Raven Walks Around the World. Thom Henley
huge thousand-year-old cedar trees toppled in the forest. I’d never felt so small and vulnerable before in my life. But I also felt free, unbelievably so, and unencumbered by social expectations. There was a richness of spirit here in the kindred souls inhabiting the bay, where community clambakes were held and amazing music jams stretched through the surf-crashing night into the wee hours of the morning.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was also an important education for me. I grew intimately knowledgeable about the Pacific coast, not as an academic exercise, but as a survival imperative. I had a few guide books, but I also learned by trial and error. I discovered that a raw mussel on a hook cast from a headland on a handline made of stinging nettle fibre at the right stage of the tide was sure to land a Tommy cod or other rockfish. I learned where and how to dig for razor clams, horse clams, butter clams, geoducks and cockles; where to gather abalone, chitons, limpets and urchins. I grew up a Midwestern kid on hamburger, potatoes and cornflakes, but now I was stalking the wild onion, sea asparagus, miner’s lettuce, stinging nettle, seaside plantain, chocolate lily and even savouring seaweed. They say that only a fool could starve to death on such a coast, but fools have done it. I was determined not to be one of them.
A wild cat I named Josephine moved in with me that winter and delivered a litter of kittens in my lap. I was amazed at her level of trust. Because I couldn’t afford cat food, I’d gather and steam mussels for her each day. Occasionally she’d suffer a case of paralytic shellfish poisoning. A stiff cat on the floor was my canary-in-the-coal-mine sign to lay off the mussels for a while. Josephine always recovered, of course, and she’d curl up in my lap to purr herself to sleep with no apparent hard feelings.
Because I could not legally work in Canada and could not risk deportation, I had to be careful to obtain needed funds quietly and discreetly. I collected Japanese glass fishing floats that had crossed the Pacific on the Kuroshio Current and been cast high up on the beach by winter storms. Selling them to souvenir shops in the nearby towns of Ucluelet and Tofino could earn me a few bucks. Once every few weeks I would hike the nineteen kilometres from Florencia Bay to Ucluelet collecting beer and pop bottles that had been cast into the ditches by weekend revellers. The deposit refunds never amounted to much, but I could usually outfit myself with a few staples like brown rice, rolled oats, raisins, brown sugar and whole-wheat flour to supplement my wild food diet. When the roadside foraging was especially good I’d treat myself to a pint of ale in the local pub with some salt and vinegar potato chips. These seem like such simple pleasures in retrospect, but mine was a very basic—but joyous—life. I was living on less than $300 a year, an average person’s cigarette budget at the time, but feeling rich beyond measure. It was one of the greatest lessons in my life, as it taught me to never fear poverty.
In the late spring of 1971, Alaska beckoned me back once more. Throngs of migratory birds were flocking north along the Pacific Flyway and I heard the same inexplicable calling. I said goodbye to my cabin, to my new-found friends and to Josephine (yes, the cat was still kicking). She’d do better on a summer diet of wild mice than a winter of mussels, anyway. About the only thing I took with me, besides wonderful memories, was the nickname Huckleberry, which would resurface years later even though I didn’t use it on my own.
My new identity in Alaska would be Thomas A. (for Arctic) Wolf. When I arrived back under my new alias, I took what little savings I had from my beer-bottle collecting and opened a bank account in Anchorage. My pitiful finances didn’t really require a bank account; I was merely after the colour-photo bank card the branch issued. With this simple piece of phony ID, I was able to secure an Alaska driver’s licence and eventually a Social Security card so that I could legally work as Thomas Arctic Wolf. Alaska has always offered fugitive Americans the best perks for first-time criminals.
Some time later the FBI got wise to the Thomas Wolf identity, and I did a fast name change again to that of a friend who looked similar enough for me to use duplicate ID. I will not reveal that full name to protect my accomplice, but I can admit to having to learn to respond to the name Dale while never responding to Thom.
