“It’s for your own good,” they’d say. And it is. Fishermen like Per Nolan and Andy Johnson, second- and third-generation fishermen, want their way of life to continue. It’s why they don’t want the road and why they respect the inexact yet demanding job their management biologist must do. They know that the creatures they catch in their nets are wild. Every year the salmon must be able to get upriver in numbers large enough to lay their eggs so that there will be a next generation. The fingerlings must grow strong and return to the ocean. They must be fast and sleek and magnificent. Per hopes at least one of his sons will be a fisherman; Seth, the oldest, is already a full share hand on the family’s seine boat.
We walked into the AF&G office. There was a Fish and Game handout there; it appeared there would be an opening. The announcement said:
Commercial Fisheries Announcement, Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game. Prince William Sound Salmon, Announcement #15, 2:00 P.M., Wednesday, June 23, 1999. Copper/Bering River Districts. The closure on Monday, June 21, in the Copper and Bering River Districts is anticipated to have improved sockeye salmon escapement in the Copper River delta systems. [Escapement means fish not getting caught in nets and making it up the river to spawn.] An aerial survey is scheduled for Friday, June 25, the results of which will be used to help determine the management strategy for the coming week. Survey results will be provided in Saturday’s announcement. With early timed upriver stocks past their peak run timing, wild stock sockeye salmon escapement into the Copper River delta becomes the primary management consideration in determining fishing time in the Copper and Bering River Districts. Through June 22, the actual cumulative escapement past the Miles Lake sonar counter is 284,928 fish versus an anticipated cumulative count of 296,311 fish. The Copper and Bering River Districts will open for a 24-hour period beginning 7:00 P.M. Thursday, June 24, and ending at 7:00 P.M. on Friday, June 25.
Even though lately fishing time had been cut back, any chance to fish was cause for a big energy boost, a shot of hope. There would be an immediate and palpable increase in energy around Cordova. Per read it; it was shorthand to him. He first shook his head slightly in disappointment. Twenty-four hours is not much time to chase down the elusive reds and kings. It’s an immense ocean, who knows where they are and when they will be there. You could catch stragglers for the twenty-four hours, and an hour after you roll up your net the big school comes through. It’s the gamble they all take, no fish, no money, no living. And then a glow came to his face. In the end, he lives to be on the water to fish, fishing is his life.
Several fishermen leave Cordova when the season is closed and work as carpenters in Washington State. Pip was a commercial painter in Arizona and with a few partners owned a smoked-and-processed-fish company called Copper River Fine Seafoods. Several also fish out in Bristol Bay. Per made Cordova his home year-round; gillnetting for reds and kings and seining are his living. It used to be he could support Neva and their two young sons, Seth and Keith, but the past few years the openings have been short and Neva’s had to take a full-time job.
ON THE TERMINAL HARVESTER
“You want to come fishing with me for this opening?” Per asked me as we stood in the office. Every phone was busy, every person was answering questions about the opening.
“Of course I would,” I answered. I had no idea how big his boat was or how rough the ocean might get or where we’d eat or sleep, but for the excitement of twenty-four hours of fishing, it couldn’t matter too much.
“There’s only one bunk in my boat, the cabin’s not very large, and we’re not small men, but it’ll be fine. You don’t think I’m beautiful, do you?” Per said. He started walking toward their trailer park, past the school off Whiteshed Road.
“No, you’re ugly,” I answered.
“Good. We’ll be leaving tomorrow afternoon. I don’t cook either,” Per added, enjoying himself. “If I can’t buy it at the grocery store, we can’t eat it.”
Their trailer was fourteen feet wide by sixty-two feet long, with an added-on room housing their TV and woodstove. Neva’s greenhouse was built on the side. Inside their arctic entry were two bright red survival suits, hanging on hooks. If a fisherman’s boat sinks and he can get into one of these, fasten all the buttons and zippers, and pull on the hood, he might live to be rescued. When disaster strikes these gillnet boats, they normally either flip over in the surf or catch on fire. Either event leaves little or no time to get the suit on.
