Going Down in Valdeez

I was standing there in front of the Pipeline Club in a fine misting rain with my hand still on the door of the taxi that had brought me in from the airport to Valdez, Alaska (pronounced Valdeez, so that the last syllable rhymes with disease, by the folks who lived thereabouts, folks who do not take the pronunciation of their town lightly and who are subject to become very pissed very quick if you do not come down hard on the eez, drawing it out in a long sibilant Z); I was standing there looking at a legless man where he sat on the sidewalk on his little wheeled dolly, a beatific look of ecstasy on his thin pale face as he looked not back at me but up into the cold slanting mist and the lady cabdriver was saying for the fourth time since I got into her cab: "These goddamn new people think they own this goddamn town but I'll tell you one goddamn thing: They don't own it yet."

I was stunned with exhaustion. The flight from Atlanta to Chicago to Seattle to Ketchikan to Juneau to Yakutat to Cordova had left me confused and disoriented. Then my ordinary morning terrors had been compounded by the flight from Cordova in a Piper Aztec, bouncing and dropping and tilting through winds that anywhere else in the world would have been called a hurricane.

The ecstasy on the legless man's face had changed to a gentle bemused satisfaction. I turned to see if the taxi driver was looking at the legless man. I thought she might tell me about him, tell me maybe that he was a religious mystic famous in Valdez for seeing through to the secret heart of things. But she was still staring furiously up at me and through her clenched teeth, she said: "You just goddamn remember that."

"Look, lady," I said, but she was already squealing in a U turn, roaring off toward the airport.

When I started across the sidewalk, the legless man put his padded fists down and gave himself a shove, shooting his little dolly past me. I stopped, blinked. There on the cement where the legless man had been sitting were two symmetrical, perfectly formed human turds. I turned just in time to see the man and the dolly being lifted by two young boys into a camper on the back of a Ford pickup. I knew I'd been given a sign. Because I believe most devoutly in such things, I knew I had been given a sign to reckon with.

Inside the Pipeline Club I asked the bartender for double vodka and tonic with no ice and then found myself a corner where I could lean my head back against a wall and collect myself.

When I got off the Alaska Airlines plane in Cordova, the flight up to that point had only been exhausting. An hour later when I got into the Piper Aztec, it went from exhausting to terrifying. We were in heavy rain and wind under a lowering sky. It couldn't have been much more than noon but it seemed like dusk dark. I was the only passenger and I rode up front by the pilot. He looked to be in his early 20s, wearing Levis and a work shirt. His damp hair was hanging in a wet curling bang over his eyes. He was impossibly young to be taking me up in an airplane.

"What airline is this?" I shouted over the noise of the engine. The Aztec was unmarked except for numbers on the fuselage and I thought wildly as we approached the runway that I was on the wrong plane and, such being the case, I could get off.

"Chitina," he shouted back. "We do ferrying work for Alaskan over to Valdeez."

He moved the throttle to full rich and the plane shook and groaned, its little wings flapping like a crippled bird's. "Listen," he screamed, "the ride'll be a little choppy today. But I think it'll be all right."

He thought it would be all right. Yes, indeed. Once aloft, I opened my eyes and watched him expertly light a Lucky Strike while the horizon tilted everywhere about us. I asked him where he'd learned to fly, thinking perhaps the Army or the Air Force.

"Aw, it's just something I picked up back in Texas. Always been interested in it and I just picked it up."

His name was Jerry Austin. From Austin, Texas. There was a story that the town had been named for some of his people somewhere back there. He didn't know if it was true. Thought it might be a lie. But you never can tell.

"Only been up here in Alasker three months. Hope to git a job with a jet out of Anchorage. Don't know if I can though. Ruther not fly this rig up here in the winter."

We had been in the air for about 20 minutes when we turned away from the coast, following a wide body of water up between two mountains that rose 4000 or 5000 feet above us on either side.

"Valdeez Bay," he shouted. We had come out of the rain now and the day had brightened under patches of blue sky showing through the clouds. "Right up yonder beyond that rise is Valdeez. This is where the tankers'll come in to pick up the oil off the pipeline." He looked down at the shimmering surface of the bay "Seems a shame to ruin that water. Won't be fit to wash your feet in when they git through with it." He pointed off to the left as he banked the plane. "There she is."

From the air Valdez looked like a mobile-home court. It was a city on wheels. House trailers were jammed into every available space.

"What's that over there?" I asked.

"That's four hundred miles of steel pipe. Thirty-foot sections. Four-feet diameter." He looked at me and smiled. "Made in Japan. It's stacked over there right where Valdeez used to be."

"Used to be?"

"A few years back Valdeez was wiped out by a earthquake and tidal wave. When they built it up again they moved it up here."

We were coming in fast now toward the airport. All manner of heavy machinery--packers and stackers and dirt buggies and back hoes and scrapers--raced about over the barren landscape. For no apparent reason, two helicopters hovered a half mile away on the side of a mountain. Raw lumber was everywhere, stacks of it, and the naked sides of buildings in various stages of construction shone in the sun but only briefly because as we made our approach the sky closed again as if by magic and a misting rain began to fall.

"Jesus," I said, "is that a dirt runway?"

"Yeah," Jerry said, putting his cigarette out with one hand and bringing us in with the other. "But when they finish over there ..." he pointed to the madly racing machinery. "When they git through over there, you'll be able to bring a 727 in here."

The lady cabdriver laughed when I told her to take me to a motel. "No rooms in this town. None. I can check if you want me to, but there won't be any." She got on her radio and, sure enough, there were no rooms.

"Take me to a bar then," I said.

After I'd had enough vodka to steady me down, I asked the bartender to sell me a bottle.

"Not but one place you can buy a bottle of vodka in Valdeez. Just a block over there. Pinzon Liquor Store. Truck Egan's place."

"Egan?" I said, the name trying to remind me of something. Then I knew where I'd heard it. "Say, he's not...."

"That's right," he said. "Governor of Alaska's brother. Truck's the smart one in the family. Shit; Bill Egan's on the phone two, three times a day, asking Truck what to do."

I walked through the rain across Egan Drive to the Pinzon Liquor Store on Tatitlek Avenue. Truck Egan was a very small man with wet eyes, a sad gentle face and a badly twisted hunchback. His long slender white fingers trembled as he put the vodka in a bag.

