One man’s wilderness Read online

  Praise for One Man’s Wilderness:

  “Richard Proenneke, an emigre from Iowa to Alaska, kept a journal during the time he was fulfilling his dream of living in an altogether undeveloped part of Alaska. Parts of that journal have been made into a book by Sam Keith, along with colored photos that prove Alaska is certainly one of, if not the, most beautiful places anywhere.”

  —Boston Globe

  “One Man’s Wilderness is the best modern piece of prose about Alaska, the one that gives the truest picture of what living in the bush today is like for the lone individual.”

  —Anchorage Daily News

  “Proenneke answered Robert Service’s call of the wild. His journal forms the text of this handsome book, and his sparkling color slides illustrate it with a beauty that tugs at your heart and sets your heels to itching just a little. You owe yourself the pleasure of this book.”

  —Biloxi (Mississippi) Sun Herald

  “It is soul reading—the simplicity of a man’s inner feelings stated in terms which leave no misunderstandings. . . . A classic of its kind.”

  —Lansing (Michigan) State Journal

  “A simply written book. . . . I finished it in just a few nights, and was sorry when I did.”

  —Gary (Indiana) Post-Tribune

  “Many of us will never realize the dream of such an escape from our hectic, complex life to that of the solitude of the wilderness. But in the pages of this book we can share with a man who lived his dream. The book is certain to bring much pleasure to anyone who loves the outdoors.”

  —Portsmouth (Ohio) Times

  “This is the record of a man in our own time who went into the bush. It is the story of a dream shared by many, fulfilled by few, brought into sharp focus by the beautiful color photographs and the simple account of Proenneke’s life.”

  —Burlington (Vermont) Free Press

  “A gorgeous picture story of one man’s adventure in the remote Twin Lakes area, where he built a cabin and overcame nature’s challenges.”

  —Cleveland (Ohio) Plain Dealer

  One Man’s Wilderness

  One Man’s Wilderness

  AN ALASKAN ODYSSEY

  By Sam Keith from the Journals

  and Photographs of Richard Proenneke

  Text © by Sam Keith and Richard Proenneke

  Photographs © by Richard Proenneke

  Book compilation © 1999 by Alaska Northwest Books®

  An imprint of Graphic Arts Books

  P.O. Box 56118, Portland, OR 97238-6118

  Thirty-second Alaska Northwest Books® printing 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Proenneke, Richard

  One man’s wilderness : an Alaskan odyssey / by Sam Keith ; from the journals and photograph collection of Richard Proenneke. - 26th anniversary ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Anchorage : Alaska Northwest Pub. Co. [1973]

  ISBN 978-0-88240-513-1

  1. Proenneke, Richard—Diaries. 2. Pioneers—Alaska—Twin Lakes Region (north of Lake Clark)—Diaries. 3. Twin Lakes Region (Alaska)—Description and travel. 4. Twin Lakes Region (Alaska)—Pictorial works. 5. Frontier and pioneer life—Alaska—Twin Lakes Region 6. Wilderness survival—Alaska—Twin Lakes Region I. Keith, Sam. II. Title.

  F912.T85P76 1999

  917.98’4-dc21

  98-27704

  CIP

  Designer: Elizabeth Watson

  Map: Gray Mouse Graphics

  Illustrator: Roz Pape

  Photographer: Richard Proenneke

  Cover Photos: Richard Proenneke

  Printed in the United States of America

  Preface

  Although Dick Proenneke came originally from Primrose, Iowa, he will always be to me as truly Alaskan as willow brush and pointed spruce and jagged peaks against the sky. He embodies the spirit of the “Great Land.”

  I met Dick in 1952 when I worked as a civilian on the Kodiak Naval Base. Together we explored the many wild bays of Kodiak and Afognak Islands where the giant brown bear left his tracks in the black sand, climbed mountains to the clear lakes hidden beyond their green shoulders, gorged ourselves on fat butter clams steamed over campfires that flickered before shelters of driftwood and saplings of spruce.

  It was during these times that I observed and admired his wonderful gift of patience, his exceptional ability to improvise, his unbelievable stamina, and his consuming curiosity of all that was around him. Here was a remarkable blending of mechanical aptitude and genuine love of the natural scene, and even though I often saw him crawling over the complex machinery of the twentieth century, his coveralls smeared with grease, I always envisioned him in buckskins striding through the high mountain passes in the days of Lewis and Clark.

  If a tough job had to be done, Dick was the man to do it. A tireless worker, his talents as a diesel mechanic were not only in demand on the base but eagerly sought by the contractors in town. His knowledge, his imagination, and his tenacity were more than stubborn machinery could resist.

  His quiet efficiency fascinated me. I wondered about the days before he came to Alaska.

  While performing his duties as a carpenter in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he was stricken with rheumatic fever. For six months he was bedridden. It kept him from shipping out into the fierce action that awaited in the Pacific, but more than anything else, it made him despise this weakness of his body that had temporarily disabled him. Once recovered, he set about proving to himself again and again that this repaired machine was going to outperform all others. He drove himself beyond common endurance. This former failing of his body became an obsession, and he mercilessly put it to the test at every opportunity.

