by Donovan Hohn
We round a bend, and an inlet comes into view. Protruding from the forested banks beside a waterfall is an abandoned sawmill. The windows are shattered and one corner of the building has collapsed. Any second the whole structure might tumble into the sea. The trees on these islands are part of the seventeen-million-acre Tongass National Forest. Fifty years ago, the timber industry was booming here, but in the last twenty years nearly all the sawmills and pulp mills have shut down.
There are ghost towns and ruins all over the islands of the Inside Passage, vestiges of its long history of extractive industries gone bust. In the 1800s the Russian fur trade made Sitka, then the capital of Russian Alaska, the largest city on the entire west coast until San Francisco eclipsed it in 1849—the Paris of the Pacific, some hyperbolist dubbed it. Then sea otters and fur seals grew unprofitably scarce. In the 1870s, after the Russians had sold off their exhausted North American hunting grounds, the world acquired a taste for canned Alaskan salmon, which in the age of refrigeration it has largely lost, though there are a few canneries left.
Today the only thriving industry here besides fishing is tourism. In towns that the cruise ship lines have not yet tarted up, you can sense what the local economy would be like if the cruise ships left. By the docks at the gold rush town of Wrangell, for instance, one wall of a wooden fishing shack has been shingled with old drift-net floats, and three school-age girls sit at card tables in a parking lot selling garnets chiseled from nearby Garnet Ledge. They appear to be competitors, not friends, each sitting stoically behind her outspread wares, the prices handwritten on tags of masking tape. They go to sleep, perhaps, reading Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose under their covers with flashlights. I buy a five-dollar rock from a girl named Tiffany, who has punctuated her xeroxed sales brochure with smiley faces and illustrated it with a hand-drawn geological diagram of strata, beginning at ground level (there’s a little house) and descending sixty feet to a lopsided circle labeled “Earths core.” Dots at ten feet represent garnets. Tiffany has also drawn a maze, at the entrance to which stand two stick figures with lanterns on their heads, rays of light emanating like tentacles. “Help the Miners find Their way to Garnet Ledge,” her instructions read.
Fifteen minutes from the ferry dock are Wrangell’s most famous treasures, a collection of petroglyphs depicting birds, fish, and sea mammals carved in the same geometric style as the Tlingit and Haida totem poles, thickets of which can be found all along this coast. The petroglyphs are only visible at low tides and in certain casts of light. I want badly to go see them, but the Malaspina is making a brief stop. Late passengers will be left behind.
Everywhere they look, archaeologists find them—buffalo sprayed with pigments onto the walls of caves, killer whales cut from cedar or stone, horses molded from gutta-percha or plaited out of straw. Our primal fear of predators and our hunger for prey cannot alone account for this menagerie. Three thousand years ago in Persia, someone carved a porcupine out of limestone and attached it to a little chassis on wheels. Four thousand years ago in Egypt, someone sculpted a mouse and glazed it blue. Why blue? Who ever heard of a blue mouse? Is this the forebear of the red beaver and the yellow duck?
In fact, many of the figurines that look to us like toys turn out to have been totemic gods or demigods, used in religious ceremonies or funerary rites. To make the archaeological record all the blurrier, some totems in some cultures were given to children as playthings once the festivities had ended. One thing in the archaeological record is clear: animals held an exalted position in the lives of both children and adults. Even after the missionaries came and cleansed them from the temples, the animistic gods survived, adapting to the altered cultural landscape. In Europe of the Middle Ages, the most popular book after the Bible was the bestiary, a kind of illustrated field guide to the medieval imagination, wherein the animals of fable and myth were reborn as vehicles of Christian allegory. From the bestiary came the idea that after three days a pelican could resurrect a dead hatchling with her blood, and from the bestiary we learned that only a virgin girl can tame a unicorn. Even Aesop, that pagan, remained a favorite with old and young alike well into the seventeenth century.
