Thomas Pease: Boyhood on a Creek

“Hang on tight and don’t drop anything,” warned David in the way older brothers always state the obvious. Well out onto the Cook Inlet mudflats, we crossed the mouth of Rabbit Creek, David carrying me on his back, the fishing rods snugged horizontally across his chest. His job was to transport us safely to the other side while I was not to drop the rods. It was 1970. I was seven and David was ten.

Like many Alaskan boys, our summer obsession was fishing. Our family didn’t have a boat or a cabin on a lake, so Rabbit Creek, just a half-mile walk from our house, became our default fishing grounds. We fished yellow fin Dolly Varden from break-up to freeze-up. Our fishing rods were poles in the truest sense: peeled green alder with twenty inches of monofilament line wound around the tip. We used and reused split shot and a number 12 Eagle Claw hook baited with a Balls-O-Fire egg to attract occasional ten- to twelve-inch lunkers. The Dollies grew slowly in cold water fed by Rabbit Lake, which sometimes remained frozen into July.

This early August day, we clomped a mile and a half in hip boots down Rabbit Creek Road in pursuit of bigger fish. Humpies and silvers were returning to spawn in the lower portions of Rabbit Creek. To catch salmon required real fishing rods, weighted lures, and large treble hooks. As we walked, we recognized the infrequent Carryall and Rambler station wagon that coasted down or labored up the hill. We knew each car by its dragging muffler, its Visqueen window, its two-toned fender. Old Mr. Shoemaker raised two fingers off the steering wheel in greeting. Mrs. Brown, who had children our age, waved vigorously and mouthed hello. Mr. Mitchell, who threatened to shoot our dog, never waved from his rusty Ford step-side. On weeks the borough oiled the road, we’d watch each car rattle off into stillness while on those weeks between oilings, we’d swallow clouds of dust.

At the intersection of Rabbit Creek Road and the Old Seward Highway, we walked past the Rabbit Creek fire hall with its air-raid siren mounted on the roof. We could usually keep pace on our bikes with the second of the two fire trucks, a WW II tanker with a pair of hobbled horses beneath its hood. At the bottom of the hill, we crossed the Old Seward Highway (there was no New Seward Highway yet), which snaked along the back edge of Potter’s Marsh and turned down a driveway to the Mahoney home site. They built their home on the banks of Rabbit Creek in 1950, before even the Old Seward Highway existed. Initially, they received their mail once a week when the Alaska Railroad tossed a bag off a passing rail car. Between mail deliveries, the Mahoneys stayed connected through the family Super Cub, which they still flew off a grass strip in their back yard.

From there it was an easy walk through marsh grass and across hard mud to the railroad trestle spanning Rabbit Creek where it flowed into Cook Inlet. By now, my socks had worked completely off my feet in my hand-me-down hip boots. They were balled up like wads of newspaper we stuffed in the toes of wet boots to dry them. A seam began rubbing my heel. We passed a beaver-cut driftwood log dusted with Cook Inlet silt, but I dared not stop to adjust my socks. Fishing demanded keeping up, not holding back the fastest in the group, who was always my brother. I jogged to catch up. We scrambled over the railroad tracks and continued onto the mudflats. The next bend downstream offered a promising spot where we could cast to an eddy on the far side. There, we occasionally caught a humpbacked, hook-jawed pink salmon.

When fishing slowed, we pursued tackle lost by weekend fishermen. David worked the deep water that curled around trestle pilings and midstream snags while I worked the less productive shallows. With sleeves rolled to the shoulder, we submerged our arms and swept the undersides of logs and the base of rocks until our arms went numb. It was a treasure hunt with useful prizes—Lujohns, Daredevils, Golf Tees, Mepps—that kept our tackle boxes stocked. On the rare occasion my brother landed a humpy, I packed both rods up the hill to our home at Rabbit Creek and Elmore Roads, while he swung his water-marked salmon by the gills. We walked silently, briskly, despite the uphill climb, a race to reach home before both gill plates—the natural handles on a fish—tore out. My mother expressed mock elation over another half-rotten fish for dinner.