  After the war he went to diesel school. He could have remained there as an instructor, but yearnings from the other side of his nature had to be answered. He worked on a ranch as a sheep camp tender in the high lonesome places of Oregon. As the result of a friend’s urging and the prospect of starting a cattle ranch on Shuyak Island, he came to Alaska in 1950.

  This dream soon vanished when the island proved unsuitable for the venture. A visit to a cattle spread on Kodiak further convinced the would-be partners that, for the time being at least, the Alaska ranch idea was out. They decided to go their separate ways.

  For several years Dick worked as a heavy equipment operator and repairman on the naval base at Kodiak. He worked long, hard hours in all kinds of weather for construction contractors. He fished commercially for salmon. He worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service at King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula. And though his living for the most part came from twisting bolts and welding steel, his heart was always in those faraway peaks that lost themselves in the clouds.

  A turning point in Dick’s life came when a retired Navy captain who had a cabin in a remote wilderness area invited Dick to spend a few weeks with him and his wife. They had to fly in over the Alaska Range. This was Dick’s introduction to the Twin Lakes country, and he knew the day he left it that one day he would return.

  The return came sooner than he expected. He was working for a contractor who was being pressured by union officials to hire only union men. Dick always felt he was his own man. His philosophy was simple: Do the job you must do and don’t worry about the hours or the conditions.

  Here was the excuse Dick needed. He was fifty years old. Why not retire? He could afford the move.

  “Get yourse
lf off the hook,” he told the contractor. “That brush beyond the big hump has been calling for a long time and maybe I better answer while I’m able.”

  That was in the spring of 1967.

  He spent the following summer and fall in the Navy captain’s cabin at Twin Lakes. Scouting the area thoroughly, he finally selected his site and planned in detail the building of his cabin. In late July he cut his logs from a stand of white spruce, hauled them out of the timber, peeled them, piled them, and left them to weather through the harsh winter. Babe Alsworth, the bush pilot, flew him out just before freeze-up.

  Dick returned to Iowa to see his folks and do his customary good deeds around the small town. There in the “flatlander” country he awaited the rush of spring. He had cabin logs on his mind. His ears were tuned for the clamoring of the geese that would send him north again.

  Here is the account of a man living in an area as yet unspoiled by man’s advance, a land with all the purity that the land around us once held. Here is the account of a man living in a place where no roads lead in or out, where the nearest settlement is forty air miles over a rugged land spined with mountains, mattressed with muskeg, and gashed with river torrents.

  Using Dick Proenneke’s rough journals as a guide, and knowing him as well as I did, I have tried to get into his mind and reveal the “flavor” of the man. This is my tribute to him, a celebration of his being in tune with his surroundings and what he did alone with simple tools and ingenuity in carving his masterpiece out of the beyond.

  Sam Keith

  Duxbury, Massachusetts (1973)

  Contents

  Preface

  Map

  CHAPTER ONE

  Going In

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Birth of a Cabin

  CHAPTER THREE

  Camp Meat

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Freeze-up

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Breakup

  CHAPTER SIX

  Cloud Country

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Red Runt

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Chilikadrotna

  CHAPTER NINE

  Reflections

  CHAPTER TEN

  Until Another Spring

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  About the author

  I’m Scared of It All

  I’m scared of it all, God’s truth! so I am

  It’s too big and brutal for me.

  My nerve’s on the raw and I don’t give a damn

  For all the “hoorah” that I see.

  I’m pinned between subway and overhead train,

  Where automobillies sweep down:

  Oh, I want to go back to the timber again . . .

  I’m scared of the terrible town.

  I want to go back to my lean, ashen plains;

  My rivers that flash into foam;

  My ultimate valleys where solitude reigns;

  My trail from Fort Churchill to Nome.

  My forests packed full of mysterious gloom,

  My ice fields agrind and aglare:

  The city is deadfalled with danger and doom . . .

  I know that I’m safer up there.

  I watch the wan faces that flash in the street;

  All kinds and all classes I see.

  Yet never a one in the million I meet,

  Has the smile of a comrade to me.

  Just jaded and panting like dogs in a pack;

  Just tensed and intent on the goal:

  O God! but I’m lonesome . . . I wish I was back,

  Up there in the land of the Pole.

  I feel it’s all wrong, but I can’t tell you why . . .

  The palace, the hovel next door;

  The insolent towers that sprawl to the sky,

  The crush and the rush and the roar.

  I’m trapped like a fox and I fear for my pelt;

  I cower in the crash and the glare;

  Oh, I want to be back in the avalanche belt,

  For I know that it’s safer up there!

  I’m scared of it all: Oh, afar I can hear

  The voice of the solitudes call!

  We’re nothing but brute with a little veneer,

  And nature is best after all.

  There’s tumult and terror abroad in the street;

  There’s menace and doom in the air;

  I’ve got to get back to my thousand mile beat;

  The trail where the cougar and silvertip meet;

  The snows and the campfire, with wolves at my feet . . .