Per mentioned that if they lived in any of the towns west of here on Prince William Sound, such as Valdez or Whittier, Neva’s adjoining greenhouse would be crushed by the snow. Cordova gets “only” about 106 inches of snow per year, about nine feet, but Cordova’s not between the mountains and the glaciers. It’s set in front of them, in the open, so storms can blow through town rather than getting trapped. Hurricane- and gale-force winds are common here.
Inside, Neva was making her famous BBQ salmon for dinner. Rebekah said we’d been given their boys’ room. On the bunk was a dinosaur quilt made by his grandmother. LEGOs were everywhere. I noticed again how adaptable Rebekah was to strange situations and how people seemed to like her immediately. She already had her stuff stored away and told me she’d take the top bunk.
“I don’t like top bunks, Dad, but then I’m not sure if it is strong enough to hold you,” she said. The bunk bed was so short I could not straighten out. Rebekah told me in the morning that I’d talked in my sleep loud enough to wake her up.
The inside of the trailer was popping and crackling with anticipation. When you count all the days in a year, there is little actual fishing going on. There are all the days and nights spent waiting for these openings, when Per and the other permit holders are allowed to fish. No wonder Neva fixed a special meal and Per brought home bags full of expensive groceries. Soon, for twenty-four hours, Per would be able to make money. His new $30,000 diesel engine could be put to use again. The nets could catch again. All Per’s decades of fishing savvy could come alive. It was still possible that he could come back without enough fish to cover his expenses. Or, hopefully, he could spend hours and hours picking kings and reds from his net, returning triumphant from the sea, his face red from the weather and wind. More than likely the results would be somewhere in between.
“Man, this summer’s going by fast,” Per said from out of nowhere. It was the early evening of June 23, one of the longest days of the year. When the last of the fishermen emerged from the Alaskan Hotel and Bar at 2 A.M., it would not be dark yet. Soon these cowboys would be cut loose to ride and chase down their prey, the highest-priced salmon in Alaska. Their fast-riding, big-motored gill nets are their sleek horses, nine hundred feet of net their ropes to lasso the fish. The big difference between them and cowboys that ride horses, other than the killer ocean they ride, is they can’t see what they’re after.
* * *
Per’s fishing began at exactly 7 P.M., June 24, and would end at exactly 7 P.M., June 25. The whole family came down to the docks to see off Per and me. There are planes and observation boats with the best binoculars watching for lawbreakers. Gillnetters almost always fish alone out of Cordova. Per said his high-strung side comes out at these times. A couple of the boats had already started their engines. All of us, including Per’s two small sons, carried something to the boat, the Terminal Harvester, which had been built in 1991 in the state of Washington. As we loaded our supplies, a fisherman named Gerald Kompkoff was on the dock mending his net. Per said he was part Aleut and part Russian. He worked on the boat the Inseine.
We loaded up the groceries and idled out to a cannery, Ocean Beauty, to load up the boat’s built-in fish box with crushed ice. Boats were coming from every direction, like people on horseback and in wagons easing up to the starting line of the Oklahoma land rush. Neva, Rebekah, Keith, and Seth waved, as did wives and partners and lovers and children and grandparents and parents all over Cordova’s docks. Bankers and merchants and mechanics and fiberglass repairers and boatbuilders an
d electronics suppliers had their fingers crossed.
The prime area targeted by Per and his fishing partners is in the Prince William Sound management area. “It includes all coastal waters and inland drainages entering the north central Gulf of Alaska between Cape Suckling and Cape Fairfield. The area includes the Bering River, the Copper River, and all of Prince William Sound with a total adjacent land area of approximately 38,000 square miles.” A report from one of the first explorations of the Copper River area by the United States, headed by Lieutenant Henry T. Allen of the Second U.S. Cavalry, in 1885 had nothing to do with salmon stocks. “In view of the fact that so little is known of the interior of the Territory of Alaska, and that the conflicting interests between the white people and the Indians of that Territory may in the near future result in serious disturbances between the two races, the department commander authorizes you to proceed to that Territory for the purpose of obtaining all information which will be valuable and important, especially to the military branch of the Government.”
