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

by C. B. Bernard

  This is the town that spawned Sarah Palin, though many argue that it was she who did a lot to spawn this town, or at least this iteration of it. This is the Main Street, America, about which she talked so often and so reverently on the national stage. She painted a picture of Rockwellian charm, a terrible likeness. “We don’t have cumbersome land use regulations that rid us of our beloved duct-taped blue tarps,” she wrote of her hometown in an editorial for the Anchorage Daily News. “Nor have we too many intrusive zoning laws that bid adieu to big stores with four walls, thus creating that boxy look that some curiously find so offensive.”

  There’s nothing curious about it.

  When still mayor, she officiated a wedding in the aisles of the local Wal-Mart, which once set a national record for sales of duct tape. “It was so Wasilla,” she told a reporter.

  Wasilla is overtly, vocally political—but mostly about social politics. Most residents oppose abortion and gay marriage. Last year the high school principal prohibited the jazz choir from singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” because Freddie Mercury was gay. Ultimately he backpedaled under protest from students and outside civil rights groups, allowing a censored version of the song to be performed. Maybe bad modeling was to blame—after all, the town’s most famous resident has taken to the airwaves to protest everything from a rapper’s invitation to perform at the White House to President Obama’s choice of Christmas cards. More recently, the principal who replaced the anti-Queen found her own opportunity to make news when she covered an art installation with tarps because she felt it resembled female genitalia. The stone-and-concrete sculpture, Warrior Within, depicts a pair of oblong aluminum and bronze shields emblazoned with warrior symbolism. It came to the school through a state program that earmarks 1 percent of capital construction costs of public buildings for the acquisition and permanent installation of artwork. A state committee vetted the work. Warrior Within went up on a Sunday, and was covered by that Wednesday.

  “There are pockets of liberalism in town, but the vocal majority is definitely those with the bumper stickers and the slogan T-shirts,” my friend Mark tells me. I’m staying with him and his wife, and it’s worth noting that he worked for Sarah for a few years. Say what you want about her, but she charmed him away from a career in journalism despite political views diametrically opposed to his own.

  I haven’t been here since her ascension, and I half-wondered if there would be a shrine or giant photos of her at the post office, maybe sitting on a throne petting a porcupine or shooting at tundra wolves from the saddle of a flying polar bear. Both big-box supermarkets on the main drag have dozens of copies of her books for sale as well as her daughter Bristol’s, all on clearance markdown. But she has left her mark on Wasilla. Hell, she put the town on the map. The networks, magazines, national press, even The Daily Show chased her here to see where she started.

  “There are people in town who still support Sarah,” Mark says. “There are definitely people here who think she talks sense.”

  And why not? She’s the local girl who made good, a fact hard to “refudiate.”

  That night, while Mark and his wife put their son to bed, I return a call to my parents, who are visiting a friend in Manhattan. “We’re sitting at Kelly’s kitchen table and looking at the Statue of Liberty out her window,” my mother says.

  “Yeah? I’m at Mark’s in Wasilla, Alaska, and I can see Russia from his house.”

  PART IV: CROSSING THE BAR

  23

  Flesh and Blood

  There was a great cry. I had killed a wolverine with my knife! A very brave thing! Why, even dogs will not tackle a wolverine for it is a very nasty animal. And I had dared kill one with my hands!

  For the short flight to Cordova, I’m wedged into a 737-400 Combi, one of seven Alaska Airlines planes converted so that a walled-off freight area separates an abbreviated passenger cabin from the cockpit. “Behind this door is cargo,” says Summer, an attractive flight attendant giving a tour to an unaccompanied minor in captain’s wings and a name­tag. “It’s mostly empty now, but when we leave Cordova again it will be full of fish.”

  “Fish?”

  “Frozen fish,” she says. “In boxes. Last week we had a bear in there.”

  “A bear?”

  “A black bear.”

  “Right,” he says, enthusiastically unimpressed.

  A woman listening from the front row chimes in. “A bear? Really?”

  “He was a problem bear being relocated to a zoo,” Summer says. “He was sedated the whole time, but it’s crazy what they ship in the cargo section. Even an elephant once.”

