Four Quarters of Light

by Brian Keenan

  On the second evening of our stay, Mike invited me to a ‘steam’, which I was happy to agree to. A ‘steam’ in Alaska means a steam bath. It is a ritual in every native community, the traditional way of getting clean but also something more than that. It’s a bit like going to the pub, or even to church. It’s where men gather at the end of the day to contemplate life and gossip about the fortunes and misfortunes of friends and enemies. It’s where you can cleanse yourself, ease the aching in your bones and put the world to rights with a few other naked men in the space of a few hours in a tiny wooden hut in the back of beyond. The steam is where you purge yourself, body and soul.

  The steam Mike took me to was a rickety old plywood and plank structure erected a few metres from his fisherman’s cabin. There were a few other cabins whose inhabitants shared the premises. The steam house was never fired up without first inviting the other fishermen. There were several boats resting on trailers and various piles of boat parts and fishing gear lying around. In fact, the steam looked more like a repair shed than a bathhouse. It was divided in two, with a changing area and a sauna. The changing room comprised two plank benches running along each facing wall. At several intervals at about head height, cup hooks or an occasional nail had been driven into the wall to hang one’s clothes on. The place could not have held more than about eight men.

  There were already three ‘steamers’ there when we arrived, and all of them sat unconcernedly naked as they talked intensely to one another. Mike introduced me, and we undressed. There was no formality and little ritual in this freemasonry of the steam. Another man arrived with a bag of beers, and after being introduced to me he too got naked like the rest of us and slipped into conversation without further ado.

  The poor season was the big issue, and as the men bemoaned the insignificant catches they were making one or two of them would disappear into the sauna and reappear ten minutes later, red and sweating, to join us. Each man wiped the excess sweat off his face and the back of his neck like a penitent about to enter a house of prayer. A single bare bulb lit the place and ghostly wafts of steam bellowed in every time someone entered or emerged from the sauna.

  As the only non-fisherman, I was soon informed by my companions about the finer details of the Pacific salmon. The Chinook or king salmon was where the real money was. These fish could weigh up to eighty pounds and more. In a good season, you could fill your boat three or four times a day if you had the energy and a good crew. Then there was the sock-eye salmon and the humpy, a much smaller fish at about two and a half feet in length and weighing up to twelve or fourteen pounds. The coho was a better fish: it could grow to over three feet and weigh in at some thirty pounds. It tasted a lot like the Chinook as it fed on the same basic diet. There was an argument about whether the curiously named Dolly Varden was a trout or a char. But, like the steel head, it was really a sport fish, and the sport fishermen were welcome to them.

  With this debate going on, I asked what fish they didn’t like to catch. There was a moment of quiet thought, then one of the naked confederacy laughed out loud. ‘I hope you won’t take any offence at this, but there is one fish that ain’t worth the effort unhooking it. It’s called the “Irish lord”, and if you’re a sports fisherman and can’t catch nothing else, then you’re sure to catch a lord. They are ugly brutes with big mouths and bulging eyes and you can’t fail to catch them because they will take any kind of bait. Anything from shrimp or spinners, banana peel and cigar butts to bologna sandwiches and potato salad, if you can get it to stay on your hook.’ I laughed along with everyone else as the storyteller spun out his improbable list. Again he apologized if he was offending my Irish sensibility. I explained that I wasn’t the slightest bit bothered as there were no ‘lords’ in Ireland. The only time the Irish had had lords that fitted his description was when the English imposed them on us. Another round of laughter went up and I took my bow by taking a turn in the sauna.

  It was about half the size of the changing room, and the heat emanated from a fifty-gallon oil drum that had been cut and laid on its side. A door had been constructed in the top of it which was covered with a blanket of rocks, and a long metal chimneystack carried the smoke out through the roof. Near the fire sat a large bucket filled with water. A ladle constructed of pieces of timber with a tin can on the end was used to pitch water onto the hot stones. The benches that faced each other beside the fire could only hold four people. The room was dark from years of wood smoke and lit by one small window in the wall. Underneath the bench were a few basins, each with a helping of cold water for dipping your washcloth.

