“Up there.” The driver pointed to a vacant ledge of rock at the back of the dump. “That’s where they hang out.” He stared at the ledge, willing the bears to appear.
“We’ve seen bears,” Derek said. “We want to see the petroglyphs.”
With aggrieved reluctance the driver turned the minivan around and crawled away from the dump, his eyes fixed on the rearview mirror.
“That’s the first time I ever took anybody to the dump and they didn’t see bears.”
“I am not interested in bears. I am interested in petroglyphs,” Derek said, reducing the driver to silence.
At the beach, the driver sulked inside the van. The tide was far out, the beach stony and boulder-strewn. We searched for petroglyphs without success.
“Every time I come here there’s petroglyphs,” I said.
Derek stared gravely at me, fearing lunacy or worse. I gestured toward the parked van, and said, limply, “The driver …”
“Ah.”
Derek spotted a small Indian girl playing with her brother in a tide pool and interrogated her. She pointed to a boulder we’d already inspected; and as soon as we saw one petroglyph, we found them everywhere. They’d been chiseled into the rock with great skill, though the tide had worn them down to shadows as pale as the lost lettering on old tombstones. Some were human faces, but most were salmon—lifelike and lifesized, all pointing the same way, to the southwest. If you swam here at high water, you’d see a hazy shoal of carved fish.
They cannot have been very ancient, or the sea would’ve obliterated them by now. The traditional Northwest ovoid had been incorporated, as a decorative feature, into a realist style of drawing learned from whites. My guess was that they might date back as far as 1900, or thereabouts.
“Direction signs,” Derek said.
The mimic fish were headed away from the Stikine River, toward Zimovia Strait and the village site I’d passed the previous day. If they were direction signs, meant to encourage real salmon to take the right-fork at Wrangell, it was hard to understand why the Indians should have wasted so much artistic labor on making the inevitable happen. In the Alaskan past of huge salmon runs, with every inlet choked with fish, why had the petroglyphs been thought necessary? Or were the Indians simply doodling on the rocks for their own amusement?
Derek, a purposeful and efficient tourist, strode from petroglyph to petroglyph, pausing before each one just long enough to focus his camera and press the shutter. In ten minutes he’d covered the beach and was impatient to be back on his boat. When I dawdled, tracing with my forefinger the dimpled outline of a cadaverous dog-salmon, its head shrunken around its long hedge-clipper jaws, Derek made a show of consulting his watch and being concerned by what he saw there.
Our route back to the harbor took us past a small white hospital, in which Derek suddenly interested himself, quizzing the driver about its exact number of beds, staff, operating theaters, and other facilities. This wasn’t the driver’s day. His answers were garrulous and artfully vague. I saw that I’d been wrong about Derek’s occupation: he must be in the medical business. Doctor? Hospital administrator? As we climbed aboard our boats, I thought I had him pegged. Urologist.
Twenty miles west of town lay Wrangell Narrows, a dredged and dynamited hairline crack between three islands, and the busiest waterway in Alaska. The zigzag channel was festooned with navigation aids, and it was easy—in daylight—to thread one’s passage through the clutter of buoys, posts, wooden dolphins, and concrete pillars that marked the fairway, though a strong tide was doing its best to sweep the boat sideways into muddy shallows.
The concentration of traffic in Wrangell Narrows had led to much building along the low-lying eastern shore. Half the wharves and jetties had fallen to bits, but new structures were sprouting between the collapsed roofs and moldering stumps of homes and businesses that had been left for dead. It was typical of the fever-chart rhythm of Alaskan life that one commodity would rocket in value just as another went into free-fall. So gold, timber, fish, and blue fox (a big resource under development on this reach in 1933, according to the pilot) peaked and hit bottom in chaotic sequence, creating a distinctive architecture in which the ruins of the latest bust jostled for position with the rising timber frames and Sheetrock walls of the current boom. Nothing looked meant to last for long: the classic model appeared to be the prospector’s tent, pitched one day and struck the next.
