State by State

by Matt Weiland

  In Alabama, the hardest, ugliest structure is the reactionary constitution of 1901, which has gone unamended for over a century. In 2002, in the spirit of the interracial evangelical movement, a law professor at the University of Alabama named Susan Pace Hamill, a practicing Methodist with a divinity degree, published a book called The Least of These: Fair Taxes and the Moral Duty of Christians. In it, she argued that the state’s tax code, enshrined in the constitution, under which Alabamians making less than $13,000 pay almost 11 percent of their income in taxes and those making over $229,000 pay barely 4 percent, is immoral and un-Christian.

  This was an argument designed to have a chance of being taken seriously in Alabama. One unlikely convert was Governor Bob Riley, a teeto-taling conservative Republican of the low-tax, fundamentalist variety from the rural middle of the state. He proposed a referendum that would increase state taxes by $1.2 billion, raising tax rates on the rich and corporations and lowering them for the poor, in order to allow the chronically deficit-ridden state to keep prisons open and improve schools. Riley made his case on New Testament grounds: “According to Christian ethics, we’re supposed to love God, love each other, and help take care of the poor. It is immoral to charge somebody making $5,000 an income tax.” But the Alabama chapter of the Christian Coalition and most conservative churches opposed the plan, and in September 2003 it was defeated by 2 to 1.

  Still, something had changed, as if some Alabamians were beginning to recall the zeal for justice that had animated my grandfather and other men and women of his time. The state’s political passions have been historically violent, based in extreme, almost unearthly claims: God’s love, God’s wrath; white supremacy, universal brotherhood; personal sin, the evil of injustice. Beneath the dominant story of a harsh inequality enforced by police dogs and popular votes, there is a hidden narrative: Alabama’s persistent effort at self-correction. Those making the effort usually fail, but they have never entirely disappeared.

  My time as a law intern and belated civil rights worker in Mobile in 1980 is now farther away than that summer was from the cataclysms of 1963. Color is the oldest, deepest truth in Alabama, but it ebbs and flows. If we are entering one of its cycles of remission, then there’s a chance for this state of believers to find other outlets for the eschatological passions that have brought them so often to the mouth of hell.

  ALASKA

  CAPITAL Juneau

  ENTERED UNION 1959 (49th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME Corruption of Aleut word meaning “great land” or “that which the sea breaks against”

  NICKNAME The Last Frontier or Land of the Midnight Sun

  MOTTO “North to the Future”

  RESIDENTS Alaskan

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 1

  STATE BIRD willow ptarmigan

  STATE FLOWER forget-me-not

  STATE TREE Sitka spruce

  STATE SONG “Alaska’s Flag”

  LAND AREA 571,951 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER 60 mi. NW of Mt. McKinley

  POPULATION 663,661

  WHITE 69.3%

  BLACK 3.5%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 15.6%

  ASIAN 4.0%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 4.1%

  UNDER 18 30.4%

  65 AND OVER 5.7%

  MEDIAN AGE 32.4

  ALASKA

  Paul Greenberg

  Just before I left for Emmonak, a village of 800 people on the west coast of Alaska, an Alaskan fish trader named Jac Gadwill emailed me the following: “Do be prepared for a bit of ‘culture shock’ here. Wonderful, loving people, but this is the USA’s own third world country. Fortunately it also has the finest salmon by far in the world. This is why the Yup’iks (meaning is ‘Real People’) settled here over 10,000 years ago. We just yesterday shipped kings from here to some of NY’s finer restaurants, direct to them, via FedEx.” In a later message Jac added, “Once here, worry about nothing. If expectations are not high, we have what passes for a house type bunk-house with groceries.”

  No one was waiting for me at the corrugated-metal shed that serves as Emmonak’s airport terminal. Two thirtyish bush pilots were passing the morning between flights. A platinum blond Grant Aviation dispatcher offered to call Jac Gadwill for me. “If you’re here to write an article, you’ve got a lot of material,” she said picking up the phone. “I really should be journaling.” Then, after asking whether I needed to go number one or number two, she directed me to the exit door where, along with one of the bush pilots, I peed off the back stoop.