  Goodbye, for it’s safer up there.

  From “Rhymes of a Rolling Stone,” by Robert W. Service. Reprinted by permission of Dodd Mead and Company, from the collected poems of Robert Service.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Going In

  I recognized the scrawl. I eased the point of a knife blade into the flap and slit open the envelope. It was the letter at last from Babe Alsworth, the bush pilot. “Come anytime. If we can’t land on the ice with wheels, we can find some open water for floats.” Typical Babe. Not a man to waste his words.

  This meant the end of my stay with Spike and Hope Carrithers at Sawmill Lake on Kodiak. I had driven my camper north and was doing odd jobs for them while waiting to hear from Babe. Their cabin in the Twin Lakes region had fired me up for the wilderness adventure I was about to go on. They seemed to sense my excitement and restlessness. I could use their cabin until I built one of my own. I could use their tools and was taking in more of my own. I also had the use of their Grumman canoe to travel up and down twelve miles of water as clear as a dewdrop.

  I left my camper in their care. I waved to them as I heard the engines begin to roar, and then the land moved faster and faster as I hurtled down the Kodiak strip on the flight to Anchorage. Babe would meet me there.

  May 17, 1968. At Merrill Field, while waiting for Babe to drop out of the sky in his 180 Cessna, I squinted at the Chugach Range, white and glistening in the sun, and I thought about the trip back north in the camper. It was always a good feeling to be heading north. In a Nebraska town I had bought a felt-tipped marker and on the back of my camper I printed in big letters, DESTINATION—BACK AND BEYOND. It was really surprising how many cars pulled up behind and stayed close for a minute or two even though the way was clear for passing. Then as they passed, a smile, a wave, or a wistful look that said more than words could. Westward to the Oregon ranch country and those high green places where I had worked in the 1940s. On to Seattle where a modern freeway led me through the city without a stop, and I thought of the grizzled old lumberjack who bragged that he had cut timber on First and Pike. Hard to imagine those tall virgin stands of Douglas fir and cedar and hemlock in place of cement, steel, and asphalt. Then the Cariboo Highway and beautiful British Columbia. Smack into a blizzard as I crossed Pine Pass on the John Hart Highway to Dawson Creek. And all those other places with their wonderful names: Muncho Lake and Teslin and Whitehorse, Kluane and Tok Junction, Matanuska and the Kenai. The ferry ride across the wild Gulf of Alaska and a red sun sinking into the rich blue of it. Sawmill Lake, and now Anchorage.

  The weather stayed clear, and Babe was on time. Same old Babe. Short in body and tall on experience. Wiry as a weasel. Sharp featured. Blue eyes that glinted from beneath eyebrows that tufted like feathers. A gray stubble of a moustache. That stocking cap perched atop his head. A real veteran of the bush. “Watches the weather,” his son-in-law once told me. “He knows the signs. If they’re not to his liking he’ll just sit by the fire and wait on better ones. That’s why he’s been around so long.”

  “Smooth through the pass,” Babe said. “A few things to pick up in town and we’re on our way.”

  We did the errands and returned to load our cargo aboard the 180. Babe got his clearance and off we went, Babe seeming to look over a hood that was too high for him. A banking turn over the outskirts of Anchorage, then we were droning over the mud flats of Cook Inlet on the 170 air-mile trip to Port Alsworth on
Lake Clark. I looked down on the muskeg meadows pockmarked with puddles and invaded by stringy ranks of spruce. Now and then I glanced at Babe, whose eyes seemed transfixed on the entrance to Lake Clark Pass, his chin resting in one cupped hand. Meditating as usual. I searched the ground below for a moose, but we were too high to see enough detail.

  Suddenly the mountains hemmed us in on either side—steep wooded shoulders and ribs of rock falling away to the river that flowed to the south below, here and there a thin waterfall that appeared and disappeared in streamers of mist. We tossed in the air currents. Then we were above the big glacier, dirty with earth and boulders yet glinting blue from its shadowed crevices. It looked as though we were passing over the blades of huge, upturned axes, and then the land began to drop dizzily away beneath us and we were over the summit. The glacial river below was now flowing in a northerly direction through a dense forest of spruce, dividing now and then past slender islands of silt, and merging again in its rush to Lake Clark.

  There it was, a great silvery area in the darkness of the spruce—Lake Clark. We came in low over the water, heading for Tanalian Point and Babe’s place at Port Alsworth. Years ago he had decided to settle here because it was a natural layover for bush pilots flying from Kachemak Bay and Cook Inlet through Lake Clark Pass to Bristol Bay. It had been a good move and a good living.

  I spotted the wind sock on the mast above the greenhouse and glanced at my watch. The trip had taken an hour and a half. Down we slanted to touch down on the stony strip. On the taxi in we hit a soft place, and we wound up hauling our cargo of baby chicks, groceries, and gear in a wheelbarrow over the mud to the big house.

  I helped Babe the next few days. We patched the roof of his house. We put a new nose cowl on the Taylorcraft, attached the floats, and there she was, all poised to take me over the mountains on a thirty-minute flight to journey’s end.