Bettles Lodge

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Listen up folks. You are about to be treated to a great story. But first an introduction. My friend Sam (Sally Ann Mitchell) is someone I've known for 30 years. She has always been for me an almost a mythic figure. 10 years older, worldly in the best way, smart and beautiful. As it turns out she's also quite an accomplished memoirist.

This is the first installment of short pieces she's penned out of her 30+ journals. There are more to come.

Bettles Lodge, Bettles, Alaska

It began with a phone call.  I was in the middle of my next-to-last semester in the MBA program at UT.  I had been nodding off, trying to read a stultifying chapter in Statistics. The phone call was my friend, Claire Drenowatz, calling me from Anchorage where she was flying a tanker for the Bureau of Land Management. She said “You like weird jobs, why don’t you come to Alaska to cook at a lodge in Bettles for the summer?”

Claire put the lodge manager, Jim, on the line and we talked about location, work week and salary. The first hook was the adventure, the second hook the salary.  Working 10/7 I would make about $600 a week.  One hell of a contrast to the $6 an hour I was working as a Graduate Assistant in 1979.

Hmm, trash a semester’s work of classes or go work in Alaska?  Anyone who knows me well knows my choice. It was a no-brainer. Jim hired me over the phone on Claire’s recommendation and asked me to come up in 10 days. I hated the MBA program; Alaska looked like paradise. I tried to find Bettles, but it is so small that I couldn’t find it on a map of Alaska (this is before Google).  It didn’t daunt me a bit.

Ed. note: Post Google search

I told John, my live in lover, that I was going.  It was not exactly a group decision.  It would mean I’d be away from Austin for close to 3months, something he was not very keen about.  He was, however, gracious enough to loan me the plane fare. I paid him back in 2 weeks from my lodge salary.

The lodge was owned by Frontier Flying Service based in Fairbanks.  The owner offered me a flight to Bettles to see whether I liked the lodge.  What he meant was, come up to the lodge and cook for us for the weekend so we’re sure you measure up.  I did, they were pleased, and so I started. Whathehell, they were paying me to do something I loved – cooking.

Somewhere I have a picture of the front of the lodge.  It is made of logs and has moose antlers covering the double entrance. It’s homey and rustic rolled into one. Inside was a large living room, a section for air travel transactions , an office, the restaurant and kitchen, and a lower basement that held the cash cow, the liquor for sale (the only liquor store in 200 miles). Upstairs there were 4 bedrooms and a large room that held 10 bunk beds.  Outside, behind the kitchen there was a greenhouse and a garden with herbs and fresh vegetables. There was an outbuilding  that held 6 bedrooms. That’s where I stayed when I was cook. 

Bettles is a tiny bush village that’s only accessible by plane . It’s about 70 miles inside the Arctic Circle and about 170 miles NE of Fairbanks. The Bureau of Land Management had a small permanent staff and a rotating shift of firefighters and tanker pilots there in the summer.

There were few vehicles (they’d been flown in by a Herc (transport  plane  Hercules). The roads were gravel, and some of them led to nowhere at all. There was the flight tower, a general store and the lodge.  Maybe about 200 people. Our mail was flown in from Fairbanks by a small plane that carried letters to the bush communities. In the winter everyone got around on snowmobiles.

Bettles is on the Koyakuk river which is where canoes and rafts floated in the summer. It was also popular for hunting and fishing, next to enormous area that became the Arctic National Refuge. Hunters came in the winter for moose, caribou, and the elusive Dall sheep. Grizzlies were on the protected list, so no bear.  It was the recreation/hunting trade that made the reason for Bettles to have a lodge.

The general store owner, Troy, had a team of dogs he used for sledding in the winter. The dogs were all staked out separately and made a lot of noise, but at night you could hear wolves howling over them. One of his favorite pastimes was to come to the lodge and start a fictitious rumor, just to see how long it would take and in what form the morphed rumor would come back to him. I caught him at it once and he laughed that it was his favorite game. You see, Bettles was a very small place and sometimes you had to create your own entertainment.

In June, when the salmon were running , we’d go to the sand bar on the Koyakuk to have a salmon roast. The air was always crisp and the  days were twenty four hours long.  In June the sun just circled overhead. Total daylight wreaks havoc on your internal clock.  I’m a night person, but found it easy to keep normal hours at work because there was no night.