  I quickly learned the ritual rhythm of the steam. The easygoing camaraderie of the changing room changed in the sauna. Here, the macho element of the freemasonry kicked in. This was very much a testing room, and I was sure my companions in the steam room were determined to test my pale suburban flesh against their own hardiness. I have little time for such shows of prowess. As the water hit the stone, exploding into slow-moving clouds of steam, I lowered my face into a washcloth and hoped that the dampness would cool the roaring air that was barbecuing the back of my throat. When the gold chain I had forgotten to remove from around my neck started to burn through my flesh, I’d had enough.

  Back in the easy atmosphere of the changing room someone handed me a beer and the conversation carried on – sometimes about boats, or engines, sometimes about different fishing practices in other countries. A lot of the talk was about their dependence on the canneries and the Japanese fish market, which ultimately determined the price. At this time of year the season was coming to a close. Men were calculating how they would get through the winter without having laid down a big supply of fish in their freezers. The talk turned to hunting and trapping. Some of the men were considering getting out from the worst of the winter. The talk was all ‘men talk’. I had half expected a bunch of guys swigging beer in a sauna to crack a few jokes about women, but the subject never came up.

  As we walked back to the cabin, I asked Mike what people did in the winter. After all, I thought, you can’t hunt every day. Mike wasn’t troubled by the question. ‘It doesn’t get as cold here as up north. So when we get snowed in we just have fun. The countryside is great for cross-country skiing and people still like to run their dog teams. Though most prefer to load up a trailer on their snow machines and head through the mountains to the villages. Alaska is a place that keeps you busy even when you think there is nothing to do.’ Before parting, we planned a trip to one of the nearest villages called Togiak, some fifty miles west of Dillingham.

  ‘How was your evening out with the boys?’ Audrey asked mockingly when I returned to the cabin.

  ‘It’s a male thing,’ I answered teasingly, ‘and unless you want to come and join us I can’t tell you. After all, this is the Brotherhood of the Steam.’

  But she would not be drawn in. She and the kids enjoyed Dillingham – not that there was much to do or see, but the small town was homely and uncomplicated. Cal was getting stronger on his legs and wanted to go ‘walkabout’ everywhere. Jack wanted to go fishing, but Mike wasn’t entirely happy about that. You had to be several hours out on the ocean to lay the nets, then you either hung about and waited or came back ashore for a while before going out again for few more hours of heavy hauling work. Mike worked from a big, long, open boat powered by a large outboard. It was cold and bleak out on the bay and there was no place to shelter from the cold or a mass of three-foot-long fish thrashing around in the boat. However, he did lay out a beach net one morning. Jack and I watched as he walked into the sea with enormous rubber boots on that allowed him to wade into the ocean up to his chest, whereupon he anchored the net to the seabed. ‘Don’t expect much, these subsistence nets haven’t been catching much,’ he’d informed us.

  In the meantime, we all went off to church and the potluck afterwards. I was beginning to think that we were not in Alaska at all. We stayed longer at the potluck than we had intended. The food was good and everyone want
ed to welcome and help the new Irish family. The only thing was, Mike suddenly realized he had forgotten about the net on the beach and we had to leave in a hurry. It was just as well. The tide had come and gone and fish lay entangled in Mike’s beached net. ‘Oh my God!’ he said. I was amazed at the number of fish. Jack was running up and down the length of the net deliriously calling out, ‘Daddy, Daddy, look, here’s more fish!’ I don’t believe he had ever seen so many real fish, even on a fishmonger’s table. ‘Look at the size of this one!’ he called out again.

