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James Campbell: I made six total trips--five to the cabin, and then one trip to Ft. Yukon with Heimo where we also went to Fairbanks for a short while.Were you at the same cabin we were?
I was at the Old Crow cabin initially, in January. That's his most remote cabin and it's my favorite. The Upper Coleen cabin, where you guys stayed, is really nice, but you don't get quite as much a sensation of being totally cut off. At the Old Crow cabin, you feel like the last man on earth.Is that just because it's farther out and harder to get to?
Well, it is physically farther out. But there's also no big river next to it, so you don't have that artery for movement. All there is by the cabin is a little crik called the Bellawaddy that you couldn't put a canoe down. There's also just something about the landscape out there--he's right at the base of a mountain, kind of sheltered by the hill--that gives you this feeling like there's nobody else out there. It kind of wigged me out at first, because I was living in that orange tent about 100 yards away from the cabin. I mean I've spent my life in the woods, but it was still unsettling. You think, "I could easily freeze to death without anyone ever knowing."
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I had my compass out all the time and he'd just laugh at me. I'd be like, "Just in case you ditch me, I want to have a fighting chance of getting back." First of all, I'm sure he's really familiar with the area around his cabin by this point, but just by being out there for so long he's grown this amazing sense of direction and spatial reference. It's unerring. He just makes these turns that don't make any sort of sense to anyone else and he's exactly right. His girls are the same too. They used to play pranks on me all the time where they'd take me out into the woods or onto the tundra and then ditch me and see if this city-slicker could make it back.How was it like being up there in the winter months when there wasn't any sunlight?
Oddly enough it wasn't that bad. You know, Heimo and I were trapping every day, and when you get out on the tundra where there are no trees, there's a lot of kind of ambient light. It's kind of just like twilight, which is nice. Then again, I was only there for three weeks and it was a totally new experience, so I enjoyed it, but I can see how if you're out there year-in year-out and have to spend two months without the sun it would really start to weigh on you. I found summer to be harder, actually. You get 24 hours of light and it just makes you manic. You lose all sense of time--your biological clock just gets destroyed.
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It amazed me, my wife and I would probably kill each other. I don't want to seem maudlin or anything, but it really is kind of a testament to how much they love each other. You know, they'd have little arguments here and there, and Heimo would tease Edna and Edna would get kind of grouchy and surly, but they were never at each other's throats. And it didn't seem like they were just putting on airs because I was around, it was all very natural.That's nice, I'd really expect Edna to get stir crazy with Heimo taking up half of her space.
Edna has a little trapline of her own that she checked, but most days when Heimo gets to go out and walk through the woods, she's stuck in that cabin most of the time. In that way I thought maybe mentally her job is even tougher.I see what you're saying, but she seemed to play a lot of Game Boy while we were up there?
Ha, that's new. When the girls were there, we all played cards every night. They'd listen to music on the radio and play games, but they didn't have a computer or anything up there back when I was there.That was one thing that sort of pleasantly surprised me, that they aren't on some anti-technological trip up there. Edna's got a computer she keeps photos on and Heimo emails with the girls on his satellite phone.
I was looking at some of the links to the video on different websites and the comments were like "This guy isn't that far out. He's got a generator and products made of petroleum." These people have absolutely no clue. They expect someone to be a purist, and if you're going to stay out there, you can't be a purist.
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Exactly, he's not trying to live up to somebody's image of what he should be.Ft. Yukon is the nearest settlement and where Heimo sells his furs in the summer--what's it like?
Oh man, Ft Yukon is a kick. It's a really interesting, odd place. I think in the book I describe it as dysfunctional, which it really is. They've kind of made a deal with the devil in that there's a liquor store in Ft. Yukon whereas in many of the so-called native villages, there are not. So there's a lot of drugs and a lot of alcoholism. But at the same time, you get this feeling like you might have had 100 years ago going up to some frontier outpost in Alaska--it's almost all log cabins, there's just a few roads, and there are old-timers up there who are still trapping. There's a guy named Fred Thomas--We heard a lot of stories about Fred.
He's, I can't remember, 86 or 87 now? He still traps out of Ft. Yukon and then has a cabin up the Black River that he goes to every year. He's still living that life.
Actually, Edward Abbey wrote a story about him years ago called "Up the Black to Chalkyitsik." It turned out Fred wasn't pleased with the story, not because Abbey did a bad job or anything, but just because he didn't want the attention. Anyways, Fred's a hoot and he's one of the last of the old-timers.
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It's primarily native people but then there are a lot of white guys with government construction jobs or businesses there. Heimo, as I'm sure he mentioned to you, has driven a front-end loader for some extra summer-wages. Did Heimo tell you about Frenchy, the French-Canadian bush pilot?Oh yeah, when we were booking our flights in he told us, "Whoever you fly with just don't go with this guy Frenchy. I don't want him to know which cabin I'm at." He never really explained what his beef with him was, just that Frenchy was sort of shady.
Well, Frenchy apparently has got a drug habit, and one time he held up the like one convenience store in Ft. Yukon. So he goes up with a mask over his face and points a gun at the checkout girl and says "Give mee zee money" And the checkout girl looks at him and goes, "Are you kidding me, Frenchy?"Haha. How does Heimo act in town? The one thing that initially surprised me about him was that he wasn't some grizzled loner up in the hills, but more like your friend's goofy dad. Does that translate or does he clam up when he's away from the cabins?
