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

by C. B. Bernard

  Other than a few dozen chickens and a handful of loose dogs, the only sign of life in the village appears in the form of a handful of teenagers walking down the middle of the road, their garb especially bright and festive, the boys’ white shirts crisply pressed and shining in the sun, the girls’ dresses brilliant shades of color. Chambers drives by slowly and waves. Most of the teens just stare. A few wave tentatively back. One girl in a robin’s egg blue dress, hair a long braid down her back, smiles bright and wide.

  Police work, a pendulum swinging between the extremes of excitement and boredom.

  That afternoon we fly across Kachemak Bay to collect evidence and testimony in a reported sexual assault at the Alutiq village of Nanwalek. The area around Cook Inlet looks even prettier from above, the coastline’s tantalizing shape with countless inlets and coves like so many puzzle pieces notched on the blue-green tabletop of Kachemak Bay. Our pilot, Tim, recently arrived from Colorado, absorbs the scenery as eagerly as I do. Chambers has folded himself into the back of the Homer Air Cessna 206 with two other passengers, having boarded the bush plane as casually as a commuter on a suburban train.

  Tim banks wide for the approach to Nanwalek, formerly called English Bay. “Worst airport in Alaska,” he says.

  In fact, it’s often cited as Alaska’s most dangerous runway, and with good cause. Planes crash in the inlet’s high crosswinds, the short and potholed gravel airstrip leprous with erosion that worsens with each storm.11 Our Cessna 206 requires 1,500 feet of runway; Nanwalek’s airstrip is 1,850 feet long, but the first 900 are closed. Tim’s got the expression of a cowboy on a mechanical bull. We put down and brake to an abrupt stop without incident.

  Maybe fifty houses compose the village, all clustered near the small airstrip. With nearly the entire population Sugpiaq Alutiq mixed with Russian blood, you need permission from the village council to visit. Chambers called ahead, and the chief arrives on a four-wheeler to meet us at the airstrip. He doesn’t say much beyond acknowledging our presence. Except for a few people picking up cargo from our flight, which they load onto four-wheelers, the town seems deserted.

  We shoulder our gear and begin walking the dusty streets. A pack of dogs forms behind us like a snowball rolling downhill. They’re all tiny, toy-sized dachshunds, terriers, mutts of indeterminate breed that nip at our heels. Curtains draw cautiously back in nearly every house we pass. Faces peer out at us. Doors close as we approach.

  Like Charlie Brown’s friend Pigpen, we kick up a cloud of dust as we walk up the short, steep hills lined with ramshackle homes and cabins. The Native corporation subsidizes most of them, their once-bright paint faded and cracked. Trash, boat parts, rusted bicycles, old tires litter unkempt yards. The airstrip at the water’s edge offers lovely views, but a sadness coats the village, a sense of poverty supported by statistics. An American Community Survey estimated that just 36 of the 180 or so residents had jobs, the unemployment rate near 50 percent, an average median household income below $29,000. Subsistence hunting plays a critical role here—the village follows traditional Alutiq ways, and its people speak Sugtestun, an Eskimo dialect based on the Yup’ik language.

  There’s a noticeable lack of commerce, no stores or restaurants, and though alcohol isn’t sold here, it can be imported. Several cases of beer and boxes from a Homer liquor store filled the cargo hold on our flight over. We pass a Russian Orthodox church, the faith’s three-bar crosses ubiquitous throughout town. In the 1800s the village was a trading post known as Alexandrovsk. One of its later names was Odinochka, a Russian word for “person living in solitude,” equally apt and a shade more poetic than Nanwalek, which means “place by the lagoon.”

  Chambers and I trudge through the streets with our canine entourage, looking for the victim’s house. He has an address, but finding it is more art than science. Addresses here are often descriptions: “only green house on north side of village,” or “brown house next to Nelson’s.” We have two hours before our flight back to Homer. We waste the first wandering Nanwalek without locating the victim, a girl in her teens reportedly assaulted while she slept, drunk, at her grandparents’ house. The entire village is small enough to clear with a seven iron and a favorable wind, but in the unmarked streets the dilapidated houses all mirror each other. It’s disorienting. On our third lap, the chief pulls up on his four-wheeler—his tiny wife hanging on behind him, arms around his noble gut—and takes pity on us, the pied pipers of his village’s dogs. He gives vague directions referring to landmarks meaningful only to someone already familiar with the village.