From atop a mountain between twenty-five hundred and three thousand feet high, there was a clear vision of the formidable obstacles that lay before them: “We had gained a sufficient altitude to see, far to the northeast, a high wall of ice, visible as far back as the eye (aided with a field glass) could see. To the north and almost joining the glacier on the northeast, we saw another monster moving off to the northeast. In our front, or east, lay a collection of thousands of small islands, varying from one-sixteenth of an acre to fifty acres in size, surrounded by light gray liquid, varying in breadth from a mile to a small stream, and in depth being about three feet here and about eighteen inches further down. This was the Copper River, that we thought might be ascended in a steamer for 50 to 100 miles!”
Lieutenant Allen, in his report upon returning from their remarkable “reconnaissance in Alaska” concluded, “Should the natives of the Tanana or Copper River commit outrages upon the whites who may be making their way into the interior, of such a nature to justify the intervention of the military, many difficulties would be encountered before redress could be obtained. To stop the sale of ammunition and arms would be a sad blow to them, but a decidedly negative retaliation.… Once on the Copper River, food in the form of salmon would be abundant, and a severe retaliation could be inflicted by patrolling the river, thus preventing, if possible, the natives from taking fish during the summer. By this means a large number of them would perish the following winter.”
A hundred and fifteen years later, some Cordova fishermen believe that there are many organizations, not just the U.S. government, trying to prevent them from fishing. Some believe these organizations would like to shut them down completely, by posting patrols to control them until eventually their lifestyle would perish. The fishermen will fight this vigorously, hoping too that it does not happen so subtly and incrementally that they do not fight until it’s too late.
Once we were out of the “no wake” zone and into Orca Inlet, Per and all the other bow-pickers of the Gulf of Alaska let their motors roar. Some had larger boats than Per, made of aluminum, powered by twin diesels, and worth close to $150,000. But no boat seemed to be gaining on us. Inside the cabin, Per told me a few fishermen, like “that macrobiotic eating” Sully, still had the wooden, slow boats. Sully sometimes left a day before the rest, and still, if they had to run to Controller Bay, where the Bering River empties, or near Strawberry Point, the fast boats beat him there. Sully and his artist wife, Rocky, are originally from the Northeast. Sully, who sometimes wore his white hair in a ponytail, was a beatnik, before hippie was a word. He is sixty-two or so; when he was younger, he had a huge beard, and he had always been lean, Per said. Sully was an extreme skier before there was even a word for these snow maniacs. Sully has a run named after him in Telluride, Sully’s Gully. Pip, an excellent skier and one of Per’s fishing partners, skied Telluride once, saw the run, and decided to pass on it for another lifetime. Per’s boat ran twenty to twenty-five knots; Sully’s little white boat does six to eight knots. Sully began his fishing career as a crewman on Per’s stepdad’s seine boat. Per says Sully survives on beans and rice. Per would feel much more at home at the dinner table with ex–football coaches John Madden and Mike Ditka.
The sky was slate gray and peppered with slow-moving puffs of light gray clouds. It was about fifty degrees. The ocean was smooth and lime green; the spray splashing up on both sides of our boat was silver. I could see something in the water, which was so shallow with sandbars and even isolated rocks that Per had to keep the boat up on plane, at full speed, so it could run without hitting anything. At first I thought it was some old kelp washing in from the ocean, but I kept seeing it. Per directed me out onto the deck. The cabin was at the back of this boat, the working area on the front two-thirds. Floating on their backs everywhere in the water, so many I could not count them all, were sea otters. Here they were protected by Egg Island. Most had their babies on their bellies, where they nursed and napped, nursed and napped. The wakes the gillnetting boats left gave the otters a modest ride. Per said he’d seen “rafts” of over a hundred sea otters before.
