Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  “How long for?”

  “Till it’s dry.”

  He reeled in a pink salmon, filleted it on the beach, and tossed the refuse toward the eagles, which swooped and caught the guts midair. “Salmon run from now to September,” the man said, casting again. He tapped his chest, and said he’d recently had triple bypass surgery. “I got a lot of goddamn problems.” His wife had died not long ago after drinking 190-proof alcohol. Three of his children had also perished. “Booze got one of them, too.” Another had frozen to death; the third died young of diabetes. “But I’m still here,” the man said, reeling in another fish. “Just hope I live till the salmon season’s over.”

  We left him casting and wandered down the beach to a graveyard and a small park filled with memorials: to fishermen lost at sea, to drowned Coast Guard patrols, to wartime casualties. “This tree grows in memory of WWII servicemen and women who planted trees,” one plaque said. Beside it stood a shrub, stunted and brown, about ten inches high.

  At the museum, I’d learned that the Aleutian campaign was not only a tragedy for natives but also a military bloodbath. The 2,370 Japanese on the island of Attu fought almost to the last man; only eighteen surrendered. American troops fighting on Attu, many of them equipped with clothing intended for desert warfare, suffered a casualty rate second only to that on Iwo Jima in the Pacific theater. Fog, cold, and friendly fire killed and injured as many men as the Japanese did.

  “This whole part of the world is one big cemetery,” Roger said, studying crosses commemorating foreign seamen who drowned while passing through nearby waters. He spotted a fresh-dug grave that still lay empty. “Ready-made for me,” Roger said, “after our next visit to the Elbow Room.”

  This reminded me of one other stop I wanted to make. Rick Knecht had recommended that I talk to an elderly Aleut named Ben Golodoff who lived two doors down from the Elbow Room. Rick said that Ben knew more than anyone in town about the old days in Unalaska. Roger chose not to go. “I’ve had enough sadness for one day,” he said, heading off to chat with a solitary yachtie he’d spotted in the harbor.

  I found Ben Golodoff and his wife, Suzi, finishing a dinner of salmon pie, the same dish an Aleut had presented to Cook on his arrival at Unalaska. Suzi called the dish by its Russian name, pirogi, and gave me a slice of the doughy, onion-flavored pie, with pickles on the side. She said other Aleut dishes included galupsy, or stuffed cabbage leaves, and a jellied meat or fish called studen. Ben poured me a cup of black tea, or chai, as he called it. “In the old days we’d have used a samovar,” he said.

  Ben was a trim man of sixty-eight, with bushy white sideburns and small black eyes. He settled on a couch covered in seal furs, beneath an icon of the Virgin Mary. Like other Aleuts I’d met, he seemed reticent and watchful. Suzi, an émigrée from Washington State, gradually prompted her husband into answering my questions about his childhood in Unalaska.

  “We were more Russian than American,” he said. His parents spoke Russian and Unangan as their first languages. Ben went with his father to steam houses where the men beat each other with grass. Aleuts were also keen chess players. Ben said old people had told him that Aleuts cried back in 1867, when the Russian flag came down and the Stars and Stripes went up.

  “The Russians were murderers in the early days,” he said, “but Orthodoxy changed that, and the black robes still ruled town when I was a boy.” Unlike the Protestant missionaries in Polynesia, Orthodox churchmen hadn’t tried to stamp out all vestiges of native belief. Shamans still practiced in Ben’s childhood, using medicinal plants. Aleuts also believed in folk creatures known as outside men: banished souls who roamed the fringes of villages and haunted the inhabitants. “If your mother wanted you to come in from playing,” Ben recalled, “she’d say, ‘The outside men will get you!’”

  World War II changed everything. Ben was eight when he and other Aleuts were evacuated to an abandoned fish cannery in southeastern Alaska. It was there that he climbed his first tree, discovered apples and oranges, and listened at night to the howling of wolves in the deep woods. “I was a boy, it was a big adventure,” he said, “but the old folks had a very hard time.” Many elders died from diseases that ran through the unsanitary camps, and with them went much of the old culture. Ben’s mother died at the end of the war; others remained in hospitals or sanatoriums, never to return home.