  When I returned, someone who looked like Nick Nolte and my college Russian teacher stood squinting at me.

  “You Paul?” Jac Gadwill asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Got here OK, did you?”

  “Yep.”

  He stared down at the ground for a moment, and then looked up and appraised me with his head cocked at an angle. “Boy, you look good here,” he said finally. “You should stay.”

  We went out to Jac’s industrial-sized pickup truck and headed down the gray ooze of a road that led into town. Jac had this to say about his three decades in the Alaska salmon business:

  “In the Lower 48, people are sort of arranged. You know when they get out of school what they’re gonna do, what they’re gonna achieve. In Alaska it’s all mixed up. It’s like everybody’s running even along a mud track. But then all of a sudden someone throws sand under one guy’s feet and zoom! Off he goes. And you’re like ‘how’d he do that?’ Well, I’m kind of that person. A few years back someone threw some sand under my feet and off I went.”

  Soon we arrived at the “house type bunkhouse” and adjoining office building. A sign hung in front of the office: KWIKPAK FISHERIES, NEQSUKEGCIKINA

  “I asked an elder in a village up the river a ways what the Yup’ik word for ‘good fishing’ was and that’s what he came up with,” Jac said. “Well, when I had the sign done up I asked the locals here in Emmo what they thought of it. They just kind of stared and said, ‘Something to do with fishing, right?’ Turns out the dialect’s different in every village. I tell you,” Jac said, “This thing is gonna kill me.”

  “This thing,” as Jac likes to call Kwikpak Fisheries, is something both new and old in the ten-thousand-year history of Alaskan man and Alaskan salmon. What makes it old is its basic principle—native people in small boats fishing for wild salmon. What makes it new is the same thing. Kwikpak is the only fishing company in the world that has earned recognition from the Fair Trade Federation. It is native owned and largely native operated, with the exception of Jac Gadwill and an associate who handles the sales end of things in Anchorage. If all goes well, Gadwill and the Yup’ik board of directors hope that these particular native people catching these particular Yukon king salmon will bring to market one of the more extraordinary fish on Earth.

  “Why don’t you go take a look around town?” Jac told me, heading up the thrown-together staircase leading to his office. “I’m gonna go call Fish and Game and see if we can’t get us an opening and get you out fishing. I’ll try the sugar-and-honey approach. If that doesn’t work, I’ll get my Lithuanian blood up.”

  I’m often confounded by the pointlessness of all the driving that goes on in America. At my family’s cabin in northern New York state, cars stream by in a relentless drone down Route 86, even during mud season, when there are no outdoor sports to pursue, no tourists to serve. Where are they going, really?

  In Emmonak, our cultural tendency to drive for driving’s sake is laid bare, and appears possibly to have its origins in Native American nomadism. Aside from Kwikpak Fisheries, an Ace Hardware, and the post office, there is pretty much nowhere for the town’s residents to go. Nor is there anywhere outside of town to go. Alaska is very markedly split 40/60 between south and north. The southern 40 percent has roads, outlet stores, McDonald’s, nail salons, psychiatrists, summer houses owned by Californians, and a phone number you can call if you’d like to claim a moose you saw killed on the highway. The northern 60 percent
of Alaska has nothing. Seen from above, Emmonak is very clearly in the middle of that nothing. It was explored and abandoned by Russians, barely settled by Americans, and no roads connect it to anything.

  And yet, when you walk down the village’s abbreviated thoroughfare, you cannot get away from the traffic. There are grandmothers in babushka scarves, fathers with sons riding piggyback, even children clearly under the legal driving age zooming their all-terrain vehicles up and down the road, shouting in the cold, foggy air. Winter’s arrival is not totally unwelcome, in large part because the distance you can drive is vastly expanded. It is not unusual to snowmobile 100 miles to shoot a moose.

