Travelers' Tales Alaska (9 page)

Few cameras flashed that drizzly October evening. As I work now through the details of my notes and memory, the singular image is that of a man in nondescript clothing—a sweater, jeans, vest. Justice Berger sits in a folding chair, bent deeply toward each speaker. Hands support his chin in an attitude of prayer. His eyes are nearly closed by the weight of his brow's furrowed concentration. Mouth. Shut. Tight.

Daniel Henry is a Pushcart-winning debate coach who began carving his niche in the Alaska wilderness culture more than twenty years ago. He has been treed by grizzlies, chased by fry-pan-wielding women, and weathered in at some of the most obscure communities in America. He is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE

In an unnamed Southeast fishing town, residents ponder hard choices and wonder what the next tide will bring.

A
S A BALD EAGLE COASTS OVER HIS HEAD, A LITTLE BOY
walks along the boardwalk toward school, wearing a life jacket, clutching a handful of daffodils. He passes an old man on a four-wheeler.

“Hiya,” the boy says. “How are you today?”

“Home, sick in bed,” the old man announces. Then without waiting for the boy to figure out the joke, he laughs, downshifts, and trundles off, rattling the planks of the boardwalk past the Cold Storage Plant and a boarded-up house. By the post office, a little dog is sitting square in the middle of the walkway, not moving. The old man stops, turns off his engine, and devotes ten minutes to the project of scratching the dog. Close by, two men in yellow rain-pants lean over the railing, talking in low voices, watching a school of herring. Frank and I sit on a wooden bench in front of the restaurant, looking across the boardwalk to the inlet and the mountains beyond. Our backs are erasing “borscht” from the chalkboard menu.

Wildland shoulders in on the little town from all directions,
jagged snow-covered peaks and fjords as deep as the mountains are high. Because the mountains plunge so steeply into the sea, the town is built on stilts over the water. Buildings line up on both sides of the boardwalk that runs along the bluffs, graying wooden cottages connected by narrow planks with railings. Even the school sits at the end of a pier, on posts above the tidal flats. Twice each day, tides move in under the town, and twice each day they move out again, stranding starfish.

The nearest road is seventy miles away. When the weather is good—which it rarely is—a floatplane might land at the dock and off-load a fisherman, or a dog, or some groceries. We flew in on yesterday's floatplane, imported from outside to teach in the school for a few days. Low clouds forced us to fly below the cliffs along arms of the sea, skimming close to the waves like a pelican. The ferry comes only once a month. When the schoolteacher's piano arrived by barge, the town turned out to haul the piano up the gangway and along the boardwalk on the back of the only suitable vehicle in town, the garbage ATV. Now the teacher trades piano lessons for halibut and jam and considers herself ahead in the bargain.

This little town is home to 160 people, more or less, people who take the word “home” seriously. When I ask my writing students what marks this place as home, the seven children in the high school put their heads together and make me a list:

The Boardwalk

Boringness

Dogs barking

My boat

TOO MUCH RAIN.

Bears

The restaurant

The river.

I press them for the names of the inlet, the restaurant, the river, the bears, and they debate for some time, but really, the question makes no sense. What's the use of proper names, when there's only one of each? But the children consult among themselves and tell me that the bears are brown bears. They wander into town in April looking for something to eat, but head back to the mountains when the snows melt. “They have their space and we have ours and it works out pretty good,” says a student. All the same, she spent the night with a friend, having been warned not to walk home past the place a bear had been seen. When townspeople visit each other at night, they carry cowbells and pepper spray. And when word comes round that a bear is on the boardwalk just past the church, the teacher leaves her meeting and walks home to bring her dog inside.

There are more docks than boardwalks in this town, and more boats than houses. Amidst the working boats, a couple of sailboats hunker down under blue tarps. “Tourists,” the sheriff explains. He laughs, holding his cigarette between his forefinger and thumb.
Lacking much business in the crime department, he has joined us on the bench. We look out together at the boats in the moorage and give the sun time to work its way into our shoulders. “Had one woman stand here on her boat and ask how many feet above sea level we were. Had another lady fly in over the glacier and ask what we did with all that Styrofoam. ‘We mine it,' I told her, ‘and ship it south for picnic coolers.'” He laughs again and then it's quiet on the dock except for the sound of waterfalls streaming down the mountains across the inlet.