  Ben and his father came back to Unalaska to find their house ransacked. Aleut fishing boats had also vanished. GIs had used the town’s Orthodox church as a dance hall. Four of the island’s eight villages had to be abandoned; the refugees moved to Unalaska or in search of wage labor to towns outside the Aleutians. There were so few natives left that they lost the tribal status they’d had before the war.

  “People tried to resume the old ways,” Ben said, “but they’d lost most of the skills and tools.” The war also brought roads, electricity, and other amenities to what had been a traditional fishing village. “We became used to certain things, and dependent on cash to get them,” Ben said. It was, in some respects, a twentieth-century replay of the transformation that occurred when Europeans first arrived with tobacco and other goods.

  Ben and other Aleut children entered new government schools, where they were punished if they spoke Russian or Unangan. Aleut parents also urged their children to embrace American ways. Having been interned during the war because of their race, they saw assimilation as a form of protection. In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, Ben joined the Army and listed his religion as Russian Orthodox. A military recruiter told him, “You can’t be that—you’re not a Commie, are you?” So Ben put down “Catholic” instead. He “went south,” to the Lower Forty-eight, and gradually, without really realizing it, became Americanized.

  Ben later returned to Unalaska and went to work on a salmon boat, where he met Suzi. They’d made a good life for themselves and built a new house on the site of Ben’s childhood home. But Ben sometimes wondered if more had been lost than gained. “I like to pick up the phone and turn up a thermostat as much as anyone,” he said. “But we’ve lost our identity, our self-respect.”

  Ben saw evidence of this in the ills afflicting many of his Aleut neighbors: alcoholism, domestic violence, suicide, welfare dependency. It was the same set of pathologies I’d encountered in other indigenous communities. When I mentioned this to Ben, he sat silently for a few moments.

  “I’ve never met an Aborigine or Maori, but I think I can see the connection,” he said. “We’re outside men, aren’t we? Left out. Haunting the edges.” He paused. “Here, we had the Russians, then the Americans, then the war. All that change, there’s a sense of defeat, a guilty conscience. You can’t help wondering, ‘Why did we lose it all?’ A lot of people just give up, they turn to booze or kill themselves or do nothing.”

  Things were slowly changing for the better, thanks to several factors: the government apology and reparations for wartime suffering, the restoration of islanders’ tribal status, and the influx of fishing dollars. All this had helped Aleuts rebuild their lives and restore a sense of dignity. “We’re starting to realize it wasn’t our fault,” Ben said. Like other indigenous peoples, Aleuts were also reclaiming their traditional ways. Local schools now taught native dance, language, and crafts, and young people attended a summer “culture camp” at which Ben and other elders taught. Aleut adornments, even the labret, were being revived—in part because body piercing and tattooing had become fashionable among young people across America.

  One model for this revival of Aleut style was the 1778 Webber drawing I’d seen at the museum: the woman of Unalaska. Ben and Suzi had a print of it on their mantel, across from the Virgin Mary. An icon of a lost world. Ben studied the woman’s face. “She looks happy, doesn’t she?” he said.

  On the day of our boat trip to English Bay, we found Rick Knecht at his museum office, pulling on knee-high rubber boots, triple-ply Gore-Tex pants, and a waterproof jacket. “It’s wet and wild today,” he said. “We could g
et clobbered out there.” Then he gulped down what he called “the Coast Guard cocktail”: high-octane Dramamine, mixed with uppers to counteract the drowsiness caused by seasickness pills. Luckily, I had some leftover pills from the ferry ride, and Rick offered us spare wet gear. “I feel like a human condom,” Roger said, as we clumped to the dock in our foul-weather duds.

  Rick’s wife, Melia, stood waiting on the pier. A compact, athletic-looking beauty with short blond hair, Melia supervised longshoremen at a nearby dock. There were two other passengers: Mona and Richard, Arizonans who introduced themselves as “installation artists.” They were completing a project about the wartime evacuation of Aleuts, and wanted to visit an abandoned village near English Bay. “Installation art is an environment you create,” Mona explained. “We won’t tell a literal or narrative story about the evacuation; it’ll be more metaphorical.”

