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

by C. B. Bernard

  Shortly after noon, the first half-day charters return, and the docks come alive. Boats are hosed down, totes rolled up the harbor ramps. Men stand in small groups, swaying with their sea legs and gloating with pride while their guides hang the day’s catch for display: a row of halibut on a string, cravats of blood at their gills, smallest to biggest in front of a sign advertising the charter company. The clients line up too, one at a time, for a photo with all the fish, to give the impression that they boated them all themselves—the Homer equivalent of driving into town with a deer on your hood. The fish hang like gruesome ornaments until the photos are done and the guides toss them into big plastic trash bins to be cleaned, packed, and presented for travel.

  Occasionally someone does boat a legitimate monster, a flatfish like a piece of plywood. The guides Sharpie its weight on the white underbelly along with the name of the boat, and the photo might end up in the newspaper. If the clients bought a halibut derby ticket before they set out, they’ll enter the fish at the official weigh-in station while crowds gather and fawn. This year’s winner, a 350-pounder, earned the guy who caught it more than $28,000 in prizes. In nearby Valdez, a tiny woman caught a halibut nearly three times her own size to win the derby, spoiling the fun for a lot of visiting sportsmen.

  Beyond the base of the Spit, on the way into town, a pair of eagles have nested in a tree across from a McDonald’s alongside the Sterling Highway. It’s Homer’s busiest intersection, home to the town’s first stoplight, installed after I moved away following years of debate and opposition. The eagles wreak havoc with traffic as cars and RVs pull to the side of the road for a glimpse of the fledglings. “Pretty annoying,” a Homer police officer told me. “All that time and money and aggravation to put in that light, and almost as soon as it goes up the eagles come in and mess it all up again.”

  Just another exhibit in the boundless theme park of Alaska.

  Past the hustle of crowds, where the deeper water of the bay edges the road, a pair of sea otters appear, almost within reach, no more than 20 feet out. The traffic pattern along the Spit alters to accommodate the tourists who pull their RVs to the side and leap out with cameras blazing. The otters roll on their backs, playfully shaking their heads and tails. Their whiskers, short paws, sleek heads and bodies make them easiest of all the marine mammals to humanize because they look and act the most like people.

  A raft of sea otters in Cordova’s Orca Inlet.

  “Look, kids, they’re holding hands!” one woman yells to her brood. She wears a pink rain-splattered tracksuit, her kids trash-bag ponchos.

  “They’re doing the backstroke,” says a man in a San Francisco 49ers sweatshirt.

  “So cute,” someone else adds redundantly.

  They are cute, with their light-colored heads and pleading faces. And they do hold hands, sleeping with their paws locked to keep from drifting apart. From here they look small enough to cradle like plush dolls. No doubt, that’s what the gathered mammalian paparazzi are thinking.

  “Oooooooh,” a teenage girl coos, looking up from her cell phone.

  But they’re not small. These heaviest members of the weasel family can weigh up to 100 pounds and grow longer than 5 feet. Get out in a boat, and you’ll see them in the swell of the bay, lounging on their backs with their feet in the air like dark mermaids. If you’re lucky, you’ll spot a raft of them, a large, single-sex group of a few hundred gathered to rest, sometimes wrapped in kelp to keep from drifting out to sea.

  They hunt for shellfish, mollusks, sea urchins, and crabs, using rocks to dislodge and crack them open. Their use of tools makes them seem even more human, as do other behaviors—like their playfulness or the way a mother will dote on her pups, carrying them on her chest and grooming them obsessively—but not human enough to keep them from being hunted nearly to extinction for their fur beginning in the mid-1700s, their population eventually diminished to an all-time low of about 2,000 animals worldwide. The only marine mammal without blubber, they rely on their fur for warmth. With up to 1 million hairs per square inch, the most of any animal, it’s ridiculously rich. Most humans have fewer than 20,000 hairs on their entire heads. Some, like me, have far fewer.

