Wild life — Kasilof duo laughs through volcanoes, Exxon during 30 years in the Bush

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Mary and Bob Haeg’s version of paradise would be some people’s version of hell, or at least purgatory.

Thirty years with no running water, no electricity, no regular mail, no phone, no TV, no computer or Internet, no neighbors, no way in or out except by boat or plane.

“No stores, no roads, no people,” Bob said.

“It sure was nice,” Mary said.

“Yeah, there was no baloney. I’d still be there if I wasn’t so damn old,” Bob said.

Now in their 80s, the inevitable march of time has taken its toll on the Haegs and the subsistence life they carved out for themselves in remote Chinitna Bay across Cook Inlet and a little north of Anchor Point. Age kicked them out of their own, self-made Garden of Eden about two and a half years ago and landed them in their version of purgatory — civilization. Or as much civilization as they could stomach, anyway. They packed up what they could from their wilderness home, shipped it all across the inlet and moved into a house near the beach in Kasilof.

“Only a couple cars a day go by. It’s already too busy. But we can stand it,” Bob said.

They made the move for an easier life. One where they can stay warm without chopping wood and eat dinner without having to find it, kill it, dress it and cook it.

“We had to do with what we had, you know,” Mary said. “Now over here you can get fettuccini sauce. We never had any of that before. It’s different being able to go to the store and cook with all that stuff.”

Different surroundings have forced a different lifestyle on the Haegs, but at heart they haven’t changed much. Their activities are still governed by daylight, rather than the irrelevant numbers on a clock, and they’ll make appointments for “when it’s light out” and head home “before it gets dark.” After a few days holed up with a cold, they need to confer with each other to determine what day it is, and only then if there’s a good reason to bother knowing. Bob still makes his famous pickled salmon; he just does it with fish from a subsistence set net site on the beach near their house. The Haegs bring the “young people” lunch, and the fishermen share their catch.

Though they say they’d just as soon not have so many gal darn people around, the Haegs can’t seem to help being friendly to anyone they meet, a throwback to their years hosting tourists in Chinitna Bay after fishing went south and they opened Haeg’s Wilderness Lodge instead. At the same time, three decades spent without having to impress or get along with anyone but themselves have left the Haegs without concern about what people think of them.

They’re equally as colorful in their stories as in real life — driving a shiny black Hummer with yellow flames custom painted on the sides and wearing bright Hummer jackets to match. The custom plates say “THXXON” — a sarcastic salute to the monetary settlement they got after the Exxon Valdez oil spill ruined fishing in Chinitna Bay.

The Haegs laugh over the plates as much as they do everything in life. It’s hard to say which came first with them — their “Oh, what the hell,” attitude or their spirit of adventure. Either way, the combination has made for an interesting life.

Life on the bay

The Haegs’ decision to move to Chinitna Bay came as spur-of-the-moment as many things in their lives have. They were living on the central Kenai Peninsula at the time, in the 1970s, after Bob convinced Mary to move to Alaska. She had been living in Minnesota with her five kids when she lost her husband, who was Bob’s first cousin and best friend. She was working at a liquor store when Bob came back to visit and showed her a picture of Alaska.

“He said, ‘You know, Mary, if you ever came to Alaska you’d never go back. You’d love it,’” Mary said. “I went to lock the liquor store door one night and thought, ‘I’m going to go to Alaska.’”

She bought a Winnebago, packed up the kids and headed north. She got into Kenai late at night.

“Where did I find Bob?”

In a bar. But neither that nor anything that’s happened since has made her regret her decision to come to Alaska.

“It never entered my mind,” she said.

Bob blames Mary for the Chinitna Bay scheme, but in fairness it was only half her doing. Mary said she loves to fish, and told Bob about a set net site she’d seen on the east side of the inlet. He’s the one who went looking across the water.

“She comes home after seeing a fishing site and said, ‘We want to buy a fishing site.’ I said, ‘Sh-- we don’t need another job.’ I was paving. I never seen a fishing site, didn’t know what it was, but I’m game for anything, gal darn. I didn’t need another job and I didn’t know anything about fishing, so I said, ‘We’ve got to buy a fishing site where you can’t do anything else.’”

It wasn’t hard to find someone who knew of a site for sale matching that bill.
“Anytime you sit down and get to bullsh---ing, you’re going to start talking about fishing. If you don’t like talking about fishing, don’t live in Alaska,” Bob said. “The guy said he knew of a site, but you can’t live there. I said, ‘Oh, hell, that’s going to be interesting.’”

Bob’s cousin, George French, flew them to Chinitna Bay, a 10-mile-long inlet east of Iliamna Lake, in French’s Super Cub to check out the site. It was blowing about 70 knots out of the west, so they couldn’t see much. A beach and some trees were all Bob had to go on.

It was enough.

“We couldn’t even land the airplane it was blowing too damn hard. We flew back and said, ‘It’s just what I always wanted,’” Bob said.

In the spring of 1976, Bob and Mary packed up the few belongings and supplies they could gather and headed across the inlet by boat. The skipper dropped them on the shore and told them they had two days to haul everything up off the beach before a big tide came in.

When they first arrived there was just an 8-by-16-foot trailer house. When they packed up 30 years later, they left 10 buildings behind.

The 2.5-acre site was more than just the buildings, though. It was all as much of their home as the 34-by-34 log cabin the Haegs built and lived in. Their walls were the mountains behind them and the cliffs that cut off the beach in either direction, making it so they couldn’t walk more than two miles either direction, and so visitors had to come in by boat or plane. The laundry room was series of racks and clotheslines strung high enough to catch the breeze. Their refrigerator was the garden they planted in an old wooden dory, the berry patches they picked in the fall, the smokehouse they used for their salmon, the traplines Bob and their son, David, tended during the winter, and the rich clamming beds and fishing grounds in the bay. Their television, playing nature and wildlife shows 24-7, was everywhere they looked.

Boom, bust at sea

Fishing was mythical when the Haegs first got to the site. They set netted for salmon — kings, reds, silvers and chums. Their summers were filled with the hard work that comes from having a hot spot — mending nets, tending buoys and dealing with the flopping, flashing bounty that came in when they pulled their gear.

There was ample sportfishing, too. Halibut were easy to find. And they’d occasionally hook a king crab so big they’d swear it was a halibut until it got up to the boat.

In the winter there were tanner crab in the bay.

“When the tide would go out they’d forget to go back so you could go pick them up,” Mary said.

They had a clam beach nearly to themselves, except when a visiting pilot would mistakenly think it’d be a good spot to land and ding a prop or wreck landing gear on the rocks.

“How many planes did we pull out that tried to land in our clamming spot?” Bob asked Mary.

The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 put a stop to that way of life. Oil balls floated up the southern reaches of Cook Inlet and invaded Chinitna Bay. Halibut, the Cook Inlet herring fishery, even the salmon runs were destroyed. They used to get 3,800 chums a day, but after the spill, a good day was 363 fish, Mary said.

“It changed quite a bit. The fishing really never did come back,” Mary said.

“Yeah, it was a mess. It still is, really. It hurt us and all we got out of them was a Hummer,” Bob said.