Gradually, as allegory gave way to zoology, we decided that animals—as the children in the old Trix commercial inform the envious, sugar-addicted rabbit—were for kids. “Children in the industrialised world are surrounded by animal imagery,” John Berger notes in his essay “Why Look at Animals?” Despite the antiquity of zoomorphic toys and the “apparently spontaneous interest that children have in animals,” it was not until the nineteenth century that “reproductions of animals became a regular part of the decor of middle class childhoods—and then, in [the twentieth] century, with the advent of vast display and selling systems like Disney’s—of all childhoods.” Berger traces this phenomenon to the marginalization of animals, which the age of industrialism incarcerated as living spectacles at the public zoo, treated as raw material to be exploited, processed as commodities on factory farms, or domesticated as family pets. Meanwhile, “animals of the mind”—which since the dawn of human consciousness had been central to our cosmologies—were sent without supper to the nursery. Animals both living and imaginary no longer seemed like mysterious gods. They seemed like toys.
Go bird-watching in the preindustrial libraries of literature and myth and you will find few ducks, which is puzzling, considering how popular with the authors of children’s books ducks have since become. Search, for instance, the fields and forests of Aesop, whose talking beasts are the ancestors of both Chanticleer the Rooster and Walter the Farting Dog, and you will meet ten cocks, a cote of doves, several partridges, a caged songbird, ten crows, two ravens (one portentous, the other self-loathing), a dozen or so eagles, four jackdaws (one of whom wishes he were an eagle), many kites, flocks of cranes, two storks, three hawks, a cote of pigeons, three hens, a sparrow with a bad case of schadenfreude, four swallows, many peacocks, a jay who wishes he were a peacock, many swans, two nightingales, two larks, an owl, a glutinous seagull, a thrush ensnared in birdlime, and nary a single duck.
Aesop’s fables exhibit considerable ornithological knowledge, but their primary aim is to transmute animal behavior into human meaning—to burden them, as Thoreau would say, with some portion of our thought. The closest thing to a duck in Aesop’s fables is the famous goose, the one who lays the golden egg and then succumbs to the carving knife. In a Kashmiri version of the same tale, Aesop’s barnyard-variety waterfowl becomes the Lucky Bird Huma, a visitor from the magical avian kingdom of Koh-i-Qaf. A Buddhist version of the tale replaces the egg-laying goose with one of the only mythical ducks I have found, a mallard plumed in gold, which turns out to be a reincarnation of the Bodhisattva. (The birds of myth, as Leda learned, are often divinity in disguise.)
In all three versions of the fable, the human beneficiaries sacrifice their magically profitable waterfowl on the altar of their greed. The farmer kills the goose, cuts it open, and finds no eggs. Dreaming of rupees, a Kashmiri woodcutter accidentally asphyxiates the Lucky Bird Huma while carrying him to market in a sack. A family of Brahmin women decide to pluck out all of the Bodhisattva’s golden feathers at once; they turn into the worthless feathers of a crane. Unlike the others, the Buddhist version tells the fable from the bird’s point of view, and for that reason it is peculiarly affecting. Both Aesop’s fable and the Kashmiri one show us the folly of human desire, and it is satisfying, reading them, to watch our wicked, bumbling protagonists endure dramatically ironic reversals of fortune. The Buddhist fable shows us the folly of human desire, but it also makes us experience that folly’s cost, the debt of suffering our appetites can incur. The tone of the final sentences is more sorrowful than ironic. Trying to escape, the once golden mallard stretches his plucked wings but, featherless, finds he cannot fly. His captors throw him into a barrel. With time, his feathers grow back, but they are plain white ones now. He flies home, never to return.
Not all the passengers aboard
the Malaspina are transported, or even entertained, by the Alaskan scenery. There is, for instance, a teenager vacationing with his parents—vacationing, I’m inclined to guess, against his wishes. He is almost always alone, wandering or sitting around, lost in adolescent thought. He wears the same outfit every day, jeans and a black T-shirt on which appears the cryptic, presumably ironical phrase IRON CHEFS ARISE.
When the rain lets up, which it rarely does, he adjourns to the outer deck to practice martial arts. On the last night of my passage to Sitka, I watch him one deck below striking poses of graceful ferocity in the shadowy deck light. He kicks his leg out high and holds it there an impressively long time. He stiff-arms an imaginary foe. The clouds have blotted out the stars and moon. No lamps burn onshore. Beyond the Malaspina’s rails, the only light is the shine the ferry casts on the black water—that and the green and red twinkling of the buoys.
