"Breakup Is Hard to Do"

James Arness hauls one of his sons and a 55-gallon barrel to their Nikiski home during spring breakup, about 1952.

BREAKUP IS HARD TO DO

APRIL 2011

Getting their teen-age daughter, Terri, to high school was a particular challenge for Stan and Donnis Thompson back in the early 1970s, after they sold their building supply business and stopped shuttling their family back and forth between Kenai and their Nikiski-area homestead on Timberlost Lake.

“The year we moved out here for good, after selling Kenai Korners, my daughter was a freshman in high school and trying to look beautiful and everything,” Donnis remembered. “And she would get herself all fixed up for school. We had a Coot (a four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicle). It was open and it had four big, big, big tires on it. And it would go anywhere. And we would wrap her up in plastic until she looked like a cocoon, and Stan would pick her up in the Coot to make the school bus, and then she would unfold just like a chrysalis. And then she would be beautiful and ready to go to school.”

The Thompsons lived—and Stan and Donnis still live—down two miles of narrow twisting dirt road off the end of Halbouty Road. The name of their private drive, “Thompson Trail,” seemed especially appropriate each spring when, for about a month in the 1950s and ’60s, it was practically impassable.

Donnis Thompson, 1956.

In their back-and-forth days, Stan often walked those two miles out to the family Jeep, parked at the end of Halbouty, and then drive into work in Kenai. On his return trip, he would reverse the process. Meanwhile, Donnis, with young children to tend, often stayed home—with no telephone, no electricity, and no running water.

She says she smiles sometimes thinking about how rough some people think they have it today during spring break-up when they’ve got a few ruts in their roads or some big puddles to drive through.  Returning to the Thompson Trail each weekend back in those early springs, Donnis said, “It wasn’t, ‘Did you get stuck?’ It was, ‘How many times did you get stuck?’ We were driving a Jeep, and (the mud) would be clear up to the doors.”

Even these days, her own road creates challenges for her: “I missed church yesterday,” she said earlier this week. “Our road is terrible”—still covered with snow in many places—“and it’s going to get worse. I don’t think I’d’ve gotten stuck; the only thing is, if I do get stuck, I’ve got to walk back. I’ll leave that to younger people.”

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Not far south the North Road is Miller Loop, from which Bernice Lake Road can be reached. In 1952, the Alaska Road Commission punched in the route to Bernice Lake, and a small group of hardy families moved out there to set up homesteads. Among those families were the Seamans, whose driveway ended in the area’s worst mudhole.

Carl and Elsie Seaman set up their home down a road that for years, Elsie said, was “mostly just a ‘Cat path,” and was therefore particularly susceptible to the vagaries of freezing and thawing.

One day in the early ’50s, when her three children were all under the age of 10, Elsie and Carl decided to head into Kenai, 11 miles away, for Easter Sunday services, which were often held those days in Louis Miller’s ice cream parlor, where Father Thompson held a Catholic mass from behind the counter while the coffee was perking.

The drive out in their old army surplus truck was somewhat rough but uneventful because the temperature on Saturday night had dipped below freezing and firmed up the roadway. However, the sun was out and strong, and by the time the Seamans were on their road heading home, traveling smoothly was impossible.

“We were dressed in the best we had on the homestead, and that old gumbo was like a quagmire,” Elsie said. “Our truck did its best, but it couldn’t quite make it. It finally bogged down. We were within sight of the homestead, so the only thing we could do is get out and walk. And when I got out of the truck, I stepped down in the mud, and both of my shoes popped off. So I had to pick them up and walk home in my stocking feet.”

“Stocking feet” for Elsie was actually a good pair of nylons, which she promptly ruined as she tromped the 200 yards or so up to her front porch—while her neighbor, Wally Van Sky, stood at his front door “just laughing his head off”—where she and the rest of her family laid their shoes out to dry so the dirt could be banged off later.

Like the Thompsons, the Seamans had no running water. All cleaning and washing had to be with water hauled up from the lake. Elsie did laundry by heating water on the stove and then rubbing clothes briskly over a washboard before hanging them to dry.

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Also nearby in the Nikiski area were Peggy and Jim Arness, who had homesteaded by Lake Arness, and, like many of their neighbors, had to leave their Jeep on one end of their road during break-up, then walk around mud and water holes from house to vehicle and back.

The Arnesses built their first homestead cabin in 1952, and Peggy has a black-and-white photograph of Jim on foot on their very rough road. On Jim’s back he has used a thick piece of rope to tie a 55-gallon barrel, which he is hauling out to the homestead. Up on his shoulders is riding his younger son, Joe.

Such manual toting of heavy materials was commonplace back in those days. The Arnesses had an old oil heater in their cabin, and there were no tanker trucks out then making deliveries to personal homes. Along with fuel, they also hauled in groceries and anything else essential to survival, no matter how bad the roads became.

The road into the CAA complex in Kenai, 1948.

*****

In Soldotna, the roads could be awful at times, too. Dale Rorrison, who lived in town for nearly 60 years, had plenty of personal experience with roads, as he worked for the Alaska Road Commission, the Bureau of Public Roads, and state Department of Transportation for about 30 years.

