Love story: A matchmaking moose united Dennis and Cathy Johnson in the wilds of Alaska
It was Aug. 14, 1977.
I was 27 years old, and I was taking the first paid vacation of my life since finally graduating from college.
I had been working in Lewiston, Idaho, as a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor and decided to take my first vacation to Alaska for sight-seeing and adventure.
This date found me in the club car that served as a lounge at Mount McKinley National Park (now Denali). Back then, the railroad club car was connected to the lodge and served as the lounge.
When I got off the train from Anchorage, it was pouring rain and I was seeking shelter. It was a tiny space with only about eight barstools, so when I entered I was lucky that there was one empty stool. As I plopped down, I noticed that the lady next to me (my own age) was someone who I had seen on the train. She was traveling with another girl about our same age. Her name was Cathy, and it turned out that she and her friend were from Costa Mesa, California. We struck up a conversation and, being from different parts of the country, we found a lot to talk about.
After an hour or so, the rain let up, and I suggested to Cathy that we take a walk to Horseshoe Lake, which is not far from the lodge.
We had a nice leisurely walk to the lake and were on the walk back when Cathy stopped to take a picture. It was a place on the trail that was narrow and sloped downward on both sides. As she was looking into her camera, and I was looking past her up the trail, suddenly a large cow moose came trotting around the corner and directly toward us. There was not room on the trail for all of us, and the moose was in an all-out run. Without thinking, I tackled Cathy, and we ended up in a heap beside the trail.
The moose stopped and stood over the top of us, deciding whether to stomp us or go a different direction. I was now climbing on top of Cathy to shield her from the moose and take whatever blows might come.
In the meantime, all she knew was that this wild man from Idaho had attacked her in the wilderness. She was fighting and slugging me to escape my attack. I looked up into the nose of the moose, who spit in my face, reared her head and then turned and went down the other side of the trail.
Cathy continued to beat on me while I rolled off her to let her up. She never saw the moose. I avoided huff prints on my back, but I couldn’t avoid the blows from Cathy. After she got tired of hitting me, I explained to her what had happened. I had to show her the moose’s foot prints and markings on the path before she would begin to believe me.
Well, eventually she decided I wasn’t such a bad guy after all, and I convinced her that I was actually her hero and just possibly saved her life so that she could go on to live happily ever after. I went from being her assailant to being “that wild man from Idaho who saved me from the moose.”
The next day, I was getting on the train to return to Anchorage, and she was going on to Fairbanks. Just before I got on the train, we realized that we didn’t even know each other’s last names. We barely had time to exchange names and addresses before we departed.
The first thing I did when I got home was to drop her a note in the mail. It turned out that she did the same thing, and our letters crossed. We had lots of laughs about our unusual experience. We ended up flooding the post office with letters (this was pre-cellphone, and long distance calls were expensive).
The rest of the story: I ended up persuading Cathy to come to Lewiston, she loved it, we got married, had two daughters, moved to Alaska in 1984, visited the spot where we met several times, moved to Spokane in 2002, and are living happily ever after. We both turned 75 in January (she still packs a pretty good punch). In April, we will enjoy our 46th wedding anniversary.