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

by C. B. Bernard

  From my truck, the boats in the harbors along the road twinkle like Christmas lights. Just past town, I take a side road away from the water and park at its end. From here the trail runs 5 miles straight and dead-ends at a waterfall. A series of muskeg meadows stretches about halfway to the falls where I’ve consistently seen signs of deer, dozens of tracks crisscrossed in the snow. My plan is to be there waiting when the sun rises. I shoulder my pack and rifle, down the last of my coffee, and head off down the trail, the air heavy, cold, brisk.

  Alaska has never seemed smaller, a state twelve times the size of New York shrunk to my headlamp’s narrow beam, everything beyond unknowable, savage, a little intimidating. During spawning season, salmon clog the 8-mile river that roars in the darkness somewhere to my right. I bring the dog here sometimes and sit on the bank with a beer and a book while she paddles in place in a deep water-hole, perfectly matched against the current, a champion swimmer in a resistance pool. Fish skirt around her, bumping her legs and eliciting growls. From the banks you can look down into the pools and see salmon hovering like torpedoes, or like John McPhee’s “sky full of zeppelins.”

  Near the river’s mouth a few miles from here, water courses just inches deep over a gravel bar, and when it fills with salmon you could cross on their backs. It empties into Sitka Sound within the boundaries of Sitka National Historical Park, a battlefield bloodied in the final conflict between the Russians and the indigenous Tlingit people in 1804. Those warriors of the Kiksadi Clan repelled Aleksandr Baranov’s initial assault until Baranov called in the Imperial Russian Navy, which bombarded the Native stronghold mercilessly. That ended the battle. It also ended an era for the Tlingit. The Russians eventually left Alaska, of course, selling it to America in 1867—the transfer officially marked on Castle Hill just a few miles from here—but more than 200 years later the battle’s outcome remains a visible taunt to the losing side: The island bears Baranov’s name, and Tlingit claim to the land is much diminished.

  The trail dark, the light of my headlamp lurches with my strides, making shadows flicker and dance on the tree cover like ghosts of the Russian and Tlingit warriors who died here in their fight. Snow begins to fall—fat, heavy flakes that cling tenaciously but don’t amount to much, a good metaphor for my presence here.

  After a time, the trail parts from the river and the noise of the rushing water dissipates. In its absence other sounds grow louder, expanding to fill the space. Branches knock together. Leaves rustle. Twigs snap. Trees rattle. A trunk sways in the dark and groans. Animals make some of the sounds, I suppose. That’s why I’m here in these shadow lands where our worlds overlap—still, it’s disconcerting, life all around me, all of it invisible. I take the rifle off my shoulder and cradle it as I walk, telling myself it’s more comfortable that way.

  The forest grows thicker. Though the trail is well marked and well traveled, in the beam of my headlamp it’s not always obvious, and more than once seems to end at a wall of trees where the path doglegs into the dark. The light catches snowflakes and turns them into falling stars, and it’s difficult to see beyond them. With each step the trail grows smaller, narrower, a tunnel closing. The morning, too, is getting darker, defying nature. Rubbing my eyes does nothing to improve my vision. Something’s not right. I’m slow to realize what, though, until it gets bad enough that it becomes obvious even to me: My headlamp is dying. I strip it from my head and aim the beam at its own battery pack and see my mistake. After putting fresh batteries in my own headlamp and checking them off my list, I’ve grabbed my girlfriend’s instead, identical in every way to mine—except one.

  It’s getting dimmer by the second. I use the last of the light to find a solid tree trunk just off the trail, clear a place to sit, and wait for daylight. When the bulb blinks out, the darkness is absolute.

  Early on in “The Heart of the Game,” McGuane sits to wait for antelope beneath a cottonwood tree, his rifle across his knees, and promptly falls asleep. “I woke up a couple of hours later, the coffee and early-morning drill having done nothing for my alertness. I had drooled on my rifle, and it was time for my chores back at the ranch.”

  That image comes to me now as I sit in the snow, my back against a hemlock, but I’m awake the whole time, rifle in hands. The loss of one sense has amplified others. The forest is charged with activity, the frozen ground slowly numbing my ass. I hear every snowflake as it falls, can trace the path each carves through the canopy. A conversation takes place between the breeze and the branches, and rustling leaves interrupt.

