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

by C. B. Bernard

  Sandy, my old editor, introduces me to a friend of the family visiting from Fairbanks, an archaeologist whose family hails from North Dakota. We get to talking about Joe Bernard, and at some point I mention Vilhjalmur Stefansson. “Stefansson was a close friend of my grandfather,” the archaeologist says.

  “Stefansson?” Sandy offers. “You know, we had dinner with his widow here in Sitka.”

  I could mention his name at a hundred dinner parties and not meet a single person who recognizes the name, or I could go to one and meet two people with personal connections to him. Alaska.

  The next morning I cut through a gauntlet of lodge vans dropping groggy clients at the airport though it’s not even 4:30 a.m., unloading their cargo of cardboard boxes stuffed with blast-frozen fish. I check my bags, buy a coffee, and find a seat beneath a sign at the Avis rental counter that warns, A CLEANING FEE MAY BE CHARGED DUE TO FISH SMELL OR HAVING ANIMALS IN THE CAR OR TRUNK.

  Taxidermied animals—salmon, deer, goats, Dall sheep—watch the gathering passengers from the small airport’s walls with dead eyes, as if they too were slow to wake.

  By 5:30 a.m. the sun is shining through the windows of the plane as it taxis down the runway. We pick up speed and then there’s nothing on either side of the runway but water, a disconcerting feeling, as if the plane is now skimming across the surface of the sound. We climb over the Alexander Archipelago, water and forest, a rim of beach, the occasional cabin or shack, someone’s fish camp, an anchored boat—a cluster of goats just white commas punctuating an alpine meadow—and then enter the clouds and everything disappears.

  I’m changing planes in Juneau, an inevitability when flying out of Sitka. It’s just a twenty-minute flight, but the pilot reports heavy fog over the loudspeaker.

  “We won’t be able to land right away,” he says, “but don’t worry, we have plenty of fuel to keep circling. We’ll get there eventually.”

  An hour later we’re still airborne. The guy next to me, a lawyer from Anchorage, makes a gun with his finger and points it at his head. “Southeast Alaska,” he says. “It just doesn’t get any better than this.”

  PART III: END OF THE ROAD

  18

  Winnebago’s Army

  God alone knows how we managed to dodge all of the icebergs but we got by them, somehow.

  The old joke says that Anchorage is nice because it’s so close to Alaska. Half the state’s population lives within 50 miles of it, roughly the geographic midpoint, falling halfway between Ketchikan and Barrow. It can be hard to reconcile its semi-cosmopolitan nature in the wilderness, the airport bright with chain stores, duty-free shops, bars and grills, the roads a concert of streetlights and crosswalks. Office complexes cast shadows across highways trembling with traffic, cars clogging streets like fat in the city’s arteries. The metro area rates well above state and national averages for property and violent crimes, especially sexual assaults. Anchorage, practically the middle of nowhere, incongruously offers the possibilities of mundane city life: office jobs, commuter culture, suburbs, box stores, strip malls, homeless people, food carts, and everything else so many come to Alaska precisely to avoid. It’s just like every other US city—except when it’s not.

  Look more closely and you’ll see rustic bones beneath that urban skin. Some of the homeless are Natives. The shops sell the same ulus and T-shirts as in Southeast. The food carts serve reindeer hot dogs. On a clear day you can see two active volcanoes and six major mountain ranges from downtown. Bears hassle joggers on municipal trails, and moose wander the streets. A few years ago a moose triggered the automatic door and walked into the emergency room at Alaska Regional Hospital.

  “Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders,” John McPhee wrote in the early 1970s, when you could still find vacant lots and log cabins on the same block as the shopping mall. “Down below, among the high buildings, are houses, huts, vegetable gardens, and bungalows with tidy front lawns. Anchorage burst out of itself and left these incongruities in the center.”

  A fair assessment, even today.

