The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

by Carl Safina

  Most of these clear-cuts we’re looking at are ten to twenty years old, but the short summers here slow regrowth. John Muir counted the rings in a hemlock here that was only twenty inches in diameter—and 540 years old. Only 5 percent of the region has been clear-cut—but because of ice, rock, and quirks of drainage, only 4 percent of the Tongass is capable of supporting truly giant trees. Loggers cut: The biggest. The oldest. Those stands that were most important to wildlife.

  The government still spends about $30 million annually auctioning federal timber to private loggers. Bids bring in about $750,000—a $29,250,000 loss to taxpayers. “Dividing that by 200 Tongass timber jobs,” writes author Douglas H. Chadwick, “the government could pay each logger and mill worker $146,250 a year to stay home and let the rainforest be.”

  But hear this: the major clear-cutting is past. A lot of forest remains. At least for now. The corporations and the massive taxpayer-funded, congressionally pumped, market-distorting corporate subsidies have, like a threatening fever, largely run their course. Weakened by their own overreaching, they’ve given way to more rational practices. This region, seemingly so wild, has actually been recovering from massive logging and overfishing. I hope it can stay on track.

  The region remains very much in transition toward “whatever will come next.” And what’s coming, mainly—is tourism. Nowadays, the 200 people employed by the region’s thirteen sawmills make up less than 1 percent of Southeast’s total employment. Meanwhile, gigantic cruise ships, each employing 1,000 workers, bring people who want to see forested slopes. In Ketchikan alone, population 8,000, cruise ships dislodge 800,000 passengers whose shopping sprees generate $120 million.

  When I ask Wade where he sees the future headed, he says, “Juneau has transitioned to tourism. Wrangell has transitioned to fishing and tourism. Ketchikan is still carrying a grudge.”

  Some people don’t want one more log taken out. But there’s room for small operators. Some former clear-cuts have dense second growth, where thinning would benefit wildlife. These communities helped protect these forests. Now environmentalists should ask them, “What are your dreams for the future?”

  * * *

  Point Adolphus brings a sea change and a change of air. The mouth of Glacier Bay exhales chilly breath, wrapping the shores in a misty taffeta gown. Cloud-piercing peaks gleam in shafts of light. It’s a dynamic, many-paneled sky, by turns somber and spectacular. Heavily timbered shores rise so steep they practically leap skyward. The place feels new again.

  Icy Strait is mainly about absorbing injected energy from the nearby ocean. The chart warns that tidal currents “may attain velocities of 8 or 10 knots.” Absolutely true; a manic tide is pushing roiling rivers of ocean water through the strait. Ocean-powered currents create lush plankton pastures, turning the water jade. Tiny zooplankton graze the single-celled, drifting grass. Swarms of small fishes reap the grazers. Whales, sea lions, and birds exploit the fish swarms. And we take it all in.

  The main hot spot—well marked by seabirds—is a seafloor hill of gravelly rubble plowed into place when the glaciers of Glacier Bay extended this far. That hill is about half a mile wide and, underwater, runs out a couple of miles from shore.

  With the tide forcing deep water over the drowned moraine, surface currents churn as if they’re boiling. The squeeze concentrates everything, thickening the broth. If you think like a hungry fish, your thoughts take you to this soup kitchen.

  Herring dimple the surface like raindrops. Even by Alaskan standards, this area seems supercharged with life. Flying birds crowd the air: Kittiwakes, Bonaparte’s Gulls, yellow-legged Mew Gulls, scarlet-legged Pigeon Guillemots. Diving birds called Marbled Murrelets chase fishes by “flying” underwater. To get airborne, they leap up, then bounce off the water while whirring their wings. In California, Oregon, and Washington, where 95 percent of the original nesting forests were cut down, Marbled Murrelets declined 80 percent in twenty years. Their population from California through Washington dropped to around 18,000 adults. Their population in Southeast Alaska: 680,000. That’s why they’re everywhere I look.

