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

by C. B. Bernard

  Unlike his manuscript—edited by Cousin Augusta and Betty Helm—the letter reveals the lack of polish in his English-language skills. When unsure of a word or phrase, he resorts to phonetic spelling. If I read it aloud, I can almost discern his Tignish accent. It’s the closest I’ll come to hearing his voice.

  32

  Holding the Past

  The wolves were howling around the schooner again all night. . . . It was 38° below.

  In the photo of the Teddy Bear over my desk, taken sometime in her second decade with the better part of her career already behind her, she wears a near-full suit of sails, only her topsail stowed. Polar bear skins draped over a gunwale dry in the Arctic sun. Barrels and crates stacked on her aft deck carry trade goods, furs, food, and supplies. Two people stand at her bow, another aft. The old girl looks weathered and tired, but proud.

  How do you measure time for a wooden schooner pushed by blunt force for a dozen winters through the Arctic? Squeezed and shaken like a piece of meat in the frozen jaws of the Arctic seas, sunk at anchor, buried beneath snow, rolled onto her side, dismantled for her wood. If it wasn’t a miracle that she survived her first ten years, it certainly was that she survived ten more.

  Late in the 1920s, her doting captain remodeled her with the intention of retiring or selling her in Seattle. On his way there—as if she knew—her engine quit, and the steadfast pair limped together into Cordova. Joe liked it here, decided to stay, bought the land at Mud Bay, and built a new boat, the St. Theresa. He laid the Teddy Bear to rest, dragging her into the clearing behind his cabin, propping her onto a cradle, and leaving her to well-deserved peace and quiet within sight of the water and his home. The earth quickly overgrew her, the ground hoping to reclaim the wood taken from it so many years before. By the time Bill and Bob played on her as kids, she was no longer the famous schooner, just a decrepit splinter-maker they couldn’t sail.

  “I think the Teddy Bear might still be over at Mud Bay,” Bill told me the first time I called. “Well, what’s left of her, anyway. I’m not sure anymore.”

  Many reasons brought me to Cordova—none more meaningful than this.

  At the harbor, Bill and I meet Mike Hicks and help him unload a sleek aluminum jet boat from its trailer behind his Alaska Wildlife Troopers truck. In response to a handful of calls about smoke coming from high in the trees on Hawkins Island, Sergeant Cloward suggested we investigate with Hicks and head over to Mud Bay while we’re there. Once the boat hits the water, he aims it for the column of smoke, and we sprint across Orca Inlet.

  It’s an overcast day, dry so far, but we all wear rain gear just the same. We check the shoreline near the smoke for boats or sign of trouble but find nothing. Hicks calls in. Dixie tells him that a pilot on a fly-by spotted a campsite with a cooking fire. The camper waved to the plane. There’s no emergency.

  “Looks like we’re going to Mud Bay,” Hicks says.

  A big guy closer to Bill’s age than mine, Hicks has a great sense of humor. But he’s been a cop for a long time, retired from the Cordova Police Department before becoming a trooper, and his personality has an undercurrent you wouldn’t want to get caught in—one that means business.

  He also serves as chief of the Cordova Volunteer Fire Department. He and Bill, old trapping and fishing buddies, have history together. As we run to Mud Bay, they trade stories about their practical jokes over the years. Like the time a friend brought along a fake arm that he used to trigger a trap. He started screaming, pretending his arm was caught. The way Hicks tells it, Bill grabbed a stick, ready to knock the guy unconscious to stop the pain and free his arm. Or the time Bill found an ornamental trap welded shut, “baited” it with donuts, and left it for Hicks at the Cordova Police station. They laugh like kids you’d have to separate in class and peck at each other like happy old roosters.

  As jolly as Hicks may be, it’s not always easy to find humor in his job. His mood darkens as he tells us about a recent case. A couple living on a remote island had been adopting Native children with fetal alcohol syndrome and sexually assaulting them. “Went on for years,” he says. “They were charged with more than twenty counts, and ten of them stuck.” It’s a career case, he says, but the conspicuous silence that follows reveals the cost.

