Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now

by C. B. Bernard

  The Alaska of Barrow, Kaktovik, and Kotzebue shares little with that of Anchorage, Wasilla, or Palmer. Bethel has about as much in common with Ketchikan as Miami does with Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Maybe it’s best not to look at it as a single Alaska, but as dozens. More. Everyone who visits finds his or her own version. Those who move here experience still another, and those born here know a different Alaska entirely.

  I don’t claim to know Alaska—no one can, least of all an outsider. But I know what it means to me. Though it’s the subject of my writing, it’s also a sign of my failure as a writer, because no words are sufficient to convey what I feel for it.

  Exhausted, the rain peters off to manageable drops on the boat’s windshield. A few degrees colder and it would fall as snow. The channel snaps into focus when I restore the wipers, and off the starboard side, businesses and docks line the shore. I leave room to port for the bigger commercial boats and glide past the Pioneer Home, where Joe lived the last few years of his life, lonely faces in its windows. A half-dozen floatplanes perch on their docks like ospreys digesting dinner. Tenders unload fish kill at the processor. A seiner sits clear of the water on the city grid, dripping rain, the receding tide exposing its belly. Letters on its transom say it’s a long way from home.

  So am I. I’ve traded my familiar existence for one my friends and family back east would find unrecognizable, eagles as common as pigeons, whales visible from my living room window, bears eating berries on the same roads I jog. I’ve swapped traffic jams for boat maintenance, business casual for Carhartts and rubber boots. But even after the better part of two years, Sitka doesn’t feel like home. I love it here, but I’m not from here, not of here. I’m still an outsider, an observer. Maybe I always will be, a dog playing wolf as the pack surrounds him.

  When I clear the breakwater at the other end of the channel, I open up the engine. At just over 20 knots, I tilt the trim tabs to manage the hull’s plane, and the bow drops obediently. I’m running at full efficiency. Even so, my next trip to the fuel dock, like every trip there, will gut me. Even with her water tanks empty, the Monkeyfist is heavy and inefficient. She’s no beauty queen either, and the fickle, half-assed affections of her previous owner, a local dentist, haven’t done her any favors. But then, neither have my own. In the short time I’ve owned her, I’ve lavished her with love, but it’s the first love of an awkward teenager. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I wasn’t raised around boats, and with the exception of some beer-soaked mentoring from a coworker and some guides in neighboring slips, I’m largely making it up as I go along. My intentions pure, my execution awkward. The one thing I’ve accomplished successfully was saving her from the name the dentist bestowed upon her, The Red Bagel, which sounded like an unpleasant euphemism. Twenty-seven feet at the waterline, she’s older than I am, and each time I run her a part of me wonders what mechanical failure awaits. Before buying her I test-drove her on three separate occasions, and she broke down all three times. I bought her anyway. A monkeyfist is a mariner’s knot to tie a towing line.

  If the Brady Bunch had owned a boat, it would have looked like this. A sectional sofa and table in the main cabin converts to bunk beds. There’s a small private head as well as a galley-up with sink, fridge, and Dickinson oil stove. Behind a privacy curtain in the fo’c’sle, just below the helm, lies a large wedge-shaped bed, and the upholstery throughout is early 1970s.

  I sip coffee and listen to NPR on the local public station, Raven Radio. Occasional bursts of squelch and hailing requests buzz Channel 16 on the marine band VHF, and I lower the volume. I use it to check in with friends when I’m away or to find out if and where the fish are hitting, though such conversations are best conducted in code. Today there’s no one I want to talk to. I’m not out for fish, not running my crab or shrimp pots, not searching the beaches for deer or scouting for ducks. I’m looking for a quiet bay and some time to myself.

  An hour north of town, clouds peel like strips of gauze, exposing the healed skin of the sky beneath. The sun burns through, reflected in the water, blue on blue.

