Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  BARBARA BROWN

  Kayaking through a Timeless Realm of Rain, Bugs, and B.O.

  A paddler finds soggy serenity.

  THE PADDLE ENTERS THE WATER WITH A SCATTERING of splashes and a plonk. It glides backward, rises from the water, and the plonk moves to the other side of the kayak, to the other paddle. Plonk, plonk. Plonk, plonk. One thousand-one, one thousand-two. This is the only rhythm of my week. This and the tides. High tide in the afternoon, high tide late at night.

  My husband, Tim, and I have thoughtfully arranged this trip in Prince William Sound to coincide with the one week of rainy weather all summer. We are out in weather that would lead Californians to say, “Let’s just reschedule; the weather will be great another day.” But as my friend Ann says, “There is no bad weather, only bad gear.” And as my friend Rob says, “If the weather were great, this place would be as crowded as California.”

  So we get rain and privacy, rain and emptiness. It’s a good trade. If it weren’t raining, I wouldn’t know that tiny silver bubbles are released when raindrops hit the water. I wouldn’t know that when my rain hood is up and I can’t see to the sides or even turn my head around, I am in a silent, solitary world. The mist hangs over the landscape. There are no mountains, no faraway distances. Just the immediacy of this cove, this gravel bar, and nothing moving faster than a kayak, nothing moving faster than the plonk, plonk of my paddle metronome.

  And then the sky clears and there are mountains and glaciers. I take off my hood, rediscover Tim, our friends Rob and Mark. We peel off rain jackets and long underwear; I’m down to my life jacket and sunglasses. Oh, rain is so good because it feels so good when it stops. A day is good when we get the tents set up before the rain. A day is bad when the rain picks up and beats down on us just as we find a campsite. A day is good when the rain starts just as we slip into our fully loaded kayaks for another paddle.

  A day is really good when we manage to escape the bugs. The gnats are clouds around us, bites on our bodies, bumps everywhere. Sometimes we race for the tents at night, right on the brink of psychosis, but then I get to fill the tent walls with gnat corpses and I feel better. Mark is new to Alaska; he lives in his head net. I take the route of personal poison: I pump bug dope all over. Tim says I will smell of bug dope when I perspire, but at least I can look at the scenery without a seam down my face.

  I already look like the Elephant Man when I’m bit on the lip. It swells up huge. I have Barbara Hershey collagen-stuffed lips. Suddenly I want to make big smooshy kisses with Tim. I feel like there’s a berry in my lip and that if I kiss him, berry juice will run through us. If all my DEET doesn’t poison us first.

  So I line up at the tent, ready to race inside before the bugs follow me in. I dive in…and reel backwards from the stench inside. “Zip the door,” Tim shouts.

  “It stinks in here,” I gasp. Old wool, he says, polypro long underwear, bug dope. Personal hygiene, I say, bodily functions. GAS. With the rain and the bugs, our tents are factories of scent, cesspools of odors. Our hygiene is so bad I am eating meals prepared by fingernails dirtier than an auto mechanic’s. We fish bugs out of our hot chocolates and then give up. We would never eat bug corpses from our tent walls, but we are eating them in our food.

  We sleep eleven hours. The rhythm of our days is clockless, timeless. We watch for high tide, are relieved when it passes our tents by, and then sleep till whenever. We eat our meals and beg each other to eat more. Should we eat to reduce volume or weight? Why did we bring so much food?

  We boil water for cooking. It’s good when it rains; we just put pots under the corners of the tarp. On sunny days, we have to filter. On rainy days, it’s easy, but our drinking water tastes like tarp. We eat a lot of things like cheese and crackers, chocolate chips, salami, gorp. I go out in the wilderness to be healthy and I eat things I’d never eat at home.

  We see otters and seals, bears and porcupines, eagles everywhere. I collect stones, each one smoother than the last, stones that have been smoothed for eons. I am traveling with three men, and they are collecting stones for a skipping tournament, best three out of five. They gang up, say I use more than my fair share of toilet paper.

  I’m paddling to the rhythm of the kayak. Plonk, plonk. I am neither fast nor slow. I am the only time of the Sound, the only time of the water. My mind is so clear, the water clear. I look at my bare arms. I have strong biceps, I think. I am the earth, the water, the rain, the air. I turn back to Tim.

