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!"
Cooking underground!
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 didn't have to think about it!
"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!
