Looking for Alaska

by Peter Jenkins

  We turned left on Railroad Avenue to see the boat docks, fish-processing places, boat-repair shops, and net and boat parts graveyard. Pip had told me that he didn’t think commercial fishermen in Alaska would be able to make their living much longer from the waters of the Copper River delta and surrounding sea, including Prince William Sound. He said a giant comet was coming to squash them but no one could see it clearly, yet. How much longer will they be able to pull their boats and store them in their yard like Andy Johnson? How long will Per be able to pile old nets in the net graveyard to be recycled? Will Cordova ever vote yes to build a road? What will happen then?

  I pointed to a slow-moving white, wooden boat chugging into its space in the docks. It was Sully, the fisherman, the one who has a run at Telluride named after him, a run too daring for most. Sully, the man who has lived his working life defying death on the sea so he could defy death on the slopes and the mountaintops, had returned cruising at his own pace, from another fishing trip and sold his salmon. Like Per, like Andy Johnson and Pip, these fishermen love the extreme demands of their lives. They are even willing to be reined in by Alaskan biologists and sonar-counting gods because this is a way of life where they can feel completely challenged and alive.

  Per dropped us off at the airport. He was proud we’d come to see the Cordovans’ world. He doesn’t mind people visiting Cordova. He would just rather not see the ones who think there may be a better way to live than to go to sea with your nets and hooks and pull your living out of it.

  When we got back home to Seward, it was 7 P.M. and still light. Rebekah asked Julianne if she wanted to camp out in Rebekah’s tent down at the bay. In the summer the bay turned into a lively, separate summer town of hitchhikers with tents, campers on Harleys, campers with awnings and full-size cars in tow. You could meet people from all over the world living down there for the night, a week, their summer vacation.

  They were eleven years apart and had different mothers, Rebekah and Julianne, yet the fires of competitiveness that burned inside them were similar. Although they didn’t live together all the time, there is an obvious big-sister/little-sister love between them. Julianne wants to do everything Rebekah does, while Rebekah still likes being in the world of a little girl.

  I walked down our hill with them, looking for “my” bike. Rita had been asked to prepare special health food for a local woman who’d had a mastectomy, mostly oriented around tofu. Rita had stayed home to make her a week’s worth. Redheaded Luke was working; the bike was leaning up against the wooden wall of Captain Jack’s. I harassed Luke and Aaron a bit, then went flying off down the road.

  9

  The Largest Member of the Congregation

  Captain Bob Candopoulos was taking me through Eldorado Narrows, a stunning ocean passage. The mountains and glaciers on our left are on the mainland. On our right was a series of rock islands that shot up out of the ocean, Fox Island being the largest. We’d left the docks in Seward maybe forty-five minutes earlier. This early morning it was salty-cool; the sky and sun were as clear as anywhere on earth—not 99.44 percent clear, 100 percent clear. The rock on both sides narrowed, and on our left the cliffs were filled with several thousand nesting gulls that flew off in riotous flocks as we rode by.

  Captain Bob, thirty-seven, a large, dark, brooding Greek-American, was born in New Jersey and grew up in Florida and Louisiana. When his mother died young, in 1978, he asked his dad, “What are we going to do now?” His father answered, “Move to Alaska.” In 1979 they did. I’d met many people in my travels in Alaska who had moved here to be healed or to forget. Bob and a partner own Saltwater Safari, a charter fishing business based in Seward. Their steel-hulled boats are named The Legacy and The Legend. Their fast, smaller aluminum boats are The Phantom and The Ghost. Bob doesn’t captain a boat every day anymore, but he loves to fish for the salmon shark. Today was one of those trips. We were on The Legacy and still had a voyage of two or three hours before we got to Montague Straits, an opening to the big, bad ocean and a passageway into the western portion of Prince William Sound.

  Large schools of the intensely aggressive salmon sharks, a relative of the great white and mako sharks, come here this time of year chasing schools of salmon. Bob was an early pioneer of shark fishing in Alaska. I was surprised to learn that there are sharks in Alaska, in this cold water. Fortunately, the salmon shark may be the healthiest segment of the shark population, worldwide. Only a few are caught in Alaska each year.