  This pair seems familiar with a human audience, preening and posing like starlets, gamely playing along with the cameras as they take turns diving for lunch.

  “Here, boy,” someone calls, like he’s talking to his dog. Someone else yells for the otters to look up for his camera. I’ve seen a Japanese tourist try to climb aboard a bison in Yellowstone and watched a man leap out of his car and whistle for a black bear’s attention in Banff National Park in Alberta. I’ve seen fools approach moose as if they were park benches. Moose injure more people in Alaska each year than bears. I’m not aware of any otter-on-human violence, but calling them sets a dangerous precedent. It also makes you look like an idiot.

  More than a dozen people have stopped their cars to watch. The last few didn’t even bother pulling over first, just turned off their engines and got out, their cars blocking the road. Slowly the otters begin to float away—20 yards, 30, 50, beyond range of the zoom buttons and priapic lenses telescoped from tiny point-and-shoots.

  “Come back,” someone yells helpfully.

  People get restless and gun their engines. Traffic starts to move again. Big pickups roar through the logjam. One of the otters sits up in the water, as if just noticing the time—that elicits a few calls from the beach, but, his shift ended, he ignores them and rolls on his dark stomach. The water swallows him. Just like that, he’s gone. The other loiters for a few minutes, waiting for his friend to return. With no final look at his admirers, no over-the-shoulder glance farewell, and no warning, he disappears.

  21

  Occupational Hazards

  The police have been looking for me all over the Arctic and even on the Atlantic Coast. It seems that when the police were investigating the Street and Radford murders they had gone to the Coppermine River where they found out that an Eskimo woman had also been murdered.

  “If something goes wrong, don’t put yourself in harm’s way,” Alaska State Trooper Rick Chambers tells me. “Get somewhere safe to call someone and let them know I need help. Otherwise, you’re welcome to follow me anywhere you’re comfortable.” Easy for him to say. He’s got a .40-caliber Glock 22 strapped to his belt and wears a bulletproof vest loaded with extra ammo clips. I’ve got a notebook and a mighty pen.

  In his patrol car—a 12-gauge shotgun and an assault rifle between us in locked mounts—we’re heading north on the Sterling Highway to investigate a house alarm in Ninilchik. A broad-shouldered guy, Chambers looks built for the uniform: dark blue trousers, blue shirt, and blue Stetson, which he wears tilted forward drill-sergeant style but removes in the car. Not unfamiliar with uniforms, he grew up in Anchorage with a military father and grandfather, spent five years in the US Army military police before he became a trooper, and returned to the army after college for an overseas tour following 9/11.

  We pass a slow-moving Subaru and make good time until we come upon two moose straddling the yellow lines in the middle of the Sterling. Moose cause as many as 900 car accidents a year statewide—they outnumber bears nearly three to one in Alaska. The sow lifts her lazy head and stares at us while her calf lumbers across the road with all the haste of melting ice. Chambers waits patiently until they’re chewing willow on the shoulder. The four state troopers and one Alaska Wildlife Trooper stationed at the Anchor Point Post, which shares a building with a dentist’s office, cover a huge swath of the Kenai Peninsula that extends from Mile 125 on the Sterling Highway—about halfway to Soldotna—all the way to the Russian Old Believer villages past the end of the road east of Homer. It also includes the villages across Kachemak Bay. Just getting to their destinations eats up a lot of their time.

  When our path clears and we find the house, Chambers parks at the end of the d
riveway and speaks briefly with a neighbor called by the alarm company, then sends him home. A REPENT AND BELIEVE sign hangs on the door of the rundown house, and two brand-new, expensive-looking ATVs shine next to a ramshackle barn.

  Chambers immediately points out a set of tracks through weeds that have overgrown the yard. “Someone’s already been here,” he says. “Probably that neighbor.” We follow the path in a circle around the house, checking each window and door—all locked. “Maybe he was rattling the windows and doors.”

