The single-engine float plane wagged its wings twice, then circled for a landing on the placid surface of the Goodpaster River, a clearwater tributary of the Tanana River teeming with northern grayling and other anadromous and catadromus species. It flowed into the Tanana about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, near Delta Junction, where the Alaska Highway ends and joins the Richardson Highway. Tilting slightly on its horizontal axis as it skimmed over the water, the aircraft’s left float gently kissed the glassy surface a millisecond before the right one, settling into a virtually splashless touch down.
As he powered the plane towards the bank where I awaited him, I immediately recognized through the approaching windshield pilot Dick Wien, member of an internationally famous Alaska family of aviators. Stilling the engine, as the propeller spun slowly to a halt, he slipped out of the cabin, stepped onto the port float and tossed a rope to me to draw the plane into shore.
I sensed this was no social call. It came in late summer of 1978 when a prominent charter bush pilot from Fairbanks would be too busy hauling passengers and cargo to deadhead into this remote river valley for an aimless tete a tete.
UP THE GOODY
Luxuriating in splendid isolation, I was in the first week of a planned month-long sojourn in a rustic cabin on what locals fondly called “The Goody,” about a 2 ½ -hour water jet boat drive from its mouth on the turbulent Tanana. The cabin’s owners, John and Grace Butrovich, and I had come upriver several days earlier from our homes in Fairbanks on one of our regular summer weekend sorties to soak up the pastoral ambiance of this remote riverine setting, brimming with wildlife, both land and waterborne.
John and Grace had been coming “up the Goody” nearly every weekend during Alaska‘s brief hiatus between winters - weather and the politics in which they were usually immersed permitting - for more than four decades to their federally patented homesite, ritually shedding the cosmopolitan personae they affected in town to bask in primal simplicity in this bucolic paradise. We drew our water directly from the crystal clear river, boiling it for drinking and cooking on a classic but simple Klondike wood-burning stove, fed from the woodpile out in the yard which I replenished daily..
John and Grace had gone back to Fairbanks after the weekend, leaving me here alone to work on a writing project undistracted by phone, television or casual drop-ins. The only concession to modernity was a cheap battery-powered am/fm radio connected to a simple wire antenna hooked onto the tip of a skinny black spruce towering above the outhouse over which, if necessary, urgent messages could be wirelessed to me from KFAR Radio in Fairbanks.
Whatever mission on which Dick Wien had been dispatched was obviously too important or private to be broadcast over public airwaves. I had a sinking feeling my cherished solitary stay on the Goody would be short-lived. Before he had said a word, Dick, I was sure, was going to haul a passenger back to Fairbanks, and I was the only available candidate.
Compared to the Butroviches, I was a relative newcomer to these environs. This was in the late 70s, about ten years after I had come into the country from my home in Pennsylvania to work as an editor at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. I had met John and Grace early on, barely a month after I arrived in Fairbanks. A special session of the legislature had been called by then-Governor Wally Hickel to deal with the aftermath of the destructive August,1967 Fairbanks flood, when the Chena River, which courses through the center of Fairbanks, overflowed its banks up to 12 feet or more.
John had been a territorial legislator, then a state senator after Alaska attained statehood in 1959, for decades one of Alaska’s most respected political leaders. At the apogee of his political career, he was the longest serving state senator in. U.S history, some 30 years. I had been assigned by my editor to cover the special flood session of the Alaska legislature in the state capital of Juneau, which lasted about a week. Upon its completion, I elected to return to Fairbanks via a northbound state ferry along Alaska’s Inside Passage to the Lynn Canal’s end of navigation at the tiny former gold rush town of Skagway.
There I boarded a coach of the historic White Pass and Yukon Railway, built between 1898 and 1900, in the wake of the Klondike gold rush, the oldest and only industrial narrow gauge railroad then operating in the U.S. It would carry me 110 miles from Skagway through the coastal mountains over the White Pass beyond the international boundary to Whitehorse, the capital of Canada’s Yukon Territory. From there I planned to fly to Fairbanks.
That’s where fate intervened. In Fairbanks, just prior to, then during the Special Session, I had made passing acquaintance with John Butrovich, in my untutored eyes, a virtually mythic presence because of his revered status within the state. But after the legislative session, on the daylong train ride north from Skagway to Whitehorse, in those confined circumstances, he, Grace and I met and were thrown together socially, forming an almost immediate mutual connection, and discovering a rare commonality of sensibilities, among them a shared taste for rum (Latin) Manhattans and Dry Sack sherry.
