Cordova is just up the coast from Seward, but there is no easy way to get there from our Alaska home. Cordova is considered one of Alaska’s larger “cities,” even though it has only twelve hundred residents in the winter and twenty-five hundred in the summer. It is a city where, so far, fishermen and the people whom they support rule. The local voters have had several opportunities to vote on whether to build a road to connect them to the outside world. The road has never passed, although the last vote was the closest ever. The voters who oppose the road say the reason the vote is getting too close is because too many nonfishermen are moving into town. Even if they had a road, it would only be open in the summer, the time when most people in this fishing village are involved one way or the other in catching fish. The summer is their harvest time, when the fishermen of Cordova attempt to catch enough salmon and halibut to make the majority of their money, enough to get them through the year until the salmon and halibut return. They wouldn’t get to use the road much, anyway. More important than a road is a protected place for their boats, and Cordova does have a fine natural harbor.
That the road would only be open in the summer aggravates plenty of Cordovans. Such a road would be loaded with tourists. Many Alaskans don’t like driving on the same road with tourists. It would be like putting NASCAR drivers on the same racetrack with thousands of drivers like my grandfather at eighty-five. Lots of Alaskans drive like they’re on the last lap of the Daytona 500 and they’re one one-hundredth of a second in the lead. Tourists, on the other hand, often drive like my grandfather did right before he couldn’t drive anymore because he couldn’t hear and his sight was failing. They tend to speed up, then slow down to fifteen miles per hour, cross the centerline, weave onto the shoulder, and stop when there’s no stop sign in sight. They drive like this not because they can’t hear or can’t see, but because they can. All around them their eyes and ears are filled with sights and creatures they’ve never seen. A bald eagle just plucked a salmon from the river running along the road. Eight tourist vehicles pull over, though there’s no place for them to get completely out of the way. I once stopped right in a curve in Cooper Landing on the way to Soldotna to watch two eagles fighting over a salmon squirming on the icy bank of the river. It was not smart—there was even ice and snow on the road—but Alaska can overwhelm you until you do dumb things.
But tourists’ driving habits are not the main reason certain Cordovans don’t want a road. What would happen if outsiders could reach their lovely town? Cordovans aren’t sure, but they have seen what’s happened to the ranchers and small-town folk in Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming. Their high desert, their mountain valleys, their inspiring lands, have been discovered and much of it has been bought up. Alaskan fishermen are intelligent as well as ornery. They read national commercial-fishing magazines. They’ve read about their fellow fishermen in Florida. First people arrived as tourists, then they moved in and tried to take over the world that belonged to the fishermen. In Florida, some of these newly arrived used vicious tactics against the unorganized fishermen to push through a net-fishing ban in a statewide vote.
Cordovans know what has happened along all U.S. coastlines, where everybody wants waterfront property. They’ve read about the lobstermen of Maine, about others who harvest the sea on the West Coast, on the Gulf Coast. People with more money and more lawyers discovered these quaint, scenic fishing villages, where folks had been making a living at the world’s second-oldest profession for generations. These Alaskan fishermen are worldly enough to understand what could happen to their quirky and attractive hometown if it was “discovered” by some Ted Turner type, who after making his hundreds and hundreds of millions decided to let everything go back to the bears or wolves or buffalo. One of these “know-it-all” people might try to buy up a chunk of the town as a personal retreat, have something to brag about at parties now that Aspen has been in the movie Dumb and Dumber.
Cordova. PHOTO BY REBEKAH JENKINS
These fishermen know these kinds of people can have inordinate power in Washington and with the media. Alaskan commercial fishermen have more political power than any other fishermen do in the United States, but mostly that influence is in Alaska. It is shrinking. Sport fishermen like me want our fish too. The commercial fishermen don’t mind these kinds of people coming to visit or even getting a summer place, just as long as they respect what Cordova is and what they do. Just don’t try to tell the fishermen how to make their living or where to store their boats. These fishermen and their families are ready to fight for their world, without surrender.
