Chapter 4. Cordova: Coast
(Where I meet the sea)
Late August, I arrived in Anchorage as a loyal Montanan. I came north for grad school, I told new friends, and because Alaska interested me. But not to stay. In November, the Intermountain West was still my home, and everyone knew that after my Alaska hiatus I’d return to my beloved dry plains and low wooded hills, to the Rockies’ craggy divide and the complex scent of western trees. (They probably wished I’d go so I would quit talking about it.) In January, I still had no intention of slighting Montana by falling for a new home place, especially one as obvious as Alaska, like the high school boy head-over-heels for the prettiest cheerleader. I also thought that trailwork was behind me. It’s a natural time to move on, I said. Grad school had shifted my focus to writing. A new path would emerge.
By May, I ate my words in two helpings. In spite of myself, I was warming to Alaska, almost contrite, as if cheating on someone I still loved. And also, I was going back to trails. I remembered Slim’s old rejoinder about seasonals: You ain’t quit until it’s next year and you ain’t back. School let out, we were broke, and all I wanted, despite my earlier pledge to step off the seasonal treadmill, was to get back into the woods. To let my brain release, feel my body’s rhythm become primary again. And so, when the applications we’d filed in mid-winter “just in case” resulted in job offers, Gabe and I accepted. Instead of West Glacier, the town of Cordova. Instead of the NPS, the US Forest Service. A new crew, new foreman, mountains and water we’d never laid eyes on.
In a guidebook I read that Cordova was a working fishing village in some of peninsular Alaska’s rainiest and most rugged terrain. The Cordova Ranger District managed the Copper River Delta, a chunk of Prince William Sound, and the eastern edge of the Chugach National Forest, the second-largest parcel in the Forest Service system. I knew the Chugach range. In Anchorage, I’d hiked and skied its western edge all winter, those snowy faces visible even from the university’s library windows. “I ♥ the Chugach,” read the locally popular bumper sticker, and puffy-heart them I did. But I knew only a sliver of them, the arc that cradled my urban home. I dreamed of work and play in a slice of the range that butted up against an unfamiliar sea.
You don’t end up in Cordova. You have to mean to get there. Surrounded as it is by ocean and mountains, your options for arrival are a tiny plane for a short flight across the Sound from Anchorage (fresh-baked cookies the in-flight snack), or the state ferry—Alaska’s most heavily used public transit—which arrives every other day from Whittier or Valdez. You can’t drive to Cordova. You could walk, overland, if prepared for perilous crevasse fields and icefalls, and you’d arrive weeks after you’d begun, itchy with devil’s club spines and the mental fatigue of a month of route finding. You could kayak, if you had time, or take a private boat, if you owned one. (If you knew how to maneuver it against chop and fetch, if you weren’t a little afraid of the sea.) No matter how you get there, what strikes you upon landing in Cordova is water and mountains. And birds, and fishy air thick with salt you taste on licked lips.
In Cordova, you need all the names you can think of for rain. Pour, drizzle, dump, shower, deluge, gush, storm. Torrent, flood, piss, downpour, cats and dogs. As important are the words that follow rain: damp, drip, wet, mold, puddle, muggy, dank, clammy, humid, mist. When the sun comes out, the air clears as if it has been pressure-washed and the whole place glistens like it was just made. Rotting rubber boots and pruned fingers are small penance in exchange for those first rays after weeks of gray. You forget the vocabulary of wet, turned suddenly to a language you learned while traveling for a brief time in a foreign place: where was that again, how did you say hello?
Moving from Anchorage with everything we needed in boxes in the back of our pickup, Gabe and I drove south along Turnagain Arm and through the second-longest highway tunnel in North America to emerge seaside in the town of Whittier, where we boarded the twice-weekly ferry to Cordova. It was pouring rain, hood-up weather, confirming the local joke, “It’s always shittier in Whittier.”