The  Cook   My kitchen kingdom was a large space with a commercial cooktop with 6 gas burners, and 2 large ovens. Besides the burners there was an outsize grill, two fridges and two freezers. My heart beat faster to see the tools I’d have to work with.  Best of all was my helper, Bronwen (a Welsh name. I wondered too). She did all the dishes!  I warned her early on that when I got stressed in the kitchen, I would chill out by swearing profusely, and she was not to be alarmed or take it personally.

I cooked for any number from 12 to 40, depending on whether a fire crew was in. The hours were not for the faint hearted.  I got up at 5:30 and cooked 3 meals a day, with another if a plane or helicopter stopped over on its way to or from the Slope. We had aircraft gasoline and jet fuel, so planes stop often. Occasionally I wound up fueling a small plane late at night, so I sometimes worked a 20 hour day. Worked fine for me, I was paid by the hour, and this was overtime.

 Breakfast was my bête noir meal.  One morning I had 40 people for breakfast.  There was a sign over the counter that said “Eggs any style”.  One firefighter said “I’ll have an omelet” and my harassed response  was “The hell you will!”

I know I’m a great cook, but wondered why I’d never heard anyone say anything negative. I’m not perfect.  I asked Jim and he grinned, ”Don’t you know? You’re the only commercial cook for about 150 miles in each direction.  You’re the most powerful woman in Bettles. No one dares piss off the cook!” I remained humble.

The kitchen was informal to say the least. Once, a guest asked me for a well done steak. I looked at him steadily and said, “I’m not responsible for anything past medium rare. You’re going to have to come in here ad cook it yourself”. And he did.

I worked 7/10. Adding overtime I worked 50 hours a week, 30 of it overtime with no scheduled time off , they just let me go into Fairbanks or Anchorage whenever I lost my sense of humor. That was  usually a month or so before I started snapping at people. Time in Anchorage might be for a week.  There were people to live with and friends to meet.  I had girlfriends from the Slope and we’d get together for a drink.  Since I knew most of the pilots, I was often at the airport playing chess during the times they were waiting for a fire alert. Whenever Claire was in town we’d go to the Captain Cook hotel and perch in the highest restaurant to catch up and share stories.

Claire

BLM  and the Retardant Teams  Let me see if I can explain how the fire crews worked.  In the summer there were many thunderstorms with frequent air to ground lightning strikes. Many of them started fires. There were teams of planes based in Anchorage that were dispatched to the fire sites. Some were detection planes, some tankers with retardant and some helicopters with helitack (helicopter) firefighting teams.

To speed up response, teams were also stationed in various bush communities (like ours) to wait for dispatch.  The teams would stay in town waiting for central to alert them for a fire in their area.  Some summers had few fires. The teams, of course, would rather be fighting fires than sitting around for long blocks of time, so the crews used leisure time to read, play cards, chess, and hacky sack. It was nice to have them in town because it brought new faces and things to do. And then one day they’d just vanish, gone to a fire.

After the summer, when the tourists had gone (except for the hunters) the fire crews were all gone – no thunderstorms after summer. I had more time to spend on gourmet meals.  One Sunday  I fixed a favorite breakfast of mine.  A pilot who came in on his way to the Slope said “Wait until I tell my wife that I had to come to Bettles to have Eggs Benedict!”

Park Rangers  There were four National Park rangers for the Arctic National  Wildlife Preserve.  They stayed in Bettles year round.  The previous winter the federal government had locked up the thousands and thousands of acres to make up the National Park Wildlife Refuge.  Since it was now a federal park, only the indigenous people were allowed to hunt there.  It angered the white hunters because they could no longer hunt in that acreage, a rich source of game.

 It was my immediate theory that the feds had locked up the land because there was a lot of oil under it, and they’d be able to drill for it if it became federal land.  Sure enough, there are beginning attempts by the fed to authorize drilling in the Reserve.

 Native culture.  The village was a mixture of Athabascan  indians and whites. Ella, a native and a good friend, was the cook over at BLM. She made out of this world cinnamon buns from scratch. Many of the helitack (firefighters who dropped into a fire from a plane or helicopters)crews were native.  Their culture differed in family customs and in hospitality.

One native custom in our village was a 3 day Open House called a potlatch. Relatives and friends came from miles around  The first night’s dinner was an enormous spread with things like caribou, moose, mountain  goat and bear (Native Indian tribes are allowed  to hunt grizzlies). And, alas, crane. As in flap,flap wings crane. I didn’t sample that; I felt too guilty as if I’d participated in a lower 48 taboo , but had everything else. I like moose and caribou, which both taste a lot like venison, but a little gamier. Bear, however, sent me to the nearest corner to spit out into a handkerchief.

