Arctic Daughter

Jean Aspen

Description

Setting off in an overloaded canoe, they journeyed down the Yukon River and walked upstream into the remote Brooks Range to build a cabin and live off the land. She was twenty-two, daughter of a famous woman adventurer. He was her childhood sweetheart. Four years later, they emerged from the Alaskan wilds. Now in her sixties, Jean Aspen updates her spellbinding tale of adventure in a harsh and beautiful land for a new generation. ARCTIC DAUGHTER is at once an extraordinary journey of self-discovery and a lyrical odyssey. A READER'S DIGEST book selection, this remarkable tale of survival and courage measures the value of dreams against the unforgiving realities of the natural world. First published in 1988 by Bergamot Books, Minneapolis, MN.
Finding the old gold town put us at last on the map, and we carefully marked each day’s travel with little penciled lines. It was encouraging to see the daily change in the landscape that now marked our upstream progress. The river no longer rambled freely, but was often bounded on one side or the other by a two-hundred-foot cutbank, confining it to a broad glacial cut where it swung from side to side as if seeking escape.
I tried to imagine what the land had looked like ten thousand years ago when a massive ice field capped the Brooks Range and a river of ice had carved this valley. A people very much like ourselves had hunted moose and bear in the Yukon flats, and fished the rivers washing out of the glaciers. In the fall, they picked cranberries and blueberries with their children, and in the spring they saw the ice go out and watched the birds return. They nursed their babies and cared for their old people and told stories around the night fires.
One day the river swung abruptly, butting into the bare bones of a mountain mass. For some time it had paralleled the range as if undecided, then turned resolutely northward, wedging open a wide valley into its secret heart. Soon we were leaving our familiar gray crags behind for another set of landmarks.
As the river began its climb in earnest, we developed a different method for surmounting rapids. These were now strewn with large boulders, “boat eaters” we called them, interspersed with deep holes. Water gushed over slippery rocks the size of basketballs and crumbling bluffs often dropped steeply into the river at a bend, affording no beach. In the past, we had grabbed the bow and muscled the canoe up the watery stairs together. Now one of us braced against a boulder, holding the craft in the turbulence of its wake, while the other worked the rope upstream. Finding secure footing, the one with the rope would haul the canoe (and the person guiding it) hand-over-hand up the racing chute. Already behind us lay nearly a thousand feet of elevation.
We were approaching another fork in the river when we pitched camp on a sandy, white beach late one afternoon. It was a clear, still day and the low-hanging sun gave the country that peculiar golden quality that outlines every detail in color. A few yards upstream a sandspit protruded into the current in graduating shades of blue, sheltering the canoe from the main stream.
There were few mosquitoes on the bar. Their numbers naturally diminish by midsummer. We stripped off our clothes and hung them on small willow bushes to dry. A slight breeze tickled the naked hairs on my back and legs as I worked, but did nothing to deter several bloodsucking flies. They were as long as a finger joint with iridescent, rainbow eyes and sharp, triangular mouths.
I staked down the tent floor as Net-Chet circled my legs, whining. She was never happy until home was established. Pushing in the last peg, I tightened the nylon guy lines. Phil had plucked a small seagull and was heating water to cook it when I plopped down in the warm sand by the fire. A large spider danced away, lugging her egg sack.
“We need to refill Wonderbox,” I said.
“Again?” Phil was squatting near the blaze, positioning the teapot.
“Well, we’re out of pancake mix, oatmeal, sugar, and powdered eggs.”
He looked helplessly at me. “We’ve eaten a third of our supplies.”
“I know, but we have to eat something. And so does Net-Chet, and she eats almost as much as we do. If there were more small game or fish . . .” I trailed off. We both knew the problem. In the far north small animal populations are cyclic. We had seen only four arctic hares all summer and no spruce grouse. Our attempts to fish on the main river had been fruitless. We now ate the tiny tree squirrels.
“Well, we may be hunting big game before too long,” he stated.
“I haven’t seen any of that either,” I said. We stared at one another in silence.

