Grandpa Was One Of The Things You Saw When People Came To Alaska
By Linda --For over 20 years, "August" meant "Grandpa's Coming!" in Gakona, Alaska.
Every summer, when August arrived, we'd all drive into Anchorage, greet Grandpa at the airport, and drive him back over 200 miles of winding road, through mountains and past glaciers, to our house on the hill above Gulkana Village.
In no time at all, we had Grandpa up and running.
He'd be riding a bike or walking -- several miles a day. He'd scramble up and down steep hills, pursuing blueberries. And he spent a lot of time baking dozens of loaves of bread, or cooking up grayling, or making cakes and pies.
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| Faded Memories Of Years Gone By |
GRANDPA AND THE FRENCH PEOPLE
In the early years, another thing happened in August at our house: The French People came.
Here's how that happened. When we first came to Alaska, Jeremy and I worked for a French-speaking Swiss mountaineer, named Ray Genet. We built him a cabin out near Mt. McKinley, far back in the woods, 12 miles into the trackless wilderness.
Ray Genet (who died several years later while camped at the top of Mt. Everest) was a pioneer in the art of wholesale, bulk Alaska adventure. He hired mountain guides from all over the world, and then sold guided mountain climbing packages to rich American doctors and lawyers who couldn't do it on their own.
One of these guides was Michel Flouret. Michel was from France, and about 28 years old.
Michel was charming and tall, and had tousled curly hair. He also apparently had an expired visa the winter we met him -- and was hiding out in the woods where we were building Genet's cabin. We, and Michel, lived in simple, charming already-finished cabins back there, with a stunning view of Mt. McKinley.
Michel had studied to be an architect, to please his father. But, he had changed his mind. He had turned to professional mountaineering. In America, anyone can be a "mountaineer." But in France, you had to undergo rigorous training, and to prove yourself a "Guide De Haute Montagne" by climbing all of the world's major peaks.
Michel didn't speak English very well, and he was there much of the time that winter, while we built Genet another cabin. So he offered a good opportunity for us to speak French on a daily basis. In addition to his possibly lapsed visa status, Michel was quite attractive. He apparently had numerous girlfriends in Anchorage.
We found this out when we went over to his cabin one winter night and saw him anguishing over his tiny transistor radio, intently listing to the Bush Pipeline.
The Bush Pipeline was a radio show -- a message-delivery system for people out in the woods who had no phone service. Other people called a radio station in Anchorage, and dictated their message (such as, "To Joe at Sourdough Creek: I will be in sometime next week on my snowmachine. Be sure to have some beans cooking on the stove!") Then, people way out in the woods -- such as Michel Flouret (or Joe at Sourdough Creek) -- would listen every night on their battery-powered radios to all the messages to see if there was one for them.
That night, there were two messages for Michel. They were back-to-back, both marked, "To Michel Flouret at Pirate Lake." Unfortunately, though, they were from two different girls. Michel was caught in the act, and he was anguished, because it was obvious that both of his girlfriends had probably heard the two messages, too -- and one of them, the one who had just sent a Bush Pipeline message saying she had bought a teepee, that they could now go have a romantic getaway somewhere, and that she dearly loved him -- was obviously going to have second thoughts.
Years went by. One cold August day, when our kids were small, I was driving home from work at the Copper River Native Association. As I drove over the Gulkana River bridge, down on the riverside below, there were two or three rubber rafts sitting on the sandy banks. Standing around the rafts were about 20 people, men and women, all in various stages of undress. They were calmly wringing out their clothes.
I drove up the hill, and told Grandpa, Jeremy and the boys about what I had just seen, and about 35 minutes later, Michel was standing outside the door--with all those people, now fully clothed, lined up on the trail behind him, still damp and shivering from the rain and river.
Michel had a new job: running some kind of major French tour guide service to Alaska. And our house in Gakona turned out to be one of the features of his tour. That summer -- and about five more summers after that -- Michel and his French people would descend, abruptly, and without notice. They were always different visitors. But the basic story remained the same every year.
We -- and our kids, our dogs, our parakeets, our Grandpa, and our general situation -- were apparently all part of the trip.
By mid-August, Grandpa would start getting ready for the French invasion by baking extra loaves of bread and freezing them -- they always had voracious appetites. And by cooking up pots of fish soup to haul out for them -- when and if they arrived. We never knew; some summers they never did show up.
French people really don't like learning English. So, inevitably, their arrival would be a mass lesson in heated French politics, French phrases, and French culture. As they wolfed down Grandpa's homemade bread and slurped up their fish soup, they would marvel that Americans still knew how to cook!
