Relaxing, Living, Taking Time To Do Things

A CHUBBY little girl in blue stretch-pants and a sweatshirt walked up and said, by way of introduction, "Hi, do you like to shoot guns? I do. I have my own 22 and my father makes bullets." She held up a lump of metal hanging from a thin chain around her neck. "He made this necklace. It's a bullet."

Her name was Patty; she was 12, and she lived near the municipal picnic area in Fairbanks, Alaska, where I was camping for a time this summer. Patty's sister Yvonne is 14; she has a bullet necklace too, and a jacket with all her National Rifle Association marksmanship patches on it. Yvonne is fat, homely, and in a junior high school way, very feminine. She wants to be the first woman fighter-pilot in Vietnam, and after that, to be a General. Yvonne can hit forty-seven out of fifty bulls-eyes from fifty feet with her 22. She talks about running away from home if her boyfriend Peter (who's only 13, but who can hit forty- nine out of fifty bulls-eyes) decides not to marry her.

Some Alaskans talk about their guns the way stock-car racing buffs talk about their cars. But it's nothing to wonder at, because hunting is a major recreation for Alaskans, as well as a means of getting food for many. If some Alaskans like to carry their rifles hung in the back windows of their pick-up trucks even when it's not hunting season, it's not so much a demonstration of militance as of the kind of spirit that prompted one Alaskan candidate in this fall's elections to pass out bumper stickers with the legend "THE WEST WASN'T WON WITH A REGISTERED GUN."

Besides being one of the few spots in Fairbanks where you can camp for free with access to drinking water (Fairbanks' Chena River is a convenient sewer), the municipal picnic area draws, sooner or later, a lot of Fairbanks' citizens.

Like a very large proportion of Alaska's present population, the assistant district attorney of the Fairbanks Borough is from "outside" (as Alaskans call any ??lace beyond their borders). His name is Tom, and he's a Texan whose first ambition was to go to West Point and whose second ambition was to be a big-league baseball player. He didn't succeed at either of these, so he ended up first in Texas law school and then in the Fairbanks D. A. office. Tom doesn't like the moral atmosphere of Fairbanks-("For its size it's one of the dirtiest towns I've ever seen")-and he doesn't like a lot of the Alaskans he's met in his first year in Fairbanks. "Alaskans are egomaniacs. They're all worried about crowding and overpopulation everywhere else in the States, and they're pretty damn pleased with themselves because they think they've escaped the problem and that they're still hardy pioneers."

Perhaps Fairbanks can still claim to be on the edge of the last American frontier-it's the largest settlement in the Alaskan interior, the last real town before the roads end, the jumping-off point for the development of the Prudhoc Bay oilfields to the North. There are still a few old log houses on the main streets of town. But more conspicuous are the new housing developments where small kids ride bicycles with high-rise handlebars and long seats like the ones on their older brothers' Hondas and Harleys; more conspicuous are three perfectly-manicured Little League fields across the street from the semi-pro Alaska Gold-pannier's Field, where families in station wagons pull in every summer night to cheer for their sons; more conspicuous are the modern churches, the fancy airline offices, the laundromats, the suburban-style family theater, and the Disney-Frontier-land-like amusement park called Alaskaland all built along the few miles of divided highway that stretches between the busy Fairbanks airport and Fort Wainwright, a sprawling Army base just outside the center of Fairbanks; more conspicuous are the J. C. Penney's department store and the Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken Take-Home and the A and W Root Beer drive-in and the two Dairy Queens. In a very short time, largely because of the presence of Fort Wainwright and the nearby Eisling Air Force Base, Fairbanks has expanded to accommodate a new influx of modern Americans and their tastes. "Ten years ago," complained one old Fairbanks resident, "you could walk down main street and you'd know everyone you saw. You can't do that any more."

