Alaska (133 page)

By 1937 and '38, recovery from the Great Depression was so solidly under way that people forgot what conditions had been only a few years before, and scores of newspapers and magazines used the supposed failure of Matanuska as proof that socialism never worked.

If there were two human beings in all America less vulnerable to the charge of socialism than Missy Peckham and Elmer Flatch, they were not known to the general public. These two had, in the great tradition of American individualists, pioneered with pennies in their pockets, triumphed over enormous odds, and accomplished wonders in their own quiet way. In Matanuska they were doing the same. Missy, at the apex of her rambunctious life, was helping a new generation of adventurers establish a society in which families would own their own farms, sell their own produce, and educate their children to do the same. Elmer, having worked in Alaska as few men ever work anywhere, had watched as his forty governmental acres had grown to more than three hundred, and although some people had laughed at him when he had said at the beginning that he wanted to be a kind of guide to rich men who wanted 'to shoot theirself a moose,'

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by dint of making himself locally famous as the best hunter in Alaska, he had patiently attracted to himself exactly the type of big-city hunter who wanted to be shown the tricks that he had mastered. As the hunting season of 1938 approached, he was in such demand that he suggested to his wife: 'Why don't you serve meals to these hungry coyotes?' and people in places like Los Angeles and Denver began to talk about Elmer and Hilda Flatch.

And when one of his clients brought with him four clippings about the communist community sponsored by the government in Alaska, he felt that he must rise in defense of Matanuska, so with help from Missy Peckham he drafted a letter, which was mimeographed and mailed to some thirty Lower Forty-eight newspapers. The opening paragraph set the tone: I read in your paper the other day that we people in Matanuska are all communists, and since I don't know much about Russia, maybe it's true. But I want to tell you how we communists up here spend the day. We get up at seven, each family on the plot of land it owns privately, and some of us milk the cows we own and others open the stores they paid for with their own hard work, and our kids go to the school we support with taxes, and at the end of the week we gather up our produce and ship it off to Anchorage to a private wholesaler who cheats us like hell out of what we think we ought to get, but when times get tight, we borrow money from that wholesaler against our next crop.

The next paragraph explained what the Matanuska 'communists' did with their spare time, and mention was made of Flossie and her pet animals and Irishman Carmody at the airport who had saved his money to make a down payment on a 1927 plane which he was using as a cargo carrier to serve the gold mines way back in the hills. The mines were owned, Elmer said, by private prospectors, some of whom had been searching fruitlessly for fifty years.

It was the final paragraph that was so widely quoted in the running debate on the practicality of Matanuska; because of that first barrage of adverse comment by men like Harold Atkinson, most readers in the Lower Forty-eight considered the experiment a dismal failure. Of Atkinson and his fellow 'go-backs,' Elmer and Missy said: We know that when Columbus set out to discover America and ran into trouble, many of his crew advised

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him to turn back. When settlers headed for Oregon and California hit the great empty Plains and the hostile Indians, lots of them turned back. And whenever anything of importance has been tried on this earth, the fainthearted have turned back. How many goldminers in 1898 took one look at the Chilkoot Pass and turned back? Those who persevered found gold and built a new land. We're building a new land up here, and ten years from now Matanuska will be a thriving valley filled with big farms and healthy people and kids who wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Watch the workers and see. Don't listen to the 'go-backs.'

While Elmer was busy drafting his defense of Matanuska, LeRoy was having an exhilarating time in Palmer, where in the last days of his nineteenth year he was being introduced to two of the most exciting experiences a young man could have: girls and airplanes.

He first met

Lizzie

Carmody at a grocery store, where her red hair and Irish smile so captivated him that he furtively followed her home, discovering that she lived in a shack at the edge of the large flattened field which served as Palmer Airstrip. In the days that followed he learned that her father, Jake Carmody, owned one of the planes that serviced the mines tucked away in various canyons of the nearby Talkeetna Mountains. It was a small plane famous in aviation history, a Piper J-3, dubbed the Cub, with wings sprouting from above the pilot's head and in this instance an improvised enclosure for the cabin in which another person could sit. Its insides had been pretty well torn out so as to accommodate the maximum amount of freight for the trips into the mountains.