  Chambers shrugs through the dust of the retreating ATV. “At least he was trying to be helpful.”

  “That was helpful?”

  In his experience, people in the Native villages rarely try to be blatantly obstructionist, but neither are they particularly forthcoming. “You’ll eventually get the answer you’re looking for if you ask the right question enough times,” he says, “but it’s almost always a challenge.”

  When we finally find the victim’s grandparents’ house, it’s a physical manifestation of depression. Chipped paint, sagging roof and railings, broken windows. A fat dog sleeps on the porch, another skittish behind a pile of bald tires and a rusted chain saw. The grandfather comes slowly to the door, a squat man in his late fifties, a prodigious belly in a tank top and cutoff sweatpants. He’s talking on the phone with his wife. We can hear her yelling at him through the phone, but he seems reluctant to hang up.

  Our brief conversation another exercise in indirectness, we determine that the victim may or may not be at her aunt’s house.

  “I’ve interviewed his wife before,” Chambers tells me as we walk away. “She’s . . . difficult.”

  When we find the house, a Native girl answers the door. She’s tall, painfully thin, pretty, and very shy. Three rifles rest on a shelf in the hallway behind her. Chambers questions her for two full minutes trying to find out whether she knows the victim before she tells us it’s her. Bruises mar her skinny arms. She asks if we can talk outside, and chain-smokes Marlboro Lights with her back to the house, throwing furtive glances over her shoulder like a frightened doe. Chambers is gentle, polite, firm. Eventually, she gives the details he needs. She fell asleep drunk on her grandparents’ bed, and sometime during the night a guy she knows from town came into the home and assaulted her. She seems grateful for Chambers’s interest and help, but no less nervous for it. With shaking hands, she lights another cigarette as we walk away.

  I mention the rifles.

  “I saw them,” Chambers says.

  “Does that make you nervous, walking into situations every day that could be dangerous?”

  “That’s one of the toughest things about the job,” he says.

  “What’s the most frightening situation? Domestic violence?”

  “It can be. Sometimes they’re perfectly innocent, just a husband and wife arguing, and a neighbor overreacts, but they can be scary.”

  He pauses a moment.

  “Any time you need to face someone who doesn’t want to settle down, you don’t know what they’ve been up to or what kind of training they’ve had. Everybody thinks they’re the best fighter in the world, and I have to assume they can whip me if I want to avoid a problem.”

  He doesn’t look easy to whip.

  “Alcohol, drugs, adrenaline, they can all make a person stronger,” he says. “Or just anger. Rage.”

  He tells of a recent call responding to reports of a man with a gun to his wife’s head. When Chambers arrived with another trooper, the man let the wife go and disappeared inside his house. “We know he has a pistol, and now we have to clear the house. In the army, I had eleven guys helping me clear a situation like that, and they all had machine guns. Being a trooper, I had just one guy standing behind me.”

  “How does your wife feel about you being a trooper?” I ask. “About the da
nger you face every day?”

  Chambers shrugs his broad shoulders. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve asked her that.”

  Abandoned by our posse of dogs, we head back to the grandparents’ house. A small plane flies overhead and circles back to touch down at the airstrip as we climb the hill for the fourth or fifth time.

  “That’s our flight,” Chambers says.

  “What happens if we miss it?”

  “There’s an apartment here that the troopers have access to.”

  “Is there a restaurant in town?”

  “I don’t think so, but it’s only one night.”

