“Freezer-Burned: Tales of Interior Alaska” is a regular column on the San Juan Update written by Steve Ulvi.
Contributed Photo/Hari Nandakumar on Unsplash
Mail Will Be Delivered, Part II
On a September day in the 1930s, mail carrier Eddie Hindermann steered his longboat away from Chris “Phonograph” Nelson, who was talking to himself onshore starting into the tall spruce fringing the river. He gently nudged his blind dog along, starting and stopping again. Arm extended high he waved at the boat growing smaller on the broad river. The Norwegian loner was again occupied with his thoughts and cabin repairs.
Joseph, a teen with an unusual sense of self, zipped his heavy coat and squirmed lower in the bow, looking back beyond his suddenly smirking uncle toward Nelson’s cabin and tall cache that distance revealed. He cringed imagining that lonely way of life, a chosen solitude that his Athapaskan roots rejected. He was anxious to call it a day and get the chance to turn a few pages of the steamy detective mystery he had slipped under his coat at the cabin. He looked down and realized that it had fallen to the floor of the boat within view of his favorite uncle.
But It was now mid-January. Eddie rested at the handlebars of his mail sled, smiling with the autumn memories of cranky Chris Nelson and Joseph ‘growing horns’. Later he talked with Nelson at his family fish camp when he boated down to pick up his sled dogs boarded for the summer. That was the last time he had seen the likeable old man. Now he stared across a half mile of grey-blue blocky ice, threaded by fogging open water, to the site of the Bluff Cabin.
Squinting, smoking a butt, Eddie worried about the old trapper, not seen since freeze up. He had learned from ‘Nation City JJ’ that in a first visit after freeze up, he found a foot of undisturbed snow around Chris’s home cabin. Most telling, there was no discernable trail up the Nation River toward his far-flung trapline and cabins as there ought to be. The cabin was shut up but hard-frozen. The rusty box stove was set with kindling and bark for cold hands to easily ignite. Plenty of dry wood. The only life was the voles scurrying out of depleted bags of oats and beans into a hole in the plank floor. Nelson’s dogs and sled were not there, either. It pained Eddie that all of this troublesome news was a month old. The tentacles of deep cold could quietly finish anyone sickened or badly injured.
Eddie knew the “Hump”; being halfway into the winter’s long grind of mail trips from Eagle to Circle and back. A grueling 140 miles every week, one way or the other, no matter what. The rumors of airplanes taking over the mail contracts created additional pressure to get through on schedule. The temperatures had been brittle cold, more early snow blanketed the Yukon country than had been seen for years. He was down to 8 dogs healthy enough to make the difficult run from the 15 he readied in November. His hickory sled had been battered and broken; backed-up mail made it hard to keep the loads under 500 pounds, temporary trailside repairs were improved during his one day off at Circle or Eagle.
It was a hellish winter, even for sourdoughs inured to extremes. Most other veteran mail carriers in the region lost valued horses and dogs to serious injury or sheer exhaustion and curling up to die. Mail was nearly lost when his horses fell through the ice on the cross-border run between Dawson City and Eagle. A few weeks earlier, Canadian Percy DeWolfe, the “Iron Man of the North”, very nearly drowned struggling to unhitch his loaded sled from his terrified horses after they fell through thin ice. Eyes bulging, front legs churning in the dark water, they weakened and slipped under the ice edge leaving DeWolfe in stunned silence. Continue Reading
From The Town of Friday Harbor
From the Town of Friday Harbor
From PeaceHealth
From organizers
