All the Cordova fishermen, including Per and Mark, were trying to decide where to go next time Alaska Fish and Game announced an opening. The word was flying around town like a bag of money ripped open in a west wind that there would be an opening in the next few days. It took the fish nine days to get from the ocean to the Copper River sonar counter. Some of the Copper River fish went over two hundred miles upriver to spawn, and it’s having to travel so far that makes these salmon so full of oils and good fat. Once salmon enter freshwater, they stop feeding and must survive from their own energy stores. The longer, more difficult, and swift a river they must swim up, the more body oil and fat they need. Some Alaskan salmon don’t swim over five miles. Don’t ask an Alaskan fisherman about the pen-raised salmon of Norway, the salmon most Americans eat. Pen-raised fish do not have to struggle to survive and to catch their prey; their meat is not as firm and rich. They do not spawn, they don’t have the fat and oil that give Alaskan salmon such flavor. It is illegal in Alaska to pen-raise salmon, only the wild will do.
“Only the wild will do,” my theme for Alaska salmon, should be the theme for the state, exempting some federal government employees. “Only the wild will do” could be added to the state flag as a motto. Only the wild salmon will do. Only the wild bears will do. Only the wild eagles will do. Only the wild rivers will do. Only the wild whales will do. Only the wild Alaskans will do. There would have to be a committee appointed with Native and non-Native representation. Members of this committee could be named based on percentages of how the people voted in the last presidential election. Then these Alaskans, along with a couple state lawyers, would write up the definition of what makes a “wild Alaskan human,” what makes “a wild salmon,” and so on.
WILD GENE
Down our side of the sidewalk came a man that Per explained had been in a terrible motorcycle accident. He is partially blind and moved slowly. My first reaction was to try to help him, but that would have been the wrong impulse toward such a determined person. Per said he was headed to shoot pool at the Alaskan Hotel and Bar, a block or two down toward where we’d first seen Neva.
Several people walked or drove by, but Per didn’t say anything about who they were. When he noticed I was waiting, he quickly rattled off their identities: a teacher, one of his fishing partners from the state of Washington, one of the stars of the high school basketball team, one of his neighbors from the trailer park. Then he told me about someone we hadn’t seen, a Cordova resident who had died several years ago.
“Watching the people with you reminded me that I hadn’t thought about Wild Gene in a while. Seems like most towns in Alaska had someone like Wild Gene in the seventies and eighties, but you don’t see people like him much anymore,” Per said.
Neva and Rebekah were getting closer to us as they watered the hanging baskets.
Per explained that Gene just showed up in Cordova one day; Per didn’t know why or how Gene had chosen their town. Some people just materialize in Alaska. When they choose a town like Cordova where most everyone knows each other, they are not really paid much attention at first. They could be a tourist who got off the ferry and stayed. They will usually leave in a day or a week or after the summer. If they make it through a winter, some people will begin to notice them and open up to them, perhaps not fully accept them as one of their own, but open the door.
Gene didn’t look too different at first, especially since he got here sometime in the seventies. Per graduated as salutatorian from Cordova High School, class of 1979, one of nineteen in his class. He remembers Gene being around during his later high school years, even during the time Per drove off the dock with his girlfriend in the car. (That’s another story.) After Gene had been around awhile, people began to find out things about him. He was from the Seattle area; his family members were important people in that state, wealthy people, and it turns out caring people too. People found out that Gene had been raised by nannies. He had grown up wearing blue blazers; he had graduated from an Ivy League–type college. People noticed that members of Gene’s family would come to town and visit him; he didn’t have a phone, so surely they got in touch with him through the mail. Per knew Gene got mail because Per’s mother, a high school English and drama teacher, belonged to the Fruit of the Month club and so did Gene. Per’s mother and Gene started having tea together, partly because they shared a Fruit of the Month club membership, and because, although he was odd, Gene and Per’s mother were both very intelligent.