  In 2008 Maggie, the much-loved African elephant, made her way from the Alaska Zoo to a sanctuary for performing animals outside Sacramento. But she flew in a C-17 military cargo plane, weighing 8.5 tons in her travel crate. “An elephant?”

  “I don’t know the details,” Summer admits.

  “Gosh,” the woman says, “imagine if he woke up and got angry?”

  “The elephant?”

  “The bear!” Everyone within earshot goes quiet for a moment, expresions stern, picturing an Alaskan version of Snakes on a Plane.

  The guy next to me is wearing a safari vest and wrinkle-free pants that zip off into shorts. He points out the window as we fly over a mountain.

  “Denali!” he tells his wife. She grips his arm excitedly—except it’s not Denali, which lies 250 miles off our tail.

  “Glacier,” the man says helpfully, leaning across his wife to point out the window.

  “Has anyone tried to count all the glaciers in Alaska?” she wonders aloud.

  “Nearly a hundred thousand,” I offer.

  “No way,” she says. “There’s no way you could do that. You’d lose count.”

  Her husband nudges her and points again. “That’s the Brooks Range,” he says, naming the largest mountain range entirely within the Arctic Circle, 500 miles north of our location, while pointing to the Chugach.

  “It’s sooo beautiful,” she says.

  The single-room Cordova airport takes its name from legendary local bush pilot Merle “Mudhole” Smith. “Some people weren’t happy with the name,” Bill tells me when he greets me at the gate, “but ‘Mudhole’ doesn’t mean what you think.” He’s shorter than I am, with sort of a walrus mustache and gray hair beneath a worn ball cap. Glasses. He deadpans the statement so well that it takes me a moment to realize it’s a joke. Merle Smith earned his wings as a Kansas barnstormer, even owning a flying circus at one point, but in 1937 he hopped a steamship north to fly for Cordova Air Service. While trying to take off from a dirt strip at a mine south of McCarthy, he hit a deep hole and buried the prop of his biplane in the ground. The mud came off after a full day of scraping the engine’s nooks and crannies, but the nickname stuck. Mudhole took over Cordova Air Service in 1939 when the owner died in a plane crash, sold it to Alaska Airlines in 1968, and started Chitina Air Service with his son. In 1979 he sold Chitina Air to another pilot named Jim Foode, and died two years later. “Mudhole signed the airline over to Jim Foode in my living room,” Bill says.

  “Why there?”

  “I guess they needed a witness.”

  That’s how history is made in small towns, with papers signed on living room coffee tables instead of in skyscraper boardrooms.

  We grab my bags and head out to his truck, parked at the curb outside the airport doors. “You can’t get away with that at most airports these days,” I say. An unleashed black-and-white husky rubs up against my leg as we load my bags and then wanders off toward the terminal.

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to do it here either,” Bill admits.

  He’s immediately friendly, even warm, but there’s a hesitant distance between us. I’ll be staying with him for the next week, and we’re sizing each other up. “A guy
could invite someone into his home for a few days and find out he was an ax-murderer or something, you know?” he says on the ride into town. I wasn’t thinking that an ax-murderer might invite a visiting writer to stay with him, but now I am. It’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it? Bill doesn’t seem that quiet, though. He’s a natural tour guide, telling me everything he knows about anything I ask.

  The airport lies 12 miles from town on the Copper River Highway, a two-lane road through the middle of undeveloped Alaska, and once it is in our rearview mirror, the surrounding landscape proves breathtaking. Snow-licked mountains edge long, open fields of muskeg, low-hanging tendrils of clouds softening rivers and ponds. In all my Alaska travels, I’ve always considered Sitka the most beautiful spot, at least when the sun was shining . . . until now. My flight came in over marshland and the Copper River Delta, all copper- and bronze-colored bog, but the fields and forest around us are soaked in green.

