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

by C. B. Bernard

  “If I were to put two glasses in front of you, you wouldn’t know which to drink,” Parrish tells me. Hale, gray-haired, and as impeccably dressed as he’s been every occasion I’ve had to meet with him, he’s a natural PR type. Cameras love him. Ripe with charisma, he makes speaking to the public or the press seem effortless, and his presence fills the ship. Say what you want about the cruise industry being an outside corporation that uses Alaska, but Parrish is himself a longtime Alaskan. He moved here from Seattle in 1965 when former governor Walter Hickel recruited him to open the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage. He’s also an awfully nice guy. Just don’t let him serve you a glass of water.

  This iteration of the Statendam came off the line at an Italian shipyard in 1993 with a $180 million price tag. Like all boats, the construction expense was just the beginning. She burns a gallon of fuel roughly every 30 feet she travels, about 150 tons of diesel a day. Depending on fuel prices, that puts her consumption in the neighborhood of $1 million a week, some of which passes directly to passengers as a fuel surcharge on ticket prices. It takes effort to move something that big, especially at her max speed of 22 knots.

  The industry is moving toward increasingly larger ships. Soon they’ll stretch nearly twice as long—100 feet longer than Nimitz-class aircraft carriers—and haul more than 6,300 passengers at a time. The Statendam is big enough to dwarf Noah’s ark, which was just 450 feet by 75 feet by 45 feet, according to biblical blueprints, but is small by the new cruise ship standard. She carries just 1,260 passengers, fewer even than Titanic lost. Like all measurements, however, the scale has two ends. She carries 500 more people than live in Skagway, one of her Alaskan ports of call. If half the ticketed passengers of this ship alone went ashore there, the town’s population would double. Some days Skagway gets up to three ships, most bigger than the Statendam.

  It’s not difficult to understand why ports of call maintain a love-hate relationship with the industry. Some people look at the disembarking tourists and see dollar signs for local coffers emptied by collapsing timber and fishing economies. Others see an invasion of culture-blind clowns.

  Despite the grandeur and allure of the surroundings on this precious cloudless and hot summer day in Sitka, a good number of passengers remain aboard, choosing to view the town from a distance, or not at all. Following Parrish back to the tender, we pass one of the ship’s movie theaters. It looks like any other shoreside movie venue, except a little nicer. The seats are nearly full. Playing on the screen is Space Cowboys. Apparently Clint Eastwood can triumph over anything—even Alaska.

  If Titanic, premier passenger ship of her day, represents hubris, the Statendam represents how much Alaska has changed since Joe sailed here in a schooner that would have fit comfortably in one of her dining rooms. If there’s an iceberg to sink this metaphor, it’s the inevitability of more change. This is the fifth Holland America vessel to bear the Statendam name. Someday she’ll be decommissioned, too, and a sixth will sail ever north to Alaska, a state big enough to hide Italy and make a cruise ship look small.

  8

  Sustenance

  I went out to pick up some of my bear traps and on the way home I killed a brown crane, one of a pair I saw. I also killed a seal which had come up to the side of the schooner. I roasted the crane for dinner. The meat is sweeter and more moist than that of a turkey.

  Hunting played a far bigger role in Joe’s life than mine. He was better at it, more practiced, and far more successful. His journals keep a running commentary of his quarry, and an entire appendix covers the tally. Over three months in 1912, he killed 54 seals, 29 foxes, 7 polar bears, 3 ougruk (bearded seals), 2 wolves, and 1 ermine.

  Three years earlier, Teddy Roosevelt celebrated the end of his presidential administration with an African safari that “collected” around 1,100 specimens, an accepted euphemism for killing animals. He and his son Kermit shot 512 between them, including 47 gazelles, 20 rhinos, 17 lions, 11 elephants, 9 giraffes, and 8 hippos. That same year, Roosevelt accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.

  A page from one of Joe’s journals.

