Charles Laughton (57 page)

The Japanese screens are not pretty-pretty, but grave and comic, and some of them dazzling. I did not get to see Fujiyama, except when we left Tokyo we saw it in the blue distance from the plane, and not as Hokusai or Hiroshige saw it from the ground. And I always wanted to go to Alaska to see the polar bears and penguins and the northern lights.

When I was invited to read in Anchorage and Clear, I quickly accepted, but I saw none of these things – no penguins, there are no penguins in Alaska – no Polar bears, we were not far enough north – and no northern lights, because it was not winter, but light all night long. In summer, the light at night is a pale gentle blue.

One night there was a moon, and the colour of the sky behind the moon was a blue I had not seen before, save in a pretty girl’s eyes.

The first day there we went to a place called Portage where there is a glacier that was majestic enough, but there was more to follow. The next day we flew over the mountains to one of the outposts of our defences at Clear, Alaska.

Most everybody flies in Alaska. There are few roads. What roads there are get roughed up in the extreme cold of winter, and many of them are impassable in the spring thaws.

We, all of us, have developed a healthy habit of getting away for the weekend or for Saturday night at least. If you want to get away to fish or hunt in Alaska you fly – but that is not entirely true – when we flew to Clear we flew over the Alaska Railroad which is the only railroad there and runs between Anchorage and Fairbanks. The trip, which
takes
an hour and a half by plane, takes twelve hours by railroad, for the train stops at any fisherman’s request at the spot where he wants to fish and picks him up on the way back.

On our way to Clear, our pilot spotted some mountain goats high up on a cliff and went chasing them. I had to keep telling myself that he was far enough from the cliff, as he was used to judging distances in a plane. But I had to keep telling myself that. ‘There they go! There they go!’ said the pilot. He would turn around to tell me, and I would have to open my eyes because he was looking at me. There were moving specks of snow which must have been the goats. I hoped that he would not find any more. Then he spotted a moose. That wasn’t so bad because it was on flat land, although we went back two or three times at steep angles to take another look.

After the mountains (we had flown by Mt McKinley which is 20,300 feet high), the man-made site at Clear looked minuscule from the air – like a small canning factory. When we were on it, it was a humming city of the future with its vast machines – an H. G. Wells or Ray Bradbury nightmare. The reflector screens are the size of a football field. The corridors are big enough for large trucks to drive down – and they do!

This was the second time I had been among men on one of our far outposts. On both occasions, I noticed that they seemed to be in a solemn and kindly mood. I had been flattered that I had been asked to read to them. I found it hard to concentrate on reading, for I was thinking of them and their machines – and the moose and the bear and the wolves outside for hundreds and thousands of miles in the wilderness. I found it very hard to speak the jokes I have in my programme. I told them about the goats on the mountainside and made a movement with my hands of the plane zooming on its side – and every head in the audience moved with my hands. They knew all right. They laughed loudly – as I did after I got over the zooming. The pilot was in the audience, so we flew straight back the next morning – no tricks! I went to bed to rest up for the evening show in Anchorage.

The two fellows who were with me running the tour inquired into the frontier life of Anchorage while I was resting. From what they told me, there were a couple of bars not too far removed in spirit from the Malamute Saloon – in
The Shooting of Dan McGrew
. One thing the two fellows were very emphatic about – the girls weren’t gorgeous like Marlene Dietrich – that is to say the girls at the Malamute Saloon. The other girls at Anchorage looked good, if those who came backstage to see me were any sample. As they tell it to me – in the saloon – a guy
came
in who literally darkened the doorway. He was the size of a Kodiak bear. He had a voice like a gravel pit, and he leant over Bob Hulter and said, ‘Are you a bridger?’

‘No,’ said Bob.

‘Well, I’m a bridger,’ he said. He put out his hand and near mashed Bob’s hand – and Bob’s a hefty guy. He’s a big Swede. I can’t go to places like that – they spot me. They get overhospitable and I wouldn’t get out of the place without downing six or seven rounds – and I wouldn’t be able to see Anchorage after that, or do all the reading at night.

