By early evening the rain has returned. Out of his engine room coveralls, Brendan is still tattooed with grease and soot, his hair wild, his eyes tired. Friends come for dinner and sit at the galley table, warmed by the iron Monarch cookstove—the same model Admiral Byrd took to the South Pole, its design unchanged from the initial 1800s production line, gorgeous in a way that modern industrial objects can never be. The cost, of course, is convenience. The Monarch provides a warmth and atmosphere no electric space heater or gas radiator ever could, but the hassle of lighting and maintaining a fire in the box and the lack of temperature control mean compromise. The stove is a metaphor for the Adak, a layer of complexity that pays for the charm.
The next day I put Kim on a plane home and return to the Adak, where I enjoy a break in the rain on the aft deck with seven-year-old Bella while Brendan and her dad, Marat, work somewhere beneath us in the engine room. Bella leaps and dances and dodges invisible raindrops. The hatch to the engine room is an open maw, a steep ladder leading into a chasm of engine parts, sharp tools, and toxic fumes. She skirts around it intuitively in her camouflage sweatshirt, pink tights, and yellow Crocs, the brightest thing on board the dark boat. Her pageboy bangs the color of sand nearly match the color of her skin. Missing a tooth, she smiles broadly just the same.
“I’ve seen a bear from here,” she says, pointing a tiny finger toward Halibut Point Road.
“No way,” I say, and she takes my measure with a stare. I haven’t met her mother, but I bet she’s a strong woman.
“I used Brendan’s binoculars.”
Brendan’s dog, Cal, limps from the main cabin to greet us. Bella has bestowed upon him a red rubber bracelet that’s slipped down over his dew claw, making it difficult for him to walk. He doesn’t complain—it’s not his nature—but he burrows his head in my lap, grateful to see me. When Bella’s not looking, I remove the rubber shackle.
Brendan’s a kind of Renaissance man well suited to this place. He can gut a deer, build an airtight timber-frame home, and quote Rimbaud from memory. When I first met him, he was twenty, living in the woods outside town in a tent stacked high with books and issues of The New Yorker. Not long after, he left Alaska for Europe and earned a master’s in French and English literature at Oxford before returning to the States to work as a journeyman carpenter. He learned barn-building, framing, and finish carpentry in California, Kentucky, and Michigan, and studied timber framing in New Hampshire.
In 2006 he returned to his native Philadelphia and started a green construction business that used reclaimed materials and practiced slow, thoughtful woodcraft, a building method that extends from his personality: even-keeled and calm. When not swinging a hammer or nurturing a business, he studied salsa dancing, restored an old row house, learned to box and play the guitar, and wrote a novel. In his early thirties he decided it was time for something new, and on a visit to Sitka decided to buy the Adak. Back in Philly, he signed the papers to convert his construction business into a co-op, sold his row house, bought an old Toyota 4-Runner for $1,200 on eBay, and moved back to Alaska to start over on his new, old tugboat. He got her for a song—but what kind of song?
Bella shows me a dance routine that uses every inch of exposed deck. Fleet of foot, light as a cloud, she pirouettes past the table saw, arabesques at the lumber pile, leaps over the braided dock lines and bollards, and pliés around the grill. In the summer she lives with her father on his halibut schooner in this same harbor. He fishes and ships the catch home to Philadelphia, where his wife distributes it through Community Supported Agriculture shares. When the weather turns, he and Bella will head back east again. It’s a quirky childhood but not uncommon here. I’ve known homeschooled kids raised in remote hatcheries, on small islands, aboard sailboats, and in yurts, others who grew up without running water or toilets. Interesting as children, interesting as adults.
“Do you like it here in Alaska?” I ask her.
“Yes, but it rains too much—that’s the one thing it never stops in Alaska,” she says, reducing the vast state to the cloud-scarred skies and puddle-pocked grounds of Sitka. “Rain.”
