A country club gourmet Chef lands a camp cook job in Alaska and finds out he has a lot to learn about camp cooking in the frozen wilderness. Luckily he finds out he doesn’t have to cook grizzlies and moose under ground with one match.
I heard there was a lot of money to be made cooking in Alaska bush camps, and I was dumb enough to think I could fly to Anchorage with two hundred dollars in my Levis and pull it off.
When the plane landed in Anchorage it was ten below. I was dressed in typical Los Angeles clothes: jeans and light cowboy boots. No problem. I figured I’d just go to this big company I’d heard about and they’d send me right out on a camp job. It didn’t happen that way.
I found out that in Anchorage the only way to get a cooking job was to go through the union. I slogged around on the snowy sidewalks getting my boots soaked and freezing my feet off until I found the union hall. “I’m a cook,” I announced to the dispatcher. “I’m looking for work.”
“Cook, huh?” She looked me over like if you’ve seen one you’ve seen “em all and referred me to a long list of names on a clipboard. “You”ll have to sign up on that sheet with the rest of “em.”
With sinking hopes I looked at the list of about thirty names. Next to each name the applicant had written down the kind of cooking job he or she was qualified for. Each one had written in the mysterious words “Bull cook.”
The term sounded ominously professional. I figured that was the finish of any hope I had of getting sent out on a big-paying camp job.
How naive I was to think that a city boy like me could come up here and compete with all these veteran bull cooks, these old-timers who no doubt knew all about cooking wild game, who thoroughly understood the mysteries of cooking beans underground in big earthenware pots, and probably knew how to bake sourdough bread, too.
It looked like it was time to drag my butt back to the lower forty-eight. I wrote my name and timidly followed it with the single pomposity, “Chef.”
Oh, how these Alaskans would laugh upon seeing that title. It was like walking into a Russian tractor factory and applying for a job as a seamstress. “Oh yeah, cheechako, let”s see ya skin a moose!”
I was plenty worried. Suppose I did get sent out on a camp job. I’d look great out in the bush stirring beans over an open fire with the snow falling off trees and putting my fire out. Then some hunter would probably drag in a grizzly and want me to cook it underground with a secret method known only to bull cooks. They’d laugh me out of camp. I wondered if you were supposed to take the hair off the grizzly first.
Two days later, with no offer from the union and my money running low, I was preparing to call the airport and head for the lower 48. The phone in my room rang. It was the union dispatcher.
“I’ve got a camp cook job that pays two thousand a week but they’ve run off the last three characters I sent out. They’re a little rough on cooks, I guess. You want it?”
“Is there a mustache in Iraq? When do I start?”
“You fly out to Nome tomorrow morning on Air Alaska. When you get to Nome you grab a charter out to someplace called Granite Mountain. That’s a hundred and fifty miles out of Nome.”
“What about tickets?” I asked. “I’m just about broke.”
“The company’s paying for all that. You just be there.”
“But what happened to all those bull cooks who signed up ahead of me?”
“Bull cooks?” she said. “You ARE from outside. Bull cooks wash dishes and mop floors. This job needs a real cook, and you’re the only one signed up.”
“Great,” I said, amazed that they were going to spend all that money on plane tickets for a big phony like me who was sure to be unmasked the minute he showed up. I just had time that afternoon to rush out and buy a couple paperbacks on camp cooking.
I read one of the blurbs.
Camp cook’s incredible tale of heroism!
The heroic tale of Sourdough Bill McCrafty, veteran of hundreds of lost expeditions, who snow-shoed out alone to rescue the Lost Japanese Expedition from a Frozen Hell, even though he lost a foot to frostbite doing it. Then this incredible man of steel cooked the starving Japanese a polar bear underground wrapped in sourdough puffpaste! “Hell” says Sourdough Bill, “and I only had one match with me, too!”
I opened up another book.Camp cook knighted by queen.
The nerve-shredding tale of Sourdough Jack McGurk, the eighty-year-old veteran of the Far North who survived Ninety Days Of Frozen Hell on an ice floe!
And then, and then! Unbelievably, this magnificent example of Arctic culinary pluck had to chop off his own foot to free himself from a bear trap… Then, in his struggle back to civilization, this Iron Man of the Arctic stumbled across the Lost British Expedition. Compounding their agony, the Brits had run out of tea. Touched by their uncivilized plight, this tough miracle-man struggled eighty miles through a raging blizzard to get the tea, then returned to the starving British and cooked them a walrus underground. Wrapped in puff paste!
“Hell,” says Sourdough Jack modestly, “I knew they couldn’t make it out there without no tea! And I only had one match to cook that walrus, too!”