It was my first time on a large, ocean-going ship. I was a landlubber, recent transplant from the Rockies, born in the Midwest, raised by the Great Lakes, which looked like oceans but tasted fresh and had no discernable tides. Though I grew up sailing a twelve-foot boat with my father on summer vacations, I knew nothing about big vessels, and had never been “at sea.” The ferry was my introduction to the boat culture I knew would permeate Cordova, and I studied that ship as if I’d be tested when I got off. I wandered the ferry for nearly the entire seven-hour ride, along narrow hallways lined with porthole windows, up flights of stairs with textured-metal steps to prevent slippage. I leaned too far over the railing at the bow, sea spray on my face, and made myself dizzy with vertigo. Walking the uppermost deck, I imagined a plummet into the water from high up, like Jonah cast overboard, or a pirate walking the enemy’s plank. I huffed diesel fumes, flicked open and shut the empty cleats, and fingered chunky knots tied with ropes the size of my wrist. The wake off the stern was as wide as a two-lane highway.
Most of the birds ganging the air and floating on the water were unfamiliar to me, except for the horned puffin, which thrilled me beyond words. Two French birders scanned the horizon avidly, once pointing out a group of floating whitish birds they called ghee-moh, heavy French pronunciation intact. It was several minutes before I realized it was a guillemot they saw, which we Americans called a “gill-a-mot.”
I visited the captain’s cabin, as wide-eyed as a child on her first airplane ride, hands outstretched for the pilot’s gift, the plastic wings clipped to her collar. I wished I dared ask him to roll out his charts, to let me hold the brass instruments and borrow some prowess by proxy. I had a hunch, where we were going, that I’d need it. Eventually, like most boat rookies, I lay down on the flat-nap carpet beneath the seats of the enclosed observation deck, trying to quell my stomach in the worst heaves of the open crossing. I took deep breaths and rallied mind-over-body fortitude to the task at hand: do not puke.
Remember the work boots, the list of leather favorites? Upon moving to Cordova, new rules applied. The midshin lace-up boots so associated with Montana trails would mold in one week of work in a rain forest, so they were consigned to the closet, where they molded anyway. To replace the sturdy Danner’s, there was the brown rubber boot called the XtraTuf, purchased at an Anchorage Army supply store before arriving in Cordova, at the urging of our new foreman, Steve, who all but refused to hire us unless we got off the ferry wearing a pair. “They’re cheaper in the city,” he said. “Trust me, you’ll want them.”
My first week in Anchorage, I’d heard a new friend refer to her “Tufs.” I thought then it was a joke, her own silly name for rubber boots. But no. XtraTuf is a brand, Tufs their affectionate nickname, and good luck wearing any other boot in Alaska and holding your head up. (The boot is so universally associated with the state that Miss Alaska’s regional costume for a recent national pageant included a specially commissioned pair of brown rubber XtraTuf pumps.) Tufs are first choice for fishermen and cannery workers, for biologists and dip-netters, for day hikes and yes, for trailwork. They’re so ubiquitous in coastal towns that the foyer of a house with a potluck going on is piled with Tufs, and people Magic Marker their names on the vanilla-colored stripe around the top in order to ensure they’ll go home in the right pair. With a tight-fitted calf and tapered toe, these beauties provide far more stability than the rubber boot from childhood puddle walks, with handles at the top and a fit like a bucket. You’d rather not lose them.
Tufs aren’t perfect. A heavy object dropped on the flimsy toe hurts, and running a chainsaw in wet weather seems sketchy, at best. Even with good insoles, ten miles on a trail in Tufs will make you foot-sore. After a few weeks, the neoprene lining stinks of mold and fish guts and gull shit and foot funk. But, in places like Cordova where it rains for days, weeks on end, in pl
aces where ordinary footwear disintegrates in months, Tufs hold up better than anything else. Feet stay warm and damp instead of cold and soaked. A small victory.
Gabe and I showed up to the yard on the first day unsure what to expect. Ten minutes in, the differences were clear. Our West Glacier trail staff was multiple crews, more than thirty employees, many of them expert lifers. In Cordova, there were twelve of us, Gabe and I the most experienced. Gabe had a couple of young guys on his crew—Bryant and Dale—and mine consisted of Randy, the leader, and Trent, a husky eighteen year old from rural Minnesota, John Deere cap low over his eyes. Randy had been hired before I applied, so there was no leader job for me, which rankled. He had worked several seasons in the Bob. We smiled and shook hands, fellow Montanans. I looked around. These were our people. No Cassie, no Kent, no Brook. No packers. And for the first day, no rain.