  This daylong trip aboard this steel-hulled charter boat was one of the advantages of living in a small town where life revolved, and things happened, around knowing each other. I’d met Bob because of my habit of going down to the docks every day when I was in town, where I loved to watch the unloading of the day’s charter-fishing catch. The fishing guides would hang the fish on a hook under a plaque that said “Seward, Alaska.” Everyone would take pictures. Three hundred pound halibut have been caught in the waters around here; I’d seen several picture sessions where people had caught fish, halibut or sharks, that were longer or heavier than they were.

  Sitting on the seat of my borrowed bike, watching the day’s catches unloaded, I got to know Bob. One day, he mentioned that if I ever had a day free, I’d be welcome to come along on a shark charter. He said there were salmon sharks out in the swift underwater currents by Montague that were over seven hundred pounds and talked about how sometimes they’d leap out of the water, bunches of them. A few times, he warned, they’d had to turn back; the weather could be totally different out there, as opposed to the protected, nestled-inside-the-mountain-range weather of Resurrection Bay.

  Montague Island was northeast of Seward, not visible. The island is over fifty miles long and unpopulated by humans. It is the home of some massive brown bears. It serves as an effective buffer for Prince William Sound from the sometimes raging seas and destructive winds of the Gulf of Alaska.

  Bob and First Mate Mark Theriault, twenty-seven, were two of possibly the most irreverent men in Alaska. Mark especially. He had a thick chip on his shoulder. While we chugged along the coast, they were, of all things, talking about religion.

  Bob looked at me as if wondering whether to say what was on his mind, and then spoke up. “This out here is our church. You can’t feel God, whoever that is, out here, I’m sorry.” Bob’s comments surprised me. I didn’t respond.

  We rumbled along for ten or fifteen miles. I stood outside breathing in deeply the vivid salt air. Most of the fishermen and women who had chartered this boat were waiting inside the cabin, hopeful.

  Suddenly the boat made a sharp turn to the north, almost a ninety-degree angle. Bob must have avoided some huge floating log.

  Rufus, the lowest ranking of the four crewmen, opened the sliding door of the cabin and told me Bob wanted me. Once I went up to him, he pointed to an area of ocean between the mountains.

  “That, out there, is the reason we do this.”

  “What do you mean?” I couldn’t see anything deserving of a ninety-degree turn.

  “See that humpback whale jumping out of the water? Look, way out there.” Bob was genuinely excited, standing up to steer instead of steering with his toe. The glare-reducing sunglasses wrapped around his dark features made him look like someone you wouldn’t want to be trapped with in a dark alley.

  My eyes scanned the water’s surface and saw nothing. Bob wasn’t very descriptive, I was just expected to see it. Plus, these guys don’t have much patience. By now, the whole crew, Mark, Rufus, and blond Jake were all in the cabin. All four of them saw the whale leap again, except for me. All I saw this time was some splash, way off.

  The first time I’d met Jake, I’d asked him where he spent the winter. He asked me if he looked smarter than a bird. I said he did, Mark said he didn’t. Jake asked me if birds were smart enough to fly south to Mexico or California for the winter. I said yes, and he answered that he flew south too, to Hawaii or the Caribbean, where he stayed from October to sometime in May.

/>   “How far away are we now from the whale?” I asked.

  “A mile or so. They normally breach a few times, then stop,” Bob said, not hiding his disgust with me for not being able to see this rare occurrence from afar. The easy normalcy of just getting to the shark-fishing grounds off Montague was being traded away with wide-eyed excitement, and these men have seen whales breaching hundreds of times.

  “Typically, the whale would have stopped by now,” Bob said, his gaze focused on the area where the whale had been performing for them. “And I would not attempt to go this far out of our way, but this humpback’s been jumping quite a bit more than usual. Sometimes one will jump and jump, breach and breach, over and over.” Bob pushed the shiny stainless-steel lever that controlled the speed of the engines forward.