For some three weeks LeRoy could not decipher whether he hung around the Palmer strip to see 'Lizzie

Carmody or her father's airplane, but toward the end of that period, the latter won out. 'What kind of plane is this?' he asked one day as he sidled up to Carmody, and the Irishman said: 'A 1927 Survivor,' and when LeRoy asked what kind that was, Carmody showed the various dents and tears which symbolized his life as an Alaskan bush pilot: 'It's a Piper Cub that's learned to survive. That long scar, landin' in a spruce tree in a fog. This'n, landin' on a riverbank that turned out to be mud when I thought it was gravel. The big tear in the side, a spare dynamo busted loose from in back of my head when I landed too fast on a lake up in the hills.' The Cub showed so much damage that LeRoy said: 'It looks like flyin' is mostly tryin' to land,' and Carmody clapped him on the back: 'Son, you just learned all there is to know about avia-812

tion. Any damned fool can get a plane up in the air. Trick is to get it down.'

'Have you ever been in real danger?' LeRoy asked, and the bush pilot gave no reply; he simply pointed once again to the eight or nine heavy scars, each one of which represented a close brush with death. Awed, LeRoy said: 'You must be brave.”

'Nope. Just careful.' This seemed so contradictory, considering the condition of the Cub, that LeRoy had to ask: 'How can you be careful if you've had so many accidents?'

and Carmody burst into laughter: 'Son, you really cut down to the quick. I am careful.

I'm very careful never to crash before seein' a way to walk out alive. Any landin'

is the right one if you walk away.'

'This plane's a wreck,' LeRoy said. 'Why don't you fix it up?'

'It still flies. Anyway, I carry mostly freight.' He studied his battered antique and said: 'I think I've about had Alaska. I'm plannin' on buyin' a Cessna fourseater and doin' my flyin' in California, or some other place Outside.'

'Where's Outside?'

Carmody laughed: 'You newcomers call down there the Lower Forty-eight. Us born here call it Outside.'

'What will you do with this one? If you do buy a new plane.'

'Lookey here,' Carmody said, pointing to a bolt. 'When I'm through, I pull that bolt and whoosh! the whole thing falls apart.'

One day when Carmody was satisfied that LeRoy was a decent lad with a sincere interest in both Lizzie and airplanes, he asked, as he was about to climb down after a freight run into the mines: 'Son, you ever been up in an airplane?'

'No, sir.'

'Jump in,' and in his bare-bones Cub, Carmody took LeRoy on the kind of flight that can reorder a young man's perceptions. Rising slowly from the little dirt strip, he flew north along the front of the snow-covered Talkeetna Mountains, allowing his passenger to peer into lovely canyons that would normally have been hidden: 'You've never seen Alaska till you see it from the air.' Then he cruised over the gleaming Matanuska Glacier, then westward deep into the glens of the soaring Chugaches: 'You couldn't survive in Alaska without an airplane. They were made for each other.'

As they returned homeward LeRoy shouted: 'Over there! That's our place!' and Carmody dive-bombed the cabin three times before Hilda appeared at the door, apron over her 813

hands, and looked up to see her son screaming past, his blond head sticking out from the plane window.

ELMER'S IMPASSIONED DEFENSE OF MATANUSKA BROUGHT a flood of letters from the Lower Forty-eight, sixty percent containing messages of encouragement, the rest condemning him as a communist. Missy Peckham, who handled the mail for the Flatches, burned the latter and paraded the endorsements through the valley, winning applause for Elmer, but it was short-lived because of a sad affair which reminded the immigrants of the nature of life in any frontier settlement. Matt Murphy, delighted by the attention given him because of his adventures in old-time Alaska, often spent his days at the Flatch cabin, helping them build a wing in which hunters could sleep overnight, or staking out a path to the glacier that overhung the valley. He found special joy in sharing with Flossie her work with animals, and whereas her grizzly resented his presence and sometimes growled at him, Mildred the Moose saw in him one more friend and would sometimes walk considerable distances with him, nudging him along with her nose.

