Valley farmer dies at 64

Oct. 20, 2006

By Eowyn LeMay Ivey

For the Frontiersman

I can't remember meeting Bob Boyd.

I might have been 12 years old, barreling across the potato fields with him, my heart dropping as he launched the pickup truck off the edge of the dam around the lake. It was only after we safely landed that I could hear his high-pitched giggle. He would have been in his 40s then, probably with a big, bushy beard not yet going gray.

But no, he was there before that. His son and I were sitting with him at an old-timer's kitchen table, sipping hot chocolate and listening to the men swap trapping stories.

No, he was there before that, too. It's as if I've always known him, his stories and his laugh. He had that kind of presence. He was always there and always would be, or so it seemed.

Bob Boyd died sleeping in his own bed this past week. He was 64 years old. While it seems impossible that he is gone, I do know that he died the best way he could - at home, with his family and farmland surrounding him. His absence, though, leaves a gap not only on his farm but in the heart of Alaska.

&#8220It's going to be so boring around here without him,” his wife, Dace Boyd, said the morning he died.

She laughed through her tears as she recalled his spontaneous plans and perhaps overgenerous heart. She spent most of her life with Bob at her side, meeting him in Alaska and then marrying him in 1969. She wore a wedding gown she and her mother sewed. The sleeves were trimmed in arctic fox.

From that day on, there was never a dull moment. Together, the two of them ran Mat-Valley Potato Growers on the Palmer Fishhook farm where Bob had grown up and his ashes now will be scattered.

Together they raised a family that often extended beyond children and nephews, brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents.

&#8220When he met anyone, they weren't a stranger for very long,” Dace told me. Many of these once-strangers ended up eating at their table, living on their farm, becoming a part of their lives. Dace said she never knew who would show up with Bob in his pickup truck, or what big plans he would have up his sleeve.

&#8220There was no one else like him,” his sister Margaret Brockman said. &#8220He was one of a kind.”

Bob was a true Alaskan, born in Sitka and raised a farmer, trapper and hunter. In addition to taking over the family farm, he worked as a state trooper, policeman and corrections officer all over the state - Cordova, Fairbanks, Anchorage and Palmer. And for each of those places, he had more than just a story or two to tell.

They were the kind of stories that keep children perched on the edges of their chairs, stories of scrapes and mishaps that recall Jack London, stories that can only exist in the Last Frontier. Some were firsthand, like the bullet he took as a policeman.

Others he had just witnessed, like the man who killed an abusive husband and was released by the judge, told that he could avoid jail time as long as he never killed anyone else.

Each story got better with another telling. They told of an Alaska many of us yearn for, the one where a poor, hungry family poaches a moose during a bitter winter and a young state trooper shares fried steaks with them in their cabin. They were stories in which the good guys almost always won, and the bad guys ended up tied to a tree, chased out of town, or made to work harder than they ever had in their lives.

To a large extent, Bob had lived those stories. He seemed to make it his goal to decrease the number of bad guys in the world, and the best way was to turn them into good guys. Even after he had &#8220retired” and lost a leg to diabetes, Bob was back working in corrections at Point MacKenzie.

His own home and farm continued to be a place of second, third, maybe even fourth chances.

Bob was always finding people on hard times and reaching a hand out to them.

&#8220That's one thing I learned from my dad - everybody deserves a second chance,” Adam Boyd told me. &#8220Don't be too quick to judge.”

Adam says his dad also taught him to love the outdoors. One of his earliest memories is of being a toddler, riding in a pack on his dad's back as they checked his traps along a snow-buried trail.

Bob introduced countless people to Alaska's wilderness. Each summer he would rope together a group of teenagers, farm workers, friends and relatives, put them on horses whether they knew how to ride or not, and take them into the mountains or out on the tundra. There were also trips to run a fish wheel on the Copper River, to hunt rabbits in willow patches up north, to check traps, to hunt caribou. And the more people, the better.

My husband, Sam, was on many of those excursions.

&#8220That's why I started trapping, hearing all his stories,” Sam told me. &#8220As far as we were concerned, Bob was one of the old-timers.”

But in the end, it's not the wilderness adventures or hair-raising stories that people remember most about Bob. It's his heart.

&#8220Whenever we walked up the hill from the trapline, whoever was in front, he would tell them to make sure everybody had a tree to lean on before you stopped to rest,” Sam said. &#8220You had to count the people behind you and then count the trees you passed, and keep going until everybody had a tree to lean on. That's how he was - he was always thinking about other people.”

So now the table has turned. Now there are a lot of people thinking about Bob Boyd, people who were once strangers but now can't remember a time when they didn't know him.

Lifelong Palmer resident Eowyn LeMay Ivey is a former Frontiersman reporter who now works at Fireside Books.