Smaller boats pass the Adak on their way to their slips in the inner harbor. No matter their size, they look tiny next to the tug. Wooden boats are like living things and require effort, care, and feeding. The list of maintenance and upkeep grows exponentially rather than arithmetically. The Adak stretches 98 feet long. The guy who sold him the boat maybe misled him a bit about her condition, and as the truth reveals itself piecemeal, Brendan is realizing that he needs to take a few steps back to see the entire scope of what he’s taken on.
He’s up against a clock too. Tired of the last owner’s runaround, Sitka’s harbormaster has put a bureaucratic foot down and demanded that Brendan move the Adak under her own power to another dock by the end of August, less than a month from now, or risk impound or scuttle. In exchange for Marat’s help with the engine, Brendan lets him and Bella use the tug’s shower and borrow his truck for trips into town. Some nights they stay for dinner or just for the company.
“I love brussels sprouts,” Bella non sequiturs as we move inside the cabin. “And school.”
“That’s unusual,” I say. It seems redundant to tell a Philly girl on a battered tug in an Alaska harbor that she’s not an average seven-year-old.
Cal mopes into the cabin behind us, giving his bright-eyed tormenter a wide berth, and jabs his head into my lap. He sheds like it’s his job, his yellow and gray hair covering every available surface. Bella comes over to pet him, eliciting a resolved sigh.
“I like Cal,” she says.
“Is there anything you don’t like?”
She screws up her face in thought but finds the answer almost immediately. It was already there on the tip of her tongue, waiting.
“Yes,” she says. “I don’t like the rain.”
We park at Eliason Harbor and resolve ourselves to getting soaked. The Adak’s berth is a long walk, there’s no straight line, and the sky appears to have unzipped itself. Rain pours down too quickly even to drain between the slatted boards of the docks. “It’s raining pretty good,” Mike says with profound understatement as he steps out of the car. “God damn,” he adds once he’s out in the rain, zipping the collar of his jacket and tugging his cap tighter. Even that seems an understatement.
He hasn’t changed much since I left. He’s a little older, but who isn’t? His wife is retiring this year, and he expects she’ll push for him to follow suit before long. Their dog died on Christmas morning a few years ago. He loved that dog and adopted another but ended up giving him back.
“How come?” I ask.
“He was kind of a loser,” he says.
It’s good to see him again after all these years.
The bottles of beer we’ve brought rattle against one another as we run the docks at a dignified gallop, past scores of boats with windows glowing. Even in this cold deluge, Mike can’t help but stop to admire some of them. When I told him about the Adak, he couldn’t wait to see her for himself. She looms at the end of her harbor finger like a haunted house on a dead-end street, but when we climb aboard, the cabin is brightly lit and inviting. It’s hard not to be impressed.
Mike whistles. “Brendan, you didn’t buy a boat, you bought a vessel.”
In the galley, we sit at the table beside the Monarch stove and drink our beer. “We’re in the only room on the entire boat that doesn’t leak,” Brendan says. He puts out salmon that he and another friend caught and smoked and tells us about the woman he met downtown, the on-call flight attendant for a celebrity’s private jet.
“She wouldn’t say who—that confidentiality was part of the service she offered—but she just sort of followed them around in the jet, in case they wanted to fly anywhere,” he says. Celebrity sightings are common. Mike thinks he saw Dick Cheney in town last week riding a purple Harley off
a yacht. Brendan points out the porthole to where Tom Cruise’s yacht docked a month ago, and Mike says he’s seen Neil Young’s in another harbor. John Wayne used to sail to town in his converted minesweeper, the Wild Goose. Now it’s on the National Register of Historic Places, and the new owners claim the Duke haunts it.
We reminisce about the Monkeyfist, which I saw earlier today in another harbor, a little worse for the wear but still proud and afloat. Brendan talks about the Adak, about his hopes for her, about living in the harbor. He tells us about the animals he sees there, the people and boats around him, the unwritten rules and politics of the live-aboard community, about the drug deals and the fights. Rain beats the portholes mercilessly, but for an hour none of us thinks about it even once.