  Except for birds, I can almost count on both hands the game I’ve shot in my lifetime. Joe needed a spreadsheet. He hunted for pelts and furs for clothing, bedding, barter, and income. He also hunted for trophies—not to hang over a mantle but for his museum collections—and for protection, tracking down a bear, wolverine, or pack of wolves tormenting his camp or traplines that might otherwise have hunted him. During long winters stacked atop one another like blocks of ice, he hunted mostly for survival. A road through the Arctic, his journal is paved with entries like this:

  Thick fog. Snowing. We could not see any distance but broke camp anyway at 8:30 and continued traveling along the coast. No signs of sled tracks. The coast line is so cut up with bays and inlets that it is very hard to find a way to go. Our provisions are low. In fact, we only have food enough for one more day and we have not fed the dogs today.

  Hunting wasn’t a decision, it was a necessity of his life. It was how he ate, fed his dogs, lighted and heated his tents and cabin, like putting gas in his car and oil in the furnace. When game was scarce in the Arctic, you tightened your belt as long as you could, and then you died.

  It was extremely cold that second winter. . . . There was little or no food to be found and even some of the Eskimos were starving to death; infanticide was more common than ever. We lived mostly on snowy owls and fox. Even caribou and seal left the country, and many of the fox were diseased. We had to go from 20 to 50 miles for game on which we had to depend.

  Every ounce of hard-earned food mattered. Babies born during hard times or seasons when game was difficult to hunt were sometimes left to die from exposure, minimizing the number of mouths to feed. Joe observed the practice with clinical detail, though it must have offended his sensibilities and his fondness for children.

  Anoyou says that Kapagu (his wife until last summer when he traded wives with Kaptookin) had 4 children. The first one, a girl about 10 years old, is now living; the second, a boy, died when he was 4 or 5 months old; the third, a girl, was thrown away; the fourth, a girl, born last fall, is still living. His present wife, Poshinto, has had 7 children. The first born, a girl, was thrown away; the second, a boy, about 8 years now is still living; the third was put away; the fourth, a girl, was thrown away; the fifth, a girl, was thrown away; the sixth, a girl, was thrown away; the seventh, a girl born last spring, was thrown away. He also says that his mother had more than 15 children, all thrown away except three who were allowed to live.

  When he meets a pregnant Inuit, he offers her a rifle if she’ll keep the baby to make it easier for her and her husband to feed their growing family. The next day he awakens to a line of women waiting outside the schooner, sent by their husbands to make similar trades.

  Hunting looks very different than it did a century ago. Oversight has become increasingly prevalent and complex, game regulations clause-and-exception-riddled booklets that specify seasons, shooting hours, permissible ammunitions, methods, and locations—much of which changes from year to year and forces hunters to become literate in obtuse regulatory legalese. In 1910, his second year in the Arctic, Joe wrote:

  I left this morning . . . to hunt for the caribou. I went along the coast eastward until I came to their tracks, following them to the foothills and up past the first ridge of hills. There were two herds of about 20 each. It was dark when I got up to them—so dark that I could not see the sight on my rifle, and had to shoot blind. I pumped the full magazine into them as they ran. I hit at least three and found two of them. It was seven p.m. when I started skinning them. . . . I cached some meat and my gun so I could take home as much as I could carry. My only light was a glow from the Aurora. I lost my bearings; then when the Northern Lights began to brighten up and dance across the sky, they became so brilliant I saw the schooner three miles away. When I finally got home at one a.m
., Putoga was waiting for me. He had killed two caribou on the ice and had brought home all he could and had cached the rest of the meat.

  It’s hard to imagine blindly shooting at a moving herd of caribou or any other animal as a legitimate method of taking game today.

  In Alaska, the separate purchase of big-game tags often bolsters license requirements. State-drawn lotteries limit certain hunts. Rigorous reporting requirements help biologists monitor populations, and hunters who violate any code face fines, jail time, and the loss of hunting privileges.