  But I was on foot and the Yup’ik barely noticed me. A woman in the distance called out to a purebred pug that had the same name as my first dog, “Sweetie! Sweetie!” A little farther along, in the yard of a kind of jigsaw puzzle house made of salvaged sky-blue plywood, a man grasped the eye socket of what looked to be a bloody walrus head with his left hand and sawed away at a tusk with his right. “Sweetie! Sweetie!” the voice called out. From the second story of another jigsaw puzzle house a man scolded: “You sleep all day. Good for nothing, you can’t even catch fish. Damn Eskimo.”

  On this day, the salmon situation was making the Yup’ik Nation particularly idle. Everyone was waiting for a handful of mostly white men and women at the Fish and Game Department at the far end of town to determine if enough salmon had escaped into the upper river to allow a commercial opening of the fishery. The Fish and Game Department was still in its “conservative regime,” having been rattled when the Yukon king salmon population plummeted several years ago for unknown reasons. The fish’s numbers have been slowly inching back up, but this year’s escapement goals were not being met, and Fish and Game was proceeding with a degree of caution that was exasperating people like Jac Gadwill.

  Seen in the greater context of what has happened around the country, though, it’s easy to understand Fish and Game’s caution. Twenty years ago, I left college for a while and found a job counting salmon for the Bureau of Land Management in Eugene, Oregon; I figured fisheries management might be something I’d like to do with my life. But during that season in the late 1980s, there were no fish to manage. The Pacific Northwest salmon runs were starting to wink out for good at that time, just as they had winked out 200 years ago in my home rivers back east. During my three months of salmon counting, I sighted one lone fish. Stories like this make Alaska seem like a wise old man sitting on a far northern perch overlooking the destruction that humanity has wrought. Today only Alaska has enough salmon to support a serious commercial fishery. The millions of fish that return to spawn each year in Alaskan rivers are a beautiful and profitable spectacle. Fish and Game is desperate not to screw it up.

  At the same time, Fish and Game must manage another population on the Yukon: Yup’ik Eskimos. Which is why they will allow “subsistence openings” during which the Yup’ik can catch salmon for their personal consumption. Only if the amount of salmon in the river exceeds both the escapement and subsistence goals does Fish and Game allow a commercial opening. And when a commercial opening takes place, the Yup’ik can sell what they’ve caught to Kwikpak Fisheries.

  When I had finished my tour of Emmonak and returned to the office, Jac Gadwill shushed me with a finger while he listened to the radio. A woman with a flat, Midwestern accent droned out the bad news.

  “At this time Fish and Game will not be opening the commercial king salmon fishery. There will be a subsistence opening only in the Y—1 and Y—2 sections of the river from 12 to 6 p.m.”

  Jac slumped in his chair. He took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled with a smoky cough. “No milk and cookies for Fish and Game.”

  He pushed a button on an intercom.

  “Sweetheart,” he said, “can you see if Ray and Francine are around? I want to get Paul here out on the river.”

  Jac then handed me some orange rubber overalls and a thick, very comfortable pair of wool socks, and wished me good fishing.

  Ray Waska, Jr.’s, face looks pinned back by the wind as his open metal skiff roars through the channels of the Yukon Delta. A giant outboard engine propels the skiff, and it is unclear if Ray is smiling or if the wind itself is whipping up the corners of his mouth. Sitting next to him is his wife Francine in camo gear, and at the bow of the boat is their teenage son, Rudy. Their three-year-old daughter, Kaylie, wearing pink, racing-style sunglasses and a matching pink jacket, is crouched between Francine’s knees. Their five other children are at the grandparents’ fish camp, hidden away in the channels some twenty or thirty miles up river. When I ask Francine if she plans on having more children, she tells me, “Ray and I kinda want twenty.”

  If e. e. cummings had wished to retire to a place where the world was truly puddle-luscious, then the Yukon Delta would have been a good choice. Minnesota boasts of being “the land of 10,000 lakes.” Alaska has more than three million, and it seems a good number of them are potholes and broken-off oxbows that surround the Yukon. There is so much of everything—sky, wind, water, and the clouds of mosquitoes that make a stinging space helmet around your head the second the boat slows down under ten miles per hour.