“Our land wasn’t worth anything because there wasn’t fishing anymore. We started taking in tourists, otherwise we couldn’t have stayed there,” Mary said.

Life off the grid

Even before the tourists, the Haegs were isolated, but they weren’t completely alone. The National Park Service created Lake Clark National Park and Preserve in 1979, extending park boundaries around the few private inholdings on the bay, including the Haegs’. The Park Service people were good neighbors, the Haegs said. They’d help out if the Haegs got in a bind, and the park made it so unauthorized fish camps couldn’t spring up on the beach and in the woods, which used to be a serious headache, Bob said.

The squatters would build plastic shacks, litter, harass wildlife, catch too many halibut, bury them until their boat showed back up and shoot the bears that were drawn in to the fish.

“Then we’d have wounded bears around. The Parks Service helped clean that dump out. We put it out on the beach, I gave them a gallon of diesel and we burned it. That was the end of that crap,” Bob said.

A citizens band radio served as a link to the outside world, on the Kenai Peninsula and much farther beyond. It was entertainment to a point, but also proved incredibly helpful on occasion, like when the Haegs’ refrigerator went on the fritz and someone from Outside talked Bob through fixing it. Or when their pet goat ate insulation and a guy on the CB talked to a vet and relayed treatment information — “We had to pour Wesson oil down his throat,” Mary said.

Marine radio kept them in periodic touch with civilization across the inlet, especially if they needed a fishing tender to haul supplies over for them or needed a flight somewhere. Bob learned to fly when he was 62, and they had their PA-12, a little bigger than a Super Cub, painted with pink flames during a trip to Soldotna.

“Oh, it didn’t fit our lifestyle, with pink flames all down the side of it, but it was a pretty airplane,” Mary said.

Their son, David, the only one of the kids to grow up in Chinitna Bay instead of leaving to attend school in town, also became a pilot.

David Haeg regularly flew supplies and equipment in and out for his parents, in all kinds of conditions. During one trip, on Jan. 24, 1990, David had guided a larger plane delivering two snowmachines out to his parents’ site, then was dropping a passenger off in Port Alsworth, which took him near Mount Redoubt just as it was erupting. Being a photography buff, he got a gorgeous shot of the mountain before getting out of there to avoid ash damage to the plane.

That luck held with all the volcanoes in the area. In the 30 years the Haegs lived at Chinitna Bay, both Redoubt and Spurr erupted and Augustine erupted twice, but not one dumped any ash on them.

Mount Augustine is a mere 30 miles south of Chinitna Bay, and the Haegs could see the steam and ash rising when it erupted in 2005.

“We could see where it blew. It went up in the air and went east and went across and dumped on you guys. Boy, that was funny. We thought we were going to get it,” Bob said.

Never a dull moment

“We had something happen all the time. There were no dull moments,” Mary said.

Animals accounted for many of those not-dull moments, and General Custer the goat was at the center of many of them. A friend from Homer told Mary she had a young goat she couldn’t take care of and wondered if Mary and Bob could keep him. Custer made himself right at home. He was housebroken, so he got to come inside. His favorite spot when he was younger was curled up on Bob’s lap in the rocking chair. When he got bigger, he liked to stand right next to the barrel stove.

“In the winter you had to watch him ’cause he’d stand next to the stove and you could smell him,’” Bob said.

Being a goat, it was a constant battle to keep him from eating things he shouldn’t, like the insulation and the entire instructions to a brand-new three-wheeler kit Bob had had delivered. Tales of General Custer traveled far and wide over the CB, prompting one woman from down south to make and send a blanket for the goat with five stars on it.

“He got promoted to a five-star general,” Mary said.

They had a series of dogs, including Howler, who would lie under the stove and howl in the middle of the night if it went out. Then there was Tasha the horse, who learned how to open the cabin door. One day Bob and Mary heard knocking on the door, and it opened to reveal Tasha with a face full of porcupine quills.

“She knew they had to come out, and she sat there and let me do it,” Bob said.

Moses the raven was an ancillary pet, adopting the Haegs rather than the other way around. Moses liked to perch on Tasha and go for rides, and the raven was deadly with clothespins when Mary hung out the laundry, and with anything shiny.

“You couldn’t put down a socket or wrench or anything shiny,” Bob said. “We never did find all those.”

Wild animals were all around, including the brown bears that became a huge draw for wildlife viewers when the Haegs and other park inholders starting hosting tourists in the 1990s.

“We lived with 20 brown bears. I never petted a live bear. I petted a lot of dead ones and I’m still alive. If you’re dumb enough to pet a live bear, they make a movie of you. If you’re smart enough to stay alive with them for 30 years, there’s nothing to that,” Bob said, referring to “The Grizzly Maze,” a documentary about amateur naturalist Timothy Treadwell, who was killed by a grizzly in Katmai National Park in 2005.

Actually, a filmmaker did think there was something to the Haegs’ life in Chinitna Bay. Nature filmmakers Bob Swerer Sr. and Bob Swerer Jr. got a hold of Mary over Marine radio about eight years ago and told her they wanted to come film a documentary about them.

“I went out and told Bob and David. They said, ‘Oh Mom, you’re just kidding us.’ But I said, ‘Yeah,’ and they came out and did it,” Mary said.

The film, “Alaska Off the Beaten Path,” is available for purchase at www.dickproenneke.com and by calling 800-737-0239. It has aired on PBS, and the Haegs sometimes get stopped in the grocery store by people asking if they’re the ones on TV. It’s a kick to see themselves on TV, Mary said, and to look back at the life they created on their own, in their own little corner of the wild.

“Oh, we had so much fun, and we’re still having fun,” Mary said. “We’ve been laughing ever since.”

Making change to fight cancer — Woman, high school start charity to help local families

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Crystal Sholin has been through a lot of ups and downs in her three bouts with cancer over the past seven years.

They’ve been mostly downs, especially counting the string of family tragedies she’s endured during that period, including the death of her son last spring. But in a way, all the stress, pain and heartache she’s suffered makes the good times, support and moments of happiness that much more meaningful. Now that she’s recovering from a particularly nasty recurrence of the disease, she’s determined to share some of the kindness she’s enjoyed during her bumpy road with others struggling through their cancer journey. To do so, she’s put her figurative two cents of an idea into action, and hopes others donate their literal change in return. Sholin, 39, a parent of a Soldotna High School student, started a Coins 4 Cancer project with the school about a month ago. A 5-gallon jug donated by Alaska’s Best Water sits on the counter at the school’s office most days, where anyone coming by can drop in whatever coins are rattling around their pockets. During school events, including sports games, the jug is moved out to the admission area.

All proceeds will be donated to the cancer fund at Central Peninsula Hospital, which awards grants to local people undergoing cancer treatment to help them with expenses.

In just barely a month, Sholin estimates the jug has accumulated a couple hundred dollars. She’s hoping the program will continue next year, and possibly grow to Skyview and Kenai high schools, as well.

“It is amazing. In just the few weekends that it has been set out at basketball games how much money we already have. And people are putting ones, fives and 10-dollar bills in there, so it’s awesome. They just see the label and they’re just dropping money in,” Sholin said.

Todd Syverson, principal at SoHi, said the program was a good one for the school to be involved in.

