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By Root 2901 0

Not until 1905, when a British physicist made the connection between the sun and the aurora borealis, was the phenomenon understood as something natural.7 Some auroras gave off so much light that people could hunt by it. But mainly the aurora borealis was spoken about in hushed terms; only a few scientists analyzed the ionospheric gases being drawn in by the gravitational pull of the earth, causing a wavelike electrical discharge. In any case, as Mardy was growing up, on clear nights she looked skyward hoping to see the shimmering green aurora dominating the sky. An old piece of folk wisdom around Fairbanks was that the aurora borealis was as alive as a person; it whistled and cracked and seemingly came to scrutinize you up close.8

Mardy Thomas (she kept her real father’s name) was by all accounts a little hoot, entertaining as well as being entertained when trappers regaled her with stories about the Arctic wind or timber wolves attacking frightened horses along the Yukon River. Much like Jack London, she began to romanticize Arctic wanderers: they might look shabby, but they had hearts of gold. Most of these prospectors were, in fact, drifters of ill repute, ne’er-do-well misanthropes unable to make an honest living in the Pacific Northwest or anywhere else. But their hobo tales were what mattered most to young Mardy. While other girls were enthralled by Little Women, Mardy was memorizing the poems of Robert W. Service and pondering survivalist tactics for blizzards. She craved adventure. At school she raised her hand so many times to ask questions that her teachers felt like muzzling her.

In Fairbanks circa 1912, self-reliance wasn’t merely an idealistic principle in a dog-eared volume of Emerson’s Essays. The residents relied exclusively on cordwood for heating; the forest belts were clear-cut. Logging, catching northern pike and whitefish through the ice, and building fires were necessary skills in a land where below-zero temperatures were routine. Sometimes even inside the best houses on First Avenue, the hearth wasn’t warm enough to melt the outdoor snow from a guest’s boots. Sometimes in Fairbanks it would be fifty or sixty degrees below zero for weeks at a time, causing the rubber tires on Model T’s to shatter. Sleet blew sideways. Icicles were thicker than logs. There were no modern goose-down and nylon parkas; Alaskans swaddled themselves in wool and thick wolf fur. Both inside and outdoors, keeping warm was a full-time preoccupation. For children frostbite or hypothermia was nearly as common as a runny nose in the Lower Forty-Eight. Wood shacks often collapsed under the weight of snow. The cold forced everybody to eat more, because constant shivering burned a lot of calories. But Mardy never complained. Fairbanks had cast a spell on her. It was her home. The people needed large amounts of timber for buildings and water flumes—and for stern-wheeler riverboats until coal-fired boats arrived in 1925. Wood was harvested recklessly. As a result, the country for miles around Fairbanks was stripped of trees. Even the N.C. Company’s power plant downtown was fueled by wood. Almost 19,000 cords of wood were burned annually for heat.

Citizens of Fairbanks adopted some customs of the Midwest—quick coffee, saving pennies, school spelling bees, bake sales, trick or treat at Halloween—but it all seemed staged. Individualism was the core value here—the kind of libertarianism that Ayn Rand would celebrate in Atlas Shrugged (only they were pro-God). Still, ironically, the isolation and the rigor of the climate fostered deep codependency here. Virtually all the children—including Mardy—had a Siberian husky as a pet. Without dogsleds nobody could traverse the snowbound country. The unity between man and dog belied the go-it-alone posturing. Sled dogs loved to be harnessed, and Mardy was accomplished at harnessing them. “When the trail was good at all, I’d stand on the handlebars; otherwise, I’d have to run,” she recalled. “And those Alaska dogs were so eager to get into harness and go that you could hardly restrain them in the