Hatching Out

• AIDJEX – Caribou Station – January 1976

I’m walking on a ten-foot thick layer of pack ice, floating under the stars and the Aurora Borealis. The bottom of the Beaufort Sea is about two and a half miles below me. The constant drone of the diesel generator has faded into silence this far from camp. Polar bears are at home wandering out 500 miles away from the nearest land but I haven’t seen one recently.

The old Norwegian, Leaf, towed a sled wagon out to this spot with the snow cat and left it here for me. Upon reaching it I pulled out the fireman’s axe from the back of the wagon and began busting up a frozen puddle of fresh water that formed in this salty ocean through fisiling, a magic trick of physics. I shoveled broken shards of ice into the wagon. Within an hour the wagon was loaded, ready for Leaf to tow it back to camp.

The glow of the Aurora danced overhead and reflected off the snow dusted ocean surface. Indigenous cultures of the far north believe that the Aurora is the souls of their ancestors who choose to linger in the sky before departing the Earthly Realm. Some of the cultures believe the Aurora is also the souls of the whales and other living beings they hunt. In an ancient mythology revived by some contemporary mystical people, the Aurora is a channel for information passing through the sun from the center of galaxy to the consciousness of humanity and anything else that may happen to be conscious on Planet Earth such as other forms of life and perhaps even crystals and Mother Earth herself – the primal reality behind our perceived reality.

Some of these modern mystics are waiting for a shift toward a higher frequency vibration of human consciousness that may be facilitated by the cosmic energies entering the Earth’s magnetic field which cause the glowing ionization of the upper atmosphere in a great crown of light encircling the northern and southern polar regions.

I did not come here to this other-worldly place to commune with my deceased ancestors or to raise the vibration of my consciousness – I came for the money, and maybe to have a little adventure but mostly for the big bucks to be made constructing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline during a somewhat depressed US economy.

I overshot that target by several hundred miles north of where the pipeline construction was happening. Nonetheless, I was making enough money to send to my good friend and landlord, Jim, in Telluride, Colorado.

Time jump back to January 1975 – Asteroid Antiques – Telluride

Christmas and New Years were over, business had been very good for those couple of weeks but now the sleepy little mining town with the new ski area, went back to sleep and the odd assortment of old-timers and immigrant ski-bums, hippies, entrepreneurs and real-estate developers weren’t buying what my girlfriend and were selling, at least not in sufficient quantities to pay the rent on our little commercial space in the historic Sheridan Opera House.

It was decided – Joanne would take care of the shop while I hitch-hiked out find work with some friends who were running a portable sawmill near Cave Junction in the coastal mountains of southern Oregon. The last word I’d heard from them was that they were being pretty successful producing sellable lumber from the scrap trees that commercial loggers were leaving behind in their clearcuts.

On the Road Again…la la la…
Arriving in Cave Junction a few days later in a gentle drizzle, I got directions to Sunny Ridge from a “back to the Garden” looking kind of hippie couple. It wasn’t long walking up the Forest Service road before I caught a ride in a classic late 1940s Chevy pick-up, like the one Mr. Natural drove occasionally in the R. Crumb comics – the perfect vehicle to ride in the back of thru the thick mist of a redwood and cedar forest climbing up to the mountain ridge where, true to its name, the misty fog began to lighten as the sun broke thru. The ridge became an island floating in a cloud ocean with a solid sky blue sky and sunshine above.

Sunny Ridge was a picture book hippie commune with private cottages, communal bathhouse, dining hall, library/meeting house, art studios, workshop, kids palace, and bunkhouses all built from salvaged redwood and cedar timber and scrounged doors, windows and hardware from abandoned homesteads down in the valley. Located on an unpainted mining claim, its legal standing on these federal lands was that the people here were engaged in some sort of enterprise based on mineral extraction. There was a sluce box located in a small spring fed stream at the lower end of the property that could theoretically catch small flecks of gold if anyone ever bothered with it. The only mineral extraction actually going on was some people picking up bits of soapstone and shaping them into cute little pipes for smoking marijuana. They were nice enough to be traded or sold along with other finely crafted handwork items.

The vibe of freedom, peace and love was enchanting and stimulated creativity. There didn’t seem to be many rules except for people to respect each other and clean up after yourself. And the food was excellent. The women seemed to be in charge but the men helped. The secret ingredient in everything was time – it wasn’t just cooking, it was culinary artistry – and mostly homegrown or locally sourced meat and produce.

I would have stayed longer but the portable sawmill had broken down a while ago and my friends were looking for parts to fix it. They didn’t seem to be in a rush about getting it repaired and running. It was winter after all and nice just hang out in a wood heated cabin and be high on life. If I needed to make money, my friends suggested checking out Seattle.

