Arctic Homestead: The True Story of One Family's Survival and Courage in the Alaskan Wilds - Softcover

Cobb, Norma; Sasser, Charles W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312283792 ISBN 13: 9780312283797

Verlag: St. Martin's Press, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

In 1973, Norma Cobb, her husband Lester, and the their five children, the oldest of whom was nine-years-old and the youngest, twins, barely one, pulled up stakes in the Lower Forty-eight and headed north to Alaska to follow a pioneer dream of claiming land under the Homestead Act. The only land available lay north of Fairbanks near the Arctic Circle where grizzlies outnumbered humans twenty to one. In addition to fierce winters and predatory animals, the Alaskan frontier drew the more unsavory elements of society's fringes. From the beginning, the Cobbs found themselves pitted in a life or death feud with unscrupulous neighbors who would rob from new settlers, attempt to burn them out, shoot them, and jump their claim.

The Cobbs were chechakos, tenderfeet, in a lost land that consumed even toughened settlers. Everything, including their "civilized" past, conspired to defeat them. They constructed a cabin and the first snow collapsed the roof. They built too close to the creek and spring breakup threatened to flood them out. Bears prowled the nearby woods, stalking the children, and Lester Cobb would leave for months at a time in search of work.

But through it all, they survived on the strength of Norma Cobb---a woman whose love for her family knew no bounds and whose courage in the face of mortal danger is an inspiration to us all. Arctic Homestead is her story.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Norma Cobb is the last woman pioneer to sign up under the U.S. Homestead Act and become a homesteader. She and her family still live in the valley they settled. Arctic Homestead is Norma Cobb's first book.

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Arctic Homestead

The True Story of One Family's Survival and Courage in the Alaskan Wilds

By Norma Cobb, Charles W. Sasser

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2000 Norma Cobb and Charles W. Sasser
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-312-28379-7

CHAPTER 1

Being isolated and lonely is different from being in town and lonely. Few people can take it. They fall apart each in his own way just as I began to fall apart the moment Les pushed back his plate and looked at me across what remained of supper's black bear roast.

"Norma ...?"

I slowly laid down my fork and, before he could continue, warded him off with both palms. I didn't want to hear it.

Even the children stopped eating. Early October's first snowfall murmured in the darkness against the spruce log cabin. Silence fell around the table, so that the fire in the wood-burning oil drum roared like a grizzly coming down the stovepipe and the whisper of snow on the black windows became as ominous as gossip at a funeral wake.

The way Les looked at me, half apologetically, half triumphantly ... Panic leered from shadows resurrected to life by the uncertain flicker of the oil lamp. Tears blurred my vision. It wasn't as though I hadn't known tonight or a night like tonight eventually had to come. Sometimes I blocked from my mind things I didn't want to happen. I didn't trust myself to speak. I knew I might say things I surely would come to regret in hindsight. The hush built.

Lester Cobb was one stubborn man. I knew it when I married him, but I married him anyhow. He had dark hair and a magnificent beard. At six feet two, he towered over me by nearly a foot. He made me feel protected and diminished at the same time. It was his attitude as much as his size. He thought he could conquer the world, and if he couldn't conquer it he would bluster his way through. I could never win an argument with him. He would have his way tonight, as he had his way in most things.

Anger, resentment, loneliness, flared deep inside my soul, fueled by emotion with which I was well acquainted after nearly three years homesteading the Alaskan wilderness — raw fear. My husband was going to abandon me and our five small ones in the middle of the northern wilds with wolves literally at the cabin door and snow bringing the long darkness of the Arctic winter. Suddenly, I let it all out from a bitter deep spring inside.

"You can't go and leave me out here all by myself with five kids. Lester, anything could happen!"

"Honey ..." Les began.

"It won't do, Les."