  The grandmother has returned home. She greets us effusively at the door. Chambers tells her he needs to collect evidence, and she lets us in. As decrepit as the exterior looks, the inside’s worse. Almost entirely delaminated, the kitchen linoleum is peeling and blackened, its dried glue exposed. Three Minnesota Vikings jerseys hang from an otherwise bare curtain rod. A rusted cast-iron woodstove squats in the middle of the kitchen. Most of the cabinets lack doors; those that remain open and close on duct-taped hinges. Dirty dishes fill the sink, the chipped counter, the small table. An elderly woman sits at the table, smoking, drinking orange juice, ignoring us completely. The kitchen opens onto the family room where two heavyset teens—the victim’s younger sisters, or cousins—watch cartoons on a giant television, ignoring us just as thoroughly. The family room carpet is the filthiest I’ve ever seen. Two rifles lean against the wall by the TV.

  The victim said she stashed her underwear beneath the bathroom sink. Chambers opens the cupboard and empties it of cleaning supplies, half-empty vodka bottles, several boxes of adult diapers, and three issues of Playboy before he finds them. He also takes the sheets from the bed where the assault occurred, bagging all the evidence.

  The grandmother walks us outside. Loud and dynamic, her frenetic personality misplaced in the slow pace of the village, she thanks Chambers for looking after her granddaughter but downplays the incident.

  “That boy,” she says, then adds: “They drink too much.”

  It’s not clear who she means.

  A nervous tremor disturbs her voice, like she’s putting on an act. It’s not that she doesn’t seem concerned about what happened, but maybe it’s difficult for her to talk about it—especially with an outsider in uniform. Maybe it’s something to be dealt with locally, reporting it beyond the village the bigger crime.

  She asks if she can hug us. Chambers tells her it’s not necessary and, in fact, not allowed. “You can hug him,” he says, but she can tell I’m just along for the ride.

  She offers some smoked salmon jerky instead. We both decline.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he says.

  The dogs reappear as we descend the hill. Behind us, the grandmother calls out one last time. “Hey, when will I get those sheets back? They’re my only ones. My husband and I—we use those sheets too.”

  22

  The Mistake by the Lake

  The trap door had been left open and a fox had fallen down into the pit. The only light was from a small candle and after chasing for some time, the fox knocked it over. Having only one match I was unable to find the candle. So I tried to tire him by continuing the chase in the dark. Well, he finally stopped, as exhausted as I, I suppose, so I shot into every corner until I finally happened to kill him.

  The mythically slow progress of glacial ice advancing and retreating across South-central Alaska and carving the Matanuska and Susitna Valley in its wake once kept at bay the tangle of greens and browns that might otherwise beautifully overrun this place. Now, centuries later, it’s a different kind of progress, one not everyone agrees is going in the right direction. The drive from Homer to Anchorage went as quickly as a five-hour drive can, but the 45 miles between Anchorage and Wasilla take almost as long, progress in the Friday evening traffic almost as mythical, every bit as slow.

  Built in the 1970s, the George Parks Highway connected the south-central portion of the state with the Interior, making Wasilla a stop on the way rather than a destination. Long before that, it had been a farming-and-fishing settlement for the Dena’ina Natives, a subgroup of the Athabaskan people. In between—around the time Joe decided to head back for a second extended Arctic voyage—it served as a sort of supply hub for fur trappers and miners working nearby goldfields. In the 1930s the US government made Wasilla a federal project site during Roosevelt’s New Deal, shipping 200 farm families from the Midwest in an effort to establish a community. (Traces of that influx from America’s heartland remain, somewhat inexplicably, in Sarah Palin’s oddly accented diction.) Now, a number of North Slope oilfield workers call this city of 7,800 home, as do a good many Anchorage commuters—a third of the population—and a quickly diminishing crop of homesteaders who settled the area because it was so out of the way . . . back when it still was.

  It’s a triumph of progress that a place like Wasilla even exists in Alaska and a clear measurement of how much some parts of the state have changed since Joe’s time. But it’s also a sign, urban sprawl spreading like an invasive species from the Lower 48. Wasilla, of course, is Alaska’s tabloid town. A good number of people outside the state’s boundaries know what they know about Alaska because of Wasilla’s presence on TV and in magazines and newspapers during Sarah’s national reign of terror and error. But to judge Alaska by Wasilla is to judge history entirely by the 1970s: It’s not wrong per se, there’s just more to it.