A LITTLE LEAGUER whose game had been rained out took shelter under the open walled shelter of the Fairbanks picnic area one evening, waiting out the shower before riding his bike home. His great-grandfather had been one of the early Alaskan bush-pilots; his father is a carpenter, and his mother is an Eskimo (or Alaskan Native, as all Alaskan Indians and Eskimos are called) from a large Eskimo village to the North. He was a bright and talkative kid who enjoyed telling stories about the winter hunting and trapping trips he makes with his father; flying their small plane up to their small cabins north of Fairbanks; he was especially glad to talk about his experiences to a bunch of "outsiders" who were visibly impressed by his knowledge of the relative values of wolf, beaver, and muskrat pelts, and the relative merits of caribou and moose meat.

He was surprised to find his audience so interested in something as commonplace as the Northern Lights. "They're just like big colored curtains," he explained, "with big pieces cut out of them." There was one thing about the Northern Lights, though, that impressed even him. "One night I was standing with my mother in front of our house. She's from Point Barrow-and she said she remembered a legend she'd heard about the Northern Lights. It said that if you chanted these certain words, the lights would get brighter. So she said these words, it sounded like mumbles to me, 'mboo hom mom,' or something, I don't understand Eskimo language-and then the lights got brighter." He shrugged, smiling. "They really did."

Anchorage lies at the top of Cook Inlet, on the edge of a plain; the city has few buildings tall enough to contend with the open sky. Only the steeply-rising mountains nearby are large enough really to hold your vision, and they draw it up their rough slopes to that sky, a sky that is so dominating that it reminds you, even in the daytime, that it is the beginning of space, and not just the end of earth.

ART DAVIDSON dropped out of school in California to climb mountains. He's a lanky, agile man with a thick red beard and hair the same length as his beard. His deep voice bobs pleasantly up and down as though he's always telling favorite stories to an appreciative group of children. One day when he was walking along a road in British Columbia between climbs, a stranger stopped and offered to give Art a ride to Anchorage; Art had heard of the incredible beauty of the mountains around Anchorage, so he took the ride, and when he arrived he set out climbing. For a while he lived wherever people would have him, and hitched rides when he wanted to go somewhere.

Art Davidson leads a more settled life now. He makes films for his own Anchorage-based company, Alaska Wildlife Productions, and has published a book, Minus 148, about the first winter ascent of North America's highest peak, Mt. McKinley. (The title refers to the temperature Art and two other members of the expedition withstood when they were forced to wait out a windstorm for several days in an ice-cave near the summit. One member of the expedition died in a crevasse during the ascent; Art was lucky enough to return to Anchorage with the loss of only one toe to frostbite.)

At the bottom of the dirt road that leads up from the highway south of Anchorage to the Davidson homestead, there is a sign that reads "Please, no shooting..." At the top of the road, up near the rock buttresses of peaks that overlook a broad arm of Cook Inlet to a mountain range on the other side, Art lives with his wife Mairiis and his two sons, Arlyn and Dylan.

Like most Alaskan homes. Art's one-room house is built for comfort; the land is built for beauty. It's a small house with a shed on the back and hardly enough space for the stove and sink, the bed, the boys' cribs and toys, and four active people. But the downhill side of the house has a long row of windows, and it's hard to imagine feeling confined when the neighbors they see from their windows are peaks on the far side of the bay.

One evening during the last week in August there was new snow on the tops of the mountains just above the Davidson homestead. Art and Mairiis will have a new, bigger house built by the end of next summer, but they'll spend this winter, as last winter, in their one room. Mairiis, who was brought up on a homestead in a place on the coast where the winters are relatively mild, looked up at the fresh snow and shivered. "I kind of dread the winter here. It gets so cold. "

Art laughed. "I really enjoy the winters-we have a sled run that goes from up there" [he pointed up the slope] "down to the gate. I really banged myself up one time last year, riding my son down on a sled. It's great fun."

BARBARA PETERSEN lives in Homer, Alaska, a tiny town on the lower Kenai Peninsula to the south of Anchorage. She and her husband Lance lived in Anchorage when Art Davidson had first arrived there, and she got to know Art pretty well from giving him rides whenever she saw him hitchhiking. Barbara is in her mid-thirties; she's a sensitive, articulate woman who refuses to try to be sophisticated and who insists on smiling even when there's pain in her eyes. She worked this summer in Homer's only industry, the Alaska Seafoods cannery, along with a group composed mostly of students who came to Alaska for the summer and ended up in the cannery. Barbara did more than her share of salmon-gutting.

