A Life Wasted

Return to Alaska

I stayed out of Alaska and finally made enough money to return, which wasn't enough. On the way home I stopped on the side of the road in the Yukon when the movement of an animal caught my eye. There was a slight rise just past the road and that was where I'd seen the movement. At first I thought it was a cow, which would be very odd this far out in the middle of nowhere, so I stopped to take a look. When I reached the top of the rise I saw a small herd of buffalo just below me. The herd consisted of one old bull, a dozen females and about the same number of young buffalo. I'd seen buffalo on farms in the lower forty-eight states, but this was my first wild buffalo, so I returned to my car and grabbed my camera gear.

The old bull looked ancient and worn out. When I first saw the herd he was laying down and when I moved in closer with my camera gear he stayed down. He might have cut his eyes at me as I approached, but he didn't so much as turn his head in my direction. Twenty feet from the nearest buffalo I set up my tripod and began shooting. The herd was stationary, but there was a slight shift as they grazed. That shift brought them towards where I stood, but I wasn't worried as they were not known to be aggressive. I've commented before about the smell of bear, but bear have nothing on buffalo. The smell is different enough that I could tell them apart in the wild, with the buffalo being the most "distinctive."

Everything was going fine, and I was enjoying my commune with the wild buffalo until one of the youngsters got too close and his hoof caught the corner of one of the tripods legs. The tripod and camera crashed to the ground and the startled youngster screamed as if he'd been bitten. Instinctively I bent down to right my gear, but when I bent down I happened to look directly at the old bull. It was amazing how fast that ancient bull sprung to his feet. I was so amazed I left my expensive Nikon on the ground and straightened up. That old bull charged me so fast I barely managed to twist out of his way. There were several small trees there so I ran towards the closest one.

The bull charged again and I moved around the tree. He made two passes with me moving around the tree to avoid him. The old bull then stopped and faced the tree I hid behind. I could almost see the calculations in his eyes. The tree was about three inches in diameter and he weighed a couple thousand pounds (I don't know what he weighed, only that he was huge). After doing the math the bull charged the tree and shattered it. I ran to the next tree, then reconsidered as he charged again and ran to the biggest of the group. This one was too thick for him to crush so we danced around it a few times.

I was getting tired, but the old bull was snorting pretty hard too. Yet he showed no sign of giving up. The dance was finally interrupted by a voice asking if I needed any help. I looked up to see a man standing on the rise with a shotgun in his hand. "Hell yeah I need help," I shouted back. "Shoot the beast." There was a loud blast and for a frightening moment I thought he had in fact shot the bull, which I didn't really want to happen. But the guy had fired into the air, which was enough to move the old bull and his family back into the woods. The guy was an Alaskan who'd decided to move to Arizona. He saw my car on the side of the road so had stopped to investigate. I was glad he had.

When I got home I spent a few days with the family, but it was mostly recovering from the trip. One day I had half the kids: Emily, Clay, Rebecca and Luke with me in Kenai and was headed home at night. The kids wanted to take the back road home so they could see the caribou herd. This back road was actually an emergency escape road that was only suppose to be used in an emergency. There was only one road between leading to where we lived and Kenai and that road ended at Cook Inlet, so there was no other way out. Half way down that road was Alaska's only oil refinery. The refinery sat too close to the road, so in case there was an incident at the plant they had built the emergency regress road. All the locals knew of the road and on occasion drove it for the same reason my children wanted to. The emergency road went through the only caribou herd on the Kenai Peninsula.

It was winter and there was about ten feet of snow on the ground, but the emergency access road was plowed just as well as the state roads, so I agreed to the kids demands. We were in my Jeep Cherokee, which had a great four wheel drive, so I wasn't too worried about getting stuck on the access road if there had been an accumulation of snow, but I did have to go slow because the road was built up ten foot above the surrounding ground. I didn't drive the road very often, but when I did I was always conscious of how bad it would be to fall off that road.