  “Man,” he says, “your armpits stink.”

  Barbara Brown and her ten-year-old daughter, Sophie, spent the summer of 2002 crossing America by waterpark. They began at home in Anchorage, Alaska and ended back there after 10,000 miles, 24 waterparks, 10 stitches to the head, and 3 demolished bathing suits. Husband Tim kept the home fires burning and Barbara is now at work on the book. Barbara was a weekly columnist at the Anchorage Daily News for the past eight years and is now the Director of Leadership Anchorage for the Alaska Humanities Forum, and a regular commentator on public radio. She is also the “Storytime Lady” for the Alaska Botanical Garden.

  DANIEL HENRY

  Eating Edward Curtis at the Ugruk Café

  A tribe’s wealth includes knowing where its food comes from.

  BROWN FACES ARE THE ONLY SKIN SHOWING ON PEOPLE with dip nets by the side of the highway. Early May breeze leaves a winterish afterbite, so everyone is bundled up. A pickup bed sags with eulachon, the local smelt treasured for its sweet grease. You swerve onto the gravel shoulder and lean against your rental car, a black techno-shaman soul-stealer dangling from your neck. As a reformed representative of the conquering nation, you are titillated by your presumed guilt, so saunter over. Conscious of a photo op with aboriginal flame-keepers, you wait for acknowledgement. A man with long raven hair chews on a strip of red fish jerky. He offers it to the man next to him, who hands it to his brother or uncle. Emboldened by ancient ritual, you ask for a bite. Time passes.

  They are amicable, quiet. Syllables gurgle and splash within the river’s rushing discourse. David, you think you hear the oldest man say by way of introduction. He meets your gaze, ducks a greeting with the bill of his ball cap, returns his sentinel stare to blue-black streaks in frothwater. Feebly: How’s the fishing? Spring flood swallows your words. You stare, too, unwilling to intrude further into the eyes of men in prayerful duty.

  The river answers your question with each netload bent to strobe-balls wrangled from glacial milk in the flat, slobbering light. Like these men, you are transfixed by thousands of fish muscling through current the color of wet cement. You focus your shaman’s eye at the rain-slickered row of backs bowing to this river called Chilkat, or “salmon storehouse,” by people whose surroundings speak to them constantly in dialects of water. Flash. Flashes of fish in silvery death dance, flashes in faces looking away. Somewhere before your thoughts circle around the pictures’ monetary value, the ancient images tiptoe past the closed door of your ethics. Maybe the door is ajar enough for you to wonder if this story is really yours to tell. You seek comfort in knowing that six or seven generations of photographers have already opened the door, captured their prizes, and slammed it shut.

  Did frontier photographer Edward Curtis feel this way when he appropriated hundreds of Native American faces a century ago? The question threatens to kick open your shadowy door as you return to the safety of your white coupe. You see them everywhere: sepia-tone images staring back proudly from posters, book jackets, the flickering campfires of cyberspace. Surely Curtis yearned to span the same unbridgeable separateness from his subjects, and you want to know how he did it. How did he know when it was time to squeeze the bulb on his hulking Kodak?

  Something primal and awkward pulls a grin across your face as you drive on. Like Curtis, you’ve crossed through time and have the pictures to prove it. You may even convince yourself in stories told back home that these men were, in a way, your friends, or at least companions along the river. But you know better. Friends invite
friends to the table. Only intimates or intruders barge in. Strangers are fed by grace.

  It’s likely that you are not the type to stop and bother Native fishers, but it happens. In my twenty years of knocking around a North known by its disconnection with all things Southerly, I’ve often driven my rusting Subaru hatchback past curious non-Natives along the sides of roads as they earnestly invested their ten minutes to bridge the gap between Burger King and subsistence people. Those tableaus may be frozen in your memory as well. Voyeurs with high-optic cameras distance themselves from the threat of an actual encounter. Drive-by shootings flash from braking SUVs. Without the shield of cultural ambiguity, Edward Curtis was compelled to listen at length to the stories of his subjects. He may have grasped the forearms of men in welcome, or lifted a small child to his shoulders. Names were exchanged. Meals were dished up. Through his images, Curtis transformed the magical events of photographic portraiture into commerce, sold to the conquerors’ spawn so we may at any moment meet the eyes of the vanquished.