There were no other customers in the store but he didn't want to talk. Or rather, his sister, Alice, an imposing lady with bluing hair, didn't want to talk, and that seemed to discourage Truck. It was apparent Alice was displeased over the prospect of anybody writing anything about Valdez.

I got back into the rain and walked toward a neon sign I'd seen from the taxi coming in from the airport advertising the Club Valdez. Egan Drive is the main street going through town. It is wide and paved with sidewalks and curbstones. But once you turn off that and head up toward the place where the house trailers are stacked in cheek to jowl, up toward the little marina where the fishing boats swing at anchor, the streets dissolve into mud and potholes and rock. Packs of dogs scavenge in overflowing dumpsters and garbage cans, snarling and fighting among themselves. Scraps of lumber and twisted sheets of corrugated tin litter the edges of swampy streets. Construction is going on everywhere in and among the house trailers. Even the Alaska National Bank of the North is in a house trailer, but they're building right next door, going at it with hammer and Skilsaw, and even as I write this they might be out of their house trailer and into something new and fine.

The Club Valdez was one enormous room, a bar across the front, two pool tables in the back and, in the space (continued on page 114) Going Down in Valdeez (continued from page 110) between, maybe ten or twelve round wooden tables. The smoke was heavy. The jukebox was playing Charley Pride. A lone couple two-stepped across the bare wooden floor as a line of men at the bar watched them.

I got a vodka and went to the head. The sweet smell of grass clung to the damp calcimined walls and clouds of smoke hung in the air, mixing nicely with the odor of vomit and piss. "My, my, my," I said to myself while I watered off, "it's everywhere, even here in Valdeez."

As if on cue, a boy popped out of the stall. "You wanta buy some?"

I looked at him and thought, Now, ain't you a dumbass? but I said, "What you selling?"

He had on a beaded headband and a fringed leather jacket over greasy Levis stuffed into mud-spattered cowboy boots.

"What you lookin' to buy?" The words turned to grits in his mouth and it occurred to me that most of the talk I'd heard since I'd been in town, including the taxi driver's, had been Grit talk.

"What you selling a lid for?" I asked.

"A weighed ounce," he said, "is worth ninety dollars."

"Not to me it isn't," I said.

"All right then," he said, "sixty dollars."

"You're hurt," I said. "Something's burned in your fuse box."

He shrugged. "People expect to be robbed up here. Anythin' is worth anythin' you can git for it. But sixty's all right. Sixty wouldn't cheat me."

"I bet it wouldn't," I said. As I was going out the door, he went back into the stall.

I went to the bar and watched the couple two-step. The girl was very skinny and she had a baby with her. She had thoughtfully tied it to a chair with a leather belt. She and the man went back to the table between numbers to chug some beer and pet the baby. She gave it a sip from time to time and the baby sat strapped to the chair, gurgling and mewling contentedly, now and then nodding off. Which reminded me I was looking for a place to put my head down.

"Writin' a letter home, are you?"

I looked up from the notes I was scribbling. The man was on the stool next to me. He seemed to be about as drunk as I was. I would have guessed his age at 30, but he had a marvelously weathered and ruined face. On his hard hat was a faded McGovern sticker.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm just writing the old lady it ain't nowhere to stay in this town."

"You just git in?"

"Yeah."

"You ain't got on yet?"

"Not yet, but I'm supposed to git on."

"You got some cash money in you pocket?"

"I wouldn't come off up here without some cash money."

"Go out yonder to the airport then and tell Dave Kennedy I sent you. My name's Bugger Wells. Kennedy's building a camp out there the other side of the airport. It'll cost you but you can stay. Ask anybody out there for Dave Kennedy. You won't have no trouble."

The cabdriver took me to a tiny two-story building that had an outside stairway leading to the top. The second floor was a single room with a half partition. The whole thing couldn't have been more than 20 feet square. Maps and overlays and blueprints and papers of every sort were stuffed into shelves along the walls. Two Teletype machines rattled next to the semipartition. A polar-bear skin covered the top of a dun-colored couch. The bear's mouth was open and its stunned marble eyes stared past me through the window where the helicopters still hovered in the distance and the yellow, growling machinery still raced about over the airport. Dave Kennedy stood at his desk, the top of which was a foot deep in papers, most of which seemed incredibly dusty. He was on the phone, cradling it between his shoulder and right ear. His left ear was pinned against his head and grown shut.

A lady in corduroy trousers sat in the corner at a typewriter. She stopped typing and looked at me. I told her what the guy at the Club Valdez had told me.

"Valdeez," she said. "You say Valdeeeez!"

"He was right," said Dave Kennedy, who had just put the phone down. "You can stay at the camp. Thirty-three dollars a day. You looking for work?"

I decided to tell him what I was doing in Valdez.

"No way," he said. "Take you a year to write this and you still wouldn't have it right. You'd have it wrong. The only way to measure what's happening here? You know? You want me to tell you? I'll tell you. A six-inch ruler made out of rubber that stretches to seventeen feet. That's how. Nothing like this ever been done. And you can't worry because a ruler's got twelve inches to the foot. In Valdeez, there may be twelve feet to the inch. OK?"

The explanation seemed to satisfy him immensely. It tended to confuse me but I thought better of asking him to explain it. I'd noticed a National Car Rental sign downstairs and asked if I could get a car. Rent you a plane if you want one, he said. I said, no, a car would do nicely. While the girl was writing out the ticket for the car, Dave Kennedy took me over to the window and pointed: "See where they're building down there?" It looked to me as if they were building everywhere down there, and I told him so.

"No, no," he said impatiently, "there by the trailer. Right there with the silver top. Go in there and ask for Hap. Hap the cook. He'll fix it. Give him the money."

I found Hap in a house trailer that had been converted into a kitchen and dining room with enough seats to feed 54 people. Directly next to it, a whole covey of carpenters was building a permanent dining hall that would eventually feed 600.

Hap was feeding some of the early night crew when I got there and he asked me to wait. I sat at a table looking at a cup of coffee he had given me and thinking how nice it was going to be to put my head down, when a foreman came in. Like most of the men there, the foreman's skin was ruined from the wind and the sun and the snow. He had what looked like it might be skin cancer across the bridge of his nose. He was pissed when he came in. He kicked a couple of chairs, hustled his balls and sat down. He started talking loudly, a little out of breath, to nobody in particular.

