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

by C. B. Bernard

  In hindsight, it seems a cruel joke on the Inuit that their entry into the world of recorded music should be the bagpipe, but Joe’s gramophone served as a gathering place for his makeshift community. A century later, the city burn pile in Cordova fulfills a similar function—in addition, of course, to its intended utilitarian purpose.

  In a Cordova Times editorial, Dick Shellhorn says that if the smoke isn’t too bad, it’s still a regular stop for many people on their daily schedule. Sure enough, we stand transfixed by the flames for ten minutes as people come and go, including Bill’s best friend, Stanley, an Aleut he’s known since childhood. The burn pile looks like an empty lot where a house has gone up in flames—only the flames remain, surrounded by piles of garbage, building materials, shipping pallets, and old clothes.

  The unregulated fire pit is a source of occasional controversy in town. People use it to dispose of improper items, and a photograph on the city website shows a front-end loader dumping an entire building onto the fire. To me it’s like the sign at the end of the road in Juneau: There’s no way lawyers would allow it most places outside Alaska. But it’s a tradition here, and Shellhorn waxes poetic about it, even name-checking Bill: “An old-timer named John Meeker lived a bit closer to town where Bill Bernard now resides. Meeker had this beat-up metal wheelbarrow with a squeaky steel wheel, and would haul stuff back from the dump to his place as fast as people hauled it out there. Locals called it Meekerville. One man’s junk is another man’s treasures.” The pit burns with the same kind of symbolism as the Olympic torch or the eternal flame—not just with Cordova’s household trash.

  Bill checks his watch and hustles me into the truck. We drive over to the ferry terminal, and soon the Chenega appears in the distance.

  “Are you meeting someone?”

  “No,” he says. “This is what we do for entertainment, watch people get off the ferry.”

  I think he’s joking, but soon other people arrive, some joining us at the railing, others sitting in cars. Before long, we’re all watching the passengers and vehicles disembark up the steep ramp to the terminal. So-and-so’s got a new truck, I see, one says as a neighbor exits in a shiny Dodge Ram. Looks like Jane’s been to Costco, they say, and a Honda Civic bursting with toilet paper and canned goods honks as it goes by.

  Like his two brothers, Bill no longer drinks. He says they burned that particular candle a little too brightly during their youth, when Cordova was a booming fishing town with seemingly limitless amounts of money, alcohol, and drugs passing through it. A younger crowd of gillnetters tries to live the same lifestyle as the highliners back in the day, he says, but it’s not the same—just because bell bottoms come back in style doesn’t mean disco’s not still dead. Bill sold his boat some years ago and doesn’t get out to fish much these days. His traps are rusting in the shed. This morning, a new TV he ordered online arrived, and he’s excited to hook it up. He’s also looking forward to the delivery of his next purchase, a skid-steer front-end loader that will arrive soon on the ferry. It’s an expensive purchase, but he’s as eager as a kid on Christmas Eve, already planning the projects he’ll be able to tackle with it.

  Someone once told me that fun looks different to the other guy. Life in Cordova is no different than anywhere else, a series of choices and compromises. The people who choose to live here love the things Cordova has to offer them, and what it lacks doesn’t seem that important.

  Is Bill happy? Happiness is a fleeting condition, and not one I’m qualified to judge. But there’s a contentment about him that I’d be thrilled to find in my own life. He’s found balance here, and from day to day seems to have eliminated many of the surprises that introduce the stress of the unknown into a life. He seems comfortable. There’s nothing holding him in Cordova besides the weight of his family history, but he chooses to stay. From his easy chair he can watch the sun setting over Orca Inlet, staining the shallow water of Odiak Slough. He can see Mud Bay, where he grew up with his parents and Uncle Joe. He can barely throw a rock without scattering a dozen memories from his family’s long history in town.

  The sun beats down on the dock, warming us. It may be a sucker hole, but it feels good nonetheless. I’m enjoying the hell out of myself, and Bill’s smiling brightly beside me. Maybe he’s on to something.

  “So what do you do for fun when there’s no ferry?” I ask him.

