Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  “Last year we lost a fisherman who got too close to the breakers,” Per remembered, his voice tinged with a sadness for the young family in Oregon and a knowledge that most serious accidents are a result of a seemingly small, inconsequential decision. He explained how the fisherman’s boat got turned sideways in the breakers. Then the full power of the ocean hits the boat broadside, wanting to turn it over. It flipped this boat; it was upside down, the engine might still have been running. The cabin probably filled with fumes and it was totally black. The man struggled frantically to find air to breathe and became disoriented, knowing he must get out.

  Fish and Game happened to be around. They responded and went into the shallow breakers after him in their inflatable. The breakers flipped them, also, into waist-deep water. They spotted gas leaking from the fisherman’s flipped gas tanks. The Fish and Game guys got a chain saw and cut a hole in the upside-down hull. One spark could have caused the whole thing to blow up. The fisherman had probably broken bones from being slammed inside the dark cabin by the waves breaking on his capsized boat. And after his boat had rolled, his net had broken loose. Fish and Game could never get to him; he died, Per told me, with no indication that the story was part of the norm for an Alaskan fisherman’s life. People died every year and many more came close.

  “My sister’s boat, a seiner, rolled and sank in deep water three years ago,” Per said. She and her crew were rescued.

  Often the gillnetters are hustling around, walking on decks and bows and side rails smeared with salmon slime and ocean water. There’s even the simple risk of slipping and falling off your boat, hitting your head on the way into the ocean. Your boat’s running, you’re knocked out or dazed. The gillnetters often fish all night. I saw no one wearing a life preserver, much less a survival suit. The water is never warm enough so someone would be able to swim to safety unless he’s right outside the breakers, like where Andy Johnson the surfer likes to catch a wave. I’d been looking for a gillnet boat with a surfboard strapped to the top but had not seen one.

  THE ABUSED SECRET CODE

  The brotherhood of Per, Pip, Art, and Marc didn’t talk to each other much at first. Was it because the excitement and anticipation of netfuls of salmon, what keeps all fishermen coming back, turned to disappointment? Per checked in with Pip and he was doing worse than we were and that was bad. Neither Marc nor Art were catching much either, or so Per discerned from the code-speak over the marine radio. Marc, who was from Washington and a rabid Washington State football fan, found out I was from Tennessee. The big debate this year in college football was over who would be the better pro quarterback, his Ryan Leaf of WSU or Peyton Manning of the University of Tennessee. I offered up all my reasons why Peyton would smoke Ryan. Marc knew it would go the other way—Ryan was the man. The argument over the radio went Peyton, Ryan, Peyton, Ryan, PEYTON, RYAN, until Per had to step in and referee.

  Per had made several sets, laying out the net, letting it set, reeling it in and picking out the salmon. The faster the net came in, the less picking, the smaller the amount of salmon, the less money to survive. And the twenty-four hours were ticking, ticking away. Who knew when the sonar god and biologist god would let them fish again?

  We moved down by Strawberry Reef, southwest of the steep Ragged Mountains, which shot up right from the beach. We made a set and then moved east some more toward Kanak Island. To our north was a potent maze of rivers, lakes, deltas, bays, marshes, and wetlands channeling the running waters, the apparently still waters, the waters controlled by the tides, the waters coming out of the glaciers. One prophetic past Alaskan governor had realized the worldwide value of pure water. And he understood the billions of gallons stored up in the glaciers and running through Alaska’s pure wilderness filters of rock and wetland. He proposed that Alaska ship supertankers full of pure water to the rest of the world. Some people thought he was crazy; more and more think it may happen someday.

  Close to dinnertime, a conversation not in code came over Per’s radio between Pip and Marc:

  Marc: “Tell me a good story to improve my mood.”

  Pip: “One night I had seven fish in the boat. I was off certain islands where we’ve done bad and done good.”

  Marc: “Yeah. So far my mood hasn’t improved.”

  Pip: “I woke up around 3 A.M. from a nap and there were three hundred fish in the net. I ended up by the end of that morning with twelve hundred fish on ice.”