"I'll tell you one damn thing: If you pick up something in this town, don't set it back down. Because if you do set it back down even for a minute, it'll be another price when you pick it up." He got off his chair, hustled his balls again, sat back down, crossed his legs, uncrossed them and sat kicking one heavy boot against the other. "Went into town there to buy a damn alarm clock. Wanted to make sure the crew was up and ready. Went in the store there. Didn't have but one kind of clock. Looked like a piece of shit, but I thought it'd get us up. Young kid behind the counter. Asked him how much it was. Said he didn't know, but the boss was next door and he'd run ask. While he was gone I picked up one of the goddamn things. Had a sticker on it said six dollars and fifty cent. Kid come back and said the boss said nine dollars and fifty cent. I told the kid the one in my hand said six-fifty. He said he just knowed what the boss said. Fuck it, I didn't want to stand around there all day talking to a shirttail kid, so I bought it. Brought it down here to the camp and the goddamn thing quit in the middle of the night. Crew was half a fucking hour late. Took the goddamn thing down there a while ago. Man runs the place said he was sorry but it was as is. Sold as is. No refund, no nothing. But the son of a bitch did say he was sorry. I told him to stick it up his ass and I hope the alarm went off. I'd already checked all over town and there weren't no more clocks. Not another goddamn one in town. I guess he knowed it too because when I told him I'd have to buy another of the goddamn sorry things, he looked me dead in the eye and said just as slick as owl shit: "That'll be twelve dollars and fifty cent.' "

Hap came out of the kitchen and took my money, $165 for five nights, and gave me over to a bull cook named Paul, a (continued on page 174) Going Down in Valdeez (continued from page 114) dark boy of about 22 with very white teeth and short curly hair. On the way over to where I would be bunking he explained to me that a bull cook was the all-round good guy in camp who made the beds, carried the trash, swept the floors and did whatever else was necessary to keep the bunkhouse crew happy.

The bunkhouse in this case turned out to be a house trailer. The entire camp was made out of house trailers joined together by a walkway and covered over with a little roof. Each trailer had a deep sink, a bathroom and slept five men. The floors were covered with gold-speck carpeting and the walls were all paneled with imitation wood, It was exactly the sort of thing that would have passed for elegance in Waycross, Georgia. Paul told me there was a washing machine and drier in the back that I could use for nothing. If I needed anything, I should let him know. When he left I walked outside and sat on an empty gas can. It was gray and still raining but the sun was brilliant and brittle as glass high on the sides of the Chugach Mountains where they rose 5000 feet and better on all sides of the town. I was finally at the end of the line, Valdez, Alaska.

• • •

Alaska is an awesome place where exaggeration and outrage are the norm. It is a place where Eskimos live and work in cold so extreme it often reaches 80 degrees below zero. Three percent of the state is made up of active glaciers and ice fields--20.000 square miles--more than is found in the rest of the inhabited world combined. It is a land of unimaginable wealth that we ripped off from the Russians on October 18, 1867, for about two cents an acre. The shortest distance separating North America from Asia is between Little Diomede and Big Diomede islands. On Little Diomede a picture of Abraham Lincoln hangs on the school-house wall. In the schoolhouse on Big Diomede is a picture of Karl Marx. Everything about Alaska stuns the imagination--including the proposed trans-Alaska pipeline. To understand what is happening to the town of Valdez, to the people there, it is necessary to have some notion of the dimensions, the magnitude of the pipeline itself.

In the northernmost part of the state, between the formidable mountains of the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean, lies the North Slope. And it is there at Prudhoe Bay that the trans-Alaska pipeline will rise. It passes the Sagavanirktok River, the Atigun Valley and crosses the mountains of the wild Brooks Range itself through the 4500-foot Dietrich Pass; and from there it goes south to the Yukon River and on south, passing only 15 miles to the east of Fairbanks. Once past Fairbanks, it goes into the Alaska Mountain Range where it will reach an elevation of 3500 feet as it crosses the Isabel Pass before descending into the Copper River Basin. The line then climbs the Chugach Mountains and descends through Keystone Canyon into Valdez, the nearest year-round ice-free port capable of accommodating tankers of the size that will be needed to haul the oil to West Coast refineries. The distance covered is exactly 798 miles.

The line itself will be buried when the terrain it crosses is solid rock or well-drained gravel. When it is not buried it will be raised on special pipe supports. It will go over rivers and under rivers--more often than not under them--and when it does go under rivers it will be encased in concrete four inches thick.

The pipe out of which the line will be constructed comes in sections about 40 or 60 feet long, four feet in diameter, with thicknesses ranging from .462 inches to .562 inches. In Berkeley, California, where the pipe was tested, a section of it was subjected to a maximum force of 2,520,000 pounds and a lateral deflection force of 459,000 pounds before it wrinkled. There is, as I write this, a total of 418.54 miles of this pipe stacked and waiting in Valdez. It was made in Japan and the first shipment arrived in Valdez September 13, 1969, the last shipment October 21, 1971. The other pipe-storage yards are at Fairbanks and at Prudhoe Bay.

By the best estimates, there are an incredible 9.6 billion barrels of oil on the North Slope and that is said to be as much as the combined reserves of Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kansas and half of Texas. When the pipeline is completed the oil will go into it hot (at times with temperatures possibly as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit) and remain warm throughout the line because of the heat of the 12 pumping stations along the route and the heat generated by the friction between the oil and the pipe itself. Initially, the line will move 1,200,000 barrels a day--that's 50,400,000 gallons--but ultimately it is designed to move 2,000,000 barrels a day. Under normal pumping conditions, there will be, at any given moment, approximately 11,000 barrels, or 462,000 gallons, in any single mile of line. When the line first begins pumping, the oil will move about two miles per hour inside the line; but when it reaches capacity, the oil will travel at something just over seven miles per hour.

The entire line will be under computer control, with a monitoring station in Valdez. At the first sign of a loss of pressure, which would mean there had been a rupture or a leak somewhere along the way, the entire line could be shut down within 20 minutes. Shutting down a system that includes almost 800 miles of line and that much moving oil would create tremendous backup pressures, so the designers have contrived to build into the line a series of valves and overflow tanks to accommodate that pressure. All tank facilities will have dikes built around them for protection against earthquakes. The Valdez terminal, which will be across the bay from the actual city of Valdez, will be constructed on solid bedrock far above the highest recorded seismic sea wave.