When Steve hired us, he made Gabe the leader of the “easements crew.” He assured Gabe, “It’s awesome, man. It’s kinda weird, but it’s awesome. You’re gonna love it.” What was it? Gabe would get a boat, he knew, and a brief small-craft training (good thing). Easements had something to do with Alaska Native land, and it wasn’t like regular trailwork. That’s about all we could figure. We pieced together the history bit by bit, a complicated and sometimes maddening issue typical of so much Alaskana—no way to make any sense of it until you see how it works on the ground, and even then, good luck.
Federal 17B easements have their root in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971, which revoked Alaska Native claims to their indigenous lands for a one-time land-and-cash buyout and resulted in the formation of autonomous Native corporations. At $963 million and 44 million acres (10 percent of Alaska’s total acreage), this was no small real estate deal, and the politics of ANCSA are muddled. Seen by some as progressive, the act was a clear improvement over the reservation mentality that had typified the United States’ previous attempts at “compensation” to Native people for their displacement. But it was still typically rapacious, a policy that, spurred by the wet dream of a pipeline economy, forced subsistence cultures into a structure they would not have chosen, and triggered internal battles over extraction versus preservation. Better or worse, there’s no noble way to see a land grab.
The on-the-ground outcome of ANCSA is a patchwork state, with federal public lands and private Native lands as enmeshed as our cultures have become. Many parcels selected by Native corporations during ANCSA border the waterways that grounded their historical settlements, especially river and ocean access critical for fishing, hunting, and transport. Non-Native Alaskans use these waters, too, and have subsistence rights that are different than Natives’ but legally equal. Where tribal parcels abut lands managed by government agencies and owned by the public (both Native and non-), access and trespass issues inevitably arise. That’s where easement corridors come in—no-man’s-lands, with ownership retained by the government, where all parties agree that the public may pass through in order to use public lands without violating Native corporation private property rights. Ideal? No. Fair? Sort of. Complicated? Yep.
The Forest Service has a mandate to provide access to the public’s lands. If it fails to, it can be held legally accountable. Because the USFS is already the target of complaints about “locking up” acreage, it’s important to the agency that it maintain at least hypothetical access. The result is paper trails, in a way, marked on maps as byways but often undetectable on the ground. Because of their remote locations and arduous going, many easements are used infrequently, if ever. The trailwork has this same jury-rigged quality, if the term “trailwork” even applies to these passages, which seem less like trails—absent walking tread and structures—and more like swaths, paths of least resistance cut through brush so that a user may have technical, if not comfortable, ingress. They’re cleared every three or seven or fifteen years, and even then, bushwhack style, as if done with a machete. This leads to the somewhat demoralizing fact that on the easement crew, most of the work is done so it can be said that the work has been done.
Even without the satisfaction of a necessary and visible result, or an obvious user group to appreciate the labor, all in all the work was taxing, and pretty darn fun. After the first week, Gabe christened the easements crew “Indiana Jones Trails.” You were far more likely to grab a thick vine and swing over a rutted gully, or get lost in brush up to your eyebrows, than to clean out a drainage structure or trim wayward limbs. If classic trails mythology lionizes Paul Bunyan and Bob Marshall, easement heroes are Tarzan and Indy. For a person who gets satisfaction from intricate tasks seen through to completion, easement work can frustrate, as the main credo is “Blaze through fast, cover the miles, and call it good.” Gabe is a meticulous worker, unused to slipshod methods and imperfect results. At first, it chafed him. But, it was his job. He learned to pull his hat low over his eyes and crack his whip.
I worked with the easements crew on several hitches, and despite the grueling and often tedious quality of the work, some days passed like a ten-hour adventure. No spectators. No bureaucracy. In some cases, no human had passed through the spot we worked in decades. Hours flew by as we slogged through insurmountable geography; like kids on unsupervised summer afternoons, we made up games: we were being chased, we were lost, or about to discover a secret stash—national treasure, a crashed fixed-wing full of pot. The crew fought when the endless rain made us pissy and glum, but we bonded over the hilarious and punishing motions of the workday, the headers into brush, the foot wrenched out of a sucking mud pit, boot left behind. We did what it took to the best of our ability, performing a slapdash job with enough nods to the artistry recalled from other tasks to preserve some sense of honor, and enough grit to get out alive. Steve was right. It’s kinda weird, but it’s awesome.
