Looking for Alaska (14 page)

“This is an exceptional king,” Al said in awe, showing his deep-seated respect for the determined fish.

The reel screamed and the pole pumped as if it had its own heartbeat as the line went out. Sam probably wanted to scream too. I know what my forty-something back feels like when I fight one, but during the twenty minutes he fought the king, he never said a word, just pulled and pulled. The humpback surfaced again, this time behind us, and blew and breathed. There was some golden sunlight now and it lit the whale's exhaled spray of droplets. This time Sam would not allow the fish to make another run; he knew he could exert his will now. He brought it straight in and Jerry netted it.

I always regret it a little when a creature like this king salmon, one that will provide sustenance to me and my family, or to Sam's, has to die after a struggle, mighty or otherwise. I know the thrill of the hunt and the chase, but then sadness when the end comes. It is always, for me, a moment of the greatest respect for a life force that has ended its reign.

We all dropped our lines out again quickly. Next Al hooked one. Al had been talking about getting as much salmon as possible. He said it has been this way for his people for thousands of years, to put up fish and all other food to survive the deep dark winters. Sam and Bill started harassing Al all they could.

“Al, when will you be satisfied, when you get all our salmon too?”

Al responded, “It takes a village.”

“We're no village,” Bill said.

“All right then. Instead of ‘it takes a village,' it takes
me
to feed the village.” Al smiled his million-dollar smile, bright enough for any arctic night.

“We'd need a huge net to feed all of Kotzebue,” Bill said. Kotzebue is the most populated Inupiat Eskimo community in Alaska.

“Never mind, just catch enough salmon to feed my own village, at home, get me through the winter. I'll even take any salmon Peter might catch.”

Al's salmon did not protest his being caught, but came right in. When we got it in the boat, Al pointed to a large, bloodred gash in its silver side.

“A sea lion grabbed that one,” Bill pointed out.

The light was perfect, as it often is in Alaska. There was no glare, and this was summer and just past noon. There was no pollution; this was as pristine and profound a marine coastal environment as exists in the whole world. What a joy. All around the colors were so richly exciting—the gemlike blue-green of the sea; the warm, angelic white of the breaking waves; the purified gold of the fog-filtered sunlight; the hundreds of varieties of light browns that colored the exposed rock that made up the islands near us.

Everyone else was getting ready to fish again. The salmon run must be harvested; it hasn't been long since a family, a village, lived or died on the outcome of the harvest. This intense need to catch during the season still flows through the systems of all the men I was with. We called it sportfishing, but it was not sport.

Bill, who has a deep voice and a deliberate style of talking, pointed to the west and said casually, “Look.”

A flock of large birds hovered about fifteen feet over the water. The easy rolling waves were coated in silver-green light. There were at least twenty-five, maybe forty birds. They were huge, brown and white. Were they some kind of rare albatross blown in here by some advancing storm? Jerry pulled the boat toward them until I could see it was a flock of bald eagles. I thought I must be mistaken; there is no such thing as a flock of eagles. They were diving down to the tips of the waves, which were boiling and bubbling.

They were catching something, and whatever it was, there was enough for all of them to congregate. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Then, what looked like a shiny black submarine came straight out of the water, rocketing up at ninety degrees. It was a humpback whale.

Bill explained to me what was happening. “That whale has made a ‘net' of bubbles it has blown around a school of herring. This way they concentrate even more than they are usually. Then the humpy dives straight down and comes straight up, mouth wide open, right through the herring.”

The upwelling power of the great white splash the humpback made when it landed threw a couple eagles higher into the air. Then a minute later the bubbles began to explode to the top of the water again.

“That's called bubble netting. We have seen it quite a bit, but for someone like you, not long in Alaska, that sight is pretty nice. Must be some reason you get to see that,” Bill said. “You sure you don't have any Native blood in you?” He was only half-joking.

Bill Thomas, Senator Al Adams, Sam Kito, and me, the lone WASP, in Craig.
P
HOTO BY
J
ERRY
M
ACKIE

“No, but three of my children do, they're part Cherokee.”

“That explains it,” Al added. He hadn't appeared to be paying attention to us.

Sam, Al, Jerry, and Bill were watching the eagles, soaking it in, silently, not overwhelmed the way I was, but moved all the same. Alaska was their home no matter how astounding, and they'd been here a collective two hundred years. I was stunned, practically on fire, by what I was seeing. The bald eagles continued diving from the sky into the ocean, and the whale rocketed into that same sky another three or four times. The herring, the source of their attention, their sustenance, could do nothing to escape but had to wait until the predators had eaten their fill. Even concentrating 100 percent, I could not get enough of this part of Alaska. I was having a holy experience, this place was too rare to close my tired eyes. I didn't want to miss anything. Al was asleep, so was Sam. Eventually Jerry steered the boat back to the lodge. Bill just sat. We'd caught our limit of kings, two each. Al could feed his imaginary village.

*   *   *

Back at the lodge, I took a hot shower. When I closed my eyes, I lost my balance and had to reach for the wall. The whole place was moving. My equilibrium had not yet readjusted to the stable ground. Dinner that night began with baked king-salmon heads; Sam couldn't wait to eat the eyes, all very traditional. I ate some—no eyes, though. While we ate, a middle-aged Native guy, who moved slowly and seemed shy, came in holding a couple hand-carved and hand-painted cedar paddles. He just stood there until Sam noticed, then Sam introduced him and his work. Haidas are renowned for their abilities to carve and work cedar and for their artistic abilities in general. Jerry mentioned that his sister-in-law, Tina, had painted the stylized, all-black traditional Haida designs on them. Both the carving and the designs were exquisite.