The French people (though some of them were really Swiss) claimed that, back home, nobody cooked anymore. They probably didn't. These were all doctors and dentists, accountants, teachers and lawyers. Grandpa would gamely hold forth throughout these boisterous conversations -- interjecting French phrases, recognizing and translating cognates, expounding on French grammar -- and discussing his Citroen.
The years that Michel brought them tend to blur together, but the last time a group of French tourists visited was several years before the French Winter Olympics were held in Albertville, in 1992.
Some of Michel's clients that August were bigwigs for the Olympics, apparently in the computer-programming division. When they heard about our computer work with Grandpa, from our cabin in the Alaskan woods, they trotted right upstairs to examine our computers, and our modem, and to talk about the brave new world of technology that they
expected to implement at the Olympics. And how everything in the world was now possible. Even in Alaska.
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| Matt & Grandpa, around the time that the "French People" used to come. |
If there's one thing that all five of Grandpa Bob's children knew, it was that he despised a guy named Noam Chomsky.
In some ways, Noam Chomsky bore the brunt of Grandpa's personal disappointment. He came to symbolize all that was wrong with "the academy." Grandpa couldn't say enough bad things about Noam Chomsky, and fell prey to a tangled mass of criticism about Noam, and Noam's thoughts about linguistics, and Noam's ideas about politics, and so on.
Noam Chomsky is a little-known linguist-turned-political commentator. He was an early opponent of the Vietnam War. And he is also one of the most important analyzers of the structure of language who has ever lived.
When Grandpa left the Foreign Service, he went into linguistics, too. This was the days before computers. As he studied all this complicated stuff about language, he wrote his notes on neat little filing cards, which he put into actual little metal boxes. What with family, and commuting, and primitive typewriters, and no computers, and the need to get a "day job," the thesis he was writing (as so many people's theses do) never made it off the ground.
Although Noam Chomsky is known in several rarified circles, he isn't a common household name -- like, say, Donald Trump is today. And he never was.
But Grandpa knew who he was. And so did a friend of ours: Pete Martin.
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| Noam |
Pete is a former Alaska State Park employee, and a longtime acquaintance. He left State Parks years ago, but continued to work out at Denali National Park, for many summers, at Camp Denali, a classy, high-end version of a Boy Scout camp for the wealthy. In the winter, he worked in Bend, Oregon, at a ski resort.
As a former Alaskan, Pete loves "coming back home." He frequently drove the Alaska-Canada Highway in his little "vintage" car. Like Michel, he never broadcast that he was coming. He'd just show up, carting into the room a paper bag of granola he'd made, and some milk he bought somewhere -- probably Whitehorse, Canada, which was his last overnight stop, hundreds of miles away.
Pete frequently showed up in March, when he took to roving the roads. Or, sometimes, he'd drop by in fall, when he was looking for "fall colors" to photograph, during that four-day period that the trees in Alaska turn orange, before the leaves are blown off.
Pete is an intellectual. He has a huge collection of classical music, on vinyl and wax records. He's a photographer. He has spent many days, roaming the hills of Denali National Park as a naturalist, explaining the foliage, geology and wildlife to tourists.
And -- he loves Noam Chomsky.
Pete Martin is very much like Grandpa was. But with that very peculiar twist. When you sat around with Pete Martin, the topic would invariably (just as with Grandpa) turn to Noam. Like Grandpa, Pete couldn't say enough about Noam Chomsky. Unlike Grandpa, everything Pete said about Noam Chomsky was good.
So, one August, we looked out the door after hearing a car drive up. There was Pete, out under the yellowing August trees, looking for fall colors, rummaging around in his little car for his ziploc bag of granola to bring in, and all set to launch into his accolades about Noam Chomsky.
Inside the cabin was Grandpa Bob, drinking tea and admiring the last of the fall petunias in a vase on the table, surrounded by his three attentive grandchildren.
We rushed out the door to waylay Pete: He absolutely would not be allowed to come in unless he never, ever, said a single word about Noam Chomsky!
We explained that Grandpa Bob, the only other person in the whole world who even knew how to say "Noam Chomsky" was indoors. And that he felt just as strongly about Noam as Pete did.
And, that he was not on Pete Martin's team.
So, Pete agreed. He came into the house with his cereal, as his contribution to breakfast the next day. Everybody ate Grandpa's supper.
Pete Martin and Grandpa got along famously that night, and had many lively discussions about all the things they both knew and had in common. But Noam was never mentioned.