The richest state in America had a hobo mentality. Alaska traveled light (in expenditure on education, for instance, it ranked forty-eighth) and lived for the moment, sowing the wind, reaping the whirlwind. Watching the unlovely shoreline slide past on the beam, I felt a kinship with it. It answered to the thick streak of nomadism in my own makeup. It mirrored all my slovenliness, my taste for the temporary and the makeshift, my weakness for crazes, discarded almost as soon as embarked on. Were I ever called on to construct and populate an American state, it would look a lot like Alaska; and I wouldn’t care to live there.
The straggle of sheds and houses along the bank at last thickened into the low, pale, floating city of Petersburg, whose canneries and bunkhouses, built out on stilts over the water, were doubled by their reflections in the oily calm. Boats greatly outnumbered buildings. In the half-mile narrows, Petersburg needed no sheltering harbor wall, so the boats were scattered piecemeal along a mile of pilings, moorings, piers, and floating docks, making the town look more like a fleet at anchor than a permanent settlement. The whole place rippled and shimmered. I felt faintly dizzy as I tied up among the reflections, then went to report to the harbormaster’s office.
As Wrangell was sunk in depression, Petersburg was on a high and suffering from a labor shortage. In the middle of the best sockeye run in years, fish were piling up on the wharves. Cannery managers were running around town, rousting drunks out of bars and pressing them into service. The glut was causing the price of salmon to fall by the hour, making fishermen race back to sea from the dock in an attempt to make up in bulk what they were losing in dollars-per-pound. So both canneries and fishermen were working flat-out, and Petersburg was flush, loud, wired, and unsteady on its feet.
Petersburg was only forty miles away from Wrangell, but these were Alaskan miles of sea and mountain—sufficient distance to render the two towns as remote from each other as summer and winter. On the docks, where disappointed men were swapping numbers from boat to boat (“Seventy trucking cents a trucking pound!”), I found Compass Rose, just arrived, and went off in search of supper with Derek and Linda.
The dim and smoky Homestead Cafe was crammed with fishermen and cannery workers. Waiting in line for a table—“Fast, Friendly, Efficient—Self Service,” warned the notice—I caved in and asked what it was that Derek did for a living.
“I am a professor of molecular biology.”
“Ah. I was almost there. Not quite, though. I had you figured for a medical man.”
“I have delivered papers to international congresses on medicine,” Derek conceded.
By the time we managed to grab a table for ourselves, with Derek revealing a possible past as a rugby forward, both our occupations were out in the open, and we were talking more easily. We had both taken to boats in middle age, and both were inclined to approach the sea as earnest, late-coming undergraduates tackling a new academic discipline. On Compass Rose the night before, I’d noticed several books that were twin to my own, like Van Dorn’s Oceanography and Seamanship, Willard Bascom’s Waves and Beaches, and Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. Now we talked whirlpools, overfalls, tidal gyres, capillary waves—subjects I usually kept under my hat. I’d seen too many people glaze over whenever I worked the conversation around to the fascinating movements of water. But Derek did not glaze over; warming to the theme, he shed his ponderous demeanor. His trip north, like mine, had taken him past a succession of wonders in physical oceanography. When he spoke of the places he had visited, he meant rips, swirls, boils, c
hutes, slippery water.
I mentioned the great exclamation marks of surf that exploded from Pointer Rocks when a sea was running off Port Simpson.
“Port Simpson?” Linda asked. “I spent ten months in Port Simpson.”
Her then-husband had taken a teaching job at the band school. They had arrived in Lax Kw’Alaams just two days after Linda discovered she was pregnant. Autumn turned to winter, the village streets to gluey mud, then rutted ice. Marooned there, unbearably far away from the city of friends with whom she might have shared the adventure of her pregnancy, Linda was lonely beyond measure.
“It was the worst time in my life.”
“How were the Indians?”
“Hostile.”
“It’s an Alice Munro story,” I said. But I was thinking of Derek and Linda, and their eight summer weeks aboard Compass Rose. That was another Alice Munro story, one I could almost write myself.
“She’s a great writer,” Linda said.