  Marc: “That’s like Santa Claus. You go to sleep and when you wake up, there are presents under the tree.”

  At 6 A.M. the morning of June 25, after fishing for eleven hours, Per delivered 502 pounds of salmon to the tender. Tenders are large boats that have holds filled with ice. They anchor near groups of gillnetters. After they harvest a decent amount of salmon, Per and other fishermen deliver a load to them to lighten their boats and keep the salmon as fresh as possible. Our last set before we delivered held only twelve fish, and six of those were dog salmon, called chum; they only brought between ten cents and forty cents a pound. The first set Per had made was forty-two fish, forty reds and two kings, a fine beginning. It was never better. Pip finished stronger than Per but had started slower.

  All these humans with their nets and fast, sleek boats, putting themselves up against what the misinformed think are dumb, small-brained fish. Yet these salmon are able to make their way down from the cold creeks in which they hatched to places of mystery hundreds and hundreds of miles away in the Pacific Ocean, then orient their way back again. A human can’t get from one airport to another in the protective metal skin of a plane without sophisticated electronic navigational devices, often assisted by multimillion-dollar satellites. How do these salmon do it? The humans pit themselves against these fish; if they make a good catch, they come back. If they don’t, they find other, less demanding work such as, as I heard several fishermen say, working for the government or working by the hour.

  This set of four fishermen could be a mash of moods, all depending on the fishing. They were grumpier than old men when the fishing was bad. They could be poetic; there was almost no way to ignore the fullness of the beauty and wildlife all around them. They were in survival mode from the ever-present death waiting behind one tired, overdaring, or stupid mistake. They could be funny as long as one of them responded. If they were tired, especially Per and Marc, the more verbal ones, they’d make jokes, amuse themselves. Pip, on the other hand, was a stickler for detail, all work and intensity until it was time to party.

  Pip was especially concerned with the use of their secret code. It was important to speak over public airways without any excitement or depression in your voice. If one of them got into the fish, had two hundred fish in the net when most others were thrilled to have twenty, the last thing Pip wanted was to give that location away to anyone but themselves. The other fishermen pay attention to the high-liners, try to break their codes. That’s another reason Pip changes their code often. Their group had been known at times to be “in the fish.” When Art, who was maybe in his fifties and the oldest guy in the group, got into the fish, or one of the others got into the fish, he tended to get too excited.

  Say Per made contact via the radio, speaking in code, where any word beginning with A meant 6 and any word with D meant 7. So Per would say, “Anywhere doggy,” meaning he just got sixty-seven in a set. Breathlessly, with a thrill infusing each word, Art would repeat, “Anywhere doggy!” They had letters that stood for the depth they fished in, their location, and so on. Some fishermen did anything, legal or otherwise, to gain information, even used illegal cell phone scanners. If the technology existed and could be bought, some fishermen would stop at nothing to get into the fish.

  At least two hundred of the fishermen wanted to keep their nets out until the last allowable moment. We were fishing a riptide outside Grass Island Bar, our last set of this opening. Every set, Per hoped for a net load, the splashing of caught fish all along the corkline, the dream of a full box of layers of salmon
and ice, some of the best-tasting salmon in the world, Copper River reds and Copper River kings. The riptide created a long line in the sea, the brown water filled with glacial silt coming at us from the Copper River delta meeting and overcoming the retreating jade-green clarity of the sea. Fishing in the rip was known to produce. We were a couple miles offshore. A couple orcas were hunting here too. Until the last fifty feet of the net was rolled up, Per expected abundance and accepted two last fish. The last two reds were worth about $9 each, plus fifteen to twenty-five cents a pound because Per layered his fish in ice and rushed them straight to the fish house, Ocean Beauty.

  Our twenty-four hours together on Per’s Terminal Harvester were over. Now the horses, these gillnetters, were headed back to the barn. From everywhere around us, from the east, the south, and the west, came almost all the gillnet boats, their throttle levers pushed forward to drive the boats as fast as they’d go. Some tenders, lit up like a tiny city, waited to unload in Orca Inlet. Most went straight into Cordova. We raced past several boats to catch up with Pip. From the highest strung to the seemingly most laid-back, these fishermen are intensely competitive people. We sped part of the way home through the delta running full blast down Pete Dahl Channel. The channels are the main fingers that carry the most water; this water spreads far out into the mudflats but is exceedingly shallow. It’s easy to get stuck.