“We have several families at Soldotna High School battling with cancer right now. We wanted to do our part to try to help our local families,” Syverson said. “The expenses are astronomical when one’s battling cancer. A lot of times insurance may cover part of it but there are other expenses. The cool thing about this particular program is we’re able to gather these coins and it’s going to stay right here on the peninsula and help these families battling with cancer.”

He said even visiting teams and spectators have chipped in to donate, as well as locals.

“What’s neat is watching a student or a parent donate, and we’ve got a lot of folks who just like to come to activities, whether it’s a drama production or sporting event,” he said. “It’s neat to see what a generous community we live in, and what a giving community we are. I know I, personally, am very thankful to live in a community like that.”

Sholin said she’s happy to give back to the community that’s given so much to her, and having something proactive and positive to do helps take her mind off the negatives.

“This way I don’t sit and stress about things, because if I have too much downtime I really find myself thinking about my son and slipping into a depression. Not fun,” she said. “So if I’m here by myself I just become a blubbering idiot. I need to get out of the house and get something to do. I figured this would be a way to repay people for all of the stuff that they’ve done for me.”

Sholin has plenty to take her mind off of these days. Her life — married to her high school sweetheart, Steve, with daughter, Kaili, and lots of family and friends still living in the Soldotna area from which they graduated high school — started veering off track in 2002 when she noticed an indentation on her right breast. She was 32 at the time, with no family history of breast cancer, but she was diagnosed with an early stage of breast cancer.

Being a naturalist, Sholin chose to take an all-natural course of medication to fight the cancer. She said it worked well — regular checkups and blood tests showed the cancer had disappeared and she was feeling better. So much better that she stopped taking the medication.

“I’m a great starter of things and not a finisher,” Sholin said. “When I started feeling pretty good I stopped taking all my stuff. Almost exactly 12 months later it came back bigger and badder than ever.”

This was in 2003, and she was sent to Washington to do a full PET scan to detect if and where the cancer had spread. It found multiple lumps in her right breast. Sholin decided to have a double mastectomy at that point, in the hope that would be the end of the cancer.

“I chose to take both off. It’s such a high probability within the next couple years if you have it in one that it will come back to the next one. … Most people choose reconstructive surgery anyway, and the healing time and pain and everything is really not doubled so there’s no reason not to take both of them off, because if and when it comes back you have to have the other one off.”

She followed surgery with a course of Chinese herbs meant to combat cancer and keep red blood cell counts up, as well as a course of chemotherapy where she had to fly to Seattle every two weeks for six months. All but one of her 12 flights were paid for by the Angel Flight program, and for the one that wasn’t, a manager at the Seattle Cancer Treatment and Wellness Center donated her frequent flier miles to Sholin to cover the ticket. Following that, Sholin traveled back and forth to Anchorage every day for five weeks for radiation treatments.
After that was periodic blood tests and scans, but doctors gave her an all clear from cancer. That didn’t extend to the rest of her life, however.

In December 2007 she started losing family members who were close to her, starting with her grandfather in northern Idaho, where she had grown up. When she was getting back to the central peninsula from that trip, her stepmother had a heart attack during a business trip to Anchorage with Sholin’s father, and the family made the heart-wrenching decision two days later to take her off life support.

A few months later, in May 2008, her 19-year-old son, Ryan, was killed in a car crash on Gaswell Road.

In July, her cancer came back, this time to her lungs. She and her husband were hosting an annual get-together with friends over the Fourth of July, and Sholin found herself too short of breath and tired to participate much in the gathering.

“I’d normally just make sure everybody had enough to eat and were set up to sleep. I could hardly breathe. I’d find myself sitting inside half the day and going to bed at 9 o’clock at night and not worrying that other people would have to clean up and stuff,” she said.

The cancer was growing on the outside of her left lung. Her body was producing fluid to try to flush out the cancer, but the fluid was building up in the pleura lining surrounding her lung. With nowhere to drain to, the excess fluid pushed against the lung and collapsed it.

Her doctor removed a liter and a half of fluid, then went in the next day when Sholin was still feeling awful and took out another liter and a half. A doctor in Anchorage did surgery on the lung to prevent further fluid buildup, but there was no way to remove the tumor itself. Sholin was told the best she could do was chemotherapy to wipe out the growth this time, and again if it came back — which it probably would.

“The tumor was inoperable. With all of the stress with losing all of the family, all of a sudden finding out that my cancer is treatable, not curable, that it will continue to come back for the rest of my life. I was just overwhelmed. I said I need some downtime before I start all of the cancer treatment,” she said.

The Sholins’ 20th anniversary was coming up in September. They had talked about going to Jamaica to celebrate. Sholin asked her doctors if they thought it would be OK if she took a two-week trip before starting treatment. They didn’t think the cancer was that aggressive, so they said fine — but no scuba diving.

“I said, ‘OK, snorkeling’s just fine.’”

But near the end of the trip her breathing problems came back. She got home and she and Steve took their daughter, Kaili, to Anchorage for her 16th birthday, but Sholin ended up at Alaska Regional Hospital on Monday morning, to find she had another collapsed lung and the cancer had spread.

“It was more aggressive than any of the doctors thought. It ended up not being just in my lungs but was in the P7 vertebra, in my diaphragm and lymphatic system. It was more like vines than lumps, just kind of smashing things in there and I was unable to breathe,” she said.

Sholin started radiation on her vertebra while she was still in the hospital, and another round of chemo. A CAT scan in December showed the cancer had shrunk so much that she’s finishing up chemo this week. She’s feeling better and her breath capacity has grown, although she’s fighting fatigue and will for some time. But now she’s got some breathing room, which she hopes will last for a long time to come. She plans to research Chinese herbs and any other alternative, natural treatments she can find.

“What they say is it’s inevitable it will come back, just everybody is different,” Sholin said. “One person was only off chemo for a month, other people stretched it out for like two years. Still, I just think, God, every two years for the rest of my life to do chemo, and I’m only 39 now. That doesn’t sound fun to me.”

Rather than watch the clock or dwell on her prognosis, Sholin decided to take action. She’s received support from the Central Peninsula Hospital cancer fund, Angel Flight, Soroptimists and friends who organized a fundraising dinner and auction in her name. Sholin wanted to return the favor.

After her first go-around with cancer, she started a business, called Move to Live, where she turned the pink breast cancer awareness ribbon image into a running figure and had it put on clothing, hats, coffee cups and other items, to donate 10 percent of sales to cancer research and Angel Flight. With Coins for Cancer, the proceeds benefit the hospital’s cancer fund.

In turn, those organizations will help many more people like Sholin and the friends and family who have helped support her.

“I don’t think there’s probably one person that hasn’t been affected by cancer somehow,” she said.

Winding road — Life’s twists hold many surprises for Kenai resident

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

The year was about 1950 and Fiocla Wilson and her husband, Philip, were driving south of Soldotna on a recently opened section of the Sterling Highway. Suddenly, Wilson spotted something puzzling.

“We were going for a ride toward Kasilof, and I said, ‘What’s a horse doing back there in the woods?’ I only saw the back end, you know,” she said. “He said, ‘That’s not a horse. That’s a moose.’”
For Fiocla, that sighting was a first.

