Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  Local and visiting boaters see and report all kinds of possibly life-threatening events: sinkings, “man overboard,” fires. “3:17 P.M. Boater reported a hang glider out of control and heading toward the sea. Coast Guard cutter Mustang advised.” Eight minutes later, another call. “3:25 P.M. Same caller advised the hang glider was a kite; no one is in danger.”

  Seward is a major sport and commercial fishing port. Resurrection Bay has one of the world’s best silver salmon runs. Icicle Seafoods and others process huge amounts of halibut, salmon, and black cod. Plenty of fishing-related calls are recorded in “The Police Log.” “12:20 A.M. Male removed from Yukon Bar, told not to go into any more bars tonight and go home. Dispute over a fishing pole.” Does this mean the guy was bringing his favorite brand rod and reel into the bars and picking fights with other patrons over what was the best brand, or did someone try to steal his pole?

  “8:17 P.M. Advised of people shooting fish in the ‘Y’ where Bear Creek and Salmon Creek come together.” Obviously these weren’t the same people at Yukon Bar fighting over the fishing pole, unless they were arguing the merits of shooting a fish with a gun, which is totally illegal. It was physically impossible for them to be shooting fish in the water from the Yukon Bar, the water’s too far away from Main Street. Speaking of fishing, some of the best fish catchers around Seward are the bald eagles. They congregate around town in winter—I’ve seen seven on the top of one telephone pole crosspiece. But sometimes even our national bird is falsely accused in “The Police Log.” “9:25 A.M. Two subjects advised eagles on Nash Road were eating what appeared to be a human; later revealed to be discarded parts of a small black bear.”

  Me, Rita, Brooke, Jody, Luke, Aaron, Julianne, and Jed after one of our salmon fishing trips in Seward. PHOTO BY PETER JENKINS

  During salmon season (when the salmon are in and entering the creeks that flow into the bay) people around Seward fish day and night. There are so many silver salmon at times that everywhere you look they are jumping out of the water. I’ve seen hundreds of people snagging them with a treble hook; the locals call it meat fishing. Good snaggers can catch over fifty pounds of ocean-fresh silver salmon in an hour and a half. One guy trying to meat fish made “The Police Log.” “1:25 A.M. Warning issued to male for endangering the welfare of a child following report of male fishing in the surf at the waterfall with an infant in a backpack.”

  I got nailed for sport fishing with the wrong license. One June morning after I’d been in Alaska a month or so, I rushed down to the bait and fishing supply place, the Fish House, right across from the docks. I was going out on a charter, it was six something in the morning; I was still not used to the almost perpetual daylight and wasn’t sleeping well. That night I’d gotten about three hours of sleep. I was rushing to buy my license. Eight or ten people were hovering around the counter doing the same, I was about to miss my boat. The teenager asked me my address; I gave her 1907 Dora Way, Seward, the address of the house we were renting. She wrote down my Alaska phone number, I told her I wanted a yearlong license. I paid what she asked for. Turned out she sold me a resident license, but I was no resident. To be one I would have had to be living in Alaska already for a year.

  The trooper found out eight months later, somehow, and one short winter day I got a call. It was our local State of Alaska Fish and Wildlife Protection officer. He asked me to come down to his office in city hall. When I got there, some trappers were checking in some beaver and wolverine pelts. I paid my fine, and then this appeared in “The Police Log” under “Fish and Wildlife Protection”: “The following has been cited by Seward Fish and Wildlife Protection officers. Peter G. Jenkins, of Seward, cited on charge of making a false statement on a resident sport license June 6. Bail set at $200.” I’m sure just about everyone we knew saw it, but only two mentioned it to me.

  The old saying about commercial fishermen hitting a port ready to fight is certainly proven true in the log. “1:18 A.M. Officers responded to Peking Restaurant for report of four males fighting. Subjects were advised not to enter any more bars tonight and return to their boat.” “9:59 P.M. 911 caller said male going in and out of consciousness at the Yukon Bar had said he thought it was fish poisoning from out at sea: medics responded.” Fish poisoning? Creative. The folks that work at the canneries in Alaska get in the most trouble. Hillary Clinton worked in one when she was still in college. “5:09 P.M. Caller advised he had just been involved in a fight with another subject who was making a lot of noise and urinated on his tent at Seward Fisheries tent city. Officer responded and restored peace.”