When the road—mainly the Sterling Highway, in Rorrison’s experience—was first constructed, he said, it was “just a cow trail, more or less,” that was sometimes built up with gravel, if it was available at the time. As a result, the weather and the temperatures sometimes played havoc with the roads.

During break-up between Soldotna and Kenai, “we had ’Cats by the biggest holes.” The earth-moving machines were mostly large HD-14 bulldozers and D-8 Caterpillars, which had large bases that would “float” well on mud, and which would be parked and ready for constant use, Rorrison said.

When the roadway thawed, operators used the dozers to push out mud and water, scraping down to frozen ground so that vehicles could continue to pass through. When the removed material dried sufficiently, the operators would push it back onto the roadbed and grade it smooth.

If portions of the road were too bad to allow traffic, operators sometimes parked their dozers right in the road to block oncoming vehicles. Such deterrents worked most of the time, “but sometimes they tried it anyway,” Rorrison said.

In some places, water might stay trapped on the roads for weeks, so road crews would drive steam points into the ground to penetrate the frost and/or clay and give the water a chance to drain. “When you’re on flat land, there’s no place for the water to go,” he said.

But even the hillsides weren’t free of break-up hazards. Rorrison remembers getting stuck once on the hill just on the Sterling side of where Fred Meyer now sits. He said that he and his wife, Meryl, “sat there for several hours” before someone was finally able to help them out.

*****

Al Hershberger, who worked for a while with Rorrison on the Alaska Road Commission, said, “In the early days, mud and getting stuck in it were so commonplace that most people never gave mud a second thought.”

Hershberger’s own first break-up experience with mud occurred in 1948, when he was an ARC employee in the Kenai camp. “One evening after work, three of us decided to go to Soldotna as none of us had been there. One of the guys had a 1936 Studebaker, so we took it and headed towards Soldotna. We got stuck about halfway down Pickle Hill.

“The Road Commission had a D-8 ’Cat nearby, so we fired it up and pushed the car back up the hill, never making it to Soldotna.” Hershberger did eventually reach Soldotna, where he has been living for about 60 years.

“Even after the (highway) was improved, there were mud problems every year, as most of the homesteader roads were not improved,” he said. “There were always lots of vehicles parked along the main road, waiting for the side roads to dry out.”

 

*****

 

 Over in Kenai, Rodger Schmidt, who worked for years as a teacher and a principal, said he remembers the time he approached on foot the intersection of McCollum Drive and Aliak Avenue, near his home, to find a surprise in the mire that had formed in the roadway.

“Right in the middle of that corner, there was a cop car and another car buried right up to the frame,” Schmidt said. “I think the cop must’ve been driving down that road to see what was going on, and ended up right by that other one.”

No one was occupying either vehicle, and Schmidt found humor in the situation because every year water became trapped in the low-lying intersection, and most people understood that, until the water was gone, walking was going to be necessary. “You could have paddled a canoe down that street,” he said.

To extract the vehicles, he said, “I imagine they probably had to get a wrecker in there, the way they were buried.” When he returned the next day, the cars were gone.

*****

In the Longmere Lake area near Sterling, travel by car in the springtime was also no easy matter.  Dan and Mary France homesteaded nearby in the late 1950s, and the road to their home was at first little more than a dirt path, beginning along the shore of Longmere and winding through the mixed birch and spruce woods.



Dan France approaches his airstrip in his Super Cub, 1964.

In the early 1960s, Chas Foster would build Forest Lane, which connected the Frances more firmly to the highway, but until that new road construction occurred, they had to make many adjustments, particularly during break-up.

According to Mary, there was a definite progression to these adjustments. Before the road became impassable, Dan (and their neighbor, Dave Thomas) would park on the frozen lake. When warming temperature deteriorated the road, they would walk a section line to Longmere and drive the length of the lake over to the Sterling Highway.

When the lake ice became too rotten to drive on, they would park their vehicles on the other end of the lake, along the highway, and walk the length of lake. When the lake became too unsafe to walk across, they used a boat, with either Dave Thomas or Dan leaning out over the bow with an axe to chop a narrow channel from one end to the other.

If the lake refroze, or the ice was blown closed, while they were gone, they would re-chop the channel. When the ice finally went out of the lake, they could navigate with the boat in the usual manner. And then, when the roads finally firmed up again—after perhaps a month or more—normal vehicular traffic would resume.

Dan owned a Super Cub and was an avid pilot, and he and Thomas (also a pilot) shared a dirt airstrip that cut perpendicularly across their private road. According to Mary, “When the airstrip dried up enough, that was a highlight of our year. We could fly into town to go to work. We could fly in for groceries. We could fly out our dirty clothes. We could fly back with water or fuel.” Like many pilots at that time, they landed right on the Sterling Highway in the heart of Soldotna.

Odd methods of transportation were nothing new in those days, Mary said. In either 1959 or 1960, she said that Chas and Ruth Foster’s oldest son, Gary, was graduating from school in Kenai, so they fired up Chas’s D-8 and rode it out to the highway, where they climbed into their vehicle, drove to a friend’s house to clean up and change, and then traveled on to the commencement ceremony.

People did what they had to do, Mary said.

Jane Fair makes adjustments to old steel airstrip mats covering a soft spot on their Forest Lane driveway, 1965.