Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  In some of these people’s eyes I could see desperation, addiction, longing. It looked as though some of them were on the run from something or from someone. But not everyone—in Andrea I saw a peace and in Hooch I saw energy. He had “that look.” It seemed everywhere I turned in Alaska, whether it be the airport or some tourist-filled street in Anchorage, there were men who wore beards and who had “that look” about them, the same “look” my dad wore once upon a time, when he was their age and of their build and of their hope. Hooch had all this. He was lean and tall with a brown/blond beard that ran to the middle of his chest. He had dirt under his fingernails and holes in his clothes, but he always seemed to wear a smile through all the muff and gruff. He was in his twenties, like most of the people who made up Hippie Cove. They came, Andrea and Hooch and all the others, I suppose, for the view—the mountains, the water, the isolation, and the assurance that no one whom you didn’t want to find you could, way up here in this little hollow corner of Alaska.

  Andrea lived alone in an old, multicolored school bus equipped with a stove, sleeping space, books, and other stuff that seemed old and worn-out, as if it had been dragged all over the world. Hooch lived in another bus with another girl. A new fling had begun for him, and he was riding it. Andrea didn’t seem to mind that he was with someone else. Rather, she was working on “soul stuff.” She was learning how to fight her fear. She told me about how she went on daily walks in the woods behind the cove, how she’d been scared to go “out there” because of bears. But in her fight she had come to a place where she could “trust the universe.” She said, “If the universe wants to take me, then it will.” It was such a strong, confident statement, I will never forget her saying it to me.

  THE SNOW GHOST

  Andy lived alone somewhere off the road to Nirvana Park, where he rented the downstairs of a wooden, two-story house from a fellow fisherman. On a light trailer at the side of the house was Andy’s flying machine, an ultralight. He’s trying to figure out how to fly to the top of the local mountains that only he and one or two others dare to snowboard down. Once he figures out how to fly to the top, he’d like to have someone fly him up there. Then he could leap off into four feet of powder and snowboard down without having to spend three to four hours hiking up for a two-minute ride down. That’s how long it takes to go up and come down Queens Chair, Andy’s favorite mountain in the world. You can see the mountain face from town. There are fewer ways to die hiking up, such as getting swept away in avalanches, than by coming down, when at these incredible speeds you can hit a surface that once was powdery snow but has been melted by the sun and refrozen icy hard. At those speeds, you can slide off cliffs or skid into unmovable trees or boulders.

  Andy understands he can’t fish or fly all the time, so he would like to write screenplays someday, and be a stuntman. He told me about fishing and flying, and I talked to him about writing.

  Hung on the front door of Andy’s place is one of his old license plates: “Boardom.” That was the name of the snowboard shop started by Andy and his best friend Teal Copeland when they were in high school. Small towns anywhere can breed boredom and give added meaning to the teenage mantra that there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. Especially places of deep snow with no road in or out. In Alaska’s small, isolated communities, more or less all its towns except Anchorage and Fairbanks, making your own fun can take on a radical and sometimes extreme definition. Andy had just one comfortable-looking chair; he offered it to me. Playing on his TV, in what seemed like endless loops, was a video of some outrageous snowboard runs down what appeared to be an almost vertical mountain face. I would later learn one of the people going off the mountaintop was Andy, at an event in New Zealand.

  A poster for Glissade snowboards hangs on the outside of the front door and one of Laird Hamilton, famous megawave surfer riding a wave called Jaws, on the inside. Jaws was perfect, the one God would show under the word wave in a dictionary. Another poster that read “The Beauty of Gray” hung by a logo for Smith, a snowboarding goggles and glasses maker. There was also a poster of Andy snowboarding down some insane-looking run on Mount Baker, near Bellingham, Washington. In the winter of 2000 it took away from Mount Rainier the world record for a winter’s snowfall, more than 1,133 inches, or 94 feet. For people like Andy who like to fly over and through the snow, Mount Baker is a “sick” place. (Sick means “really good.”)