Sujets

• Travel
• Pacific
• United States
• West
• US

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781941821589
• Langue: English

Extrait

Arctic Daughter
A Wilderness Journey
Jean Aspen
Copyright 1988, 2015 by Jean Aspen.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.
Arctic Daughter was originally published in 1988 by Bergamot Books, Minneapolis, Minnesota (ISBN 9780943127019), and a Delta Expedition trade paperback was published in 1993 by Dell Publishing, a division of Bantam, Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., with permission from Bergamot Books (ISBN 0-385-31400-0). A hardbound edition was published in 1993 by Menasha Ridge Press, Birmingham, Alabama (ISBN 9780897321211). Arctic Journey, an excerpt from the book, appeared in the November 1993 issue of Reader s Digest (p. 189). An excerpt from Chapter 1 of Arctic Daughter was used with permission along with part of a chapter from Constance Helmerick s book Down the Wild River North in Making Connections: Mother-Daughter Travel Adventures , edited by Wendy Knight and published by Seal Press in 2003.
Aspen, Jean.
Arctic daughter : a wilderness journey / by Jean Aspen.
pages cm
Originally published: Minneapolis, MN : Bergamot Books, 1988.
ISBN 978-1-941821-16-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-941821-58-9 (e-book)
1. Brooks Range (Alaska)-Biography. 2. Pioneers-Alaska-Brooks Range-Biography. 3. Alaska-Description and travel. 4. Frontier and pioneer life-Alaska-Brooks Range. I. Title.
F912.B75A76 2015
979.8 7-dc23
2014034764
Cover design: Jean Aspen and Vicki Knapton
Illustrations by Jean Aspen
Photographs by Jean Aspen, Phil Beisel, and Tom Irons
Map by Elizabeth Barnard
Published by Alaska Northwest Books
An imprint of

P.O. Box 56118
Portland, Oregon 97238-6118
503-254-5591
www.graphicartsbooks.com
For my mother, Constance Helmericks,
who taught me to dream.

Constance and Jeanie Helmericks, 1952.
Constance Helmericks, age twenty.
I love the summers in this land. But I also love the feel of winter winds against my cheek, when the snow squeals underfoot, and the ptarmigan, the white grouse, come whirling down from the Arrigetch Peaks once more-or any peaks in Alaska!-to talk along the valley by my house. I love the colors of the bleak wastelands where nobody goes. When the circling sun falls low, and the leaves hang and rattle in the wind, and cranberries turn to mahogany brown, and frosted blueberries taste of wine, then my cabin on the river will be snug and tight against the arctic gale. When wild grass has turned to hay and the wild geese wing their way once more over mountain and valley to the southern land below, the canoe is put away and the snowshoe will appear. But when the Arctic turns to green again and the geese return with the sun, I shall take my canoe from the tall cache, and I shall travel on the river to see some new place.
We Live in the Arctic Constance Helmericks, 1947
Jeanie, age twenty-five.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I had just turned twenty-two and Phil was only a year older when we set forth into the arctic wilds. It was a time for testing ourselves and discovering our own strengths. In truth, I would never have envisioned such an undertaking nor had the tools to do it without my mother. There were, of course, others whose names I have forgotten that provided guidance and support along the way. I regret not paying closer attention, but at the time my need for independence blinded me to this greater community. With a few additions, I leave these acknowledgments as I wrote them in 1988.
Through their love and support, the following people helped create this book:
My mother, Constance Helmericks, inspired and championed our adventure;
Phil s parents, Cliff and Marion Beisel, stood behind us with love while knowing not the journey;
Chris Olson, who died before I was born, and the generous Gwich in people of Venetie helped us stay alive.
My sister, Ann Helmericks, and her first husband, Steve Boice, retrieved us from Alaska and provided a home for me while I wrote the first drafts.
Friends who encouraged me in writing and rewriting: Charlotte Cardon, Sue Clemans, Terrel Miedaner, Celia Weber, and my beloved aunt, Janet Cutler.
Jennie Vemich and John Earl amended my creative spelling in days before spell-checkers.
Donald Sayner taught me illustration and welcomed me into his studio as I created these drawings.
Dr. Douglas Camfield guided my early prose and went to bat for me when I wanted to use this book as an honor s English thesis at the University of Arizona.
My editor and first publisher, Barb Wieser, believed in me and worked to tighten my manuscript into a book.
Doug Pfeiffer, Kathy Howard, Vicki Knapton, Angie Zbornik, and Michelle Blair helped revive the book for a new generation. Lindsay Wolter and writer Nan Leslie guided the process.
My husband, Tom Irons, and our young son, Luke, stood unfailingly behind me, though the story wasn t theirs.
And of course, Phil Beisel, my youthful sweetheart, without whom this adventure and all that followed would never have happened.