More than the sublime scenery we’ve passed through, more than the charismatic megafauna we’ve seen both on-screen in the recliner lounge and live, this is the scene I will remember best from my ferry ride, I feel certain—this karate kid with his black ponytail and his ironical shirt, out there shadow dancing in the deck light as we thread our way brightly and noisily among green and red beacons, past quiet islands we sense but cannot see.
BEACHCOMBING THE PACIFIC
On the morning I disembark, Tyler and Dean Orbison are just returning from a two-week, three-hundred-mile beachcombing expedition to Lituya Bay and back. They go on such expeditions every summer, traveling farther and farther afield every year, poking around in bunkers abandoned at the end of World War II, walking beaches where the only footprints in the sand are animal tracks. They have a cabin cruiser big enough to sleep in and an aluminum skiff for going ashore. From the cruiser, they look for V-shaped coastlines that funnel the tides, and they look for “jackstraw”—driftwood logs jumbled like a pile of pick-up sticks—and, most important of all, like prospectors panning in the tailings, they look for “good color,” their term for plastic debris visible from afar. Where there’s some color, there’s sure to be more. Their style of beachcombing is by necessity a tag-team affair. One person has to stay in the skiff to keep it from foundering on the rocks while the other person wades in and combs. They take turns. Dean prefers to hunt high up, in the purple fireweed, where storms will throw objects out of the reach of tides. Tyler, Dean’s son, is “a digger.” Like a human metal detector, he’s learned to divine the location of buried objects by reading the terrain.
This year for the first time Tyler and Dean started combing in seaside caves where tangled driftwood will form a kind of flotsam trap. It’s dark in the caves. You have to beachcomb with a flashlight. It’s also cold, but the labor of log-lifting keeps you warm. The effort’s worth it. Every cave the Orbisons search contains a farrago of wrack—a Dawn dish detergent bottle, glass fishing floats, Floatees. Half a water pistol turned up in one cave, the other half in another. By far the most common objects the Orbisons find are polyethylene water bottles. They have begun keeping the screw tops, cataloging the varieties. On this last trip they identified seventy-five brands, many of them foreign in origin. Up in Lituya Bay they saw a live black wolf and the bones of a whale, and they picked wild strawberries, and when their cooler ran out of ice they floated alongside a glacier and broke off a chunk.
Now, at the end of my first day ashore, they’ve fetched me from my hotel. “Growing up here, I mean, there’s nothing,” Tyler tells me from the backseat of his father’s truck while we’re waiting for his parents to emerge from Sitka’s only supermarket. “I mean we don’t even have a mall. So I took to the outdoors pretty hard.”
It is clear that Tyler has never given much thought to the marginalization of animals. You wouldn’t either if you’d grown up in Southeast Alaska, where bears make off with household pets, and ravens alighting on transformers cause power outages, and bald eagles sometimes come crashing through dining room windows. If anything, it’s the people who occupy the margins here. Just look at a map: Sitka perches on the coastal brink of Baranof Island, wedged between mountainous wilderness to the east and watery wilderness to the west. Sitkans share their island with an estimated 1,200 grizzly bears—more than are found in all the lower forty-eight states combined. In May and June, eagles and ravens—the supreme deities in the pantheon of the native Tlingit—wheel overhead. In July and August, the creeks grow dark with spawning sockeye and chum. In November, the whales and the whale watchers arrive. People like me may feel sorry for the 1.2 million sea otters that the Russian American Company parted from their pelts in the early 1800s, but since the Endangered Species Act protected them in the early seventies, otters have repopulated Sitka Sound with such procreative gusto that local fishermen now regard them as pests—crop-thieving, net-wrecking vermin of the sea.