  I hear movement in the forest around me. Big things. Small things. I can’t tell. Maybe a squirrel, maybe a bear. The sounds come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  I’m just a few miles from the road, from town, not in the frozen Arctic, not a day’s trip by dogsled from the safety of my wintered schooner. More experienced outdoorsmen would find this experience a good excuse for a nap, or they’d push on in the dark, feeling their way along the trail. Or they wouldn’t have made this mistake in the first place. They’ll laugh when they read this, declare me an inept fool.

  Three cold hours until the sun comes up. By dawn I’ve already eaten both sandwiches. When it’s light I see tracks in the snow just a dozen feet from where I’ve been sitting. I can’t tell if they were there before I was, but they’re big.

  What can I say? I’m not very good at this.

  An hour later, I’m skirting the fringe of the meadow when a deer bursts into the clearing. My rifle comes to my shoulder almost of its own accord. I inhale, exhale, and squeeze the trigger like I know what I’m doing. The deer bounds across the meadow and twitches into the trees. A few moments later the silence of the forest returns once more.

  6

  Northern Lights

  In 1907, I decided to go farther into the Arctic to trade and explore.

  Months later, I drop anchor in a small bay 30 miles north of town, untie the canoe from the transom of the Monkeyfist, and slip into the water with an hour of daylight left at best. I paddle half a mile, hugging the shoreline, until I find a small creek scouted on another trip. From there a quick portage takes me across a slim finger of land to a horseshoe-shaped cove narrowed so finely at the mouth it’s almost invisible from outside, the secret passage to my own little Shangri-la.

  It’s quiet when I arrive. Deep grass at the water’s edge sways with the breeze. Trees rise along the slopes of a mountain on one side: Sitka spruce, red and yellow cedar, hemlock. Some of these trees are more than 500 years old, and most more than 100. They saw Joe come to Alaska and now they’re watching over me. The first time I visited this place, huge rafts of waterfowl filled the cove, feeding, preening, squawking like senior citizens playing bridge. Each return visit has given me a gift. Deer roaming the beaches. A jowly brown bear scratching his back on tree bark. My dog, Tabasco, has leapt from the boat to swim with seals and harbor porpoises, the Northern Lights smudging the sky overhead and the water below.

  I build a small duck blind out of camouflage tarps, driftwood, and cut greens and paddle back to the boat as darkness falls. The temperature drops with the sun. My hands are cold, the exposed skin on my face is cold, even my ass is cold from the canoe’s brittle cane seat. It’s the kind of sudden chill that feels like you’ll never be able to shake it. Joe had days like this, whole weeks when he thought he might never get warm, that the sun might never rise again, home never so out of reach. Days when the only way a calendar can give you hope is when you burn it for warmth. But this isn’t the Arctic—I knew far colder winters living in northern Vermont, an argument my fingers find unpersuasive as I struggle to tie the canoe’s painter to the transom.

  The Dickinson stove blazing, I climb aboard to warm up in the cabin. Hope returns quickly, as does the feeling in my fingers. I strip down to a T-shirt to make dinner, and open a beer.

  I’ve spent hours in the woods and on the water, thumbing dog-ear
ed reams of books and articles in Gray’s Sporting Journal and Field & Stream and chapters in Chapman’s Piloting. I’ve picked hunters’ brains until they wanted to swat me like a mosquito. Each time I hunt, I walk the forest a little less obtrusively, see through the trees a little more clearly. Some hunts—maybe most—I never fire my gun, but even then I’ve come to enjoy that time for what it is: intense solitude, focused silence, moving meditation. Mostly I hunt alone, but even when I’m with Mike or another friend, it’s inherently solitary, soft-stepping through the forest in silent conversation with my thoughts.

  Remarkable things happen here in Alaska. I’ve anchored in the lee shore of the wildlife refuge at St. Lazaria Island—a misshapen volcanic plug, small and rugged, with 100-foot cliffs and arches towering above the breaking sea—to watch hundreds of thousands of birds return to their nests, darkening the sky, their songs drowning out the waves crashing beneath them. While walking across a downed spruce to cross a stream on an island in Neva Strait, I came face to face with a sow bear and her cubs crossing the same tree from the other direction. I ran almost literally into another bear on a trail behind town, and on the beach at Mosquito Cove. I’ve watched a pod of humpbacks circle a school of fish to create a bubble net before taking turns blasting upward through its center to fill their gaping mouths with prey. A couple months ago, while hunting deer on an island north of town, I followed a sound I couldn’t identify to the edge of a cliff and peered down into the blowhole of a whale sunning itself in a shallow cove below me.

