Great friendships 'just take a minute'

"Road Commission hasn't cleared the brush for a while" Fabian complained, "but let's see how this old guy is doing."

Which old guy? I don't remember.

There were so many in the Fifties when my Dad took me driving on Sunday, his day off. These men came to Alaska during the gold rush -- or shortly thereafter -- and were now grown old. Some had pensions, some received territorial welfare. All lived alone, although a couple had dogs. By the mid-Sixties, all were dead.

Fabian never told me we were going visiting. He let me figure out his intentions by myself. It wasn't hard. When he stopped at a bakery Sunday morning to buy a bag of fresh pastries -- butterhorns and bear claws -- I knew what the afternoon held. A lot of sitting quietly on my part, a lot of talk with an old-timer at high decibels on Fabian's part. The old-timers were invariably hard to hearing; so was he.

Not that the old-timers completely ignored me. They asked me if I had been hunting, if I was progressing in school, if I wanted an apple or candy bar from their larder or a piece of moose meat simmering on the wood stove in a Dutch oven.

I was expected to listen and learn but at first, listening brought only confusion. Where was the Forty Mile claim the old guy mined in '01? And the Kantishna where he built a cabin 25 years later? And the Bonnifield Trail where he mushed dogs after he built the cabin? And the Bearpaw, which I discovered was interchangeably the name of a river and a region beyond Nenana? I needed a map. My companions didn't. Their heads were full of maps.

I tried not to squirm with boredom as I wondered when Fabian would tell the old man, "OK sourdough, time to take the kid home" and stared at a calendar from a Seattle or St. Louis fur buyer nailed to the cabin wall. The buyer urged trappers to ship him their prime pelts and enjoy his prime prices. The art covering the top half of the calendar was irresistible. A reproduction of a classic frontier scene originally painted in oil -- a buckskin clad trapper, rifle raised over his head like a club, in combat with a snarling grizzly bear. On calendars of yesteryear, grizzlies came in one size: Extra-large.

Fabian wasn't lying when he said the visit would "just take a minute." It's just that after the old-timer greeted us, marveled at the pastries, and began talking, there was one more story to tell, one more question to ask, one more stick of wood to throw on the dying fire, one more cup of coffee to pour as minutes became hours.

For many years, I thought these visits were my first history tutorials. But when I became white-haired myself, I realized the history lessons were of less importance than the example Fabian set. Friendship requires nurture, and you nurture friendship with the simplest of gifts, your time. You don't have to bring your friend butterhorns or bear claws, but sometimes you have to drive down a narrow dirt road slippery from rain.

Michael Carey is the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com.