Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now

by C. B. Bernard

  19

  Family Reunion

  The ice pressing in all day dragged the schooner and finally pushed her up on the beach. I cleaned the rest of my eggs then made a lamp for burning lard as we have no more coal oil left for our lamps this winter.

  Joe’s mood darkened with the season. He and Old John hoped to be back in Nome by September 1913, but last year’s ice continued to pin them down in Lady Richardson Bay. Supplies scarce and rations meager, their efforts to fill their larder in an anchorage mercilessly bereft of both game and firewood exhausted them. Joe realized quickly that his fifth winter would also be his worst.

  Cloudy, NW wind blowing hard all day. Snow squalls. Freezing. The blow cleared the bay of all the ice except a few grounded pieces. I went out hunting to the north and to the west but saw nothing. When I got back I found out that my lead dog had killed one of the other dogs during a fight, so we have chained them up.

  A late-month inventory of the Teddy Bear’s larder turned up “5 fifty-pound sacks of flour; 10 pounds of rolled oats; 10 pounds of rice; 25 pounds of dried prunes; 10 pounds of beans. We have plenty of coffee, tea and sugar, but no lard, butter or salt.” Hardly a reassuring pantry.

  With little wood for fires and a dwindling supply of stove oil, Joe wallpapered the walls of his cabin with pages torn from magazines. “If I had gas I would leave this barren place,” he wrote in late September. As an extra measure of warmth and protection, he framed and built a small canvas house over the cabin. When he caught a young, docile fox alive in one of his traps, he kept it on deck as a pet, an effort to distract them from their day-to-day situation, which grew increasingly bleak.

  By the first week of October, the temperature had already dropped below zero. It continued to fall for the next few weeks. By mid-November it was 35 degrees below.

  On November 27 he wrote: “The sun did not appear today.” They checked their traplines regularly, but even those had fallen under the same dark cloud.

  There seem to be quite a few around but bears keep springing our traps and eating the fox. Today I caught a small bear in a trap. It was good to have bear meat for our dinner—fine meat, not very fat. We are now so used to getting along without salt that the caribou meat we have been eating tasted salty. After we had warmed it up for the second or third time, the gravy would be so salty we could scarcely eat it.

  Christmas came, clear and cold. Joe shared a feast of roast duck he’d been saving for months with Old John, a side of bear meat pie, the last of the prunes. “We have so much to be thankful for, to God, for His protection and care,” he wrote that day.

  A month later, while strangling a fox caught in one of his traps, Joe noticed his dogs shivering—something he’d never seen before. When he realized that he too was shivering, his hands too numb even to reset the trap, he retreated to the schooner. The thermometer registered 52 degrees below zero, winter made all the worse because he no longer wanted to be there.

  Very few Inuit visited their anchorage at Lady Richardson Bay, and Joe passed the time in tight quarters with the old German sailor, eating their way through 35 pounds of beans and dried prunes. In April, when spring was lifting much of the world on its shoulders, the Arctic remained flatfooted with winter. Joe’s mood worsened further when the Teddy Bear began to leak. Four barrels of water one day, six barrels the next, then sixty. Then more than a hundred. Easter Sunday, he and Cole cut their meal short in order to bail out the schooner. At least the effort kept them warm—they’d rationed their limited stock of firewood.

  A week later, their stores disappearing quickly, Joe’s usual optimism also started to leak. “We stayed at home but did not do anything because we do not have enough wood to keep a fire going except for cooking our meals. It’s too cold to work without a fire.”

  Winter had taken its toll.

  A few weeks later, still bailing hundreds of buckets of water each day, Joe tried to build a pump using spliced pieces of old boards and seal oil boiled thick enough to fill the seams. His invention failed, and by the end of May, suffering from snow blindness and unable to leave the camp, he surrendered to the sea. He and Old John emptied their gear from the schooner, moved ashore into a tent, and let her fill with water. “We cannot keep the schooner afloat anymore. . . . With the ice this thick, it will hold her up; she will be lifted with it and she will not sink.”

  He might as well be talking about his sense of hope.