  Hunting methods vary by region and quarry, but I don’t know anyone in Southeast Alaska who wears clothing the color of traffic cones or sits in a tree stand soaked in mail-order doe urine. When I hunt with Mike or other friends, it’s literally a walk in the forest. Deer flit like shadows. I choose to hunt for food, but for others in rural areas like Sitka and for many of Alaska’s Native populations, it’s not so much a choice as a way of life, a cultural imperative. In Arctic Alaska, where a gallon of gas costs almost $7 and a gallon of milk nearly twice that, with the nearest supermarket 1,000 miles away, hunting remains a primary channel in the food supply. Seth Kantner, a writer from Kotzebue, grew up in rural Alaska, white in a Native village. His book Shopping for Porcupine recounts his childhood and the lives of the people around him in stark, honest detail. Kantner’s work offers maybe the best depiction of “the Real Alaska” yet written, told not by an outsider but by someone raised on the customs and traditions but always kept just at the fringe because of his color. His book and his earlier novel, Ordinary Wolves, give a visceral understanding of how much there is to the state and its people, and what it might have been like for Joe as an outsider who immersed himself in Native cultures and traditions.

  In Kantner’s Alaska and the rural corners tourists never visit, the way of life has changed far less since Joe’s time than in places like Sitka. Regulatory oversight has evolved in those places too, but the actual methods of hunting remain similar thanks to cultural traditions and the simple fact that they still work. Of course Eskimo hunters today are as likely to use snowmachines as dogsleds, and rifles have replaced handmade tools and weapons. In fact, Joe may have played a part in that—he traded hundreds of rifles to groups of Eskimo and Inuit who had never seen them before for furs and cultural artifacts.

  Hunters, Native and otherwise, have had to adapt to the reduced availability of game, evolving state and federal bag limits, and the increased role of conservationists and biologists in managing what once was seen as a right but is now treated more and more like a privilege. In Joe’s day, no one monitored the harvest, enforced fair methods, or prevented poaching in the Arctic.

  This morning at eleven o’clock, we saw some caribou coming on the ice to the east. Putoga, Ayiak and I went along the beach and got one from a long way off. We noticed a large herd. They were in two files abreast. I fired two shots and downed three. By then they had jumped off the bank and were soon out of sight. After a little while I saw them running in the river. . . . I fired at the first caribou not expecting to hit it, but I wanted to make the herd turn around toward Putoga. I actually hit the second caribou. When it fell the whole line of caribou behind trampled over and broke its back. I was so surprised at having hit the caribou at such a distance, I paced it off. It was eight hundred yards. And what was better about that hit, when I did that the herd turned and went toward Putoga and he got two more.

  Joe sure as hell wasn’t thinking about protecting the population. As far as anyone knew, it was limitless.

  As a conversation, hunting plays out in different dialects. Biologists say resources, harvest, management; hunters use different words. Natives, too, have their own tongue for it. It’s a language some people don’t speak at all, but their voices ring loudly just the same in some parts of the country. If we’re going to have the conversation, we all need to listen to one another.

  These are animals, and we are killing them. A century later, we’ve learned that if we kill enough of them, they will disappear. This is not an argument against killing them, but one for temperance and moderation.

  Hunting plays a crucial role in subsistence, predator control, and population management as well as in recreational tourism and fiscal revenue. The effort in Alaska seems to be to find the middle ground. How do you protect both the resources and the right of people to partake in them? In that regard, Alaska is well managed. Biologists do their jobs, setting bag limits for the state to enforce, and the state in turn treats game like a commodity. There’s only so much of it, and when it’s gone, the store is closed. It’s bad business to shut your doors, so the state does everything it can to keep the shelves stocked.

  Fish and Wildlife Service survey data showed total revenue for all hunting in Alaska at just over $125 million a few years ago, revenue for wildlife viewing another $581 million. Nearly half the state’s population—and another 270,000 nonresidents—bought Alaska hunting licenses. For comparison, the national participation rate for hunting is just 5 percent. Figures for hunters per capita vary in how they’re calculated, but Alaska typically tops the list.

