Alaska (146 page)

LeRoy Flatch, now a captain in the Air Force, was urged by his superior, General Shafter, to remain in that service, with assured promotions to major and lieutenant colonel: 'After that it depends on the impression you make on your superiors, but I have confidence you could be a general one of these days . . . if you get yourself some education.' Despite similar recommendations from his fellow officers, LeRoy opted to retire so that he could resume his career as one of the leading bush pilots, and in pursuit of this ambition he 886

decided to apply his bonus money as down payment on a used Gull-wing Stinson fourseater, total cost $10,000, whose former owner had been a mechanical genius. The plane, as he modified it, had both wheels and skis, permanently attached, which meant that Nate could take off, wheels down, fly to some snow-covered field high in the mountains, activate a hydraulic system, and retract the wheels through a slit in the middle of the big wooden skis. On the return home he could take off on skis, punch the hydraulic button, and feel the wheels come down through the slits. Of course, since the system was fixed, he could no longer attach pontoons for the summer lakes. So, to ensure maximum flexibility, he also bought an updated version of his old Waco YKS-7 which had pontoons, but he was shocked by the price increase. He had paid $3,700 for his first Waco, $6,300 for its replacement, which he kept on a lake near his cabin.”

But he now had a wife, and the former Sandy Krickel, accustomed to the free and open life of the Aleutians, especially the field trips with her father to isolated islands like Lapak, did not look with favor on being cooped up in a Matanuska cabin with her in-laws.

Matanuska had proved such a signal success, despite the early negative publicity, that it seemed as if half the people who came to Alaska wanted to settle in the valley, which meant that LeRoy and Sandy could find nothing suitable. Sandy suggested acquiring some land up toward the glacier and building their own home, but LeRoy pointed out that with the purchase of two planes he could not swing a house too.

'Why not buy just one plane?' she asked, and he said firmly: 'Wheels, skis, pontoons, tundra tires, a guy like me has to have them all,' so the possibility of a house vanished.

At this point an old friend, or rather four old friends, helped him make a radical decision, one with which he was going to be quite happy. Tom Venn of Seattle, with his R&R ventures prospering in the peacetime business resurgence, was eager to reestablish himself at Venn's Lode at the side of the great glaciers' issuing out of Denali: 'I want to spend more time there. So does Lydia. And the young ones, Malcolm and Tammy, insist. So, LeRoy, I want you to fly the stuff in and more or less look after the place when we're gone.'

'I'm a pilot, not a real estate agent,' LeRoy said brusquely, and Venn said: 'So you are. But I think that in the years ahead, bush flying is bound to center on some spot well north of Anchorage. Competition from the big planes will kill you if you stay in Matanuska.'

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Since Venn had proved many times over that he had an acute business sense, LeRoy had to listen, and he attended carefully to what the older man said as they spread before them maps showing central Alaska: 'It's not badly named, this stretch between Anchorage and Fairbanks. ”The Railbelt,”because the railroad, such as it is, ties it all together. This is where the vitality of Alaska will focus in the future, and it's where you've got to focus now.' With an imperative finger Venn stabbed at the Lode: 'Our place is over here by the mountains. Matanuska, your place down here, is too far away for you to service us properly. Fairbanks is way too far north. But here in the middle is a delightful little town, Talkeetna, named after the mountains.

Within easy distance to our place. Lots of mines in the area needing flights. Lots of lakes with one or two cabins along the shore needing groceries. The railroad runs through, but what keeps it good, the highway doesn't. Talkeetna stands off to one side. Quiet. Frontier.'

'You make some good points,' LeRoy said, and the wily businessman concluded: 'I've saved the most compelling for last. Move to Talkeetna and I'll finance your two planes, no interest.'

'Talkeetna has just become my headquarters,' LeRoy said. Then he reflected: 'You know, Mr. Venn, after you've been an Air Force captain in charge of big planes, you start to think big and you want to make something of your life. A wife and all. The best thing I can visualize, a real good bush pilot, master of this whole frontier,'

and he spread his hands over the Railbelt, which would henceforth be his terrain, its remote fields, its whiteouts, its hidden lakes, its storms, its wonder.