A Chaplin in the Canadian Air Force and his wife picked me up somewhere south of Seattle. By the time we got into the city it was looking damp and cold outside of the warm and comfortable back seat of the car I was in. My ride was returning home to a military base in Canada. I looked at their gas station road map of western Canada and saw that they were going a good ways into British Columbia and by a highway junction on the main route to Alaska.

It was dark by the time we crossed into Canada. The boarder guard waved through as soon as he saw the Chaplin’s military ID, and was totally unconcerned about the passenger in the back seat who was trying his best to be asleep and invisible. The Canadian government was known to turn away young hitchhiking Americans with very limited financial resources. I was down to six US dollars. The Chaplin’s wife gave me ten Canadian dollars when they dropped me off at junction where we would part company. It was getting late, but there was still traffic on the highway and it wasn’t long before a man, a few years older than me, pulled over in his mid-sixties wide body American car. I had a ride Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.

He was in a hurry to get back to his job at a mine and also wanted to avoid turning his car off for very long so that it get cold and be difficult to start. We drove all through the night and the following night and kept driving until we got there, taking turns driving and sleeping. It was early in the morning when we drove through Whitehorse and, a few miles west of town, we said goodbye and I got out. He was turning north onto a small highway and I was continuing west.

Even though I hadn’t planned on hitchhiking to Alaska when I left Telluride, I was prepared for the cold. I put on both of my pairs of long underwear at a restaurant/gas station we’d stopped at the day before, I had good gloves, wool hat, sweater, down parka with hood, insulated Sorrel Boots (made in Canada) and a winter rated down sleeping bag. So, bring it on. After ten or fifteen minutes of standing around waiting for a car to come by, I began to realize how freaking cold it was. I pulled my sleeping bag out of my backpack and wrapped it around me as best as I could. I tried to sit on my backpack but it was pretty much empty now since I was wearing almost all of its contents, therefore not much to sit on. I huddled down into as much of a ball as I could make myself on the theory that a sphere is the most efficient shape for retaining warmth.

Maybe it was two or three hours by now still no cars, only a raven flying around and then landing in the middle of the road, taunting me with his peculiar raven sounds. How can this bird not be frozen solid walking around in his bare feet and bare beak. Maybe he was just keeping me company and offering encouragement. I smiled at him and he flew off. Within a couple of minutes a white van with California license plates approached and pulled over. I tried to stand up and couldn’t move my legs, only managing to fall over sideways and lay there. I thought this was pretty funny for some reason, maybe because I had been rescued and wasn’t going to die.

A woman got out of the van and helped me inside through the tail end door. There were no seats in back, just suitcases, boxes and various types of bags but all arranged in a way to create a space with blankets spread out where a person could lay down.

The young couple was returning from a visit with family in California to their homestead on the Tanana River. At some point along the trip before they picked me up, the van’s heater mostly stopped working. Rather than take the time to get it fixed, they had decided to deal with it after they were home. It was definitely warmer (somewhat less colder would be more accurate – the word warm did not apply to the situation) inside the van than outside. But I would have the opportunity to warm up soon enough.

A few miles before the US/Canada boarder, my rescuers warned me that we might be searched for illegal drugs and if I had anything, it should be well concealed, consumed or tossed out the window. I didn’t have anything. They did.

We came to a stop and presented our identification. A boarder officer opened the door behind the passenger’s seat. He survey the pile of boxes, suitcases and bags briefly and then selected a camera bag to inspect. Inside were twenty or more little 35 mm film canisters. He picked one, opened it, looked inside, smelled it and we were busted. I was ordered out of the van and into the building.

Several hours later, we all had our clothes back on after being strip searched, everything was packed back up, after having been thoroughly unpacked (minus the contents of the film canister and a quarter ounce of marijuana that the woman had tucked in her panties.) The District Attorney’s office had been contacted and declined to prosecute us for such a small amount of contraband. The boarder officers were allowed to impound the van because it had been used in a violation of customs law. The owners of the van paid the $150 fee to regain possession and we were back on the road, I was warm, and I was in Alaska!

After driving a few miles, the woman opened the glove compartment and removed its contents and then pulled out the interior liner. (I didn’t know they could be pulled out like that.) She untaped an item that was taped to the back side of the liner, carefully wrapped in foil and multiple ziplock bags. The boarder officers did not find the brick of hashish that was going to keep them high through winter and into the spring. If an officer would have found it, it was quite possible that it would have gone unreported as if it never existed. We all got high as we literally rocked and rolled along miles of newly built highway that was broken into short sections of uneven pavement caused be the melting and freezing of the ground beneath it. We stopped in Tok for gas and then they let me out at the junction of the highway heading southwest to Anchorage. They were continuing northwest on the highway to Fairbanks. I wish I could remember their names and stayed in touch. They invited me to visit them and gave me their address and directions to their homestead but I never did.

