, the morning of our farewell, Todd climbed on his snow machine and used it to clear a path to Thacker’s pickup truck. Thacker went to work sweeping his truck of snow. It was 10:00 a.m. The arctic sun was nowhere to be seen. We said our goodbyes, and I worried about leaving Todd all alone with no cell phone or transportation means.
After about an hour and a half driving south, back down the North Slope Haul Road towards Fairbanks, we stopped briefly at the sign marking the official crossing of the Arctic Circle, at 66 degrees, 33’. As a precaution, Thacker left the truck’s engine running while we darted to the front of the big wooden sign to snap a few selfies in minus 30 degrees.
The author, Kathleen Tarr, at the Arctic Circle, North Slope Haul Road, Alaska, December 2018. Photo by Tony Thacker.
Stunted spruce stood like black bristles on a brush. In the prolonged twilight, I imagined I was standing inside a giant vase of blue glass, peering out. The austere landscape was imbued with that unique polar light made famous in the paintings of Alaskan artist Fred Machetanz, a mystical blueness I have not quite experienced anywhere else. The same eerie blue cast covered the gentler slopes adjacent to the North Slope Haul Road. We stopped the truck to allow a bull moose with the largest rack I had ever seen cross the narrow road and move through mounds of snow.
***
A few weeks passed. Another Fairbanks friend, a biology professor from the university, wentcame to visit Todd Strong. It was later that Thacker related the story to me:
Todd needed a lift back to civilization for more doctor’s appointments and another round of chemotherapy. On their way south, he and the professor stopped at the Yukon River bridge diner on the James Dalton Highway to grab a hamburger. I like to think that Todd had stumbled into grace that day.
A thirty-something woman, probably dressed in a well-worn parka and snow pants, her light brown hair braided into a long ponytail that fell down her waist, had hitchhiked solo up the Dalton Highway from Fairbanks. She was in the diner inquiring about a seasonal waitress job, having worked there once before. A few minutes later, the men started up a lively conversation with this drifter-gal, as Thacker described her. The men were eager to know more about what she was doing all alone at the Yukon River rest-stop in the middle of January.
Tanya did not hesitate to join them and casually sat down at their table. Turned out the drifter-gal was single and worked part-time as a dog handler—Malemutes, huskies, whatever dogs needed to be watched, fed, or run. It was demanding, physical work to clean out dog pens and to keep sixteen dogs fed and watered. For whatever reason, her funds had run low the winter of 2018, and she needed to supplement her hourly wages.
Tanya needed a job, and Todd needed a caregiver. His health was deteriorating, his vitality diminishing, though he was determined to continue living as he was accustomed. He was tired of living alone, not sharing his piece of wilderness with anyone. Todd invited the female stranger to live with him for the rest of the winter and into spring.
The dog-team handler became his nurse-protector, the Sophianic woman, tender, merciful, yielding, playful, and spirited. It wasn’t just practical help that Todd needed. Tough as he was, like Haines, he possessed a kind of emotional fragility rarely displayed, except with intimate female company.
Tanya made sure Todd took the right dosage of meds, she fed him pizza, broth, and toast. She helped him through his chemo nausea, monitored his weight loss, controlled the numbers of friends who could personally visit at the trailer, and the length of time they stayed to chat. From her compassionate, loving ways, and sheer physical strength, her female presence, he drew the physical and spiritual sustenance he needed.
They remained in his arctic sanctuary until June before they both hitchhiked on an oil tanker, first down to Coldfoot, and then to Fairbanks where they lived together in the trailer Tanya owned.
Before it was Todd’s time to go, he planned his own celebration of life gathering to say goodbye to his pals. Technically, Thacker was not invited to the August event due to another mutual falling out. The invitation was instead addressed to his dog, Stubbie.
In early September 2019, Todd Strong, 58, died of prostate cancer. A short time later, Todd’s stepbrother put all of the arctic wilderness property up for sale.
***
I didn’t see my friend Tony Thacker again until May 2020 when, once more, I longed to escape Anchorage. A novel coronavirus, COVID-19, had disrupted the entire world. Throughout March and April, in the pandemic spring, I stayed home in “lockdown” as public health mandates required. Thacker spent more time in his Lost Lake cabin reading gold mining history. Enthralled with John Haines’s life story, he read The Stars, The Snow, The Fire, Haines’s memoir, and took a chance on a few of Haines’s poems.
Snow began melting off the Chugach Mountains, the May sun shone for 20 more hours each day, birch leafed out, and I shut off CNN.
Our inner journey has both summits and resting places; moments in history during which we grasp some sense of ourselves we thought we had lost, as Haines believed.
Maybe this was one of those times.
Now that the weather had greatly improved, I felt an urge to hit the open road and head north again, towards the vast, less populated Interior. Since the normally thriving tourism season would be rendered non-existent, I chose to drive alone for an estimated 700 miles round-trip, up the slower, bumpier, and far-less traveled, Richardson Highway.
Though the old Richardson homestead had been John Haines’s place of conviction, his spiritual bedrock, he reluctantly sold it in 1969 for $7,000, a decision he regretted for the rest of his life. Years passed. He took temporary teaching jobs and writer’s residencies in Montana, Ohio, Washington, California, and other places Outside—the Lower 48—to support himself. Eventually, Alaska called him back, and he returned to the Interior, and for a few short years was able to rent the homestead. During his twilight years, and with financial circumstances changing and strained once more, he eventually rented a small city apartment.
In a note Haines sent me from Fairbanks, dated 13 August 2009—by this time he was renting a small apartment in Fairbanks—day to day-to-day living had grown more cumbersome and taxing. He said things had not changed much, and that the financial difficulties wore him out. Though he was still teaching a fall seminar in writing at the UAF Honors College at age 85, he doubted he could keep going much longer with the minimal adjunct salary.
“But perhaps something will show up to change all of this,” he wrote, “or I will head on down to the old Richardson homestead and put myself to sleep! home at last…”
The Richardson homestead has changed hands several times; it was now owned by a dentist, Thacker learned, a woman who has intentionally preserved it without the nuisance of intruders or squatters, if possible. If we successfully secured special permission to visit the private property, we planned to find and explore the old homestead.
I didn’t know what was left of Haines’s original cabin, the small outbuildings, or his more secluded writing hut which I had read much about, but I was determined to walk all around the grounds, to see where his old greenhouse might have stood, to wander in the woods as the poet with his axe and auger once did.
One of Haines’s favorite spots was a meditation bench he cobbled together, nestled in the heavily wooded hills above the primary cabin, under cottonwood, birch, and aspen. He often climbed to that special vantage point to sit in solitude, attentive to reading whatever shadow language he could decipher on the floor of God’s creation.
Along with the ravens and many species of owls, the landmark peaks of the Alaska Range had always kept him memorable company. Haines could gaze at the mountains from the bluff overlooking what is today a busier stretch of the Richardson Highway where locals, military personnel, and oil tankers regularly travel. From that windy spot, Haines enjoyed panoramic views of the river he intimately knew, the Tanana, with its islands and ever-changing channels.
“Life itself is endlessly fresh and forgiving,” he said. “In spite of all the harm done, I find the world still new, the light still there.”