  Mike decided we needed boxes and some help to get the fish untangled before the tide started moving again. He also quietly confessed that although he was surprised at the number of fish he really wanted to get them out of the net before any of the villagers saw what had happened. I looked at him, puzzled. Nobody ever allowed fish to lie on the beach like this. The people here have a thing about taking fish then forgetting about them. Subsistence is a big issue here and food is too valuable to leave for the birds or the bears to pick at. And things like this have a habit of becoming a joke at the steam. I swore myself to silence as I pulled another big salmon out of the net while Mike headed off. Within minutes he was back with Olaf and a truckload of fish boxes. After a few hours with four of us working we dropped the last fish into a box. I now understood why Mike thought Jack might not enjoy being on the ocean, laboriously untangling thrashing fish in a rolling boat.

  Back at a shed near the steam, Mike enlisted a few neighbours’ help to fillet the fish. In the meantime he phoned some native families to come and share his catch. Obviously Mike had a long time ago understood the Eskimo ethic of sharing.

  The next day, Mike and I drove the two and a half miles to the airstrip. There were three other passengers, all young and in various stages of inebriation. The pilot was an Indiana Jones lookalike with a brown leather jacket and carefully crushed fedora. I got the feeling that his attire was chosen to give the impression of a cool, risqué bush pilot who had long since learned to ride the storms of Bristol Bay and didn’t care too much about the rules of aviation or recommended flightpaths. When we were all safely buckled into our seats the swashbuckling pilot informed us to expect a few bumps and that if anyone was feeling sick to make sure they used the sick bag in front of them. We knew he was reinforcing the message to one passenger in particular, and he wasn’t being too diplomatic about it.

  We were only airborne a few minutes when the radio crackled and the pilot turned to Mike, who was sitting nearest to him, and said, ‘We’re gonna have to go in low. There’s a big heavy cloud formation above us and a big blow coming off the bay.’ The pilot must have believed he had been an eagle in another life for the plane dipped and swooped, powered in and out of cross-currents of air, and flew so low over the tundra that you would have thought the pilot was looking for something he’d dropped on a previous flight. Even Mike, who had made this journey many times, thought the pilot was pushing his luck way beyond the safety limits.

  Mike leaned forward and tapped the flyer on his shoulder. The pilot removed the headphones from one ear and leaned back to hear what Mike had to say. ‘I’ve never been to Togiak this way before,’ he said, but the implication of his words was, ‘Do you know what you’re doing, fly-boy?’ The pilot’s answer couldn’t have been less encouraging: ‘No, neither have I.’ To which Mike could only smile and shrug.

  Meanwhile, the least inebriated of the passengers who sat directly behind us leaned over the back of the seat and began to massage Mike’s shoulderblades. Mike nervously thanked the lady and suggested that he was just fine. She in turn insisted on striking up a conversation, which Mike found hard to detach himself from. He looked at me pleadingly and I winked back at him, enjoying his discomfort. At one point he tried to extricate himself by pointing out the landscape below, saying it was ‘one vast protein soup’, to which I could only teasingly remark that it wasn’t half as thick as the soup he had currently got himself into!

  The young lady showering attention on Mike didn’t seem to be intoxicated like her two companions. They were obviously Eskimos from the village. But the lady in question was very questionable. She was immaculately made up, with plucked eyebrows and shiny black hair that was coiffed to give it body and depth. However, her clothes were straightforwardly masculine. Alaska was a country that didn’t discriminate between the sexes and even in the summer it had neither climate nor culture for the latest haute couture. I left Mike to his dilemma and smiled quietly to myself. However feminine ‘he’ may have made ‘herself’ appear, I knew for sure that this ‘lady’ was definitely a man.

  We were late arriving at Togiak. Fly-boy admitted that he had got lost and couldn’t find the string of small plane wrecks that all the local pilots use to plot their flightpath. Mike explained that the storms and hurricane winds that blast in off the ocean tossed light aircraft about like straws in the wind. ‘Parts get snapped off and the plane goes down like a clay pigeon,’ he explained.