  “There it is,” I said. Finally I could see the splash and some of the falling body of the whale.

  Then a few minutes later there it was again. This time I saw the whole body but the fluke come out of the ocean. With these guys, I could never be sure if they were serious or setting me up. I moved onto the bow into the fullness of the wind, and the whale came out of the water twice in close succession.

  “These humpbacks have the world’s most powerful muscles. Can you imagine how strong they must be to propel their thirty tons or forty tons [sixty-thousand to eighty-thousand pounds] almost completely out of the water like this one’s doing now.” I tried to imagine me breaching. I doubt Greg Louganis could breach. Before this moment the word whale for me had always denoted fat, overweight, not coordinated or graceful.

  We were now less than a half mile away from the whale; Bob slowed the boat to about half speed. The whale had returned to its underwater world. All five of us looking intently out to sea could not find the whale.

  “He’s done. Let’s go find some sharks,” Mark growled. At six foot two, 220, he was a muscled-up fishing machine who liked to fight with commercial fishermen. Mark, twenty-seven, had grown up in New Hampshire before moving to Florida.

  The weather was doing things that seemed odd to me but were normal for Alaska. It was very localized. Offshore we could see blue skies and a drying sun, yet here in close to shore, the mountains and glaciers created a hanging fog blanket that lay atop the midranged, spruce-covered mountains. Where had the whale gone?

  Bob slowed to an idle as everyone searched around us, hoping for more. The clients wanted more; a display like this was what most people dreamed of seeing in Alaska. We circled slowly when we reached where Bob thought the whale had been last, not far off Danger Island.

  Then I heard a jolting splash, as if a plane had dropped a boulder the size of this boat out of the sky. Bam, the whale was back. It jumped and jumped and leaped again, a ton of water splashing up all around it. It did not enter cleanly headfirst back into the ocean; it landed on its ample side. This is what generated the splash, the noise—the impact of the whale on the water. I wondered if the humpback could arch and reenter headfirst. Was there any reason for it to land on its side? I recalled what a belly flop felt like off a diving board, how painful it was entering the water wrong. It sometimes took my breath away, left red marks on my skin. How about sixty-thousand pounds of whale landing on its side. Did it hurt? Why did whales do it?

  Whale specialists are not sure why humpbacks breach. Some say breaching is some kind of message to other whales, or a warning, a dramatic type of body language to other whales or boats to stay away. Some have speculated that it’s a way for whales to pop off irritating barnacles or get rid of sea lice on the humpback’s skin. Officially, no one but the whale knows for sure. I doubt this breaching was any sort of message to us, or anyone. We had been three miles or more from it when Bob had first seen it rocket out of the water. This whale seemed to be all alone.

  We sat and watched, and nothing. I’d loaded my camera with film. Maybe I should have turned on the motor drive, but I didn’t.

  Up again it came, whoosh, an immense sound generated by a combination of the whale thrusting up into the air and the water falling off. Then, less than a minute later, the whale breached again, then in about thirty seconds, again. What fantastic pictures I hoped I was getting. I had only tiny bits of time to turn and shoot.

  These extraordinary moments of purity and pure power had created a silence among this crew of irreverent men. As we sat idling in neutral, the whale’s long, white flipper, close to a third of its body length, went straight up in the air less than a hundred yards away. The whale flopped it to and fro, appearing to be deeply relaxed. Bob eased us up toward it slowly. This close to it, we could see some of its massive black body in the Coke-bottle-colored water. This whale had come to the Montague Strait for the same reason we had. The powerful incoming and outgoing currents carried massive amounts of aquatic life. This whale ate forty-five to fifty-five hundred pounds of living things every day.

  While we watched, it lolled around, flapping its snow-white flipper for a few minutes in this new restful state, like me back-floating in a sun-warmed Vermont lake. Bob had turned off the motors; there was just an occasional breeze across the cheek, and almost no sound except from some distant waves crashing. Then the whale came back to the surface within seventy-five feet of the bow and started slapping its tail on the top of the ocean. Bam … bam … bang … bam … bam … bang. When its tail hit flat, it made the banging sound; at an angle, it bammed!

