Wolf Hebel - A Search for Adventure Leads to Alaska

A Search for

ADVENTURE

Leads to Alaska

W O L F H E B E L

PO Box 221974 Anchorage, Alaska 99522-1974

ISBN 978-1-59433-332-3
eISBN 978-1-59433-333-0
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2013935506

Copyright 2013 Wolf Hebel
First Edition

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in any form, or by any mechanical or electronic means including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, in whole or in part in any form, and in any case not without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Dedication

To my children
Daniela, Diana and Logan, and their children

Acknowledgement

M y appreciation is given to Publications Consultants for their work in the publication of my manuscript in English.

My sincere thanks to my belated friend and journalism teacher, Charles Keim; it is he who encouraged me to write about my adventurous life and is responsible for my writing style. To my daughter Diana goes my thanks for her patience while introducing me to the world of the computer and for her help in the electronic production of my manuscript.

Siglinde Fischer and Walter Steinberg () have my thanks for editing my manuscript in German and for finding and negotiating with my publisher.

The publisher Neumann-Neudamm I thank especially for the hard work of cleaning and restoration of some of my old slides for use in the book.

Foreword

Imagine a world close to natureno electricity, no phone, no running water, and no computers to entertain you. For entertainment, people take walks, use their imagination, and actually speak to their friends face to face. People read books and write letters by candlelight or by the light of an oil lamp. This is the world I grew up in for the majority of my childhood. I did not think of myself as different from anyone else in the world. To me this was normal, just like your childhood was most likely normal to you. Now that I have grown and can see the greater scope of the world around me, I feel fortunate to have lived like this and to have had the experiences that come with that style of life.

I fondly remember when I was three years old and my parents and I made the boat trip from Fairbanks to Ruby. I remember stopping along the way and looking in old abandoned cabins, seeing the old sheds that stand on stilts, called caches, or just watching wildlife along the way and counting the numbers of bears or moose we would see in one day. I enjoyed a visit to Kokrines, where I first met Frank and Josephine, an old couple who were the last to live there in the little town. Next to the old village site was, or is, a crystal clear creek that bubbles out and into the Yukon River. I was only three, but I remember building boats and sending them down the creek into the silty water of the Yukon. I created villages along the sides of that creek and sent barges, loaded with imaginary supplies, back and forth between them. Perhaps my daydreams, at that age anyhow, were not as adventurous as my fathers, but they did take on a similar manner in their expression.

Another experience I remember, and I enjoy telling the story of, is a time when I was nine years old and my brother was age two. My parents took us on a camping or fishing trip on the Nowitna River. The tent was pitched and my mom was either cooking or otherwise poking around at the campfire. My dad was taking a walk along the beach looking for whatever thing of interest he might find, be it an agate or even a bit of fossil. It was a nice, calm, beautiful day to be out on the river.

My mother, always afraid of bears, was looking across the river checking out every little spot of brown she might see. This was usual for her and I knew she had to be looking at a waterlogged bit of stump lying in the water.

Is that a bear? she asks me.

No thats a log I reply.

We argue back and forth on this point for a little while, when suddenly my brother who was behind me and next to my mom says, excitedly, big puppy! big puppy!

We turn around and just past our tent and not more than 20 feet away is, to me, a very large black bear standing on its hind legs. My mom, in her fear, reaches by the tent to retrieve a rifle, and using the rifle to gesture, she starts hollering, Shoo! Go away!

I remember asking her what she was doing. She said she had hoped the bear would see the gun, know what it is, and get scared off some how.

I dont know if my dad noticed something was off, or heard us, or maybe just happened to look back in the direction of camp, but he dropped whatever he was looking at or carrying at the time and ran full speed, straight toward the bear, cussing every obscenity he could think of while waving his arms around. The bear just looked at him like, This guy must be nuts! But soon, the bear must have decided that it did not want to tangle with a crazy man and turned and ran off into the forest.

I had taken these little side adventures and stories for granted while growing up. Now I feel fortunate to have lived them.

The time that I lived without all the amenities of modern life and, for the most part, a life dependent on subsistence, was only a short moment in time compared to my fathers adventures. A take-it-or-leave-it kind of guy with a short fuse and great sense of humor, Wolf had the privilege of living a life we can only dream about. His childhood included worries associated with being a child during WWII, the teenage years associated with growing up and finding a career path he could live with, and later, his nature and adventure filled daydreams that took him to California, Mexico, and finally Alaska. While some of the adventures of these earlier days are still possible, the constant changes of time prevent a complete re-creation of these events to ever occur quite like this again.

Diana Hebel

Contents

Chapter 1

Memories and Dreams for the Future

T hinking back to the years of 1957-1958, I seemed to have few, if any, problems. My health was as good as the health of any average twenty-three-year old. I was securely employed in my trade as a glassblower, lived in the upstairs apartment of my parents house, and last but not least, I had a beautiful wife. We were not rich by any stretch of imagination, but we were as well off as just about any of our friends and acquaintances. Our future was neatly laid out before us, but in spite of it all, I was restless and had the feeling that my life was running toward a dead end. There had to be more to life than accumulating possessions, raising children, and growing old. What I needed was something that was not yet determined, something like an adventure, with some degree of danger or uncertainty in it.

Even though I was born in Berlin, the capital of Germany at that time, on August 8, 1935, I always loved nature, animals, and stories about explorations of wild places.

It doesnt even seem that long ago since I visited the zoo and the aquarium in Berlin with my parents, or spent the weekends at one of my grandmothers in the wooded outskirts of the city. On those hikes through these woods, we often picked mushrooms, and my father might catch a lizard or two for our terrarium.