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)
Looking up the lake from Low Pass
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