“Cedar paddles, like those but much bigger, and our oceangoing cedar canoes, some fifty feet long, were one reason all other Native people feared the Haidas. We could come from here, across large open water, raid their villages on the mainland, and they could not come after us. They did not have the canoes we did,” Jerry said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Bill, the Tlingit, said in sarcastic response.

Haidas and Tlingits now only make war on the basketball courts, during high school games and Southeast's extremely important Gold Medal Tournament, held every year in Juneau.

“Jerry, you gonna sing for Pete at the Hill Bar tonight?” Bill asked.

“Only if Pete gets up there with me.”

The Hill Bar is just a half block down the street from the lodge where we were staying. It overlooks the dark harbor, the fishing boats that are tied together because there isn't enough dock space to handle all of them, and most of old town. JT Browns General Store and Ruth Ann's Restaurant, with their straight-up wood storefronts, the boat docks, and the fishing boats gave old town a look like a block off the San Francisco wharf during gold rush times. This night a new fog swam up at us from the ocean that surrounded the village, swirled around the streetlights, and hid other people as they walked through it. It gave me chills.

Jerry's mother, Marge, owns the Hill Bar, a combination bar, pool hall, and pull-tabs place. Pull tabs are a form of legal Alaska gambling; you buy a pile of cards and pull segmented tabs of paper off the front of them to see what you've won. Some people do nothing but sit at the bar and pull tabs and drink, pull tabs and drink and drink and drink, pull tabs and drink, lose all their money, leave. There is a liquor store downstairs, Hill Bar Liquors, and a convenience store next door. Marge owns these too; in fact she owns the building and all of the grocery stores on the island. She is a powerful, discreet woman.

As we walked into the Hill Bar, two raven-haired Native women ahead of us saw each other, ran to each other, hugged, yipped, swirled each other around.

“Where have you been?” one yelled, excited. I didn't hear the answer.

Jerry tapped me on the shoulder. “You know why that was such a big deal, Pete?”

“No.”

“Because you can't lose someone on this island.”

Jerry's brother-in-law was playing tonight, as he did a few nights a week, every week, and has for years. A light bank above his stage, controlled by foot pedals, shone on him and the dance floor. It had red, yellow, orange, blue, purple, and green lights. Another one rotated round and round like John Travolta's disco light. There was no real reason in the Hill Bar to get rid of the sixties or the seventies or the eighties, to worry about precisely what was hip this minute.

The interior of this bar was dark, the walls were smoke-stained cedar, there was a long, L-shaped, wood-topped bar. A stuffed king salmon hung behind the bar between the windows that looked out into the fog that now hid about half of everything. This bar had obviously been here for many decades and hadn't tried to change much with the times; then again, “the times” on this island have a very different way of passing. Sam told us he'd been to this bar when he was sixteen. He was a deckhand on a seining boat, and some strapping Norwegian fisherman had thrown him over the railing by the door. The shrub he had landed in is still here; he made sure to point it out.

Jerry's brother-in-law, a Mexican-American named Serafin Lara, has dark black hair, is in his forties, and has a medium build. His horn-rimmed glasses and air of restraint give him an oddly intellectual appearance. But in this place, colored with the patina of thousands of brawls, one-night regrets, a million smoked cigarettes, patrons who haven't left this island in a couple decades, and streetlights outside that couldn't overpower the gripping fog, this aloof music man was a welcome relief. It didn't seem to matter to anyone that he'd been playing here nonstop for years and years. It is a long, long way to any other live music, and you definitely don't leave this island in the dark looking for nightlife. Some people who have tried it ended up in eternal darkness.

We sat at the front two tables. Everyone knew Jerry, of course, but everyone also knew Sam. People treat Sam with an “I'd die for you” respect. Sam is known all over Alaska for his ability to entertain; there would be no way to count how many rounds of drinks he has bought. And Sam doesn't just buy drinks for people who can do him some good. He is known while entertaining to outlast men and women half to a third his age. On his black and gold Jeep Grand Cherokee is a bumper sticker that reads, “I'm a living legend at Kooteeya Bar, Hoonah, Alaska.”

It appeared that everyone in the place, maybe one hundred people, knew who Sam was, and a good number of them came by during the night to say hello, timing their arrival so as not to interfere with what was going on at the table. There were fishing guides and three bartenders who came by, and a tugboat captain and several people from Hydaburg. A trolling-boat owner about six feet six from Petersburg who had played basketball with Sam in high school bought Sam a Crown Royal on the rocks. Even someone's mother who looked to have spent too much time here stumbled up to Sam and asked him to dance. Everyone had been turning her down, but he didn't. No matter who you are or aren't, what you've done or not done, you feel accepted around Sam Kito.

Jerry leaned over to me and gestured to the far inside corner of the bar, near the partition that separated it from the pool hall and pull tabs. About fifteen people, about an equal number of men and women, most with black hair, were sitting together there, including one skinny lady with gray hair.

“Those people are from Hydaburg. That's their corner when they come here, nobody messes with people from Hydaburg. It's an all-Haida village. See that lady with them? She's ninety, comes here all the time, has a few glasses of wine, listens to my brother-in-law, dances a couple times. Them Haidas are something. I'm probably related to half of them.”

“Yeah, yeah. Pete, come here, I need to tell you about the Tlingits, they never lost a war,” Bill said, motioning with his large right hand.

A striking young woman who had occasionally been getting up to sing with the island's music man came to sit at our table. Someone said she was half-Haida, half-Tlingit. Someone else smirked that she was always at war with herself, you know, they joked, since the Tlingits and Haidas were always at war. She had a wide face and high cheekbones, very exotic looking. She sat next to one of the fishing captains who had come to buy drinks for Sam and Al.