The Wild Women of Talkeetna : What’s This? A Contest Where the ‘Gals’ Fetch Beers, Haul Water and Saw Firewood as Bellowing, Belching Bachelors Look On

Woman, get me a beer!

And a sandwich too!

Hurry up, we’re hungry!

Thus, with a stopwatch ticking, the bachelors of this tiny, frozen, log-cabin town measure the essential skills of womanhood. At least as the bachelors regard them.

Well, maybe.

Or maybe not.

And the steely-eyed, hard-muscled women who have gathered here in the stiff wind of a zero-degree weekend to see how fast they can make sandwiches, open beers, haul water down an icy road, saw firewood, snag a salmon, shoot a ptarmigan and snowshoe through the woods?

Well, maybe they’re just having good, irreverent fun in one of the zaniest contests ever to emerge out of the frozen interior of Alaska.

Why of course this is 1992--that starchy, angry, uncertain, breakthrough year for the realignment of the sexes in America.

Which is fine in most places.

But, girls, while you’re slipping and sliding over the 6 inches of ice that glaze Main Street, fetching 50 pounds of water in two buckets, remember: Don’t spill any! And hurry up, else you’re never going to catch a man!

Gulping for air, trapezius muscles straining, hands chapped by the cold wind, careening down the 100 yards that lead to the next obstacle, the 13 entrants in the annual Talkeetna Bachelor’s Society Wilderness Woman Contest appear to be laughing inside. Laughing at the bearded, bellowing, belching bachelors on the sidelines, at themselves and this ridiculous test of “skills,” at all the rest of us with wide eyes who delight in the rich and sporting and blasphemous and tough and colorful life of rural Alaska.

In other words, only here would you dare something like this.

Here, where many contest entrants have built their own cabins with their own hands in lonely forests of stunted spruce and birch; where they tote their water each day in buckets and split their own fuel with axes; where they are outnumbered something like 10-to-1 by men and maybe 20-to-1 by sled dogs; where romantic has definitions city dwellers may never consider; and where a woman worries about going outside in the dark mostly in fear of meeting up with a moose on the trail.

Spoof it may be, but the Wilderness Woman Contest earlier this month reminds us there really is a culture of women who live in what they call the Alaskan bush. And it’s not just all-out athletes like Susan Butcher, multiple winner of the Iditarod sled dog race to Nome, but also rural schoolteachers, nurses, park janitors, bartenders and single mothers. A small, hardy sisterhood has simplified their lives, and complicated them too.

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So anyway, would one of you gals quick work us up a sandwich, extra mustard, and put another log on the fire?

Pam Rannels, a 17-year-resident, recounts the history of Talkeetna’s Bachelor Society and Wilderness Woman Contest:

“It was back one cold night years ago when the bachelors gathered and said, ‘We gotta organize.’ So they did. Then, a couple of years later, they said, ‘This is stupid, we’re organized but all we do is sit around and drink and call ourselves bachelors.’

“So, they said, ‘Let’s invite every single woman in the world to come up and we’ll have a party.’ That was the first Talkeetna Bachelor’s Ball. That went on a bit, but frankly they needed a way to attract more women. So they decided on a contest. The Wilderness Woman’s Contest. This is our seventh annual. . . .

“Sexual harassment? We don’t have many problems with that here. If a woman doesn’t like it, she’ll probably knock the fellow off the damn bar stool and that’s the end of it.”

Actually, that’s only part of it.

Women here may play tough, but some concede that life is not always easy when the shaggy-haired and -bearded trappers, gold prospectors, dog mushers, oil field workers and other galoots in greasy overalls who drink Tabasco with their schnapps and call it a Hot Shot are on the loose in 20-below temperatures.

The women here even have a saying about this 10-to-1 ratio: The odds are good, but the goods are odd.

Kathy Trump, a San Francisco transplant, came up here five winters ago. “Men didn’t even look above your neck. You were an object, two objects. I was a bartender . . . somebody once handed me a list. He said, ‘These are the names of the men who like you. Which do you want to go out with?’ Some of these guys had never spoken to me. It got to be so I was afraid to go even to the post office alone,” she recalls.

She entered the Wilderness Woman Contest once, finished seventh, and promptly got married so she would never have to go through it again.

Two-time champion Mary Palmer, a schoolteacher once from California who now lives on the Alaska coast in Homer, has a different view:

“This life isn’t something I’ve come to, it’s where I’ve come from. It’s a more peaceful, natural world. I don’t think men treat me any differently here than on the outside”-- outside being the term Alaskans use to describe everywhere but Alaska.

She first entered the competition when the prize was two airline tickets to Europe and “I really needed a vacation.” This year’s winner gets a coyote fur hat and a gold nugget, but Palmer entered anyway because the contest motivates her to go into training--like loping across the schoolyard at recess with buckets of water in hand. That will help when she sets out this summer to climb 20,320-foot Mt. McKinley, America’s highest peak.