  In my experience, life works the same way as sucker holes, though when I get older I hope I learn that I’ve always had it backward, and that you should save your cynicism for the clouds, not the sun. I throttle back and ease my way toward the shore. For now, daylight bears down on Alaska, raindrops glisten on spruce needles, and the rocky beach dries in the sunshine that stains the mountain snow the color of fire. I may be just a visitor, but while it lasts there’s no place I’d rather be.

  I quietly drop anchor and let the boat settle with its own diminishing wake. On the foredeck, the crisp January air feels brittle in my lungs, as if one deep breath might break off a piece of the day. I step back into the cabin and grab a sweater. I’m belowdecks only a minute, but back outside the mountains have already regained their shadowy menace. A few minutes later, drops of rain intersect the calm surface of the bay.

  2

  Departures

  On August 1, 1900, I sailed for Nome. I arrived there June 17, 1901.

  It felt like stepping off a cliff. The myth of Alaska played out in my mind as a series of worn stereotypes: people wearing fur ruffs, commuting by dogsled, sharing ice huts with Eskimos. At the heart of every stereotype lies a kernel of truth, and that described Joe’s Arctic but woefully misrepresented life in Southeast Alaska.

  For my girlfriend, who had lived in Juneau for a few years, the decision was uncomplicated. She loved it there and hated Massachusetts. Her whole family had moved to Juneau as well, giving her a network in and familiarity with the place. For me, the choice had been anything but simple. My friends were supportive, my parents distraught. Everyone had an opinion, but no one had context.

  Would my decision have been easier if I’d known about Joe beforehand? When he made the same decision a century earlier, slightly younger than I, he faced a much more difficult voyage. From eastern Canada he traveled to Portland, Maine, then sailed down around Cape Horn—the southern tip of the Americas—and then north all the way up the Pacific Coast. It took me the better part of a month to drive leisurely across a continent; it took him the better part of a year to sail around two. We’d put the same distance between ourselves and our families, but for Joe that space must have seemed significantly larger.

  Leaving home runs in our blood. The Bernards fled France in the mid-1600s with thousands of other peasant farmers and fishermen, prompted by drought, plague, famine, and the Wars of Religion. They came to North America to settle the new French colony of Acadia—what became Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and parts of Québec and Maine. The British captured the Acadian capital in 1710 during Queen Anne’s War, known here as the French and Indian War, marking the beginning of the end of French rule, but the Acadians refused to swear unconditional allegiance to the British crown. In 1755 the British government orchestrated the Great Expulsion, or Le Grand Dérangement, forcefully deporting as many as 14,000 Acadians. Soldiers burned their homes, tore families apart, and muscled them into the cargo holds of ships, where they died from disease or drowned. Some were sold into slavery. Thousands more were “relocated” to New England or back to France. Others fled to Louisiana, where Acadian became “Cajun” and a new culture took root.

  But a handful of Acadian families had seen the portent of British rule and moved to the tiny village of Malpeque on the eastern edge of l’Ile Saint Jean, where they survived the Expulsion by assimilating with the onslaught of Scottish settlers pouring into the area. The growing influence of British rule soon made their lives even there increasingly uncomfortable, and they found themselves again looking for a new place to call home.

  The British renamed l’Ile Saint Jean in 1799, calling it Prince Edward Island. That same year, eight defiant families took to the sea in small boats, leaving Malpeque to travel 60 miles west in the cold, rough waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They landed at the
crescent tip of the island, and their October settlement became the village of Tignish. One of these founding families was Grégoire Bernard, his wife, Judith Chiasson, and their two children—Joe Bernard’s ancestors and mine.

  A. B. Warburton writes that, upon landing at Tignish on winter’s shoulders, Grégoire Bernard flipped his boat to use as a family shelter until he could build a more suitable home the following spring. Strong coastal winds piled deep snow around them, and temperatures fell. They pulled fish from the sea and hunted waterfowl, walruses, and wolves. That first winter proved difficult, but they survived. More than 200 years later, the names of those founding families still weigh down the Tignish phone book.