So I'm driving slow, about twenty miles per hour, when I hit a patch of black ice. You can't see black ice, but you sure know when you hit it. The jeep slid sideways and there was nothing I could do to counter the fall off the elevated road. Through nothing I could take credit for, we went over the side of the road front wheels first, so the Cherokee didn't roll over, but did manage to be carried through it's forward momentum twenty feet away from the elevated road bed before coming to a stop.

Snow covered the windshield and the side window. We were nearly completely buried in snow. I shut the motor off for fear of carbon monoxide poisoning. The snow was pressed to hard against my door to open it, so I rolled my window down. I instructed Emily to roll it back up, then crawled out and up to the top of the Jeep. I had bought the Jeep from my friend the photographer. John had build a heavy wood rack on the roof that he used to stand on with his tripod when taking shots of wildlife near a road. The rack had eight inch high sides so it was a convenient place to keep needful things, like a high-lift jack and a couple of shovels. I had a snow shovel and a long handled round point shovel for digging hard stuff. I grabbed both and climbed down the back of the Jeep on the side where the exhaust pipe sat. It took five long minutes to dig out the exhaust pipe to the point where it would be safe to run the engine. I went over the top and to the front of the Jeep and dug out the area in front of the engine so it could breath. It would have started without this opening, but would have soon over heated. Less than ten minutes passed when I knocked on the driver's side window. Emily rolled the window down and I climbed back in.

The Jeep had gotten cold so the kids were happy to get the heat back on, but I was wet and bone cold. I needed to warm up before going back out, but I couldn't afford the time. There was a better than average chance that no one else would use the emergency road for several days. Mary had no idea that I had taken this route, but she might figure it out when we didn't show up, but I didn't think we could take that chance. Besides, I've never been the kind of guy to wait for help. I explained to the kids that they would be fine with the engine running now, but I had to get out and start clearing a path to the road. I wasn't sure if the Cherokee would climb the bank back up to the road, but I wanted to try. First, I would need to shovel out twenty feet or more of ten feet high snow. Not something I looked forward to.

After explaining this, Clay said, "Dad, why don't you just put it in four wheel low and drive through the snow." As patiently as I could while shivering I explained to my son why it wouldn't be possible to displace ten feet high snow that was packed tight and would pack tighter as I pushed it against the elevated road. Clay had been out in this very Jeep when it was still John's the previous winter so he talked about how John had went through thick snow with it, so why couldn't I. Not for a minute did I believe the Jeep could push this show for more than a few feet, and if I tried that all I would do would be to push snow into the radiator, which I'd have to remove so the engine didn't over heat. I tried to explain this but Clay kept on with John this and John that. In frustration I said, "Okay, I'll try." To his credit Clay didn't say anything after that. So I shifted the lever and put the Jeep Cherokee into four wheel drive, low gear.

It moved like a tank, but move it did. As my young son predicted the Jeep pushed through the snow like it wasn't an obstacle, then mounted the sharp bank of the the elevated road at an angle then climbed it. No problem at all. I felt stupid for shutting the engine off and climbing out to clear the exhaust and radiator. Almost under his breath, Clay said, "Told you." I acted like I didn't hear him, but did thank him for his sage advice.

For the next few weeks most of the discussions Mary and I had were about the North Wind and fishing. I wanted to go back out and try again to catch some fish. Mary wanted me to either sell the boat or give it a proper Viking funeral. Mary thought I was crazy, that the sea had stolen what little good sense I had. She pointed out that when I came home after weeks at sea I didn't smell like fish because I never caught enough to "catch a smell," but I smelled like diesel fuel. She even suggested that the constant exposure to diesel fuel had damaged my brain. She called it a "diesel lobotomy."

In the end Mary agreed to give me a few more months, but I had to agree to one concession. Mary was sick of worrying about my safety so the concession was that I would have to move the boat to Prince William Sound and fish there.