  On the windowsill was a primitive carving from Costa Rica of a man carrying a surfboard. Last winter, Andy spent a couple months down there surfing right before fishing started. He surfed, did yoga, ate super healthy, and adjusted for the first time in his life to a tropical place with bugs, snakes, and lizards. When Andy surfs the breakers off the Copper River delta he’s got to watch for salmon sharks, Steller’s sea lions, and humpback whales. He said he preferred Alaska; he’d rather worry about big predators than bloodsucking insects.

  Also on the sill was a hand-carved, deadly looking piece of curved wood. It looked at first like a horn from some animal. Andy told me it was a spike for killing vampires. He does not care for the “users” in this world who suck the life out of you, who take your heart or spill your blood. He doesn’t think they deserve to “be around,” he told me in a voice heavy with experience, so he’s ready for them. Obviously, he had met more of these people than he would have wished, and this stake is symbolically about warding off anymore “injuries.” Andy’s life is about the heights of sensation found in the extreme natural world. He reaches those heights by surfing on top of the deep powder or riding the curls of the waves or flying through the sky on his ultralight. All the while, he fights to control his gifted body, to keep from being injured or wiped out, to keep feeling as alive as possible.

  Andy is a salmon fisherman because his grandfather and grandmother and father and uncles were before him. His boat, a twenty-six-foot-long fiberglass bow-picker powered by a jet drive, is named The Snow Ghost. Jet drives are motors that use jets of water to power them instead of propellers. It lets fishermen get into really shallow water. Permits to fish the Copper River delta and Prince William Sound are hard to come by. The authorities issue only 560, only about 350 to 400 of which are active in any given fish season. Andy got his permit when his grandfather retired.

  Andy’s twenty-four years old and part Aleut. The Aleuts originally traveled these treacherous oceans in kayaks. They did venture this far south, but were centered mostly on the Aleutian chain. Traveling the open water in an animal-skin kayak, like a cork on a deadly ocean, seems almost unimaginable. They were the ultimate water explorers. Andy’s hair is dark, his spirit deeply sensitive yet death-defying. His last name, Johnson, probably means he is part Norwegian. No wonder he is so comfortable on, in, and zooming over the icy cold water. Andy fishes so that he can make enough money to live the life of the spartan warrior-snowboarder the rest of the year. His life is not fishing, like Per’s; he fishes so that he can afford to fly the way few people can.

  At some point between when his father’s fishing boat doubled as his crib, rocking him to sleep, and when he went to high school, Andy developed a problem with taking the regal lives of so many salmon, especially the king salmon. As a sixth-grader, having fished his entire life, he would look into the powerful eyes of the king salmon as they died on the deck of his father’s boat. He wanted to see them, really look into their eyes as they flopped, captured by the net, drawn out of the salt water to the boat where fishermen stood atop the salmon world. When he was at his most sensitive, Andy felt the kings were looking at him as if to say, “Please throw me back, please throw me back.” The salmon these fishermen catch have not fulfilled their reason for being yet because they have not spawned. They have spent every day of their lives avoiding the sea’s predators, the sea lions and salmon sharks, the orca and Dall porpoise. If they get past the humans, and then the bears, to deposit their eggs or sperm and create more king salmon, then their kind will last forever.

  People like Andy’s father and Per
want their sons to be fishermen like them. They love the life, for the most part, and understand how someone could want to throw a dying king or a flopping red or a high-leaping silver salmon back to live a bit longer before dying for their species. Andy came to appreciate that some of the salmon have to give themselves to some of the many predators, and that he is one of those predators. He still deeply respects the taking of a salmon’s life, especially the king. It’s a sacrificial moment, and it’s not felt by everyone, but Andy does not care about what others feel or do. He will not think of the lives of the salmon he takes so that he can live, as a dollar amount that trivializes what incredible creatures they are and what their flesh provides.