The audiences are great. They are building a community theatre and I had to break the ground for it with a spade that was still claggy with gold paint.

The people there must be the most hospitable people in the world, for they do not want to show you off to their friends. They are proud and want to show off to you the lives they lead in their state. So Stanley McCutcheon, who is a lawyer, and his son-in-law, Stewart, flew us into a lake in the ‘out-country’ where Stanley McCutcheon has a cabin.

The plane in which we had flown up to Clear was a wheel-plane that belonged to a small commercial line. But there are not many landing fields in Alaska and the planes which are privately owned are mostly float-planes, because they use as landing fields the multitude of lakes in that country. In winter when the lakes are frozen over, they change the pontoons for skis.

We flew up in two one-engine float-planes into the lake where Stanley has his cabin. At the take-off we had to rock backward and forward to change the angle of the wings, for Stanley said that we had an extra heavy load of gas. I think he was being a good host and not saying that he had an extra-heavy passenger. We did not succeed the first time and the other passenger had to be ditched and fetched later.

When we were over the cabin we circled it several times, as the day before they had had a bear with two year-old cubs around and the bear got menacing toward Stanley’s children. Stewart’s large calibre rifle had jammed and Stanley had had to shoot at it with a very light-calibre rifle. The bear had got away into the woods and Stanley was afraid that she might be waiting for us.

However, no bear – and down we came onto the lake. We had been given high-waders, and I found out why when we got there. We waded from the float of the plane to the shore. There were moose and bears – we didn’t see any wolves – and ducks and swans and arctic
terns
, which must be the most beautiful birds in the world. I had never hoped to see a bird whose flight is more beautiful than the flight of a seagull. The arctic tern has a black head and neck and a body of pure white feathers. The tail and wing feathers spread like a fan and they hover upright like humming birds. And there were swallows, the bluest swallows I have seen. The swallows were friendly and swooped around our heads and dived in front of us, and lighted on the ground a yard from our feet.

It is very silent there. And you hear the cries of the birds in perspective from the forest and over the lake. The approaching honk of swans and geese, and near – the cheerful chatter of the swallows.

Later in the day, we set off in the two float-planes. I was in Stanley’s plane, and he had arranged to meet Stewart on a lake set in a glacier. When we got near the glacier there was no sign of Stewart, and the rendezvous lake was frozen over. We were running out of gas. I think Stanley had not taken as much gas as usual since one of his passengers was overweight, and he was counting on getting a can from Stewart on the glacier lake. However, we were running out, so we had to land on another lake.

‘What a beautiful lake,’ I said. ‘What is it called.’

‘It is an unnamed lake,’ said Stanley. ‘Stewart will be worried.’

However, after foraging around, Stanley came grinning, saying that he had hit the jackpot. He was carrying a five-gallon can of gas which he had found in the only cabin, which was on the shore of the lake. I thought he was trying to josh me. I thought he knew it was there all the time because afterward I saw an aerial map of the area marked with black dots saying ‘Cabin with Gas.’ I was having far too good a time to be worried. I learned later that I was wrong. Stanley wrote me that he had been worried. ‘The nearest filling station was a two-week trek on foot through some of the wildest part of Alaska. Friends would have found us within two or three days, weather permitting, but Oh Brother, what headlines across the country in the meantime.’

We flew back to his cabin, and Stewart had not been worried. He said that he knew better than to worry about Stanley.

About nine o’clock one of them said, ‘What about dinner?’ We had brought no dinner. And I was wondering, ‘What about dinner?’ Three of them went off in a small boat leaving Stanley and me behind. In about half an hour they came back with a mess of rainbow trout. How good they were from those cold waters.

As they were setting off to go fishing, we heard shouts from the boat
and
ran to see what it was about. There were two bears – the young bears from the day before – out on a spit of land looking for duck eggs about fifty yards away from us. They headed the boat into the shore and yelled, and the bears went away. But Stanley had raised his rifle in case the bears charged. Then I knew why, when you went to the toilet about fifteen yards from the cabin, you always had to carry a gun. When the children go to the toilet (the children were not there that day), someone stands guard outside for them. Living the sort of life I do, I figured I should have been scared by this sort of thing, but I was not. I felt at home in the country of the big animals – I have to get back there! I was scared by the machines at Clear and the knowledge that somewhere in those buildings there was a button that someone might some day have to press.