All of this planning and designing and construction is being carried out by the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company. Alyeska was formed in August of 1970, by Amerada Hess Corporation, Arco Pipe Line Company, SOHIO Pipe Line Company, Exxon Pipeline Company, Mobil Alaska Pipeline Company, Phillips Petroleum Company, BP Pipeline Company, Inc. and Union Alaska Pipeline Company and is owned outright by these eight companies today. Certainly, it would appear that the designers have clone everything they could do to prevent despoiling a beautiful irreplaceable wilderness by visiting ruination upon a balanced, though delicately so, animal and plant life.

But there is some question as to whether what they have done is enough. There is the matter of those caribou, for instance. Everybody has heard about the pipeline and the caribou--that magnificent herd of animals balanced off nicely on the scales of progress against this magnificent herd of people, you and I. There are better than 205,000,000 of us; there are only 450,000 of them. Each of us--every man, woman and child--uses an average of three gallons of oil a day. Numbers count for something, by God. So what does Alyeska intend to do about the fact that 450,000 caribou are up on the North Slope every summer to calve and then migrate through the Brooks Range where they are sure to encounter the pipeline? Where sections of pipe are aboveground and would interrupt the natural migratory patterns of the caribou. Alyeska will build underpasses for the animals to walk through. That's right, underpasses. Will the caribou walk through the underpasses? They'd damned well better if they want to get to where they've been going for hundreds of years.

What of the spawning of fish when they are laying all that pipe under all those rivers? Simple. They are going to time the operation so they won't be putting the pipe down when the fish are spawning. But will the fish spawn after their natural beds have been upset by inevitable noise, vibration and the ubiquitous debris of construction? Many of us hope so, but many of us doubt it.

Alyeska also plans to time its construction to minimize the disturbance to Dall sheep, a rare species, grazing and lambing in the Atigun Canyon. But they will be disturbed, however minimally, and nobody can predict with certainty what the outcome will be. The peregrine falcon is an endangered species, and yet there will be many places along the pipeline where the peregrine falcon nests. It is stupid and absurd to say the pipeline work will not disturb and upset the peregrine. Anything disturbs and upsets the peregrine, so delicate is her nervous system and so finely attuned is she to the natural rhythms and cycles of the earth.

Many people who love the idea of the pipeline will point out to you that Alyeska doesn't want or need much land to carry out its project--a ridiculously small percentage of the state as a matter of fact. The right of way will extend only 25 feet on each side of the four-foot pipeline; and if you add all the additional working space required for the job, it will only come to about 7680 acres, or 12 square miles. The state of Alaska contains 586,412 square miles. That figures out to be .002 percent of the total area of the state. But it is not, of course, what they want, it's where they want it. The quarrel comes from the fact that the 12 square miles form a thin knife-edge line and therefore a barrier of some sort, if nothing but an access road, across the entire interior of Alaska from the Arctic Ocean at Prudhoe Bay to the Bay of Valdez.

The final nut buster is that there are men who have every reason to know about such things who think we did not need to go onto the North Slope to start with. One of those men is Barry Commoner, director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University in St. Louis. In a Playboy Interview of July 1974, he said, "It's been estimated that the oil on Alaska's North Slope may provide the U.S. with a two-or-three-year supply. So we've extended the country's oil resources from, say, 20 years to 23 years. For that, we may permanently wreck the ecosystem in Alaska. Is it worth it? I don't think so."

But all this has been hashed over. And for every expert you can find who thinks the pipeline is a horror, the oil companies can find five who think it is an unmitigated blessing. In the meantime, the actual welding of the line has not started; but those miles and miles of pipe are lying there in Valdez, waiting. Barges are on the way from Washington State, loaded with supplies. Men and equipment arrive every day. The town is gearing up as best it can for the onslaught. Dave Kennedy is completing a camp to house 600 men. Another camp is going up to house 1700 men. And across the bay at the site of the proposed terminal, Fluor Alaska, Inc. is about to start construction of a camp where 3500 men will stay. Valdez will change from a village of about 1000 people to a boom town of 17,000 in the next few years. There is a tension, even a violence, in the air of Valdez, poised on the brink of becoming something it has never been before. What that something is, nobody knows. But you can hear it in the growling machinery, the whine of ripsaws, the constant beat of hammers. You can smell it in the smoky bars. You can see it in the faces of the people.

• • •

I was standing out on the dock in the rain, freezing, while they headed and gutted fish. That morning, Dave Kennedy had asked me down at the camp if I knew why the men had to drink so much in Valdez. No, I told him. He said you had to stay as wet on the inside as you were on the outside, so you wouldn't warp. I had done the best with it I could but I was beginning to warp bad. The boy standing beside me, whose name was Chris Matthews, stood not as I did with my back to the rain but rather with his face into it, looking out toward the flat gray water of Valdez Bay. He didn't seem to notice the rain or the wind even though my teeth were chattering so I could hardly talk. The rain was fine as mist and driven by a thin cold wind. Chris was 16 years old with corn-colored hair cropped close and a mouth full of broken teeth. He had just brought the fish in off the boat where it was anchored out in the flats off Cordova. A seaplane had taken him and the fish off the boat. He was a quiet, almost shy boy but when he spoke his voice carried the flat authority of a man who had been around the block.

"It's a seaplane that'll take you off the boat and bring you in for fifteen dollars. Cain't bring my boat in. Got a Indian fishing out there with me. Good man. But a drunk. I bring him in, I cain't git 'm back out again."

He was popping the heads off the salmon, expertly ripping their bellies, lifting out long pink roe and dropping it into a zinc bucket at the end of the bench. Directly he quit with the fish and wiped his hands on the end of his shirt. He walked over to the edge of the dock and spat in the water. Straight across the bay from where we were standing was the site of the terminal where tankers would take the oil off the pipeline. Even from there we could see the yellow scrapers and dirt buggies and Cats, small as ants, digging away at the mountain, preparing for Fluor Alaska to build a camp for 3500 men.

"We'll all end up working for Fluor," he said and spat again. "The money's too good."

