Looking for Alaska (12 page)

“You both ready to go?” he asked.

“I am,” I said.

He opened the right-hand door of the plane.

“Now, who wants to ride in the front seat?”

Neither of us volunteered. I was confused. How do you sit in the front next to the pilot? Where does the copilot sit?

“Okay, then,” the guy who couldn't be our pilot said, “you both can climb on in to the two backseats. Watch your step.” This guy appeared to be in his twenties. I decided he must be a combination baggage-handler/steward.

I stepped onto one of the floats as waves lapped against it. One wave came over and got my foot wet. A colossal cruise ship had just passed by on its way north. I heard steps coming from the covered walkway and turned. A man in his mid-to-late thirties was running toward us.

As he reached the plane, the woman said, “Hey, Jerry.”

“Oh, hi.” He wasn't even out of breath.

“You been politicking?” she asked.

“Always,” Jerry answered.

I got in, then the woman with the chain saw got in. She had not allowed the guy to load it in the luggage area; for some reason she seemed to want to be near it. What was really in there?

The young guy in the Broncos hat climbed into the pilot's seat, and then Jerry got into what I'd assumed was the “copilot's” seat. The young guy started the engine. The insides of this floatplane were scuffed and scratched; portions of my side window looked as if some child had worked it over with a nail. The floatplane had started bobbing up and down in the waves from passing boats.

“One time flying this same route to Prince of Wales Island I saw a pool of orcas attacking a humpback whale,” the biker babe said. I could not really think about that, I was too consumed with who this guy was, acting like he was going to fly the plane.

The guy revved up the engine; I thought he must be warming up the motor for the still unseen pilot. It was now raining directly over us. A hundred yards to our left I couldn't see through the fog, yet a half mile behind us the sun was shining and it was clear blue skies.

Some guy, even younger, appeared beside us on the dock. He reached down and untied us from the dock's moorings. The young guy in the Broncos hat, who didn't look old enough to be a weatherman at the smallest TV station in Alaska, let the current take us, then powered up the motors and we headed out. He
was
the pilot. There were boats everywhere. I knew there was no way we were going to take off with this much boat traffic in our way. Right?

I glanced over at this guy in the copilot's seat, Jerry. He was looking out the window.

“Excuse me, what kind of plane is this?” I asked.

I had to speak loudly, in the direction of his ear.

“You ever flown on a floatplane?” he answered. I detected a strong energy in his voice.

“No, I haven't.”

“Well, you're on a DeHavilland Beaver.”

“Oh.” We sped across the waves, through the pelting rain. I could feel the aluminum floats on the plane pounding so hard on the water it was as if we were taking off from a fresh-plowed, furrowed dirt field.

“They stopped building these planes in the fifties,” Jerry volunteered.

“In the
what?
”

“In the fifties.”

That's great. This plane could have been built the year I was born. I sure don't fly the way I did when I was younger.

When would we ever take off? Were we having some kind of trouble? Hopefully, I had guessed close to my actual weight, and so had everyone else. “Come on, plane,
come on, come on, plane, please lift off the water.
” I think I even spoke my hope out loud, though no one could have heard me. It was very noisy inside the cockpit by now.

For a time just as we began to lift, maybe three seconds, though it felt like much longer, it looked as if we might run into a slow-moving, black-hulled tugboat. Finally with the plane off the water, the pilot banked it hard to the right. The pilot upped the power dramatically to get us over the green mountains in front of us.

Ahead spread out before us was an ever-changing shutter of white-gray clouds dangling from the silver walls of rain. Would there be the holes in the clouds to fly through? If you had to wait for ideal weather to fly in Alaska, there wouldn't be much flying.

These planes were not flown using autopilots; the human pilot must be able to see. We climbed and climbed; the plane seemed to have plenty of power. I heard Jerry say something to the pilot about this plane having had a turbo conversion done to its engines, whatever that meant.

Without warning we hit something and the plane dropped, then slammed into some kind of fierce air. I don't understand much about air masses, but these didn't like each other. If I hadn't had my seat belt on, I would have popped up and hit the ceiling of the plane with my head. The plane had no windshield wipers, and the overwhelming rain blasting at us had to be pushed off the glass by the wind. It sounded as if machine guns were shooting BBs at us.

