On the Porcupine River, Alaska – A week before, he had harnessed his six huskies to a homemade dog sled and vanished into the black spruce of the snow- covered taiga of northeastern Alaska.
For five days he cleared trails and set traps in his sixth seasonal pursuit of fur, dining on caribou jerky and sleeping in a tent as the Arctic night sent the temperature to 25 degrees below zero. But now Paul Jagow was warmly ensconced in his little home, a traditional Eskimo sod hut, pouring coffee for visitors.
He had not seen a human being for almost two months.
It would be a month before he expected to see another.
“Tell me,” he inquired hungrily, “did Reagan win the election?”
Paul Jagow was once a New York City boy, the son of a successful corporate lawyer. But today, at 36, he is one of that curious sort that has found himself in Alaska. In America’s most sparsely settled state, his remoteness nonetheless distinguishes itself. He lives in every respect off a land that both rewards him in the trapping of fur and punishes him in the grueling mental and physical contest of survival.
Alone.
His is a life of hard labor and winter isolation, without mail, without phones, without electricity, without running water, without fresh foods, without people and without help should something go wrong.
How?
Why?
“I like my solitude,” he said. “I just like being here. You just fall into it. The time just goes on, and after you spend a whole year out here, it’s a habit, and if you’re good at it, you just continue. I enjoy doing the things I do out here, one after the other.
“I do like being reliant on myself as much as I can be.”
“They say you’ve got to love yourself to be out here,” he added. “But you’ve also got to hate yourself a little bit. There’s a lot about this land that’s wicked; being out here is like being a rubber band and you’re stretching to the breaking point. I can’t give you reasons, but I know it’s there.”
Later, he said, “That country is why I am here, man. I love it. I am hopelessly hooked. I’d try to leave but I can’t. All the time, wherever I go, I’m homesick for this place.”
Besides, life to Paul Jagow is something other than plumbing and power, neighbors and news. “All the basic things that happen in civilization happen out here, too,” he said. “I’ve had hassles and I’ve had lots of good times. I don’t really see this as being all that different. It just seems different. There are all these different ways of life that seem different, but when you do it, there’s no difference.”
In Alaska there are miners, trappers and assorted others of uncounted number living a remote existence like Jagow, more or less, the isolation an integral part of their livelihood.
For others, though, the isolation is an escape in itself. “Homesteader Dies Trying to Head Off Threat of Government,” said a headline in the Anchorage Daily News last year. A shoot-out had claimed the life of a man opposed to talk of forming a town government in Kenny Lake.
But Jagow is here for the trapping. “That’s all you do out here,” he said. “It wouldn’t make any sense at all, a ‘live-off-the-land’ type deal. This country is rich in only one thing, fur. If you look at me from the point of view of someone down in the States, I’m a recluse. But if you look at me from the point of view of someone in Fort Yukon, I’m doing the normal thing. There’s a load of us out here.”
It is a life of general self-reliance, but of physical and emotional dependence on a team of six strong dogs; a life in which a sharp ax is a best, if cold, friend; a life of splendidsolitude for reading and thinking; and a life of nights in which the exhausted trapper finds exhilaration in driving his dog team quickly through a boreal forest lit by a clear, clean moon hanging in a sky streaked with Northern Lights.
It is a life of detailed planning and spontaneous accommodation, to bridge the winter from freeze-up to spring breakup. This year he brought in 1 1/2 tons of supplies by boat. “By mid-September everything is here for the winter that we’re going to have,” he said. ‘Kerosene, grains, dried fruit and vegetables. Logistics has a lot to do with how good you trap, how you survive. But once you are out here and run out of something, you will make do. I don’t care how, you will make do. . . . When something breaks down or when something happens, you have to make do – and usually it is for the better. Very rarely is something worse.
“I’m Robinson Crusoe every day.”
***
Paul Jagow came bursting from the trees driving his dogs onto the frozen Porcupine River as the circling single-engine plane announced the arrival of visitors. With a curving dive into the river canyon, bush pilot Doug Stern, 35, set the plane’s skis smoothly down on the snow-covered ice. The visit had been uncertainly arranged by a “trap-line chatter” message broadcast on KJNP; such messages are broadcast on radio stations across the state, and they represent the only communication from outside for many Alaskans.
On the first Monday of every month, Jagow is committed to listening to KJNP so that friends or relatives can be relatively certain of getting news to him.
He cannot return a word.
Jagow lives 60 miles above the Arctic Circle in a canyon where the Campbell River joins the Porcupine. His closest neighbor is “a pretty rough” 16 miles away; the next one is 40 miles. The closest American community, Fort Yukon, is 125 miles to the southwest; the nearest Canadian town, Old Crow, 40 to the northeast. From his tiny hut here – actually a room about the size of a walk-in closet and built of poplar still wearing its bark – he ranges over 800 square miles of wilderness.
He works the trap lines in forays, and it may take three weeks before he visits the same trap again. With perhaps only three of hours of daylight, he said, there are traps he has not seen in the light of day since he first placed them. Then, after five to seven days of retrieving the frozen marten (sable), lynx, olverine, wolf, fox and mink caught in his traps, he returns to his sod-covered hut for two days, and the cycle begins again.
His first year out here, Jagow didn’t see or talk with another person from October until May. In 1982, he told his first spring visitors: “You’re the first living things I’ve seen in six months that I haven’t shot, skinned and eaten . . . except for my dogs.”
So by spring, Jagow said, the approach of humanity can be intimidating. “You talk about isolation,” he said of this life in the Alaskan bush, “that many months and you’re ‘bushy’: You want to go out but you’re afraid to go out. It’s fear that I’ve forgotten how to deal with other people.
“You know what happens? You lose all aggressiveness. You become very innocent.”
An anthropology graduate at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Jagow was a 1960s dropout, a flower child who “just got caught up in the whole euphoric feeling” of that era. He lived in a commune outside Philadelphia and in a teepee in Maine. A cross-country trek ended in Alaska, where he worked on the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline. Then he worked at Prudhoe Bay. Then, one day, he walked out.
It was another of his frequent”new beginnings,” and he eventually settled here, choosing the spot more because it was not being trapped at the time than because he wanted to get as far away from people as possible. His hut has been dug into the ground and covered with sod. Its entrance is a pitched tunnel to prevent the escape of heat from the wood-burning stove. He is known from Old Crow to Fort Yukon as “the guy in the small house.”
Salmon hang from nearby drying racks; Jagow caught them and he will feed them to his dogs over the winter. The dogs are his companions, often the only other minds he must reckon with. “I am totally dependent on those dogs out there,” he said over steaks – from one of seven caribou he killed to sustain himself – and an improvised pasta dish. “I couldn’t survive without the dogs. And there’s a lot of companionship in them.”
One winter, a litter of huskies was born on the floor of his hut. He crumpled pages from an old dictionary to comfort them. But if a dog will not or cannot pull as part of the team, he shoots it, because there is no room in this life for animals that are only pets.