The training also pays off this weekend on Main Street. Palmer finishes first in the water-carry and snowmobile race and becomes one of five finalists for the concluding two events.

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Talkeetna, 120 miles north of Anchorage, is launch point for summer mountaineering expeditions to McKinley, 60 miles to the northwest. It is not on the main tourist route, although plenty of visitors come here to charter small airplanes for “flightseeing” tours of the peak, where the 18,000-foot rise from the flatland is the greatest of any mountain in the world.

In winter, Talkeetna is populated by just the few hardy locals--an estimated 300--and occasional cross-country skiers from Anchorage. Dog sleds skid down the streets, triggering any number of harness-jumbling dog fights with local pets on the loose. Snow machines share the road with the classic Alaska “beater” cars, those rusty, coughing masses of machinery and cracked glass held together with duct tape and wire and faded bumper stickers.

On contest weekend, a bonfire burns against the wind in the main intersection to keep participants and spectators from freezing and giving the contest a bad reputation. Large drafts of ale, flasks of whiskey and a deeply beaten path to the bar at the old Fairview Inn also contribute to individual warmth. It may or may not be true that Warren G. Harding became sick and later died following a hard Saturday night at the Fairview in 1923 after he drove the gold spike along the Alaska railroad.

For this weekend’s fun, maybe 80 people have gathered.

“How can a small town like this have so many bachelors and bachelorettes?” a spectator asks. “How come they don’t find each other?”

“I can answer that for you,” responds nurse Barbara Mercer. “We know each other too well.”

Chuckles pass in the crowd.

The contest’s next event finds one bachelor sitting on a chair on Main Street, watching a make-believe cardboard TV and hollering demands. The five finalists take turns running across the street, making a lunchmeat-and-cheese sandwich, opening a beer and then “serving” the bachelor.

Hurry up! The commercial is almost over!

Traditionally, service is quick. And equally traditionally, the bachelors end up wearing their sandwich and beer.

A local dog named “Whiskey” has watched the contest before and positions itself at the ready.

Contestants finish this event by sawing a 10-inch log and delivering it to the bonfire.

The final round of competition requires the wilderness women to snag a salmon (cut from foam) off Main Street using a fishing pole and treble hook. They then don snowshoes and race off through the woods, shoot a ptarmigan (orange balloon), face a moose (large man in costume) at the end of a culvert, climb a tree to safety (via ladder), shoot the moose (cap pistol) and return to the starting line to deposit the salmon in a bucket.

Bachelor John Thomas Evans watches all the events and shouts out his “encouragement.”

“This is important stuff,” he says. “A woman’s got to be a be able to move. It’s hard enough to get around out here without having to carry her.”

Then he gives a pure Alaska response to the banal inquiry of a New York TV producer. What does he want in a woman? He scratches his beard thoughtfully and answers: “One who can talk.”

*

The contest rules get fuzzy at this point. Announcement of the winner is postponed for five hours, apparently to permit everyone some time to warm at the bar. Some get plenty warm.

At night, the crowd dutifully moves to another bar called Latitude 62 for further warming. Here, the contestants and all other single women on hand--about 40 tonight--offer cash bids for a date with those among the 42 bachelors who are drunk enough or confident enough offer themselves in public for money.

The lowest price for a date is $5.50. The highest, offered by a consortium of three single women, is $60.

“Bachelors are then obliged to buy you a drink and dance with you,” the emcee explains. “The rest is up to you.”

This being rural Alaska, some women have shown up in rhinestone-studded cocktail dresses. Others sport flannel shirts and jeans. Some bachelors have bathed and combed their hair recently; some have not.

Some mumble shyly when describing themselves to bidders. “I’m a geologist, I find little yellow rocks that people like. I like living in the bush. My dog is Whiskey,” says Grog Peterson, attired in a handcrafted elk-skin pullover. Bernie Gehringer, who has apparently lost his comb, recites verses of Shakespeare at 400 words a minute.

Bidding for all is brisk. What the heck, eh?

According to bachelor society lore, the annual festivities sometimes lead to the oh-oh inevitable.

Why, just back in 1987, poor old Rick Koch, was auctioned off for $120. He survived that OK. But the losing bidder waited until the next day to introduce herself. His resistance was down, everyone figured. The couple married, have two children and now live in Anchorage. He probably has to fetch his own beers too.

Before tonight’s partying gets serious, someone remembers to crown the Wilderness Woman of 1992. She is Rebecca Franklin, a 23-year-old, dark haired, sweetly smiling Russian-language teacher who lives in the bush outside Wasilla in a home she built herself. This year, a cow moose and her calf have taken up residence in Franklin’s back yard.

Her winning time for the final two events was 5:28, two seconds better than the runner-up.

A Yreka, Calif., native, Franklin describes a woman’s life in the wilderness.

“Sometimes it’s hard. Like when I went to get the lumber for my house, some man asks me, ‘Did your husband let you out to do this?’ ”

And the good parts?

“Well, there’s tons of men.”