  “I’ll record some sound, pick up the vibrations of the grass,” Richard added. “Everything has its own pitch.” He’d already recorded celery grass growing at another site. “The idea is to pick up whatever echo you can of the past.” Listening to Mona and Richard, it was hard to keep a straight face—particularly with Roger silently mouthing “wankers”—until I realized we were seeking much the same thing.

  The skipper, John Lucking, interrupted us to give a quick safety briefing about his fishing boat, Hot Pursuit. As we motored out of the harbor, he switched on a radio to catch the marine forecast: “Small craft advisory with periods of heavy rain, areas of fog, temperatures in the upper forties, winds fifteen to thirty miles per hour with occasional higher gusts.”

  John chuckled. “‘Winds fifteen to thirty with higher gusts’—that’s a big window. They leave it wide open to interpretation.” He said the weather changed so quickly in the Bering Sea that forecasts were always this broad, rather like astrological readings. “When passengers ask me how the weather will be, I always tell them ‘bad.’ By the end of the day, I’m sure to be right.”

  As the boat hit choppy swell outside the harbor, I fled the claustrophobic wheelhouse and joined Rick on the windy back deck. Distraction, I’d learned, was the best defense against seasickness. So I drilled Rick with questions about his journey to “the edge,” as he’d put it when we’d spoken earlier.

  “The story of my weirdo life?” He laughed. Rick said he’d become interested in archaeology while accompanying his father, a physician, on his rounds among Native American communities in northern Michigan. By the age of ten, Rick had filled the family basement with arrowheads, fossils, and other curiosities. His father was also a keen hunter and fisherman, and he took Rick on wilderness trips. “He always said that he spent his workday saving lives, so he wanted to spend his free time killing things.”

  Rick didn’t share this bloodlust, but the wilderness skills he’d learned as a child had proved invaluable during his years as a “shovel bum” in Alaska. Among other misadventures, Rick had once been stranded when a bush pilot took off without him; he’d been shot at by a drunk loner in an isolated cabin; and he’d survived several near drownings in boats swamped by huge, frigid waves. “Nothing really that scary,” Rick said. He paused, then added, “Well, there was one helicopter ride.”

  Seven years ago, Rick had flown with two women colleagues to survey a remote archaeological site. As they swooped low over the island, the helicopter’s rotor slowed and then snapped. The women began hugging and praying as the pilot prepared to crash-land. “I wasn’t that worried,” Rick said. “I’d bounced off runways in bush planes and figured it would be like that.”

  Instead the helicopter hit hard and “pitch-poled,” catapulting end over end. When Rick came to, he felt spray on his face: blood spurting from an artery in the pilot’s gashed head. The two women seemed to have been crushed by the wreckage. Rick had a bone sticking out of his finger, a broken foot, cracked vertebrae, and ruptured intestines. The pilot somehow staunched his own wound and put out a fire before the fuel tank exploded. He and Rick extracted one of the women and the three lay on the ground, shocked and bleeding.

  “That’s when the grizzly burst out of the woods,” Rick said. “It was spring, he was hungry, and we were covered in blood—his favorite sauce.”

  The pilot chased the bear off by firing a flare. Eventually, the helicopter’s emergency beacon drew rescue helicopters. Miraculously, all four passengers survived. “It may sound twisted, but I wouldn’t trade that crash for anything,” Rick said. “It’s great to be at the edge and make it back alive.”

  Melia joined us on the back deck. I asked her how she’d ended up with this lunatic for a husband. Melia laughed. Men outnumbered women in Unalaska by three to one, so finding a date wasn’t a problem. “The odds are good,” she said, “but the goods are odd.”

  So was her wedding to Rick. They’d married atop the wheelhouse of a fishing boat in a remote island cove. A geologist friend officiated (in Alaska, anyone can legally preside over a wedding), the skipper served as best man, and a male deckhand acted as maid of honor.

  “Sounds romantic,” I said.

  “It was, in a way,” Rick said, “except that we had to spend our wedding night in the cabin of this tiny boat with three other guys listening in.”

  Melia shrugged. “That wasn’t the worst part,” she said. “The boat ride to get there was really rough. We projectile-vomited the whole way.”