I went into a restaurant/motel at the junction to see if I might find a ride with someone who was going to be driving through the night, and also maybe grab some food from an unfinished plate before it was cleared off the table of a departing customer. There weren’t many people this late at night. I ended up sitting at the bar. The bartender, Vic, asked me if I wanted anything to drink. He brought me the water I asked for and a shot of pretty smooth whiskey. He asked me if I was looking for a job and told me he needed to hire some help. I told him I was looking for work on the pipeline. He brought me some warm fried potatoes and explained that a lot of his employees had quit to go work on the pipeline (which was paying more than he could afford to pay.)

Vic offered me a room in the motel for the night, no charge. He was closing up for the night and said he’d stop by in a little while after I’d had a chance to shower and relax, and we could talk if I wanted to. Vic was gay, I’m not but I was open to new experiences. Early the next morning I was back on the road and caught a ride that was going all the way to Anchorage. I got out in Palmer at the junction of the highway going north to Wasilla.

Posted September 16, 2024

My friends, Bob and Linda worked at First Lead Mountaineering, sewing backpacks and other mountain gear in a building on Colorado Boulevard (aka Main Street) in Telluride. Once the ski area opened, they could read the writing on the real estate signs and by the summer of 1974 they were on the road to Alaska. The last I heard, they were building a log cabin near Wasilla. I figured Wasilla had to be a pretty small town and it wouldn’t be too hard to track them down.

It wasn’t actually a town or even a village, it was a gas station with a very small cafe that also had the post office in one corner with a couple dozen post office boxes. None of the 3 or 4 people in the cafe/gas station/post office knew Bob and Linda but one of them said he had noticed a green van with Colorado license plates driving on a road into a new subdivision a little ways out of “town”.

It wasn’t long walking out on that road when I heard a vehicle approaching from behind me. It was Bob and Linda. After a couple of miles we pulled up to the log cabin they built from lodgepole pines that had been cut down when the developers of put in the road to access the subdivision lots, leaving the fallen trees all along the roadside, conveniently available for building material or firewood.

It was the perfect Alaska homestead cabin of one’s imagination, not more than twenty by thirty feet with a sleeping loft at one end, heated with a wood burning cast iron cookstove. Built during the brief summer months just in time to hunker down for the long winter. A winter’s supply of food, large glass canning jars of various dry beans, shelled nuts, whole grains, honey, dried fruit and other basic essential food items, and plastic or metal mouse proof 5 gallon buckets and cans with tight fitting lids for stockpiling more of the basic staple items.

Bob shot a moose in the fall, patiently waiting for it to graze its way under the tree where he and Linda would hoist it up it up and butcher it. The smoke house had already been built in anticipation of making moose jerky. After visiting with Bob and Linda for a couple of day, I needed to get on with it and get one of those high paying jobs with the pipeline. Bob informed me that most of the hiring was happening in Fairbanks, three hundred miles further north. They sent me off with a week’s supply of moose jerky and wholewheat bread rolls made from grain that they ground themselves using a hand cranked grain mill. Seriously hard-core beautiful people.

Bob gave me a ride out to the highway once there was enough twilight for a person to be seen from a distance standing on the roadside. I caught a ride pretty quickly with some Jesus Christ Superstar hipster style born-again evangelizing Christians who were part of a ministry operating the Bread of Life bakery in Palmer. They were making the morning bread and doughnut delivery to someplace several miles up the road, the first piece of my day’s journey to the coldest town in North America. I wouldn’t be riding with them long enough for them to save my soul, so they gave the phone number and address of their friends in Fairbanks who were operating a shelter in the basement of a church.

A couple rides later, past scenery that has to be witnessed firsthand to be believed (that could do way more to convince me of the awesomeness of God than quoting bible verses) I made a timely arrival in Fairbanks, dark already but not at all too late to show up at the church in hopes of finding a warm bed for the night.

Fairbanks was experiencing a flood of people, including me, coming up from the lower 48 looking for work. This quiet, quaint little church graciously opened its basement door to the newcomers. It was a very nicely appointed basement, inviting and warm. Cots were lined up along the walls of the main room which adjoined the church kitchen. People were finishing up with dinner but there was still plenty left for late arrivals.

