Tok author has built work on tent foundation

By CAROLYN STRAUB

TOK--The family kept four-hour shifts all night stoking the Fisher woodstove. They incinerated a cord of wood every 24 hours. When Dick and Donna Bernhardt sent their children to school the next morning, the pair hurried from their thin tent to the truck to chop firewood. Even the action of chopping kept them alive.

That winter of 1977-78, the temperature plunged to minus 70. The Bernhardts had left Anchorage the summer before to settle their frontier in Tok. They emptied their savings. Underestimating the time it would take to establish their new lives and homestead, the duo were still jobless. Their dream log cabin was three logs high. Alaska's short autumn was gone and they realized, head-on, that they were going to spend an infamous Tok winter in a snow-flooded, MASH-style Army tent.

In the old, 16-by-32 tent, the woodstove never reached much more than a tolerable 30 or 35 degrees. Frost inched up the sides of the unlined, canvas walls of the temporary shelter, and unwary sparks floated dangerously overhead to the flimsy roof from the stove. The small fires were shot down with a water squeeze bottle, and tiny, cigarette-type holes pocked the roof. Son, Rick, 11, and daughter, Katherine, 7, took turns aiming the bottle and spotting the sparks in time to prevent the "home" from burning. That was one of their constant after-school chores.

At the ordeal's end, the Bernhardts had survived 13 months in the tent, which is displayed at Mukluk Land. Although Dick died following surgery in 1987, a decade after that awful winter, Donna Blasor-Bernhardt has turned their sub-zero initiation to Tok into a writing career which has spanned 20 years.

"The tent experience started everything. It was too dark in the tent to read," she remembers. She is now the poet laureate of Tok and the Alaska Highway.

"I found an old-fashioned grocery bag on the dirt floor and wrote my first poem." Blasor-Bernhardt recalls.

Photo: Donna Blasor-Bernhardt holds her new book, "Tok -- The Real Story," in front of her cabin, built after her winter in an Army tent. (Photo courtesy of Donna Blasor-Bernhardt)

The raw experience welded her family together and for Blasor-Bernhardt resulted in six, self-published poetry books centering on the tent, as well as a full-length, non-fiction account, which has been shown via an Anchorage agent to HBO, AllAmerican and Twentieth Century Fox as a possible movie project.

"Just being an Alaskan to us," said Blasor-Bernhardt, "meant the freedom to do what we wanted. It was only possible for the tent winter, especially the poetry and writing, to happen in Tok. Not anywhere else."

The Alaska representative for the International Women's Writing Guild, a support group for women writers, her latest writings single out Tok.

Blasor-Bernhardt has been spotlighted in national newspapers, magazines and on television. Five years ago, Charles Kuralt visited her at her cabin on the 50th anniversary of the Alaska Highway and she was featured on "Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt." Three years later, Blasor-Benhardt opened "WinterCabin Bed and Breakfast" at the cabin. Tok's "tent lady" relates her story there and reads and talks about her poetry. Summers, she reads at Mukluk Land for tourists.

This winter, Blasor-Bernhardt founded "Frozen Ink," to share her poems and stories with others. The group of about a dozen meets the second and fourth Mondays of the month at a member's home. They have been composing a homemade radio skit for Tok to help raise funds to install a transmitter to bring KUAC public radio to their community.

"Currently, we don't have access to radio other than the military station, AFRN. Winters are long and our group is a great way to get things going," said Blasor-Bernhardt, who writes for the Mukluk News.

Four years ago she began the "Frigid Poets' Society" in Tok.

"I'm not much of a joiner," commented Willy Lou Warbelow, 81, the oldest member of the fledgling group, "but I think any kind of association like this does some good."

Blasor-Bernhardt's newest non-fiction book, "Tok--The Real Story," is 13 pages long and reveals the story of how Tok got its name.

"Most communities know how they got their names. We didn't," said the author.

She was given a clue during the Alaska Highway's 50th birthday party. Present were men of the Army Corns of Engineers' 97th Engineer Regiment who blazed the Tok Cutoff from Slana north to Tok and the Alaska Highway from Tok on to Beaver Creek, some 235 miles.

Tok was not named after the Tok River, nor was it taken from an Athabaskan word, according to Blasor-Bernhardt, who contacted Andrew McMeekin, the former commanding officer of Company A, who was credited with naming the town.

Photo: Postcard of the "Tent in Tok," home for 13 months from 1977 to 1978 to the Bernhardt family. Temperatures that winter reached minus 70 degrees.

Tok was the company's pet Husky. The company also caught a black bear cub at Porcupine Creek on the way north from Slana and named it Little Dynamite. The bear and the dog became friendly, according to the story, and the two actually boxed.

"I want there to be some kind of mystery left to encourage people to read the book," said Blasor-Berhardt, who is writing offshoot books this winter to commemorate Tok itself and the highway.

"Pioneer Road" will be a collection of personal experiences gleaned from some of the 14,000 to 17,000 men who built the early highway.

"I've heard from over 300 and have tons of photos," said Blasor-Bernhardt. "No one has written about the human side, and I've read lots of touching, sad experiences."

The highway was the writer's own route to Alaska from Pittsburg, Kan., in 1950 when as a 6-year-old, she; her father, Donald Archie Blasor; mother, Bessie; 3-year-old adopted sister, Ann; and Zipper, the dog, all boarded an old, unheated, rusty Dodge. The rust bucket had bald tires and crept up the highway recently opened, minus guard rails..

Blasor-Bernhardt is also collecting stories from Tok's first settlers for a book called "Tok--Humble Beginnings."

Working with her partner, Geralyn Curtis of Anchorage who grew up in Tok, Blasor-Bernhardt is pursuing grants through University of Alaska-Tok to eventually fund a kiosk-computer in the center of town.

"We hope to put our profiles into a set-up somewhere so that the public can come in and view the history of Tok right on the computer screen," said Blasor-Bernhardt. The final stage would be the publishing of the book.

The proposed computer-kiosk is similar to "Project Jukebox," a program of public accessible computers placed mostly within outlying Alaska villages and funded by grants administered through the oral history program and staff at University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

"There isn't anything like this on Tok yet," said Blasor-Bernhardt, "and it needs to be done before our history here is forgotten."

Carolyn Straub is a local free-lance writer.