  I get out on the water or in the woods most days after work and weekends, but I’m still green as the forest, each mishap and adventure a lesson that sharpens another arrow for my quiver. If nothing else, I’ve learned how much I love quiet spaces—a boat where the world cannot seem to reach me, or deep in the wet tangle of a moss-licked forest, the arched canopy of the Tongass watchful, silent, effortlessly beautiful.

  After dinner I crawl into my sleeping bag and read Joe’s manuscript as the Monkeyfist rocks gently on anchor.

  Just a handful of years under his belt trading the Siberian and Alaskan coasts with his uncle, and Joe decided to go it alone. Broke. Curious. Drawn to the path of greatest resistance. Maybe we have more in common than I thought.

  He contracted with the Bigelow Manufacturing Company on Seattle’s Lake Washington to build a small schooner to his specifications: 54 feet long, with a 14-foot beam and a shallow draft of just 6.5 feet. Built of 6-by-6 timbers, her heavy frame had 2-inch planks and a thick skin. At Joe’s request, the shipwrights sheathed her hull in a layer of ironbark, a heavy wood from a species of eucalyptus, to protect her from the crushing ice pack. A single-screw 20-horsepower gas auxiliary engine pushed her, but he preferred to rely on “a heavy suit of sails.”

  Amundsen’s Gjoa, which traversed the Northwest Passage in 1906, was 70 feet long with a 20-foot beam. The Erebus and Terror from Sir John Franklin’s expedition, like most of the schooners in the whaling fleet—the only ships to have sailed the distant corners of the Arctic beyond which Joe hoped to reach—stretched well over 100 feet long and had large crews to man them. In comparison, Joe’s new schooner seemed small, but purposefully so. Designed for a crew of four, but manageable with just two, she was fleet and nimble enough to navigate the ice pack as well as the smaller bays and natural harbors he expected to find.

  Working aboard her at a Seattle harbor, Joe heard a young girl comment on how tiny his ship was compared to her family’s yacht. If the schooner were hers, she said, she’d call it Teddy Bear. He gave his boat that name in her backhanded honor. Teddy Bear became a legend in the Arctic. She survived two decades of shipwrecks, collisions, icy seas, and some of the worst conditions imaginable. She earned herself and her captain a reputation for reliability, courage, and fierce endurance. Yet it’s difficult to imagine a more unassuming name.

  Joe applied for American citizenship, and while waiting for the slow winds of bureaucracy to blow, he spent the summer trading in Siberia, where he earned enough to pay off his new boat. The following year, Ira Rank, who owned a local mercantile company in Nome, staked him for his first trip north.

  On August 21, 1909, thirty years old and newly an American citizen, Joe loaded the Teddy Bear with trade goods—old army rifles, ammunition, kettles, knives, brightly colored cloth and beads, candy, chewing gum—and left Nome for the Arctic. He was gone five years.

  I’m about the same age as Joe was that first winter, though his schooner was twice as big, his winter twice as cold. The entry he wrote on this date in 1910, recording a strong westerly breeze with some snow drifting, the temperature 28 below zero, reads: “I went to my traps up on the hills. Got nothing.”

  The Monkeyfist’s oil stove feels luxurious. The bed in the V-berth is comfortable. There’s a stand-up head and enough space to move around. It’s far more indulgent than Joe’s winter quarters, but I can’t imagine it as the sum of my existence for a five-year voyage. What if I ran out of food? What if the engine didn’t start? My VHF radio and a CB for backup stand at the ready. But what if I lost power and couldn’t use them? I filed a float plan before leaving town, alerting friends to my destination, route, and timeline, and if I’m not back Mike will come looking for me or a passing boat will find me in a day, or two, or a week. My flares could signal a plane. I’ve got a rifle and shotgun, a few boxes of shells for each, crab pots stacked on the flybridge, shrimp pots on the stern deck. There’s a rack full of fishing gear.