In Whitehorse, after spending several days sightseeing together, they invited me to drive up the Alaska Highway with them to Fairbanks in their car, which had also made the trip from Juneau to Skagway aboard a state ferry, then lashed to a flatcar aboard the WP&YR. John and Grace had made this trip many times over the years, but this was my virgin jaunt up the Alaska Highway from Whitehorse to the highway’s northern terminus at Delta Junction, thence north on the Richardson Highway to Fairbanks. Both skilled raconteurs, John and Grace enthralled me with wise and witty anecdotes of landmarks, legends and historical ephemera pertaining to the famed road, once known as the Alcan Highway.
In short order, they, their extended family - their daughter Jan, her children and husband, Hawley Evans, Grace’s mother, Mary Brown - became my surrogate family in Alaska. Rarely, if ever, has a newcomer to Alaska , a “cheechako,” been so lucky and privileged to form such a rewarding bond.
Their salutary friendship and familial affection aside, John and Grace’s social and political connections quickly opened to me doors that would otherwise have remained forever closed, a motherlode of insider access for a newly arrived newsman. Before long, I was sharing their long summer weekends “up the Goody,” a tradition that lasted nearly 20 years.
There we would spend halcyon days exploring the upper reaches of the Goody as far as The Forks, where John and Grace had inherited a homestead established years earlier by a longtime trapper on the river they had befriended, Lawrence Johnson. We would clean weeds from the yard and repair the crumbling cabin and cache, contemplating his elaborate tombstone there, buried by his friends where he lived and died. An irrepressible optimist, Johnson recorded his quotidian activities in a journal which ended each evening with the entry, “Fine Day,” notwithstanding the sometimes life-threatening challenges and travails he overcame.
Lawrence Johnson hadn’t quite died with his boots on, but came close to it. One friend, the late Paul “Doc” Haggland of Fairbanks, an MD and one-time state senator, had flown in on skiis one winter day, landing on the Goodpaster ice in front of Lawrence’s cabin to check on him, a ritual Johnson‘s close circle of pilot friends in Fairbanks regularly observed. He found him slumped over, sitting on the edge of his bunk in the act of donning a boot, frozen in that position. He’d suffered a fatal heart attack. Rigor mortis had set in. Doc had literally to break a couple of Lawrence’s stiffened limbs in order to get his frozen corpse inside his small plane to take him back to Fairbanks for thawing and embalming.
Among the antiquarian curiosities we found at Lawrence’s homestead at The Forks were artifacts dating back to a bygone era around the turn of the 20th century when a 21-year old army lieutenant by the name of Billy Mitchell led a contingent whose orders were to survey a route for a proposed intercontinental telegraph line through Alaska to Russia. We found military matchbooks still functional, glass electrical insulators, cans of still edible and tasty unhomogenized peanut butter, electrical wiring, and others from that long ago foray.
A couple hours each day on the Goody with the Butroviches were spent fly fishing for grayling, a dinnertime delicacy. While Grace and I waved off clouds of mosquitos, John, covered with the pests, defiantly refused to acknowledge their existence. He would grunt: “What mosquitos?” We gathered wild strawberries, red raspberries and blueberries in the woods, low bush cranberries in the late summer. Evenings after supper were often spent in quiet contemplation of the pastel sunsets suffusing the ivory peaks of the distant Alaska Range
One of our favored evening pastimes was flinging shards of remembered poetry at each other, from Shakespeare to Bryant, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelly to Dickenson and Frost, among others. John affected a distaste for classical music, for which Grace and I shared a passion, regaling us with his mock contempt for "Stravinsky Korsakoff."
John learned to fly in his 60s, acquiring a Piper SuperCub. While he amassed many hours of flight time, he never progressed beyond a student license to obtain his pilot’s license, hence was not legally certified to carry passengers on his flights. Nevertheless, he frequently took me upstairs with him without telling Grace, who frowned upon, nay, forbade the illegal practice. One Easter Sunday, snow and ice still covering the Interior, John and I took off for the Goodpaster cabin without telling Grace I was with him.
We landed in front of the cabin on the river ice, which was just beginning to melt along the edges. He taxied too closely to the edge of the stream. One ski broke through the rotting ice, imprisoning the plane. While we worked to free it by building a rough log ramp with cut firewood, I took a series of photos, carelessly tossing a film wrapper into a wastebasket inside the cabin. By the time we freed the plane, darkness was approaching.