I pressed my face to my side window, but when I did, it fogged up. I could see nothing in front of us but banks of clouds. If I were just a spirit, capable of passing through physical reality, which is the way I felt in the clouds at times, this could be joyful. If we'd cleared Gravina Island, then we were supposed to be flying over Clarence Strait. I tried to look down; there was nothing but clouds and fog. Were we over a glacier? How would we know if we were headed left or right? Was the pilot disoriented?

There,
below us—if that was below us—something dark appeared, then it was gone. There it was again. It looked like the ocean. Then it was gone, then it was back. I saw another hole in the clouds, and in it I saw something that was not the open ocean. It was the land, covered with evergreens, mature and tall. Then into the hole came large boulders, perched on the edge of the ocean. Then, as quickly, the gray hid everything again. I could feel my body tightening with every droning moment. The muscles in the back of my neck were strung so tight it felt as if they could pull my head back until my skull hit my back.

It seemed just a matter of time before we would hit something that would tear the plane and all of us apart. I'd always wondered about when a plane crashes. How much force is required to tear it into so many tiny pieces, with people actually missing body parts here and there? The impact must be unimaginable. Right now we could be headed straight into a mountain and wouldn't know it. Or what if we landed in the water? Would we hit so hard that I would be dead on contact? What if my legs or arms were broken? Was there any kind of life raft on board? Did the plane float? No one survives long in Alaskan salt water. Would the Coast Guard be upon us quickly enough? If we were trapped inside the plane, would the girl crank up her chain saw and cut us out? Damn my imagination. I wished I could turn it off.

Another large hole was below us. We were over the ocean; I spotted whitecaps through the hole, even from this height. Had the pilot circled away from the island, was he turning around? I was totally disoriented; was he?

The young pilot seemed to be taking the floatplane higher. It did not respond as effortlessly, as powerfully, as before. Was something wrong with the engines? The next bit of reality I saw through the clouds was a slab of green mountainside right outside the window, not below us, but next to us. No wonder so many planes crash out here. Surely the pilot had a route he was following, but how did he know where he was, or if he had drifted off his route? There was no radar, no screens in front of him showing him where he was, where to go. For me, the worst thing about this dire situation was that I was completely powerless to do anything about it.

“Hey, see that hole in the clouds? I think you need to head through there,” Jerry suddenly said to the pilot, but calmly, as if he were directing a blind grandfather to the bathroom at a restaurant.

To head where this guy Jerry had directed, the pilot would have to make an almost ninety-degree turn. Surely we weren't that far off course. And who was he to tell the pilot where to go? The pilot didn't say anything, but I could feel that he had slowed down, possibly as slow as the plane would go. I remembered hearing something about going too slow and stalling the plane out. For a moment it seemed we were standing still; then we hit another batch of rough air and lurched down like a rock falling off a cliff until we hit another batch of invisible air and bounced back up.

“Listen, I've flown here hundreds, probably thousands, of times. We need to be over Kasan Bay. I see too much ground below. Fly through that hole in the clouds.” Jerry spoke with a calm assurance.

This conversation was beginning to remind me of what I'd heard on the news from recovered black boxes, when professional pilots are trying everything to avoid crashing, talking to each other as calmly as if they were out fishing on a warm summer afternoon. Why didn't they scream, raise their voices, lose control? I wished for a parachute so that I could take my chances floating to the ground or the water. The pilot still said nothing. He just looked around too much.

I felt like screaming out to him, “What do you think about what Jerry is saying!”

Jerry again pointed to the hole in the clouds, which was closing, and the pilot finally turned the plane and bolted through it. I'm not sure why, but I trusted this unknown Jerry more than I trusted the pilot.

Jerry pointed down and said, “There's Hollis, the ferry dock, okay, we're heading in the right direction now.” The pilot never said a word.

