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

by C. B. Bernard

  The Alaska Marine Highway System ferry Fairweather in Lynn Canal.

  Once aboard, we sit by the window looking out on Lynn Canal. A Tlingit carver from Angoon sets up at the table beside us with his eleven-year-old son, who eats his way to the bottom of a bag of potato chips and a can of cheese dip. It’s just after 7 a.m. They’re traveling to Sitka to visit the boy’s mother. The dad plans to peddle his art at the galleries and shops in town, and his work is beautiful—a dog salmon intricately painted in the black, red, and turquoise of the Northwest Coast art palette, a school of fish carved into a plank. During our voyage, he carves a decorative rifle stock with images of seals. When Kim compliments his work, he shows her a mask he’s made, fierce and beautiful, a wooden warrior’s shield.

  “I’m growing my hair long,” he says, “and in a year I’ll cut it and use it on the next mask.”

  She asks him to don it for a photo.

  “I carved it looking in the mirror,” he says from behind it. “I’m a handsome guy!”

  Near Tenakee, we pass a clutch of fishing boats. His son runs to the window and points excitedly.

  “Is that one of them?” he asks.

  “One of what?” his dad says.

  “One of the boats from the Deadliest Catch?”

  It breaks my heart, an Alaska Native so impressed by a small-screen version of his homeland.

  On the aft observation deck I meet Dan Neeley, three months into a tour with his wife and two dogs. They left San Francisco and drove their RV up to Dawson City, in the Yukon, took the Dalton Highway haul road to Deadhorse, and circled counterclockwise south through Alaska. After a few days in Sitka, they’ll take the ferry to Victoria, BC, drive south through Oregon, and eventually back home.

  “Trip of a lifetime,” he says. “Juneau was great. We landed a helicopter on a glacier. We rode a dogsled.”

  “That’s amazing,” I tell him, and I mean it.

  Between Baranof and Chichagof Islands, we enter Peril Strait, where the currents create a perpetual tidal tug-of-war. About 200 years ago, Aleut hunters camping in a bay along the strait picked mussels from the beach, and more than a hundred of them died from paralytic shellfish poisoning, giving Peril Strait its name. Ferries can run it only at slack tide, and even then they make nearly 200 corrections to their navigational course. Rocks pepper the way. Occasional bumps happen. When I lived in Sitka, a ferry ran aground on a charted reef here, the passengers evacuated by helicopter.

  A small crowd has gathered on the observation deck to take in the scenery. Dall’s porpoises swim alongside us and whales surface nearby, tails rising magnets that draw passengers to one side of the ferry. Eagles fly overhead. Salmon leap like stones skipped by an invisible hand. In Neva Strait we see an abandoned boat, overturned, rotted through, birds roosting on the rusted hull.

  “That guy had a bad day,” says a man who’s been chain smoking since we left Juneau. “Lot of bad days up here.”

  His voice a rusted muffler, he wears a faded denim jacket and a pair of jeans that look like he fished them out of an oil spill. His name’s Gary, and he’s from Sitka.

  “Born and raised,” he says. “When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to get out of Alaska. It just seemed so small. I wanted to get out and see the world, live in a big place, have something besides ocean and forest and wilderness, meet different people. When I finally left, I couldn’t wait to get back.”

  “What did you miss?”

  “The ocean. The forest. The wilderness. The people.”

  He’s fifty years old, he says, and has lived in Southeast all but two of them. For the remainder of our journey, he points and grins at every whale spout, eagle, or fishing boat. “Look at this view!” he says. “Beats hell out of flying, don’t it?” A dozen nodding camera lenses, a deck full of people agreeing.

  Town soon comes into view. The volcano rises on the horizon, mountains shine in the sun, the forest lush and green, the water bright. Mike and his wife and two friends from the newspaper greet us warmly at the ferry terminal. Any questions I had about what it might feel like to return to Sitka after ten years float away on the breeze, and for a moment it feels like coming home.

  14

  Dashed Hopes

  He came on a whale carcass at which he saw about 20 bears. He turned his dogs loose but soon called them back, for some 60 or 70 more bears got up into view! The bears had been lying down after gorging on the whale meat. Andreasen said there were so many he did not dare go any closer. The next day he went back and shot 4 or 5 bears at the same place, then they disappeared and he got no more. No one has ever seen so many polar bears at one spot since.