  Small, swimming shorebirds called Red-necked Phalaropes positively pepper the surface. When two predatory jaegers buzz in, the phalaropes rise in snaking lines that merge into smokelike clouds. I estimate—it’s hard to see the end of the flocks—perhaps ten thousand phalaropes. Flocks I’ve seen elsewhere had about a dozen birds. The world’s largest sea lions—Steller Sea Lions, elsewhere in trouble—proliferate here. Their jaws dwarf a Brown Bear’s. One surfaces with a salmon, and a quick, skillful flip makes the fish vanish whole.

  And soon we sight so many whales—Humpbacks—so close to shore that the sound of their breathing mingles with the chittering from eagles watching from towering trees. The whales’ misty exhalations drift like little clouds against the forested slopes. In groups of six or eight, the herring-hounding whales plow through tide rips and along shoreline drop-offs. Gulls seeking injured fish fly around the whales and through their steamy spouts, dipping occasionally for a prize.

  Fluke, fluke, fluke, fluke. Gliding shoulder to shoulder, the whales roll into their next dive and throw their tails skyward, the weight of their immense tailstocks driving them like pilings into the sea. For a few minutes, they vanish. John Muir: “Think of the hearts of these whales, beating warm against the sea, day and night, through dark and light, on and on for centuries; how the red blood must rush and gurgle in and out, bucketfuls, barrelfuls at a beat.”

  Blow, blow, blow, blow. Abruptly surfacing whales shoot dense jets of breath, roaring their steamy exhalations loud enough to echo from the rocks and higher silences. Strangely, one trumpets almost elephantlike whenever it blows.

  For two hours we watch one dense herd of about fifteen Humpbacks surfacing in unison and plunging to hunt the unfathomable tons of small fish they need. The sonar screen shows flecking from 150 feet down to the bottom, at around 300. “Busted-up herring schools,” Wade interprets. “This is a long time for feeding whales to stay pressed against one small stretch of shore. Those herring they’ve been working are probably shot to remnants.”

  Occasionally, a distant breaching whale detonates a great explosion, the sound taking as long as two seconds to report like muffled cannon fire. Wade’s assessment: “Boy, this is some pile o’ whales.”

  * * *

  Whales aren’t the only ones who have to eat. We drop a line with half a dozen shiny hooks—and in seconds several herring come over the rail. Wade moves us to a secret spot. We anchor on a hill just sixty feet deep and drop a couple of fresh-caught fish to the seafloor.

  When we haven’t had a bite in five minutes, Wade gets agitated. I’m thinking, “Wade, we’re fishing; have patience.”

  Just five minutes later a fish comes knocking. Wade said this was a great spot for fish that are “the right size for dinner”—but he miscalculated. After a ten-minute struggle, we tie a seventy-pound halibut to our stern cleat.

  In a world full of starving people, the herring themselves would have been sufficient blessing. Here, in a few minutes, we traded a quarter-pound herring for months’ worth of beautiful fish meat. The thick fillets gleam with pearly translucence, delicious simply to look at. If you figure, very conservatively, that only half the weight of the fish is muscle (and the rest is head, guts, bone, skin, fins), then we have 35 pounds of pure fillet—70 half-pound meals, 140 quarter-pound servings. Wade will be rich in fish all winter. Our biggest daily decision for the rest of the trip will be: Fresh salmon or fresh halibut, grilled, fried, or baked? Our halibut is the biggest Wade’s ever seen from this spot. In most other places, the biggest fish were caught long ago. But like I said, this is a place that still works. Wade’s assessment: “Boy, that’s some heap o’ meat.”

  * * *

  I’m spoiled. Smitten. It didn’t take long to feel this place capturing my soul.

  We anchor in a cozy, conifer-lined cove under a bowl of snow-draped peaks. I’m amazed to see so much snow
in midsummer; but Wade’s never seen so much bare rock up there. That’s the value of having lived in a place: you have some idea of what’s expected and what’s unexpected.

  From those peaks, streams pour down corrugated, nearly vertical slopes before plunging into dense forest. The icy fingers of meltwater serve a wide emerald marsh and a shallow, braided creek that runs to the tidewater.

  The large island that our map calls “Admiralty” has a more apt Tlingit name: Kootznoowoo—Fortress of the Bears. So when I get my first good scan of shore, this is what I see: A flock of crows picking through the tide-line rockweed, bent into their task like van Gogh’s potato planters. A Brown Bear lifts its head from the tall marsh grass. Suddenly, two. The second has cubs, so four. Another bear with two cubs strides into view along the forest border. So—seven Grizzlies.

