In the course of researching grants for The Aujaqsuittuq Project, I stumbled upon something that made my heart stop: The Housberg Photography and Videography Award, administered by the Alaska Conservation Foundation. The award is named after Dan Housberg, one of the best shooters ever to set foot in Alaska. And we aren't talking about guns here. Certainly, he was the best photographer I've ever worked with.
Dan the Cameraman
Dan moved to Alaska in the early 80's from suburban New York. He'd studied at NYU film school and then responded to a longing to get the hell out of the city. He stuffed everything he owned into a backpack, moved to Anchorage and got a job as a news cameraman at KTUU-TV, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage. I was a reporter and anchor there at the time. Dan drove to work in a mud-colored two-door sedan that he must have bought at a scrap metal auction. Or maybe it was a demolition derby. In any case, if this had been any state other than Alaska, it wouldn't have been legal. It was even stretching Alaska's dangerously liberal laws.
Dan was a compactly built guy with a dark beard, dark hair and an animated gait. He shared an apartment with a friend. They had three pieces of furniture: a cheap dinette set, a beat up Barca-Lounger and a bruised TV. Otherwise they lived out of their backpacks, slept in sleeping bags on the floor and filled their fridge with beer and rolls of unexposed film. Their apartment throbbed as a beat-up cassette player on the living room floor pumped out Grateful Dead tunes.
It's hard to believe that Housberg grew up in suburban New York because he was quintessentially Alaskan. The first thing he did upon getting the job at KTUU was to start saving for a cabin. Not a bed. Not furniture or a decent car. He wanted a cabin as a far away from town as possible.
A Cabin in the Friggin Wilderness
Within a couple of years he bought one. I'm sure it still stands today. Here's how to get there: Drive two hours north of Anchorage to Talkeetna, base camp for a lot of Denali climbers. Then catch the Alaska Railroad going south. Ride about 30 minutes until you come to a small clearing with an old school bus rusting beside the tracks. The train doesn't stop there, but it will slow down so you can jump off with your gear. X-country ski or hike in 9 miles. And there it is, Dan's two-story, essentially two room, log cabin, complete with a propane lighting system and broken wood stove.
We went there as often as possible. Once, in winter, we invited friends out to spend the weekend. We had a neighbor meet them at the train with his dog team and sled so they wouldn't have to schlep their packs all the way in. Dan, who thought this was all great fun, was oblivious to the few guests who, by the time they reached the cabin two hours later, were almost in tears from cold, hunger and fatigue. By then, with the weak winter sun setting early, it was dark. So he wore a headlamp while he gingerly unpacked their gear from the sled. Everyone shuffled inside where I had the fire going and a pot of moose stew on the stove. They pulled off ski pants and boots, frozen stiff from the cold. They peeled frost encrusted scarves and neck-gaiters off their faces, while their mittens, hung on the wood stove's dish towel rod, sounded like metronomes, rhythmically dripping melting snow onto the rough-hewn wooden floor.
Dan unscrewed the caps off a couple of bottles of cheap schnapps and brandy and did his best to create a spirit of merriment. It didn't work. Our friends hunched at the homemade dinner table over tin plates of stew, pushing chunks of moose around with their spoons and jerking their heads up occassionally when they fell asleep in mid-bite. There wasn't an ounce, a flake, a molecule of party in them. After dinner, Dan and I cleaned up while they crawled straight into their sleeping bags. They got the hell out of there as fast as possible the next morning. Dan stood in the cabin doorway, waving with one hand, a pot of untouched coffee in the other as our friends and the dog team disappeared homeward through the woods.
Ridin that Train...
Another time, also in winter (which, in pre-climate change times was most of the year in Alaska), we took the Polka Train out of Anchorage. It got that name for two reasons: the blindingly vibrant, two and three foot diameter dots painted on the walls of a special, seatless car and the dancing being performed there. At one point, in Dan's honor, the accordionist played a polka version of Grateful Dead's "Sugar Magnolia". Dozens of sweating people careened into one another on the swerving train, sloshing beer while Polka dancing to the Grateful Dead as they chugged down the Kenai Peninsula.