  As she spoke, our boat lurched and icy water washed over the deck. We’d entered Unalga Pass, between the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea, a strait known for its fierce current. I was just starting to feel queasy when we rounded a point and motored into a sheltered inlet. The hills surrounding it were so green that the color looked enhanced, as if in an animated film. Rick brought out copies of sketches by Cook’s artists, sealed in plastic sheeting, and held one up against the landscape. “Look at the boulders, the waterfall, the shape of the hills,” he said. “It’s hardly changed at all since Cook was right here.”

  We anchored in seven fathoms of water, just as the English had, and rowed ashore—in a rubber dinghy rather than a wooden pinnace. While the other passengers poked around the rocky beach, I followed Rick through a field of purple lupins and tall rye grass. “This is it,” he said, reaching a spongy plateau. Invisible to me at first, but obvious to the archaeologist, was a slight, perfectly square elevation, about twenty feet across. “That’s not native,” he said. “It’s an obsessive, Western thing to put down a perfect square of sod, with neat, ninety-degree corners.”

  Consulting English charts and journals, he’d determined that the plateau corresponded to the site of an observatory Cook had erected. The sod was laid to create a perfectly level platform for surveying and astronomical instruments, and to protect the gear from the wet ground. Last time Rick visited here, he’d brought a handheld global positioning system. With a touch of a button he’d read off the exact longitude and latitude of this site. The English had struggled to do the same with clocks, telescopes, and a trough of mercury, called an artificial horizon, in which their observations were reflected. They’d calculated their position with remarkable accuracy. “Still, I wonder what Cook would have paid for a GPS,” Rick said.

  This time, Rick had brought a metal detector. “The odds aren’t good that we’ll find anything,” he said, “but the goods would be fantastic.” As he surveyed the sod, Rick’s face lit up with the puckish zest of a boy digging for Ottawa arrowheads in northern Michigan. He swept the ground with the metal detector’s bagel-like ring. At several points it beeped, shrill and insistent. Rick began working the fine dirt with his fingers.

  “In subarctic tundra, stuff sinks about an inch a century,” he said, “so if there’s anything here it won’t be very deep.” I joined in, thrusting my fingers into the soil and uncovering a dark, nail-shaped scrap. “Sorry,” Rick said, studying my find. “It’s just fern root.” We tried a half-dozen other spots: more beeps, more fern root.

  Rick said false readings were common in Aleutian soil, which con
tained a lot of “bog iron.” Even so, I felt possessed by the thrill of prospecting for Cook treasure and could have kept going for hours. “It’s addictive, eh?” Rick said, tugging me back to the beach. He told me about a few finds he’d made at other coastal sites: silver pieces of eight, wooden masks, messages in bottles. “It can be eerie, like someone talking to you from the past.”

  This put him in mind of Cook again, and as we waited for the dinghy to collect us, Rick told me more about why the captain spoke to him. “I’m forty-seven, the same age as Cook when he set off on the third voyage,” he said. “You have to wonder why he did it.” Rick paused. “There’s been some recent discussion in academic journals about a gene for a ‘novelty-seeking personality.’ Apparently, it has adaptive value. Prehistoric people who trekked out of Africa may have relied on intrepid, nervy individuals to lead the journey. I reckon Cook had that gene.” Rick smiled. “Today, a guy like him would probably be diagnosed as having attention-deficit disorder and dosed with Ritalin.”

  Returning to the boat, we motored out of the cove and around a point to the sheltered inlet Samwell had called “deep Bay.” Rick took out another of Webber’s sketches, which showed the mounds of semi-subterranean homes, with ladders and Aleuts poking out the top. As at English Bay, the contour of the background exactly matched the shore we now gazed at. Then we landed and walked into the drawing, to the site of the dwellings. Nothing remained except shallow depressions overgrown with chest-high grass.

  “They were like bunkers,” Rick said. “The whole adaption was to the wind.” He cleared away the grass and dug down a few inches to expose the hard-packed floor of one house. We also found scraps that Rick identified as charcoal, the edge of a stone tool, a small piece of whalebone, and the remains of a driftwood rafter. We scanned with the metal detector, but the chances of finding anything here were even more remote than at English Bay. Samwell and his companions had stayed only a few hours; at best, they might have left a nail or some other small item as recompense for sex. “Given what happened here,” Rick said, “we’d probably have better luck finding a DNA sample in the soil.”