  But how long could I survive on my own? Not five years. Which would betray me first, my stomach or my lack of heart? In less than a week I’d burn through the five-gallon can of diesel and the Dickinson would go cold. I’ve learned to make a fire, even here in the Tongass where the wood is always wet, but how long before I’m burning more calories running down firewood than I’m taking in with my meager subsistence skills?

  “This was uncivilized and unexploited country,” Joe wrote a year later. “The Eskimos were primitive; had never before seen a white man. . . . And there was plenty of wood for fuel. Up the river, only 20 miles away, we found small trees; we also gathered plenty of driftwood from the small island on the southern shores.” Twenty miles by dogsled for firewood, and he felt fortunate. Was that a sign of his relentless optimism, or simple context given the conditions he so long endured? Imagine traveling days overland for a stick to burn for warmth. How long before you’d give up? I can’t even imagine a worst-case hypothetical situation that approaches the danger of Joe’s reality, but his wasn’t a worst-case scenario; it was his life.

  In Alaska, the competent survive. When Joe and his Uncle Pete saw the folly of wasting their time prospecting, they returned to sailing, their known strength, and Joe chased his dream of adventures in uncharted places and a life at sea. I’m chasing my dream of writing, and the rest of it—driving off the edge of the continent, throwing hooks at fish, hurling steel shot at birds and lead at deer, pointing my old boat around a godforsaken coastline—is something else entirely, something other than work.

  I’m thankful to lie here in the quiet, wrapped in a warm sleeping bag, tethered to the earth by 40 feet of anchor chain. This anchorage reveals no signs of humanity, no boats or buildings or power lines. Nothing but the land and the sky and the sea. How far would I have to go in Massachusetts for such solitude? It’s tempting to believe I’m the first person here, but that’s ridiculous, of course—it’s mapped meticulously on my nautical charts, for starters—but what if it wasn’t? What was it like for Joe to anchor in a cove like this, knowing that no ships had ever sailed there?

  In his own journals, Diamond Jenness, an anthropologist with Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition, tells of meeting a group of Inuit well east of Alaska in Coronation Gulf who shook his hand, a custom they’d learned years earlier from Joe. Farther east he met more Inuit who, he says, “were not visited by Stefansson, and some at least have never seen a white man, not even Joe Be
rnard,” though Joe had wintered there already. Another expedition member writes of discovering a natural harbor and wintering there only to find empty tobacco cans and trash from the Teddy Bear as spring melted their surroundings.

  Joe had arrived first, again and again.

  But even that, of course, is misleading. How many places did he go not already traveled by centuries of Eskimo or Inuit, who marked it in their collective memory but not on any paper maps?

  On his maiden voyage, Joe left Nome with two companions: Gus Sandstrom, a former railroad worker from Kent, Washington, and Johann Koren, a Norwegian naturalist on a Smithsonian-sponsored ethnological survey. Rounding the Seward Peninsula northwest of Nome, the Teddy Bear reached the Diomede Islands and dropped Koren on the larger of the two, owned by Russia. The International Date Line runs between them, and the smaller island is American, which means they’re separated by a calendar day, a country—and during the Cold War, a vast political ideology—but only by 2.5 miles. A few years later, a shipwreck stranded Koren on the Siberian coast, where he endured a winter of unspeakable hardship before being rescued. He returned to Nome in 1913 without his hands, lost to the cold.

  Joe and Sandstrom breached the Arctic Circle just south of Kotzebue, where the Kobuk, Noatak, and Selawik Rivers reach the coast, an Inupiat village since at least the fifteenth century. They sailed past Cape Krusenstern, now a national monument, where 70 miles of beach ridges and limestone hills reveal the markings of a human presence dating back more than nine millennia, older even than some ancient Egyptian settlements. They passed Point Hope, later the site of nuclear weapons enthusiast Edward Teller and the US Atomic Energy Commission’s 1958 proposal, code-named Project Chariot, to build an artificial deepwater harbor by burying and detonating a sequence of thermonuclear devices equaling 160 Hiroshimas. They rounded Cape Lisburne in the Chukchi Sea, first sighted by Captain James Cook in 1778, a claim that ignores centuries of Eskimos who knew it long before Cook was a captain—or even alive.