  After retiring from a hard life of trading in the Arctic, Joe Bernard settled here in Cordova. A happy accident, really—the Teddy Bear broke down on the way south in the mid-1920s. He limped into Orca Inlet and stayed fifty years, working as a commercial fisherman, then as Cordova’s harbormaster, while polishing his manuscript and making a life in this quiet town until his declining health forced him to Sitka in 1970. Known throughout the Arctic as “Yo,” in Cordova he went by “Cap,” for Captain. Considering that the men who fill this town make their lives at sea, the nickname speaks to the respect he commanded.

  I’ve come here chasing his Alaska—the one he came to know—and in a different way, my own. For so long I’ve read about the things he saw that I wanted to experience some of them myself. Joe’s legacy is here, and now so am I.

  A few miles from the airport a handful of fishermen winch dripping boats from the Eyak River onto trailers. Bill slows, rolls down his window, and asks for a report.

  “A few silvers,” they say. “But it was slow.”

  “It’s early yet,” he reassures them.

  Bill grew up on the water and in the woods around Cordova. For years he walked traplines in the mountains, hunting for food, fishing commercially. He worked for a time as a fish spotter, riding shotgun in bush planes winging recklessly over the fleets. With a lifetime of experience in the outdoors, he’s capable and humble. The first time I called, I got his answering machine: “This is Bill. I’m down the slough chasing ducks. Leave a message.” I knew right away I would like him.

  We roll into Cordova proper, a tiny town focused around the waterfront, very much a fishing town, a more-working-class Sitka. Some industry clusters along the edge of the water: Alaska Marine Lines, seafood processing plants, an abandoned and decrepit cannery. Docks everywhere. The Coast Guard maintains a presence in town. Under “Shopping, Dining, and Amenities,” the USCG information packet for new and prospective recruits advises the following about Cordova: “There are no fast food restaurants, night clubs, or big chain stores. . . . There are two grocery stores, a hardware store, a pharmacy/corner store/Radio Shack, and a few specialty shops. There are only a few restaurants in town, most of which close in the winter.”

  Bill cruises past them all. Some of the bars and restaurants look a little rundown, a no-frills feel to them. A Korean/Chinese/American sushi place, the Killer Whale Cafe, a falafel and gyro place. It’s not exactly a foodie paradise, but there’s no McDonald’s, no Subway, no franchise joints you’d recognize from other parts of the country. We pass the Alaskan Hotel and Bar, the sign outside mounted upside down so patrons who wake up on the sidewalk after a night of overindulging will find it easier to read. The city ensures that any banners on the light pole out front go upside down as well.

  Bill waves at nearly everyone we pass. The cars and trucks parked along the street look battered, worn, but a few stand out, brand-new Ford F350s and Dodge Rams with shiny rims and glossy paint. “Highliners,” he says, referring to the young Russian gillnetters who seem to pull $100 bills out of the Copper River Delta. Bill bought his truck from his brother secondhand, a gray Dodge with a cap on the back. A small, comic moose figurine adorns the dash, “Alaska” painted on its flank.

  “Mind if we hit a grocery store?” I ask.

  “A guy would have a better selection at the AC Value Center,” he says.

  Inside the store, pickings are slim. The entire produce section is the size of a Whole Foods olive bar, and the choices, if I’m being diplomatic, are underwhelming. A half-dozen ears of corn already dry enough to wrap tamales. A few shrunken heads of lettuce. Brittle asparagus stalks bundled like kindling. The milk fridge advertises “Cheapest Price for Milk in Town” at $5.99 per half gallon. If this is the better selection, I wonder what the other place looks like.

  Bill’s house sits on a hill above Odiak Slough, which opens to Orca Inlet. From his living room window he can see Hawkins Island—68 square miles, population: 4—which separates the inlet from Prince William Sound. Before the earthquake, fishing boats brought salmon right into Odiak Slough to offload at the cannery that once occupied its shore. The ground rose high enough to decimate the local razor clam population, one of Cordova’s most viable fisheries, and shallowed the slough enough to make it unnavigable even at high tide. A few old boathouses remain high and dry after all these years.