I expected the same thing when I first went up. I hadn't seen him in 30 years and I just figured he would be, to put it nicely, a man of few words. So I was genuinely taken aback by how outgoing and nice he is. He's basically the same in Ft. Yukon, but I had the chance to go to Fairbanks with him for a few days, and he's a legend there. We were buying groceries at the Fred Meyers and all these people kept coming up to us to say hi and Heimo would end up talking to them and telling them stories. It took us two hours to get out of there. I said to him when we were leaving, "Wow, Heimo, that was really amazing," and he said "Yeah, I like it for about a week, but then I've got to get the hell out of there. After that I shut down. I just can't tolerate it anymore and I've got to go home." So, I'd say he does really like people, but in very, very small doses.
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I was going to say he enjoys it more as he gets older, but I don't really think that's the case. When he was a young guy, all the trappers who were out in the bush would congregate in Ft. Yukon. Obviously there were a lot more at the time, and so it would be this big trappers' reunion and they'd just go nuts. There'd be drugs and alcohol and women. Then after 10 days of it, when they could barely stand, they'd go back into the bush and dry out. Based on the stories not just Heimo has told me, but other old-timers, it was once wildOne thing that was a big part of your book, but which Heimo didn't really discuss with us was his family back in Wisconsin.
He had a pretty complicated relationship with his dad, which is something I go into a lot in the book. [extra-short version: his dad had a short-temper and beat up Heimo several times in his teens, which helped drive him away from Wisconsin. They eventually reconciled--ed] Originally I wasn't going to include a lot of what he told me, but Heimo said "Hey, this is who I am and you've got to write about it." I tried to talk to his brothers and sisters, but they didn't want to discuss their father. As it turns out, he wasn't nearly as hard on them as he had been on Heimo, and so the father I portray in the book is different from the father they knew. That led to a little resentment on their part. Not that they thought that Heimo was making stuff up or anything, it was just that his experience growing up was drastically different than theirs.
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I'm sad to say, I think it's complicated his relationship with some of his siblings. But Heimo is very matter-of-fact about it. He says "This is the way it was and I'm not apologizing for it." If anything, I think I feel worse about the whole deal than he does.What does the rest of the family think of Heimo?
Oh they worship him. I worshipped him. When I was little I'd think "When I turn 18 I'm going to do the exact same thing as Heimo. I'm going to be a mountain man." None of them think he's an oddball or a weird loner. They wonder how he does it.I don't know if he mentioned this to you, but anytime Heimo brought up something political he'd preface it with "Jim told me I wasn't supposed to talk about this, but…"
Hahaha, I just said, "Heimo, you can talk politics with these guys but please don't make the whole trip your political outlook on things. Besides, you're a loony."Did you two butt heads a lot?
Heimo and I would get into some heated debates, but he's never fierce about it or dogmatic. I'd call him a loony right to his face and then we'd just laugh about the whole thing. I actually got into worse debates with Edna and the girls, I think largely though because I didn't spend as much time hanging around with them so we hadn't built up that kind of rapport.Do you remember what some of the flashpoint were between you and Edna and the girls?
Oh, a lot about the war and torture and the like, but also just about the role of government. Does the government have an obligation to uphold some kind of social contract or is it just a free-for-all? It's funny because Alaska is a welfare state. Alaska's in many cases like the American West--they all acted like these rugged individualists, but if it wasn't for Eastern capital and "enlightened" government spending, nothing would have happened. You think they would have come up with all those public works programs on their own? I mean I love Alaskans and the whole adventurous spirit about them, but I can't take that rugged-individualist sanctimony. I think it's crap.How did Heimo and Edna's kids feel about you being up there when you were making the book?
I don't know if Heimo or Edna alluded to it, but I think it was hard on them. From their perspective, I was kind of invading their world and taking Heimo away from them every day. I'd go out hunting or checking the traplines with him during the day, then we'd get back and I'd interview him until 10 or 11 every night. They never got a chance to see him, and I think they sort of resented me for it. I think also at first I was a little pushy with questions that I should have taken more slowly. But I was aware that I wasn't going to spend two years up there, so I kind of had to make hay.Have there been any plans to turn Final Frontiersman into a movie?
I have a film agent and there's been some recurrent interest. For instance, when Sean Penn was making Into the Wild we were hoping like hell that the film was going to do well, which unfortunately it didn't and the interest sort of disappeared. Right now we're working on pitching the movie in a different way. The way the contract is written, Heimo gets 50% of the movie rights, so he'd definitely do pretty well financially if a movie is ever made.Is the fur-trapping aspect a stumbling block when you're pitching it to people?
There was a PBS crew who was going to go up there and do a documentary, but they ultimately didn't on account of the trapping. Have you seen the documentary Alone in the Wilderness, the Dick Proenneke story?I have not.
It's about a guy who's slightly similar to Heimo, except he doesn't live as remotely and supposedly he doesn't trap. So there's nothing in there about trapping. But, of course, he does trap. They just left that part out of the documentary, which I don't think is right. I mean, Heimo couldn't do what he does if he didn't trap.What all have you been working on since the book came out?
I actually started a documentary film company three years ago. We're doing kind of adventure-travel stuff. For my second book, I wrote about some guys who marched across New Guinea in World War II, so I took a small film crew to New Guinea and we retraced their route. One day, I'd ultimately like to write a sequel to Heimo's story, but more time has to pass. I hope--not for my sake--they stay well. God knows what can happen out there._Now that you want your very own copy of _Final Frontiersman, buy it here.