I imagine many people would side with the Cordovans who don’t want a road. The slogan No Road sounds so cool. No Road sounds almost as good as Save the Rain Forest. Who could be against it? It’s easy to be against roads and oil drilling and the harvesting of wood when you already have as much of them as you could possibly use. How many would be against a road if they had none? Most of us have never spent a second thinking about roads, because there are so many, enough to take us in every single direction our lusty hearts might desire.
Right now the only way out of Cordova is on the Alaskan State Ferry, on your own boat, or by plane. None of the options are cheap. The way out on the sea is real slow, and you’re still on foot when you get where you’re going. For those who don’t want a road to Cordova, such as the people I was going to visit, it’s not about the romance; it’s about the desire to save their way of life.
If you live in Cordova, you can drive fifty-one miles without going around and around. In Alaska, that’s a bunch of road. In Angoon, on Admiralty Island, they are proud to have just three miles of road, “all paved.” Some Cordova locals think their mostly Mayberry police department should not have gone so Rambo and bought the used “high pursuit” police cars from that police department in Nevada. In Nevada it’s dry and flat and people can try to outrun the police. In Cordova, all you can do to get away from the police is go out the road and past the airport before you have to come back. No one would even try to walk away from here but Wild Gene, and he would never have caused the police any trouble anyway. You could use the slowest police car in the country and just ease out the road past Lake Eyak, park, and wait. Technically, you could just wait in town until whomever you’re chasing comes back. Besides, in a high-pursuit police car you could hit a nesting trumpeter swan if you ran off the road.
If Rebekah and I had been ready one day earlier, we could have taken the Alaska Marine Ferry over there from Seward. It takes eleven hours and covers 144 nautical miles, which is 164 “normal” miles for those of us road-addicted people. Many, many Alaskans gauge their travel more by nautical miles, air miles, or hours down the trail. The cost for the ferry was only $64.
HANGING BASKETS
Rebekah, my firstborn child, who is almost twenty, was sitting next to me on the milk run to Cordova. They call this Alaska Airlines flight the milk run because it stops so many times. Anchorage, Cordova, Yakutat, Juneau, Ketchikan, and finally Seattle. When the salmon are running into the Copper River delta, which is the main catch of Cordova fishermen, the jets on the milk run have large cargo sections loaded with fresh king, red, and silver salmon, high-dollar fresh fish, headed for the markets and best restaurants in Seattle and beyond. Reds and kings are worth more as cargo than any human per square foot. Rebekah was in the middle seat; a handsome, blond Scandinavian-looking guy with earrings in both ears was in the window seat next to her. She handed me her CD player and asked me if I’d heard of Dave Matthews. I wasn’t sure, I said. I never thought I’d lose track of who made the best music, but I wasn’t paying so much attention to popular trends anymore. She said I must have a listen, she just knew I’d like it. I was a Dave Matthews fan after hearing her two favorite songs. Responding so intently this quickly to new music was rare for me. I closed my eyes, laid my head back, and listened.
When I opened my eyes to tell Rebekah how awesome I thought her music was, she was lost in conversation with the strong blond. Turned out he
was headed to Petersburg, Alaska, the fishing village they call “little Norway,” to crew on his dad’s long-line halibut boat. He was a sophomore at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Being with Rebekah was an almost constant replay of my younger life. I watched her relate to people; I remembered what it was like. I listened to her music, some of which was mine first—Van Morrison, the All-man Brothers. I was honored she would even go to Cordova with me, but I got the feeling sitting on the plane she would have liked to change her plans and head to Petersburg. There was no way I could have hung around with my mother when I was Rebekah’s age.
Landing the 737 at Cordova, if that’s what we were doing now, was at once frightening and otherworldly. As we made our approach, if that’s what it was, I couldn’t even see a runway or any airport buildings, just the many fingers of the Copper River delta. It looked almost like the Mississippi River delta, except it was surrounded by plane-humbling mountain ranges and glaciers. It was raining one second, sunny the next, foggy here and there, over this chunk of Alaska. The jet engines seemed to be making a noise I hadn’t heard before, but then I’ve learned that flying experiences in other places have little to do with Alaska.