“I never saw a live moose until the highway was built to Homer,” said Fiocla, who was born in Kenai in 1916. “I never knew what a moose looked like.”

This may seem like a strange proclamation from someone who began life in Alaska 92 years ago and who subsisted, in part, on a diet of moose meat, along with salmon and wild berries, and some store-bought goods. Philip regularly hunted moose during open season, but Fiocla said that she never accompanied her husband on his hunts and never saw a moose wander into town prior to that drive to Kasilof.

Of course, Wilson knows that life can be full of surprises.

Born Fiocla Sacolof to a part-Russian father and a half-Russian, half-Athabascan mother, she found herself an orphan at the age of 9. Because of her young age then, Wilson said, she was unsure what caused her parents’ death, but she did realize that her life was about to change.

Her older sister took in her younger siblings, but could not afford to take in Fiocla, too. Since there was no road yet to Kenai, Fiocla was sent by boat to Anchorage to live with a relative. She attended school in Anchorage until she turned 12, at which point she decided to receive vocational training at the Eklutna Industrial School for Natives.

She arrived by train in Eklutna and stayed at the school until she was 16, attending regular classes in the mornings and training sessions in the afternoons. Wilson said she learned to work in a kitchen and a laundry, learned to sew and learned how to be a waitress, among other skills.

At the school, she was surrounded by more than a 100 other Natives from villages scattered throughout Alaska. Despite the many different cultures and languages represented there, only English was allowed to be spoken. If they were caught speaking Russian or any Native tongue, they were punished.

“There was another girl from Kenai, and I said something to her in Russian and the matron heard it,” Wilson said in a 1985 interview, recorded in a book called Our Stories, Our Lives. “We both had to wash our mouth out with soap! I don’t remember what I said. Wasn’t anything bad or anything.

“That’s how strict they were. And that’s why I can’t understand now why everything’s getting back so that they want us to talk our Native language.

“At that time the government wouldn’t allow us to talk in those languages. And now, they’re giving funds to get back to our heritage.”

Despite the strictness, however, Wilson — who was called “Fanny” by the matrons — said she was pleased that she had the opportunity to attend the school, and she fondly recalled one particular home-economics teacher who taught her an important lesson.

“I had a teacher that always told me, ‘Never be ashamed of your nationality.’ And it wasn’t your nationality that counted as much as your character and your personality. And she always told me that I would go a long ways if I would just be the way I was with my personality and character. Because she said I had an awful sweet personality.”

When Wilson left the school in 1933, she had a surprise waiting for her. A man she had always known as “Uncle Dan” met her at the train station in Eklutna, where he handed her $25 and an envelope containing a photograph of himself. He said he had written something on the photo, but he did not want her to read it until she had boarded the train.

On board, she learned that “Uncle Dan” was her biological father, who had run off to Anchorage with another woman when Fiocla was too young to remember. The man she had believed was her father had actually been a stepfather.

On the eve of her first steps into adulthood, “Uncle Dan” had reached out in his own way to let her know the truth.

A few days after leaving the boat in Kenai, Fiocla turned 17. Before the year was out, she was married to her first boyfriend, Philip, in a ceremony officiated by the Rev. Paul Shadura at the Russian Orthodox Church.

Philip, the son of a Caucasian father and a half-Russian, half-Athabascan mother, had been born in Kenai in 1912. He fished commercially in the summers and trapped in the winters. By the time the Wilson family had grown to six children in 1949, he also had an airplane, a single-engine Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser, which he used occasionally to fly out men on hunting trips.

One of Fiocla’s favorite times of year occurred when the family ventured down to their setnet site below Wildwood.

“I enjoyed that, taking the kids out on the beach,” she said. “Living in tents. It was just like a vacation for my children. They really enjoyed that.”

Fiocla smiled as she remembered the work involved in commercial fishing. “I liked picking fish. I used to think that was fun. I used to see how many I could carry. I could have 10 fish, you know — you put your fingers in their mouth and carry ’em like that.”

As she explained, she held out both hands, palms up, fingers and thumbs curled like hooks.
“And I used to run to (Philip’s) dory to put the fish in.”

From the dory, the fish went to a scow, and then on to a tender that carried them to the Libby, McNeil and Libby cannery across the wide river mouth. She said that when they began fishing in 1934, a single sockeye salmon fetched 7 cents, while a single chinook fetched a dollar. At the Kenai Commercial store at the same time, a pound of butter cost 25 cents.

Fiocla and her family fished the site until the early 1960s, when Philip decided to sell the place and buy a drift boat, which he named the Kenai. In her home today, Fiocla has a Jim Evenson painting of Philip’s plane on skis in the winter, and another painting, by one of her daughters, depicting Philip’s boat on choppy water, with the Kenai bluffs stark in the background.

Philip, who suffered from diabetes, died in 1975. Several years later, Fiocla moved into the home that she still maintains by herself, although one of her daughters lives right next door. She keeps busy with her large family — including 16 grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren, and several great-great-grandchildren — and as a member of both the Kenaitze tribe and the Kenai Bible Chapel.

These days, the moose are more plentiful in Kenai. Some of them even wander into the neighborhood.

Making the law — Kenai attorney followed mother’s advice to first Alaska Legislature

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

Soldotna’s James Fisher said that his mother’s imploring voice followed him into adulthood and constantly urged him toward public service.

“She used to tell my brother (Bob) and I, ‘You should give back to society. You want to contribute to society.’ Over and over,” Fisher said. “In effect, she programmed us.”

Fisher’s mother, Mary, also practiced what she preached. According to Fisher’s daughter, Sally Tachick, she provided numerous examples of giving to society throughout her long life.

Fisher, who began his public service by joining the Marines just before his 18th birthday in 1945, found it impossible to resist his mother’s advice. After he and his father traveled in June 1955 from Texas to Anchorage — where the first person he met was Seaborn Buckalew, a lawyer who became famous as a Superior Court judge throughout most of the 1970s and ‘80s — it took Fisher little time to find himself embroiled in the politics of his adopted home.

It wasn’t his first venture into the political arena, however. At the age of 23, he had run unsuccessfully for a seat on the Texas Legislature. Despite losing the election, he had enjoyed the political scene, and so, in Alaska, after working with the military’s White Alice communications system and a brief stint as an insurance adjustor, his political aims took on a sharper focus and met with greater fortune.

Fisher, who had earned a law degree in Texas in 1952, took up residence in Anchorage, involved himself in the grassroots “Operation Statehood” efforts of 1958, and became a member of the first Alaska Legislature in 1959.

With his election as an Anchorage delegate to the first state House, Fisher joined a vast majority of other Democrats in the Legislature. As strange as it may seem in today’s Republican-dominated state, in 1959 Alaskans elected Democrats to the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, the governor’s mansion, and to 18 of 20 seats of the state Senate and 33 of 40 seats of the state House.

This majority didn’t always equate to unity, however. Appointed to the Judiciary and Rules committees, Fisher found himself “assigned” an extra duty: Watch Rep. John Hellenthal (D-Anchorage) and make sure he follows the rules.

Speaker of the House Warren Taylor, Rules Committee Chair Richard Greuel and Majority Leader Peter Kalamarides — all Democrats — came to Fisher with this unusual task.