  This place bears Brown Bears at almost unimaginable densities: about one per square mile. The bears are so abundant because of beaches and mudflats full of shellfish, rivers that swell with salmon, and the general lushness the rain facilitates. Though the same species as Grizzlies, these Browns represent a distinct lineage believed to be descended from bears marooned between impenetrable ice sheets hundreds of thousands of years ago. Bigger than interior Grizzlies because of their salmon supplement and the longer foraging season, coastal Browns attain weights exceeding one thousand pounds.

  I sleep with a headful of dancing bears.

  Ursus arctos once ruled from the Mississippi to the Pacific and from Mexico to the Arctic tundra. They maintain their footing in parts of Russia and a tiny fraction of Europe and North America. (Though its visage stalks California’s state flag, California’s last Grizzly was shot in 1922.) Their final stronghold: Alaska. In Southeast they live largely on three big islands—Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof; the “ABC islands”—which harbor over four thousand bears.

  Around the time of the last California Grizzly, the Daily Alaska Empire editorialized, “The brown bears ought to be exterminated—at once.” Then John Holzworth’s passionate 1930 book, The Wild Grizzlies of Alaska, sparked a national movement to protect Southeast Alaska’s bears, and Admiralty’s Browns appeared saved. But in 1968, loggers planned to cut down 95 percent of Admiralty’s trees. Even at nine feet tall, the bears couldn’t stand up for themselves. Litigation would decide whether the bear’s fortress would fall. For a raging decade, lawsuits were lost, won, and appealed. In 1978, President Carter ended the debate by declaring Admiralty a national monument. Two years later, Congress designated most of Admiralty as the Kootznoowoo Wilderness. It took fifty years, but basically, the bears won. Whenever cooler heads prevail and something has been saved, time always confirms the value of salvation, and earns our thanks.

  * * *

  “Good morning; see any bears?” Wade’s on deck with a face towel and his toothbrush.

  Soon a dark Griz saunters onto the beach trailing three cubs past half a dozen loafing eagles. One cub, a runty little thing, endearingly pathetic, is likely doomed. More than half of Grizzly cubs die before their first birthday, and being the runt among siblings doesn’t make for good odds.

  One bear per square mile is Admiralty’s average density. But at this time of the year, many bears move down to stalk salmon, making the lowland densities much higher. The bears have come but, unlike at Anan Creek, the salmon here are late, still sparse. That might mean hungry, edgy bruins.

  This is a good, safe vantage. All of the most experienced people I’ve spoken to (and I’m talking about guides and biologists, people less afraid of bears than of traffic) have, at one time or another, felt the need to raise a loaded rifle at a threatening bear. We have no rifle. Nor could we have a better defense than the boat and binoculars.

  But we decide—I cannot help feeling that this is foolish; I mean, there are a lot of bears with cubs—to go ashore.

  A few days ago I declined to go ashore on a very pretty island when Wade mentioned that it was free of bears. No bears? What was the point? The on-edge feeling of being in bear country has become, well, I don’t want to say “addictive.” When I mentioned this later to a local, he didn’t say something like “You’re naïve; they’re dangerous.” He said, “Yeah, you want to know there are some bears around.”

  Well, yeah, that’s what I want to know. And so—.

  Into a light drizzle I’m carrying a heavy-duty can of pepper spray, my fly rod, and a lot of trepidation. Pepper spray isn’t foolproof. (Nor are guns.) And because the canister costs about fifty bucks, we have no spares—so I’ve never practiced firing it.

  All across the exposed tidal flats, I see little jets of water squirting; the flats are loaded with clams. At the mouth of the river, I notice small packs of newly arriving salmon—six to a few dozen fish in each—gliding in. This is a short stream, so these are Pinks. We walk past.

  Griz tracks are everywhere in the sand. I soon notice that as a rose by any name smells sweet, this monumental island smells like bears. Their trail at the edge of the forest is well worn and wide. This is no vaguely visible “game trail.” It’s a bear road. Imagine a well-used horse-riding trail. That’s how much bear shit.