  No one answers when he knocks at the door—owner out of town—and we check the barn. It’s unlocked, but nothing seems amiss. Bicycles, fishing gear, an outboard motor, the stored detritus of a family’s life. “There’s a lot of good things here for a thief,” he says. “Those ATVs are worth a lot of money. I don’t think this was a break-in.”

  No damage to the house, he reports back to dispatch, leaving the alarm company to contact the owner. On the way back to the cruiser, we almost step in a pile of moose pellets still steaming in the late morning sun—just another occupational hazard in Alaska.

  How do you enforce the law of the land when the land is so geographically and demographically diverse? With no counties, Alaska has no sheriffs either. State troopers enforce laws statewide, including many of the smaller cities and villages without local police. Chambers, like most troopers, works alone. He responds to any number of situations in any number of places, and backup is not always close—when it’s available at all.

  “We’re on our own a lot of the time,” he says. “But that independence means we’re given a lot of responsibility we might not get in other places, and that’s a good thing.”

  Think about Arctic villages accessible only by plane or snow­machine, logging camps, remote lodges, and all the other far-flung places that make Alaska what it is. In some of the more remote Native and Russian Old Believer communities on Kachemak Bay, the troopers face the obvious language problems plus an entrenched xenophobia, particularly toward outsiders wearing badges and enforcing laws locals don’t necessarily believe apply to them. And everyone is armed—or enough people that you have to assume that everyone is. In 2011 Alaska led the nation in per capita gun-related deaths, with a rate nearly double the national average. But—lies, damned lies, and statistics—that rate is misleading because of the low population, and the tally of gun-related deaths in Alaska ranks low compared to other states. In 2008 there were 142—just eighteen were homicides, and eight unintentional or of indeterminate intent. The other 116 were suicides. Alaska’s suicide rate also doubles the national average.

  Statewide, more than 6,000 cases of domestic violence are reported each year, many more unreported. Alaska’s rate is two and a half times the national average for rape, six times for sexual assault of children, and highest in the country for per capita male-on-female homicides. Not unrelated: the prevalence of alcoholism in Alaska, with dependence and abuse figures twice the national average.

  All of which gives you a sense of some of the hurdles you face when you sign up to enforce the law in America’s largest state.

  The Arctic saw only a minimal police presence during Joe’s time, all land east of the Canadian border under the jurisdiction of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. During their investigation into the double murder of prospectors George Street and Harry Radford—stabbed by their Inuit guides near Bathurst Inlet in 1912—Joe found himself the subject of an extensive search by Canadian authorities. “I learned that the police have been looking for me all over the Arctic and even on the Atlantic Coast,” he wrote in 1919.

  It seems that when the police were investigating the Street and Radford murders they had gone to the Coppermine River where they found out that an Eskimo woman had also been murdered. The natives had laid out the body but when the police went to examine it they could not find it. Then they interviewed Charlie Klengenberg. ‘Oh, hell,’ he told them, ‘Bernard took the body and pickled it! Why, he’d collect any kind of specimen.’

  In Alaska, with no American equivalent of a territorial police force, the United States Army and Navy became the de facto enforcement presence after the purchase from Russia, with help from a scattered few federal marshals. In Sitka, residents organized night patrols to guard against Tlingit attack, at one point even beseeching the government of British Columbia to send a warship, but the army withdrew around 1877 when the Treasury Department took jurisdiction—which it initially managed with a single US Customs Service official.

  The first territorial criminal code was passed in 1899, prompted in part by the crime epidemic of the anarchic gold rush. US marshals and deputies administered the law, but the territorial legislature did not establish the first iteration of Alaska-wide law enforcement until it created the Alaska Highway Patrol in 1941. The agency’s primary task was enforcement of the highway traffic code—which seems like a punch line in the context of 1940s Alaska, but the real punch line was that the legislature didn’t assign the AHP any authority to go along with its responsibility. Instead, local police departments were expected to uphold the law, though many communities had no local police force.

