Stranded on the Yukon

The temperature plummeted to 50 below zero the morning Sonja Woodman climbed in Polack Joe's 18-foot boat in Eagle, Alaska. She was headed home to an A-frame cabin 120 miles away near the confluence of the Yukon and Charley Rivers. It was early November in 1975, and up until then the mighty Yukon had been running wide open while rosehips froze at night and thawed by day. That morning, ice chunks started flooding out of the tributaries, rushing past low-hanging yellow leaves and swirling their way downstream. The further they got, the more ice-choked the river became, and it started to build up on the sides of the hull. "Polack Joe" Hajec, a local gold miner and trapper, kept one hand on the outboard tiller while he handed her a wooden oar and told her to start beating the ice off the boat.

Sonja leaned far out and started banging at the aluminum hull as the boat was pushed relentlessly downriver with the torrent of ice chunks. Her arm was swollen from a week of penicillin shots that Elva Scott, the local nurse in Eagle, had been giving her to stop the spread of a blood infection. She had contracted what is commonly known as "fish poisoning" by helping her only neighbor near the Charley River pick huge, slimy, sharp-toothed salmon out of a gillnet to feed his dogs. A few of the teeth had raked cuts into her fingers. As a red streak grew up her throbbing arm, Polack Joe had ferried notes between Sonja in her cabin and Elva in Eagle until it was determined that the only thing to do was bring Sonja to town for treatment.

WINTER GETAWAY

Spending the winter in a moose-hunting cabin on the Yukon River with her best friend, Candy Sloan, "would be a good adventure," Sonja concluded when Candy proposed the idea.

Sonja was raised in the Seldovia and Homer harbors, ran a Snug Harbor cannery boat in Cook Inlet, helped her father guide hunts and worked at oil pipeline camps. All of it had given her a set of biceps and an unwavering gaze that made men set down their newspapers and follow her onto airplanes (but that's another story). Sonja and Candy were in their mid-20s, a little confused about who they should be married to and ready to get away from the throngs of lonely Alaska men for a winter to figure it out. Upon reflection, the Yukon may not have been the best choice.

STRANDED

Sonja was battling the ice buildup on the boat hull with everything she had, interrupted only by a frantic jump to shore for a bathroom break that required a sprint down the bank and a leap back into the boat, which couldn't stop in the river of moving ice. When the boat started sinking, they finally gave up, took 45 minutes to figure out how to turn around and made their way back up to the half-buried cabin at Nation. They gunned the boat up onto the shore ice, where it sat idle until it washed away with the ice during spring breakup.

Polack Joe decided to walk the 50 miles back to Eagle alone, despite Sonja's objections. After three days of teaching her all of his best trapping tricks, he left at midnight. He left her with all the food, which wasn't much, making her almost completely reliant on trapping rabbits.

While the temperature stayed pinned at 50 below, she listened to the long song of the Yukon freezing up, with its grinding, smashing, buckling, booming, scraping, squeaking and then, one morning … tremendous silence. Flames shot out of the holes in the stove of the Nation cabin as Sonja worked hard to keep it full of wood. A plane flew over and dropped her five pieces of pilot bread, two cans of peas and a note that said, "I made it to Eagle, will be back soon."

Unbeknownst to her, down trail Polack Joe sank two snowmachines in the freezing but not fully frozen Yukon trying to get to her.  

Weeks went by while Sonja battled her only foe—a great snowy owl—for fresh rabbit meat, becoming accustomed to the high-pitched screaming of the rabbits as the owl ripped them apart.

On November 18, she heard the whining of a brand-new John Deere Spitfire snowmachine. Polack Joe threw open the door to the cabin, 20 pounds lighter than when he left, and couldn't believe his eyes.

"They told me I had killed you, Sonja! I didn't know a woman could stay alive by herself in this cold for two and a half weeks. Look, I brought  chocolate ice cream."

She was amazed. He had no idea that it was her birthday, or that chocolate ice cream was her favorite food in the world.

A PROPOSAL

Polack Joe was so impressed by Sonja that he wouldn't take her home. "If you will only stay and be my wife," he pleaded, "you will never have to work again. You will just have to zip up my wetsuit every day as I mine the rivers."

For three days she tried to convince him that she was not the woman for him, stayed on the opposite side of the small table, and finally started eyeing her duffel bag, making plans to run for it. Looking back now, she shrugs her shoulders and laughs.

"He wasn't a bad man. He was a nice man. He was just lonely." Eventually she convincingly feigned a sickness from "eating too much rabbit," and Polack Joe acquiesced and took her back to nurse Elva in Eagle.

END OF AN ERA

Although none of them knew it, life on the upper Yukon River for people seeking a place to live for a season of solitude or subsistence was about to end. Stanley Gelvin's A-frame cabin—Sonja and Candy's "winter getaway"—would be burned down when the land became the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve several years later.

Life on the land was also about to end permanently for legendary Polack Joe. Two years after the cabin burned, Sonja picked up a newspaper and burst into tears as she read about him being shot to death in his wetsuit by armed claim jumpers on the Fortymile River. A sign at Hajec Landing sums it up: "In Memory of Joe Hajec (Polack Joe). One of the last of a tough, independent breed of men that have vanished along with the Last Frontier."

Megan Corazza was born in 1979, two years after her father's trapping partner, Polack Joe, was gunned down near Napoleon Creek. Sonja Woodman and Rich Corazza would go on to raise Megan and her brother, Rick, in many remote cabins in the Alaska wilderness. Megan has never quite figured out how to live up to her mother's standards of adventure, but she tries.

This story first appeared in the June 2016 Adventure Issue of 61°North. Contact the editor, Jamie Gonzales, at jgonzales@alaskadispatch.com.