Looking for Alaska

  In Alaska, now, the Republicans rule, and since Jerry changed from the Democratic to the Republican Party in 1998, he has become a powerful young man. Jerry is majority leader of the Alaska State Senate. He’s fiscally conservative but definitely not a part of the right-wing extreme social agenda. He is a natural leader and politician. For example, when he was sixteen, no one seemed to want to show up to fight the fires that broke out around Craig that year. So, Jerry organized the disorganized volunteer fire department and soon there were twenty-plus volunteers.

  Bill Thomas could pass for a retired professional football player, a middle linebacker. He is a Tlingit; Vietnam vet; a professional halibut fisherman; CEO of Klukwan, Inc., his local Native corporation; and a lobbyist. He lobbies when he is not fishing. Bill lives in Haines with his wife, Joyce, a gifted artist of Tlingit-based designs.

  The testing, the judging, of me, the lone WASP, began early on.

  “Peter, you ever seen an Eskimo fish without a spear before?” Al asked.

  I wasn’t sure what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I’m not sure I’d ever seen an Eskimo before.

  Bill chimed in, “Don’t worry, Pete, you can’t tell them Eskimos apart from any other Native when they’re not in their igloos.”

  Bill was not a man you would want to make angry. I could picture him in a raiding war canoe, the kind his ancestors used to stab fear into their adversaries. It would probably be a good idea to laugh at his jokes.

  “Peter, you ever been with this many Natives before?” Al asked, his dark brown eyes dancing, I hoped, with mischief.

  “No,” I said faintly.

  “You look nervous. You think we might be planning to have you for dinner?” Al began to laugh. “You know how much we like raw meat. You ever eat stink flipper?”

  “Yeah, Al, I, uh, teethed on stink flipper back in Connecticut.” Here’s hoping Al has a good sense of humor.

  At one time, when the Democrats controlled the Alaskan House and Senate, Al was chairman of the House Finance Committee and quite powerful. Now that the Republicans rule, it was frustrating for Al, and he would be retiring soon.

  “What are we using for bait?” Sam asked me.

  “How about Al,” Bill replied quickly.

  “Nah, I’m too skinny, we need to use Sam, we’ll catch more,” Al said.

  Jerry, who was driving, didn’t slow down as we made our way through a pass that went between two outer islands, west of Prince of Wales Island. We were close to Canadian waters. Once through the pass, which was edged by massive rocks, we came to the open Pacific Ocean. The Pacific was rolling under us, big rollers, white foam at the top of some of the waves. A rain came down on us that was really a mist. People around here call this mist “liquid sunshine.”

  When we stopped, the tiny drops felt cool and soothing on my face and beard. I love being on the ocean, sitting, riding waves with distances between them, in a small boat, feeling like a cork. We pulled along one island, steep-sided with bare rock at the ocean level. Jerry told me this was Cape Addington. The smashing, pounding waves on the ocean side of the island kept anything from growing wherever they crashed. Spruce trees grew above the rock, and elegant waterfalls were here and there just waiting to be seen, meant to be painted into nineteenth-century landscapes. The dramatic lighting would not need to be manipulated by the artist; everywhere I looked was like a classic painting. We pulled up next to a boulder about the size of a two-story home coming out from the shore. It was time to fish.

  Because the pass was so narrow, the tidal currents were strong in the pass, and therefore the small fish, the herring, the needlefish, were funneled in here. This in turn brought all the local ocean predators to feed here; about twenty bald eagles sat on the boulder, and that was just the mature eagles with white heads and tails, the ones we could see. Immature eagles are brown and white and were hidden by the colors of the rock. Many more eagles were diving into the water here and there, too many to see or count. There were also Steller’s sea lions lounging on the rocks, huge and brown, fat and warm, laid out on their beds of stone.

  The halibut can weigh over three hundred pounds and be well over six feet long. They too come here where the herring and the salmon thrive. Hopefully, the king salmon were here, thrashing, dashing, and feeding, gaining weight and power. They needed all the pent-up strength they could gain in order to reach their spawning rivers and creeks where they would lay their eggs, or fertilize them, and then die. And now we were here, the human predators, inept compared to the others, but attempting to catch our share.

  All I could hear were the loud, absolutely pure sounds all around us. The notes made by the world here were boisterous and overpowering. The sounds made me feel more powerful one moment and intimidated the next. Ocean waves broke on the sheer rock of the west-facing islands they met. Mature bald eagles fought and taught their young, both activities requiring different sounds. Our motor gurgled when the propeller was raised out of the water by a passing wave. But none of these sounds compared to the blasting, concentrated whoosh of air that overcame all the rest the instant it occurred, less than twenty feet from the boat.

  One moment there was just the surface of the water, and the next there was the black, bumpy, glistening back of a humpback whale. It exhaled, then inhaled and dove back to be completely surrounded by the water of the ocean, where it is the most massive predator of all. Apparently the whales were here too.

  I put a piece of herring on my hook and dropped it to the bottom. We were in about seventy-five feet of water. Once the weight hit the bottom, I began reeling it up; the king could hit the bait anytime. We did this over and over and over, not talking, concentrating intensely to feel the slightest nudge that would mean a salmon had been hooked. We all wanted to be the first to catch one. Then Sam’s line went limp as he dropped to the bottom—the weight below the hook was no longer keeping the line tight. Bill had said that the kings would often hit the bait on the way down. Sam set the hook and—zoom—the fight was on. Line instantly began peeling off his reel. The king salmon swam straight toward Japan and didn’t stop until Sam bore down enough to turn it, after it had stripped off a large bit of line. What astounding power for a fish that probably did not weigh more than thirty-five pounds.

  Sam pumped and reeled and pulled and fought. Tourists have been known to have heart attacks fighting these Alaskan kings. Sam is tough, though, and has serious sea legs. Waves, six feet and higher, were rolling into our boat, occasionally hitting it on its side, making it hard to stand. We had to hold on with one hand or sometimes both for extra balance. Sam could not spare even a finger in this all-out battle. He fought the king to the surface.

  In the pristine, dark blue and green ocean I caught occasional flashes of its bright silver side as it neared the top. It was thrilling to watch. Sam reeled in the line, then the salmon would answer and take back whatever line Sam had reeled in and more. Sam said nothing; he knew from over sixty years of living in Alaska that you should never lose your focus when fighting the life-and-death battle with a king salmon. They will somehow win the struggle with those who can’t keep total concentration. Even with fantastic focus, the kings can break your equipment or wear you out—anything to win and regain their freedom.

  Jerry had the net ready. The fish made another run, this time off the back of the boat, almost wrapping Sam’s line in the motor. It took more line than at any time before. Sam’s strong back worked and fought and brought the king back close enough again to where Jerry thought he could net it. Jerry, a longtime fishing guide before he got into politics, knows you don’t net an ocean-run king too soon. When they see the net, they seem to get a new burst of energy, enough often to break the line, get tangled—somehow, some way, to get away. To net one takes precise, definitive moves. Strike with the net if the king is not close enough to the top or is still too energized, and there is possible ruin. There may be nothing worse than fighting a magnificent king salmon with great skill and expenditure of strength, only
to have the person with the net lose your fish. Jerry came within a foot of netting it; it responded by heading straight down to the bottom.

  “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. PHOTO BY JERRY MACKIE

  “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 car
ds 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.