  Like people everywhere else, people in and around Seward pound on each other every so often. “4:17 P.M. Advised of a male and female arguing at the campground near Coast Guard housing. Officer brought the female, who allegedly assaulted the male, to the Seward jail.” Rarely are people taken to jail. This man must have been seriously beat up by this female. “4:43 P.M. Advised a shot had been heard in 500 block of First Avenue; it was an accidental discharge when a pickup driver was putting his shotgun under the seat.” I didn’t know you could put a loaded shotgun under the seat of your vehicle.

  “9:00 P.M. Report of two juveniles rolling bowling balls down Fourth Avenue.” As creative as I was as a juvenile, this activity never occurred to me, probably because bowling wasn’t hip back then. “9:30 P.M. Caller advised two bowling balls were taken from his vehicle while parked at AVTEC [a statewide technical school] last night.” Those stolen bowling balls were never the same after their trip down the street. “12:08 P.M. Advised of two hitchhikers at Mile 3; the man was hitting the woman on the head. Contacted, all OK, playing around.” Seward people do love to play around.

  I’m not sure what was going on with this family: “5:17 P.M. Advised of white Mazda driving in Lost Lake subdivision and looking at empty cabins.” “5:31 P.M. Caller asked if there had been a body found on Exit Glacier Road. His mom, driving a white Mazda (see previous entry), had been gone for a while and he was concerned.”

  And there was this one, called in by some thoughtful, law-abiding citizens: “7:44 P.M. Female called wanting to know if they would get in trouble and how much it would cost if someone wrote ‘Bob’ or ‘Cindy’ in the fresh cement in front of the Breeze Motel. Also, mentioned something about ‘butt’ and ‘boob’ prints. Not sure if they had already done it or if she just wanted to.”

  Does wet concrete stick to bare skin or hairy skin? How do you get it off? What if the fresh concrete was deeper than you thought it would be and you went to sit down to make your butt or boob print and slipped and couldn’t get up? And then “Cindy” reached over to help remove you, butt first, and she fell in boob first, and you were both stuck and the cement was drying fast. Could the dispatcher advise Cindy and Bob how to escape the hardening grip of the concrete? At least you were in there together.

  4

  “Fly Through That Hole”

  Most Alaskans hate standing in lines. This giant place is filled with people determined to live as free from others’ intervention as possible. Alaska may have served as the incubator for the behavior now termed politically incorrect. They despise being herded; if they were sheep, they would never go off the cliff together. More than likely, they’d trample the shepherd.

  Fortunately, Alaskans don’t have to wait in line regularly, unless they’re in certain places in Anchorage or their boats are lined up outside the cannery to off-load their catch of salmon. This summer day I was standing in line in the Ketchikan airport, about as far south in Alaska as I could be. Another fifty miles and I would have been in British Columbia. Just one other person was in this little line. She was in her twenties, dressed in blue jeans, frayed; a blue jean shirt, with holes; and a blue jean jacket, with two different Harley-Davidson patches. Her only luggage was an oil-stained, orange plastic case, and inside it was a chain saw. She was flying out to a fish camp to meet her boyfriend (in Alaska the word is often partner). I didn’t ask her what she was doing with the chain saw.r />
  Earlier she’d mentioned that she, but not her boyfriend, belonged to a bikers’ club in town, the Ketchikan Harley Riders Association. She said her boyfriend, who was from California, did not own a Harley since the main road to ride was just twenty-something miles long and there was no road that could get you “the hell out.” The road that leads out of town is only twenty-six miles, and then it ends. There is no way to drive away from Ketchikan, or from most Alaskan communities, even the capital city. This doesn’t stop thirty or forty riders from getting on their Harleys and running out the road just so they can come back, screaming through town, those beautiful motors rumbling.

  “There are forty bars and forty churches in Ketchikan,” she said from out of nowhere. Her statement was thrown at me aggressively, like a punch.