We went back over to the bench where Chris's daddy, Bob Matthews and Bob's partner, Johnny Craine, were finishing up with the fish. Johnny's wife Lynn was packing them into long fish boxes.

"We'll freeze 'm and sell 'm locally in the winter," Chris said. "Ain't no fish here then much. Sell 'm wholesale for forty, forty-five cent. These reds will bring that, the king'll go for a little more maybe."

"Let's go across the street for a drink," somebody said.

Wet, smelling slightly of fish, we went up the ramp with the fish boxes to the pickup truck. We walked across the muddy, unpaved street to the Club Valdez. It was late afternoon and the bar was beginning to fill up. Four couples were two-stepping to Merle Haggard. The boy ordered a Coke and I got a vodka. The others asked for Olys, by which they meant Olympia beer. I never heard anybody order any other kind of beer but Oly while I was in Valdez. I know there were other kinds of beer there because I (continued on page 178)Going Down in Valdeez(continued from page 175) had been into several Budweisers myself. But everybody else drank Olympia because goddamn it it was Alaskan beer. They didn't care what people Outside drank; they drank Olympia. (Outside is the word they use for anyplace that is not in Alaska. Sometimes they'll refer to the "Lower Forty-eight," but mostly it's Outside.) Native Alaskans, as well as people who are not native Alaskans but who have been through one or more Alaskan winters, have a tremendous contempt for people Outside. And like people everywhere they do not gladly suffer fools to instruct them on the error of their ways. It is common to see bumper stickers saying, Sierra club go home and we don't give a damn how you do it outside.

Earlier, out on the end of the dock, Chris had been standing there kicking one rubber boot against the other when he looked up and said: "Family of pukers."

I looked where he was pointing and saw a man and a woman and a child coming down to the dock from a 50-foot yacht with raised fishing chairs and curtains on the windows of an enclosed cabin. The man was double-knitted and color-coordinated and wearing a braided cap at a jaunty angle. The woman was pants-suited in something phosphorescent pink.

"Pukers?" I said.

"This is one of the best fishing waters in the world--commercial, sport, anything. People like them there come from Outside with they damn boats and git one of us to guide 'm. Only thing is, they spend all day puking. Pukers ought not to have boats."

I eventually learned that puker had become one of the kinder generic words for anybody from Outside.

Johnny got up to dance with his blonde and handsome lady, Lynn. They sailed smoothly about the wooden floor, Johnny's cheek pressed against hers, she humming the words to the song softly, the two of them two-stepping as only people can who have been together 30 years and better. Lynn had followed Johnny to Valdez, but Bob's wife was Outside. She didn't like it in Alaska. Johnny and Bob had been partners for 21 years, worked dirt jobs all over Alaska, had been up on the North Slope together back in the early days. They were Cat drivers and together owned some heavy equipment they leased out. They were just about to bid on the sewage contract the town of Valdez was going to put out in a few days.

A friend of theirs came in and Bob waved him over. He was lean, not big but set up thick in the shoulder and narrow in the hip. His hands were wedge-shaped and laced with heavy veins. His eyes were dark, his hair, thick and straight and black. He was a little drunk. The lady with him was slender, with flat cheeks and deep eyes and a beautifully formed mouth. Bob introduced us. His name was Jay and hers was Chris. They were both native Alaskans. He was Irish and Indian. She was Eskimo.

She hugged my neck like a good buddy and said: "You met your first full-blood Eskimo in the Club Valdeez." Then to her husband: "Show 'm what you got for Father's Day, honey."

Jay wasn't feeling good. He looked at me. "Gone come up here and write it all down in a week or two, are you?" I told him I didn't think I'd get it all, no. I was feeling about like a snake by then myself. "You know where I just come from?" he said.

"Show 'm what you got for Father's Day, honey," his wife said.

"I'll tell you where I just come from, a meeting with the pipeline people; Impact Meeting, they call it. Had a goddamn Texan there, ten-gallon hat, cowboy boots, sunglasses, and he was telling us what to expect from these Alaskan winters." His voice was thin and bitter. "Telling us how to dress and what to do--you know, the dos and don'ts of Alaska. I sat there wondering how in the hell I got through forty-some-odd years up here without a goddamn Texan to tell me what to do."

His wife didn't like the way things were going. "Somebody ask him what he got for Father's Day. A gold watch is what I gave him."

Jay shook his head and drained his Oly. "Goddamn Texans took over this state and never fired a shot."

His wife said: "You know what Father's Day meant? It meant I could go back for seconds." She laughed nervously. She had tremendous teeth.

"You know the difference between cowboy boots and farmer's boots?" asked Jay. "Farmer's boots got the bullshit on the outside."

His wife came over and took his arm. "I want to dance," she said. He didn't seem to want to, but he got up, anyway, and they two-stepped away to Hank Williams, Jr.

A lady, rather heavy and smelling of talcum, had joined us at the table and had begun a long story in a sour, quarrelsome voice about what was happening to food prices.

"We're not all on the pipeline money, you know," she said. "A eight-ounce can of vegetable juice, the kind I like and all, jumped from seventy-nine cent to a dollar and three cent in one week."

I'd walked around town that day myself, seeing what the stores were like. There was not a single bar of hand soap in any store in all of Valdez. Neither was there any milk. None. A Coke, a small one, cost 50 cents. Generally anything that is brought in by truck is very expensive, if you can get it at all. Anything that is flown in is, given the scheme of things, fairly reasonable. Meat, for instance, comes by plane, and round steak in the grocery store was $2.25 a pound.

Jay and his lady came back to the table and he was in a better mood. He showed us the gold watch she had given him for Father's Day. He said he was going to be a grandfather any day now. Except for his beat-up face, he looked 30. He said he was 42.

His wife started telling me how her mother used to make ice cream. When she got to the place where her mother was adding seal oil, she suddenly stopped and said, "Do you boogie?" I told her I'd boogie her back off. "Goddamn, let's do it," she said. And we did, but it was science-fiction boogie, because we had to do it to Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree.