I promised myself one thing for sure: I was not gonna go out on a camp job without a whole pocketful of matches!
Next morning, just like I knew what I was doing, I caught the two-engine prop job at Anchorage and flew out to Nome. The Nome Airport was twenty-five below and I was still shivering in cowboy boots and a thin jacket. carrying one small suitcase.
I met the pilot of the single-engine Cessna at the strip. He looked me over doubtfully and noted my thin boots. I think he could see right off I wasn’t the sole survivor of the 1908 English Disaster.
“I’m Bubba,” he told me, “Dead Stick Bubba.” (I knew his name wouldn’t be Theodore the Timid) “You the cook for Granite Mountain?”
Shivering badly in the wind, I managed to silence my chattering teeth long enough to admit it.
“By God, if this don’t look like it’s gonna be another short trip. Where’s your gear?” I held up the small suitcase. He shrugged his shoulders. “I guess you know what you’re doin’. Climb aboard then.”
When we got in the air, Bubba said, “They’re sure gonna be glad to see you – if you know what you’re doing, that is. I’m gettin’ tired flying cooks out there and havin’ to go pick “em up again next week. Every one of “em lookin’ like a whipped dog, too.”
This cheery news just about finished off whatever confidence I had left. What kind of crafty old veteran of the Frozen North were they expecting? And what did they do with impostors out there in the bush? I hoped the flight would be a long one. I’d brought along my cookbooks and wanted plenty of time to look them over.
I concentrated on a chapter called THE GREAT NOME MASSACRE OF 1804, a tragedy about a cook who made the mistake of serving baking powder biscuits to a one-legged trapper called Sourdough Jim.
I made a mental note never to bake anything with baking powder.
After an hour in the air the plane glided in low over an airstrip with one deserted wooden building. No control tower. The strip was just a cleared space in the snow. The pilot banked low over the strip so he could get a close look at the snow. I looked around and saw nothing for miles in every direction. Not a tree, just the vast expanse of the tundra surrounded by low mountains.
“We’re gonna land here?” I asked. “Where’s town at?”
“This is it,” the pilot said. “I’m looking for holes in the runway, snow drifts or maybe a dead moose.” Satisfied that a landing appeared possible without cracking up, he banked in a long circling glide and whooshed down on the strip. We taxied over to the one deserted wooden building and got out.
In minutes my toes were frozen, my ears were brittle appendages that threatened to drop off any minute. I was in pain. A person could die out here. Shivering in the wind, I looked enviously at what Bubba the pilot was wearing: Arctic boots made of caribou tops with waterproof rubber soles; a knee-length parka insulated with goose down; and over his head a hood lined with wolverine fur.
I asked Bubba where everybody was and where the site was and he waved vaguely in the direction of the nearest mountain.
“Well, wasn’t somebody supposed to meet me here and tell me which way to walk?”
“I dunno,” he said calmly and warmly as he climbed back in the cockpit.
Alarmed, I said, “You’re not gonna leave me out here, are you?” I was terribly afraid that this bush pilot figured a man was on his own out here and ought to know how to take care of himself. I wondered if I could break into the building and start a fire. Would they find me in the spring?
“Hellfire, man,” said the pilot. “I’m not gonna leave anybody out here alone, I just wanta get on the radio and tell “em I”m here and find out when they’re coming out to pick you up.”
Just then I heard the roar of a motor and in a minute I saw a big snow machine crawl around a snowbanked road and head toward us.
Bart Mahaffey a bearded, belligerent 250-pound driller with a smashed nose and broken teeth, was at the controls. Seated alongside him and climbing down now was a whipped dog, who I assumed was the departing miserable failure of a cook.
The whipped dog didn’t look at us, he just pulled his hood over his face, climbed in the plane and sat there, looking out at me and shaking his head. “Go back now,” he cried, “while you’ve got a chance. These guys are crazy!”
Mahaffey unbuttoned his red parka and flapped it in the breeze, airing it out. “Hi, Bubba,” he greeted the pilot, “you got some joker of a cook here who knows how to make hot coffee out of ice water?”
Bubba jerked a thumb at me. “There he stands, but I don’t think he even knows where he’s at, let alone how to make coffee.”
Mahaffey looked me over and growled, “You some kind of poor excuse for a cook?”
“Who, me?” I replied.
A look of incredulity spread over the big man’s face. He wrinkled his brow, then shaded his eyes with a hand and turned around in a circle, peering off into the distance at forty miles of tundra, elaborately pretending to search for someone else he might be talking to.
He turned back and barked at me, “How do you make your pancakes, round or square?”
“Huh? Why, round, of course,” I said.
“Hurray,” shouted Bubba. “You’re in!”