We’d passed Mummy Island and squeezed through the dangerous Whiteshed Point. Some barrier islands—Cooper Sands, Grass Island Bar, Kokinhenik Bar and Strawberry Reef—shield the Copper River delta. We were headed there to claim our spot to be able to begin fishing at 7 P.M. exactly. Per said there would be about three hundred boats in this district. Some would fish inside the islands, some up the river a bit—wherever they thought the salmon were. Where were the “high-liners” going? everyone wondered. High-liners are those fishermen seeking salmon who consistently seem to find the fish and catch more than the other professionals.
We were now in the Gulf of Alaska. On the beach of the barrier island to our left, three bald eagles fed on some dead flesh. What I wondered was, how do these fishermen keep from being completely overwhelmed? Water surrounded us, its surface giving no hint to what lay below. Per had said that they look for jumpers, salmon that occasionally leapt from the sea. But that worked more for seiners, when the fish were in larger schools. How intimidating it seemed that there are so many spots to let your net out into the water.
Per chose a spot and let his net out. We watched the net for top water splashes, for signs that reds or, even better, kings were hitting the net. The top would move and buoys would pop down in the water when they hit at first. Our hopes would soar—we hoped it would happen again. Per let some sets last an hour, or even less; a few were for three hours, when he would just leave the net fishing without pulling it up. The net jutted straight out from the boat’s bow, stretching nine hundred feet and sinking twenty-three or twenty-four feet down. There was time for storytelling and for chats with Per’s fishing partners on the radio. Pip called and said that the opening price was set by Norquest at $1.80 per pound for reds and $2.50 for kings. Per felt that the price would go up because the take would be small. He was having second thoughts; maybe we should have gone to another place to catch netfulls of cheap pink salmon. The situation made him thoughtful.
“This life on the water runs in our family. My father, he was studying the information obtained by Gary Power’s U-2 spy plane. He is a university-trained physicist, but he didn’t want to work for the industrial war complex. So we moved to Alaska,” Per said.
He kept the motor running and his thirty-foot-long bow-picker in gear to keep the net straight. Without the power of the engine, the current or the net could suck us toward the breakers, where several boats have been flipped and fishermen killed.
Per explained how his father, an adventurer on many levels, had taken a huge spruce log from the Northwest and put two axles underneath it. He then towed it from Washington to Monterey, California. There he hollowed it out and sailed it, as a trimaran, from California to the Marquesas and then to the Big Island of Hawaii. He took a sextant and a book on celestial navigation and learned how to guide himself on the way there. Per’s dad, also an inventor,
fishes Bristol Bay and winters in Fiji. Bristol Bay is believed to have the most abundant run of red salmon in the world.
A Steller’s sea lion popped up right along the net. Per had already told me to look for them; he said they knew the sound of the gillnet boats; to them it was the sound of an all-you-can-eat buffet. It certainly was easier for them to just rip the fish from the net instead of speeding through the ocean, darting and cutting, to catch these quick, sleek silver-sided salmon. Occasionally, a seven-foot-long salmon shark would about tear the nets in half, leaving gaping, expensive holes. Dolphin and killer whales, normally, were too intelligent to mess with the nets. Even the salmon could sometimes see the net and avoid it.
Per noticed a fisherman whose boat he did not know making a set close to the beach. Fishermen are tempted to head inland because salmon often run close to the beach. How do the fish find their way for possibly several thousand miles back to the exact place they were born? There are no landmarks underwater to follow; surely they don’t “smell” their home freshwaters diluted beyond recognition in ocean waters. The return of the salmon is one of the unknown miracles of nature.
Looking for Alaska Page 20