Wordsmith
Kev Reynolds
The Man with the World’s Best Job
www.kevreynolds.co.uk
The Man From Alaska
W
he’d entertain himself by playing Rachmaninoff on the piano
that he’d transported into the wilds by buckboard.
When our journey across the mountains was over, he
gripped my hand tightly, looked me in the eye and said:
‘Let’s keep in touch.’
We did, and for several years I treasured each letter
that arrived. ‘Winter is just around the corner,’ he wrote
in one. ‘This afternoon I canoed to the far side of the lake
to cut winter wood, and broke ½ inch ice some of the way;
coming back towards evening, my earlier passage breaks
were skimmed over with new ice. I feel that will be my last
canoe trip of the year … Northern lights may be in store for
tonight.’
In another he described how ‘the mercury has slipped
into the “far belows” as we call it -50 or better.’ He told of
the caribou having left early for the Yukon, that moose were
his most prominent neighbours that winter, and how he’d
‘spotted wolf tracks out on the lake.’
When he was 70 Fred made a three-month trip ‘outside’ -
meaning outside the State of Alaska. He described spending
a month of it along the coastline of
Vancouver Island, ‘kayaking from
island to island, enjoying side trips to
homesteaders, inland lakes for warm
water swimming, dining on clams,
mussels, oysters and fish about the
evening campfires, bathing in hot springs and walking some
of the beaches on the Pacific Rim.’
Fred was a man whose love of the natural world was
infectious, so with his agreement I planned to take a film
crew to visit him. What an inspiration he would be! But as
with so many well-laid plans, it came to naught when the
independent film company was taken over by executives
with no interest in a man who lived alone in the wilderness.
Eventually we lost touch. My fault, not Fred’s, I was racing
hither and yon trying to earn a living, stumbling from one
financial crisis to the next, moving home and losing things.
But though our correspondence ended, I never forgot the
man from Alaska.
More than 25 years after we’d first met, I had a yearning
to get in touch again. By now he’d be in his nineties…
Tapping his name into Google, up came Fred’s smiling face,
illustrating his obituary. My friend Fred had died three
months earlier.
Now began another correspondence, this time with
someone who’d known Fred much longer and far better than
I did, and who could tell me a whole lot more about the man
who’d lived a life I could barely imagine. He was not the lone
wolf I’d pictured. Instead he was a friend to many, drawing
admirers from all walks of life with his natural warmth and
humility, and who became so well-loved and respected that
the State of Alaska honoured him by instituting a ‘Fred
Rungee Day’.
So I was not the only one whose life was enriched by an
encounter with the Man from Alaska, and I shall cherish the
memory of our walk in the Alps, and never recite Call of the
Wild again without hearing his voice….
e were running short of breath when we finally
reached the Sefinenfurgge, but having climbed
1800 metres since breakfast, we could be excused
for that. Resting on a convenient rock, Fred mopped the
sweat from his brow, then turned to me and said in that soft
North American drawl of his: ‘I guess you bein’ a writer, you
might like a bit of poetry?’ I nodded. ‘Does the name Robert
Service mean anythin’ to you?’ he asked.
Grinning, I quoted back: ‘Have you gazed on naked
grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on?’ Fred took
up the next line: ‘Set pieces and drop curtain scenes galore,’
after which we completed in harmony the first verse of Call
of the Wild, that classic hymn of praise to the wilderness.
With that, our friendship was established, and over the
next few days as we trekked the central section of the Alpine
Pass Route together, I gradually got to know something
of the life of this quiet man from Alaska, and the more I
learned, the more I grew to respect and admire him.
A gentle, thick-set man of medium height, Fred
Rungee was 67 at the time, and making a nostalgic return
to Switzerland which he’d last visited
as a four-year old when his father, a
composer, had spent a year there with
his family. Fred inherited his father’s
love of music and trained for a while as a
classical pianist, but fate had other plans
and as a conscientious objector he became a smokejumper
during World War II, after which he moved from Connecticut
to Alaska where his love of the wilderness took root. For
the rest of his working life he was a smokejumper for the
Bureau of Land Management – that is, a fire fighter who
would parachute into remote regions to combat forest fires.
He and his crew would land with a backpack of survival and
fire-fighting equipment, and cut breaks to prevent wildfires
from spreading. It was exciting, dangerous work, of course,
but well paid.
Finding he had an affinity with the wilderness, Fred
saved his money, took early retirement and bought a parcel
of land on the edge of the Wrangell-St Elias National Park,
where he built a cabin in which to live overlooking Carlson
Lake, about 4km from the nearest road. He grew vegetables,
ate berries, caught fish from the lake, drew his water from
a nearby spring and because of bears, had to carry a rifle
whenever he stepped outdoors. His home, he told me, was
on a caribou migration trail, so twice a year immense herds
would wander past, sometimes destroying his vegetables
on the way. On occasion he’d shoot a moose to keep him in
meat for a year or more.
There was no boasting with Fred. He’d answer my
questions with enthusiasm and honesty, and as the days
went by I began to build a picture of his life of self-imposed
solitude in which there was no room for loneliness. I sensed
his disciplined humanity; he was a man at peace with himself
and the world around him. Submerged as he was by nature in
the raw, he would mesmerise with tales of close encounters
with black bears, but would contrast such excitements by
quoting numerous authors, reciting poetry and telling how
He was a man at peace
with himself and the
world around him...
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