  The Teddy Bear left Baillie Island in August 1912 and almost immediately hit ice. Dolphin and Union Strait remained blocked by thick floes, even in summer, and he struggled to work the schooner east, looking for safe harbor. Most of the charted bays lay on the north side of the strait, on Victoria Island. The ice too thick to cross by boat, Joe scoured the mainland to the south and found an uncharted bay west of his old anchorage at the Coppermine River that looked like it might provide shelter and game. Just a few weeks after leaving Baillie Island, he put in for the winter.

  After Billy Banksland left with Stefansson, Joe had recruited a friend named John Cole, an Arctic veteran known as “Old John the Sailmaker” who had arrived at Baillie Island on the whaler Rose H some time earlier. Joe knew Cole’s experience and knowledge would serve him well on the Teddy Bear. They settled into their new anchorage, which they named “Ougruk Bay” for the crash of bearded seals they found there.

  The seals drew the Inuit, and the visitors eagerly bartered. Joe quickly made up for the poor trading of the prior winter. “I have had to stay at the schooner to trade with the continuous line of visitors from the east,” he wrote. “They come and go every day now bringing very good fox skins and a lot of summer caribou skins. John is getting out to his traps every day and takes care of getting the wood and the meals because I am so busy.”

  After the bad luck he’d experienced since leaving Nome a few years earlier, Joe hoped for an easier winter, and the upturn in trade buoyed his hopes. Before long, however, he found his misfortune continuing. As his trade picked up, his health declined. A few days of sickness turned into a chronic, ongoing illness. By mid-April it took a turn for the worse. His leg swelled painfully, and within a week he couldn’t walk.

  My nose bleeds if I sit up much. I have had to drag my leg to get around and my gums are sore. The swelling has increased so in the past two weeks that I cannot sit up, and my head aches so badly, and I have even vomited. Today I put my fingers on the right thigh, pressing down and holding them for a minute on the flesh, and an impression of them would remain for about five minutes after I withdrew my fingers.

  He diagnosed himself with scurvy. Cole, who had seen numerous cases of the vitamin deficiency in his years at sea, worried that Joe’s severe pain—not a typical symptom—meant something worse. With no doctors nearby, Joe turned to his own knowledge and experience. He’d long credited fresh air and sunshine with his triumph over tuberculosis as a boy, and believed it could cure him now too. Each day he had Cole carry him onto the deck of Teddy Bear for as long as he could stand the cold. He read that raw meat and blood could treat the affliction, and began eating sandwiches of raw game and dried apples from the ship’s store. When Cole shot a handful of ptarmigan, Joe “sucked the warm, raw blood from the birds,” and drank a bucket of blood from a freshly killed caribou brought by Inuit traders. His leg remained discolored and swollen, and he began to experience fainting and dizzy spells but continued the treatments despite his worsening condition.

  Joe’s Inuit friend Okomea had married “a medicine woman named Kolok,” and when she offered to cure him in exchange for a few trade goods, he agreed “more out of curiosity than anything.” He writes about a simple ceremony in
which she chanted and waved her hands over a charm made from a quarter-sized piece of skin cut from an old mitten. “She had it stuffed with grass, tied at both ends with string, and the loose ends of the string were put around my leg . . . She kept up this part of her ceremony for about 30 minutes then told me to keep the charm on my leg until she returned in a few days and that it would get better.” Kolok’s intervention didn’t work, and he continued his self-prescribed anti-scurvy diet. “I am not eating anything but raw meat and blood and apples, and I see that I am outside on deck almost all day. I keep the window open at night to let in fresh air.”