  Andy keeps a sort of sculptural tribute to these salmon and their sacrificed flesh wherever he goes, wherever he lives. In his apartment in Cordova, piled in carefully built pyramids of gleaming gold cans stacked on top of the kitchen cabinets, is Andy’s “home pack.” For almost all Alaskans, “home pack” is one of the most important symbols of their reason for living. Home pack is an Alaskan’s own personal pile of canned, vacuum-packed, and/or smoked strips of salmon. Eating it makes existence enjoyable, even blessed, with moments of great pleasure.

  Andy said he liked to keep his golden cans of the salmon caught by him and canned by his neighbor out where he can see them all the time, not hidden in some dark pantry. It makes him feel like a king to see what he thinks is the greatest food in the world; the cans are his piles of gold. The Copper River kings and sockeye and silver salmon give him much of his power and energy, because the flesh of a salmon is so loaded with fish oils and healthy fat and eye-opening, muscle-powering protein. The salmon pass on to him the energy they would have used to fight their way up the Copper River, some two hundred miles.

  In Andy’s apartment stood an old Ping-Pong table. Bent in the middle from a tidy arrangement of outdoor equipment, the Ping-Pong table was a display of who Andy truly was. The centerpiece of the display was a collection of shoes to put his body and mind and spirit to different uses. There were running shoes and basketball shoes. There was also a pair of old snowboard boots. He’d finally bought some expensive Northwave boots, red and white Apollos. They are the most supportive of all boots, and Andy had wanted them for a couple of years. They cost $240. Counting all his snowboards and boots and surfboards and flying machine and specialized clothes, he had to catch a lot of salmon to pay for it all. Andy spends the majority of his income on equipment so that he can fly, in the snow, in the water, in the air. Andy told me he uses his old Jamie Lynn snowboarding boots to fly his flying machine. On the day I was there, a car battery sat on the table, only temporarily. Andy had left the dome light on in his old truck and worn out the battery. He is human.

  There was a pair of white, tall boots for the Kawasaki X500 dirt bike he rides. There was a pair of snowshoes, the skis for his flying machine, some old ski poles, some Techtron waterproofing spray. There was a box with his wet suit for surfing. There were six different helmets to protect his head. From all the death-defying things Andy has done, he knows the body can more easily be repaired than the head. There were two helmets for flying his ultralight, a helmet for snowboarding, a helmet for use on his Jet Ski, a helmet for mountain biking, and a helmet for dirt biking. Every year, Andy said, it seems as if one of the three hundred or four hundred fishermen in Cordova dies. A few years before, three had died during the short season. Everyone he knew, I suppose including himself, had been in really bad situations, but most lived to fish again. So far, none of these Alaskan cowboys wear helmets to fish.

  On Andy’s refrigerator, the one place in North America where you can find out what lies dear to a person’s heart, was a poster of a mountain peak advertising his friend’s helicopter company. They flew extreme skiers and snowboarders with money to surrounding ultrafantastic extreme skiing and snowboarding locations. Andy said with a smile that he needed to marry a superrich woman who was also a helicopter pilot.

  Last winter, he’d hiked up alone to snowboard down Queens Chair. Andy has done quite well in competitions in Valdez at the World Championship, in New Zealand, and all over the Northwest. The Queens Chair is his favorite place in the whole world to snowboard. The mountain looks like a throne. It’s a technical ride; it offers an “intricate playing field” for him, a challenge. Well, during this ride the challenge almost ended in his solitary death.

  He had left at 5 A.M. and told only his landlord where he was going. It took him three hours to hike to the top of Queens Chair, the last hour of which was severely steep climbing to get to the top. When he began, the powder was deep and fine—he was “dancing in the white room.” “Dancing in the white room” is one way to come down the mountain. When the powder’s dry and deep enough, three or four feet, by flying through it with all this force and speed and gravity, the way a boarder turns creates “the white room.” As Andy made each turn, the snow flew out and about and everywhere. Making sharp turns deep and wide, the snow was sprayed up all over the place, surrounding him, like the walls of a white room. He couldn’t see anything but white. When a boarder is dancing in the white room, he must know precisely where the trees and cliffs and boulders outside are located. It used to be Andy wore his Walkman, and when he created the white room, he was in there listening to CDs by Pennywise and Offspring. Now he listens to the sounds of the powder and his breathing and his board. Andy had been in the white room an infinite amount of times and was in it again coming down Queens Chair, except this time, he said, he had this premonition that he should come out.

