"Tragedy & Romance, Revisited"

Cliff House on upper Tustumena lake, November 1966.

TRAGEDY & ROMANCE, REVISITED

SEPTEMBER 2009

When David Letzring reached for the in-flight magazine, he had no idea that he was about to revisit a tragedy and be introduced to an unexpected romance.

It was early winter in 1978, and Letzring, who worked for Marathon Oil at the time, was settling into his Alaska Airlines seat for a flight to his office in Anchorage. From the seat pouch in front of him, he plucked the November issue of Alaskafest and began to scan through its contents. Soon he found himself beginning an article entitled “Anne: A True Story,” by Dan Strickland, who was identified as an Alaska Department of Fish & Game employee living and working in Fairbanks.

The first-person story began colorfully, with ebullient adjectives and a touch of personification: “The sun splashed down on the trees lining the river, wooing autumn colors of the leaves into radiant beauty.” But it was the fifth paragraph that grabbed Letzring’s attention. There, Strickland referred to a cabin known as the Cliff House, located at the end of a long glacial lake.

In Letzring’s experience, there was only one Cliff House—and, until it had burned to the ground earlier that very summer, it had been located at the upper end of Tustumena Lake.

Two paragraphs later he found a reference to “Dave,” and he realized that he was a character in this story, as was “George,” a Kasilof friend of Letzring’s named George Calvin. One other name was familiar, “Mike,” whom Letzring recognized as Homer-based guide, Mike McBride.

All of the other names were unfamiliar—the story had inexplicably changed Strickland’s own name to “Paul”—but Letzring knew who they were. And suddenly he remembered one horrible night three years before….

 

It was September 1975, and Letzring, his son Mike, Ken Knoblauch, and Terry Johnson were all descending on horseback from the mountains above Clear Creek, just a few hundred yards south of the Cliff House along the shore of Devils Bay in Tustumena Lake. Letzring’s party had been hunting, and at the Cliff House they had left behind the gear they had not needed on the hunt.

While they had been in alpine country, however, McBride had flown in a 68-year-old West German hunter named Herman Ulner, and Mitch and Cindy Gyde, who had spent the entire previous winter in the Cliff House caring for owner John Swanson’s horses.

When the hunting party arrived, said Letzring, “Cindy was there, and she said that Mitch had taken ‘Herman the German’ over to do some hunting on the glacier flats.” Since the cabin was fairly commodious, the hunters decided to stay at Cliff House that night, and the worsening weather made their decision that much easier.

“It started getting really crummy—stormy,” said Letzring. “And then it started raining, and then it got dark. And Cindy started worrying about Mitch. ‘He should be back by now. He should be back by now.’ Finally, at about nine o’clock, it was really dark and the wind was howling. Knoblauch and I decided that we would take the boat and go up to the glacier flat.”

The flats of the glacial moraine lay only a few hundred yards north of the Cliff House, and the two men made their way just off shore, using the foamy white of the breaking waves as markers to keep them on course. As they worked their way around a small point of land, they spotted a fire.

“And it’s a big fire,” Letzring said. “And this guy’s jumping up and down.” The guy was Ulner, who hurried to their boat as they tried to beach the craft in the pounding waves.  Letzring, who had spent some time in Germany, could converse just well enough with Ulner to understand what had occurred.

After Ulner had exited the 16-foot aluminum skiff he and Gyde had traveled in, Gyde also climbed out but inadvertently pushed the boat back out into the lake. At first, Ulner told Letzring, the boat drifted only a little ways, as the waters just off shore were protected from the wind, so Gyde decided to strip down and swim out to retrieve the craft.

The waters of Tustumena Lake are notorious for being turbulent, turbid and deadly cold. Less than a month earlier, three sheep hunters had drowned trying to cross the lake. And on a chilly September evening, Mitch Gyde had little chance when he dived into the frigid waters.

According to Ulner, Letzring said, the boat was beginning to catch the wind when Gyde entered the water. Soon, “he’s a hundred yards out. And he tried to make it back, and he couldn’t. He drowned.”

In a move that Letzring said would haunt him later, he decided to keep Cindy Gyde temporarily ignorant of her husband’s fate. He told Ulner to say nothing, and he convinced Knoblauch that they should tell Cindy that Mitch had decided to stay behind with the boat. Letzring said he hadn’t been sure how to deal with a grieving, hysterical widow in an isolated cabin in the middle of a storm.

The cover-up in place, Cindy spent the entire night awake, pacing, while the others slept fitfully. When the weather had calmed by daybreak, Johnson and Knoblauch took off in their boat to inform the State Troopers. In town, they also called McBride to inform him of Mitch’s fate.

Unfortunately, the call to McBride set in motion another problem: Just after Johnson and Knoblauch had returned to the Cliff House later that day, McBride landed in the bay in his seaplane and taxied up to the shore. His wife jumped out, threw her arms around Cindy, and tried to console her for her husband’s death that she knew nothing about.

“And Cindy exploded,” Letzring said. “She went off her head. She was going to dive in the lake. That was it. ‘I’m going to drown,’ you know.”

Eventually, they calmed her enough to get onboard the airplane and fly her out to Homer. The hunters later discovered the lost skiff, which had drifted nearly to Caribou Island, many miles from the glacier flats. And Letzring had one more uncomfortable encounter with Cindy a few months later, when she approached him at a mutual friend’s house and demanded to know why he’d lied to her.

In the end, he said, he was able to convince her that he simply hadn’t known how to help her. “But I don’t think she ever forgave me for that,” he added.

 

And that might have been the end of it, as far as Letzring was concerned, if not for the article in Alaskafest.

According to the story, author Strickland, whom Letzring had helped to transport out to the old Emil Berg cabin six miles up the lake shore from Cliff House, had fallen in love with Cindy Gyde while simultaneously befriending her husband, Mitch.

Of course, the Gydes’ names have been changed in the story—to Anne and Roger Reynolds—but by the end of the first page it is clear that “Paul” is entranced: “She was dressed in army surplus jeans and a work shirt too large for her, but the clothes could not hide the fact that she was beautiful.”

As the Reynolds’ nearest neighbor during that winter of 1974-75, Paul spent a lot of time at the Cliff House and grew close to the couple. He makes it very plain that Anne and Roger are deeply in love with each other, but he keeps his personal feelings simmering.

Halfway through the story, with that first winter passed and the next one approaching, he relates Roger’s tragic drowning and the sadness it caused him to lose a friend. At the end of the next paragraph, however, he writes: “My thoughts turned to Anne.”

He wrote her a letter a few months later, and they began an intermittent correspondence that he believed was bringing them closer. “There were no very frank statements, just a growing understanding and a longing to see each other, to touch hands,” the story said.

A few months later, Paul was surprised to learn that Anne was getting married and would be leaving the state, at least temporarily. Just before she left, they met and shared a final conversation over a bottle of wine, and he found it impossible to tell her how he really felt.

Strickland ends his story by attempting to capture the melancholy in his soul through a metaphor of color: “Across the bay the glaciers had receded into the dark shadows cast by the mountains, but I knew they were there. Just the faintest blue … if you looked hard enough.”

When he finished reading, Letzring kept his complimentary copy of the magazine. A member of the Kasilof Historical Society, he also later returned home and opened a manila folder to file away the story along with the many other chapters he had collected of life, and of death, on the lake.