After my 2011 Alaska visit I tried to stay in contact with Bill. I would talk to him at least once a year: On New Year’s Eve. Because Singapore is 17 hours ahead of Alaska, when I got up 1 Jan and had my morning coffee, it was still only afternoon 31 Dec in Fairbanks, so I would call up Bill and ask him how his year had been, he thought that was quite funny.
I offered to go out and help him during the summer, but these trips were not so easy to arrange; I should have gone more often I guess, but at least I manage to make one last trip in 2015. I arrived in Fairbanks 13 May; Bill picked me up at the airport as usual, but he had warned me on the phone that he was getting a bit ‘feeble’, was the term he used. Bill got confused driving out of the airport car park, for a while he suddenly couldn’t find the way; that was a bit worrying, but otherwise he seemed OK.
Our plan was to go up to the Creek after the break-up of the river; I would help get the camp ready for the summer’s work and take the bus back to Fairbanks in time for my 18 June departure to Singapore. But we never made it up. In fact, I found out that Bill had not been up to the Creek for several years now; he didn’t make it up that year, nor the next either.
I had a fantastic time in Fairbanks that spring. I love the town, the state and especially the people there; it is so easy to make friends in Alaska. What is hard is walking along the highway for the exercise and not have people pull over all the time to offer you a ride! I cannot remember anyone ever asking me where I was from, in Alaska that doesn’t matter. The fact that you don’t live there or talk a bit funny makes no difference to people there. You just fit in automatically, and people take you in, accept you and appreciate you for what you are.
I was under the impression that we should drive up to the creek within a day or two, it was late spring already. But Bill wasn’t quite ready. He called up Mike in Coldfoot, there was still too much ice in the river to cross he said. The van needed fixing. Bill’s mailbox had been damaged during the winter by the snow-plough and had to be put back. This took days. The days would drag on and turn into weeks.
A young man named Ryan came up from Anchorage in his own pick-up truck that he had modified into a camper van, towing a four-wheeler. Ryan was the son of one of Bill’s friends in the south of the state and a great Alaskan kid; he had worked in construction up on the North Slope and knew about mechanics and construction work; he brought enormous dumbbells with him for exercising and was strong as an ox. Now he was keen to go into the Brooks Range with an old-timer – Bill – to learn the ropes about gold mining. He stayed in his truck at a camping ground near the Chena River with his dog and came out to Bill’s compound every day to help us get ready. But when Ryan saw where we were heading (= nowhere) he lost patience and said ‘goodbye’ one afternoon. He headed straight up the Dalton Highway to Coldfoot alone, to go gold mining on his own. We didn’t hear from him again.
When Ryan left I knew we were not going to make it. I would never again go with Bill north, cross the Koyukuk with him or open up the camp again. Janet, Claudene’s youngest and Bill’s step-daughter, lived nearby a bit further north with her husband Terry in a wonderful, spacious log house. She offered that I could move over there, “before this ends badly”, she said. But I had things to do at home, so instead I cut my stay in Fairbanks short by one week. I paid the airline $150 to have my departure time changed and traveled back 11 June instead of 18.
Around that time I had run out of things to do at Bill’s compound: You can only rake and clean and cut weeds for so long, eventually you run out of stuff to do. One day I went for a full-day hike across Creamer’s Field, ending up in swampy water to my knees, got chewed up by mosquitoes and was lost for a while, but I still had a good day out. I helped Claudene with her shopping; she appreciated having someone drive her around town now and then. At night Bill and I would still sit up sometimes and listen to the radio or just talk about places, the old times, politics or the price of gold.
Bill knew I had to go back, he didn’t say much about that. He said he would go up to the Creek later in the summer when his son, Karl came up from Illinois for the summer. Karl had retired from the army as a captain in the Marine Corps and was now wheeling and dealing in properties and mining claims. Bill drove me to the airport and saw me off: “Next time you bring Bee Choo and Mark”, he said. “I will get a bigger ax for Mark, so that he can help cut firewood”.
I never spoke to Bill again after that. Bill had stopped using email at that point; he was worried about the government spying on him. So I wrote a snail-mail letter after I got back and tried to call a few times, including 1 January 2016, but Bill didn’t pick up. However, in early December that year I got an email from Claudene that Bill had died. I was shocked, but not completely surprised. I called up Claudene and found out what happened: After I left in June 2015, Bill had gotten gradually worse; as I mentioned, when Karl got there he went up to the Creek on his own, Bill never made the trip again. Janet works at the Fairbanks Pioneer Home, an assisted-living facility, and had seen all the symptoms of dementia before; in fact, Bill was registered for a place there but never went. He didn’t even see a doctor and was never diagnosed, but Janet strongly suggested that he suffered from Alzheimer’s. Bill’s condition deteriorated in 2016, he stayed on his own in the workshop next to Claudene’s cabin; later Claudene found a stack of Panadol there, but Bill never complained to her about any pains. During that year, Claudene brought up another one of her daughters, Janet’s big sister, from California; she helped look after Bill a bit for a while to make sure he got his meals and such. Bill stopped driving out and would spend most of his time pottering about the place, doing little chores and organizing his tools repeatedly over and over again.
Once here in Singapore, I spotted a sorry-looking helpless man in a wheelchair and I pointed him out to my son Mark (born 2002) and said: “If I ever get to be like that, do me a favour and push me out over a cliff to get it over with”. Mark replied: “I would rather have you around like that than not at all”. And that is how I felt about Bill. He wasn’t himself when I last lived with him in 2015. But that didn’t bother me at all. Somewhere in him was still the strong-as-steel amazing man I met in 1974, who could travel across the winter ice of the Middlefork and Glacier rivers to Mascot Creek and build a house and mine for gold, all alone! Once the Dalton Highway was in, he built a regular small village in the wilderness by himself, financed entirely from the money he dug out of the ground. To me Bill would always be Bill, and I would have enjoyed visiting him for many years, even if he was sitting in a wheelchair at the Pioneer Home!
But that wasn’t to be. Bill turned 80 on 21 October 2016; the next month, 18 Nov, he fell over on his way from the workshop into Claudene’s cabin with a massive stroke, his brain flooded. He was mumbling a bit but never spoke again and soon slipped into a coma. They flew Bill in a medical evacuation to Washington State for treatment, and Karl and his family came across to be with him. But Bill never regained consciousness, and he died 21 Nov 2016.
Karl and his wife Suzanne arranged for the cremation, and the next summer in 2017 they traveled up to the Creek and spread Bill’s ashes around the canyon below where the Peregrine Falcon and the Raven have their nesting places, so I understand. I haven’t been to Alaska myself since.