  By late May they had eaten their way to the bottom of both 100-gallon drums of bearded seal meat they’d stockpiled for dog food, the meat long since spoiled. Then Joe caught a break.

  I went out on the land to hunt, and from the top of a level area I saw two caribou feeding. It was impossible for me to get close enough to shoot, but since we have been eating rotten seal meat for so long, I was determined to get them if I could.

  Resolved to fresh, red meat, he circled ahead of the caribou, out of sight. Slowly he dragged himself along the bare ground toward them, settling on his stomach in a small trench full of meltwater where he lay for more than five hours as he waited for the caribou to approach. “I was so numb with the cold, I almost gave up, but we needed the meat,” he wrote. “I soon warmed up while skinning them.”

  By mid-June the Arctic began to thaw. Joe found a beehive with a small amount of honey in it. The seasons flipped, and the snow and ice began to melt faster than he’d ever seen. As he’d predicted, Teddy Bear rose with the ice, and by early July her deck had cleared the water. He and Cole began to restore the schooner for travel, rolling her with the tide, repairing the rudder, recaulking the hull. They worked nearly around the clock for more than a week, and on July 24 they dropped her back into the water, pumped her out, and dropped anchor. Unwilling to chance getting stuck for another winter, Joe worked furiously to restore the cabin to the deck and move their gear back aboard.

  “We are now ready to leave, but with the east end of the bay and the entry island now full of ice, we cannot get out,” he wrote on August 1. The next day he reported “not much open water—only a few small leads here and there in the ice,” but the entire body of ice seemed to be moving slowly, inexorably, east, as he had done himself. “I have made up my mind to try getting out of here tomorrow,” he declared.

  Three days later they left the harbor and sailed around the outside of the point, covering only a short distance. The next day they tried again at first light and fought their way through ice floes in heavy rain, sometimes tacking as frequently as every 100 yards. Half a day later they reached Kendall Island and anchored in a fog too dense to sail that lingered for the next three days.

  They left on August 10 at 5:30 a.m., reached open water by late afternoon, and by dinner were making 4 knots in a fresh southeast breeze, the eastern Canadian Arctic growing smaller over the Teddy Bear’s transom. Joe didn’t risk that the sea would keep her arms thrown open, welcoming them as she was, and he pushed to cover as much of the distance to Nome as he could. The wind shifted to the west, and they sailed through the night and the next day. Despite mid-August snow squalls and foul weather, they made good time.

  A week later the Teddy Bear met one of the ships of the Canadian Arctic Expedition in Coronation Gulf: Mary Sachs, the schooner owned by his Uncle Pete. Rafted on anchor, the Bernards greeted each other for the first time in five years.

  I learned that the Mary Sachs is now one of the Canadian Arctic Expedition boats and that they had been instructed to look for us and give any assistance we might need. They had mail for me and I took their mail for outside. I obtained some provisions from them, of course. Among the food was some canned fruit. John and I are so used to Eskimo fare we both had “heart-burn” when we ate a dish of the fruit. It tasted great, but too rich for us. I paid for my provisions with two wolverine skins and some rope. They offered to give me gasoline but I declined, as it would take me from eight to 10 days to get the engine in running order
and by that time I will be around Point Barrow.

  Their reunion was brief. Neither could afford to risk not reaching his destination—for Joe, the harbor at Nome, where he planned to strip the Teddy Bear of her rigging and head south to the States on a steamer before winter fell on Alaska once again, and for Pete, Banks Island, to set up camp for Stefansson’s expedition.

  Joe’s record of the rendezvous is brief and clinical.

  “We had a fine visit,” he wrote. “They left us at 7 p.m., tied to the ice, so I took some pictures of the schooner. They are going to Banks Land to explore. We have to stay tied to the spot because there is no wind.”

  20

  Theme Park

  I decided to put on an Eskimo show at the Exposition going on in San Francisco. In one of the pavilions where I had my exhibit I met a chap from Venice. He said there was a good chance of making more money with a show on the Ocean Park Pier.