The next item on the native feast was Eskimo ice cream. I know the recipe so I should have been warned.  You take snow and mix it with blueberries and then add seal fat to give it the right texture.  If you don’t have seal fat from a relative who lived on the coast where they hunted seal, you used Crisco. Have I drawn an accurate  picture? It was the second time that night my throat said,”Oh no, you’re not going to send that this way”.

The party goes on for days with liquor being one of the favorite offerings.  There were a few sprawled bodies when it was all over in two or three days. It’s an event that’s very expensive to give, so there was only one in the two years I was there. I felt flattered to be included, but I didn’t last past the first night.

Athabascan mothers had a communal bond with other mothers. They tended to the children as a group, and it was possible for a mother to be gone for a couple of years without the child losing parental guidance. Natives who went to school out of state often came home to stay after a year or two, never finishing their education.  They missed their culture too much.

Flying   As a thank you for good cooking, or maybe because I was one of about the only single women who lived near the airport, I was often offered rides in a number of different aircraft.

Bill , my favorite pilot, flew a Grunman Goose for a geology group, and he flew me over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge at about 100 feet, well below radar.  As we were flying I could see out of the corner of my eye a large plane dropping to our altitude.  It was an enormous Herc that slowed to keep pace with us, until the pilots had exchanged hellos. After that the plan sped up, waggled its wings and returned to a legal altitude. Pretty nifty.

When he left for the summer to go home, Bill took off and then circled back towards the lodge.  He had asked me to go outside the lodge to wave goodbye  I got to see him buzz the lodge at about 50 feet.  I smiled because I knew it was for me. He waggled his wings to say goodbye and was gone to Sitka for the winter.

Another pilot flew me for the day to a gilt edge resort on a beautiful lake in his float plane. To get there you had to fly over a range of really stark, jagged mountains. Breathtaking. The resort catered to wealthy fishermen from the Lower 48who had come for some of the exotic fish that were in the lake. Full service – after they’d made a catch they never had to touch the fish again.  Helpers gutted, filleted and put them, frozen, in coolers ready to ship back home.  As an added touch they had a cook like me, who did everything from scratch.

One helicopter pilot offered me a ride and as we took off he asked me where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.  My answer was one of the most foolish things I’ve ever said – “Scare me.” With that he put the plane into a steep climb and executed a hammerhead stall.  You fly completely vertical and reach stall speed, make a quarter turn and fall into a fast deep dive before you level out.  I didn’t know a helicopter could do that maneuver.  I wish I could say it was exhilarating and that I laughed.  Not so, I was white knuckled and had my eyes shut through most of it.  When we landed, the pilot said with a self-satisfied smile, “Well?” I managed  “Thank you” in a quavering tone and said he’d certainly scared the hell out of me. I didn’t ask him to do anything extreme again.  He thought it was pretty funny.

One of the Frontier Flying pilots, the lodge’s parent company, took me for a flight in his twin engine Aztec.  We flew over the Koyakuk River at about 50 feet (also illegal) following the many twisting curves that he banked at each turn. It was like being on an aerial road race on the curvy Big Sure highway. Now that was exhilerating.

One of the Frontier planes that came in from Fairbanks was a DC3, a large, nearly vintage aircraft.  Its route was to fly to Bettles, then to three or four villages delivering freight.  I hitched a ride to Kotzebue one day and helped unload. Hefty work.  As we flew back to Fairbanks from Kotzebue, the pilot offered me a chance to help fly the plane.  The copilot and I swapped places and they let me take the wheel.  What a rush.  The pilot did most of the flying, handling trim and rudder, I was just maintaining altitude and heading.  Regardless, it was flying the plane. As we flew over the Yukon River I knew it was one of those moments that only comes once in a lifetime.

A Kodachrome moment came in the winter when there was about 3 feet of snow on the ground.  As I walked through the snow to see a friend, each footstep was a squeek (arctic snow doesn’t pack like wet snow, you can’t make snowballs. It’s more like millions of tiny ice crystals because it’s so dry and cold).  That night the temperature was maybe 8 degrees and I was wearing a winter parka. It was a clear night and the northern lights were coloring the sky. About 100 feet from the lodge, I turned to look back.  There was a little thrill in my heart looking at the dark building in the snow, lit up and welcoming.  I knew it was a picture I’d never forget.

The next year Frontier sold the lodge, so I headed for the North Slope, intrigued by the location and seduced by the salaries.  And that’s the next story.

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