Snapping his fingers, Venn rented a car and together they drove the eighty drab miles toward the sleepy, false-fronted, wooden-housed town of Talkeetna, population about one hundred, and during the trip LeRoy was apologetic for the bleakness of the land, but as they left the main highway for the Talkeetna cutoff they climbed a short hill, from the top of which there was a superb view of the great Denali range, high and white and severe, the guardian of the arctic, and the sight was so majestic, and so rare considering the clouds that usually prevented any view, that the two men halted the car, parked at one side, and luxuriated in this spectacular revelation of the Alaskan heartland: 'Looks like the mountains are sending you an invitation, LeRoy,' and the young veteran caught a reinforcing glimpse of what life could be like in this area during his mature years.

But even as they sat there on this day that seemed so 888

perfect, a weather front began to scud in from Siberia at a furious speed, and within minutes the mountains were lost, and LeRoy was reminded that in moving his operations to Talkeetna, he was taking on a whole new set of challenges. He would still have to fly to remote lakes where old men lay dying or young women were preparing to give birth, and he would as always run the risk of being caught in sudden storms, but off to the northwest would rise that tremendous range of snow-capped mountains, and if he were to do a real job of flying, he would have to master them: land on skis at eight thousand feet to deliver and pick up mountain climbers, fly at sixteen thousand feet to scout the flanks of great Denali to locate where the dead bodies lay. It was the kind of flying a bush pilot not only accepted as a challenge but sought.

As the great mountains disappeared, those that would in the years ahead be his white beacons, he said quietly: 'I'll do it,' and Venn said: 'You'll never be sorry,' and the switch to Talkeetna with its earthen strip and convenient nearby lakes was done.

Sandy did not find a house they could afford, but with the loan from the Venns she and her husband were able to build one, and when they were ensconced it was she who volunteered to look after Venn's Lode while her husband did his flying. It was also she who purchased what she called 'this neat little radio job,' on which she could talk to her husband while he was flying out to some remote site or hurrying home ahead of a storm.

The move to Talkeetna was one of the best things LeRoy Flatch ever did, for it introduced him to the heartland of Alaska, the Railbelt that bound the major cities together.

As an aviator he had previously been aware of the railroad only as a line of life-saving tracks to be followed when visibility was otherwise nil, but now, with daily trains stopping at Talkeetna, he occasionally had the opportunity to ride north to Fairbanks.

Then he appreciated the superlative job his Alaskans had done in building this northernmost railbed. And he was especially pleased with the exceptional beauty that enveloped the land during a few trembling weeks in late August and September.

Then shrub alders turned a flaming gold, blueberry bushes a fiery red, while stately spruce provided a majestic green background against the pristine, icy white of distant Mount Denali. It was Alaska at its best, and LeRoy told his wife: 'You can see it only from the train. Looking down from a plane . . . just a blur,' and she replied: 'From wherever I stand, it looks pretty good.'

But later, when they flew to the Lode to dine with the 889

Venns, they learned that others had quite different dreams of what Alaska might become.

There's a lot of loose talk beginning to circulate,' Tom Venn said after dinner, 'about this crazy idea of statehood for Alaska.' He studied the two young people before him and asked: 'Do you support such nonsense?'

Since his question practically demanded a negative response, the best Sandy Flatch could do was temporize. Vaguely but not passionately in favor of statehood, she voiced an opinion which would be heard much in forthcoming months: 'I wonder if we have a big enough population?'

'We do not!' Venn said firmly. 'How about you, LeRoy?'

Since he still owed the Venns for the two planes and his house, and was dependent upon them for much of the business which kept his one-man company afloat, he, too, deemed it wise to be evasive, but in his case he believed rather strongly in the military judgment he now issued: 'Alaska's principal value to the United States, perhaps its only value, is to be a military shield in the arctic. With our limited resources we could never defend this territory against Asia. And with Russian communism on the march everywhere, they might be coming at us at any moment.'

'You've hit one nail on the head,' Venn said enthusiastically, but then he turned to his wife: 'Tell them the even bigger idea they missed, Lydia,' whereupon she entered the conversation with considerable vigor: 'My father saw it in the old days. I see it now. Alaska will never have the people or the power or the finances to operate as a free state, like the others. It must depend on help from the Lower Forty-eight.'