Gene would often disappear into the wilderness for long periods and live off the land. Around Cordova even the locals don’t venture into its extremities very often. Mountain-goat hunters, some of the most extreme outdoorsmen in Alaska as they have to hike up to the frigid mountain peaks, traveled as far out as just about any human ventured in Alaska. Gene would often surface more than seventy-five miles from Cordova. One time he just appeared, as if he could astral project, right after a couple hunters had shot a mountain goat. He cut the balls off and popped them in his mouth, unfried, fresh Alaskan mountain oysters. His appearances and his appearance shocked some, and Alaskans are the hardest people to shock that I’ve ever met.
People would see Gene out on the road, past the airport, thirty miles out of town, pulling a 150-pound log by some rope. He told people if they asked that he was training to walk across Russia. He would load his pack with rocks, shoulder it, and hike the mountains, cross the glaciers, and even wade the surging rivers filled with small icebergs.
Some locals thought Gene had told them that he was here to write his master’s thesis, on what they were not sure. When his family would arrive to visit—Gene never left Cordova except to explore the surrounding wilderness—they would eat at the Reluctant Fisherman. They realized, surely, as many Cordovans did, that Gene had entered a place that most of us cannot or will not go. Although I’m sure they hoped to be able to find him there and help him return, they never did. Gene stayed the rest of his life in Cordova, and it became almost impossible near the end to find him, even when he sat right next to you on Main Street.
Per said he looked like someone from the movie Quest for Fire. He lived in a primitive shack in Hippie Cove, Cordova’s tent city. Almost every place in Alaska that has a cannery, where young college students, adventurers, drifters and escapers work, has a place in the deep woods at the edge of town where people squat. Some like Gene squat in these camps for years. Per said Gene had a small woodstove but no pipe for the smoke to flow properly out of his shelter. His body was saturated by wood smoke because he didn’t have a way to bathe regularly. Some said he didn’t believe in washing off the skin’s oils. Per, always a good swimmer and basketball player, swam laps to stay in shape; he said he always knew when Gene came to Cordova’s public pool to swim. Per would be swimming laps, his head down, and suddenly he’d taste something odd in the water. It seemed to be the distinctive taste/smell of wood smoke. The first time he noticed it he dismissed it, but then the second and third and fourth times he’d stop swimming laps and look to see who was in the pool. There was Wild Gene. Per would just keep swimming; he’s a fisherman—fish slime is money to him—and a little smoke is not going to bother him.
“People who came to visit Cordova would see him and ask me, who is that?” Per remembered. Even I knew that to stand out in Alaska enough that people asked about you suggests you are extraordinary.
Although Gene looked as if he could break you in half, he never hurt anyone. For the first few years Per said Gene was exceedingly dark and handsome and well built. You don’t pull 150-pound logs down an Alaskan logging road for days without getting fantastically in shape. He also rarely said much of anything to anyone. In his journeys into the Alaskan wilds alone he certainly saw more of this rare wilderness world than almost everyone, maybe more than anyone else.
“He actually lived the life of a Neanderthal. He put himself through such tough conditions his body just wore down after several years of it,” Per said.
We saw Neva and Rebeka
h lingering at one of the hanging baskets down the block; Neva was talking to someone she knew.
People around town began to notice Gene was getting thinner. His muscles were disappearing; he was not training anymore, not to walk across Russia nor for whatever reason he used when he’d first come to Cordova. By now, he was part of the town. People cared about him, wondered why he was the way he was, wondered why he wouldn’t eat well. Wild Gene had earned the townspeople’s respect; he could survive Alaska, in all its severity. Some said all he ate toward the end was Crisco, some bread, and crackers. Surely he had support from his family if he needed it, or a ticket out at any time. But he didn’t use it.
One day, someone who knew his habits noticed he hadn’t been around. Worried about him, the friend finally checked and found him in his shelter with a knife in his stomach, dead. Many people had come to respect Gene’s wild ways, the ability that almost none of them had to survive in the wilderness and live amid its extremity and brilliance. He was not buried at the local graveyard past Nirvana Park; he was taken back to finally be among his family in Washington, who had missed him.