Prince William Sound is a geologic wonder that is rarely described without superlatives. Oldest, longest, coldest, most diverse, best, clearest, wildest. In the decades-long aftermath of the 1989 Exxon oil spill: most delicate, most fragile, richest, most heartbreaking, at greatest risk. A 10,000-acre inlet off the Gulf of Alaska that laps at the southern coast of the state’s mainland, the Sound is a saline depression born of plate tectonics and eons of glaciation, home to the array of northern maritime wildlife: sea lions, puffins, seals, whales, pelagic birds of all kinds. Kittiwakes by the thousands nest in rookeries. Murrelets and guillemots bob on the waves in rafts. Cormorants hunch on rocks; oystercatchers patrol beaches, protecting their hidden eggs.
Where birds live, of course, there are fish. All kinds of fish. Schools of swirling herring and eulachon have been integral to native diets and are critical calories for predatory fish, birds, and mammals. The eulachon, (or “hooligan,” following its phonetic pronunciation) is an anadromous fish so oily it’s called “candlefish” because when dried, strung on a wick, and lit, it will burn. Fishing has been a lynchpin of Sound communities since the first Eyak fished from kayaks, and in today’s economy, fishing is a commercial industry, a sport for tourists, and a subsistence pastime for residents of coastal towns and villages. Halibut and salmon are the cash crops, the catches that draw most commercial boats and seasonal tours to troll the Sound. Halibut is a type of flounder, a deep-sea flatfish with a migrated eye atop the head. They can live at depths beyond two hundred feet, along with harvestable rockfish, cod, and the occasional ill-tempered and unappealing skate (perfect for fish sticks). Catching a halibut is no rush, akin to hauling in a sheet of plywood, but its meaty flesh and delicate flavor are incentive enough.
On the other hand, an ocean salmon run is a hoot. Five species of salmon spawn in the Sound in summer. Salmon gorge themselves in the ocean to prepare for the long haul to their birthplaces, where they’ll drop their eggs and sperm. Bright and lively, they arc above the waves with the vigor that attends reproductive rituals. Gulls and eagles hover, waiting for an exhausted fish, a seiner’s slurry cast overboard, the easy protein snag.
Like any ecosystem of such scope, the Sound encompasses contrast, with ecotones—places where distinct biological communities abut each other—at every turn. Forest slopes to shoreline, shore meets tide line, tide line drops to shallows, shallows deepen. Bus-size whales slip beneath boat keels, beginning or ending migration, while microscopic plankton drift the currents, awaiting direction. In a day of paddling you might glide beneath the ice-aged face of a glacier, katabatic winds watering your eyes, and half an hour later tuck into a plate glass cove with swampy kelp draped on the water, plovers after bugs at the shoreline, a torpid sea otter tailing your boat. Batten down hatches for a long crossing, and as you weave between grimy container ships bound for Japan and cruise ships decked with toasting retirees, the Sound seems the world’s crossroads. Then find land again, duck into a long, slim arm where your buddy’s boat is the only one visible, and the sea seems like a private away you’ve entered via wardrobe.
The lure of the Sound is wide cast. Tourists and Alaskans alike wax eloquent on its “extensive charms,” its “lifetime of exploring possibilities.” True as they are, these accolades can ring as hollow as a chamber of commerce brochure. Longtime Sounders, those who have worked and explored the waters for years, speak of Prince William in intimate tones, tinged with possessive humility. They’ve seen the panoramic vistas on a day trip, and have also lived weeks out in damp fog under head nets to keep out mosquitoes, or been turned back from a destination by a wind that lasted days. They’ve admired the photo-shoot puffin colonies, and have also held crude-soaked birds in their gloved arms. They’ve hauled out fish-heavy nets and also mended them at night in oil-lamp cabins, puked in the cockpit while riding queasy swells, and fallen to sleep in narrow berths, cradle-rocked with cramped knees. Such an old-timer is a partner to the Sound, like half of a long-married couple who have shared the span of years, only to realize how much they still don’t know.
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