  But this is not about blame or guilt. It is about sharing. The gap that some contend exists between ancient and contemporary peoples is an interface, really. As Tlingit poet-linguist Nora Dauenhauer suggests in her poem, “How to Cook Fresh Salmon from the River,” perceived cultural chasms may be bridged by the contents of a paper plate: “Serve to all relatives and friends/You have invited to the bar-b-q/And those who love it./ And think how good it is/That we have good spirits/That still bring salmon and oil.” Like wolves and hounds, teachers and students, parents and offspring, the blood that courses under our deceptive skins defines our commonalities. And long before prejudice or love, the pulse within our bodies burns with the heat of food.

  The smooth faces of a young Inupiaq family gazed up at me from a glass bowl a few winters back at a neighborhood potluck near my home of Haines, Alaska. Dark, shining eyes found mine as I daubed away sauce-drenched morsels of Thai stir-fry while the rich steaming clatter of feeding friends swirled around the hewn-log room. Wolverine ruff flared from self-assured faces etched into smoky glass, faces so beatific and rare that I stared long enough for a friend to reveal the bowl’s garage-sale lineage. Part of a Curtis set traded locally, over and over. She showed me her Chief Joseph, his powerful jaw set in pride and sorrow, and another bowl containing the haunting visage of “Papago Woman,” whose deep eyes peered from behind yellowish globs of tapioca.

  From each set of burnished eyes peering eternally into Curtis’ lens, I sense a profound love of place; the oneness beaming from Inupiaq faces, or the yearning in Joseph’s. Each possesses tribal knowledge of sunken halibut ledges and meadows of wild asparagus, bear trails, and sea lion haul-outs. Like others who came from someplace else to set roots in the glacially scoured soils of Haines, I moved here for the same reasons that local Tlingits used to justify their aggressive defense of territory: fish, birds, wild game, berries and plants for the gathering. Access from tidewater to trade routes penetrating a dry Interior in Alaska and Yukon. Most important, it was where they belonged. Home.

  The Chilkat and Chilkoot watersheds proved an ample homeland for up to a thousand residents in four villages. That they were fierce proprietors of an extraordinarily rich territory was widely understood, earning ethnographer Aurel Krause’s nomination for “the mightiest of all the Tlingit tribes.” Their wealth was measured by the sweep of legendary terrain as well as the fabulous artwork used to prove their ownership, carved in totemic design or woven into Chilkat blankets. But among trading partners they were known best for eulachon oil, a treasured food that supplied the namesake for their closely guarded route to the Interior, the so-called Grease Trail.

  In 1879 the tribe’s sense of ownership shifted when a preacher-explorer named John Muir delivered his “brotherhood of man” oration to hundreds in Yendestucke, at the mouth of the Chilkat. The shaman followed Muir’s speech with an acknowledgement that, “for the first time, the Indian and the white man are on the same side of the river.” Crossing the spiritual gap was a piece of cake for Muir compared to the epicurean gulf to come.

  Isu’iq piturnertuq means “the seal tastes good.” Seals, sea lions, porpoises, and whales produced meat for food, oil for light, hides for boat coverings, and bone and sinew for tools.… It was important to strike a seal after it took a breath of air, so the injured animal would not sink.

  —Amy Steffian and Florence

  Pestrikoff, Alutiiq Word of the Week: Lessons in Alutiiq

  Language and Culture

  At the invitation of Chief Don-na-wuk, Muir partook in a celebratory meal, a “feast of fat things” prepared for the “Ice Chief” and his missionary friend Samuel Young. In a memoir published a year after Muir’s death, Young described the meal served to the two white men in “huge washbowls of blue Hudson Bay ware.” The first course consisted of dried salmon stacked in each guest’s trencher like kindling, drenched in seal oil. Then the tubs were washed out and returned with a second course, “great long hunks” of deer back fat drowned in seal gravy. Following this, bowls were again washed and set before the visitors, this time heaped with walnut-sized Russian potatoes ascending from a puddle of oil. For dessert, fleshy rosehips as big as plums overflowed from their bowls, again dripping with grease. After a period of exquisite moans and lip-smacking by his gracious hosts, Muir leaned toward Young and exclaimed, “Mon, mon! I’m fashed we’ll be floppin’ about i’ the sea, whiles, wi’ flippers an’ forked tails.”