Trips to Rabbit Creek occurred in late winter as well. With the sun’s waking warmth, we began walking the frozen creek accompanied by one, two, or all three of the Paulson boys, who lived in a daylight basement a half mile north on Elmore Road. We rode a runner sled down Elmore hill to their house, double-decker style. My brother steered on bottom while I gave a running push and belly-flopped on top. If polished ice coated the roads and we’d eaten a second bowl of Wheaties with powdered milk, we could sled all the way to the final rise before the Paulson’s. We stashed our sled in the woods, picked up the Paulson boys, and ventured down onto the frozen creek.

The Paulson home was a subterranean box of concrete blocks whose tarred roof barely poked above ground. A handful of tiny windows provided the only natural light. These windows sat below grade with the earth excavated from around them. When snow covered the ground, the only visible portion of their home was a plywood structure the size of an outhouse, which marked the stairs descending underground. Daylight basements represented the first phase of owner-financed home construction, with one or more levels to be built the next season. In some cases, a Hillside family’s aspirations never rose above ground. The Paulsons, with six children, lived in a daylight basement for close to ten years.

Our house lacked a basement but sat above ground, a log home built in the early 1950s from spruce trees felled on the property. The house still sits on a two-and-a-half-acre home site patented by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 1955. Rabbit Creek and parts of the surrounding Hillside were divided into two-and-a-half-acre home sites distributed by BLM to Territorial residents who then had to prove up on their parcels. Proving up involved building a habitable dwelling and living in it for most of three years, at which point the occupant could pay $2.50 per acre for the land patent. Based on the assortment of abandoned cabins and shacks sprinkled across the Hillside, proving up was loosely enforced. Homesteads, on the other hand, encompassed 160 acres. Before Statehood, for the cost of a used dozer and a sack of rye seed, an Alaskan could acquire a respectable chunk of South Anchorage.

At 1,500 square feet, our Rabbit Creek house was spacious by Hillside standards. During this era, people lived on the Hillside because they couldn’t afford a lot in Fairview, Mountain View, or downtown. In 1960, my parents bought their log home and two-and-a-half acres for $25,000. That same year, they moved south with my infant brother from the L Street Apartments (now Inlet Tower) to Rabbit Creek. My sister followed 15 months later while I arrived 15 months after that, a tremor felt a year before the 1964 Earthquake. Like most young Anchorage families, we had one car, a VW bug that Dad sometimes chained up to climb Rabbit Creek hill. We had one bathroom, a standard architectural feature of the time regardless of a family’s size.

On March weekends, as the sun released winter’s grip, we spent hours walking the frozen creek. We jumped onto ice shelves next to open leads in a youthful effort to hasten break-up and summer fishing. As the skinniest of the bunch, I couldn’t produce dramatic ice calves, but as a team, our collective weight sometimes did. As the ice ledge on which we jumped trembled and cracked and finally buckled, we scrambled for the safety of thicker ice behind us. The boldest in the group retreated last, a soaked Tuffy boot or a wet pant leg a sign of bravado. We watched the spinning platform of ice wash downstream and disappear beneath the frozen river below us.

At sunset, we trudged home. The Paulson boys turned off and descended like rabbits into their daylight basement. David and I retrieved our sled and climbed Elmore hill in silence, too exhausted to take another run on perfect ice. Soon, break-up would transform our playground. We’d replace sleds with bicycles, ski poles with fishing poles, glaring white skin with midnight sun tans.

Today, much has changed, and little has changed. Pockets of the old South Hillside hide behind walls of new houses. Some residents eye the old structures hungrily for the teardowns they will become. Others view these old properties wistfully for the era they represent.

Thomas Pease was born in Anchorage in 1963 in the New Providence Hospital at 9th and L (now the Municipal Health Clinic). He learned to ski at Alyeska when it consisted of a single wooden chairlift, and he learned to swim in Hidden Lake at the top of O’Malley Road. He now lives in Government Hill in a home built in the 1950s. Pease occasionally walks down the hill to Ship Creek to fish for king salmon in the shadow of the city’s tallest buildings. His parents still live in their log home on Rabbit Creek Road. Long ago, they traded in their eight-party phone line and Spenard postal address for cell phones and email accounts.