This talk of writing led Derek to describe a novel he’d read by Michael Crichton. He couldn’t recall the title—was it Eaters of the Dead?—but it was about primitive people, and had caught Derek’s attention as a rare work of fiction that was faithful to scientific fact. I thought, This is exactly what he’d say in the Munro story.
It was dark when we left the Homestead Cafe. The walkway down to the dock was treacherously slick after a recent shower. We clambered apprehensively down it, while Derek talked of the present state of research on the flow of water through pipes.
“The results,” he said, “aren’t altogether what you might expect. The most nearly laminar flow occurs in pipes with a roughened surface. The most turbulent flow occurs in smooth pipes, where the surface does nothing to hinder the formation of eddies.”
“That’s strange,” I said. For I instinctively thought of turbulence as something caused by an obstruction—a projecting headland, a rocky and uneven sea-bottom, an island in the stream. “But I like it. It means that turbulence just happens. It needs no provocation.”
“Well, that would depend, wouldn’t it,” Derek said, “on whether confining the flow of water to a pipe counted as provocation?”
I saw it exactly: the confinement and the turmoil; the trapped water boiling in the pipe, spinning furiously off that smooth containing surface. Back inside the boat, I scribbled a note on the behavior of water in pipes, thinking it an image that was bound to come in handy for something, sometime.
Next morning, the sky was blue—not the usual shallow, faded-denim of the Northwest but the blue of deep ocean. Above the snowy mountains to the north and east were a few chalk-scratches of very high cirrus. With the clear sky came a dry easterly breeze, just enough to keep the boat jogging along quietly under sail at four to five knots: the saloon table was so perfectly level that an egg would barely have rolled to leeward on it. It was the best weather I’d seen since leaving Seattle.
Juneau was less than a hundred miles off, and Jean and Julia’s arrival was still five days away. I had time to loaf and enjoy the landscape, with no pressing need to clock up mileage. With the sheets set and the wheel on autopilot, there was little to do but loll in the cockpit as a passenger while the boat made its own placid way up Frederick Sound.
Though the sky was blue, the water kept changing color. First, it was a yellowish tan, from a dozen muddy rivers; then, as Thomas Bay and Beard Glacier came abeam, it turned a streaky jade-green. Off Cape Fanshaw, from a distance, it appeared to go quite black, where a miniature tide race of close-packed ripples somehow robbed the sea of light. Beyond the cape it altered again, to the powder-blue of a butterfly’s wing.
On previous days, the visibility had been too thick for me to see the extent of the country I was passing through, all low cloud and dark forest, the setting for a Grimms’ fairy tale. Now the curtain was lifted, disclosing a gigantic land in which ranked lines of ice-cream alps receded, range on range. I could see clear into the Yukon and beyond, with ribs and chimneys of bare rock rising from snowfields that turned from white to raspberry-pink in the far distance.
The forest was the least of it. Above and beyond the treeline, Alaska looked like the work of a megalomaniac confectioner. In any other light but this freakish sunshine, its snowy barrenness would have appeared intimidating and oppressive. These were the forbidden mountains of Indian stories—a chthonian region to which unfortunate humans were occasionally abducted by terrible powers. On days like today, the Indians of the Inside Passage were confronted by the extreme narrowness of the habitable world; a tortuous green threadline, with a wilderness of rock, ice, and snow on one side and empty, undifferentiated ocean on the other. These boundaries were absolute and clearly visible; you kept to the center of the path, or risked falling victim to thunderbirds on the right, monsters on the left. Only inside the serpentine line of riddled islands could you count on being halfway safe. No wonder so many of the stories harped on the dreadful fate awaiting wanderers who did not stick to the beaten track.
I skirted a group of wooded islets that resembled upturned hearth brushes and came into Stephens Passage, a broad seventy-mile reach that ran north by west almost all the way to Juneau. Twenty yards off to starboard, a whale surfaced: I saw the scythelike blade of its dripping black dorsal, then a humungous swirl, then a hole in the water, as if a plug had been pulled from deep underneath.