  In 1994 an effort to move the state capital here failed a statewide vote, one of at least six efforts to relocate the capital. In 1974 voters elected to move it to Willow, a city that did not yet exist, but—money, meet mouth—subsequently failed to fund it. Politically, the argument goes that such a move would cost too much and damage Juneau economically.

  But some Alaskans seem particularly unwilling to locate the seat of power here specifically. “Wasyphilis,” a Sitka fisherman called it when I mentioned the town. Others call it the “Mistake by the Lake.” An Anchorage-area slur for a certain segment of Wasillans is “Valley Trash,” once leveled at a constituent by state senator Ben Stevens, son of Alaska’s late, long-serving senator and much-loved Incredible Hulk fetishist, Ted Stevens. Someone else told me that hockey-loving Wasilla is “equal parts sleeping bag, duffel bag, and douche bag.” The general consensus holds that you need to be a Vietnam vet, NRA advocate, or white supremacist to live in Wasilla, which isn’t true—but not quite untrue either. Less than 1 percent of the town self-identifies as black. Hunting outfitters, giant diesel 434s, and ATVs riddle Wasilla the way drugstores, Toyota Camrys, and bicycles do California. A lot of bumper stickers sporting slogans like “Sure you can have my gun—bullets first,” or “PETA: People for the Eating of Tasty Animals.” Google lists more than 760 churches in the area—roughly one for every ten people—but no synagogues. Bars stay open until 5 a.m., a legacy of Mayor Palin’s administration, but city code forbids strip clubs or any kind of nude entertainment. For that you have to drive to the wonderfully unironically named Great Alaskan Bush Company in Anchorage.

  Men with high-peaked ball caps, flattop haircuts, beer guts, beards, and tattoos populate the town. I sit for half an hour in the parking lot of a village store that sells gas, conveniences, and liquor, and of the twenty-two people who go into the store, count eighteen wearing camouflage—young and old, male and female, couples, even a man in a camouflage cap carrying a toddler in matching onesie. It’s like Boston, where everyone wears Red Sox caps to show their allegiance to their local team, except here it’s Team Camo.

  Newer developments spring up across the town with names like Silverleaf Estates, Cottonwood Shores, Secluded Meadows, Serendipity, and Autumn Ridge, balancing an equal number of smaller, less-impressive double-wides with exposed Tyvek house wrap, tractor-tire retaining walls, homemade smokers, dogs chained in the yard, boats, four-wheelers, and snowmachine
s. It’s the collision of new Wasilla with the old, as if an urban planner threw up out the window of an airplane while flying over the state.

  This is Alaska, the Last Frontier, where you can still get lost in uninhabited wilds. But it’s also Wasilla, where signs on a canoe trail warn paddlers to beware of power boats and aircraft. It’s a contradiction of homesteads on rural acres built by God-fearing gun-toters who love their country but hate their government and subdivisions of McMansions with minivans in the driveways. Wasilla: Where you can vote the Alaskan Independence Party, which favors secession, but still commute to a cushy state job in Anchorage.

  Bonneted with snow, the Chugach and Talkeetna ranges rim the horizon, hinting at the past . . . until you lower your gaze into the yawning bay of a quickie oil-change shop, a used-car lot, a roadside flea market. North Slope oilfield money contributed to Wasilla’s evolution, and the Parks Highway running straight through town didn’t help. A scenic highway elsewhere, in Wasilla it’s a main street widely considered the state’s ugliest, a cluttered Monopoly board of box stores, strip malls, fast-food drive-thrus, gas stations, repair lots, and pawn shops, six lanes of traffic with enough stop lights to decorate the White House at Christmas. You can feast at a Señor Taco, the Ugly Mug Saloon, or the MatSu Family Restaraunt, the spelling error theirs and displayed proudly in neon.

  It’s the meth capital of Alaska—not just a catchy tourism slogan, but a designation given by the Alaska State Troopers, who busted forty-two area labs in a single year. Troopers told the Associated Press that when they raided a converted bus being used as a meth lab, the thirteen-year-old who answered the door bragged that his mom cooked the best meth in the Mat-Su Valley.