  Scurvy was unheard of among the Eskimo and Inuit, despite as little as 2 percent of their traditional diet consisting of fruit, vegetables, carbohydrates, and other common sources of vitamin C. In the index to Joe’s manuscript, subentries under “Food” include bear feet, blood, caribou, brown crane, dog, fat, fish, mice, ptarmigan droppings, rotten seal, seal intestines, seal stomach, squirrels, wolf, and wolverine, giving a pretty good idea of what the typical Arctic diet looked like.7 One subentry, “bedding skins,” refers to a particularly desperate sled voyage when Joe and his companions boiled pieces cut from their animal-hide sleeping bags for protein. Raw and undercooked meat provide high amounts of vitamin C, and it’s likely the Eskimo diet also gets it from other sources including the skin of the beluga whale, or muktuk, which may contain as much vitamin C as several oranges.

  Whether by science, fresh air, or Inuit prayer, Joe was back on his feet by mid-May—albeit tenderly and with some effort. “It is still keeping very cold but I have been feeling so much better each day I work harder and stronger,” he wrote on May 20, and by early July he’d improved markedly.

  So had the weather. He and Cole worked to ready the Teddy Bear for summer travel. Using the anchor for leverage, they rolled her on her side with the tide, and Joe mounted the propeller, repaired the rudder, painted the cabin, and oiled the deck while Cole mended the sails and rigging, worn from three years of use and exposure. When the schooner was righted and loaded with their gear, they waited for the weather to cooperate.

  When ice began to clear from the bay, Joe climbed a hill to look for a clear path for the schooner. The strait had opened to the east, but all the water west of them—their route back to Nome—remained blocked. He decided to take a chance, hoping the weather would improve and the ice would clear along the way. The Teddy Bear set sail on July 22.

  They’d long since run out of gasoline and, relying on sail, covered less than 10 miles by the end of the month—each one hard fought. For the first time in more than 400 pages, disappointment and frustration begin to show in his narrative:

  The schooner has been taking so many hard hits with the ice already I believe we will have to look for suitable winter quarters. If we had not found this shelter the pressure would have piled us high and dry. . . . We are constantly hearing loud crunching and grinding—the breaking ice. This situation gives me a new understanding of the experiences of Franklin, Richardson, Rae, McClure, and Collinson and their crew, the first explorers of this sea, so many of whom lost their ships and perished. Several times we were close to disaster while crossing the strait.—August 1, 1913

  Tonight the whole body of ice is moving to the west. I took the dory ashore to get some wood. It is useless for us to try getting out of this shifting mass of ice.—August 4, 1913

  My hopes of getting out this season have been dashed.—August 19, 1913

  On August 20 he reported temperatures so cold that even saltwater was freezing. “I am now sure we will have to winter near here,” he wrote. “Too much of a risk to try to get out.”

  They drifted with the pack ice, tied to a floe. When he could, Joe pushed the Teddy Bear hard, but with each day conditions worsened, the risk grew, and their situation became more dire. On the north side of the strait they entered Lady Richardson Bay and made for a small island that looked as if it might provide shelter from the closing ice.

  We worked desperately all day to move the schooner toward a small rock on the south side of a little harbor. We had to ‘kedge’8 the schooner through young ice which had a lot of pieces of old ice in it. It was desperately hard work but this is our last chance. We finally got to within 600 yards of the little rock island . . . some 600 yards from Victoria Land. It makes a fine place to put our dogs.

  All signs began to point to a severe winter. Joe considered one last attempt to leave when the wind blew the ice from the bay, but it was too risky. The following year he learned that he’d made the right decision. Conditions had been equally bad or worse all throughout the Arctic. “It would have been suicide to have made the crossing,” he wrote, noting that the diminished whaling fleet hadn’t made it to their winter grounds at Herschel Island, several vessels caught or even crushed in the ice.

  Stefansson had returned to the States after leaving Baillie Island with Billy Banksland. By the following year, when Joe and Cole were leaving Ougruk Bay, his newest venture, the Canadian Arctic Expedition (CAE), set sail from Nome. Initially sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the American Museum of Natural History, he convinced the Canadian government he was likely to discover new land in the uncharted Canadian Arctic. When the Canadian government took over sponsorship, Stefansson—born in Canada but later made a US citizen—reclaimed his Canadian citizenship, demonstrating that his loyalty lay always with his own best interests.