One day she had guided him toward the shore of the Knik River, and he told Flossie: 'I think she wants us to go see the George Lakes,' and with only this shadowy suggestion the old Irishman organized an expedition to one of the treasures of Alaska.

As the four Flatches and the Murphys crossed the icy Knik with their lunch baskets and climbed its left bank toward the snout of Knik Glacier, Matt utilized the rest periods for a description of what they were going to see: 'Way up there a closed-in valley. It ought to flow directly into the Knik, but the wall of the glacier blocks it off, so the backed up water forms a chain of three beautiful lakes, Upper, Inner and Lower Lake George. And there they stay locked up all through the cold weather, because the frozen glacier serves as a stopper.'

At this point the climbers resumed their progress to the prominence from which they would be able to look down upon the marvel that Murphy had promised them, but at the next halt he explained what would be happening one of these days: 'When warm weather gets here, the ice in the glacier barrier, it sort of melts. Water in the three lakes, now really one big lake more than a hundred and fifty feet deep, tremendous pressure you can be sure, it begins to seep right through the glacier wall and weaken it. Finally, one day in July the time comes when the pressure from the lake grows so intense,

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bang! the lake breaks through, the walls of the glacier explode, and you have a gorge six hundred feet wide and more than six hundred feet deep.'

'Will we see that?' Flossie asked, and he said: 'You never know when the break will come. Not many see it. But the gorge stays open about six weeks. The lakes empty.

And huge icebergs float down. Government engineers figured the flow. Two million seven hundred thousand gallons a second when the break comes. That's a lot of water.'

The Flatches had no concept of what they were to see when they reached the vantage point overlooking where the three lakes had been, but as Murphy led them to the top they could hear the roar of water below them, and he shouted: 'I think it broke through!'

and finally they saw this miracle of nature, the only instance of its kind in the world, in which an immense lake exploded into the face of a soaring glacier and tore away chunks of ice bigger by far then the St Mihiel on which they had come to Alaska.

Flossie was the first to speak: 'Look! That iceberg coming at us is bigger than our house!' then her brother said quietly: 'And look at the one behind,' but they all fell silent when the rushing lake water cut off a whole side of the glacier, a cathedral of ice that remained upright for a hundred yards, then toppled slowly onto its side as it felt the full force of the flood. It was so immense it did not twist like the others but in supreme majesty made its way down the turbulent chute.

Far down the course of the river the Flatches saw the final grandeur of this extraordinary performance; there, enormous icebergs, having run out of sufficient water to keep them afloat, perched like stranded white seabirds while the more placid water moved quietly past them. It would require weeks of bright summer sun to make them disappear.

'Does this happen every year?' Flossie asked as they were hiking home, and Murphy said: 'As far as I know. It's been happenin' every year since I first saw it.'

'How long ago was that?' the girl asked, and Matt said: 'About a score of years.

We came to Matanuska often in the old days. Huntin'. We knew then it was a choice spot. We knew good people would come to it one day.' And the old fellow cried: 'Now look who's comin' to meet us on this fine day!' And there came Mildred the Moose, stepping carefully along the path to greet the people she had grown to love. She was an admirable creature that sunny afternoon, bigger by far than a deer or a caribou, much heavier than her friend the grizzly, and awkward in the endearing way a thirteen-year old girl can be when her legs seem so long and uncoordinated.

And then, with the sun on her, she lurched forward as a 815

shot rang out from below. 'No!' Flossie screamed as she had that first day when her father had tried to shoot the moose, but as she ran forward, with Mildred still on her feet, there was a second shot, and the huge animal plunged to her knees, tried vainly to crawl forward toward the Flatches, and keeled over. She was still breathing, blood flecks spraying from her nostrils, but before Flossie could cradle her head in her arms, she died.

'You!' Matt Murphy shouted, and with surprising energy he started to run toward the two hunters, men apparently from Anchorage, judging from their expensive guns, but when they became aware that they had shot a tame moose, they scuttled off. Murphy, scandalized at their cruel behavior, chased after them, but he had covered less than a hundred yards when he collapsed, all at once and like the wall of the glacier, and while Flossie, distraught, tended her dead moose, Missy ran forward to care for her man lying on the rocky path.