Phil and Jeanie Beisel, 1975.
ALASKA
Phil and Jeanie, our first winter, 1972.
PROLOGUE
More than four decades have elapsed since two na ve kids followed their dreams down the Yukon River and up into the mountains on a remarkable adventure. What for me began as a hiatus from college would ultimately become a lifetime centered on wilderness.
In updating my books for a new generation, I am grateful for this chance of amending some inadvertent slights and for the opportunity to add a note about sequence. In the original book I thought to honor the privacy of others by using pseudonyms, yet twenty years later when I again paddled out of the mountains with my husband, Tom, and our young son after another year in the wilderness, I was remembered in the little Indian village. Why, people asked me, did you change our names? Referencing my early journals, I now wish to set that record straight.
In addition, because Phil and I lived in the Brooks Range for nearly four years, some events were included that compress those seasons. For example, the hike to the Arctic Continental Divide occurred in the summer of 1977, but to keep the book a reasonable length, I originally placed it in 1973, where it remains. In rereading this time capsule of my life, I was tempted to amend and polish my youthful voice, but have generally left it frozen in time. What right have I to direct that hopeful girl from my height of sixty-four years? Let her have her adventures and ideas, her untarnished enthusiasm. Any who wish to follow her wandering footprints into maturity can do so with my other books and documentary, going where she could not-across the mysterious expanse of my lifetime.
Wild Blessings, Jeanie Aspen, October 2014
CHAPTER 1
My mother once said that I must have been imprinted very early on the Arctic for I spent the first three years of my life there. As a child I can remember people asking me, Are you going to be an author and arctic explorer like your Mommy?
No, I would answer. I m going to be a doctor.
In my family the role of arctic explorer was occupied. Long before I was born my parents had spent years in Alaska s wilderness, living off the land, traveling by canoe and dogsled, and on foot. Later they pioneered in tiny planes across the vastness. Writing books and lecturing together had been their way of life until twelve years of companionship ended in an angry divorce about the time my memory begins.
I inherited the legacy. I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, listening to stories and leafing through the heavy family albums where across the pages of Life magazine little Jeanie toddles on her snowshoes. But she remained somehow out of my reach; a fairy child. Still I felt that undeniable pull, almost a memory. An eaglet hatched in a henhouse never really forgets. Across the dusty years it called, echoing between the sky and water of my restless soul-like a promise.
Yes, I was drawn to the Arctic, but not by the glamour of being an explorer. There was something more. Maybe the smell of autumn leaves or the stillness of a winter night; the faint song of running water heard even as I gazed upon the arid playground and waited out my childhood sentence in the public schools of Tucson. Perhaps it was the half-remembered family warmth of my first three years in a little cabin on Takahula Lake. Whatever drew me, it pulled me north as soon as I could fly-unerringly as the geese-to repeat another cycle. At the time, I denied any connection with my parents. Yet somehow I always knew that I would return.
My mother was also serving out her time in Tucson. She once said that she had lived her life by the first commandment, Thou shalt have no other gods before me, for she saw God everywhere in the natural world, and her love of nature came first, even before her children. She was a wild spirit and she fretted being shackled, as she saw it, to the demands of two small children and poverty in the city heat, away from her beloved wilderness.
My earliest memories are of wild places, campfires, and trails along desert streams. More walk, less talk, she would say, restricted even there by my short legs. As my legs grew, she began to dream of returning to the wilderness with her daughters. She managed to get her publisher, Little, Brown and Company, to advance the money for the three of us to canoe three thousand miles down the Mackenzie River system in northern Canada-a journey spanning two summers and resulting in her seventh book, Down the Wild River North. I was fourteen then and my sister, Annie, was twelve. Our mother was nearing fifty.
Before I turned twenty-two I put together my own expedition.