  How the Yup’ik find their way amidst this shifting matrix of bald shoreline and brown water is any white man’s guess. Hardly a tree or rock marks the way and, as with any truly natural delta, the landform is semipermanent, sinking or rising at the whim of the river. And yet, there is never a hesitation in the forward momentum of our boat. Turns are made with unquestionable assurance until all of a sudden the engine cuts out, and Rudy rushes to the front to start paying out net line. We are subsistence fishing.

  Once we are set up and anchored there is nothing to do. The net hangs vertically in a sixty-yard-long, surface-to-bottom curtain blocking passage in a small section of the river. The mesh openings in our gill net are big enough to accommodate the head and shoulders of a salmon. If a fish swims into the net, it will be stopped midway through. If it tries to back out, it will find its gills ensnared in the mesh. A few more thrashes and its fins will be caught.

  The buoys strung along the top of the net start to twitch. Having only seen one wild salmon in my life, I rise in my seat. Ray and Rudy barely notice. Fish and Game has set a six-inch mesh size on the nets today—the size that will ensnare the gills of the more common (and ten times less valuable) chum salmon. The kings have heads that are bigger than the allowed mesh size, and they should be able to bounce off unharmed if they hit the net. If it’s just chums coming in, the thinking goes, you might as well fill the net before you haul.

  But haul we finally do. After just four hand-over-fist pulls on the net, the first three salmon are in the boat.

  “Chums,” Ray says, the native way, clipping the consonant cluster at the end so that it almost sounds like “chumps.” It’s a little like factory work. Haul, haul, salmon, salmon, flop, flop. But just as things start to seem commonplace, Ray tenses. He pushes his son out of the way, makes one last haul, and thwap! A much bigger, more beautiful salmon lies on the deck. It has accidentally snared itself in a net meant for chums, its lower jaw wrapped three times around the twine.

  “King,” Ray says, the faintest trace of excitement in his voice.

  The fish is three feet long and around thirty pounds—twice as big as the chums, with a steel-colored head. Since Fish and Game has declared a subsistence opening only, the king cannot be sold to Kwikpak. But nobody has said anything about barter. We pull anchor and blast our way down river. The wind is starting to penetrate my rubber overalls. The only part of my body that is warm is my feet, stowed snugly in Jac Gadwill’s socks.

  Around a bend and the boat slows again. A mosquito helmet forms around each of our heads. Rising up above us is a massive cargo ship, the Olitok. We pull up next to the ship and bang on the hull. Some prior communication has evidently taken place, for a few moments later the ship’s cook appears on deck carrying two ten-pound packages of frozen chicken parts.
Francine stands and smiles. Yellow Styrofoam backing. Plastic wrap. A bar code sticker that says $ 19.99. Francine appraises the package.

  “Gee,” she says, “I hope this doesn’t have freezer burn.”

  Ray nods his head to the cook and reaches down into a cooler. With one huge haul he grabs the king salmon and throws it up onto the deck where it lands steely and shimmering in the watery sunlight.

  A pause.

  “Holy shit!” says the cook. He looks down at it, shuffles his feet, and glances at the frozen chicken he’s traded in return.

  “Hold on a sec,” he says. He slips a hand into the gill plate of the salmon, drops the fish, picks it up again, and disappears into the galley. He returns in a moment with two packages of frozen ground chuck.

  “Gee thanks,” says Francine. She looks at it again and turns to me. “Do you think these have freezer burn?”

  Ray’s mother, Laurie, and I sit under a four-legged corrugated-metal canopy on a hill overlooking a football field—sized clearing that is the Waska family fish camp. A dog named Romanoff spins and barks. Dozens of grandchildren, some directly related, some adopted, run around in the grass and mud. Jac Gadwill jokes that the sharing of children is so common among the Yup’ik that some families may have accidentally adopted their own.

  Using a fan-shaped ulok fashioned from an old circular-saw blade, Laurie starts to break down the 400 pounds of salmon we’ve caught over the last two days. She makes a slit on either side of the fish’s anal fin and then runs the blade down the length of the spine. The fillets are smooth and flawless.