I sat at the long table eating while most people were picking up their empty plates and helping clean up. A young man approached me and asked if I’d like to join the Bible study group that would be starting shortly in an adjoining room. I politely declined and he continued to encourage me to join the group as soon as I finished eating. I told him that I was tired and wanted to go straight to bed after I finished eating. Fortunately, the study group was ready to start and he was called away.

I washed my face and brushed my teeth in the bathroom. At my previously assigned bed, I undressed down to my long underwear and got into the covers. The lights were still on in the room since a few people were still up and moving around, so I got a book out of my back pack, opened it to the bookmark and continued reading. At some point the Bible study group ended and more people were coming back into the main room. The person who invited me to the study group saw me reading in bed and approached me.

“You told me you were too tired to join our Bible study but here you are awake and reading a book.”
“I am tired, but the lights are still on and reading helps me fall asleep.”
“What is that book you’re reading?”
“Damien, by Herman Hesse.”
“What’s it about?” he asked in a somewhat accusatory tone.
I was suddenly feeling very tired and sleeping, and not wanting to have this conversation. How do I explain this rather complicated story to him? I didn’t have to – he wasn’t actually interested.
“The Bible is the only book worth reading and you missed an opportunity to learn…” He continued on getting more agitated as he spoke. He informed me that the book I was reading was Satanic and I was probably possessed by Satan which is the real reason I didn’t want to attend the Bible study.

There were fewer people in the room now and those who were, seemed to not to notice the person who was becoming hostile towards me. Not towards me exactly – the hostility was directed at Satan who he perceived to me inside of me and inseparable from me. He was ordering me to get out of this Holy Place. I told him I would leave first thing in the morning please. He was going to call the police if I didn’t leave immediately. Other people in the room were probably aware of the conversation but deferring to this person’s authority in the matter and not intervening on my behalf. It was not terribly late, maybe nine or ten PM but it was also something like minus 40 degrees outside. I could have let him call the police and probably spend a warm night in jail and be released the next morning, maybe even get a complimentary breakfast. But my presence in this church basement sanctuary seemed to be freaking out this person, which was starting to freak me out. I got dressed, packed up and left.

(At this point I could digress and go back some years to earlier encounters with evangelizing Christians but we need to get back to the ice station soon. Something is going on there that I need to explain to you.)

The church was just a short walk back to the main road I came in on. I remembered passing the University of Alaska a few miles before arriving in Fairbanks and caught a ride back out there. The campus was very quiet at this time of night and the doors of the dormitory were locked, with no student coming in or out that I could slide in with. Walking around the building looking for possibly a service door that might be unlocked, I discovered a snow and ice free patch of dry concrete where a ventilation fan was blowing out warm air from inside the building creating a temperate micro-climate in the depths of arctic winter. The warmed area was easily big enough for me to stretch out and be comfortable with my sleeping bag and pad. This was the first time I saw the Aurora Borealis. It was mesmerizing and difficult to close my eyes and go to sleep but I was warm enough and so happy to see such an amazing sight.

The next morning people were moving about campus even though it was more dark than light. I found my way into the Student Center building strategically located in the middle of the university with doors on all sides so that you could easily enter from any direction and exit from any other direction, and warm up while passing through or find a comfortable chair and just hang out for a while. Somehow I had missed this building last night otherwise I would have certainly checked it out and probably fallen asleep on one of the many couches – but then I would have not taken in the most amazing light show.

Back in Fairbanks people from all over the country were lining up at various union halls to sign up for jobs on the pipeline. Some of the lines were two or three blocks long. After a number of inquiries with persons in various lines I got in the line for carpenters. A couple of hours later I made it into the building, a notable feat of standing rewarded with interior warmness. The woman at the desk informed me that I was in the wrong line. I was the line to get my “B” card but I needed to get a “C” card at another location before I could move up the alphabet to B, and then, I assumed, stand in another line for an A card. All the lines were out of the buildings and down the blocks. The process seemed designed to weed out any people who couldn’t manage to stand around outside for hours in minus forty degree weather.

I met a friendly person in line who invited me to spend the night in a hotel room that he and some friends were renting. When I entered the room, there were multiple times more people sleeping or getting ready for bed than the maximum allowed occupancy. The camaraderie was wonderful but I did not return for another night in the sardine can.

I was not excited about starting my morning standing in more lines, and, since the hotel was near the University, I went there instead. While wandering around in the student center building, I discovered an employment bulletin board listing a job offering as a cook in the school cafeteria. They were desperate because their old employees were taking higher paying jobs with the pipeline. so my work experience at the Village Delicatessen one summer in Snowmass at Aspen and few months cooking at the Floradora Restaurant in Telluride qualified me for the job.