“They were frankly suspicious of John Hellenthal,” Fisher said. “They didn’t think he could be relied upon. They described him as a ‘loose cannon.’ They weren’t sure that they could hold him to his word.”

They weren’t the only ones who believed that Hellenthal was manipulative. Former Gov. Jay Hammond, who was also a member of that first State House, wrote that Hellenthal was “perhaps our most artfully articulate philosophical prostitute.”

Hellenthal, Hammond said, “could argue opposing positions on any issue with equal passion and persuasion” and was “sometimes more intrigued with mind manipulation than meaningful effort to resolve conflicts.”

Fisher said that Hellenthal had a “reputation for always coming up with his version of the truth.
“So they assigned me to the Judiciary Committee — and he was the chair of the Judiciary Committee — and I was there to watch him, to make sure he performed as a committee chairman should.”

In the meantime, Fisher said, Greuel sometimes maneuvered politically in ways he had accused Hellenthal of doing, and Taylor occasionally took liberties himself and “wasn’t very sensitive to the ethical ramifications of his actions.”

Hellenthal, on the other hand, was clever, but he “wasn’t acting as flagrantly as I’d heard him described.”

Despite such machinations, however, Fisher deemed the first state Legislature a success.
“I still remember that day when we were going into Juneau (for the first time), flying into Juneau in one of the old (Lockheed) Constellations,” Fisher said. “It was misty, as it frequently is in Juneau, and we weren’t at all sure then how long it would take to set up and organize the state government.

“There was some speculation it might take six months. Well, actually, it only took 81 days.”

In that first session, from Jan. 26 to April 16, 1959, the new state lawmaking bodies passed legislation that created the organizational framework that has run Alaska’s government now for 50 years.

“We thought we were starting something brand-new that hadn’t been done before, and that we wouldn’t make the same mistakes that had been made before,” Fisher said.

At the end of the Legislature’s second session in late March 1960, Fisher got married, an event that perhaps signaled many more changes to come.

Defeated for a second legislative term later in 1960, Fisher moved on. He and his wife, Helen, and their daughter moved to the Kenai Peninsula, and their son, Bruce, was born the following year. Later in the 1960s, with attorney Jim Hornaday, he opened up one of Kenai’s first law offices.

Fisher stuck close to home, eschewing another try at political office so he could remain close to his family. And even while Fisher & Hornaday was going strong, he never faltered in his dedication to public service.

He was president of the Kenai Chamber of Commerce for three years, worked with the nonprofit Alaska Legal Services, and, with Helen, he became involved in environmental issues and joined the Kenai Conservation Society.

Now 81 and one of only four surviving members of that first State House, Fisher is still active in his community. He is a member of local historical societies, helps out at the Soldotna Senior Citizens Center and is on the board of the Kenai Peninsula Food Bank.

As he can be seen frequently riding his bicycle or walking from place to place around town, he never fails to be mindful of the need to give back to society, and to heed the “programming” initiated by his mother’s imploring voice.

Where there’s a Will ... — Biologist had wild time in Alaska

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

The mystery of the naked boater guy — like many enigmas — began simply and innocently enough, and ended with a logical explanation.

As Cooper Landing’s Will Troyer relates in his latest book, “Bear Wrangler: Memoirs of an Alaska Pioneer Biologist,” the whole episode began with his desire to capture some images of Alaska wildlife with his 16 mm movie camera.

It was the early 1950s, and Troyer, fresh from Oregon State College with a bachelor’s degree in wildlife management, had recently been hired as a territorial enforcement agent in Southeast Alaska. Hoping to eventually parlay the enforcement position into a biologist job, he was based out of Wrangell and tried to spend his free time learning more about photographing his new environment. A target that intrigued him strongly was the wily mountain goat.

When a sunny summer day arrived, he started his “photographic safari” by climbing into his skiff and motoring up the Stikine River until he located a suitable access point to the high mountains. Tying off his boat to a spruce tree on the banks of Andrews Slough, he slid into his daypack and began working his way through thick alders toward a snow-filled draw that led up the mountain.

Digging the toes of his boots into the hard-packed snow, Troyer ascended steadily. Although it was “a bit slippery,” he said, “it beat fighting the alder brush and devil’s club thickets that covered most of the slope.”

Soon he was in goat country, but, much to his disappointment, he could find no goats. He searched and rested and searched some more. He placated himself somewhat by shooting pictures of alpine vistas and of slopes covered with wildflowers, and then in the middle of the afternoon, frustrated, he began his descent.

To avoid the brush and the thorns, he opted again for the snowy ravine.

“I whittled off a 6-foot alder pole with my pocketknife to aid in going down,” he said. “The snow was slick, but by sitting down, digging in my heels, and riding the alder stick, I managed to stay in control most of the time as I slid.”

Kicking up a spray of snow with his braking boots, he slid and spun downward, occasionally veering dangerously close to the alders lining the edges of the ravine. “Several times I caught myself saying, ‘Whew! That was a close one!’” he said.

“Finally, I really got out of control. I went spinning down (the ravine), and I just knew that I was going to fly into an alder and break a leg or something. But I glanced off of an alder and just got stopped before I hit a group of solid ones.”

Realizing that he was jeopardizing his health, he abandoned the ravine and beat his way through the brush to the slough. Before he reached his skiff, however, he was nearly driven crazy by swarms of mosquitoes, active and hungry now in the warming summer air.

“My shirt became covered with the dark demons that bit unmercifully,” Troyer wrote. “In desperation I ripped off all my sweaty clothes, threw them and my pack into the skiff, and dove underwater.”

The cool water soothed his itchy skin, but the mosquitoes were waiting each time he exposed any flesh to the open air. He couldn’t imagine trying to dress himself while the insects ravaged him, so he decided to get away first and then dress later. Hoisting himself over the side of the skiff, he jumped in, untied the rope, started the engine, and roared away in triumph, “naked as a jaybird.”

“I steered with one hand, batting and swatting mosquitoes with the other, until I lost most of the biting pests,” he said. Then he spotted another boat about 300 yards downriver that was moving his way.
Although the other boat was full of people, the vision of those passengers for a few moments more would be partially obscured by the high alder thickets along the banks of the slough. Troyer thought fast.

“I saw a narrow fork in the river that allowed me to veer to the right and disappear behind an island. I slowed down, quickly got dressed, and headed back to town.

“Several days later, rumors spread around Wrangell that a crazy naked guy was seen boating on the Stikine River. I smiled to myself but kept my mouth shut, and my secret was never revealed.”

This is just one short tale in one of 26 chapters of memories — some humorous, others dramatic or tragic, informative or action-packed — contained in Troyer’s third memoir, a 250-page follow-up to 2005’s “Into Brown Bear Country” and 2003’s “From Dawn to Dusk.”

Despite the “Bear Wrangler” in the title, however, this memoir only marginally concerns Troyer’s renowned work with Kodiak brown bears. One of the four bear-related chapters, “Wrangling Kodiak Bears,” is the source for the book title.