Rebekah had joined us on the sidewalk in the moss-drying sunlight. Across the street from Orca Book and Sound where we stood was Davis Super Foods. It was a smallish grocery store; amazingly, Cordova had two and the other one was quite large. A dark-haired, athletic-looking young man standing out front was wearing X Games–style sunglasses; he wasn’t looking right at us, but beyond.
“That’s Andy Johnson,” Per said, continuing to ID every person we saw. “He’s a third-generation fisherman. He’s in his early twenties, and he’s a snowboarder.”
Per gestured high into the air above downtown Cordova, toward the east to one of several large mountains that surround Cordova in a semicircle completed by ocean.
“That mountain, that’s Mount Eccles, it looks over the town. Andy’s best friend, Teal, another top snowboarder, was the first to snowboard it.” Per pointed out that this time of year, because of snowmelt, the side of this mountain was shaped like a lady in a flowing dress.
I couldn’t imagine anyone flying down that mountain’s face. It looked almost vertical from here, and mountains always appear less steep than they are when you’re looking at them from below and far away.
“When Teal died in a car wreck, Andy snowboarded down it as a tribute to him,” Per said.
Andy was crossing the street toward us. Either he could tell we were talking about him, recognized (like just about everyone else) we were new in town, or had noticed Rebekah.
A cab went by. Per said Cordova was the kind of town where if a cabdriver saw your dog running loose, he’d give your puppy a ride home if he could get it to obey him.
Andy had short hair and the calm assurance of a daredevil who has never been seriously injured. He could have been one of those models in an Armani ad, one of those fit Italians. He walked slowly, like someone used to doing things at speeds faster than just about anyone else can. Per introduced us; Andy shook my hand politely and lingered just a fraction saying hello to Rebekah. Per explained to Andy what we were doing. When he heard we were writers, he told us he was planning to take a screenwriting class in L.A. in the off-season.
“Hey, man, you want to talk about writing sometime while you’re here, get in touch with me,” Andy said. He looked down the road and strode away before I could answer, his step light and long.
I called out to him, “Yeah, if I have some time, sure.”
“I always know Andy’s boat—he has an older bow-picker he bought from his grandfather—because he almost always has a surfboard strapped to the roof,” Per said. “Around here, Andy and I, in the beginning of the season, we fish with gill nets. You make a set and sit awhile, let the fish swim into the net. Well, Andy will put on his wet suit and fish the beach side. He’ll catch a wave or two before pulling up and picking the fish out of the nets.” Per remembered Andy had been on the Junior Olympic ski team in the sixth grade.
An exotic-looking and quick-stepping woman walked by. Per said she was Hanna, one of the bartenders at the Alaskan Hotel and Bar. She’s been here since the mideighties. She’d come from Africa, came here with a fisherman she’d met, but it didn’t work out. Per thought Hanna was from northern Africa, and he said she worked out at Muscle Mary’s.
When these fishermen have big earning years, when the salmon are thick and the price is good, some travel to far-off, hot, dry, sunny places to have some fun. Given the dangers of the way they make a living, exotic and dangerous travel locations don’t faze them at all. Some return with almost no money left and accompanied by a different woman from the one they had when they left.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT
Neva had finished watering her hanging baskets. Per asked if we were hungry, and everyone was. We went to the café frequented by the fishermen and locals, in a back room of the Cordova Hotel and Bar. Next door, the Alaskan Hotel and Bar sign outside was purposefully hung upside down, had been for some time. These bars looked as if they had been floated here from the Wild West, though Alaska is the Wild West. You could either walk through the bar or through a dark hallway. The hallway back to the Cordova Café was barely lit; the carpet was old and worn and a popular style from a decade or two ago. It was obviously a local’s place. It felt as if we were entering a speakeasy or some other place where illegal acts were perpetrated. Almost every table was full. There were pictures on the walls taken by local commercial fishermen, photos of the fantastic situations all fishermen dream about.
“One time I know of, I think it was the largest single set ever, this gillnetter had thirty-eight thousand pounds of reds. That was in Bristol Bay,” Per said, reminding himself, getting himself psyched up. These fishermen try to forget the sets with zero fish or three fish or twelve fish.