  Of course hunters aren’t the only threat animals face. Habitats are disappearing. Forests are logged, land developed—even in Alaska. Polar bears rely on the ice to find food—more than half of their dens in the Beaufort Sea area are built on offshore sea ice—but the ice is vanishing quickly. Take away the ice, and what happens to the bears? Overhunting depleted their numbers to dangerous levels once already, during Joe’s time. A five-country treaty in 1973 prohibited hunting polar bears from certain ships and aircraft and helped lead to their recovery, only for them to face a new threat as their habitat literally dissolves beneath them.

  The bears aren’t alone either. No reliable figures exist for caribou populations in the first part of last century, but the numbers were massive. Canada’s Bathurst Herd, which Joe hunted, declined from around 472,000 caribou in the 1980s to about 186,000 less than two decades later. By 2009 it had dropped to fewer than 32,000, a decline of almost 93 percent. The following year the provincial government imposed a total ban on hunting in the animals’ winter range. Aboriginal hunters raged at being shut out of their traditional subsistence grounds; at the time of the ban, they were harvesting around 6,000 caribou each year. In a story about the effect of the ban on the Dene people, the Canadian Broadcasting Company said that in some remote areas a family of five might eat as much as twenty-five caribou a year and that the prohibition could lead not only to poverty, since beef is so expensive there, but to increased obesity and diabetes if community members had to eat fattier or processed meats.

  Here’s the thing about Alaska: Even Sitka, its fourth-largest city, is a federally designated rural area. Alaska prioritizes subsistence use of fish and game over any other consumptive harvest, the only state with such a law, and allows for more permissive subsistence harvest limits and seasons in rural areas. People who rely on the meat for survival or cultural use get preference when the state manages resources. Congress passed a similar law for federal lands within Alaska in the 1980s. Entire rural villages feed on subsistence hunting and fishing. Salmon. Whale. Caribou. Deer. Even in comparatively urban areas like Sitka, game accounts for a significant portion of the local diet.

  Subsistence isn’t just hunting, it’s gathering too. Alaskans harvest about 55 million pounds of wild foods, primarily fish and land and marine mammals, but also birds, shellfish, berries, and plants. The state’s Division of Subsistence estimates the average rural subsistence harvest statewide at about 375 pounds of food per person per year. At more than a pound of wild food per person each day, that’s about 100 pounds more than the average American eats each year in domestic meat, fish, and poultry combined, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Traditional foods play a recognized role in Native cultures at funerals, weddings, dances, potlatches, and other ceremonies. They’re also widely shared, especially with those in the co
mmunity who cannot provide for themselves. Dog teams eat salmon. Inedible parts are used for clothing and tools.

  It’s easy to oppose hunting when you can walk into a Whole Foods and buy your wild fish, corn-fed beef, organic vegetables, and all-natural dog food in half an hour. But sit down with an entire village and tell them you think they should abandon countless generations of cultural traditions and starve to death.

  Worldwide, thirty-four of the forty-three major caribou herds are in decline. Some estimate the total population has dropped by nearly 60 percent globally. But it’s not all bad news for caribou. Results of a recent aerial photo-census put the population of the Porcupine Herd, which spends much of its time in Alaska, at about 169,000. Less than a decade earlier the herd was only about 123,000 strong, down from 178,000 in 1989, and biologists feared the population had reached a tipping point if hunting continued unchecked. The herd provides an important source of subsistence meat to communities on both sides of the Alaska-Canada border and migrates more than 1,500 miles every year between its overwinter range and its spring calving grounds, the longest land migration route of any animal. The range is bigger than the state of Oregon and stretches as far north as Kaktovik, the only village within the confines of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on an island in the Coastal Plain—Barter Island, in fact, where Joe spent his first winter on the Teddy Bear. Each spring the herd makes its way there for calving and remains to graze until summer mosquitoes numerous enough to darken the skies drive it east and south.