Other chapters concern more of his adventures with goats, including one time he nearly lost the sight in one of his eyes; learning how to be a game warden and a “fish cop”; the prank-filled environment between wildlife biologists and the fishery crew at Camp Island; the construction of the canoe system on the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge; close encounters with birds and caribou; the “contest” between Dirty Yantzee and Dirty George; and a tribute to those who have lost their lives in the business of managing Alaska’s fish and game.

Troyer, who was raised as an “Amish/Mennonite farm boy” in Indiana, worked for 30 years for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service before retiring in 1981. He was named manager of the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge in 1955, at the age of 30, and became the head of the Kenai National Moose Range in 1963.

The cover of his new book, which should now be available in local bookstores, features Troyer in his early 30s in Kodiak, holding up the head of a tagged, unconscious brown bear along a salmon-heavy stream in the Karluk Lake drainage.

Spreading wings makes for turbulent teen years

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

At the beginning of the 1950s, the village of Kenai was poised on the edge of modern life. In 1948, the Alaska Road Commission had connected Kenai to the new Sterling Highway. And during the ’50s, a new school would be built, a military presence would be installed at Wildwood, the village population would double, oil would be discovered on the Swanson River field, and statehood would follow close behind.

Times were about to change, but for some of Kenai’s teenagers, like teenagers today, the changes may have seemed ponderous and slow.

Young Arlene Rheingans knew something of the world outside Kenai. In 1950, the 11-year-old Rheingans — who had spent the first nine years of her life in Hope after her parents, Ervin and Joyce, had left California in 1937 to seek their fortune mining for gold up Resurrection Creek — had read books and magazines and “Archie” comics, and she had listened intently to the stories of life Outside, stories sometimes as transient as their tellers.

But in Kenai, most of that exotic life elsewhere was simply something to dream about while making do with what one had: typically little or no electricity, little or no indoor plumbing, no telephones or televisions, no local doctor or dentist, and only about 300 other residents with whom to share this fate.

Rheingans was a loyal playmate with friends, was close to her parents, participated in school dramas and musical events, and was an active member of the Kenai Bible Chapel. Once she finished eighth grade at Kenai Territorial School, she found a best buddy in Jackie Benson, and the two of them began spending as much time together as possible. They even taught Sunday school together.

With the advent of her adolescence, however, came what Rheingans called a “mildly rebellious” streak. Some of that rebelliousness was aimed at the Kenai Chapel, which had strict prohibitions on smoking, drinking, playing cards, attending movies and wearing anything more than the lightest trace of makeup.

Rheingans began wearing some lipstick and mascara. When she and Benson had sleepovers, the two girls often crawled under the covers with a flashlight to read Max Shulman novels about the silliness and awkwardness of youth.

Then one day, on a trip to Anchorage with friends, Rheingans and Benson were left alone for a while, and they risked “surefire heck and darnation” to stop along Fourth Avenue and catch a movie —“Jumping Jacks,” starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

Emerging from the theater 90-some minutes later, their sides aching from laughing so hard, they decided to adopt for themselves the names of the film’s main characters. Benson became “Chick,” the Dean Martin character, and Rheingans became “Hap,” the Jerry Lewis character.

“Early the next day, the (Kenai Chapel) missionary’s wife arrived at our house to read me the riot act,” said Rheingans. “Seems she had been in Anchorage the day before, walking down Fourth Avenue, when who should she see coming out of the movie theater but her two Sunday school teachers.”

Ervin and Joyce, who was the Kenai postmaster, were far from pleased. Still, the girls were not finished with their rebellion.

Hap, who went to modeling school and changed her name to Lisa Marie Graham at age 17 before beginning a 50-year marriage to Tom Augustine just prior to her 19th birthday, said that she and Chick had read somewhere that “a person could get drunk by combining aspirin with Coca-Cola.” So they decided to give that a try, especially since neither aspirin nor soft drinks were prohibited by the Kenai Chapel.

In her memoir of life in Hope and Kenai, “The Dragline Kid,” Lisa Augustine wrote: “For our daring experiment, Chick and I bought a bottle of aspirin at Kenai Commercial and headed over to Mrs. Miller’s (soda fountain), where we ordered two bottles of Coke, ensconced ourselves in the back booth and set about crushing aspirin as best we could and funneling it into the bottles.

“We sipped hesitantly at first, sure that the concoction was going to take immediate effect, then, disillusioned but still a bit apprehensive, drained the drinks just as Louisa’s husband, Freddie, approached to ask with a frown, ‘You kids aren’t up to something, are you?’

“‘Uh, no,’ we blurted, and fled, leaving behind twin bottles coated with aspirin residue.

“The experiment didn’t make us drunk, but it probably did irreparable damage to our kidneys or livers or whatever. On the bright side, I never had a headache for the rest of high school, either.”

But even such a bitter defeat didn’t apply the brakes to Chick and Hap’s string of escapades.

“I suppose we were a little preoccupied with forbidden fruits just then, because not long after that (Coke) episode, we decided to get the whole Kenai Chapel Youth Fellowship tipsy,” Hap said.

Using connections to some of the Army soldiers being stationed nearby, they procured a half pint of vodka and spiked the fruit punch at the KYF Friday-night affair. The most affected person at refreshment time, however, appeared to have been “one of the female pillars of the church, who was acting as chaperone,” according to Hap.

She was “smacking her lips and pronouncing loudly, ‘This is the best punch I’ve ever tasted!’ as she poured her third glassful.”

In 1953, the girls were exposed to even more GIs when the Wildwood Army Station was established. Soldiers regularly came from the base to attend church services and other functions, drawing the eyes of teenage girls weary of the regular male faces around Kenai. Many of the soldiers, some of whom were still teenagers themselves, began dating the village girls.

Then, in the fall of that year, after a variety of such “dates” by both girls, Chick “escaped,” Hap said. She had graduated early from high school, and left for business school in Seattle. “Hap” without “Chick” became Arlene again.

In quick succession, much to her parents’ chagrin, she began dating Walter Hotchkiss, a young soldier from Georgia who was seven years older than herself; she joined the Civil Air Patrol and became a second lieutenant; and, in June of 1955, 12 days after her 16th birthday, she became Mrs. Walter Hotchkiss.

Nine months later, Walter decided he wanted to return to Georgia, and Arlene, who was not quite 17, accompanied him. Five months later, they were no longer together.

Still, the story has a happy ending. Arlene’s faith and her strong personality overcame the limitations of her youth. She learned poise and fashion sense in modeling school, and as the wife of Tom Augustine she had two daughters; stints in modeling, secretarial and volunteer work; and a chance to live in several places around the United States.

Currently, she and Tom live in the retirement community near Sacramento, Calif. She has written a book of humorous poetry entitled “Cheer Up it could be Verse,” and she has talked about, but not committed herself to, writing a second memoir that tells the “rest of the story.”

Learning experience — Teaching in Alaska is whole new class of education

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

Mary France was pleased when she received the telegram from Juneau offering her a teaching position in the only school in Kenai. She had applied for a job teaching first grade, and she made the assumption she would be teaching first grade.

The truth was one of several surprises in store for the 26-year-old when she came to the Last Frontier in 1954.

Mary France, now 80, was accompanying her husband, Dan, to the Kenai Peninsula, where he had been appointed protection officer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She had left behind five years of elementary school teaching — two in Washington state and three in Idaho — and was grateful for the opportunity to continue.