  He smiles. “We watch all the bumpers rust.”

  26

  Fish Oil and Snake Oil

  By March 1914, we had used up all our ship’s stores but by then we did not crave salt. Fish was the only food which tasted flat. It took longer to get used to it than to caribou or other game.

  Salmon from the Copper River have achieved a level of celebrity that has eluded their peers, and more people outside Alaska know the fish than could find the river on a map. The Copper River flows 300 miles from Wrangell–St. Elias National Park to its delta near Cordova, and the salmon that spawn in its fast waters rank among the most prized. How much of that comes from their natural characteristics and how much from marketing—in other words, how much fish oil and how much snake oil—remains debatable. Until the early 1980s, the salmon primarily were canned or frozen for export to Japan, but a food writer and ex-commercial fisherman named Jon Rowley did for salmon what Starbucks did for coffee. Recognizing the value of the fish, he worked to establish routes to ship it fresh.

  Rowley, whom Julia Child dubbed “the Fish Missionary,” believes Copper River kings are genetically blessed with more of the oil that gives salmon its flavor and healthy characteristics. To preserve their natural excellence, he worked with the commercial fleet to establish a better method of handling them, and then marketed them to create a demand, a game-changer for Alaska salmon—at least for the next fifteen years, until farmed fish began crowding wild salmon out of the market. Rowley and his business partner, John Foss, upped the ante not by changing the game again but by turning it into a race: Who could be first to get Copper River kings to market once the short season opens? They hired a helicopter to hoist the first king salmon of the season right from the boat that caught them, rushed them to the Anchorage airport, and flew them directly to Seattle and a horde of waiting media. Restaurants and seafood markets began to compete for bragging rights, and soon consumers were shelling out nearly $40 a pound for the much-lauded fish.

  Rowley and Foss may have manufactured interest that first year, but the media has shown up unprovoked every year since. The marketing has become its own monster. Some retailers have taken it to the extreme by promoting “designer” fish from a particular commercial boat, advertising the place, date, and time of the catch. It’s hard to imagine the cattle industry doing the same for a burger.

  Even without confusing marketing, salmon are complicated enough for consumers. The different species all have alternate names: chinooks are kings, cohos are silvers, pinks are humpies, and chums are keta, dog salmon, or silverbrites. They all taste different, and some believe that how they’re caught affects how they taste. From a culinary perspective, salmon is like “meat,” a broad term that demands further clarification. If the salmon at your fish market isn’t labeled king, coho, sockeye, or pink, and the person working the counter can’t tell you which it is, buy it somewhere else.

  Then there’s the additional complexity of the wild-caught vs. farm-raised debate. To the untrained eye, the two are indistinguishable at a seafood counter—in fact, farm-raised fish are often more visually appealing, identically sized and predictably colored—but the wild might sell for as much as $35 a pound compared to $5 for the farm-raised. To make matters worse, they’re often mislabeled. A 2011 University of Washington Tacoma study found that about 38 percent of samples from restaurants, grocery stores, and fish markets incorrectly promoted farm-raised Atlantic salmon as wild-caught Pacific or mislabeled lesser-grade cohos as kings. A similar study by the New York Times found that salmon sol
d as wild by six New York City stores, for as much as $29 a pound, was farm-raised—which at the time was selling for $5 to $12 a pound. In 1999 Sitka’s Daily Sentinel reported that some Costco stores were selling “Fresh Farmed Alaska Whole Salmon,” which isn’t even a real thing—fish farming is illegal in Alaska. If you don’t work in the industry or are just looking for a good piece of fish for dinner, there’s a lot to learn about salmon.

  More than 60 percent of all US commercial seafood landings happen in Alaska, which makes the $2 billion seafood business the state’s largest export, without serious competition—followed, but not closely, by zinc, lead, and Palin offspring. The seafood industry provides around 80,000 jobs statewide—more than tourism, oil and gas, logging, and mining combined—and generates around $80 million in annual taxes and fees.