We came back to the table and Jay put his hand on my arm. "You serious about writing about this?" I told him I was. "Then I want to tell you," he said. "I'm native Alaskan. I never went Outside until I was grown. Still haven't been Outside but two or three times in my whole life." He waved his arm to include the room. "There's not but seventy thousand of us. Think about that. This country and there's not but seventy thousand natives. We're Eskimos, Aleuts, Indians and people like me, a cross, but born here and raised here. And this pipeline's gone kill us, kill the country." He was speaking with great intensity, his face flushed, his hand where it held my arm gripped hard enough to hurt. "Ruin it all forever."

I thought he meant the pipeline itself, running across the interior of the country. I thought he was talking about ecology.

"Shit, no," he said. "I was Outside a couple of years ago in a bar and a couple guys started in on me about how the line was gone ruin Alaska and they had a river right there in their own state that'd kill a horse if he was to drink out of it. They're so full of shit in the Lower Forty-eight. Let 'm look to their own back yard before they start telling us what's ruining our country. What's gone kill us is the scumbags that'll follow the line, follow the men and the money. The Alaskan people are delicate--the seventy thousand--so ... so ... innocent. You know innocent?" I told him I knew innocent. "It's not the workers. Hell, the men are all right. Look at 'm up there." We turned to look at the long line of men at the bar, solemnly staring at three couples two-stepping over the smooth wooden floor. "Scumbags always follow construction, but there'll be scumbags here like they've never been scumbags before. This job is so big, the money's so.... Look, a laborer on this line'll make seven, eight hundred dollars a week. A guy driving a dirt buggy can make twelve hundred a week. The companies put these men in camps, feed 'm, give 'm a place to sleep. All that money's free and clear. Only a few of 'm got their wives up here. So what'll the men do? They'll give their money to scumbags. And I don't give a shit about that. You think I give a shit? But this job's going to draw every high roller, promoter, hype artist, con man, pimp and dopester.... It's gone suck 'm up here from Outside. And once they're here, it'll be all over. They'll go through this country, every city, every town, every village, like maggots through meat."

He stopped and chugged an Oly. The whole table had grown silent, listening. It was a little embarrassing, because he was so obviously sincere, so impassioned about something he could do nothing about.

The boy who had sat all this time drinking a Coke said in his flat laconic voice: "That's why I'm staying on the boat. Me and that drunk Indian. They'll have to come take me off that boat."

Everybody laughed and the boy's daddy. Bob, slapped the table with the palm of his hand and said: "Hey, let's go have a fish fry!"

I said I'd go by Truck's and pick up some beer and meet them at their trailer. After they had gone I had another vodka and thought about the mess that was Valdez, Alaska, and how pleased I was that it was their mess and not mine, or, if in some larger sense it was mine, that I wouldn't have to deal with it. I'm a coward that way.

I'd gone by a couple days before to see the mayor, but he was out delivering the mail, had a mail route. The mayoralty turned out to be one of those dollar-a-year jobs. So I dropped by to see the city manager, Mr. Lehfeldt, a neatly dressed man with slicked-down black hair and nervous eyes. He in effect told me he was scared to death. "There's not enough sewers and there's not enough water and I had a meeting with Alyeska last week...." He stopped and drew a deep breath before his tight petulant voice ran on. "And they're talking about coming in here to start building housing for a thousand supervisory personnel. That's more than all the permanent housing in the rest of Valdeez put together!" When I got through talking to Mr. Lehfeldt, the mayor was still out delivering mail.

So I stopped by to see Police Chief Dave Ohler, a big man with enormous hands, whose gentle, whispery voice almost put me to sleep even though I only spoke with him for a minute or two. He seemed to see no cause for alarm in the fact that there were only three men on the police force. " 'Course, we've got a state-trooper office here with two men permanently assigned to it, so that gives us five officers, and we've only got at this moment about two thousand people in town." What about when it jumped to 5000 or 6000 or 10,000? Well, he wasn't sure. But so far things seemed to be going along OK. "I guess we can expect some trouble, but so far everything in town seems to be pretty clean." Drugs? Whores? Not that he knew of.

I went over to the Pinzon Liquor Store for some beer and vodka. Alice wasn't there but Truck was still as reticent as ever. We exchanged pleasantries about the weather and I went back out into the rain. Just as I was getting into the car, a guy called to me from across the street. There were two of them, both young, both bearded, sitting in a Volkswagen bus.

"Step over here a second," the one on the near side called. I walked over to the bus. The one behind the wheel leaned toward the window. "You want a tattoo?" he said.

First I thought I'd heard him wrong, then I thought he was crazy. "No," I said. "No, I don't want a tattoo."

"Listen," he said. "I'm from L.A. I worked for Lyle Tuttle. You know Lyle Tuttle?"

"No," I said.

"Tattooist to the stars," he said. "He's the one tattooed Janis Joplin."

"How you know you don't want one? You ain't seen my work. Pete, show him my work." The boy nearest me got out of the Volkswagen. I took about three steps back when he stepped down to the street. I was pretty freaked by then. "This here's Pete. He's a walking advertisement for my work." Pete shucked out of his shirt, held his arms out, flexed and slowly turned. He was intricately and beautifully illustrated. From neck to navel he was a complicated network of interlocking eagles and jaguars and anchors and hearts and legends written in a kind of Germanic script. I couldn't take my eyes off him. Among other things, he must have been an iron freak. Muscles, as he turned, rippled and slid, ridged and quivered making the smooth, multicolored skin come alive, pulsing in an undulant motion.

"Jesus Lord," I finally said.

"See," the guy in the truck said. "You don't know what you want. I got lots of designs you can choose from, or I'll work from something you design. We're camped right out...."

"I've got to go see some people," I said. "They're waiting."

The illustrated iron freak was still turning and I could not bring myself to say I didn't want one of his tattoos. They were too beautifully and skillfully done to tell him that.

"OK, that's OK. Come by our place any time."

He told me where they were camped, out beyond the Pipeline Storage Yard on the road to Anchorage. You turned left on the first dirt road beyond the yard.

I was just turning to go when he said: "One last thing. You wanta buy a watch?" He whipped open the door to the bus and there in a shallow suitcase must have been 150 watches of all kinds--wrist, pocket and pendant.

"When I got more time to look at them," I said. "When I come for my tattoo, maybe."

"Good enough," he said and closed the case.