The train eventually stopped at some non-descript clearing and disgorged us, nearly one hundred staggering drunk dancers in ski boots, in the middle of no where. The conductor waived as the train pulled away, promising to pick us up on their return trip later that day.
Dan and I could barely lace up our ski boots. He fell over several times trying to help me with my bindings and the open beer in his pocket spilled down my leg. We managed to ski a quarter mile before collapsing in the snow on top of a waterproof tarp we'd brought and passed out under the warm, late-winter sun. Hours later I dreamt that I was boiling water in a kettle on the stove and no matter how many times I turned the stove off, the kettle kept whistling. Then, in one of those am-I-dreaming-or-is-this-real? moments, I realized the whistling wasn't coming from a teapot at all. It was coming from the train which was waiting for us a quarter mile away, filled with several hundred travelers. In spite of our stiffness from the cold and the beer, we tore off for the train like a couple of Norwegian Olympians. The train began inching away just as we threw our skis into the luggage car. We ran to pull ourselves up and in. The other skiers, who had been watching our frantic return from the warmth of the Polka Car, cheered and then proceeded to get drunk all over again.
Behind the Camera
But the best times I had with Dan -- and what he is remembered for today --were when he was taking pictures, both still and video.
Once we covered a union riot on the outskirts of Anchorage. I was the reporter and there were two cameramen, Dan and another guy we'll call Bob, who went on to win the U.S. Videographer of the Year Award three years in a row. Bob scoped out the yelling, shoving, swearing crowd of angry unionists surrounding a small cluster of strike breakers before putting his camera on a tripod a safe distance away. Dan, on the other hand, threw his video camera on his shoulder and muscled his way into the increasingly violent crowd. Bob got really pretty pictures but Dan shot the riot. His pictures were unstable, they jerked back and to the right, propelled this way and that by shoving unionists and scabs. The air was thick with the grunts, obscenities and hard breathing of fighting men. And when we put it on the news that night, edited tight and hard, you could feel the unrestrained resentment of the strikers and the palpable fear of the scabs. I wrote almost no narration. There wasn't any need. Dan's pictures said it all. And in the end, I think his video told a much more powerful story than the artful pictures of the award-winning cameraman.
Another time we shot the start of the Iditarod Sled Dog race, which begins on 4th Avenue in Anchorage. It's a big party. The street is covered with snow and lined with dog teams, sleds, dog trucks (with all the little individual dog compartments on the back), cheering crowds and the deep-throated voice of an announcer booming over the loud speaker. Dan shot that event to death. He ran along side the dogs, recording dozens of paws crunching over the hard snow. He shot from atop one guy's sled to provide the musher's point of view. He shot teams coming at him and teams disappearing into the distance. Onlookers, individual dogs, mushers kissing their loved ones good-bye and dogs peeing on the slush. He even crawled into a cramped dog box on one musher's truck and shot out, giving you a dog's eye perspective of the event. Then he edited it into one fluid, sun-soaked, cold-foot-stomping, dog-bark-filled, applause-smattered, ghee-haw dabbled story condensed into two short, edge-of-the-seat minutes.
We ran the piece without any narration; words would have been redundant. I didn't contribute much to that report, but of the hundreds I've been involved with, that's one of my favorites.
The End of An Era
Dan stayed in Alaska after I left in the mid-80's. He eventually married and moved to Kotzebue where he honed his already dazzling photographic skills to a Samurai-sharp edge. And to supplement his income as a videographer, he became a bush pilot, carrying mail to small communities and remote villages.
That's how he died. He was on a mail run down the Kenai Peninsula when his small plane crashed. He was survived by his widow, his parents and his two brothers. The funeral service in Anchorage was standing room only, filled with family, friends and colleagues. At the end we were given a few moments to quietly reflect. That's when someone hit "play" on Dan's old, beat-up cassette machine, attempting to fill, with the Grateful Dead's version of the "Beer Barrel Polka", the huge, silent space that Dan left.
Photos of Dan
If you'd like to see a picture of Dan, I've got one posted in the photo album of this blog.