  To find a metaphor for the change that came to Alaska between Joe’s arrival in 1901 and mine in 1999, look no further than here. Anchorage didn’t exist yet when he first pulled up at Nome, nor even thirteen years later when he fought his way back from his first extended Arctic voyage. The city burst into being in 1915, a star exploding, when President Wilson ordered the expansion of the Alaska railroad at the mouth of Ship Creek. Construction began, a tent city popped up, and Anchorage was born. As in Nome fifteen years earlier, grifters, adventurers, and entrepreneurs descended upon this new frontier outpost, and it has continued to grow ever since. Inflated by military investment during World War II, the population jumped from 3,000 in 1940 to 47,000 in 1951, an expansion of 1,467 percent. Discovery of oil on the North Slope magnetized Anchorage and drew even more people, and by 1980 the population neared 185,000. Today, with 292,000, it is more populous than Toledo and less so than Cincinnati.

  South of Anchorage the highway traces the edge of Turnagain Arm, named by William Bligh on his search for the Northwest Passage under Captain James Cook a decade before his crew on the HMS Bounty mutinied. A reef in Prince William Sound takes its name from Bligh himself—in 1989 the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on it. At low tide the exposed beaches look inviting, but they’re colloidal mudflats, which means they change from a solid to a liquid without warning—essentially quicksand. Every few years some unfortunate gets stuck and drowns beneath a diurnal tide the height of a three-story building bearing down an inch a minute. Those tides also bring bringing salmon and harbor seals, and sometimes Cook Inlet beluga whales, which occasionally get stranded and die.

  On the road, blasted out of the Chugach Mountains, you can sometimes see mountain goats or Dall sheep on the cliffs towering above. The highway parallels railroad tracks leading north to Fairbanks and south to Seward. Those tracks catalyzed the founding of Anchorage, but today they mostly serve tourist traffic, the engines towing private railcars owned by the major cruise lines during the summer months. There are plans to extend service as a commuter line, as in so many other American cities, but this is Alaska, so you can still catch the Hurricane Turn train too, since 1920 the only lifeline and means of transport for some Alaskans living in remote cabins. Get off wherever you please on its 55-mile route along the Susitna River from Talkeetna to hunt, fish, hike, or camp. To get back on, simply flag down a train by waving a white cloth.

  No billboards line the Seward Highway, no tollbooths or rest areas interrupt the mountains, waterfalls, glaciers, and wildlife. In the off-season you might share the road with just a handful of other cars, but drive it during the summer and you’ll witness Winnebago’s invading army advancing en masse toward the Kenai Peninsula. During salmon season the traffic is even worse as Alaska’s urbanites flee Anchorage for the Kenai.

  A slow day for combat fishing at Bird Creek outside Anchorage.

  A long line of brake lights disappears into the Chugach in front of me, signaling the start of the weekend. During the two years I lived in Homer, at the tip of the peninsula, I made this five- or six-hour drive dozens of times in an old truck with a busted heater core, wrapped in a sleeping bag unzipped at the bottom so my feet could still work the pedals. The highway can be treacherous in winter, the drive long and lonely, but today it’s none of those things. It’s sunny and warm, and, with traffic slowed to a crawl, I long for a little loneliness. The next gas station, coffee stop, and public restroom lie a couple of hours away, so in Girdwood, half an hour outside Anchorage, I stop for all three.

  Nestled among the peaks of the Chugach in a lowland valley, this small town—originally named Glacier City—once served as a supply camp for gold miners. You can spot some of its seven surrounding glaciers from the road, han
ging ponderous and blue from the sides of the mountains. Mt. Alyeska is here, home to a large resort and the state’s largest ski area, and Girdwood has a ski-town vibe, both laid-back and well-off. You can walk down a street named Fly Fishing Lane, eat at a restaurant called the Double Musky, and visit a bakery that serves sweet rolls the size of large fists.

  Girdwood was 2.5 miles closer to Turnagain Arm until the Good Friday Earthquake swamped most of the town. As I shoehorn my truck back into traffic, I pass the remains of the old cabins that rise from marshes that once were solid land. The 9.2-magnitude earthquake struck just after 5:30 p.m. on Friday, March 27, 1964, the second strongest ever recorded in North America. It released about 10 million times more energy than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

  The epicenter 80 miles from Anchorage in Prince William Sound, initial shocks lasted five minutes; more than 10,000 aftershocks followed. The quake destroyed a number of Anchorage businesses and seventy-five homes, but much of the statewide damage came from ensuing tsunamis, which accounted for 119 of the 131 deaths in Alaska and 16 deaths as far south as Oregon and California.

