Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  Wildland shoulders in on the little town from all directions, jagged snow-covered peaks and fjords as deep as the mountains are high. Because the mountains plunge so steeply into the sea, the town is built on stilts over the water. Buildings line up on both sides of the boardwalk that runs along the bluffs, graying wooden cottages connected by narrow planks with railings. Even the school sits at the end of a pier, on posts above the tidal flats. Twice each day, tides move in under the town, and twice each day they move out again, stranding starfish.

  The nearest road is seventy miles away. When the weather is good—which it rarely is—a floatplane might land at the dock and off-load a fisherman, or a dog, or some groceries. We flew in on yesterday’s floatplane, imported from outside to teach in the school for a few days. Low clouds forced us to fly below the cliffs along arms of the sea, skimming close to the waves like a pelican. The ferry comes only once a month. When the schoolteacher’s piano arrived by barge, the town turned out to haul the piano up the gangway and along the boardwalk on the back of the only suitable vehicle in town, the garbage ATV. Now the teacher trades piano lessons for halibut and jam and considers herself ahead in the bargain.

  This little town is home to 160 people, more or less, people who take the word “home” seriously. When I ask my writing students what marks this place as home, the seven children in the high school put their heads together and make me a list:

  The Boardwalk

  Boringness

  Dogs barking

  My boat

  TOO MUCH RAIN.

  Bears

  The restaurant

  The river.

  I press them for the names of the inlet, the restaurant, the river, the bears, and they debate for some time, but really, the question makes no sense. What’s the use of proper names, when there’s only one of each? But the children consult among themselves and tell me that the bears are brown bears. They wander into town in April looking for something to eat, but head back to the mountains when the snows melt. “They have their space and we have ours and it works out pretty good,” says a student. All the same, she spent the night with a friend, having been warned not to walk home past the place a bear had been seen. When townspeople visit each other at night, they carry cowbells and pepper spray. And when word comes round that a bear is on the boardwalk just past the church, the teacher leaves her meeting and walks home to bring her dog inside.

  I’d read two things about this place. One: that the people were friendly to tourists. And two: that they were not. Timing, temperament, season, and weather made the difference, I guessed.

  It didn’t bother me too much, though. There was something about this village: the drawn shades, the rare walker striding past with collar up and face hidden, the casual service in the town’s only open eatery, that made me feel the very opposite of pandered to, and somehow better able to rest, turn inward, and feel hidden away myself. Here, on a gray day, overly chipper smiles would have been out of place.

  —Andromeda Romano-Lax, Walking Southeast Alaska

  There are more docks than boardwalks in this town, and more boats than houses. Amidst the working boats, a couple of sailboats hunker down under blue tarps. “Tourists,” the sheriff explains. He laughs, holding his cigarette between his forefinger and thumb. Lacking much business in the crime department, he has joined us on the bench. We look out together at the boats in the moorage and give the sun time to work its way into our shoulders. “Had one woman stand here on her boat and ask how many feet above sea level we were. Had another lady fly in over the glacier and ask what we did with all that Styrofoam. ‘We mine it,’ I told her, ‘and ship it south for picnic coolers.’” He laughs again and then it’s quiet on the dock except for the sound of waterfalls streaming down the mountains across the inlet.

  “I don’t know why they call it tourist season, if we’re not allowed to shoot ’em.” But he’s only joking, just running through his repertoire of dumb-tourist jokes, and here comes the next one: “Some guy asked me how much rain we forecast, and I said I expected it to fill the inlet about eight more feet by suppertime.” Then the law looks over at us, so obviously strangers, and remembers his manners. “Aw, a few tourists aren’t so bad. As long as they go home.”

  A boy runs past, carrying a fishing pole. A few others bunch on the boardwalk, jostling and wrestling without ever dismounting from their bikes. Their parents are out on the boardwalk too, gathered in small groups to talk and tease, enjoying the first clear evening in a long, long time. “I don’t think I’d like to live anywhere else but here,” a sixteen-year-old tells me. “Doesn’t seem all that nice in other places. Except maybe I’ll go to college, if there’s a college in a place like this.”