I looked at the decorations on the walls. There were pictures of old gillnet boats, the slow boats before they began using fiberglass hulls and fast $40,000 diesel engines. There was a mounted king crab and a picture of a seine boat with its net so full of pink salmon the boat leaned over into the water. Most exciting to these cowboys of the gulf was the picture of a gill net in the water, white foam all across the top of the net. This happens, Per explained, when hundreds of red salmon hit the net at once. Even better is when it’s a smashing hit of salmon. Then the whole top of the net foams and splashes, corks even disappear. The picture represents every fisherman’s dream; it is why they take all the risks. It is why when there are only five fish in their net after an hour, they still hope for the set when they will fill their icebox. The picture, that dream come true, is why they spend so much time grunting it out, rushing here and there in the ocean.
As we finished at the Cordova Café, Per introduced us to a couple of his fishing partners, Pip and Butch. Many of these fishermen belong to small groups. During an opening they fan out and fish in different places that have been hot in the past and might be again. Per had been debating with himself for hours. “Should I go around Ester Island and pick chum salmon? I’d be about guaranteed there would be lots of them at forty cents a pound. Or should I gamble and risk an opening going for the much higher priced kings and reds?” They’re called reds because of their bright, bright red flesh.
The buyers don’t like to announce the price until an opening has begun; it’s always highest in the beginning of the season, and if numbers caught are high, it can drop. The fishermen-talk at the tables underneath the pictures of full nets at the Cordova Café was that kings might be $2.50 a pound, and they were hoping $1.60 to $1.80 for reds. Kings are not plentiful, but a couple twenty-pound kings in the net is $100 worth of salmon. Reds weighing five, six pounds are more abundant. If reds average five pounds each, and the buyers are paying $1.75 a pound or $8.75 a fish, 15 reds are $131.25, 150 reds are $1,312.50. If there are 1,500 fish, the net is quaking and shaking and half-sunk and your dream is alive in the daytime, that’s $13,125 in one full net. Per told me as we hit the street and headed back to their trailer park that
he’s made sets without one salmon, and sets when the Steller’s sea lions had a chance to pick them out before he did.
On the Cordova sidewalk, standing on a piece imprinted with a sea otter, Neva started talking to an older gentleman named Guy Beedle. He is her flower-growing buddy, a retiree who has created the latest excitement in the Cordova flower-growing community. He’d begun growing native Alaskan iris from seed. Guy wore his ever-present brown Carhartts. All over Alaska they have Carhartt fashion shows, or would that be antifashion shows? Whichever, it would be the only fashion show I would ever have a chance to star in. Neva was asking Guy about planting flowers near her church. She’s active in St. George’s Episcopal Church, an enchanted sanctuary with a peaked roof surrounded by old spruce trees that do not let in much sunlight. About 75 percent of the time one of the few parishioners led the service because there was no permanent clergy, just a priest who served them as well as several other isolated congregations. Guy’s inspiration, Neva thought, came more from flowers, their care and growing, than organized religion. But Guy said he’d help her plant his vibrant flowers, several of which he’d grown from seed, around her church.
We walked down to Council Street, then to Railroad Avenue. We were headed to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game office. They are the permission givers—they schedule the openings. Daniel Sharp, the area management biologist, was a powerful man around here. His decisions were debated, directly questioned, but generally respected in town, Per said. What a job: to have to live in the town, a town with no road in or out, with no way to avoid the fishermen whose lives you affect in so many ways. And if the fishermen didn’t have enough money, they couldn’t hire crews, boat cleaners, engine mechanics. They couldn’t belong to Muscle Mary’s, buy books at Orca Book and Sound. Per and Neva couldn’t eat out too often at the Cordova Café. Boats had to be used for several more years, engines pampered, propellers repaired one more time. Houses went unpainted, church offering plates showed more bottom, school fund-raisers brought in less, sports trips that required hundreds of miles of air travel were curtailed. This city depends on the exquisite salmon: kings, reds, chum, pinks, and halibut. Daniel Sharp was like a god here, but he could also be like a strict parent, making you come home early or not allowing you to go out at all.