“Since I had applied for a first-grade position, I assumed that I had a first-grade teaching job,” she said. “Well, I didn’t realize that that wasn’t so, and when school started in the fall I discovered I wasn’t the first-grade teacher; I was the fifth-grade teacher. It was a huge difference.”

Since Kenai principal George Fabricius had been out of the area for the entire summer, France didn’t discover her actual appointment until the day before school began, barely enough time to get used to the idea, let alone prepare to teach.

Still, she dutifully took her new class and began getting to know them and figuring out how to instruct them.

Meanwhile, things were not going as planned in the first grade.

The school had estimated that it would receive approximately 25 first-graders. Instead — due in part to the 1953 establishment of the Wildwood Army Station just outside of town and the burgeoning growth of young homesteading families — opening day saw 50 first-year students cramming into Joyce Carver’s southeast-corner basement classroom.

Consequently, at a faculty meeting at the end of the first day, France was made an offer.
“That’s when they asked me if I would switch to first grade,” she said. “Mr. Fabricius thought there was someone else in the area that had applied for a job that he was going to see if he could get to come in.”

By day two, Mrs. Biggar was in charge of the fifth grade, and Mary France was a first-grade teacher, sharing a single classroom with Carver and 50 students.

“We had to hunt for desks,” she said. “It was a struggle to come up with enough desks and equipment.”
Another struggle was basic classroom operation, especially since no kindergartens existed in the area and most of their students had never been in any kind of school before. Many of the students did not know their colors or numbers, let alone the alphabet, and some were unsure of where they lived and even their last names.

For practical purposes, France and Carver sometimes split the class in half. “I took my group of students and went into the hall for beginning reading,” France said. “But many things were taught together. We could do math together. One of us would do the teaching, and the other one would supervise and keep things going.”

The cramped conditions continued until Nov. 11, when the upstairs addition to the school was complete and Carver took half of the students to a new classroom.

The problems, however, were not over. And neither was France’s introduction to the intricacies of teaching in a remote location.

Most of the town, according to the Frances, received electricity from a diesel-powered generator operated by Frank Rowley. In the mornings and evenings, when the natural light was low or nonexistent, Rowley’s generator couldn’t keep up with the demand. At those times, Fabricius would go outside and start up the school’s own “light plant.”

The principal expected energy conservation from his faculty.

“Mr. Fabricius was pretty iron-handed, I guess,” France said. “You had to keep the temperature at 68 degrees, and you never turned on three banks of lights at a time. You turned on the two inside banks, but you never turned on the third bank because of the electricity problem.”

Another occasional problem centered around recess. “Kids went outside to play, regardless of the weather,” France said. “Everybody went out to recess (at the same time), and somebody always checked the playground to see if there were moose because if there were moose on the playground we couldn’t take the kids out for recess.

“And many times the moose would come and lie just by the windows at the back of the school. And the kids couldn’t go outside to play because (the moose) wintered there.”

Another difficulty came at the end of each day, especially early in the year.

“One of the hardest things to do was to get (the first-graders) on the right bus. The military kids had their own bus, but to go out to North Kenai, it was all Greek to me,” said France, who was unfamiliar with the area herself. “I didn’t know where any of those roads were out there.

“We did the best we could to put the kids on the right bus. Then it was kind of up to the bus driver.
“One kid — the bus driver came back (to the school) with one that was left over. And he didn’t know where he lived, so we just had to stay there until his parents came.”

The teachers and students at the Kenai school made it through the year, although France said the experience was an education for everyone. The area was growing, oil was about to be discovered on the Swanson River field, and things would never be the same.

“That was the first year that they had to have two teachers (for one grade), and after that year the second grade had to have two, and then the third, and so forth,” France said. The earliest grades also stayed large, and so for many years in a row at least one teacher was added to the faculty.

France’s first first-graders would not be her last, but — including such familiar area surnames as Reger, Segura, Ames, Juliussen and Ivanoff — they would be among her most memorable. Except for a two-year foray (1957 to 1959) into high school home economics, France continued in elementary education until she retired in the 1970s.

Over the years, the area got telephones, radio, television, natural gas and paved roads, but progress was rarely easy. Mary France got better and better at teaching elementary school in rural Alaska, but it was that first year that helped prepare her for the many to follow.

Fighting at 14 — Cooper Landing man got early start in service

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

These days, 77-year-old Elzie Eugene (“Gene”) Wheeler likes to relax and admire the view from his home in the Cooper Landing senior-housing development known as Senior Haven. When he was in seventh grade back in tiny Tonkawa, Okla., however, he was “bored” with the pace of his life and began making decisions that would change his life forever.

An increasingly antsy Wheeler, who said he was larger and felt more mature than his classmates, began hanging out with 17- and 18-year-olds. When some of these older friends began enlisting in the military, he became determined to do the same.

In 1946, one year removed from America’s victory in World War II, Wheeler (at this point 14 years old) made a conscious decision he now refers to as “joining the Liars Club.”

“There were five of us wanting to enlist, so we went to a Navy recruiting office,” he said. “The recruiter asked us what we were doing at the time. It was February, and three of us were still in school; two were seniors, and I was in the ninth grade. He told us to stay in school and come back in June.”

Such advice did not jibe with their plans. They learned that some Army recruiters were in town, so they tried again. This time, they all claimed to be out of school and ready to serve their country, so the recruiter started the paperwork, warning them that they would need parental consent if they were not yet 18.

“I knew that my parents wouldn’t sign for me, so I did some fast thinking and told the recruiter that I would be 18 on March 21,” Wheeler said.

The truth was that his birthday was Aug. 25, when he would turn 15. But on March 21 he went to the Selective Service office to register.

“A lady asked if she could help me, and I told her I need to register. She asked, ‘When is your birthday?’ I replied, ‘Today.’ She filled out the papers and gave me my draft card.”

The five boys traveled five days later to Oklahoma City and were sworn in at 5 p.m. Then they were directed onto buses and transported to Camp Chaffee, Ark. Wheeler and two of the other original five friends had enlisted for three years and were assigned to the Army Air Forces; the remaining two friends were assigned to artillery.

On his fourth day in uniform, Wheeler was assigned to guard a work detail of four German prisoners who were filling out their time before being sent home overseas. Soon he was shipped off to train at Sheppard Field, Texas, where he was not the only underage trainee, but was the youngest.

It was about this time his parents learned what had become of their son.
“My parents found out where I was when the Army mailed my civilian clothes home,” he said. “My mother went to the school superintendent for advice on how to get me out of the Army.

“He suggested that she consider leaving me where I was. He told her he couldn’t keep me in school, and perhaps it was best that I stay in the Army. She agreed.”
Wheeler soon began training to become a medic. During this time, at Shaw Field, S.C., in early 1947, he got a pass off base and took a girl he had met on a date in town, but the date didn’t turn out as he had planned.

“We went to the movies, and I was walking her home when a police car pulled up beside us,” he said. “They put us in the car, took my friend home, and took me to jail. I was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The girl was 17 and we were out after curfew.