  Boats that lingered closer to Cordova had beat us to the cannery and fish-processing place. We lined up and waited our turn. Family, wives, and girlfriends, children and other dependents, gathered at the docks to see the hunter-gatherers return. The gold, the meat, was iced and hidden, waiting to be lifted up in metal baskets by small cranes and weighed. After unloading, we headed back to Per’s dock space, where Neva, Rebekah, Seth, and Keith waited. I held up a fat, silver, twenty-five-pound king salmon. Per had said he wanted our family to have it. Seth and Keith were totally focused on their father. They knew he’d waited all winter and most of the spring to be fishing again. They knew his mood—the mood for all of them—and their town depended on catching salmon. The catch wasn’t fantastic, not even really good. But some money was made, bills would be paid, with still a month or so of gillnetting to go. The fishermen of Cordova would take it one opening at a time, one throw of the net at a time, to gamble with the sea.

  Per was jovial, joking, his face was a healthy red, and he was content and full of himself. Per lived in Alaska so he could go out into the unknown, his net ready to unroll, and come back with these exquisite-eating wild salmon on the Terminal Harvester on a dark-blue-sky day. He wondered why people wanted to live in other places. He knew of nowhere else in the world he would rather be. These moments hunting the unseen salmon made the isolation and frigid, gray winds and the lack of any other jobs and life in a trailer worth it. On this Alaskan summer evening, the sun shone on Per’s triumphant moment. His gamble, their gamble, had paid off once more.

  Per Nolan in Cordova. PHOTO BY PETER JENKINS

  Rebekah, Per, and I took the king salmon down to the other end of Cordova where Per said he could have it smoked. Pip and Scott, a partner, smoke, can, and sell some salmon every season. Neva works for them. A few years back, Scott almost lost his life when he was thrown out of his boat. The breakers hit the stern and flipped it over bow first. The cold water can numb your body and hands and arms, depriving you of the strength to hold on. If he hadn’t wrapped himself up in the corkline, he would have drowned. And he’d only wrapped himself in the corkline so his loved ones would find his body and not doubt what had happened. But he was rescued. We’d get the salmon smoked at their facility, in an old cannery building built over Orca Inlet, looking out toward Hawkins Island.

  Neva had said there were few sights as inspiring as six killer whales coming through here on their way in or out of Prince William Sound, especially with the sun setting in the west and lighting up their exhaled breath and their dorsal fins in silver and gold. They swam through the channel slowly, unless they were hunting. Looking for whales, I spotted instead an older bow-picker coming toward Cordova with a surfboard strapped to the roof of the cabin. The surfboard was creamy white with orange striping—it was Andy Johnson, the fisherman, the world-class extreme snowboarder, the surfer returning from his place of worship, where the ocean and mountains and snow and ice and water all meet.

  I told Per I’d had about all of him I could stand and that he needed to go be with his wife. I would hang out with Andy, if I could catch up with him. While we were gone Rebekah opened some of her own doors.

  FROM REBEKAH

  Hippie Cove

  Cordova is the place, Alaska is the country. I am near twenty the first time I visit Cordova with my father, and out of all the places my father has taken me or sent me to visit, Cordova remains my favorite. I know picking favorites is absurd; perhaps the best way to put it is that Cordova is the place in which I would most want to live. Why? Because of the countryside, the peaks and skies under which it sits, the hollow little corner of the world that it claims, and the people that attract me so, because they live out their lives, day in and day out, in their own little corner of this magic land.