  He tells me about the old Aleut woman who lived on the steep slope beneath him—no running water, no heat, just a cookstove—and how he used to look after her. No trace of her cabin remains, nor most of the others built around the slough. Some collapsed into rubble half-sunk into the earth, others demolished and hauled away. An abandoned boat in the grass at the foot of the slope has surrendered to rot, beached on an outgoing tide that never returned.

  Bill decorated his yard with old fishing gear. Line floats, buoys, a life ring hanging from a tree. He mounted a fishing boat gurdie on a stanchion that he uses to clean and fold old salvaged fishing nets, which he resells to golf courses and driving ranges. Old trapping gear hangs rusting in an open shed. He hasn’t trapped in years, but his gear awaits his next trip, forever hopeful. Behind the shed is Bill’s shop, though calling it a shop doesn’t do it justice—it’s bigger than his house. He had it shipped, disassembled, on a barge. Inside he’s restoring a 1932 Model DB Ford pickup. Bought new in Cordova, the truck has lived its whole life here, including a stint as the town’s fuel truck. Bill has leaded the fenders, fixed the pitting, and painted the body, and he rebuilt the engine before the project stalled. Retired from a city job, and a little young for it, Bill still works odd jobs around town but counts on projects like these to help fill his days.

  He lives alone, divorced, now a committed bachelor. He doesn’t go out to eat or entertain much. “You should have a dog,” I tell him. He nods and shows me where he buried her in front of the house.

  I’m staying in a downstairs apartment that used to be his garage. Cement floors, inexpensive fixtures, comfortable and homey. Radio-controlled model planes hang from the ceiling. He builds and repairs them at a workbench full of spare parts and flies them around a nearby field when his grandson visits. The furs of a fox, coyote, and mink hang from one wall, and in a corner, beside the television, there’s a mount of a wolverine Bill trapped some years earlier. He says it’s a small female, but it looks big to me. There’s a wall clock made from a small trap hanging over a Monitor heater, and though it’s August, the heater is on.

  After Joe decided to stay in Cordova, he brought his nephew Smokey here from Tignish, much as Uncle Pete had done so many years earlier for him. When Smokey got a little older, he returned to Prince Edward Island, married, had four kids, and then came back to Cordova for good. They all lived in a small cabin at Mud Bay on Hawkins Island—Joe, Smokey and his wife, the three boys, and their sister—with no running water or electricity. The boys slept in a big bench seat that opened like a hope chest, packed in like sardines.

  You can see Mud Bay from Bill’s house,
just a change in the shape of the trees and shoreline on Hawkins Island. He points to it out the window, then shows it to me on one of the old nautical charts hanging on the walls of the apartment. “These charts were Uncle Joe’s,” he says.

  Behind the TV hangs a glass display case filled with belongings and artifacts his great-uncle accumulated over the years. There’s a book given to Joe and signed by Dr. R. M. Anderson of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, the man who became his lifelong friend and scientific mentor in exchange for the gift of a mosquito net. A gorgeous ivory Inuit carving. A brass caffrail log—a torpedo-shaped gauge dragged from the transom to measure water speed—made by the John Bliss Company of Seattle, Washington. A box on the table contains Eskimo and Inuit carvings made of bone and wood from Joe’s voyages, another his old black-and-white photo albums.

  “Take a look through these while you’re here,” Bill says, as friendly and welcoming as can be. I guess he’s decided I’m no ax-murderer. Our relation is distant at best—cousins removed so far that you’d need a calculator to figure it out—but we’re related. Blood is blood.

  Joe once owned this lot on the slough. He built a cabin here, now long gone, though in Bill his family remains on his land. As we stand at the window, looking out, the clouds part just enough to allow a column of sunlight to descend. Its bright edges delineated clearly against the dark skies, against the hills of Hawkins Island on the horizon, I half expect Orca Inlet to boil where the light hits. The grasses of the slough are matted and wild, textured greens and yellows offset by the dark outline of the evergreens on either side. Joe knew what he was doing when he bought this lot, and so did Bill when he kept it.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say.

  “A guy could do a lot worse,” he answers.

  24

  Tragedy Strikes

  At midnight we were off Cape Woolley. We are almost home.