  The scat is full of blueberries, which grow luxuriantly to heights over our heads. There’s a lot of close cover; a bear could appear from anywhere. Their trails network the whole forest. Brown Bears so thoroughly pervade the mists and shadows that the silence virtually hums with their presence. There’s no need for Bigfoot. The Brown Bear is all the monster you could want.

  I’m out of my element. Wade’s the guy experienced in Brown Bear country. Sheepishly, I admit, “This seems a bit stupid.” I await Wade’s reassurance.

  “Yeah,” he says instead, “this is kinda on the ragged edge of that word.”

  I start calling, “Hey, bears! Hi-o.”

  Bears don’t like surprises. But nothing guarantees that an alerted bear will choose to slink off. Some bears have pride. Others have cubs. Maybe a bear has just walked by but her cubs are fifty yards behind her when we show up between them.

  “Hey, bears! Hi-o. Tasty white meat here.” The thick wilderness silence quickly absorbs our calls. If anything can be simultaneously awe-inspiring and nerve-racking, this is.

  * * *

  Two planes and a helicopter suddenly overfly the creek, shattering the aura. Wade’s radio informs us that they’re searching for a floatplane missing since yesterday. A father and son—friends of Wade’s. Fog soon suspends their search, and the sound of engines fades.

  And when the aura of wilderness returns, it clamps down on me. This is no movie set. It’s a big, primal place that can still swallow people whole, even people who come to penetrate with all the backup of modern civilization.

  * * *

  We walk in about a mile. Easy walk, mostly along the bank. But Wade is quiet now. I leave him to his thoughts and walk ahead, alone.

  All along the shore, all since the last high tide: bear tracks. One set tells of a female with cubs, walking upstream this morning, just as I am. Her front prints dwarf my fist.

  I look up frequently to call out my presence and scan around. The sedges in the estuary are tall enough to hide bears easily, but right now they’re beaded with dew and bent into cowlicks. So my view—and the bears’—is pretty good here.

  The main channel is only about fifty feet wide, with steep gravel sides and hairpin meanders. At a bend where a smaller creek enters the main stream, quite a few salmon are holding in the lazy current. An occasional fish leaps, probably just hyped on its own pent-up energy. If such fish harbor some deep inkling that the end is nigh, they don’t show it. But what can they feel, and what can they know? You can get so close, sometimes, and still yearn for contact and a route in.

  Lacking any superior way to plumb their inner depths, I resort somewhat dumbly to the familiar. I strip some line and begin waving my fly rod in the air as I step into the water, then let the fly enter the flow. Certainly many fish see the drifting lure. Three casts. Five. I’m casting in front of
, alongside, and amid dozens of fish. They entirely ignore my offerings. I cast again and again. I cast for over an hour; this is the most fish I never caught. Eating is not on their agenda. But if a salmon can point upstream without thinking much about it, so can a man cast.

  * * *

  I’m glancing around for bears when my hook snags something that pulses. A flank flashes. I put a bend in the rod and the fish shakes to rid itself of the prick. A male, it is changing into its courting costume, forming a conspicuous nuptial hump. It skitters upstream, splitting the current with the wedge of its enlarged back, its tail throwing water.

  Seldom have I met a more determined fish. It knows, as nothing else, where it was meant to be. And it is determined—startlingly so—to stay right where it was. Its genes and biological clock have turned it into its own delivery package with a predetermined address. This late in its hegira, everything depends upon not wavering or being distracted. It has one right answer.

  And so it acts toward the pressure from me as it acts toward the pressure from the stream: it opposes. Simply and completely. I certainly wasn’t expecting that. Its main concern isn’t the hook but staying in place, holding in the main channel. If I drop the pressure, it simply retakes its position, stemming the flow. If I reapply some pressure, I gain line only if the fish decides to turn around and charge briefly downstream, whereupon it again seeks the main flow.

  I change tactics from trying to gingerly, almost surreptitiously lead the fish toward the bank (which clearly won’t work) to applying significantly more persuasion. The fish resists, runs, thrashes, and leaps. The only way I figure I can finish the contest is to use my palm to brake the reel spool during one of its skittering arcs, when the fish’s own momentum can propel it to the beach.