We landed. There was no fence around this runway, which appeared to be hacked out of the wilderness by renegade bulldozers; what if a moose or a bear had been standing in our way? We could see one small building. Everybody got off and walked down some stairs into the real world. Inside the building were plaques celebrating that 2 million pounds of wild salmon and halibut had passed out of Cordova’s airport on their way to the outside world. Some mounted salmon were on one wall alongside a diagram of the Copper River delta, which is one of the world’s most alive, productive, and clean wetland areas. How did they ever get bulldozers out here, not to mention gravel and asphalt to make a runway? All over the state, Alaskans land planes on surfaces you have to see to believe.
We had arranged to meet up with Per Nolan, a local salmon fisherman. His wife, Neva, had invited us to come stay with them after she had heard me interviewed by the guru of Spenard, Alaska, Steve Heimel of Alaska Public Radio. She said she had known me from my earlier writings, and they wanted to show us their slice of Alaska. Alaska is one big pizza. Neva said it would be good if I could go out with a gillnetter while I was here, but her husband was a big guy and there was only one small bunk on his boat. We’d have to see about that. I asked Neva if it would be all right if I brought my daughter Rebekah with me. Neva said, great, bring the whole family. That was a typical Alaskan response. They always seem ready to take you in, feed you, provide you with shelter. It’s been that way forever up here. Imagine Per as a cross between John Candy and an offensive lineman for the University of Idaho. He is funny; large-framed, not cut like a bodybuilder, he is surprisingly spry on his feet when he needs to be. Until you experience Per in a bar, you wouldn’t know he is also a pool shark and the life of the party. Per is an observer. He was in college in Hawaii when John Travolta and disco hit, and he told us he had had the “disco fever” shiny suit, the open-at-the-chest shirt, the gold chain, and the platform shoes. After being in Cordova only a half hour, I could not imagine him wearing anything like that. Cordova is a flannel-shirt, blue-jeans, and work-boots kind of place.
Driving in from the airport, the wind was either chilled blowing off the glaciers or warmer coming out of the wetlands. To the south was the Gulf of Alaska. Compared to Cordova, Seward was wide-open. Per told us that if we could walk to the nearest town, Valdez, which was west along the tide line, it would be 140 to 150 miles. By boat, it’s only 55 to 60 miles. This illustrates why Alaska has more coastline than the whole lower forty-eight states combined, thanks to thousands and thousands of bays and countless islands. And Cordova has the fishing industry that goes along with this vast area. Some Cordova fishermen became “spill-ionaires,” renting themselves and their fishing boats to Exxon during the cleanup.
Neva Nolan in Cordova. PHOTO BY REBEKAH JENKINS
Per pulled up in town next to a ladder set up by a hanging basket spilling over with vividly colored flowers halfway to the ground. Neva, who grew up in Wrangell, took care of all the many hanging baskets of growing flowers on Main Street in Cordova. She stood atop the ladder, watering the basket carefully. She’d attached a greenhouse to the side of their trailer that was more than half the size of their home. It was instantly obvious, the way she lifted up the flowers to water them, the way she finished her job before turning to us, that she found much inspiration in the beauty, rich color, and delicate petals of her charges. Neva had an exotic look, almost Mediterranean. She said she took care of thirty hanging baskets in Cordova.
Cordova was not what I expected. Alaskan communities are competitive with each other. Don’t ask a person from Seward what he thinks of Cordova. If you are in Soldotna and you want to know what Seward’s like, don’t ask a longtime Soldotna resident. They’ll tell you all it does is rain in Seward, that moss grows on everything. And so it goes all over Alaska. I’d ask some people I knew in Seward what they thought of Cordova. “It’s badly in need of a paint job.” “There are too many old hippies and eccentrics.”
The four of us stood on Main Street by Laura’s Liquors, next to a flower box. Neva explained that here on the Alaskan coast she had to plant flowers that could survive wind and lots of rain. Daisies, pansies, petunias, lobelias, grew nicely until the end of October. The town was also adorned with brightly colored banners with sea otters, red salmon, waves, and wildflowers on them, which were hung from the streetlights. Imprinted in the concrete sidewalks were drawings of octopuses, starfish, and salmon. The sun shone down on Cordova and made all things bright.