  A pair of blank stares behind halfhearted thumbs, they appear out of the rain soaking the Homer Spit, dressed naively for the weather in jeans and running shoes, cotton sweatshirts soaked to the skin, hoods plastered to their backs. What compels someone out on foot in this weather? Their expressions of grim resolve offer no answer, so I pull to the side of the road and recognize a flicker of polite hope in their eyes. Once in my truck, they shake off like dogs.

  A finger of land that pokes Kachemak Bay, the Spit curls slightly at the tip, beckoning the mountains from across the water. Differing theories credit either the fierce currents with building it piecemeal over the millennia or the retreating glaciers of the Kenai Mountains for leaving it behind, a terminal moraine catch-point for ocean deposits. Either way, it’s a work in progress as the wind and water continue to shape it. A two-lane road runs from knuckle to nail. As recently as the 1960s, lush grass, bright flowers, and a grove of spruce lent the Spit color and texture, and it was wider and drier then, but the earthquake—the earthquake—limned and reshaped it, lowering it so that today’s high tide erases the edges. All the saltwater that swallowed the land killed the floral palettes too, and the spruce, and what’s left is mostly gravel, glacial silt, and sand.

  But restaurants, pizza shops, and shacks peddling trinkets, storefronts for fishing trips, glacier tours, and bear-viewing expeditions line the road on either side like a crowd gathered for a parade. Homer’s economy depends on that parade returning each year.

  Pitched tents score the beaches. One belongs to my hitchhikers, both in their early twenties and here for the summer from Ukraine to work shifts on a fish-processing slime line. When the fish failed to arrive in sufficient numbers, the shifts dwindled, then stopped. Today their foreman cut them loose. They’re hoping to try their luck—and their English—at another plant.

  “We come here to see States and to learn language,” says the more outgoing of the two, riding shotgun, his friend dripping in the backseat. “Maybe find new job that give us house too. Place to sleep, you know? Then we move out of tent.” He’s serious, formal, polite, trying so hard to find the right words that he’s fogging the windows. “Someone tells us it gets cold in September here?”

  “It can,” I say. “September can be unpredictable. You might get some mild weather, but don’t count on it.”

  “And winter? Cold like Ukraine?”

  “Not cold like Ukraine,” I say, remembering the snow deep around my cabin the two years I lived here, moose tracks across the frozen pond, a lonely New Year’s Eve with a Christmas tree bonfire, the Northern Lights like paint spilled across the sky. “Cold like Siberia.”

  Their eyes widen, and I laugh to show them I’m kidding. Homer is relatively temperate, but 600 miles northwest of Sitka, and just 450 miles below the Arctic Circle, it has its share of cold days. Hell, it’s early August and the heat’s already on at the house where I’m staying. They nod in grave comprehension.

  The Spit Road terminates at Land’s End hotel, a pretty spot where the earth dips into the sea across from a panoramic view of the Kenai Mountains. On warm days, drinks on the deck are hard to beat. Along the Spit’s 4.5 miles you can find a community ice rink, a couple of boat harbors, deepwater docks, a Coast Guard cutter awaiting deployment. A ferry terminal, public restrooms, a bar. Stores that will sell you sweatshirts celebrating the crab boat Time Bandit from the Deadliest Catch TV show, whose owners are Homer boys. You can buy fish-and-chips, a salmon burger, pizza, ice cream, coffee. There’s even a fishing lagoon where hatchery salmon are tricked into returning—expecting to spawn, they find themselves trapped, hooked, and iced instead, something to keep in mind on your next date.

  Eagles overwinter in number here, preening themselves from their perches atop the tsunami warning sirens that line the Spit. The bird viewing in general is impressive enough to merit an annual shorebird festival. Marine mammals appear alongside the road, the occasional moose lumbering by, but locals—sometimes called “Homerroids”—know that tourists are the most common wildlife. If you catch them during their migration, before they shed their RV shells, they line the Spit like elephants searching for a new watering hole.

  Land’s End is literally the end of the road, as far west as you can drive in the continental United States,10 5,300 miles from Key West. But Homer also represents the figurative end of the road, long a refuge for counterculturists and hippies. Even before them, Homer drew waves of homesteaders attracted by land well suited to farming and raising livestock. Generations later, many of these families remain in town, their histories now local lore. This is a good place to live off the land. A good place to disappear. A number of conspiracy theorists, militia types, and general wingnuts also call it home. Maybe it’s in Homer’s DNA—the town was named for a con man.