  Waves more than 200 feet high destroyed the town of Valdez and killed thirty-one people, mostly children. Oil tanks ruptured and caught fire in Seward. As entire subdivisions disappeared beneath the tidal waves that swallowed Resurrection Bay, families sought shelter on the roofs of houses torn from foundations and set adrift in the harbor, the oily water around them in flames. A 30-foot tsunami struck Chenega, killing twenty-three of the village’s sixty-eight residents, a third of its total population. Some 200 miles away on Kodiak Island, the quake raised land as much as 30 feet, obliterating two canneries and carrying fishing boats and buildings 3 blocks into town.

  Violent enough to splash water from swimming pools as far away as Texas, the quake liquefied the earth around Anchorage, creating rockslides and avalanches. Soft clay bluffs dissolved beneath dozens of homes. Vertical land displacements of nearly 40 feet occurred in other parts of the state, and the land around Turnagain Arm sank more than 7 feet. Saltwater floods killed countless trees, their dead trunks still rising along sections of the Seward Highway like withered arms reaching from the grave.

  South of Anchorage the road splits south and west to the Kenai and southeast to Whittier. The Good Friday Quake annihilated the nearby settlement of Portage, but the US Forest Service built the Begich-Boggs Visitor Center here in 1986. The viewing window looked out on the Portage Glacier, which filled the entire 14-mile valley, but the glacier has retreated so quickly you can no longer see it from the viewing window—or even the parking lot. The center now overlooks a much-less-dramatic lake, and the calved icebergs that round the corner and fill it when the wind is right seem misplaced with no visible signs of the glacier that birthed them.

  I once launched my canoe here, paddled among the drifting blocks to the 100-foot face of the glacier and put my hands against it. A dangerous thing to do, but once I got close, I couldn’t resist the blue of the glacial ice. Compression acts as a filter and absorbs the other colors of the spectrum—up close it’s even more surreal, a dense, brilliant blue that doesn’t otherwise exist in nature. Some of the icebergs were small enough to throw, others big as dump trucks. When the gunwale of my canoe kissed a piece of ice the size of a two-story home, all scale evaporated, and I imagined Joe steering the Teddy Bear through Arctic floes that dwarfed his little schooner, drifting in their lee as the entire Coronation Gulf moved westward. Each iceberg is a chunk of time itself, frozen for centuries before it dropped. The ice in Portage Glacier is old enough to have seen what Joe saw in Alaska. When I take off my shoes and step into the icy water, it connects me to him across the years.

  Just beyond Portage, a 2.5-mile-long tunnel through Maynard Mountain connects the highway system with Whittier. The tunnel opened to traffic in 2000, alternating vehicles with trains, turning Whittier into Anchorage’s playground. It now has fewer residents than boats in its two ice-free harbors.

  Named for the poet John Greenleaf Whittier—born, like me, along the banks of the Merrimack in Massachusetts—there’s little poetry in this small town. The military designed its largest building, sprawling and industrial, as a “city under one roof” to house Whittier’s entire population, and it included a medical wing, theater, cafeteria, and jail. Then the Good Friday Quake damaged it beyond repair. The cost of demolishing the ruins and transporting the debris from town outweighs any local desire to see it go.

  Most of Whittier’s 200 residents live in the next largest building, the fourteen-floor Begich Towers. The rest live in nearby Whittier Manor. Tunnels to the public school save children the trouble of venturing outside in the winter, when an average of 34 inches of snow covers the ground. Though the concrete Begich Towers has all the charm you’d expect of something built by the US Army in the 1940s, it’s open to the public, and you can walk the narrow hallways and ponder life in Whittier or stay overnight in one of the top-floor suites operated as a bed-and-breakfast.