Last August while prospecting for gold, Les met a man named Gary Streicher. Streicher was putting together an oil field service company to construct iron islands — oil derricks — in Prudhoe Bay. They could only be erected when the bay was frozen over, from October to April. They were built right out on the ice, then drilled and anchored to the bottom of the bay. Come spring thaw, people who didn't know wondered how they got out there like that in the middle of the water. Streicher had hired my do-it-all husband to ramrod the operation over the winter.

Rough as a Cobb. That was what people said about Les. The expression somehow expanded to include the children and me after we migrated to Alaska. It became "Lester and Norma, the Cobbs, and their five little Kernels." Rough or not, we were still chechakos, tenderfeet. Other bush people were predicting we would never make it as pioneers. We were lucky, they said, if this land didn't kill us all. Which it might do yet — starting this winter after Les abandoned the children and me.

"Honey, either I take the job to earn enough money to see us over," Les argued, "or we give up right now and move back to Colorado ..."

Sid, the eldest of the brood at nearly thirteen, sat very straight and stiff. He folded his hands in his lap, squared his shoulders, and looked across the table at Les. His face turned pale; Sid loved it in wild and isolated Minook Valley.

Sean, ten, exchanged uncertain glances with seven-year-old Tommy. Things had started out rough for Sean, but the valley had been the first real home he had known in his short life. Tommy got up and as self-appointed protector to the twins, Cara and Cora, moved around closer to them. They temporarily suppressed their endless tittering and picking at each other. At four years old, nearly five, they were already a riotous and rebellious pair. Their bottom lips swelled in mirror images of defiance and resistance to whatever decision we reached. To please was never an objective in their lives. They were just like their father.

The Kernels seemed to realize that we Cobbs were confronting another landmark obstacle in pioneering.

"Honey ..."

"Les, it's our first wintering over. And to do it out here by ourselves, without you ... We're not ready."

"Honey, the cabin is finished —"

"The roof fell in on the last one when it snowed."

"All the food supplies are in —"

"Remember how bears broke into the other cabin and ransacked it?"

"The bears are hibernating. Firewood is all bucked up for the winter —"

"What if we run out of food? Can't you wait until spring and get another job?"

"Norma, we have to have the money —"

"What about the Bushman? He chased Sid. He's stolen some of the Indian kids."

Les threw up his hands in exasperation. "The Bushmanl God help the Bushman if he should run into you!"

Grinning like that, Les had the look of a rough-and-ready TV villain, even down to the mischievous devil-may-care twinkle in his blue-gray eyes. The way that man could grin!

"Grinning won't work this time, Lester," I warned him. I turned to the children. "Kids, finish eating and go to your loft. Fur is going to fly. Your father is deserting us."

"I am not deserting —"

"I'm scared," Tommy whispered, wide-eyed and looking around at the window for prowling bears and Bushmen.

If I were to be honest with myself, I had to admit Les had a point. We were all but broke, again. If he turned down this job, with its really good pay, he would undoubtedly have to hike out of the valley and look for employment come spring, when he was really needed to work the homestead. There were cabins to build, the airstrip to finish, some gold prospecting to do. We had only three more years, a little over, to "prove out" our homestead claim before it actually became ours. Les insisted that about all he had to do in the winter was lie around, eat, and, weather permitting, run a trapline with Sid and Bony Newman the Eskimo.

But the important thing to me was that he would be here, with us, when it really mattered. I actually pretended all summer, even knowing differently, that I was going to spend the long, snug, romantic winter cocooned up with my husband and children. I thought we would have plenty to keep us busy — books, home-schooling the children, trapping furs for making mukluks and caps and robes, training the sled dogs so we would have transportation.

I had tried to ignore the growing restlessness I saw forming in Les as winter approached. Winter and cabin walls were hard on men, especially high-energy men like Les. They started getting restless in September and early October. I suspected the threat of cabin fever, of being confined with women and children, was the reason men took to traveling and trapping as soon as the streams froze and there was enough snow on the ground for dogsleds.

Summers were visiting time for people in the bush. It was as if everyone tried...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St. Martin's Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312283792
• ISBN 13: 9780312283797
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 314
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland