Doug Pfeiffer, Kathy Howard, Vicki Knapton, Angie Zbornik, and Michelle Blair helped revive the book for a new generation. Lindsay Wolter and writer Nan Leslie guided the process.
• My husband, Tom Irons, and our young son, Luke, stood unfailingly behind me, though the story wasn’t theirs.
• And of course, Phil Beisel, my youthful sweetheart, without whom this adventure and all that followed would never have happened.
Phil and Jeanie Beisel, 1975.
ALASKA
Phil and Jeanie, our first winter, 1972.
PROLOGUE
More than four decades have elapsed since two naïve kids followed their dreams down the Yukon River and up into the mountains on a remarkable adventure. What for me began as a hiatus from college would ultimately become a lifetime centered on wilderness.
In updating my books for a new generation, I am grateful for this chance of amending some inadvertent slights and for the opportunity to add a note about sequence. In the original book I thought to honor the privacy of others by using pseudonyms, yet twenty years later when I again paddled out of the mountains with my husband, Tom, and our young son after another year in the wilderness, I was remembered in the little Indian village. “Why,” people asked me, “did you change our names?” Referencing my early journals, I now wish to set that record straight.
In addition, because Phil and I lived in the Brooks Range for nearly four years, some events were included that compress those seasons. For example, the hike to the Arctic Continental Divide occurred in the summer of 1977, but to keep the book a reasonable length, I originally placed it in 1973, where it remains. In rereading this time capsule of my life, I was tempted to amend and polish my youthful voice, but have generally left it frozen in time. What right have I to direct that hopeful girl from my height of sixty-four years? Let her have her adventures and ideas, her untarnished enthusiasm. Any who wish to follow her wandering footprints into maturity can do so with my other books and documentary, going where she could not—across the mysterious expanse of my lifetime.
Wild Blessings,
Jeanie Aspen, October 2014
CHAPTER 1
My mother once said that I must have been imprinted very early on the Arctic for I spent the first three years of my life there. As a child I can remember people asking me, “Are you going to be an author and arctic explorer like your Mommy?”
“No,” I would answer. “I’m going to be a doctor.”
In my family the role of arctic explorer was occupied. Long before I was born my parents had spent years in Alaska’s wilderness, living off the land, traveling by canoe and dogsled, and on foot. Later they pioneered in tiny planes across the vastness. Writing books and lecturing together had been their way of life until twelve years of companionship ended in an angry divorce about the time my memory begins.
I inherited the legacy. I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, listening to stories and leafing through the heavy family albums where across the pages of Life magazine little Jeanie toddles on her snowshoes. But she remained somehow out of my reach; a fairy child. Still I felt that undeniable pull, almost a memory. An eaglet hatched in a henhouse never really forgets. Across the dusty years it called, echoing between the sky and water of my restless soul—like a promise.
Yes, I was drawn to the Arctic, but not by the glamour of being an explorer. There was something more. Maybe the smell of autumn leaves or the stillness of a winter night; the faint song of running water heard even as I gazed upon the arid playground and waited out my childhood sentence in the public schools of Tucson. Perhaps it was the half-remembered family warmth of my first three years in a little cabin on Takahula Lake. Whatever drew me, it pulled me north as soon as I could fly—unerringly as the geese—to repeat another cycle. At the time, I denied any connection with my parents. Yet somehow I always knew that I would return.
My mother was also serving out her time in Tucson. She once said that she had lived her life by the first commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” for she saw God everywhere in the natural world, and her love of nature came first, even before her children. She was a wild spirit and she fretted being shackled, as she saw it, to the demands of two small children and poverty in the city heat, away from her beloved wilderness.
My earliest memories are of wild places, campfires, and trails along desert streams. “More walk, less talk,” she would say, restricted even there by my short legs. As my legs grew, she began to dream of returning to the wilderness with her daughters. She managed to get her publisher, Little, Brown and Company, to advance the money for the three of us to canoe three thousand miles down the Mackenzie River system in northern Canada—a journey spanning two summers and resulting in her seventh book, Down the Wild River North. I was fourteen then and my sister, Annie, was twelve. Our mother was nearing fifty.
Before I turned twenty-two I put together my own expedition. Phil, my high school sweetheart and friend, was a year older. Looking at our pictures now I can see how very young we were, a couple of kids on an adventure. The year was 1972, a time when other kids our age were dying in the jungles of Vietnam. So perhaps not so young after all. I see myself with more clarity now than I did then, as if who I was to become was already in me. There I stand, a familiar stranger: a lovely blond girl of medium height, a bit chubby, with tanned skin and even white teeth. There is a sense of determination in the set of the jaw, confidence and excitement almost masking the questing in the blue-gray eyes.
Phil and I had prepared well for an extended journey into the wilderness: two years spent gleaning information from my mother, reading books, and pouring over maps. We would drift down the Yukon River, which flows westward across Alaska from Canada to empty into the Bering Sea, and then pull our canoe up a tributary north into the Brooks Range. There we planned to build a cabin and live alone for a year or more entirely off the land. The day after final exams of my junior year in college, we started north.
I have been asked why I would undertake such a journey. Why, I might counter, would any young person choose instead a mortgage and forty-hour-a-week job instead of freedom to explore a wild and beautiful land?
At 2:00 A.M. the sun was just coming up as Phil’s old pickup truck plowed through the last mudhole and into the tiny settlement of Circle, Alaska. End of the road. Three of us had driven north for ten days, Phil and I and a friend who had come along to take the truck back to Tucson. Gradually, we had left darkness behind as we neared the Arctic Circle, an imaginary line around the earth where the sun doesn’t set for one day each summer and fails to rise one day each winter. Now at last, our rutted dirt track simply vanished into the biggest piece of river I had ever seen: the mighty, muddy Yukon. Like a moving lake, it reflected the early morning sun into our tired eyes.
Phil switched off the truck’s engine and stretched. Silence rushed into the cab. We sat a moment, numb from the hours of jostling. Then I flipped up the door handle, enveloping us in the waiting mosquitoes. Within minutes we had our tents up beside the truck.
By 6:00 A.M. the sweltering heat of an early June day on the Yukon Flats drove us from sleep. We were camped on a sloping, grassy bank facing miles of open water and pale blue sky. The land spread flat and lush beneath the endless summer sun. Behind us a few tattered buildings were hidden from view in the dark spruce trees. Steam rising from the damp earth and foliage made the air heavy and hard to breath. Even the mosquitoes were hiding in the shade.
Feeling tired and cranky, I wandered down to the river and splashed