  The chamber of commerce map includes directions to berry bushes, known eagle nests, and a salmon stream. A deepwater dock, proximity to Anchorage, and the railroad have given Whittier a second life as a cruise ship embarkation point, though it’s worth noting that it’s a point of origin rather than a destination. The tunnel closes at 11:15 p.m. each day, isolating residents from the rest of the world. I make sure I’m through it well before then, exchanging the claustrophobic darkness for sunny skies and the open road on the four-hour drive to Homer.

  The Sterling Highway peels off the Seward Highway and descends from the Kenai Mountains into a clockwise turn just west of Moose Pass. It begins at Mile Marker 37—the first 36 miles are actually on the Seward Highway, a bit of creative mapmaking that leaves tourists scratching heads.

  Most of the Kenai’s population lives along the Sterling, a well-traveled, well-maintained highway, though still just two lanes skirting through the wilderness. With the salmon running, empty boat trailers scattered along the edges of the highway loom like the skeletons of large animals. The river’s blue-green waters move quickly, awash with the white combs of riffles. Eagles perch in trees, eyeing drift boats full of fishermen squeezed into waders. Kenai Lake gleams, fireweed like pink ink spilled along the shores.

  Once the highway finds the Kenai River, it follows it past several smaller settlements and villages until the town of Sterling, where a medical clinic’s roadside sign offers FISH HOOK REMOVAL HERE. When the road goes quiet again, it gives occasional views of Cook Inlet and the 10,000-plus-foot peaks of Mt. Iliamna and Mt. Redoubt, part of the Ring of Fire, which contains 75 percent of the world’s volcanoes. Redoubt has erupted five times since 1900. In 1989 a plume spectacularly reached more than 8 miles into the air and tagged a commercial flight with volcanic ash. In 2009, just a month after Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal’s nationally televised rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address, in which he sneered about stimulus package spending wasted on “something called ‘volcano monitoring,’” the Alaska Volcano Observatory issued warnings before Redoubt erupted again. That eruption floated dangerous ash clouds well north of Anchorage and created an ash cloud more than 11 miles above sea level. Mt. Iliamna hasn’t erupted in recorded history—not even as a prank—but a field of vents on its eastern flank emits near-constant clouds of sulfurous gas and steam, giving the impression that it might at any moment.

  Just across Cook Inlet, these snowy mountains circled with halos of spindrift and gas seem a world apart from the sun-soaked Sterling Highway, where a sign warns that so far this summer 263 moose have been killed in traffic accidents. Moose is valuable meat, and the state maintains a list of people to call when one is hit—a roadkill registry. If you sign up, you have a window of time when your call comes to remove the meat from the road before you get bumped to the bottom of the list. Moving a dead moose is no trivial undertaking. They can weigh as much as 1,600 pounds, and, once you’ve got
one into your truck and hauled it home, you still have to dress and butcher the thing. If you get the call, don’t put down the phone—use it to call a few friends, because you’re going to need them.

  The great, gangly beasts aren’t the only lives colliding with fate on this stretch of pavement. Yesterday four people died in separate crashes an hour apart between Cooper Landing and Skilak Lake. Last month a state senator from North Dakota died in a single-car accident south of here, and six people have died in the last seven days on the two Kenai Peninsula highways, bringing the year’s total to forty-six, with five full months yet to go.

  “The Sterling is eating people this summer,” an Alaska State Trooper told me, darkly.

  When I left Sitka in 2002, I moved to Homer. Two years later I left Alaska for good. Though the drive from Anchorage triggered mental muscle memories, coming back doesn’t feel like coming home—not like Sitka did. A combative relationship and a combative job editing the newspaper marked my time here, but Homer is a friendly town with a strong sense of community, a haven for artists and individuals, and I’m happy to be returning.

  With nothing left between me and the edge of the peninsula but my destination, I pull off the road. It slopes down a long hill to Kachemak Bay, hugged by the snowy Kenai Mountains and the foothills beneath them. Water laps at grassy beaches beneath the Grewingk and Portlock Glaciers, the glaciers themselves reflecting the blue of the sky, the blue of the bay, and my own blueness at having been away for so long.