Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Frank Haberle writes about Downlanders from Flexible Press.
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In September, 1992, my un-girlfriend and I tramped our way slowly down a trail from Resurrection Pass in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. We were caked in gray ash, the result of a nearby volcano blowing its lid two nights before while we were in our tent. The mountains around us were shrouded in vapors. A dense, cold rain turned the world into a clay-dripping, boot-sucking mess.
Out of the mist, three people on horseback appeared, the first we’d seen since the volcano. I guessed they’d come to rescue us. I waved and yelled “hello!” The leader—bushy beard, floppy hat, big boots and shotgun—just glared at me. They disappeared into the clouds.
Two hours later, exhausted, we stopped at an abandoned cabin. Two Fish and Game wardens walked up the trail with high-powered rifles. Again, I assumed we were being rescued, but they just wanted to know how long it had been since the horses passed. When I told them, Warden One put down his rifle and took a seat on the porch.
“Fucking poachers,” he said.
Warden Two glared into the woods, rifle in hand.
“We can catch them at the pass if we keep going,” she said.
“We’re in no rush,” First Warden said, pulling his cap down over his eyes. “We’ll catch them soon enough.”
My un-girlfriend was many things, but tactful was not one of them. She compulsively asked random questions of strangers, and unlocked a story from Warden Two, while Warden One snoozed. When Warden Two was in training camp, a strange hippie followed her and a colleague on a patrol. This was in Katmai, the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, notorious for its cranky Grizzlies. When they encountered a bear, the hippie started dancing and singing in a high-pitch voice—the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do. The bear charged. Warden Two was the one with the gun. At the last second, she had to shoot the bear.
“It wasn’t the bear’s fault,” Warden Two said, staring up the trail, as a beam of sunlight burst through the swirling fog and lit her in glacial blue light. There was a sadness, replaying that moment in her head. But she was hard-wired, focused, her eyes filled with a distant rage. There was something very thousand-mile-stare about her. I almost felt bad for the poachers.
At the time, I had no aspirations as a writer. But her image and her story imprinted itself in my imagination, like a blueprint. I crumpled the blueprint in a drawer, somewhere in the back of my mind, with fifty other blueprints from my three months in Alaska.
At the time of that meeting I was eight days sober. I’d arrived in Alaska two months before, an impaired alcoholic with a delusional Kerouac complex who had screwed up every job, friendship and relationship that ever reached out for me. Thousands of screw-ups like me get off the boat up there every summer, thinking they are going to “fix themselves.” The Alaska trip was the kick I needed, but it wasn’t the one I expected. I never found the courage to work in a cannery or on a fishing boat. Instead I bummed around, hitchhiked, backpacked, and burned through the last of my savings. I quit drinking, stopped talking and started listening. The miraculous arrival of my aforementioned un-girlfriend helped. We ended up un-together soon after, god bless her. I tucked all those blueprints away for a very long time.
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I started writing the first scribblings of what became Downlanders fifteen years later. I was back in Brooklyn, in a tiny apartment with three little kids and a soul-sucking job as a nonprofit middle manager. On my daily commute I started daydreaming, focusing on pulling those crumpled blueprints out of the drawers. The people and the images came back to me like a burst of energy. Why were they there? I became so attached to these imagined lives that I started looking forward to the subway. The end-products were about a dozen short stories—about two church ladies who picked me up in their Winnebago, or a bush pilot who taught me how to repair a seized fan belt, or an emergency room nurse who hates drunk flatlanders (this story, “Beauty,” appeared in Necessary Fiction some years ago). Alone, I liked the stories; but together they seemed a little too pat, like just another story about a City guy who goes off to Alaska to “find himself.” I’m especially uncomfortable with how we flatlanders depict the people of Alaska. There are too many stories about people who find themselves—what about the people who lose themselves?
Downlanders came to me in the early fever-dream months of Covid. With a little more time on my hands I dreamed up a fictional wilderness region—not exactly Alaska—and it became much easier for me to pull the thread into place. Downlanders borrows a lot from the people I met up there, mixed with stories from and about people I knew in the city, in my darkest moments, just before I dropped everything and took off for the wilds. In my mind Warden Two became Fiona, a blend of that person I met in the volcano and someone I knew when I helped run a soup kitchen in Tompkins Square Park. The story’s “problem child,” Chief, is based on someone who menaced an off-the-grid encampment outside of Denali. The Winnebago ladies, the bush pilot, and the nurse are there. Everybody has a story. Everybody’s looking for something. Everybody thinks they’re going to find it in the wilderness. But the wilderness, we all know too well, has other ideas.
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Downlanders features a fictional history of a place called The Grizzle Peninsula that was inspired by an obscure, tattered history book I found in an Anchorage used bookstore, The Thousand Mile War, about World War Two in Alaska (I knew so little about this—the Japanese occupied several Aleutian Islands; and Black regiments from the Deep South built the Alaska highway). In my imagination the Grizzle Peninsula, recovering from a protracted war, wild and unsettled, arcs for 1200 miles into a northern sea. The place itself is under threat of development and extinction. My story happens in the 1980s, before GPS and the internet. Back then backpackers traveled with guidebooks like Lonely Planet and took their chances. Downlanders is framed by an early-edition knockoff, The Only Planet Guide to Grizzle, that guides the ill-fated travelers into the wilds.
Downlanders was a long time coming—it took 15 years to pull out those blueprints and another 15 to unravel those stacks of scribbled notebooks.
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Frank Haberle is the author of Shufflers (Flexible Press, Minneapolis, 2021), a story of transients moving through minimum-wage jobs in the 1980s; and Downlanders (Flexible Press, November 2023), following five misfits into a fictional wilderness. Frank’s short stories have won awards from Pen Parentis, Beautiful Loser Magazine, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and (most recently) the 2021 Rose Warner Prize for Fiction. They have appeared in more than 30 journals including Deep Wild Journal, the Adirondack Review, the Baltimore Review, Wilderness House Literary Journal, Necessary Fiction, Vagabonds and the Nomadic Review. Frank lives in Brooklyn and works in The Bronx.