“What kind of food do you guys like?” I ventured.
“We like good food,” Mahaffey roared, “and plenty of it! Get in!” We climbed in the snow machine and took off.
In great fear for my existence, I watched Bubba roar down the strip and climb away. There went my last tie with civilization.
The big man at the controls of the cat closed one eye and glared at me with the other. “One thing we might as well get straight right now. Breakfast is the most important meal out here, and we’ve gotta have plenty of coffee so we can fill up our thermoses and take “em with us out to the drilling sites. There”s twenty-five of us out here. We’re out at the sites all day and we don’t get back to camp until dinner, so we like to take plenty of coffee with us. You got that? We like plenty of coffee. That last belly-robbing bean jockey we had out here couldn’t never make enough coffee so that’s why we run him off. Besides that, his pancakes was square!”
We arrived in the center of a large snow-covered compound. Bart Mahaffey got out and walked off, giving me a final glare of menace. “See you in the morning,” he muttered, daring me to show up, I suppose.
On one side of the compound, I was to find out, was a log cabin for the geologists, and next to it were indoor shower stalls and a long bunkhouse for the drillers. On the other side were the cookshack and a separate log cabin which was my sleeping quarters. This setup is similar to the army’s practice of keeping cooks separate from the troops.
I’ve often thought that the official reason given for the universal practice of keeping cook’s quarters separate from the troops’ is wrong. The army thinks cooks need a private room because they have to get up before everybody else and can’t get any sleep listening to card games and carousing all night in the barracks.
But the army’s wrong, as usual. The real reason for separate quarters is to prevent the crew from having the cook conveniently at hand to bitch at all night about the quality and quantity of the food. Tempers can get short. And not just when a bad meal has been served. It’s common practice everywhere for crews to ride the cooks; it’s part of barracks humor, usually good-natured, sometimes not. But the them-against-us syndrome is wearing.
An old-time cook knows he’s the natural target for men who want to strike out against somebody because of their dissatisfaction with the system in general. That’s why, in self-defense, most cooks become muttering old grouches, like me.
An old-timer’s standard response to complaints about the food is: “You guys act like you think I give a damn if you like my cooking or not,” or “You guys know I can’t cook.”
This shuts the crew up for days while they plan new strategy. No fun riding a cook who doesn’t give a damn.
Bob Hooker, the camp supervisor, emerged from the geologists’ shack and tramped up to me. He was a short, dark-faced man with stringy black hair over his eyes and a habit of blinking furiously when he talked.
“Guess you’re the cook, huh. Well, you don’t look too dangerous,” he said, blinking rapidly and offering his hand. He switched a cold cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “I’m Hooker, the supe. Glad to see you. I hope you’re the man we’ve been looking for. The crew’s been in such a bad mood I can’t hardly get any work out of them.” He sighed. “We’ve had one big problem nobody’s been able to handle. If you can’t solve it, no hard feelings but I’ll just have to call into Anchorage for another cook.”
“Well,” I said, “I guess it all depends. If you guys want everything cooked underground I’ll do the best I can, but in all this frozen tundra out here . . . Where’s the firewood?”
“Underground? Firewood? What in blazes are you talking about?” He clamped down on the cold cigar and blinked even more rapidly, then seemed to decide he hadn’t heard me right. He motioned with his hand. “Come on, let’s go in the cookshack and get you squared away.”
The door to the cookshack was frozen shut and we had to put our shoulders to it. Inside, Hooker said, “Look, Cookie, let me give you a tip . . . These guys are basically okay, but let me tell you, in the morning they’re always in a bad mood. Most of “em have smuggled hooch into camp and they play poker and drink whiskey all night, then they”ve got a rough day’s work ahead of them and they’re in a rotten mood and they’ll be looking for a handy target. That’s you.”
At my nervous nod, he continued, “You’ve got to keep your oven on all night or your supplies will freeze.” He looked at me expectantly. “Course you know all that.”
I nodded vaguely. “Oh, of course.” Just like in southern California.”
The cookshack had a propane stove with an oven and four burners. The crew’s long wooden dining table ran down the center of the building. Against the wall were shelves with canned goods On the floor were large cans with powdered milk, flour, salt and sugar. A case of eggs sat on a top shelf where they wouldn’t freeze.
I looked over the rest of the supplies: peaches, tomato sauce, canned soups (canned soups?), pancake mix, blueberries, canned vegetables, canned pork and beans (canned beans?). Well, at least there was one thing I could cook above ground. Maybe I could handle this job after all – until somebody dragged in a grizzly, that is.
Then I noticed the coffee percolators; ten of them scattered around the cookshack.