  What she doesn’t know is that she may live in the only place like this.

  This was a company town, built for packing salmon in 1930. For decades the people got by, prosperity ebbing and flowing with the schools of herring that brought in the Chinook. But last year, the long-line fisherman who doubles as town manager received a letter over his fax machine: The fish plant will close on Friday. Word spread quickly the length of the boardwalk, past the wet-goods store, past the storefront “steambaths and showers,” past the bar-and-grill and the restaurant, past the fire station and the boatyard where crab traps pile up off-season, to the row of little company houses along the boardwalk, the school, the river, and the end of town.

  Some families moved away. Some fathers left to get jobs outside, leaving their families behind. Other parents divided their children among the neighbors and went off to find work. Somebody cobbled together financing to run the fish plant for a few months a year, other people set up their boats for halibut, off-loading their catch on fish-buying boats. The people who remain in this little town get by whatever way they can and wonder what will happen next. On the docks, we overhear the worried conversations, the patched-together plans. In the school, I listen to the children. They want to know about the Seattle Sonics, but I can’t help them. Their parents are holding on to a way of life as tightly as the town clings to the mountainside, but they know it’s going to take more than a life jacket to keep their children from drifting away.

  So it’s complicated when a corporation from outside announces plans to build a floating lodge near the town and fly in paying guests. The site the corporation has chosen is close enough to town that the people will see floatplanes coming and going, day after day, bringing in people, taking out trophy fish. The corporation plans to moor its lodge in a place rare and wonderful, anchoring its cables to pilings in front of the only beach in the fjord, a beach where townspeople have always come to dig for clams, and where long-line fishermen—grandfathers and fathers and sons—angle for salmon and halibut. The place where mothers bring their children for picnics, running out to the beach in skiffs.

  “The people don’t want the lodge,” says a songwriter whose family has lived in the town from the beginning, when the first corporation came in three generations ago. “None of us want it. It won’t bring us any jobs. And even if it did, they wouldn’t be worth it. But what can we do?” And sure enough, when a representative of the corporation comes to town, the people are polite, the way they are polite to the bears and the occasional tourist. People don’t argue here, said a fourteen-year-old girl. “In a town as small as this, you can’t just say whatever you’re thinking.”

  But the people know the value of what they would be giving up. Scarcity raises the value of anything. As peace and solitude and wildlands disappear under bulldozers in the south, their price increases proportionately. Peace becomes a commodity, like board feet of cedar or kilos of frozen fish. Solitude is precious. Unspoiled beauty sells for a premium. Anyone who figures out how to extract these resources will make a fortune.

  The townspeople call a meeting, gathering in the town hall just down from the dry goods store. “What the corporation plans to do,” a bearded man says, “is take the peace and solitude that belong to this community, the same peace an
d solitude the people have been saving for their children.” They will take it without asking, without giving anything in return, as if it belonged to them. Then they will package it and sell it to strangers for something around $2,500, a five-day package deal. “There’s a word for this,” a woman says, holding her son on her hip. “But I can’t put my finger on it. Isn’t it ‘theft’?”

  The schoolteacher pushes back her chair and stands up. “This isn’t about just one fishing lodge,” she says. “It’s about this one and the next one and the next. Is this the kind of life we want? Is this what we want for the children?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” says the corporate representative. “That’s a philosophical question.”

  But the people know. What they want for their children are salmon and yellow cedar, the river, the inlet, and a little town where wooden houses stand on stilts above great schools of fish. A place you know is home because, as a teenager explained it to me, when you open the door “there’s a row of boots and raincoats and some firewood, and your little brother is waiting to beat you up.” A place where bears roll boulders on the beach, sucking up crabs and sculpin. Where gardens grow in milk crates stacked above the tide—daffodils and garlic, and rhubarb for pies. A place where women’s voices call to children across the docks, and salt wind carries the laughter of men. A place where people can make a living, but not a fortune. A place where enough is great riches.

