The Town Talk from Alexandria, Louisiana • Page 64

E-8 Town Talk, Alexandria-PineviUe, Wednesday, December 15. 1982 If i Freezing, Starving Camper Leaves Diary, Kills Himself Ci When the ashes cool, I'll be cooling with them. Carl McCunn I if 0 -X ple," McCunn said. "Evidently it wasn't as strong as he thought it was or he would still be alive today. When the pipeline people, came, he complained that people weren't as close.

Before that, he said ever body knew each other." It was easy to be a loner in Alaska, and Carl was a quintessential loner someone who didn't fear months of solitude in a wilderness camp with only the stars and wildlife as his companions. "He could go off like this for a long time all by himself." McCunn said. "I couldn't do it. After three or four days, I'm looking for other people." Carl's suicide might never have happened if he had been more specific with a pilot he thought would pick him up at camp at the end of the summer. In his final months, Carl could only wait and hope to be rescued by a passing plane.

The. starvation and freezing before he shot himself to death in the Alaskan wilds. (UPI) Carl McCunn, In one of the last photos taken of him. tells in his diary of his final days of By Brett Skakun San Antonio Light Distributed by I PI SAN ANTONIO, Texas In 1981, on a quiet summer day in the remote Alaskan tundra, Carl McCunn took five boxes of gun shells out of his wilderness tent and threw them into a cold, nameless lake. "I felt rather silly for having brought so many.

Felt like a war he wrote in his loose-leaf diary. "So I threw, all the lakc.but about bright. Who would have known I might need them just to keep from starving?" One of those shells did keep him from starving the one he fired into his skull to end his tortured, hungry existence as summer dragged into winter in the Alaskan bush country. Carl left" his Fairbanks home March 1981 to travel north of the Arctic Circle to take wildlife photographs and camp in the solitude of the bush country. Ultimately, he would perish there after his will to live had been drained by the harsh Alaskan elements.

His death came after he had grown weary of being a scavenger, eating rabbit heads and tree bark to survive another day. Me had suffered the numbness and sting of frostbite on his nose, hands, fingers and feet. He had cursed the mornings when he awoke with the chills. And he had grown despondent at waiting to be picked up by an airplane that never came. In late November or early December of 1981, Carl gave up all hope of the plane's arriving to return him to Fairbanks.

"Certainly someone in town should have figured something must be wrong me not being back by now," he wrote. "But then again, there's probably no one in town who gives a What in the hell do those people think (I) gave them maps (of my camp location) for? Decoration?" When the remaining food and fuel Carl had was depleted, he wrote his epitaph and turned the barrel of the rifle towards his head. "When the ashes cool, I'll be cooling along with "I chickened out once already, but I don't wanna go through the chills again. They say it doesn't hurt. people who had died and been revived recall a relaxed and wonderful free floating "Dear God in Heaven, please forgive me my weakness and my sins.

Please look over my family." WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO LIMIT QUANTITIES 400 BOLTON AVE. PHONE 442-1661 Open til 9 p.m. daily SPECIALS GOOD THRU DEC. 18th THURSDAY SENIOR CITIZEN DAY He then signed a note to his adoptive father living in San Antonio, Texas, attached his Alaska driver's license to it, then killed himself at the age of 35. Even on the threshold of death, Carl was still able to grace his note with a lighthearted touch.

"The I.D. is me, natch," he wTote. Following Carl's death, his father, Donovan McCunn, gave The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner permission to publish his son's 100-page diary. Excerpts from the journal were printed in the newspaper last month. "If anything comes of his death, it will be to caution other people not to get in the same circumstances," McCunn said in a recent interview at his San Antonio home.

"If only we can keep one person from going through what that kid went McCunn said. McCunn wants to donate his proceeds from the possible publication of his son's diary in book form to establish a search and rescue team for persons in similar situations. With the assistance of the News-Miner's five-part series of articles and an interview with McCunn, the story of his son's life begins to unfold. Carl, who was nicknamed "Dutch," was only a month old when McCunn adopted him in Europe shortly after World War II. Months later, McCunn married Carl's natural mother.

McCunn later moved his family to Maryland, where Carl graduated from high school. In 1968, McCunn then moved his family to San Antonio to retire from "the Army after more than 20 years of service. Carl was in the Navy at the time. ShorUy after Carl left the Navy, he migrated to Seattle where he got a job on the ferry traveling between Washington and Alaska. The lure of Alaska seized him, and about 1970, Carl stepped off the ferry one day and dropped his bags for good in Alaska.

"He worked in the sawmill, in the lumber camp. He did a little bit of everything up there, even working in a bar," McCunn said. Carl was fascinated and attracted by the state's stark, desolate stretches and the rugged individualism associated with Alaska. "I think more than anything else he felt a close kinship to the peo WE ACCEPT PAYMENT OF ALEXANDRIA UTILITY BILLS! yUS GRADE A FRESH $189 BAKING HENS A US Choice Beef Boneless CHUCK ROAST Bryan Pure Pork Fresh PAMPERED SAUSAGE Philadelphia CHO CREAM CHEESE oz. ea.

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