While the others were out fishing, Stanley told me a story. His cabin was up the hill. The one we were in at the edge of the lake belonged to a trapper – an old-timer – called Tom Krause.

Tom Krause is a trapper and commercial fisherman, and a connoisseur of rocks. They say he is the best petrologist in Alaska. If anyone brings him a rock he can tell its mineral content by ‘the smell of it,’ as Stanley said. He has little ‘book-learning,’ but deep knowledge. He goes to his cabin and lives there by himself. Stanley is an old and treasured friend, but after three days of company Tom becomes irritable, and at the end of six days, impossible.

Stanley said to me that I wouldn’t believe this story. And that is a good way to begin any story. So this is the story of Tom and Sam, the moose.

It was in the wintertime, and there was twelve feet of snow. Tom had cleared the area in front of the cabin, and the moose was hanging about in the clearing. A moose finds it difficult to get around in deep snow, as it is not equipped with snow shoes. Every time Tom opened the door to go up the path to the chic sales, the moose charged – so Tom had to put on snow shoes, climb out of a back window and go to the toilet over deep snow, where the moose could not follow. And Tom had a Husky that he kept around for company, and to bark at moose and bears. But the dog fell for the moose and slept with him underneath the cache. So Tom lost his only protection. Outside every cabin in Alaska there is a food cache built up on high stilts with sheet metal from old gasoline cans nailed around the stilts so that the bears cannot get a grip to tear the cache apart for the food inside it.

After a few weeks of this, Tom got mad and figured he would settle the moose. He started throwing hunks of wood, but the moose would
not
go away. So he picked up a big log and crept up on the moose and bashed it over the head, and the moose leaned against the stilts of the cache, bleeding. And Tom retired to the cabin and began to feel sorry for the moose – so Tom fell in love with the moose too. And he began to gather together young willow trees – that is what moose eat. They call moose ‘wood-burners.’ Tom made little heaps of young willow trees and began to think of the moose as ‘Sam.’ However, this made his life very complicated and inconvenient, and he figured he had to get rid of Sam somehow. So he made a pile of willow trees in front of the cabin, another a mile away, and another two miles away to lure Sam. And he shut up the dog so that he wouldn’t follow his friend. So Sam went away after the willow trees and after a couple of days Tom let out the Husky. And the Husky went after the moose and brought him back. So Tom was stuck with Sam until the spring thaw. And then Sam went away.

Everyone who lives this sort of life lives, in winter, on moose meat, which is hung in the open under the cache because the hibernating bears are not around then. And the next fall it was getting time for Tom to bag a moose for his winter supply of meat. About fifteen yards from the edge of the lake there is a large birch tree, and Stanley was with Tom. And Stanley saw a big moose standing by the birch tree. Tom was carrying a gun. And Stanley said, ‘There’s your moose.’

And Tom said, ‘That moose doesn’t look to have particularly good meat. Its ribs are showing. And there will probably be another thaw and the meat will go bad anyway.’

And Stanley said, ‘I believe you think it is old Sam.’

And Tom said, ‘You’re darn right. I know it’s old Sam!’

And Stanley showed me a picture taken by Tom of old Sam and the Husky looking at him with loving eyes – and that proved the story, I guess.

After that, Stanley started talking to me about the winters in Alaska. There are only a few hours of daylight. He talked about the sounds in winter and particularly about the northern lights which stretch out sometimes like a curtain draped across the sky – red and green and blue. I asked him how he started the engine of a plane when it was forty below. He said he warmed up the engine with a blow torch, and that one day he had burned up a plane doing that. I said, ‘How did you get out of the lake?’

He said, ‘After five days somebody came after me.’ He also said, ‘Once a friend of mine couldn’t start his engine because the
temperature
was eighty below and he had to wait until it warmed up to sixty below before he could start it.’