  Kathleen Dean Moore is the chair of the Philosophy Department at Oregon State University, where she is a prize-winning teacher and director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word. Riverwalking, her first book, won the 1996 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award. Her second, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World, from which is story was excerpted, won the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. Her essays have appeared in a wide variety of magazines and journals.

  SUSAN BEEMAN

  From Scratch

  The trek to her parents’ old homestead is a ritual return to the bush.

  EVERY AUGUST, I LOAD UP THE CAR WITH SLEEPING BAG, cook stove, food, and tubs for picking blueberries. As I pack, I remember the sound, the tink, tink, tink the first fat berries make when they hit the bottom of the tub and how that sound becomes muffled the fuller it gets, until all the city chatter inside my mind is muffled too, and I’m just there on the mountainside picking quietly.

  Headed north from Anchorage on the Parks Highway, I tune the radio to NPR for Saturday morning’s “Savvy Traveler” and pretend I’m a savvy traveler. Where will I stop? Will I meet locals when I take a break from the wheel, and talk to them about the weather or the fishing or this year’s berry crop? Or will I keep silent and eavesdrop on the old men who wear baseball caps with hunting lodge logos and drink coffee from thick white mugs? What new stories will I bring home? I relax into the road. No need to hurry. The blueberries are getting sweeter every hour, since nights are almost freezing.

  I sing along to Mary Black and Natalie Merchant and Deep Forest through the long stretch of dull road between Willow and the Talkeetna junction, then settle into the silence of the road, the rhythm of driving. Birch trees, still hanging on to green leaves, line the roadside and wave me gently north toward an old family treasure at Byers Lake.

  My parents’ decaying cabin hunkers on one of the hidden knolls above the lake. It’s been falling into itself for years now. At the trailhead, I study the piece of weathered paper taped to the Alaska State Parks sign to find out about the most recent bear sightings. Every year, the paper is taped here, with comments scrawled in pencil or pen. The most recent ones are these:

  8/15, grizzly sow with two cubs by inlet;

  8/17, small blackie in campground;

  8/18, black bear hanging around outhouse, Alder Loop;

  8/20, fresh tracks by old cabin.

  But nothing for the last two days.

  I follow the muddy trail over tree roots into the cool forest of birch and spruce, where mushrooms and mosses grow underfoot and high bush cranberries reach up to glint red in the dappled light, and I think of my parents living here forty-odd years ago, before the highway was punched through. I picture them snowshoeing these woods, Dad wearing wool pants that Mom hemmed to fit him; she setting a failed loaf of brick-heavy bread outside the cabin window for the gray jays and black-capped chickadees to peck. My parents launched their married life here in 1959, snuggled together in a bed frame made of sturdy spruce poles hammered together with spikes and a mattress of pungent boughs laid beneath sleeping bags.

  Trumpeter swans chortle and loons lament on the lake to my right as I walk deeper into the forest. Voices echo across the water from a couple paddling a canoe or someone fishing from the walk-in campground on the far side of the lake, but I can’t hear what they say. Were those high-pitched noises really people, or just gulls crying? I glance behind me. Maybe it was a bear cub.

  A three-hour drive north of Anchorage, Denali State Park is among the most accessible of all Alaskan park-lands, bisected by the Parks Highway (which connects Anchorage and Fairbanks) and bordered on its eastern edge by the Alaska Railroad. Yet many travelers headed north to bigger and better-known Denali National Park speed through “Little Denali” without even realizing the gems it holds. Just off the highway at Mile 147 is Byers Lake, rimmed with spruce-birch forest. Visitors may boat, fish, hike, picnic, or stay in one of two public-use cabins. Loons, beavers, swans, bears, and moose inhabit the lake or its edges and salmon spawn here in fall.

  Not far from Byers Lake is Kesugi Ridge, one of Southcentral Alaska’s premier backpacking routes. One reason is the view: several of the Alaska Range’s grandest peaks dominate the western horizon, culminating in the snow- and ice-capped throne of 20,320-foot Mt. McKinley.