Life in Alaska was a joy. I returned to the trapper’s cabin beside the railway tracks north of Talkeetna, where a small community of back-to-the-landers had been growing. This whistle stop in the wilderness eventually became known on Alaska maps as Chase, and I often wondered how many of the residents there were also on the run. I met wonderful and bizarre characters, people like Dirty Dave, a crazy, burly Chicano biker from Los Angeles who roared up the tracks on his Harley one day. All week long, Dirty Dave would throw his leftovers and table scraps into a big stew pot, then invite all the neighbours over on Saturday for Dirty Dave’s Stew Night. The gruel was always heavily laced with cayenne pepper to suit the Chicano palate and presumably mask the colour and odour, as well as kill the critters crawling in it. Disgusting as it was, you didn’t dare refuse the invitation and risk insulting the host—he was armed and dangerous. “Mighty good, Dirty Dave,” we’d compliment the chef as we gagged back another bite.
Robert Durr and family lived on the back lake, a four-kilometre hike in from the tracks. He was a psychology professor from some Ivy League school back East who had followed Dr. Timothy Leary’s advice to “tune in, turn on and drop out.” His wife made the transition well from cocktail parties and caviar to boiling moose meat over a smoky fire, but they didn’t reject all the refinements of their former lifestyle—halfway along the bush trail to the Durr complex you could always count on hearing classical music echoing with loon calls across the pristine lake.
Denny Dougherty and his partner Edie were two of my closest Talkeetna neighbours and friends. Denny was a star athlete in school and a Vietnam vet who built a five-storey A-frame log cabin on the edge of a little lake. It was an impressive structure but impossible to heat in the winter, and Denny was forever cutting firewood just to keep his water buckets in the kitchen from freezing. He had a larger goal in life—to someday be the first to ascend Nix Olympus—the highest mountain in our solar system, located on Mars. Edie was the more grounded of the two. She had been a fashion model in LA who gave it all up to mush dogs with Denny in Alaska rather than strut her stuff on the catwalks.
There were other characters too numerous to mention here. The history of Alaska and the history of Haida Gwaii, as I would later learn, have been shaped by eccentric characters. I felt fortunate to be among them and to continue my formal schooling with those living on the edge.
Summers in interior Alaska in the early 1970s were fleeting; the snow wasn’t fully gone until June, and it was back on the ground in late October. But there was a timeless quality to the season brought on by the perpetual daylight. I can recall drifting lazily down Arctic rivers in my kayak, watching the low-angled sun set the sky ablaze for hours as it slowly crawled across the horizon to begin a new day’s sunrise. With all this light, flowers and other vegetation didn’t just grow here, they exploded; sometimes a single cabbage required a wheelbarrow to transport it from the garden to the root cellar at the end of August.
Winters in Alaska were pure magic. The snow fell deep in the upper Susitna Valley, where North America’s highest mountains trap the Gulf of Alaska’s moist air moving up Cook Inlet. On many mornings, I had to dig two to three metres up from my cabin doorway to find ground level at the rooftop and step outside to discover a world transformed with dwarf trees. Just the highest tops of the black spruce trees still stood above the snow line. The small log cabin was well insulated by the deep snow, requiring little wood to keep it warm and cozy. The problem was daylight: it was such a fleeting midday phenomenon on the southern horizon that at times I slept right through it into the next night.
A friend took this photo of my dog, Moosejaw, and me in front of the old trapper’s cabin I was living in located nineteen kilometres up the Alaska railway tracks from Talkeetna. The snowfall is always deep in the upper Susitna Valley where the moist air from the Gulf of Alaska is trapped by North America’s highest mountains. Steve Rorick photo
They call the Alaska Railway the Moose Gooser because the engine cars waste so many moose that use the tracks as the only snow-free corridor along the Susitna River. The “cowcatcher” pushes along the dead moose on the front of the engine car until the carcass reaches an elevated trestle, where it