'And that means what it's always meant,' her husband broke in. 'Seattle. We can assemble the money from the other states. And when we have it, we've always known what to do with it.'

'The point is,' Lydia said persuasively, 'my family, for example, we've always tried to do what's right for Alaska. We look after the people up here as if they were members of our own family. We help educate them. We defend their rights in Congress. And we treat their natives far better than they do themselves.'

For the better part of two hours the two Venns hammered away at the doctrine that had become almost sacred in Seattle: that statehood for Alaska would be wrong for the people of Alaska, wrong for the nation at large, wrong for the natives, wrong for industry, wrong for the general future of the area, and, although Venn never said so openly, not even at home, terribly wrong for Seattle. The two Flatches, who had entered this chance discussion with no strong convictions, 890

left the Venns' house fairly well convinced that statehood was something to be avoided.

THE SECOND FLATCH FAMILY, FORTIFIED BY ITS Education at the university, took the other side in this battle. Flossie Coop had only vague and generally unpleasant memories of Minnesota, even though she had been ten during her last year in that state. 'It was bitter cold,' she told Nate, who had never visited the Outside. 'Much worse than Matanuska. And we never had enough food. And Father had to poach to get us a deer now and then. And I left it with no regrets, none at all.'

'What's your point?'

'So I was what they call disposed to like Alaska. For me it was freedom and enormous vegetables and a glacier right up the valley and a tame moose. It was excitement, and a new world being born, and great neighbors like Matt Murphy and Missy Peckham, and the feeling that you were taking part in history.' She stopped, tears came to her eyes, and she leaned over to kiss her husband: 'And what you did in the war.'

Suddenly embittered, she rose and stalked about the cabin: 'And what my old man did building that road. And the way LeRoy flew his airplanes everywhere in all kinds of weather. People have the nerve to ask me if we're ready for statehood? We were ready the day I stepped off that Sir.

Mihiel, and we're a lot readier now.'

Nate Coop did not require his wife's surprising histrionics. Alone he had spied out the enemy on Lapak Island. Sometimes alone he had spied on Adak, Amchitka, Attu and Kiska. He rarely spoke of his adventures and never of the death of Captain Ruggles, one of the finest men he had known, but he did feel that from these experiences, and from his years as a miner in the heart of the territory, he knew something about what Alaska was and what its potential could be. He was for statehood. Men like him and his fatherin-law working on the Alcan Highway and his brother-in-law flying those planes, they had earned statehood and a whole lot more. He rarely entered into the public discussions that were beginning to spring up across the territory, but if questioned, he left no doubt as to his basic opinion: 'I'm for it. We got the brains to run things.'

When peace came to Matanuska it modified the life of the elder Flatches very little.

They continued to live in their original cabin, and even during the time they had to share it with LeRoy and his wife they felt no inconvenience, mainly because each of them was outdoors a great deal. Because 891

Elmer's broken legs did not heal easily or strongly, the old man could not resume his life as a hunting guide for parties of rich men out of Oregon and California, and he was grateful when young Nate volunteered to replace him. There was trouble when they told Flossie of their plans, for she said: 'I want nothing to do with hunters who kill animals,' but Nate said: 'All you have to do is feed them,' and he encouraged her to start a section of the holding in which she kept orphaned animals and those wounded by careless shots.

It was during one of these hunts that Nate first felt emboldened to reveal openly his desire for statehood. He was guiding three well-to-do Seattle sportsmen in the Chugach Mountains; they had wanted to camp out in the old tent-and blanket style, and rarely had he worked with a team which better exemplified the meaning of sportsmanship, for each man carried his full load of gear, each washed dishes in turn, and each chopped wood. They were a notable group, and on the third night, after the work had been done, one of them, a banker who had helped Tom Venn's Ross & Raglan finance recent expansion in Alaska and who had accepted enthusiastically Venn's interpretation of Alaskan history, said to his companions: 'It would be a shame to spoil this wilderness with some expensive nonsense like this statehood folly they're talking about. Keep this as the paradise it is.'