The strange thing about being on the North Coast of Alaska, where my family spent one summer, is that whatever is done by any human, in any time period, remains where it was. It has not been plowed into the tundra by generations of farmers. One day, for reasons unknown to me, our host Bud Helmericks, my dad, and I got into our little skiff, with a faded green 5-horse Johnson outboard on its transom. I was just a silent witness. The adults had their own conversation as the engine droned. My childhood was like that, lived in the back seat. Private.

Presently we arrived at a low, flat island. Everything is flat on the tundra. The island was covered in low greenery. A dwelling had been here—its rectangular outline was now a geometric ripple in the grass. Here had been a door. No structure remained. I was thinking blankly about those who had lived here.

Poking up, out of the earth was a bit of wood. It had been a wood plane. There was no blade, but here was something as full of purpose as the rectangle. Years of exposure had cracked the wood, but it had not been digested back into soil. A short growing season.

The house outline implied questions. It remains a powerful ripple in my mind.

Another day we visited the umiak, a short distance up-river. The umiak was a skin-covered, frame boat for several paddlers, for hunting sea mammals. There was the frame, originally supported to preserve it for future use, but now fallen and disintegrating. Where did the paddlers go and why didn’t they return? Was it considered not worth fixing, like the line of seven laid-up old river steamers we saw on the riverbank at Whitehorse, on our drive north to Fairbanks? The oldest was clearly falling apart, wracking and settling. The most recent had lived on the Yukon not so long ago. They filled me with unreadable emotions.

Presently we flew east along the coast, for gasoline, stored in drums at one of the camps used by the Navy in their 1948 petroleum survey. Empty fuel drums in Jamaica had been transformed into musical instruments. The war had covered the world with airstrips, fuel drums, and jeeps. Taking the fuel stacked here on the tundra was illegal but where were the arresting officers? Our airplane was partly drawn onto the shore. Frame buildings still existed, but weathering and empty. I was given a line connected to the airplane and charged with not letting it drift away. As wind came up, its pressure on the vertical tail was pulling me into the water, so I called out.

How was the airplane made secure at our camp? Bud demonstrated, digging a short trench on the shore, parallel with it. He dug a short trench from its center, straight toward the airplane. Into the first trench he placed what he called “a dead-man” – a piece of wood with the mooring line tied around its middle. The line stretched toward the plane, through the second trench. He replaced the earth and tamped it down. A secure anchorage. So basic.

Bud poured fuel into the airplane’s tank through a funnel he carried, with a chamois skin arranged inside it. Chamois wet with fuel doesn’t pass water, which stands as droplets on it. Bad to have water in the fuel. This is why, before flight, private pilots drain some fuel from the tank and examine it for water. If water hits the mainjet, the engine falters.

Years later I would see others at road races using chamois skin this way.

Back at camp, I was lent a Cessna booklet, which I studied by the light of a hissing Coleman lantern. What seemed a strange idea – that aircraft not tied down will take off in high wind – made sense. A wing doesn’t “know” whether it is sitting still and the air is moving, or that the airplane is moving and the air is still. Years later, in 1979, a tornado would hit an outdoor collection of historic aircraft at Hartford, causing them to fly some distance and be destroyed. A friend and I would buy, from the air museum that owned them, mighty radial piston engines cut from their wreckage

All the illustrations in that Cessna booklet were done in that smiling, Dick-and-Jane reader style—we are all so happy together in our pastel colors. It had taken a year of grade school to get through Dick and Jane.

Being in the empty Arctic that wasn’t really empty, but full of unreadable blinks of human story, was utterly another world. I felt things but there was nothing to say.