In 1984 I worked for a summer along with Dave Scheer for Jan and Beverly Masek up at Stuckagain Heights, a nice restaurant overlooking Anchorage. Jan was an Iditarod dog musher, race car driver, and restaurant owner who had escaped from communist Czechoslovakia years earlier, Beverly was his wife, a Native woman from Anvik who would later go on to be an Alaska State Representive. Jan had a bad temper but was crazy and fun and told great stories, word is that after he gave Steve Martin a ride in a sleigh behind a team of 6 horses in Colorado that he wrote his "Wild and crazy guys" routine. I believe it.
By day we worked keeping up the the team of 75 sled dogs that were there on the property and at night we showered up and were waiters in the restaurant. Jan let us renovate some old shed on the property and we lived there. For a month or more we were joined by Carl Jerue, Beverly's brother.
I haven't seen or heard from Carl for over 33 years but I thought I would pull into Anvik and ask around to see if he was around. As we turned the corner to pull into Anvik Creek a float plane landed right behind us, Jeff waved him by and he passed us in the small channel. After we were tied up I walked up the hill to look around the small village of 90 people. I couldn't see any town anywhere and when a man passed by in a pickup I asked him if he knew Carl. It was his cousin Wilson who said he would give him a call for me when he got home and ask him to come down to the river to talk.
Carl came down in his truck and we stood talking, he is my age, married with two girls at home and an adopted 17 year old son that is doing good. We talked about the time we capsized in a canoe in the Kenai River Canyon and were lucky to have made it and talked about our current trip along the Yukon and talked about growing up and becoming different people than who we were in our twenties. He told us how to cook a pike by peeling a willow stalk and poking it through the fish from the mouth, wrapping it around with the willow bark. Set it over a fire and slow cook it, all we need is the pike. Carl told how the village was getting a new biomass boiler heater so that they could start getting local people to cut wood for heat instead of fuel oil. He also told us that he was hopeful that the village could get a heated greenhouse built so that they could grow winter vegetables.
It was a nice visit, we gave him some small gifts that we had with us and pushed off to get out in front of the barge that was waiting to head down to the next village downstream. It was about 8 at night on the night of June 20th, the weather turned sunny and calm and not too cold so we decided to make a midnight run into the solstice.