I indicated them to Hooker and asked him why so many. He took the cigar out of his mouth, scratched a match on the stove, blew out a cloud of smoke. “Oh, yeah, that’s why they ran off the last cook. Poor devil.” He shook his head sadly. “That cook never could make enough coffee or have it ready on time. I don’t know what you’re gonna do about it, but everything kinda hinges on what you do about the coffee problem.”
He stared at me mournfully, blinking and chewing the cigar. “I don’t even think they’ll care if you can cook or not, but if you can’t make enough coffee . . .” He sighed again. “A supe’s job is hard.”
Well,” he said as he went out the door, “your quarters are next door. I think you’ll find it comfortable. Good luck and see you in the morning.”
When he left I checked the oven to see if it was burning properly, then went outside to my shack. All it had was a bed with a big red sleeping bag on it and that was it – except for a Big Ben alarm clock. I lay there thinking about rivers of coffee and planning the best way to make enough so I wouldn’t get run out of camp.
At six I woke up and pulled on my clothes, ready for my first trial by fire. I darted out of my little log shack and around the corner into the cookshack. I got the burners going and looked around for the sink. Found it after a short search. No faucets. Therefore no water. How was I to make coffee without faucets? I panicked.
I could see the headlines now:Great coffee catastrophe at granite mountain; Drillers run cook out of camp to die alone in frozen hell.
Just then the cookshack door scraped open and the two yardboys, college kids, came in carrying four big buckets of water. “Hi, Cookie, here’s your water.” They’d lugged it up from the creek where they kept a hole open in the ice all winter. They set the buckets on the floor, then hustled out and down to the creek to get some more bucketfuls. They brought the water in, then left to do camp chores.
I looked in despair at the assorted little percolators. I’d never be able to make enough coffee in those dollhouse pots. It looked like I was going to be on the next plane out too.
Then I looked around and found just what I was looking for: a ten-gallon soup pot. I poured the pot full of cold water, put it on the stove and turned the fire wide open. I found a container of coffee grounds and dumped the whole thing into the pot, then turned to other matters.
I looked around and found a sack of potatoes. I sliced them up, skins and all, and put them on to boil in another big pot.
Luckily the stove had a grill on top. I found some bacon and eggs and fried off the bacon, naturally saving the grease in an empty peach can. Next I found some pancake mix and a couple cans of blueberries. I cooked blueberry pancakes in bacon grease and while doing that I found a gallon can of half-frozen pancake syrup. I floated the whole can, unopened, in the hot potato water to warm the syrup up.
As my coffee began to bubble, I gave it a stir, poured in some cold water and turned the fire way down to let the grounds settle.
Meanwhile, I found a roasting pan and put it in a slow oven. I kept cooking blueberry pancakes and throwing them in the oven. The potatoes had come to a boil. I had sliced them thin so they would cook fast while not getting mushy.
I took the syrup can out of the potato water, opened it up and poured hot syrup into three pitchers and set them on the table. I grabbed a strainer, put it in the sink and poured in the steaming potatoes.
All of a sudden my feet got hot. Huh? I looked down and saw I was standing in a puddle of hot water. I looked under the sink and found an open pipe leading to a single overflowing bucket. What do you know? No drain. I mopped up the water, then dumped the boiled potatoes on the grill with some bacon grease and chopped onions. They browned nicely. I put the fried potatoes in a big stainless steel bowl and shoved it to the back of the stove.
Next I scraped the grill clean and scrambled a big mess of eggs, keeping them soft by adding some water. I put the scrambled eggs in a container and pushed them to the back of the stove. I opened some canned peaches and put them in a couple of bowls on the long wooden table.
The two yardboys entered and picked up their plates. “Oh, boy! Yippee! Blueberry pancakes! Bacon and eggs! Home-fried potatoes! All right!” They loaded up their plates and dived in. One of the boys, his mouth full, chomping and chewing, looked up from his plate, and said,
“This is great, Cookie! But I gotta tell ya, you’ve cooked way too much breakfast?”
I said, “What do you mean? I’ve got a whole gang of hungry drillers coming in here for breakfast in a couple minutes.”
The boys laughed. “Those guys never eat breakfast. They’re so hung over from drinking whiskey and playing poker all night, they just want to fill up their thermoses, get on the choppers, and fly out of here. The coffee keeps “em from freezing to death out on the sites.”
They looked at the empty percolators. “Uh, Cookie, shouldn”t you be making some coffee? Those big drillers get mean if they don’t get their coffee.”
So this was the big breakfast I’d worried about. I motioned them over to the stove and showed them the soup pot full of ten gallons of steaming black coffee. They looked at me in astonishment.
“Cookie! You’re in!”
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