  The Bernards settled an area of Tignish called Nail Pond. Their children had children, as did their children. Into that generation came my great-grandfather Pierre, born in 1888, one of ten siblings. As Pierre told the story, when the family grew too big for the farm, the two oldest—he and his brother Eddie—left to find work, promising to send money when they could. They kissed their mother good-bye, shook hands with their father, and made their way south, where they crossed into the States and took the only work they could find: logging the Great Maine Woods.

  Their selflessness wasn’t uncommon among young men of that era, but they weren’t young men. Eddie was thirteen years old, my great-grandfather just eleven. The brothers eventually made their way to Massachusetts, and four generations later my family remains there, a knot tied loosely around the Merrimack River valley.

  Maybe Pierre’s exodus from Nail Pond was apocryphal or embellished, or maybe he and Eddie weren’t as young as he always claimed. Truth is mutable as memory. Stories evolve with each generation that tells them, both the gift and flaw of oral history. Either way, I learned that the most amazing feats of endurance often are not sought but suffered, and that exploration is sometimes necessary just to find a place to call home.

  Like my great-grandfather, Joe grew up surrounded by family in Tignish, a passel of siblings, aunts, and uncles, cousins thick as picnic ants. But he spent much of his childhood alone. Illnesses shrunk his world to the size of his bed, a prison with a headboard and clean sheets. Whooping cough kept him from school. A chronic ear infection damaged his hearing. Then doctors diagnosed him with consumption and said he wouldn’t survive the year. Of course, he did—and not just that year but scores more, ninety-three in all, not a single one of them easy.

  He managed just three years of formal schooling, more often than not confined to his bed until age fifteen. Unable to go outside, he pored through books instead, “mostly marine news and reports, history, stories of ships and of science,” he later wrote, imagining a life of adventure he couldn’t have known he would someday lead.

  As Joe recuperated, he forced himself to walk the mile from his house to his father’s fish cannery each day. “I had to leave the house at 9 a.m. in order to be there in time to eat as I had to lie down and rest every few hundred yards,” he wrote. “At first it was very hard for me. But I kept at it. By the time I was 16, I was strong enough to be out all day. I spent my days at the waterfront, longing to go out to sea.” He got his chance a year later when he stowed away on an uncle’s fishing schooner. “When we got back from that trip, I was almost well. After that sailing was in my blood.”

  By learning about our ancestors, we keep them alive. For my family, it’s Joe, Pierre, and Eddie, their French forebears. Someday my descendents will remember my parents, and someday me, as the brave Bernards of Tignish vanish into history, so much already forgotten, each generation losing more of it forever. It’s human nature to sacrifice the past for the present and the present for the future. But from these people we inherited our looks, personalities, tempers, skin tones, receding hairlines, each generation introducing something new to the bloodline—an Irish grandmother, an Italian mother—until we have become something new entirely.

  My father and I sit down with a spreadsheet to try to map out family lines as best we can, but questions go unanswered. Those who might remember are gone, and it’s easy to make mistakes—the Bernard family tree has many branches but few unique names. We could fill Fenway Park with Josephs, Pierres, Fideles, Grégoires, and Théophiles, all born within a handful of years and a handful of miles of one another. Nearly every Bernard household in Tignish had at least one, often two, sometimes three daughters named Marie. Tracking our genealogy is like watching a pack of dogs chase their tails.

  What I find surprises me. A century after the founding families slept beneath their snow-covered boats, Pierre and Eddie left behind a number of cousins in Nail Pond. Around 1897 one of those cousins also left the island to head west when the Yukon Territory coughed up gold. My great-grandfather’s first cousin Pierre, who went by Peter, failed as a miner and in 1899 chased the next gold rush west across the border to Nome, where he bought a mining claim and sent word for his nephew to join him in Alaska. That nephew was Joe Bernard.

  When I left Massachusetts months earlier, I believed I was the first in my family to move to Alaska, but now I’d found the real story of how the Bernards got there, and when—seeking a better life at the tail end of the nineteenth century, not restless and bored on the cusp of the twenty-first. They’d beaten me there by a hundred years, exactly.