The breeze dwindled. The boat made little headway against a southgoing tide that kept on flowing more than two hours after it was predicted to turn in my favor, according to the tables. Searching for an explanation, I found a note in the pilot: when the moon was in quadrature, a continuous ebb sometimes ran in Stephens Passage. This was less arcane than it may sound. The sun and moon had to be in line (as they are at the new and full moons) and pulling in consort to raise a flood tide strong enough to overcome the mingled river currents as they ran south to the ocean. Useful to get that learned. More often than not, the Alaskan tide tables seemed to me the work of a bogus fortune-teller, so little did they correspond to the water’s actual behavior. They described an ideal world in which snowmelt and river outflows had no place, and at neaps (when the moon is in quadrature) they went haywire. With the boat making three knots through the water and the land barely shifting against the shrouds, I turned into Hobart Bay to look for somewhere quiet to spend the night.
I was hailed on the radio by a NOAA research vessel, John A. Cobb. Turning around to pick up the mike, I saw that the big trawler was right astern, and plowing into my wake. I’d thought I had the whole sea to myself. The captain was making a courtesy call: planning to drop anchor in Hobart Bay himself, he wanted to know where I was thinking of putting down my hook. I told him to go ahead and pick his spot; the bay was big, roomy enough for a fleet. A few moments later, I called Cobb and asked if I could pay a visit, curious about its oceanographic research. Perhaps they were revising the tide tables.
When Cobb was comfortably settled on the ten-fathom shelf, I went alongside. My lines were taken, and I scrambled over the rail to meet the tanned and bearded gang of seamen and scientists. The captain, in his thirties, announced himself as a yachtsman, currently between boats, and flatteringly interested in mine. I mentioned my hope that they were doing something about the weird tides.
That, the captain said, was a job he would relish. “But tides aren’t sexy. Physical oceanography isn’t sexy. There isn’t the funding for it.”
Whirlpools not sexy? The quadrature of the moon not sexy? I felt aggrieved.
The project under way on John A. Cobb that summer was the investigation of historical salmon populations. The scientists, from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and Juneau, were taking core samples of sediment from the bottom of inlets, going out in small boats and sinking six-foot plastic tubes into the seafloor. The tubes, filled with mud, were stacked on the trawler’s afterdeck like banks of organ pipes. When they returned to their laboratories, the scientists would search the cont
ents of each tube, millimeter by millimeter, looking for traces of the fish scales, bones, phosphorus and nitrogen that dead salmon had left behind in the black glop. Sediment accumulated at the rate of about half a centimeter every five years, so each tube held about 1,820 years of mud history. The researchers were studying salmon runs from the European Dark Ages to the present day.
“Is there much variation?” I said, for the project did not yet strike me as sexy at all.
One of the scientists, Bruce Finney, from Fairbanks, gave me an informal digest of his own work so far, which included research on historic sockeye populations based on sedimentary traces in Alaskan lakes. The yearly fluctuations in the size of runs were of no great significance. But their “decadal” variations, in clumps of twenty and thirty years, were enormous. Finney said that he was looking at a wavelike pattern, over several centuries, in which the salmon populations diminished, troughed, surged back, only to diminish again after a crest lasting five or ten years.
“Like in the early 1500s, there were big runs then. Then you see a steady fall to about 1550. Then they start coming back again.”
“What about the eighteenth century?”
“Low in the early 1700s, but very high close to the end of the century.”
“When Vancouver was here.”
“Right. It goes down again in the early 1800s—the time of the Little Ice Age. There’s a high from about 1870 to 1900, which is about when commercial fishing got going. You get another low beginning in the 1950s. We seem to be coming out of that right now.”
“When you say ‘low’ in the historic period, before the whites were here, how low do you mean?”
“As low as anything we’ve seen this century.”
The sexiness of the project was now dawning on me.
There was a sharp net decline in Alaskan salmon numbers since the mid-nineteenth century—the result of heavy commercial fishing and the pollution by the timber industry of so many inland spawning grounds—but the wave pattern was stronger in outline than the steady downward curve attributable to the “anthropogenic” impact of white commercial interests.
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