LONE MAN
What a book of yarns and jokes this is becoming! To-day work went a little better—and the weather a little worse. It pours. For the end of December it is wonderfully mild; but then I expect little really cold weather here. To-night it is full moon. The tide is at its highest for the year and the southeast wind piles the water up till it reaches and overflows the land. Olson expects it to touch his house to-night if the wind continues. Tree trunks, uprooted somewhere from the soil, monstrous and grotesque, grind along our beach; the water is full of driftwood and wreckage.
Wednesday, December eighteenth.
There’s a little bucket of dough that stands forever on the shelf behind the stove. Sour dough is made with yeast, flour, and water to the consistency of a bread sponge and then allowed to stand indefinitely. For all that you take out you add more flour and water to what’s left in the bucket and that shortly is as fit for use as the original mixture. Alaskans use it extensively as the basis for bread and hot cakes. You add but a pinch of soda and a little water to the proper consistency and it’s all ready for use. The old time Alaskans rejoice in the honorable title of “Sour Doughs.”
Olson’s cabin in Seward stands comfortably on a little lot in a quite thickly settled part of the town. I wondered at his affluence in possessing a house and lot. Here is its history as he told it to me to-night. When Olson first came to Seward he built—or he bought already built—a little cabin standing on a part of the beach now occupied by the railroad yard. In course of time he went to Valdez for a winter’s work. Returning, he found no cabin. It was gone from that spot and he has not found it since. But corporations and governments are nothing to Olson when he feels himself injured. He went to one official and said, “See here! Winter’s at hand and I have no house, what are you going to do about it?” Well, they would see what could be done, and in time referred him to a higher authority. “I want a cabin,” Olson said to this one. “If you don’t give me the lumber to build one with I’ll have to steal it from you. I have no money and no cabin. Winter is here and I’m certainly going to live in a cabin this winter.” So they gave him an old shed to tear down and use but told him not to build on the beach. The town of Seward was laid off in lots. By the stakes Olson could tell a lot from a street, and fair and square on a lot, somebody’s lot, he put his cabin. The owner of the land was tolerant and let it stay there a few years; but one day he ordered Olson’s house taken off. So Olson carried it somehow out into the middle of the street where it fitted in nicely among the tree stumps. Well and good for a little time till in the summer before last the town of Seward improved that street and sent a man and team to remove the stumps. “If you’re paid to remove the stumps you may as well move my house for me,” said Olson. “Where to?” asked the man. “You can suit yourself,” said Olson. So the cabin was again planted on a “desirable” lot of somebody’s,—and there it stands to-day, neat and trim, with a little wooden walk connecting its doorway with the plank sidewalk of the street. Alaska is, to be sure, a great free country!
To-day has been wonderfully mild and comfortable. From time to time the rain has fallen gently. Over the water the clouds have drooped, hiding the mountain peaks. The sea has been glassy save for the long swell—and this more to be heard upon the beach than seen. Rockwell and I at dusk walked the shore out to the point between the coves. We saw the glowing sky where the sun had set, the mountainous islands to the southward, and our own cove and its mountain ramparts—beautiful in the black and white of the spruces and the snow. If I but had my prepared canvas I’d make large studies of the many views from this point.
Rockwell at dinner begged me repeatedly to have part of his junket besides my own. I wondered at it for although he is always considerate and polite this was almost too much. And in other ways I noticed his alacrity to be obliging. Later in the day he told me, after much embarrassment, that he had made up his mind to be nicer about everything and to do more for me,—and yet I had previously found no fault with him; how could I! So ends a day;—and again I think that in this country I would gladly live for years.