Tyler’s arms and face are partly tanned, partly sunburned, and like the karate kid of the M/V Malaspina, he is wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, only his T-shirt is not in the least cryptic or ironic. Decorated with bicycles and boats, it commemorates Sitka’s annual triathlon. Twenty-three years old, he is currently earning his teaching credentials at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, a city of fifty thousand. More than five times the size of Sitka, Fairbanks is too urban and too populous for Tyler’s taste. “I don’t do cities very well,” he says. As soon as classes let out, he hurries home. This summer, he’s been working part-time on commercial fishing boats and part-time teaching a summer school class on mammals to middle schoolers. With what time remains, he goes hunting and beachcombing with his father, whom he calls by his first name.
Dean used to be an engineer at the pulp mill. After it shut down, he started working for the power company, running the hydroelectric plants that electrify all Sitka. He’s semiretired now, which means he has plenty of time to play outside with his son. They are, by all appearances, best friends. They are also two of Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s most devoted disciples.
When Tyler’s parents finish their grocery shopping, we drive off to have a look at the salvaged flotsam piled on their front porch. Tyler rummages around, pulling out item after item and keeping up a running curatorial commentary. There are plastic buoys; a tightly sealed tin can of air; something that looks like the lid of a blender; a plastic housing with Russian characters on it. About one object on their porch Tyler and his father disagree. Tyler thinks it’s a boat muffler. Dean thinks it’s the cover off an underwater cable. “We’re not sure what that is,” Tyler concludes, “but it’s pretty skookum.” The haul also includes a message in a plastic bottle.
Even the most skeptical of travelers, upon discovering a message in a bottle, must experience a frisson of wonder. Fishing the scrolled parchment out, you can’t help but hope that the words scrawled across it will spell something disastrous or mysterious, like, “Of my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other” (the opening sentences of Poe’s “Ms. Found in a Bottle” 3).
These days messages in bottles seem to be sent mainly by schoolchildren or by drunken tourists, which would explain their characteristic style—more like seaborne graffiti than poetry. Among drunken tourists, the shopworn SOS-from-a-deserted-island-or-sinking-ship conceit is a perennial favorite. Schoolchildren tend to be more matter-of-fact. In 2003 an octogenarian beachcomber in Australia found a bottle. “My name is Harmony,” the message inside read. “It’s my birthday. I am nine years old today. If anyone finds this, please ring me.” From a bottle they dug up on a New Zealand beach in 2002, two boys withdrew the following memorial, dated December 2, 1912: “This note is to commemorate the enjoyable experience by two Nelson College boys, and also in memorance of our notable land-mark.” When his ship, the USS Beatty, was torpedoed off Gibraltar in 1943, all a sailor—who actually was gazing into the mortal abyss—could think to say was, “Our ship is hit and sinking. Maybe this message will reach the U.S. someday.” In a sense, mortality i
s the theme of all messages in bottles, which are addressed to distant times as well as distant shores. They are little time capsules, escape pods, sea beans of memory, loosed on the waters of oblivion.
Like most beachcombers of the Pacific Rim, the Orbisons started out collecting Japanese fishing floats, the glass balls that you sometimes see hanging in nets from the ceilings of seafood restaurants, or decorating the window displays of maritime boutiques. The popularity of glass floats owes partly to their delicate, soap-bubble beauty, partly to the Kuroshio Current that sweeps them across the Pacific and bowls them up the beaches of the American West Coast, and partly to Amos L. Wood, an aeronautics engineer and beachcombing enthusiast whose books Beachcombing for Japanese Floats and Beachcombing the Pacific have become to beachcombers what Audubon guides are to bird-watchers.
A century and a half ago, beachcombers tended to be transcendental weirdos like Ellery Channing and Henry Thoreau. Back then, much of New England’s shoreline was as wild as Alaska’s is today and more treacherous to passing ships. Just before Thoreau arrived at Province-town in 1849, a ship carrying Irish immigrants sank off Cohasset. The bodies of the drowned lay strewn along the beach, torn asunder by the surf and fish. “The Gulf Stream may return some to their native shores,” Thoreau later wrote, “or drop them in some out of the way cave of Ocean, where time and the elements will write new riddles with their bones.” Even where no shipwrecks had occurred, a Cape Cod beach in 1849 was “a wild rank place” littered “with crabs, horse-shoes and razor clams, and whatever the sea casts up—a vast morgue, where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them.”