This new world eddied around the silent old men like waves lapping a rock. Though the hotel was overheated as was every Alaska dwelling in winter, they sat in their coats and caps and mufflers and snow boots, snug now, secure, savoring comfort as only those can who have the far memory of killing cold to give them a momentary inward shiver.

From a corner of the hotel lounge a television yammered. The relaxed oldsters gazed at the antics of make-believe desperadoes whose squawking resounded in the dim room. They regarded these melodramas as a tolerant but undeceived parent views the caperings of children playing at cops and robbers. They had seen much worse than this in real life half a century ago when there was no hotel lounge, no Baranof, no anything except a cluster of tents and shacks in a wilderness of mountains and snow and ice and bitter cold sweeping down from the Arctic.

They preferred to watch the pretty young women in the commercials, so coaxing and chummy. In evening dress obviously designed for presentation at the Court of St. James’s these friendly girls extolled the wonders of shining refrigerators and kitchen stoves and dishwashers; or displayed oozing cakes and pies made with Fluffier Flour; or even recommended cigarettes that magically stimulated, soothed, and built you up at the same time.

The humming new North had little time for these septuagenarians and their sagas. They had been frozen, shot at, half drowned in icy waters; beaten, cheated; clawed by wild animals; had drunk, caroused, slept with native women; stomped and yelled and fought in saloons and bawdyhouses; battled ice and snow and mosquito hordes, and heat. That they were here at all was proof of superb endurance. But who would pause to heed these ancients in a day of speed and tension? Not the young people dressed in the careless clothes of the times. Frequently you couldn’t tell the men from the women, the boys from the girls. The males were genial hustlers in loud plaid shirts, tieless, the shirttail out; slacks or corduroys; sometimes even striding hatless in the smiting cold. They sped through the streets, they crowded the bars, they flashed in and out of shops and offices, they drove high-powered cars going nowhere and nowhere to go; they devoured dainties such as king crab diabolo at Nick’s Caribou Café, and steaks that thick, and apple pie that flaunted a hat of ice cream. They drank coffee coffee coffee morning noon night.

“Hiyah, Pop! You’re looking good!” they might yell as they rushed past.

Sometimes an oldster might pluck at a passing coat sleeve or point a wavering finger at a map on the wall of the hotel lobby.

“I walked,” he would begin, looking at you like a prideful child, “I walked from here to here, all the way afoot. Year Nineteen Hunderd and One, it was. Took me sixty-three days and like to killed me. Flour rice and a bit of sugar was all. A snip of bacon, maybe. Sixty below, blisters on my feet, and frozen. I poured coal oil on the blisters if I could get it. Fella I was with boiled his boots and ate ’em. Had to. Now they make it less than an hour on the airplane.”