  3

  Trails

  Fifty years ago I designed the schooner Teddy Bear for my personal use in the Arctic to satisfy my desire to collect Eskimo ethnological specimens and to explore uncharted waters. I was a trader, uninterested in fortune, an explorer, uninterested in fame, but consumed with a great curiosity about things of science and nature.

  Exploration takes many forms. Joe’s brought him to the wild Arctic, mine to less obvious places. Before I moved to Sitka, I had an hour-long commute to an office-park cubicle. Now I was learning a new trade as a reporter, working out of a cluttered newsroom with views of the mountains and sea, negotiating the uncharted landscape of city politics, high school sports, and news important to the opinionated community of a far-flung rock in the Gulf of Alaska.

  Already an eager fisherman, I experimented with the local techniques. Though slow to grasp deepwater trolling for salmon in Sitka Sound, I caught Dolly Varden from shore and adapted my New England fly-fishing sensibilities by learning to cast with a shotgun slung over my shoulder after losing a steelhead to a brown bear in a tug-of-war. I bought an aluminum skiff, bow dented from a collision with a humpback whale, and tried to build confidence in my ability to run it to distant islands, beaches, and coves for overnight trips. I took my first, tentative steps to hunt the island’s deer population. They had nothing to fear.

  Some of my explorations took place in the pages and photographs of the past. When I first learned about Joe, I set out to explore the legacy he left behind. At Sheldon Jackson College’s Stratton Library, I found books by or about more famous Arctic explorers in which his name appeared. One even contained a photo of his schooner, Teddy Bear, sailing the Arctic Ocean with a clutch of polar bear hides hung to dry over the gunwales. I copied, framed, and hung it over my desk.

  Across town at Kettleson Memorial Public Library, a waterfront building with views of Crescent Bay that real estate developers might kill for, the Alaska magazine archives contained his obituary. Bob DeArmond, a writer and historian who lived in Sitka, once owned the publication and still contributed to the Daily Sentinel, my paper, though he was already in his nineties. Bob had witnessed or participated in much of the history about which he wrote. He and his wife, the artist Dale Burlison DeArmond, were Alaska royalty.

  With Joe’s obit in hand, I called on them in their apartment at the Sitka Pioneer Home. One of six state-run assisted living facilities throughout Alaska, Sitka’s angles like a boomerang on a scenic corner more or less next door to the Sentinel. The largest building in town, it overlooks Sitka Channel, where boats move like pulley ropes in opposing parallel lines. Some of the rooms have views of Mt. E
dgecumbe and Sitka Sound. This was where Joe moved in 1970, two years before his death. Bob surprised me by saying he knew Joe personally.

  They’d met long ago when Joe reached out to Bob, then editor of another magazine, Alaska Journal, about publishing his ship’s log and memories as a manuscript. He put Joe in touch with “a young grad student” named Claus Naske to help, but the project stalled and eventually derailed.

  Bob thought Alaska Journal might have run a story about Joe when he died. He shared his memories of him, somewhat dimmed by the decades, and patiently answered my questions. Now and again after that day, he sent word that he’d remembered something that he wanted to share, but each time I visited he had already forgotten it. I didn’t mind. Bob made a career of chronicling the contributions of others to the state he loved, but his own stories were every bit as impressive. Decades earlier he had helped establish the Southeast Alaska village of Pelican as a cold storage site for a local fish buyer. Later he worked for the territorial legislature prior to statehood. At one point, he had what he called “an encounter with the wrong end of a shotgun” and spent some time recuperating in Washington State, where he returned in the early 1930s when he rowed a 16-foot dinghy from Sitka to Tacoma, a voyage of nearly a thousand miles.1

  It turned out he was right about the Alaska Journal piece, though. The Autumn 1973 issue ran an article by historian Mary J. Barry that included the first photographs I’d ever seen of Joe, dapper and trim, with piercing eyes and a wry smile. Barry’s article ended with a mention of the unpublished manuscript Bob had told me about, which, she wrote, “was turned over to the University of Alaska and hopefully will be published in the not too distant future.”