  That seemed to me to be about right for Alaska, keeping heaven and hell right across the street from each other, nothing hidden, one Alaskan convinced heaven is here and hell is there, the next Alaskan having the opposite opinion.

  The girl and I had all kinds of time to talk because we were waiting for the fog to lift and the weather to improve, something Alaskans must be willing to wait for or to risk dying. The fog lay on the water and moved like liquid mercury; it sifted through the needles of the spruce trees; it hid killer mountainsides. The list of people who have died in small-plane crashes in Alaska is filled with far too many pilots who thought they could fly through, over, and around the low clouds, the fog, the curtains of gray.

  Here the clouds in the sky and the fog blowing off glaciers, sea, and land merge and make landscapes deceptive, a world sugarcoated in soft-as-cotton-looking clouds. It becomes moisture-laden, seductive fluff hiding a cruel, hard death. The clouds and the fog are as much a part of southeast Alaska as sunshine is part of Arizona. Some pilots, with too little Alaska experience or too much, pilots who just once get a false sense of their abilities, are sometimes tricked by this shrouded world and end up running into unmovable mountains or the tundra. Some people I met won’t fly with any pilot who doesn’t have ten thousand hours of flying in Alaska.

  Right before we stepped up to the counter, the chain-saw-toting biker woman stuck out her square jaw and said, “We get a hundred and seventy inches of rain a year here too, and that doesn’t keep us from riding.” The more intense the environment, the weather, and the wilderness get, the more some Alaskans enjoy not being intimidated by it all.

  A cargo guy strained to push a cart by us; it was loaded to well above his head with Styrofoam boxes filled with vacuum-packed salmon from some sportfishing lodge.

  “Hi, where you headed?” the surprisingly young, black-haired woman asked me. She clearly worked for Taquan Air, though she wore no uniform.

  “I’m going to Prince of Wales Island, to Craig.”

  “Okay,” she said, “what’s your name or are you just a number?” She had a playful personality.

  “My name is 1 … 2 … 1 … 2.”

  In response she began doing jumping jacks behind the counter.

  “What are you, some kind of aerobics instructor that doesn’t believe in your own program?”

  “All right my name begins with P, and the next letter is an o…”

  “Come on, now … if you don’t hurry, you can swim to the island.”

  “All right. My name is Polar Eskimo.”

  She lifted her eyebrows and frowned. “You’re not even ready for my high school talent contest and my high school had twelve people in it.”

  I gave in. “Okay, my name’s Peter Jenkins.”

  “How much do you weigh?”

  “What’d you say?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly.

  “I said, how much do you weigh?” She stepped to the opening in the counter for the baggage and looked me over.

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  “Because this is a floatplane you’re flying on.”

  “A floatplane, I don’t want to—”

  She interrupted me, “You’d have to tell me your weight no matter what plane of ours you’re flying on.” She sighed. “Come on, you can tell me, how much?”

  She seemed almost flirtatious. I definitely wasn’t happy about answering; I don’t get on scales. Surely she wasn’t serious. And if she was, I was beginning to wonder what else they might want to know.

  “I weigh one hundred twenty-five pounds.”

  She started to write it down, then looked up and raised her eyebrows at me. “Your right leg weighs more than that! Be serious.”

  “All right, I weigh two ten.”

  She stepped back again so that she could see all of me. “Come on. You’re leaving out body parts. Now, just add ’em all up: legs, arms, head—you know what there is under those fashionable clothes you have on, then subtract fifteen pounds, since you males are known to exaggerate.”

  I had on my favorite three-year-old blue jean shirt, some almost as old jeans, and a pair of scuffed Roper boots. She didn’t appear to be in any hurry.

  It had been years since I’d experienced an airline employee with a sense of humor, other than the folks at wacky and wonderful Southwest Airlines.

  “By the way,” she sighed, “when was the last time you stepped on a scale?”

  “A couple years ago. You don’t really need to know my weight.”

  “We really do,” she replied, now with all seriousness. “We’re trying to figure out how much food you’ve eaten since you’ve been in Alaska. It’s a study we’re conducting for the Alaska Department of Tourism. Now, how much do you weigh? We know what you weighed when you first got here. Ever see the movie Enemy of the State?”