We descend into the engine room, both sprawling and claustrophobic. Six huge cylinders create 450 horsepower, but the engine once required a crew to maintain it. Marat toils there, stoic and silent, with dark hair and beard and a black sweatshirt, Hades at work in the underworld, Jonah in the belly of the whale. Brendan hands him a beer.
The engine extends the length of two rooms, all wheels, pulleys, belts and wires, everything caked in grime and heat-hardened grease. As they slowly unravel the many mysteries of the great beast, Marat and Brendan have labeled the fittings, dials, and gauges whose secrets they’ve already decoded. Tanks hang from the ceiling and rise from the floor, stalactites and stalagmites. A chaos of tools, fittings, wires, and parts covers rows of shelves, gallons of old paint and chemicals, boxes of God-knows-what abandoned by past owners and inhabitants. Water drips slowly from above and splashes off the paint-chipped floors.
Back above, Brendan shows us the old crew quarters, four small-bunked staterooms he hopes to rent out, their narrow doors and tiny portholes. This is where the crew slept. His own master stateroom, a previous owner’s addition to the ship’s original lines, occupies a deck of its own. Spacious, it has a futon on the floor and a small balcony over the transom that offers astonishing views, even in the dark of a rainy summer night. The stack runs through the center of the room, paneled with the same bright wood as the ceiling. Books and magazines litter the floor. Clothes hang from a rack against one bulkhead, a rifle leans against another. There’s a small lamp, a throw rug, a model sailboat, a single chair where Brendan writes each morning.
Mike’s expression changes in the wheelhouse. This is what he’s waited for, the captain’s chair a carved throne, straight-backed, padded, with commanding views from windows that wrap around three sides. The wooden-spoked ship’s wheel, 3 or 4 feet in diameter. Bulkheads painted red, trimmed with stained wood scarred with a patina of age and use. Brass fittings catch the light, a candy store of ’40s-era naval architecture.
In the main salon, Cal watches from his bed, aloof. Brendan shows us the changes he plans to make, and then we move back to the galley, open to the salon and demarked by a built-in desk with bookshelves. The beer’s gone, so Brendan fetches a bottle of bourbon. While he’s out of the room, I ask Mike if he would have done what Brendan did and bought the Adak.
“Hell no,” he says.
I tell him what Brendan paid, and his eyes bulge against his glasses.
“That’s it? That changes everything,” he says. “That’s a steal.”
He looks around, reappraising. Maybe he’s wondering if he could talk his wife into letting him buy something like this. I know his wife—the answer is “no.”
Marat rises silently from the engine room and disappears. When he returns, Bella accompanies him. She makes a beeline for Cal, stopping only to kick off her shoes.
“Leave your shoes on,” her father tells her. “We’re not staying.”
“I don’t care,” she says. “They’re wet.”
“We’re not staying.”
She pouts, sighs, and puts her shoes back on. “I hate the rain,” she says, getting no argument from the peanut gallery.
The Adak is too big to haul out for repairs in Sitka, which doesn’t have the facilities for a boat her size. Hoonah, a village about 75 miles away, has a new haul-out but doesn’t have the infrastructure to support it, so Brendan would need to hire and transport his own workers and equipment. Every path to a solution leads similarly to a new roadblock. To move her he’d have to fill her tanks with fuel, but the tanks are probably rusted, and he needs to drain the contaminated fuel already in them first.
“She holds 12,000 gallons,” he says. “At today’s price that’s about $50,000.” He jokes about pulling up to the fuel dock, handing them a Visa black card, and leaving town for the weekend while the attendant fills the tank. “Does the fuel dock even have 12,000 gallons?” he wonders aloud and pours more bourbon.