  The whale moved closer to us, even closer. I kept thinking how rare this was, how essential it was to focus on everything that was happening. Bam. Salt water splashed high up into the sky. The whale’s fluke was at least ten feet across and almost completely black, with just a few white edges. Some whales’ flukes are almost completely white; like fingerprints, none are identical.

  I was in prolonged, pronounced ecstasy thanks to this whale in the midst of the head of Prince William Sound. This location was only reachable by a substantial boat like The Legacy, by hard-core fishermen like these, willing to ride for a few hours and risk the erratic and dangerous maritime weather.

  The whale’s tail-slaps continued to send water through the air and shower those of us in the front of the bow. Mark was standing near me; he tapped me on the shoulder and pointed toward the whale. “Look at that brown color in the water. The whale’s taking a dump.”

  He was right. The water directly around the tail was brick brown; the rest was perfectly blue-green. A whale relieving itself, excreting waste—how could that be happening, especially now? The vision before us that just moments before was the height of natural holiness now seemed, ah, wet and dirty.

  The whale slapped its tail again and again. The brick-brown water coming directly from the back end of its tail was spreading with every slap. Because it was surrounded by the forever of the blue-green ocean, it was quite easy to see. Then it hit me. I am no marine biologist; I’ve been known to eat a lot but certainly not over two tons of food. The whale is a mammal, I’m a mammal; we do some things the same.

  Could it be possible that when whales are breaching, it is not always just to celebrate being alive? It may not always be because they are feeling good. What if this humpback, while gulping down part of a school of herring, accidentally swallowed a couple silver salmon? What if the whales have learned that by breaching and landing on their side, they can release blockages, built-up gases? What if breaching can give some relief for whale constipation? The whale slaps its tail on the water to further assist in the release of whale waste. Imagine a hundred-and-fifty-plus feet of intestine, processing four or five thousand pounds of seafood in a day. Thank God humans don’t drink salt water.

  The whale settled on its side, seeming happy, if happy is a word that relates to whale behavior. There was no doubt the whale was contented. There was no more leaping. Then it sank back into the depths and did not return. It was probably feeding time again. Another meal, another ton or two of herring.

  Bob started up the engines and we headed east toward San Juan Bay, looking for the salmon shark.

 
10

  Termination Dust

  It was just late September and the season’s creeping had begun. It was coming to take most of our colors away. Termination dust had already come to the top of the highest mountain peaks. Termination dust is what the first snowfalls are called, and it’s a sign that enormous changes are coming. It seemed to take much of the summer to clear off last year’s snow from the high rock faces around us. Then the termination dust creeps down the mountain slowly toward where people live. Half of it might melt off, but it is always replaced and added to. Not long from now almost everything would be void of color; at times our whole world would seem white.

  Oddly, now was the most brilliantly colored time of year. Wild blueberry bushes that seemed to cover whole mountainsides were bright shades of red. Sometimes, as if to exclaim the brilliance, a cone-shaped, blue-green spruce would rise from the fields of red. Living in Alaska is in some ways like being a manic-depressive. You have a couple months of almost perpetual daylight, when every bit of your world is alive and breeding and blooming and offering itself up. There is no time to sleep. People and animals who have adapted to Alaska know that is the time to gather sustenance for the coming dark and cold, the hibernation time. You run here, run there, exhaust yourself; live, laugh, so many possibilities. In Barrow, as far to the north as I would go in Alaska, the sun comes up around May 10 and doesn’t set again until around August 2. That’s eighty-five straight days of light. Talk about light therapy. Then the trade-off comes; in winter they have seventy-seven days without sunlight.

  On June 15 in Seward we had nineteen hours of daylight. On December 15 we would have nine hours. Then, no matter how hard you try, your jaw yawns, it seems to stretch and fall, your eyes seem to close involuntarily. Sometimes you feel like going to bed at 7 P.M. After an entire winter you feel your face is melting into a sleeping blob. Didn’t I feel that I had too much energy three months ago? A triple shot of espresso in your Americano only keeps you wired for a half hour.