  The Harley-driving woman tapped me on the shoulder. “Listen, dude,” she whispered, “they really need to know because these planes only carry so much weight, and if you don’t tell them correctly, it could be dangerous. You know the plane can’t take off overloaded. They haul mail, cargo, whatever, up to their capacity, after they figure in the weights of the passengers and pilot.”

  Behind the counter the young woman smiled and held up her pencil. I told her what I thought I weighed.

  I couldn’t help imagining: What if this was happening at LAX, the Los Angeles airport, and this same feisty counter worker was asking the same question of a fifty-plus-year-old woman who was overtanned, underfed, and so altered by plastic surgery that nothing original was left unchanged on her head but her skull. “I weighed myself this morning and I was one hundred and twelve and a half pounds, three pounds less than I weighed in high school.” What if they asked passengers at La Guardia or Kennedy Airport how much they weighed?

  About half an hour later we walked down a gangplank to a floatplane, tied up like a boat at a dock. This airport was on an island, across the water from Ketchikan. You can’t even drive to their airport; you’ve got to take the ferry less than a half mile or fly in. Flat land in Southeast Alaska is rare.

  Even if I hated flying, there were few other ways to get around much of Alaska. At least in Southeast you had two choices, flying or the ferry. If I were to take the state ferry all the way from Seward to Prince of Wales Island, just to avoid flying, it would take days, maybe longer than a week, to cover the six-hundred-plus miles.

  Alaskans call this part of the state Southeast. It’s a thin strip of some of the world’s most wildly awesome mountain-and-ocean-dominated land. Southeast is about five hundred miles long and is attached to the giant part of the state by a glacier larger than Rhode Island. Alaskans who live north of Southeast condescendingly call this part of Alaska a suburb of Seattle. Even though they may never have been here, they think of it as a place with “some” yuppies. (I hadn’t seen any yet.) It’s supposed to be a part of Alaska where the living is too easy.

  On a map, Southeast looks like nothing but islands. The only part of the land that isn’t an island is a thin strip backed by Canada. Alaska’s equivalent of the Great Wall of China, a nearly impregnable string of mountains and glaciers, barricades it in. Juneau, the capital of Alaska, is i
n Southeast, and there’s no way to drive to it, no roads that reach there. There are only three roads out of Southeast, and unless you live in one of the small communities that boasts a road, you are out of luck. The only way to get out in a vehicle is to put it on the Alaska Marine Ferry and travel to one of these towns where a road starts. One road leaves from Haines, one from Skagway, and one from Hyder; none of them are connected to the others. They all lead into Canada.

  I noticed a young man striding down the walkway toward us from the airport. Surely this was not our pilot. He wore jeans, a Denver Broncos cap, jogging shoes, and a navy blue windbreaker. How many times in his life had this guy shaved?

  “You both ready to go?” he asked.

  “I am,” I said.

  He opened the right-hand door of the plane.

  “Now, who wants to ride in the front seat?”

  Neither of us volunteered. I was confused. How do you sit in the front next to the pilot? Where does the copilot sit?

  “Okay, then,” the guy who couldn’t be our pilot said, “you both can climb on in to the two backseats. Watch your step.” This guy appeared to be in his twenties. I decided he must be a combination baggage-handler/steward.

  I stepped onto one of the floats as waves lapped against it. One wave came over and got my foot wet. A colossal cruise ship had just passed by on its way north. I heard steps coming from the covered walkway and turned. A man in his mid-to-late thirties was running toward us.

  As he reached the plane, the woman said, “Hey, Jerry.”

  “Oh, hi.” He wasn’t even out of breath.

  “You been politicking?” she asked.

  “Always,” Jerry answered.

  I got in, then the woman with the chain saw got in. She had not allowed the guy to load it in the luggage area; for some reason she seemed to want to be near it. What was really in there?

  The young guy in the Broncos hat climbed into the pilot’s seat, and then Jerry got into what I’d assumed was the “copilot’s” seat. The young guy started the engine. The insides of this floatplane were scuffed and scratched; portions of my side window looked as if some child had worked it over with a nail. The floatplane had started bobbing up and down in the waves from passing boats.