In everyone’s life come moments of recognition that perhaps some invisible line has been crossed, like Icarus, whose wax-and-feather wings were melted by the sun. Brendan must have such moments when he comes to face to face with the task ahead, I think. His wings haven’t melted—they’re sodden with rainwater and straining against the weight of this load he carries.
But there’s smoked salmon on the table and bourbon in his glass. A sweet dog is snoring at his feet. Tomorrow the sun might rise over the mountains, or the next day, and he’ll ride it out on the Adak until it does. Other voices will fill the cabin as new people find shelter with him from the rain—friends, roommates, Marat and Bella—and with each of them he’ll find shelter, too, from something else entirely.
16
Trout Fishermen and Metrosexuals
This is the first time these people have ever seen fishing done in this manner and they were very excited.
If you think taking people fishing for a living isn’t work, spend a day on one of Mac’s charter boats. His business, Frontier Charters, owns five of them—one of which he runs himself—and he looks exhausted when he returns to the lodge after a full day on the water. As we chat in the dining room while fourteen clients school around the dinner tables, it’s clear that Mac’s day is far from over. A steady stream of phone calls from clients scheduled to arrive in the coming days interrupts our conversation, as do questions from his other guides, his lodge manager, and his chef. Tomorrow he’ll wake up around 4 a.m. and do it all again. Throughout a brutal schedule of long days and physically demanding work, he entertains guys on testosterone highs who’ve paid good money for a charter trip.
If all they wanted was the fish, they’d go to a seafood market. They’ve come for the experience, adventure, and camaraderie, for the fish tales and the bragging rights. Even the clients are exhausted, and they didn’t do any of the work prepping the gear, manning the downriggers, or running and cleaning the boat. All they did was catch a lot of fish, and maybe drink beer. When they finally retire for the night, head back to their rooms and call their wives and children before hitting the sack, Mac will still be up. He has a business to run.
Do an Internet search for charter-fishing options in Sitka—the results will overwhelm you. In 2005, 121 different charter businesses operated 213 charter boats, hosting about 10,400 charter fishermen, not including those contracted through the cruise lines. The economic impact of the fleet rang up at about $31 million, according to a McDowell Group survey commissioned by the Sitka Charter Boat Operators Association. The charter industry was ballooning like a tech or housing bubble with no obvious end in sight, but like all bubbles it eventually burst. By 2010 the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported just 95 businesses running 156 boats and fewer than 7,300 charter fishermen, a 30 percent decrease. All those numbers continue to decline.
But Mac’s business, Frontier Charters, is going strong. Hard work? Sure, but there are lots of hard workers up here. That’s not enough to distinguish yourself.
“I got in early enough that I had already paid for it all,” he says. “I had a few years where I made embarrassing amounts of money, and everything was paid for. When it crashed, I lost money for t
wo years—which I had never done before—but that didn’t put me out.” The same skills that make him a great fisherman and an accomplished hunter make him a good businessman. Understanding prey, determining when to be aggressive and when to be patient, knowing when to set the hook or pull the trigger. With Mac, those feel more like character traits than lessons learned. One of the most generous people I’ve met, he keeps himself at a slight distance—calculating and shrewd, warm and likable, all seemingly without contradiction.
If they are contradictions, they’re in good company. Despite his almost preternatural skill at finding and catching fish and game, he’s never so much as tasted a bite of either. Ask him about the odd dichotomy of being a fish-catching, deer-killing vegetarian, and he shrugs.
“What can I say? I like catching and killing things.”
His diet a holdover from his childhood, he grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist family in Douglas County, Oregon, and moved to Alaska in 1991 to work as a stern monkey on a commercial fishing boat. The money was good, but the work sucked a lot of the fun out of fishing. When a hometown friend offered him a job guiding in Sitka, he took to it like . . . well, a fish to water. That same friend gave him the nickname “Mac,” fearing that his given name, Stonie, might discourage business because it seemed to imply drug use—because of his religious upbringing, Mac doesn’t drink alcohol or use drugs.
Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now Page 14