  I was pondering whether or not to thank him for telling me this when his friend who lived in the village pulled up in his truck. As we stowed my bags, Mike asked about the woman who had travelled with us. His friend, the village schoolteacher for twenty years, looked at our three travelling companions, then back at Mike. ‘No women on that flight, Mike,’ he answered with a deadpan expression. Mike was aghast as I laughed aloud and commented, ‘Too many hours sitting in that sauna or out at sea. You’ve lost it, Mike.’ This time Mike laughed, but when I teasingly asked him if this was another incident that he didn’t want brought up in the hallowed confines of ‘the steam’, he answered with a seriously affirmative ‘No way!’

  We only had a few hours before our return flight so we deposited our gear with the local schoolteacher and had a coffee before heading off. The man’s name was Bill. He’d arrived in Alaska on the same volunteer programme as Mike, and, like Mike, had chosen to remain. He admitted he didn’t rightly know why after all these years. Then, after a pensive moment, he said that as a young man life hadn’t seemed to have the same edge to it back home. ‘I suppose you take on the values of the people you live among without knowing it. You share so much with these people that they become family. Also you learn a lot about yourself and what you want to do with life.’

  We finished our coffee, and after a brief chat about fishing quotas left to look around. We walked around the village of sturdy wooden cabins that stretched out behind a bank of dunes along the sea front. Boats of every size and description were everywhere. The village contained a well-stocked supermarket, a school and a youth facility and community centre. As villages go, Togiak was enterprising. On the outskirts was the cemetery. A few of the graves had carved marble headstones, many were wooden, and many more were simply marked by a large boulder. In a close-knit community such as this, everyone knew who was buried where; names and dates were an irrelevancy. Mike explained that there had been many more smaller communities in the Bristol Bay area but that epidemics of influenza and diphtheria had reduced the population and created thousands of orphans. Many people remembered these epidemics and the orphans, although they were pensioners now and were living proof of the tragedy. ‘It almost wiped out the culture of this area completely,’ said one. ‘I survived, but now these epidemics and the controls of the fish and game department on local hunting and fishing have all got lumped together by some aggressive young Eskimo rights activists. The traditional way of life had functioned here for thousands of years, but now, with the coming of the white man and his system of government, it’s being changed out of all proportion.’

  On our way back to pick up our gear and catch our flight, we called on one of the village’s oldest residents, Moses Nick. Mike had not spoken to him for maybe fifteen or sixteen years and it was obvious old Moses was not sure who Mike was, but we were welcomed into his house and offered tea and boiled eggs. Moses understood English, but his age and his accent made it difficult for me to follow as he talked about Togiak and how he remembered growing up. He sh
owed us some ivory carvings he was doing, and when Mike asked him if he still played the accordion his eyes lit up and he answered, ‘You betcha.’ He hauled himself out of his chair and went out of the room, returning within minutes with a gleaming red and white accordion. Mike had been explaining how early Russian trappers had frequently visited this part of the south-west before the Russian government sold Alaska to America. The mention of the Alaska purchase did not pass by Moses Nick. ‘I ain’t never seen no bill of sale with any Eskimo name on that sold any part of Alaska to the Russians in the first place. So how they could sell it to America is way beyond my understanding.’ Moses Nick was making it plain to the two white men in his house that the Eskimos owned Alaska and everything in it. There was no piece of paper, title deed or proclamation of any government anywhere that could prove otherwise.

  ‘Now, what you wanna hear?’ Moses asked. I left the choice up to him, and without further ado he squeezed out a note-perfect ‘Lilli Marlene’ and followed it up with a few more German waltzes. His playing might have attracted an old friend who called in. He and Moses chatted away in their Yupik tongue, and as the visitor spoke little English we thanked Moses, took our leave and walked back to Bill’s place, to the strains of ‘The Blue Danube’.

  On board our flight back to Dillingham, Mike jokingly asked the pilot if he still intended taking the ‘lost’ way back. Indiana Jones was unruffled by the jest. ‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘The wind blew the cloud cover clean away so it’s blue skies straight home.’ The engines fired up, and within no time we were homeward bound.