“The next morning, my commanding officer, who was also the hospital commander, came to the jail. When he was told what the charge was, I could hear him laughing. He told the police that they had the wrong one locked up. He knew that I was only 15.

“The charges were dropped, but every time the commander saw me going to town he told me to leave the young ones alone.”

In the end, Wheeler served for 20 years, one month and three days, retiring from the military June 30, 1966, at the ripe old age of 34. He had served through the Korean War and the early years of the Vietnam War. He traveled all over the world, acting mainly as a medical technician.

Ten days after retiring, Wheeler went to work for a large nonprofit group that operated hospitals. He did administrative work in Wyoming before coming to Soldotna to help complete and open Central Peninsula General Hospital in 1971.
Although he would continue to work and travel around the country for nearly the next 30 years — as an insurance agent, a real estate agent and a hospital administrator — his time in Soldotna convinced him that the Kenai Peninsula was where he would retire.

In 2006, after seven years in Kenai, he and Anna, his wife of more than 50 years, came to Cooper Landing. They had planned to retire to a small cabin north of Kenai, but they are pleased with the community they now call home.

“I look down on the lake, and it’s beautiful,” Wheeler said. “I can sit here on my couch and look at the sheep on the mountains outside the window.”

In 1997, Wheeler contributed to a 660-page volume of personal stories written by men and women who had entered military service underage. The volume, now the first of three, was called “America’s Youngest Warriors” and was published by an organization called Veterans of Underage Military Service.

According to Wheeler, the VUMS has 2,000 members, the average age of which is in the mid-80s. The oldest living member — and the only one left from World War I — is a 107-year-old Virginia man.

Wheeler said he is proud to be a member of such a select group, and is pleased with the decision he made so many years ago.

“I got to do things I couldn’t have done any other way,” he said of his military career.

When asked whether he would do anything differently, if given the chance, he replied, “Probably signed up a year or two sooner.”

New leaf — Tree cutter carves out different path in life

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

Michael Jones loves trees. He loves to look at them, walk among them and admire the beauty he says he believes is God’s handiwork.

“They’re the neatest plants on the planet, as far as I’m concerned,” he said, his green eyes sparkling beneath the brim of his green cap. “When I walk into a forest of trees, to me, I see rooms — and there’s a room over there — it’s just kind of a hollow under the trees, and the canopy’s over top.”

Those rooms are places he loves to inhabit, he said. He feels most at home among the rooms the trees provide.

“My love for the woods is eternal,” he said. “I’m a tree man all the way.”

Given these statements, it may seem odd to learn that Jones also loves to cut trees down. The son of a lumberjack, and a tree-feller himself by trade for nearly 40 of his 50 years, he believes that felling trees is in his blood.

“I think (the forest) was put here in wisdom,” he said. “I think it was put here to be harvested, just like our gardens, but I think it should be done responsibly. And I think we’re learning that.”

For much of the past 25 years, Jones has been operating his own tree-cutting business called Timber Tree Service. Success has never come easily to him, and he has overcome some tremendous obstacles along the way. His struggles have brought him to both his love for the woods and his potent faith.

Born and raised in Kalispell, Mont., Jones said that his father gave him his first chainsaw as a present for his 9th birthday. “I couldn’t even start it,” he said of the yellow McCulloch CP70.

His father put him right to work cutting lengths of log into firewood, then began taking him to work with him about the time Jones was 10 or 11 years old.

“Summer vacations were spent learning how to fall trees,” he said.

Jones’s father expected his son to help bring in money for a family, also consisting of a second wife and four stepchildren. Jones’s biological mother and his siblings had moved away after his parents divorced when Jones was about 8 years old.

“My father was a very mean man,” Jones said. “He loved to cause pain. He loved to make me bleed. My name was ‘Stupid.’”

When his father would hurt him, Jones said, he was fond of saying, “It’s good for ya, ya little sonofabitch. It’ll make you tough.”

Since he and his stepmother hated each other, Jones said, he spent about two years living in a shed before eventually leaving home, determined he would, in fact, become tough — tougher than his father could ever imagine.

Instead, however, Jones plunged into years of drug and alcohol abuse that nearly cost him his life.
By 1981, he was a mess. Despite a string of tree-felling jobs, he did not stay clean and sober. Although only 23 at the time, he could forge no meaningful relationships, and his health was deteriorating.

“Most people made a wide circle around me because I wore an Injun Joe hat, a 14-inch Bowie knife on my side. I mean, everything about me said, ‘Stay away!’”

One woman, however, refused to be put off.

“She was not intimidated by me one bit, not one bit,” he said, his voice choking, eyes brimming with tears. “She’d come at me with this beautiful smile and eyes that just pierced into my soul.”

Her lack of fear bothered Jones, in his muddled state. After he discovered that she was a member of a “little country church” in Kalispell, he decided to show her who was boss: “I loaded up a rifle — I had a .30-30 rifle — and I loaded up a couple boxes of shells, and I went down there and shot that church completely full of holes.”

He said he expected to go to jail. He’d been there before. Instead, the church got the money together to fly him to a special Los Angeles rehabilitation facility for hard cases.

Sick with gonorrhea, cirrhosis, bleeding ulcers and malnutrition — and addled with chemicals — Jones managed to clean out his system, become healthy and find God.

His faith gave his life needed focus, but his path was still strewn with the stones of adversity.

His first marriage lasted 11 months; the divorce “threw me into a tailspin,” he said. His second marriage he called “the most miserable eight years of my life.” He spent many of those years living in tents on logging sites, and he swore he would never marry again.

Instead, in 1991 he decided to purchase survival gear, get to Alaska somehow and live alone in the wilderness until he died. But even that didn’t go as planned. It took him more than a decade to actually live in Alaska, and in those intervening years he had a heart attack (attributed, he said, to earlier years of cocaine abuse) and got married again.

In Neha Bay, part of the Makah Indian Reservation on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, Jones became involved in the Youth With A Mission church, and at one point attended a pig roast where he met Susan, a member of the Makah tribe. They made an immediate connection. Despite Jones’s mighty resistance, they married in July 1992.

Jones found himself with an instant family — a new wife and her four children.

The new Jones family lived most of the next 10 years in Libby, Mont., where Jones worked as a tree-feller, and said he learned to open up and allow himself to be loved. He also continued to struggle with his health in an occupation consistently rated as one of the three most dangerous jobs in America.

Through it all — the heart problems, a bout of pneumonia, injuries on the job — he has kept his faith.

“God is the Great Physician,” he said. “And I believe that God is big enough to take care of me.”
Since moving to Sterling in 2002, Jones has been operating his business full time, nowadays with his youngest son, Josiah. Timber Tree Service specializes in removing trees that endanger homes or power lines, clearing work for contractors and oil companies, and chainsaw-style landscaping.

“We’ll take your jungle and turn it into a park,” Jones is fond of saying.

“I’ll cut your trees just like I would cut your hair. You want me to dye half of it, tie jingle bells in the other half, I’ll do it for you,” he said.

Despite his prodigious ability to fell trees, limb them and buck them into logs, Jones is beginning to contemplate a new path. Josiah, he said, is showing interest in taking over the business, and Jones himself is becoming interested in a welding career.

As long as he is surrounded by trees, his family and faith, Jones said he has everything he needs.