  From a global perspective, Alaska’s total catch puts it in the top fifteen seafood producers worldwide, ahead of the Philippines, Vietnam, Iceland, and Burma, but trailing Norway, Chile, China, Indonesia, and Thailand. Then again, those are countries, and Alaska’s just a state. Those figures also apply to seafood in general; when you look specifically at salmon, Alaska becomes even more competitive, accounting for about 96 percent of the wild salmon caught in the United States, about 80 percent caught in all of North America, and about 40 percent caught worldwide. Some years, Alaska’s salmon catch is worth north of $725 million.

  For a salmon caught during Joe’s time to make it from Alaska to market in the United States, it had to be canned—unlike cod, salted salmon didn’t appeal to consumers—and by the time he left Prince Edward Island, where his father owned a fish cannery, forty-two salmon canneries were operating in Alaska. During the first half of the twentieth century, the federal government managed the salmon fishery with a relatively hands-off approach. But the growing number of canneries drove an increased harvest, which in turn led to overfishing so severe that in 1953, President Eisenhower declared Alaska’s fishery a federal disaster area. Harvests had dropped to 25 million salmon, 712 percent lower than the 2011 harvest of 203 million.

  After statehood, Alaska took control of its own fisheries. It formed both the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the Alaska Board of Fisheries, bestowing the former with a strong mandate toward conservation and the latter with the power to allocate the harvest to competing interest groups, and wrote explicit conservation language into its constitution—the only state to do so. Those actions initially slowed the decline of stocks, but changing technology made fishermen better at their work, and soon the numbers began to drop again. They reached record lows in the 1970s, and in 1973 the legislature capped the number of commercial salmon permits.

  But limiting the number of fishermen chasing the fish isn’t the only way to battle the problem of dwindling stock. You can also create more stock. In 1971 the state launched a hatchery program that releases about 1.4 billion salmon each year, which accounts for as much as 37 percent of the statewide commercial harvest. Sometimes called “salmon enhancement” or “ocean ranching,” hatchery programs augment local wild stocks, which sets them apart from fish farming. Farmed fish are reared in captivity until adulthood, when they’re slaughtered for market, never seeing wild waters. Fish farming may be illegal in Alaska, but farmed fish pose some of the biggest threats, both environmental and economical, to the state’s salmon fishing industry.

  Farms in western Canada and Washington State hold their stock in crowded offshore net pens, making them more susceptible to disease. In 2005 furunculosis killed almost 2 million smolts at a Vancouver salmon hatchery, and a 2007 infectious salmon anemia (ISA) outbreak destroyed 70 percent of Chile’s farmed salmon stocks. In 2011 ISA turned up for the first time in wild Pacific salmon in British Columbia. Experts believe it spread from a nearby fish farm.

  If disease is one risk, the cure is another. Farmed fish receive vaccinations and antibiotics, the latter typically administered through medicated baths and feed and therefore able to spread to nearby wildlife and other organisms.

  But even healthy farmed fish can pose environmental threats. A typical Canadian farm holds more than 700,000 salmon weighing around 11 pounds—the equivalent biomass of 360 Indian bull elephants—and their waste builds up on the ocean floor beneath the nets, creating algae blooms. Farming contaminates marine ecosystems, decimates clam populations, increases tumors and lesions on fish, and boosts their mercury levels.

  Sea lions, seals, and porpoises come to the floating buffets, and those that don’t get stuck in the nets and die are often killed to protect the farms. In the first quarter of 2011 in Canada alone, 141 California sea lions and 2 Steller sea lions—a federally listed endangered species—were shot and 37 harbor seals reported shot or drowned.

  There’s also the Houdini effect. Farmed salmon have a way of escaping. A couple hundred thousand fish are estimated to “leak” out in Canada each year, and though the net pens are in the Pacific Ocean, the escapees are nonnative Atlantic salmon. These aggressive fish outcompete wild stocks for food and habitat and spread disease and pathogens. One study found nonnative Atlantic salmon in more than eighty wild spawning streams in British Columbia alone and feral juvenile Atlantics in three of them, enough for the state to consider them an invasive species. Over a twenty-year period beginning in 1987, more than 1.5 million Atlantic salmon were found in western Canada. The first Atlantic in Alaska was caught near Juneau in 1990—an event of such significance that the New York Times covered it—and over the next decade nearly 600 more turned up as far north as the Bering Sea. The problem worsened in 1998 when the first Atlantic salmon was caught in a freshwater spawning stream; more than a dozen were caught in Sitka during my three years there.