  The CAE fleet included three schooners, the Karluk, Alaska, and Mary Sachs, the last of which Stefansson bought from Peter Bernard. Pete had purchased the Sachs, a former US Postal Service schooner, around the time Joe built the Teddy Bear to continue his trade along the coastlines of Alaska and Siberia. Stefansson paid $5,000 and retained Pete’s services as ship’s master for $125 a month, with a provision that Pete kept a one-third interest in the vessel and ownership would revert back to him at the conclusion of the expedition.

  When the three ships left Nome, they quickly encountered the same severe conditions the Teddy Bear had met to the east, ice blocking much of the route they planned to travel. By September, all three ships were caught.

  The flagship, Karluk, trapped near Herschel Island, began drifting westbound toward the Siberian coast with pack ice. Stefansson and a small party left the crippled vessel, purchased another schooner to replace her, and continued the expedition. He left most of the crew behind to drift with the Karluk while they awaited rescue. Five months later, in January 1914, ice punctured the hull. The crew, including twenty-two men, an Inuit woman and her two small daughters, and twenty-nine dogs, abandoned ship for the frozen Arctic Ocean hundreds of miles from land. When rescuers reached them nine months later, just twelve survivors remained.

  Far to the east, reluctantly ensconced in their quarters, Joe and Old John the Sailmaker resolved themselves to another winter in the north.

  15

  Shelter

  I could not run the engine. There was so much frost in the engine room I had to protect the water pipe from freezing and bursting. . . . I went out on the ice around the bow and noticed a broken plank. It must have happened when we ran around the ice west of Flaxman Island. The schooner was so heavily loaded that the sheathing was all under water.

  Sitka is a torment, its weeklong sunny disposition turned on its ass. The downpours worsen with each day. Temperatures tumble, bullied by gravity, and if the wind blew any harder it might slow the Earth’s spin.

  A hundred miles south of here, in Ketchikan, a “Liquid Sunshine Gauge” on the dock outside the visitors bureau puts an optimistic spin on the weather: “Our rain!” it brags, adding that Ketchikan is “King Salmon Capital of the World!” and that “Salmon love the rain!” The sign leaves Outsiders with the impression that the town suffers from an overabundance of not just precipitation but also exclamation marks. Ketchikan averages 154 inches of rain each year, five times the number of miles of road—enough to make Si
tka’s comparatively meager 97 inches seem inconsequential, until you spend some time here and the rain soaks you for so long that even your soul starts to wrinkle.

  Brendan and Cal beside the Adak.

  When the rain eases for an afternoon, the town takes the opportunity to wring itself out. At Eliason Harbor, boats bob in their slips, an entourage of nodding trollers and longliners, live-aboards and luxury yachts, each larger than the last. At the tip of the most distant finger, too long to be confined to a slip, floats the biggest of all: the Adak. Her new owner, Brendan, works long days deep in the wooden belly of the beast, trying to restore her pride.

  Today, in the crease of her bilge, he’s degreasing the propeller shaft, a euphemism if ever there was one. The shaft lies in a tunnel beneath the floor, and to get to it he has to pull the rectangular floor panels. Most have not been touched for years. As he removes them, they break apart with rot. Those that survive intact swell so much from the moisture in the air that they won’t fit back into place. Stacked in a pile, warped and cupped like a hand of old playing cards, they sway at odds to the rocking of the boat. With the shaft exposed, he strips away decades of built-up grease, bilge water, and sludge, twice again as unglamorous as it sounds. There’s a price to the romance of boats. Especially old wooden ones.

  A World War II harbor tug built for the US Army, the Adak hauled cargo and passengers to bases along the coast or nearby islands. Her bulk defies description—not just long but beamy and blunt, thick of hip, big-boned. She draws 10 feet and displaces 185 tons. Her 2,000 square feet of living quarters include sleeping berths for more than a dozen. It’s difficult to overstate the challenge Brendan has embraced. A 1940s Fairbanks Morse diesel turns her single, massive screw. Past owners jury-rigged her electrical, plumbing, heating, and steering systems. Her bones and skin have gone soft in places. A decade-old marine survey recommended $90,000 in needed repairs, most not acted upon, and the ensuing years have been unkind. She’s the kind of project Brendan could spend a lifetime finishing and still never finish. But he has always seen romance where others see logistics.