Bob Matthews was already cooking the fish when I got there. He was doing it outside even though it was raining. They walk through the rain in Valdez like the rest of the world walks through sunshine. They don't seem to notice it. I went inside and drank with Johnny Craine while Lynn made cole slaw and cooked corn bread. A guy came in and said hello and asked if he could take a shower. Lynn told him sure and said there were towels by the sink.

"That's something you get used to up here quick," she said. "Somebody says hi, then they ask you if they can have a shower. Nobody's got any water up here much, you know."

Bob came in with the fish and we ate and drank and told sea stories. No alcohol is allowed in the pipeline camps up on the North Slope by the oil companies because the men are working in such cold weather that a drunk could easily wander out into the snow and freeze to death. So Lynn baked a cake for Johnny one Christmas, hollowed it out. put a quart of whiskey inside and sent it to him. (I think I understand that story but I'm not sure.) Up on the North Slope no engine is ever turned off during the winter months. Tractors, Cats, trucks run day and night for the good reason that if anything ever shuts down you can't start it again. Rubber tires shatter like glass. Bob told a story about getting outstanding on some bootleg stuff and decking an Eskimo only to wake up later that night to find the Eskimo outside on a Caterpillar bulldozing down the camp.

And so it went late into the night, through outrageous quantities of fish, corn bread, slaw and beer and vodka, until we were all full, talked out, laughed out and sensationally drunk. At which time I thought I was going back to the camp and I'll never know how it happened (maybe I just wanted to see the illustrated man again) but I ended up out on the road to Anchorage, left on the first dirt road past the Pipeline Storage Yard. None of it's too clear, but I do remember sitting in a trailer with these two guys explaining that my right leg was game, a really bad knee, broken, torn, bad cartilage, unrepairable, and saying that I thought I needed hinges on that knee, four tattooed hinges, one on the front and back and one on each side. I think I was joking. It's all very hazy. Anyway, that's the last thing I remember.

I woke up the next morning in the rented National car with a pounding head and a dry mouth. I thought at first an ant, or maybe even a bee had stung my right arm, was stinging it. I looked down to knock it off and damned if I didn't have a tattoo. A hinge on my right elbow. I was still parked in front of the trailer where the tattoo artist and his walking advertisement lived and I went bellowing out of the car, my head hurting 90 miles an hour, into the trailer. The two guys were asleep on a ratty bed.

"You son of a bitches," I was shouting, "you tattooed me!"

Their eyes were open now. One of them yawned and said, "That's right."

I started yelling and screaming that you just didn't tattoo somebody when he was out on his ass, that I never would have agreed to being tattooed, that only assholes got tattooed and I was not an asshole. And then I really started foaming at the mouth when he told me it had cost me $65. Out with the old wallet. A quick look. Sure enough, I was lighter by $65.

"You bastards, what if I get hepatitis?"

The iron freak got off the bed, his eagles and jaguars flashing, walked right up and leaned into my face and said softly: "If you get hepatitis you'll turn yellow as shit."

As I was driving back to town I said to myself: You have been rolled and permanently discolored in Valdeez. Alaska.

• • •

The whore was 22 and her name was Micki (spelled with two I's that way). Her husband's name was Buddy. They were from Los Angeles.

"So, you know, I'm reading the paper one morning and the wire service has picked up a story about a girl who got permission to go up on the North Slope and sell subscriptions to Argosy magazine. Two months later some security people stopped her. She had five subscriptions to Argosy magazine and $19,000 in her pocket.

"So, you know, we were swinging down in Los Angeles, right? I mean, you know, Micki was turning four or five guys a party anyway. So I said why not go up there and make some money? Micki said sure, why not? In three years we'll retire to France forever."

"The Riviera," said Micki.

We were in a mobile home, a double wide. Micki had come out of her little room and was sitting in a housecoat. Buddy was tricked out in the best tradition of pimpdom. He was all ruffles and lace and stacked heels and wrap-around goggle-style amber sunglasses and a gold earring and on and on. He'd been going through this long number about how cool he was (I think he'd read Iceberg Slim's autobiography) when Micki leaned forward in her chair and said, looking at my discolored, swollen, scabby hinged elbow: "How long've you had that?"

"About three days," I said.

"Is the guy here in Valdeez?"

"Who?"

"The man who gives the tattoos."

"Yes."

"Buddy," she said. "I want a tattoo."

"Bullshit," he said.

They were immediately in an awful argument. He'd flown her out to Seattle not long ago for a little R&R, and she'd seen the movie Papillon. She wanted a tattoo of a butterfly on her ass. He shouted that she wouldn't be able to fuck for a week, with a tattoo on her ass. Just look at that goddamn hinge on his goddamn elbow! She screamed she wouldn't turn another trick if he didn't get her a tattoo. It was very embarrassing. I hate to witness family disputes. But he relented finally and stomped out of the room. He wasn't gone but a minute before he was back, zipping himself into a pair of muddy Levis and buttoning a Mackinaw that was torn and raveling at both sleeves.

He shrugged. "I have to get out of my good stuff and put on this shit when I go out of the trailer."

He wanted me to go with him but I told him the tattoo artist and I had had words. He didn't like me and I didn't like him; further, I thought they were doing a bad thing getting the butterfly, at least from the man out by the Pipeline Storage Yard. But Micki was adamant and Buddy left with the directions I gave him. While he was gone, we talked about her situation there in Valdez.

"They mostly want head. Hell, I don't mind giving head. I'm in the business. It comes with the package."

"Well," I said, because she had paused and I didn't know quite how to react to that, "it's so cold and wet here in Valdeez."

She didn't understand what I meant by that any better than I did. She regarded me blankly for a moment. "I think they think I might have the clap or something. Shit, we got a doctor who looks after me. See, most of 'm have their old ladies Outside in Seattle or up in Anchorage and they fly out to see 'm every couple of weeks and I don't think they want to risk carrying home the clap."

She'd broken out a little cellophane bag and dumped a small hill of white powder onto the table in front of her. While she talked she chopped it fine and then laid it out in little rows with the edge of a razor blade.

"Like I say, it don't matter to me, but you'd be surprised how many insist I swallow. In a long day that can work out to a lot of come."

With considerably more show than I thought was necessary she took out a $100 bill--going to some pains to make sure I knew it was a hundred--rolled it up, put one end in her right nostril, her thumb against her left, and leaned forward over the table and snorted a row of coke. Then she gave her left nostril the same shot.