University campuses were great places for young nomads to blend in at take advantage of the facilities. While taking a shower at the gym. I met Richard and his brother Bob, my old roommates from my first winter in Telluride. They just got hired as carpenters and were going to be heading out to a pipeline camp in a couple of days. I wasn’t making as much money at my new job as they would be but it was double the rate I was making as a cook previously. Besides the free food I could eat at work, I was able to couch surf in the dormitory lounge rooms and at the student center. I’d fall asleep with a book over my face or a notebook and pen in my lap, and my backpack nearby but not in plain sight (which was significantly larger than a normal student backpack.

A couple of science/math students let me sleep in their dorm room for a few nights and were excited to show me a computer in the basement of one of the buildings that was networked to other computers so that they could access research papers from connected universities and government science organizations all over the country. It wasn’t until two decades later that I realized I had seen the internet in it’s infancy – which reminds me that I need to get back to where this story started a few pages ago.

“Cook wanted for research camp at sea on the polar ice. $7.00 per hour, 70 hours per week with overtime, meals and accommodations included. Arctic Research Laboratory, Point Barrow.” The new notice on the employment bulletin board grabbed my attention. I’d been working in the cafeteria for only a month but this was an opportunity to make a lot more money with the same hourly rate but a lot more hours and maybe an actual bed to sleep on instead of couches and lounge chairs. The woman at the personnel office didn’t have much additional information to say about the job other than I was hired and to come back to her office in the morning to pick up my plane ticket to Barrow.

There was/is a stuffed polar bear in a glass case at the Fairbanks Airport. In less than a year, I would see this same polar bear again through fresh eyes opened wide to the wonders of Life on Earth and the cosmic dance of space, time and consciousness.

My face is always glued to the window next to my seat on any airplane flight where there is something to see out there. Flying north out of Fairbanks over the Brooks Mountains was something to see. At the airport in Barrow, a young man about my age with long dark hair and a plausible mustache recognized me as the person he was sent to pick up probably due to my look of “Where the hell am I?” He drove me a mile or so out of the town/village to the northern most point in Alaska, where the laboratory was located.

The laboratory was once a research outpost of the US Navy. The Navy turned it over to the University of Alaska. My new friend (can’t remember his name, maybe Michael, his father was an admiral in the Navy) carried my backpack for me and I followed him into a one story building to what looked like the front desk of a hotel, which it kind of was. I was checked into a nice room, informed about meal times and told to make myself at home in the lounge/recreation room. And, someone would let me know when I was flying out, in a couple of days probably depending on the weather and logistics – flying five or six hundred miles further north out over, and landing on, the frozen Beaufort Sea, the part of the Arctic Ocean between the north coast of Alaska and the northwestern most coast of Canada.

The next day I was brought to another building when I was issued a set of full-on arctic gear – heavy-duty down coat with wolf fur lining around the hood, insulated pants, mittens, long underwear, socks, white “moon boots” that were clownish in size and the thickest down sleeping bag I had ever seen. The following day I loaded everything including myself into the airplane parked on the laboratory’s airstrip. It was an R4D, the Navy’s designation for what is more commonly known as a DC-3, a World War Two era transport plane that was also very popular in the early days of commercial air travel. It could seat up to 32 passengers but this one only had six or eight seats that were spartan in design, made from aluminum tubing and interwoven seatbelt material. The rest of the space on the plane was given over to cargo.

Frozen ocean and low clouds were not much to look at but after a few hours we made a big circle around a cluster of tiny day glow orange cubes and other objects half scattered about and others arranged in a linear order. We were landing at Big Bear, the main camp of the Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment (AIDJEX). The bright orange cubes were prefabricated insulated wood frame/plywood panels assembled into huts measuring about twelve feet by sixteen feet and eight feet tall. There were also some red Quonset shaped huts made out of sturdy aluminum framework with insulated nylon tent material in thick panels that laced together on the outside and inside of the tubular framing. Other assorted uninsulated tents and piles of boxes, and then no other signs of humans or pretty much any life for hundreds or thousands of miles.

I’m replacing the most popular guy at the station, a seasoned navy veteran past retirement age, Matt Valley, who will be flying out on the plane I flew in on – the guy cooking everyone breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks seven days a week for a crew of about 25 people from several different countries.

There are a meteorological team of graduate students from the University of Washington, ocean scientists from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, and polar ice scientists from various places. A Canadian crew of four including the mechanic who fly the Dehaviland Twin Otter, a cool airplane capable of taking off and landing on short runways, Ruby, a sixty + year old grandmother, pilot/mechanic of small Bell helicopter. And support personnel from Norway, Denmark and New Zealand, and me.