  Traditional foods were discouraged at the Presbyterian mission that followed two years later. Beef, poultry, and flour became staples in the boarding school through which each Tlingit child passed. The same language used expertly by Reverend Young to translate his and Muir’s speeches was banned among Native speakers. However, despite non-Native efforts to squelch an identity centuries in the making, Tlingit ways persist today. Even the gradual settlement of a couple thousand non-Natives in this venation of green valleys walled by glacier-draped crags has not deterred the rule of citizens waxing Tlingit by blood or association. They never signed a treaty, never relinquished the power that they now share with the strangers who came to their table. And I have felt the grace of their generosity.

  Consider the contents of these pages a tribute to the generous spirit of subsistence people. Their blood flows with blueberry shine, sockeye wiggle, rain, wind, and impetuous sunlight. Described herein are two pathways, both of which I have trod. Each leads to a scene made familiar in the history of the world when people share food: one, like Muir’s banquet, is by auspicious invitation. The other, like the roadside scene, is a bungling intrusion. I carry the lessons from these occasions as reassurance and warning, reminders of my place as a guest at the table.

  Green-bottle tones glint from the clear water that tumbles a rocky mile from Chilkoot Lake to the sea at Lutak Inlet. Filling the narrow wooded valley is the same liquid conversation that once spoke to a village of about one hundred twenty L’koot Tlingits, people of the Sockeye clan. On this day in late May, 1991, perhaps two dozen descendents scurry between work stations, their spirited palaver punctuating the river’s drone with ancient grammar and laughter rarely displayed on Main Street in Haines, ten miles distant. Their chief, Austin Hammond, is called Donawak, after the leader who invited John Muir to his banquet. Austin has asked me to come out, take pictures, pose “good questions,” and watch with white man’s eyes as clan members attend to the business of cultural survival.

  Diaphanous boundaries of kin and culture keep Tlingit folk distinct from non-Native residents, but their presence in Haines insinuates itself on nearly every level: politics, religion, education, business, food. Subsistence sets Alaska Natives apart from most other shoppers on the continent. Their traditional ways define an ancient culture with each recipe for salmon or seal gut, with each prayer for bountiful harvest. Beyond consumerism, though, Natives operate with a set of principles based on stewardship of the places that supply their groceries. Overharvest threatens their identity, disrespect can
insult the spirits of plants and animals on which people depend. Food usually arrives when it is supposed to arrive, although fish stocks and other species have declined dramatically in parts of the state. Even the legendary tribes of eulachon, whose runs still contribute to local Tlingit status, have become sporadic.

  “Now you get to see how Tlingits really act,” Hammond says as he steps out of a thick coil of steam vapor to shake my hand. “Like our eulachon brothers, we are the last who know the ways.” A purplish flush creeps up the eighty-one-year-old man’s wizened neck, tinting his already dark face with burning radiance; his eyes twinkle with lipid-induced euphoria. He grins, a kid eating birthday cake. Guffaws burst from the other elders sitting in lawn chairs just up the riverbank. They dip celery and Ritz crackers into a salad bowl brimmed with honey-colored solution while calling out advice and jokes to the younger tribal members who work below. Austin nudges me, revealing ravaged dental work, and spreads both arms broadly toward the workers and the river gushing past them. “I am a wealthy man,” he says. “To be here cooking eulachon with my children and grandchildren. This is my wealth.” He runs a gnarled hand across his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, widens his eyes. “It gets so your ears tingle. Then you know the eulachon’s working for you.”

  Young men shoveled a truckload of the oily fish into a pit ten days earlier, then covered it with a sheet of plywood until today. Sammy carefully lowers himself into the hole until he is out of sight. His hand reappears grasping the bale of a steel bucket overfilled with fermented eulachon. Fumes emanate from the putrefying mass. Insect clouds hover over the eight-by-ten-foot excavation. A potent bouquet punches me when I peer into the pit. Tears well in my eyes and a fist of nausea clenches my stomach. Austin lightly touches my elbow to bring me back from the edge.