  Cordova is both bitter and sweet, but more sweet than bitter, the more “offbeat” you are. I love its roads, the way they all seem to have a part that moves uphill. I love Cordova’s houses; the big furry dogs tied up to their front porches that never bark. I love the Russians who live in that hole over past Per and Neva’s trailer park, and how the Russian women keep their heads covered in white, probably hand-stitched bonnets, and how these women all drive the nicest Ford and GMC trucks in town. I never saw any of the other locals talk to the Russians. I did, though, drive into their hole on one of my many Cordovan drives. The hole was really a fenced-in cemented RV park housing expensive RV after expensive RV. Neva let me take her old beat-up Sentra around town a lot. I would drive the back roads and then get scared and turn around because all of a sudden I would realize that I was out by myself and I knew nothing about how to come face-to-face with men like Wild Gene or wild bears like I’d seen on TV.

  I love Cordova’s baseball field and the view from the bleachers. I wonder if Neva even notices the mountains in that view anymore, just as I hardly ever notice the rolling hills and green flavors of my own state anymore. When is it that we actually stop looking out the window—when our eyes see nothing but road and the endless yellow and white lines on the pavement? It’s sad. I know that’s why people move, for the views of mountains and hills or lakes, but once they settle in and the years start to roll by, the wonderment finally wears off. Where do all of these magnificent views go, when exactly is it that the damn road becomes the only object of our stares? Thank God people have kids and the world hasn’t exploded yet because in those kids’ eyes, hope exists for reclaiming the view.

  Cordova has a certain “air” to it that I have not found in any other Alaskan town, or anywhere else, for that matter. This air seems to represent all things reflective and deep. The people carry this air, as does the view. It made me want to look as far into the water as I could and keep the feel of the breeze that blew on my forearms while I stood on Per’s boat on my skin forever. It made me want to climb a nearby mountain despite my fear of encountering that one pesky bear that Neva and the boys kept reminding me about. This air of reflection made me want to sit in the Orca Café and drink endless cups of coffee and write, my colored pencils at hand, and plunge into these new people I’d met. It made me want to never stop looking out the windows of Cordova, no matter whether they were the windows of the café, the windows of Per and Neva’s home, or the windows to the world that are my come-with-me-everywhere eyes, windows that lead to the very essence of my soul.

  * * *

  “Hooch” was his name, and Andrea was hers. I had encountered people like this before, the lone-wanderer types who can find a home no matter the weather or the town. She reminded me of Alanis Morissette, with her long, nearly black hair falling to her ass, and she had these hands that
were perfectly traveled and beckoning to the next best thing. They were the kind of hands that were made for acoustic guitar playing. Andrea and Hooch had dated, been together, whatever you want to call it, and I met her at the Orca Café. She was working the deli and coffee counter hidden in the back of the store behind all the shelves filled with books and trinkets. I was alone and shy and new in town, and I guess that was written all over my freckled face. She was kind and sweet-spirited, and she reached out to me, inviting me down to her place—Hippie Cove.

  Hippie Cove is a piece of land inhabited by old rusted vans and school buses and people who need nothing but food, love, and liquid for the day. Thus the name, I suppose. All around were tall pines, pebble streams that you could either hop over or walk through (nothing wrong with getting a little wet, right?). The sound of small water-falls, a sound that seemed to me to be the marriage of silence and searching, filled the air. It was about three acres of land with a dozen or so buses and vans and a banya, so to speak. The banya lay past all the buses and vans and was for steaming and scrubbing and getting naked.

  Another important relic to Hippie Cove is its “birdhouse.” It’s really a tree house that was built long ago by some hippies. It has a stove, tall ceilings, a porch filled with bongo drums, guitars, torn upholstered chairs, and candles, and shelves and shelves of books from backpacks and knapsacks off the backs of the hippies who have visited this place. They were all books about adventure and dreaming and bums, all the things near and dear to these bearded and long-haired young people. Although there was an old man or two, as there always seems to be an old man or two. The one I was introduced to had a long gray beard and glazed blue eyes, and he talked about how the land they all lived off of was going to be taken away because the people who owned it were tired of all those “squatters.” Andrea seemed to think of this old man as her father figure, her protector. But then again, she seemed comfortable, despite its lack of skyscrapers and suits. It was all about “love” and “listen to this song,” and “hey, man, check out that eagle over there!”