Back in Fairbanks, Grace, concerned over John’s failure to return before dark, had sent their son-in-law Hawley Evans, a well-known and accomplished Alaska bush pilot, into the darkening skies to see if he could find John’s plane. Within a few minutes, Hawley passed us airborne from the outgoing direction.
Fast forward to a couple months later. After snow and ice had disappeared from the Interior, John and Grace made their first weekend trip “up the Goody.” As she entered the cabin, Grace, an impeccable house tidier, spotted the film wrapper in the otherwise empty waste basket which she knew had not been there when they had closed down the cabin at the end of the previous season, and instantly divined the situation. She knew, intuitively, that John, who didn’t use a camera, and I had surreptitiously flown to the Goodpaster cabin that Easter Sunday several months earlier. She never said a word, and wouldn’t speak to John for days. Eventually, she forgave him, but never forgot the incident. In later years she could joke about it.
With one harrowing exception, the few days after John and Grace had left me alone on the Goody before Dick Wien appeared were uneventful. Few boats heading up or down river came by; one or two river rats who knew I was there alone stopped to make sure I was okay. One warm afternoon, as I studiously contemplated the bare inner plywood walls of the outhouse, I heard a tremendous ruckus and crashing of brush just outside the door, which I hadn’t closed, as no one was around for miles.
An instant later, a cow moose shot past the door, headed for the river about 20 yards away, followed closely by that year’s calf, barely six months old. They were frantically fleeing from a pursuing grizzly, whose hairy bulk seemed to fill the outhouse door as he too careened past in hot pursuit of the cow and calf. I sat there frozen for uncounted minutes, petrified, incapable of moving. By the time I did, the pursuer and pursued were nowhere to be seen, and I never knew the outcome of that frantic dance of life and death between predator and prey.
* * *
“John asked me to come and get you and bring you back to Fairbanks,” Dick Wien told me as he stepped ashore from his float plane. “He didn’t tell me why, but he said it’s important.” I quickly put the bear-proof shutters up on the cabin windows, locked the door, fastened it with a chain loop, gathered up my typewriter, papers, clothing and other effects and climbed into Dick’s plane for the brief flight back to Fairbanks.
In that year’s Republican primary election, August 22, 1978, former Governor Wally Hickel had challenged the re-nomination of the incumbent, Jay Hammond. It was a tight race, but in the end Hammond appeared to have prevailed by a narrow margin of fewer than 300 votes. But there were obvious discrepancies, even apparent fraud in the counting of the votes, several hundred of which had been lost or temporarily misplaced. It was clear that Hickel would challenge the election in court.
A number of Hickel’s leading supporters, including the Anchorage lawyer who had served as his appointed attorney general during Hickel’s first term as governor back in the late 60s, Edgar Paul Boyko, had formed a group they called “The Honest Election Committee.” It’s goal was to investigate the election’s proven and suspected irregularities and collect data to bolster their impending case in court. In that context, they had sought someone known to be politically independent of both candidates to launch a detailed investigation into the circumstances surrounding the election and the counting of the votes. I was the only prospect in Alaska upon whom the members of the bi-partisan committee could all agree.
They learned I was remotely ensconced in John Butrovich’s Goodpaster River cabin, and asked him if he could contact me to ask me if I’d be interested in undertaking an independent inquiry into the election for them. John asked Dick Wien to fetch me back to Fairbanks. Upon my arrival a day or two later in Anchorage, I told the committee I would agree to do so only if I were guaranteed complete freedom in conducting the investigation without any interference from the committee, and sufficient resources to conduct a creditable investigation. The members agreed. I reluctantly decided to forego my sojourn on the Goodpaster River to undertake the investigation. But that’s another story.
I climbed into the passenger’s seat of Dick Wien’s Cessna 180, we roared down a straight stretch of the river, got up on the step, then rose above the black pines, cottonwoods and alders that laced the river banks, the plane’s shadow flitting below on the serpentine river’s mirror surface, and headed north towards Fairbanks, towards a new adventure that would plunge me into the inner recesses of one of Alaska’s convoluted and storied political battles.
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Joe LaRocca was a newsman in Alaska in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, covering the legislature, state government, politics and the oil industry for various Alaska news media and The New York Times. His book Alaska Agonistes: The Age of Petroleum - How Big Oil Bought Alaska is an anecdotal political history of Alaska’s modern oil industry. He now resides in his hometown of North East (Erie County), PA and may be contacted at jlar5552@verizon.net or 814.725.8926.
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