Barbara's husband Lance was the foreman of the unloading crew at the cannery, operating the hoist that carried loads of fish from the boats up to the unloading dock, and tallying the weights. In his dirty white Levis, his quilted parka vest, with his wavy black hair combed back and a Camel firmly in the corner of his mouth, Lance looks about the way you'd expect an unloading foreman in a small town on the coast of Alaska to look.

Lance is a writer; as he puts it, he and Barbara "came out of retirement" for several weeks this summer to make some money. In the middle of August, when they'd made enough, they went back into retirement. One of his friends describes Lance's personal philosophy of labor in this way: "Work early, work hard, and then retire."

Last summer, before going into retirement for the first time, Lance drove gasoline trucks through burning timberland in the Kenai Fire to supply the vehicles of the forest-fire fighting crews; it paid very well. When the fire was out, Lance published an article about it in a fireman's magazine.

He spent most of last winter writing a novel, Memoirs of Captain Brown, based on the life of a man who ran away to Alaska in the thirties at the age of thirteen to become a fisherman. Captain Brown has had the kind of experiences that are more likely to be passed off as fiction than as fact.

Lance has mixed feelings about the two years of graduate study in writing that he's done- "Graduate writing courses are mainly concerned with teaching people how to teach other people how to write. They get involved in the question of whether it's really possible for a writer to communicate, and things like that. When they get to that point, they're not going to get anywhere. I had to getaway from a lot of what I've learned in writing courses when I wrote my book, and concentrate instead on how to tell a good story well. Writers today get so involved with other things that it's hard to set down experience simply as a story you want to tell."

Barbara and Lance live in an uncompleted summer cabin that belongs to friends. Inside, insulation bulges out from between, the exposed uprights of the walls; partition separate the interior into three small rooms at the front and a large kitchen-dining-living-bedroom that looks out through windows over a tidal inlet of Kachemak Bay to the village of Homer and the bluffs above the town. A big, black, Franklin stove warms the cabin, burning lumps of soft coal that are washed from an exposed vein in the cliffs on the other side of the inlet and carried by the waves to the beach by the cabin. Their dinner table is a huge telephone cable spool, sanded, stained and polished to a rich shine; a bunch of dried wildflowers and some fresh ginger hangs from a rafter; neatly assembled shelves and counters of scrap wood line the kitchen walls.

Barbara bakes whole-grain sourdough bread every day; she has a small garden, and wild peas and berries grow on the point, Lance can skin and butcher a moose so that almost all the meat is steak; they keep their yearly moose in a friend's freezer in town. In the summer, fresh salmon, shrimp and crab are easy to come by in Homer.

Though they made the same wages as the transient young people who worked at the cannery and camped on the beach nearby, Barbara and Lance often managed to put together magnificent dinner-feasts-fresh shrimp, Dungeness and King Crab, hamburgers, Lance's spiced back-of-the-stove beans, and fresh fruit-for some of the cannery workers. Their home became a home for those who had none other in Alaska.

In the winter, Barbara and Lance don't have so many visitors; when there's snow, most cars can't make it over the road to their point of land. Those people who do make it in for a long visit have to learn a few things. "When people come here to stay with us here in the winter," Lance explains, "it takes a while for them to unwind. They get here and they seem to be waiting for something to happen. After a while they begin to relax-they find out that they can just live and take their time to do things. I spent hours last year just watching an eagle catching air currents by the cliffs out there. It was really remarkable-he'd balance in the air, tilt and dip, and rise again forever without moving his wings.

Ask Lance what he and Barbara will be doing a year from now, and you won't get much of an answer. The future doesn't impose on them from too great a distance. "I'm trying to get my novel published. We'll stay here in Homer through this winter. After that..."