She smiled a laid-back smile. "I figured out one clay I took nine yards of cock. Later on I won't have to work so hard. Once all the men are here and the camps are full, Buddy plans to expand to take some of the load off me. Maybe then, too, Buddy can wear his clothes on the street. It kills him to have to get out of his fine things to go out, but Valdeez is still so small and our cover's not good enough to let him flaunt himself. He wants to flaunt himself."

The telephone rang and she answered it. "Yeah, if you come right over."

The guy must have been calling from the corner because he was there in about four minutes. He was a fisherman. He reeked of salmon. She took him into her little room. In less than five minutes they were out again. She sat down and snorted another row of coke.

"This has got to be one of the greatest places in the world to work. These guys are so horny I can bump into them and they come. Of course, everything has its drawbacks and disadvantages. That poor creep probably hasn't had a bath in a month." She gave me her dreamy little smile again. "I washed about six inches of him. It'll be the last bath he has until he sees me again."

The telephone rang. She picked it up, listened, then put her hand over the mouthpiece. "How soon do you think Buddy ought to be back?"

"He ought to be back now." I said.

"No," she said into the phone. "No, not even later. Call tomorrow."

I commented that business seemed to be good, trying to make it as objective and professional as I could, just the sort of thing you might say to a used-car dealer who had lately opened a lot and was trying to establish himself.

"Oh, this is slow," she said. "The middle of the week is never any good much. But weekends? You ought to see weekends. It's a madhouse around here. They all seem to be hornier on weekends."

I asked her if it was a Friday, a Saturday or a Sunday when she took the nine yards, because I'd done some quick, easy arithmetic in my head and--using a modest six inches as a standard--found six guys to the yard, times nine, and got the, at least to my mind, phenomenal number of 54.

"It was a Sunday," she said. "Sundays are always good here."

Buddy came in with the illustrated iron freak and the tattoo artist. They were both carrying stuff: alcohol, gauze, swabs, a little metal case that held the electric needle.

They were very friendly to me, as though nothing had happened out there at their place three days ago.

"How's your too?" said the iron freak. "You ready for another one?"

"No," I said.

"They're addicting," said the artist. "Everybody comes back for another one, and then another, and pretty soon you'll look like Lyle Tuttle."

"I've never seen Lyle Tuttle," I said.

"Tattooist to the stars," he said.

"You told me," I said.

"Well, he's got more pictures than Pete here. Right, Pete? Lyle Tuttle's got no space left."

"Great," I said. "That's just great."

Buddy went immediately and changed into his street-corner flash. Micki was looking over some designs the artist had brought over. He had plugged in what looked like a baby-bottle warmer to get some steam to sterilize his equipment. While he made all these motions of cleanliness--hospital conditions, he called them--I couldn't help noticing that his fingernails were extravagantly dirty. Micki finally found the butterfly she wanted. It was a big thing, nearly as big as my hand, with blue, green and yellow in its wings.

Buddy came out and looked at the design she had chosen. "Good Christ," he said. "You'll be out of commission for a week."

She said: "You know as well as I do I do most of my work on my knees." He started to protest again, but she stopped him by saying, "Shut up, Buddy, or I'll send you back to Los Angeles."

While she was lying face down on the couch, pulling her robe up around her shoulders and sharing the last few rows of coke with Pete and the artist, Buddy leaned in close to me and said behind his hand: "Regular pimps get treated with respect. Hell, they're gods to their girls. Right? Am I right?"

I told him I'd heard that what he said was true.

"Don't ever hustle for your wife," he said. "You get no respect."

I told him I'd remember that. We turned to watch the artist at work. He was swabbing down Micki's cheek. She had a fine ass. The little machine with the tattooing needle in the end of it made a sound like a small egg beater. The artist held it lightly in his hand and, I was pleased to notice, made quick sure strokes with it. After each stroke, he swabbed the stroke with an alcohol-soaked piece of cotton. Micki lay with her face turned to the side and her eyes closed. She never once flinched.

Buddy, the first time the artist missed with the cotton swab and the blood coursed down off her snow-white ass, grabbed his mouth with his hands and said: "Oh, oh, blood, my God, the blood!" and ran to the rear of the double wide.

Finally the tattoo was done. And a handsome tattoo it was after the colors were traced and blended into the wings and all the blood was wiped away. There was a slight redness around the edges of the butterfly, but other than the redness it might have been painted on with bright water colors instead of embedded in her flesh with an electric needle. In a few days, of course, it would swell. It would scab. It would turn ugly, and if Micki couldn't keep her fingers off it, there would be infection--not much, but still infection--a little puss, a little blurring of the line with scar tissue. But, as everybody knows, if you want a tattoo (and why in God's world would anybody want one?), you have to run the risk of infection, of puss and scar tissue.

It was no doubt gratuitous, even sentimental, but looking at the butterfly on the young whore's ass I thought of the long snaking pipeline falling from Prudhoe Bay across the interior of Alaska to the Bay of Valdez. I thought if Alaska is not our young whore, what is she? She is rich, but who can live with her? She is full of all that will pleasure us, but she is hard and cold to the bone. And if we scar her, leave her with pestilence and corrupted with infection, irrefutably marked with our own private design, who can blame us? Didn't we buy her for a trifling sum to start with?

Watching the freshly wiped butterfly that had so lately been bloody, knowing that before it would be beautiful again it must first be scabby and unlovely, I came to a kind of bilious outrage and depression. It was a green and sour thickness I could taste on my tongue. It was a taste and feeling that would stay with me for weeks after I left Valdez.

I stood up, made my apologies for leaving early and, without waiting for Micki to answer, went through the door into the fine misting rain. I walked back toward the car in the dark thinking about the town out there, the people I'd met: Dave Kennedy building, Hap cooking, Chris on the flat with the drunken Indian fishing, Johnny Craine's wife cooking and giving showers to those who had none. I thought about it all and watching the bloody butterfly going on Micki's snowy cheek; finally, all I could think of or remember with any pleasure was that over in the Club Valdez they were still two-stepping. Charley Pride was singing and Hank Williams, Jr., was next and at the bar, a long line of quiet, almost solemn men watched the dancers two-stepping, gliding over the smooth wooden floor, their faces touching, the lips of the women parted, softly humming the words of the song.