  There’s increasing evidence that farmed fish are as bad for you as they are for the environment, but they’re getting harder to avoid. More than half the world’s salmon is now farm-raised. In Alaska, where fishing is a lifestyle, it’s not unusual to see bumper stickers and T-shirts that say, “Friends don’t let friends eat farmed salmon.” Consumers bought 26 percent more organic vegetables in 2011 than the prior year, and attitudes toward organic and sustainable foods are shifting due, in part, to consumer education. So how do you educate an army of consumers trying to put food on the table with limited time and budgets about the difference between wild and farmed salmon?

  Enter the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI), a public corporation created in 1981 as a cooperative endeavor of the commercial fishing industry and state government. Stakeholders, primarily seafood processing companies and commercial fishermen, fund ASMI, but a legislative restructure gave the processors a majority of seats on the board of directors. Federal funding for ASMI began in 1988 to promote Alaska seafood internationally, and in 2000 the late US senator Ted Stevens, Alaska’s favorite uncle, shepherded a $5 million congressional appropriation under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act toward the organization. ASMI continues to receive federal funds to help compete in evolving global markets.

  Now that you can fly frozen or even fresh seafood nearly anywhere in the world, stores and restaurants are no longer beholden to local providers or resources. Alaska seafood now competes against the entire world, including less-expensive seafood and salmon farmed in Chile, Norway, and Europe. The sustainability of stocks or a differentiator like “wild” can provide marketplace advantages, and the Marine Stewardship Council, whose labels on fresh, frozen, and canned fish certify their provenance from a sustainable and environmentally sound fishery, awarded sixteen Alaska salmon fisheries blanket certification in 2000. Alaska salmon is also certified—along with halibut, sablefish, and pollock, with cod and crab in the queue—to the United Nation’s highest international standard, based on the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries and Guidelines for Ecolabeling of Fish and Fishery Products from Marine Capture Fisheries. That’s a mouthful to fit on a label on a salmon fillet in your grocery store’s seafood counter display, but it puts an arrow in A
SMI’s quiver.

  Marketing the resource is almost as important as protecting it. But a significant percentage of the salmon it markets as being “wild” were cultured in hatcheries. There’s no debate that these salmon are distinct from farm-raised fish, but doubt remains about whether they are distinct from wild fish, primarily among pro-farming advocates. Labeling them as “wild-caught” rather than “wild” seems more accurate but also dulls the arrow a bit.

  Fisherman-direct marketing, which promotes certain aspects of the fish—like “Frozen-at-Sea” or “Alaska Native-Caught”—and regional promotional programs, enabled by the state legislature in 2004 and funded by taxing local fisheries, have bolstered ASMI. The Copper River/Prince William Sound Marketing Association came first. But thanks to Jon Rowley, Copper River salmon had already been a successful brand for more than twenty years.

  In Joe’s day, salmon was still just a fish and not yet the subject of conservation efforts, marketing strategies, or sociopolitical debates. What would he have thought about the recent announcement by Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies that it had created a genetically engineered Atlantic salmon raised from eggs developed in a laboratory on Prince Edward Island? To circumvent NOAA regulations, they ship the eggs to Panama, where they hatch into salmon that grow twice as fast as those raised on farms or in the wild. The rapid growth results from combining genes from Pacific chinook salmon that stimulate the body to make growth hormone and genes from the eel-like ocean pout, which keep the growth gene working round-the-clock so the salmon grow twice as fast and more than twice as big as nature intended. An AquaBounty salmon weighs an average of 13.3 pounds, according to the company, compared to about 5.5 pounds for a nonengineered Atlantic. In promotional photos showing two eighteen-month-old salmon side by side, the nonengineered fish looks like bait for the lab fish.