  But first it was a campsite for the Alutiq and Dena’ina people, and then, after the Russians discovered coal, a small industrial town. In the late 1800s, mining companies built Alaska’s first railroad here, a limited track running 7 miles from the shafts and tunnels above town to the end of the Spit, where cargo ships waited. Near the close of the century, the Alaska Gold Mining Company arrived, helmed by Homer Pennock, a promoter and first-class grifter, who left after just one year to chase Klondike gold. His name, like his legacy, lingers.

  A pair of tourists in matching red rain gear run across the road in front of us, shielding themselves from the rain with Time Bandit gift shop bags. I brake hard, and the driver coming the other direction pounds an angry horn. Unscathed and unperturbed, they dash into a gift shop without even acknowledging the near miss. Welcome to Alaska.

  “What about them?” my Ukrainian friend asks. “What about tourists? They don’t mind Alaska cold?”

  I laugh again. “There aren’t many tourists here in the winter. Dodging them is strictly a summer sport.”

  He confers with his comrade in the backseat.

  When the coal market collapsed, Homer residents turned to farming, fishing, livestock, and eventually tourism. Coal company buildings erected hastily on the Spit came down just as quickly, replaced by canneries, homesteader shacks, and fishing cabins. In the 1930s a fire burned most of them to the ground, spread by the coal washed up on the beaches. The Spit started over.

  The rain falls steadily now, skies dark and puddles deep. Tomorrow might be sunny, or the day after that, or the one after that. My Ukrainian friends came here for work—turned away, they’re pressing on undeterred. The fish processor on Douglas Road might offer them jobs, or the one across town, or the one in Soldotna. They’ll knock on every door until they find one that will. Until then, they’ll walk in the rain and sleep in a tent unless someone offers them a lift or a place to stay. They came here chasing opportunity. They can’t imagine letting anything—especially something as trivial as weather—get in their way.

  I drop them at their destination, shake their hands, and wish them luck. The rain beats against the roof and the windshield, and the wipers strain to keep up
. Their sweatshirts, sneakers, and bags are drenched again already. They may have a long journey ahead, but they walk toward the office at an even pace. Maybe they’re too dignified to run. Maybe they realize they’re already as wet as they can get. Their reflections waver in the puddles at their feet, the world around them—America, the Land of Opportunity, and Alaska, the Last Frontier—rendered two-dimensional, the round world flat again.

  All morning I haunt the Spit, walking in the rain, looking in shop windows, watching the tourism industry try to outwit the weather. The shops, built in clusters, link together like row houses raised on pilings above the rocky beach and the tide, a few hundred yards between each group of buildings forcing people to run through the rain on the elevated wooden sidewalks. The tourists wear Homer-themed sweatshirts bought when they realized it was 20 degrees cooler than they’d hoped. It’s early August, the dog days of summer howling mournfully in Alaska.

  Field biologists will note that these are not the same tourists who roam Sitka and Juneau. Many have come for the fishing, large men in camouflage ball caps and sweatshirts grouped in packs. Each pack has an alpha to whom the others defer. To a one, they’re eager to impress the guides with their skills, as if to say, “We come from fishing places too.” Maybe not halibut or salmon, but bass or catfish. “We get big fish back home too.” The guides greet them at the docks, unimpressed. Spend a day on the boats and it’s always the same. Someone from Southern California, Texas, or New York hooks a 12-pound halibut and hollers about how big it is, it’s a barn door, it’s the goddamned mother ship. He hauls it to the boat, and his buddies see it’s just a little one, just a baby. They hoot and holler and rib their friend until one of them feels a pull on his line and it starts all over again.

  Being on the road system means Homer draws a lot of sightseers too, and a fair portion of the people wandering today are families with kids in tow. Up and down the Spit, camera flashes detonate in the puddles and the shop windows. Trinket stores bustle. At 11:30 a.m., just half an hour after it opened, the Salty Dawg—a favorite bar—already has a crowd.