Neva told us, “One day of sunshine is worth a week of rain.” I’d heard that at least ten times since I’d arrived in Alaska. People truly appreciate sunny weather in the summer. It’s like a wonderful meal someone else cooked and left as a surprise at your house. The people who live here year-round earn their portions.
Around us, people were walking everywhere, living their lives here. Cordova was impressively set up for so small a town; after all, all this art and these banners and Neva’s flowers were provided by the city and her neighbors just to inspire the locals. Visitors like us, newcomers, were welcome, but life in Cordova was not designed for them. The town’s biggest yearly festival was the Iceworm Festival, held the first week of February, put on for the benefit of just the year-round folk. Cordova even held their Fourth of July fireworks in February because it didn’t get dark enough in July until too late for the little ones.
Neva drove an eighties Nissan Sentra. It had few miles on it; how could anyone put many miles on any vehicle here? Rebekah was going to help Neva with the rest of her watering while Per and I walked down the street; the boat docks and Orca Inlet were on the block below us. Per said it was common to see two hundred or more sea otters just off the docks by St. Elias Ocean Products and North Pacific Processors in the winter. We headed to Orca Book and Sound and the Killer Whale Café. Inside, we could have been in Seattle in the late eighties. Kelly, the owner, was once a kayak guide; he used to be mayor, but he had lost the most recent election to Margie by one vote. Margie owns the restaurant and motel one block below called the Reluctant Fisherman and is a passionate supporter of the road and the tourism industry.
We got a couple of mochas from Scott and wandered out to the sidewalk. I began asking Per questions about passersby. Who is that coming out of that store, who’s parking that truck? Who is that leaning against the front of the smaller grocery store in town—why does that lady seem too dressed up for an Alaskan fishing town? (Turns out it was Phyllis Blake, secretary of the Prince William Sound Aquaculture Association. She always dresses nice, Per told me.)
Per knew every single person who walked, bicycled, or rode by in a car, truck, motorcycle, or van. As I pressed him for information on each person, he could and did speak detail after detail about everyone we saw. He knew more about people in this town than a normal person would at the
ir own family reunion. Then as a joke and I thought something of a challenge, I asked him to name everyone we saw from behind, without seeing faces. He did it. Mary, who ran Muscle Mary’s, a workout place, was an easy ID. She had about 2 percent body fat. Few people I saw in Cordova looked like her, from any angle. Per said that if we hadn’t spotted her from the rear, I would have noticed that she always smiled, was always happy. Mary always took part in Cordova’s biggest adult-female event of the year held in late February or early March. The local women decided on a theme every year. One recent theme was Dressed to Thrill. Per served as a bartender for that one, and he remembered Mary’s outfit because it consisted of paint. She painted on her Dress to Thrill costume. They’d had a disco theme, one with evening gowns, one to “dress as slutty as you could.” Per remembered one woman went wrapped in Saran Wrap for that one. Because everyone in Cordova knows almost everything about everyone else, having these parties is more like playing dress-up with your sisters.
Per acted surprised when he saw one fisherman with a woman he thought was involved with someone else. It reminded him of the often-repeated Alaskan mantra: “In Alaska you don’t lose your girlfriend, you lose your turn.” If you’re the type who can’t live around someone you went out with or were married to, don’t move to Alaska.
A red Ford F250 pickup pulled up in front of the bookstore, which was next to the office of the Cordova District Fishermen United. CDFU lobbied, followed political winds of change, and fought for the rights of local commercial fishermen. The guy who parked the truck was Mark King; in his mid-to-late forties, he was a second-generation Cordova gillnetter and seiner, like Per. Gillnet fishermen like Per and Mark are the cowboys of the Alaskan fleet, the fast runners. They are after the big-dollar fish, the kings and the reds.
Floatplanes often flew over downtown. All gillnetting for king and red salmon, which was the current season, is tightly controlled by Alaska Fish and Game and usually done in “openings” of twenty-four hours, sometimes only twelve hours. The Alaska Fish and Game office in Cordova is responsible for deciding when and for how long salmon fishing will take place. The openings were scheduled based on a sonar salmon counter fifty miles up the Copper River. A certain number of salmon had to be passing by to allow fishing in the ocean. When they’re ready, they announce the time and duration of the opening, usually a day or so before the appointed hour.