  —Bill Sherwonit

  At the kinked birch my family used as a marker I turn off the main path onto the wide new trail to the cabin. We used to bushwhack to get here, back when we’d come on the weekend or school holidays, before we sold the cabin to the government as it swallowed more land for Denali State Park.

  As I approach the cabin, I come to what once was a small clearing. It is overgrown now with devil’s club, willows, grass, and young trees, but a tall cache used to stand in the clearing, its four thick spruce legs covered with cut-open tin cans, flattened and nailed around the legs to keep bears and squirrels from climbing up. Fox, lynx, and wolverine furs were stored in the cache. Moose meat, too, and big sacks of flour for bread and pies.

  The jagged metal corner of the cabin’s porch sticks out from behind brush and I notice how tall the spruce and birch trees growing from the top of the grassy roof have become and how moss thicker than a down quilt hangs from the top of the sinking cabin.

  I pad slowly around to the front, careful not to lean too close to the sharp-edged porch overhang, the rusty corrugated tin roofing bent down by many wet winter snows. I peek in the side window, the glass long shattered, to see the living room where my parents cooked and ate and sang and skinned pelts and read aloud to each other by Coleman lantern light. Where they built wood fires each frigid morning in December when the day would not brighten until the sun glowed at its zenith behind Curry Ridge at noon. Only remnants of those days remain now. Over the years the cabin has been vandalized, cleaned out. Even the spruce-pole couch frame Dad built is now gone, ashes in a campfire somewhere nearby. The little table he made still sits in the corner, though, and candle wax is still pooled where it dripped so long ago, next to flies twenty years dead.

  I pull my head carefully back from the empty window frame. Out front, I trace with the tip of my index finger the official wood-burned state parks sign that reads in neat loopy letters, Beeman’s Cabin 1959.

  Another sign outside reads Unsafe—Keep Out. Visitors aren’t supposed to crawl inside the cabin, where they might break an ankle jumping over the root cellar built into the middle of the living room floor, collapsed onto itself with rotten planks jutting up from below. Or a person might whack his forehead on the
low log over the doorway between the living room and the bedroom, the doorway where my parents stapled a cutout magazine photo of a mallard so they wouldn’t forget to duck. Visitors might squeeze into the bedroom and sit down on the edge of a bunk bed to see more clearly the drawings my brother and I sketched on the ceiling and the frame could crack, injuring them.

  But I’m not a visitor. I crouch through the front entrance and step carefully over the root cellar in the dim light and duck into the bedroom to see the old artwork. Yes, those were my horses. I did lie there thirty years ago, drawing long-backed stallions with squarish legs and foals with perky, pointed ears, laughing and telling stories with my brother as he uttered boy noises in the other bunk, drawing pistols and bullets on his side of the room.

  Now it is time to go, time to pick berries. I’ve seen all I can see at the cabin. I’ve remembered all I can, the memories only hints of what had gone before, more bird track than bird.

  I drive on, through Cantwell, and park just past the Nenana River. Carrying my empty tub, I walk the highway shoulder a few hundred feet. Two huge boulders hug the edge of a tundra field on the left. I drop down the steep side of the roadbed and push through tall grass, careful not to trip on hidden dead-wood underfoot, and crest the lip of the field. My hiking boots sink into spongy mosses and lichens and I scan the ground for blues.

  It’s a good year and the bushes hang thick with fruit, like grape clusters, the blueberries fat and juicy and waiting to be plucked before they freeze and shrivel. Late afternoon sun shines up the valley, and across the river against the steep mountainside, the train’s rumble and whistle sounds. I’m not far from the road, but once over the field’s edge, kneeling on my folded rain pants, and pulling fruit from the twigs, all is quiet. The blueberry patch is my own private place. I pop a few berries in my mouth and roll them around on my tongue before mashing them and tasting their sweet sourness.