Shortly afterward, we dropped over a medium-size mountain into a narrow valley. The pilot got close to the long spine of mountains on our right. More rough, up-flowing air hit us. At least we could see. Jerry pointed to some deer that were actually above us near the mountain ridge. Their golden hair stood out vividly in the Irish-green grass. Below us sat several homes, spaced far apart, built along a road. The land around the houses had been logged. The plane was now bouncing around like a Ping-Pong ball in a wind tunnel, but it was almost enjoyable compared to what we'd just come through.

Soon the pilot swung wide again. Why was he doing that?—Jerry hadn't said anything. I looked and found it was because we were headed for a gorgeous bay, surrounded by evergreen-covered outer islands. A sawmill was below us; several huge piles of sawdust stood around it. The pilot threaded his way between some anchored salmon-seining boats and landed right in front of the little village of Craig (pop. 2,043). It is the largest community on Prince of Wales Island, which is the third-largest island in the United States. Only Kodiak Island, north of here, and the island of Hawaii are bigger.

The pilot maneuvered the plane up to a floating dock. Most of the fog that had so imprisoned people earlier this morning was now evaporated. If you'd just woken up, you'd wonder why all the flights were coming in late this morning. Rays of golden sun shot through the little bit of fog that still floated on the water. Slivers of clouds, highlighted by the deep yellow sunlight, poured down from the surrounding mountaintops like waterfalls. Our whole world was clearing up. The mysterious closed-in world of gray-white clouds and fogs was gradually being overtaken by a rich blue sky and a bronze sunlight that together colored everything regally. The world now seemed perfectly clear and evident.

While we squirmed out of the plane, a bald eagle screeched from the tall spruce trees that grew on a point across the bay. I was surprised the pilot didn't thank Jerry. The pilot said nothing. Maybe he was stunned, or maybe I was too new to Alaska to realize what I had just come through. Could that trip have been normal? We didn't crash, everyone survived—just another flight in Southeast Alaska.

THE LONE WASP

Sam Kito, sixty-two, the half-Tlingit, half-Japanese-American man who had summoned me here to Craig, was waiting at the dock. He is an influential Alaskan Native leader, a wise man, and an elder. He doesn't want to be called an elder, possibly the most respect-filled word in the Native world, because it is given to men and women who are the oldest in the community, usually in their seventies and eighties. I think Sam thinks he is in his thirties; sometimes he acts like he is still in his twenties.

Sam's hair is naturally coal black. He is stocky, short, kind of bowlegged, and he dresses fashionably. I'm not sure what I was expecting; you would think after all my years of traveling and living in other worlds that I would have stopped previsualizing people and places. Had I expected Sam and the others I would be fishing with to have Chilkat blankets draped over their shoulders, their heads protected from the rain by woven cedar hats painted with stylized ravens? No, but I hadn't expected them to be so universally stylish. These Native leaders dress in a uniform that allows them to be twenty-first-century warriors for their people. Sam wore black silk T-shirts, fine blue blazers, Italian sweaters, Dockers khakis, and Florsheim black loafers, with tassels. His assistant, Linda Sylvester, told me that he spends a large sum at the Juneau shoe shop having tassels put back on his loafers. This may be because Sam loves to dance and people keep stepping on his tassels. Almost no one steps on his toes, though.

In Alaska you don't hear the word
Indian
very often—the word is
Native.
“Native politics.” “Native musher.” “Native women writers.” “Native issues.” “Native arts.” Then several phrases are used all the time in Alaska that have paired
Native
with a word of the outside world. “Native corporation.” “Native Olympics.” “Native airline pilot.” “Native orthopedic surgeon.” “Native lawyer.” “Native oil-field worker.” “Native comedian.”

Making up Alaska's Native population are five major groups. Starting with the top of Alaska and working down, there are the northern Eskimos, the Inupiats; the interior Indians, the Athabascans; the southern Eskimos, the Yupik; the Aleuts, whose place is on the Aleutian Islands and the Alaska Peninsula; and the Tlingits and the Haidas, the Southeast coastal Indians. Although not long ago some of these groups warred with each other, now they have banded together to fight for their piece of Alaska, which was once all theirs. Their organization is called AFN, Alaska Federation of Natives.