“I don't know why they call it tourist season, if we're not allowed to shoot 'em.” But he's only joking, just running through his repertoire of dumb-tourist jokes, and here comes the next one: “Some guy asked me how much rain we forecast, and I said I expected it to fill the inlet about eight more feet by suppertime.” Then the law looks over at us, so obviously strangers, and remembers his manners. “Aw, a few tourists aren't so bad. As long as they go home.”

A boy runs past, carrying a fishing pole. A few others bunch on the boardwalk, jostling and wrestling without ever dismounting from their bikes. Their parents are out on the boardwalk too, gathered in small groups to talk and tease, enjoying the first clear evening in a long, long time. “I don't think I'd like to live anywhere else but here,” a sixteen-year-old tells me. “Doesn't seem all that nice in other places. Except maybe I'll go to college, if there's a college in a place like this.”

What she doesn't know is that she may live in the only place like this.

This was a company town, built for packing salmon in 1930. For decades the people got by, prosperity ebbing and flowing with the schools of herring that brought in the Chinook. But last year, the long-line fisherman who doubles as town manager received a letter over his fax machine:
The
fish plant will close on Friday.
Word spread quickly the length of the boardwalk, past the wet-goods store, past the storefront “steambaths and showers,” past the bar-and-grill and the restaurant, past the fire station and the boatyard where crab traps pile up off-season, to the row of little company houses along the boardwalk, the school, the river, and the end of town.

Some families moved away. Some fathers left to get jobs outside, leaving their families behind. Other parents divided their children among the neighbors and went off to find work. Somebody cobbled together financing to run the fish plant for a few months a year, other people set up their boats for halibut, off-loading their catch on fish-buying boats. The people who remain in this little town get by whatever way they can and wonder what will happen next. On the docks, we overhear the worried conversations, the patched-together plans. In the school, I listen to the children. They want to know about the Seattle Sonics, but I can't help them. Their parents are holding on to a way of life as tightly as the town clings to the mountainside, but they know it's going to take more than a life jacket to keep their children from drifting away.

So it's complicated when a corporation from outside announces plans to build a floating lodge near the town and fly in paying guests. The site the corporation has chosen is close enough to town that the people will see floatplanes coming and going, day after day, bringing in people, taking out trophy fish. The corporation plans to moor its lodge in a place rare and wonderful, anchoring its cables to pilings in front of the only beach in the fjord, a beach where townspeople have always come to dig for clams, and where long-line fishermen—grandfathers and fathers and sons—angle for salmon and halibut. The place where mothers bring their children for picnics, running out to the beach in skiffs.

“The people don't want the lodge,” says a songwriter whose family has lived in the town from the beginning, when the first corporation came in three generations ago. “None of us want it. It won't bring
us
any jobs. And even if it did, they wouldn't be worth it. But what can we do?” And sure enough, when a representative of the corporation comes to town, the people are polite, the way they are polite to the bears and the occasional tourist. People don't argue here, said a fourteen-year-old girl. “In a town as small as this, you can't just say whatever you're thinking.”

But the people know the value of what they would be giving up. Scarcity raises the value of anything. As peace and solitude and wildlands disappear under bulldozers in the south, their price increases proportionately. Peace becomes a commodity, like board feet of cedar or kilos of frozen fish. Solitude is precious. Unspoiled beauty sells for a premium. Anyone who figures out how to extract these resources will make a fortune.

The townspeople call a meeting, gathering in the town hall just down from the dry goods store. “What the corporation plans to do,” a bearded man says, “is take the peace and solitude that belong to this community, the same peace and solitude the people have been saving for their children.” They will take it without asking, without giving anything in return, as if it belonged to them. Then they will package it and sell it to strangers for something around $2,500, a five-day package deal. “There's a word for this,” a woman says, holding her son on her hip. “But I can't put my finger on it. Isn't it ‘theft'?”

The schoolteacher pushes back her chair and stands up. “This isn't about just one fishing lodge,” she says. “It's about this one and the next one and the next. Is this the kind of life we want? Is this what we want for the children?”

“I wouldn't know,” says the corporate representative. “That's a philosophical question.”

But the people know. What they want for their children are salmon and yellow cedar, the river, the inlet, and a little town where wooden houses stand on stilts above great schools of fish. A place you know is home because, as a teenager explained it to me, when you open the door “there's a row of boots and raincoats and some firewood, and your little brother is waiting to beat you up.” A place where bears roll boulders on the beach, sucking up crabs and sculpin. Where gardens grow in milk crates stacked above the tide—daffodils and garlic, and rhubarb for pies. A place where women's voices call to children across the docks, and salt wind carries the laughter of men. A place where people can make a living, but not a fortune. A place where enough is great riches.