  In the early 1950s the legislature and the Department of Justice created a new agency, the Alaska Territorial Police, staffed up to an underwhelming thirty-six officers. After statehood, the territorial police became the Alaska State Police and more than doubled in size. In 1967 the Alaska State Police became the Alaska State Troopers.

  The troopers maintain four bureaus—investigation, judicial services, alcohol and drug enforcement, and highway patrol—as well as a State Fire Marshal Office. Today there are about 240 troopers statewide, not many considering the vastness of the areas they protect. California has about 7,500 officers in its Highway Patrol, New York more than 4,600 state police, and even New Jersey—compact enough geographically to fit into Alaska seventy-five times—boasts more than 3,000 state police, nearly 1,000 more than the total number of sworn law enforcement officers from all of Alaska’s state and local agencies combined. Crunch the numbers any way you want. Sprinkle 240 troopers across the massive landscape and watch them disappear. That they accomplish all they do is remarkable.

  By midmorning we’ve investigated reports of gunfire at a campground and followed up on a family scuffle Chambers investigated last night—one he walked away from with an uneasy feeling, though all familial ill-will has vanished with sunrise and sobriety. He makes a note in his logbook, and we move on to a presence patrol in Nikolaevsk, one of the Russian Old Believer communities off the Sterling Highway.

  In the seventeenth century the Old Believers split from the Russian Orthodox Church after the latter excommunicated them for protesting certain reforms. The czars persecuted those who objected to the changes, many enduring torture. Some fled Russia for other countries. Others moved to the Siberian taiga, and, during World War II, about 300 left there for China, where they remained until the rise of communism drove them to Brazil. Around 1960 they came to America, settling for the most part in Woodburn, Oregon, south of Portland. The community thrived, but within a decade the young began to stray from the fold. Some of the more orthodox Old Believers relocated yet again, seeking to be left more or less alone. They bought 640 acres of land on the Kenai Peninsula, and the community of Nikolaevsk was born.

  Two eagles perch on the Orthodox Russian cross atop St. Michael’s Cathedral in downtown Sitka. PHOTO BY KIM BERNARD

  These settlers built an access road to their village and logged the land to make room for their homes. Other Old Believers followed, and by the late 1970s the community had established itself well enough that the more orthodox members again sought to form new communities to avoid the apparently inevitable assimilation. For years, a sign at the village entrance warned visitors that the road and the village itself were private, but that’s no longer true. The town has modernized to an extent, and, though residents interact economically and politically with the area, th
ey still maintain a social distance—though even in that regard they’re increasingly adapting their culture to their surroundings. A number work in Anchor Point and Homer as commercial fishermen or in construction. Today Nikolaevsk has fewer than 500 residents, about 50 homes, and 2 stores. At the school—elementary through high school—students learn English but speak Russian. The 12-mile access road from Anchor Point was paved for the first time in 2002.

  The lifestyle among villagers blends a curious mix of the contemporary and traditional, self-sufficient and family-oriented—subsistence-based, but with modern tools and utilities. Built by their owners, the houses are small, rough, many with good-sized gardens and chickens in the yards, shiny new pickups and trailered fishing boats in the driveways, satellite dishes on the roofs. The Old Believers still wear traditional clothing at all times—the long Russian rubashka shirt and belt for boys, long blouses beneath sarafans and aprons for girls, heads covered in similar fashion to the Amish—and the men don’t shave, growing the long beards dictated by church doctrine.

  “There’s a large wedding today between the two largest families in the village,” Chambers says as he drives slowly down the unpaved streets. “We’re expecting trouble, but so far it’s been pretty quiet.”

  Despite religious objections to consuming alcohol, alcoholism runs rampant in Nikolaevsk and the other Old Believer villages, often leading to domestic violence, assaults, fighting, and drunk driving. Nikolaevsk falls among the more accessible, and in some ways the more liberal, of the villages on the Kenai, making it easier for troopers to respond to complaints and make regular patrols as a way of establishing a preventative presence. But the villages tend to eschew outside intervention, policing themselves with laws that seldom overlap those followed by the rest of the state.