  When he came out and stopped, he immediately saw the danger he was in. The sun had hit one side of the mountain, the side he hadn’t started on, and hardened the crust so that Andy could not break through, couldn’t get his edge in. He had to stop. He was stuck, and below him was a hundred-foot sheer cliff. If he went off the cliff, he would land in a section of boulders. He had no ropes and no transceiver, which skiers use when caught in an avalanche. Earlier that winter he’d been snowboarding in Washington and watched his friend get swept away in an avalanche.

  As he perched there on the smooth, icy snow surface, he thought about how he had to turn around. Just turning around took ten minutes. He had to leap up and twist around without sliding off the cliff. But he did it. Every move put him on the edge of death. Finally he was able to get his snowboard off and hike back up to where he could go down a different chute. Just hiking up took another half hour, because he had to dig in his snowboard with each movement up, barely being held from sliding to his death. He had to make all the decisions himself. So alone. As so often happens in Alaska, he returned to his home before noon, only one person ever knowing he had even gone anywhere. And he’d told no one how close he’d come to ending his life until he told me, and initially to me he even made it sound about as noteworthy as turning on a light switch.

  Already this summer, Andy had been surfing. He found it more complicated. Everything is constantly moving: the water’s moving and he is moving and his feet are moving. When the fishing is slow, Andy will put his net out and go surfing. Some of the locals see him and think he’s lost his mind. Andy surfs in water where so many have been chilled so badly by immersion that their body parts failed and they drowned. When he’s surfing in the Gulf of Alaska, Andy’s got his dark dry suit on and only his hands and face are exposed. Some of the middle-aged fishermen tell him that one day some older fisherman with bad eyesight will mistake him for a sea lion and throw a seal bomb at him.

  On one of the warmest days of the year last summer, not very warm as warm goes but warm for Cordova, Andy, who’s always searching for the most freeing rush to be found in nature, decided to catch a couple waves completely naked. He didn’t think any of the near- or farsighted fishermen saw him. He said it felt pure and exhilarating. A sea lion was nearby; Andy understands now how they feel as they surf the waves. He was so inspired that he has a plan for this coming winter. Sometimes he and a few of his friends snowboard during a full moon. Instead of
dancing in a white room, it is a beautiful blue room, inside it the dancer’s dark, flowing shadows. Someday soon Andy plans to make the ultimate full-moon snowboard run in the blue room—naked.

  * * *

  I walked back to Per and Neva’s. Andy had given me a couple cans of his home pack. Rebekah was still out kayaking. Right about the same time Rebekah got back to the trailer park, Per and Seth pulled in from having done their chores in the seine boat. By mid-July they’d be living aboard it, fishing for their living. Neva was out with Keith in her boxy Sentra caring for her beloved flowers. She pampered them and admired them the way most humans wished they were. Per asked Rebekah if we’d like him to cook dinner. Rebekah, not having been around Per enough to know if he was kidding or not, looked at me to answer.

  “Per, how about Rebekah and I take your truck and get us some pizza,” I said.

  If Neva had been here, she would have said, “Oh, Per, come on.”

  Rebekah and I went to get the pizzas down past Orca Book and Sound. I was impressed to see how quickly she made things happen, completely on her own. Her NOLS wilderness course had added several layers to her foundation of confidence. Being with her in the cab of Per’s old pickup felt like being by myself, like being able to talk to a female version of me when I was twenty. Our spirits and minds seemed so similar, just in different places on the spiral of decisions and experience. We don’t look much alike; our hair couldn’t have been more different. Hers is curly and thick—to die for, I often overheard people say. I’ve never heard curly or thick used to describe my hair, and if I had to depend on it for warmth, I would die. I was awed at times by her ability to discern things in the world around her. She saw things I did not, and it inspired me. Sometimes she set me straight.