  Both the cabin and boatshed that Joe built at Mud Bay have gone, torn down by one of the property owners who followed him. Some of the original wood went back into the buildings that replaced them, and Bill says the cabin floor still shows some of Joe’s orange paint. Other tributes to the original owner remain, including a ceiling tile with holes in it from the shotgun that went off while Joe was cleaning it that someone framed and hung as art.

  Near the northeast corner of the island, Mud Bay is small and shallow, Joe’s old property the only sign of civilization on its shores. Hicks eases the jet boat toward the gravel beach near the cabin. Bill leans over the bow, calling out directions for a clear path. Over the transom, buildings along the road south of Cordova appear across the inlet, including a few of the old canneries still in their prime when Joe lived here.

  “We’re going to want to get out of here before low tide,” Bill says. We all check the time.

  The color of dark chocolate, the boatshed is the bigger of the buildings and closest to the water, sitting above the grass on short pilings just high of the rocky water line. An old set of launching skids extends toward the water from sliding doors, perched atop sections of what looks like an old telephone pole driven in pairs into the ground. One skid makes it just halfway to the water before it ends, broken off or rotted away, the other not even as far. Moss covers the wood, bright green on faded brown, mingled with the dull white of bird shit. The weatherworn paint on the shed has chipped. A lighter brown cabin looks out over the water, its generator shed the same color. All three buildings half-hidden against the lush evergreen backdrop, uninterrupted forest rising into the island’s hills. A scarf of cloud wraps around the rooflines, the whole scene mirrored in the shallow water of the bay. It shimmers in the light wake of our boat, at once not much to look at and incredibly beautiful.

  Bill’s gone quiet. He has spent most of his life just a handful of miles from here, but there’s some emotion in returning. There’s emotion for me too, though I’ve never been here. This is hallowed ground for me. A longtime disciple of the collected works of Captain Joe and the divine Teddy Bear, I’ve spent more than a quarter of my life reading about them. I don’t take being here lightly.

  “This is a beautiful spot,” I say.

  Bill agrees. “A guy could do a lot worse.”

  Despite their long friendship, Hicks knows little about Bill’s family history. We give him the nutshell version of Joe’s adventures as we walk up the beach and into the deep weeds behind the cabin. The faded wood of an old raised deck has sprouted a thick carpet of moss and yellow lichen. At the far end of the deck, an old sharpening wheel sits waist-high on asymmetric wooden posts, a short axle through its center. The axle has rusted, and the wood is rotting, the posts capped with moss. Weeds devour the structure from the ground up. Joe would have used this to keep an edge on the saws, chisels, rasps, and planes he used in his boatshed.

  Behind the deck, weeds have also overgrown a small clearing surrounded on three sides by forest. The entire property feels unkempt. Not wild—this is someone’s home at least part of the year, and that someone has made efforts to tame the land—but much of the property has been neglected. Hicks surveys the scene like an investigator. I study it like a reporter. Bill traipses across it, his XTRATUFs buried deep in the wet grass, and disappears into the shadowy trees.

  “She’s back here somewhere!” he yells.

  I follow him into the canopy of trees and wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. A few lazy mosquitoes hang in the air. A squirrel chatters from a spruce branch.

  That the Teddy Bear has gone to rot isn’t news. Eight
decades of rain, snow, and neglect have gone a long way toward reassimilating her timbers with the earth where they grew. At the Cordova Museum, a few photos showed her cradled here. In one she’s recently retired, high and proud and dry. In another, decades have passed, her soft hull already collapsed as planks peel from her ribs. I didn’t expect to see a structurally sound sailboat standing tall on her keel, but nothing visible is even remotely boat-shaped: no cradles, no jacks, nothing but trees, weeds, and moss so thick you’d need a hacksaw to cut through it.

  Have I come all this way for nothing?

  For years the Teddy Bear has lived not as an actual wood-and-iron boat but as an idea in my head, alive only in books and Joe’s journals, tangible only in the photos I’ve gathered in which she forever sails—battered, scraped, but sound—through the frozen Arctic, frozen in time. I can’t touch her. I can’t run my hand along her rails, rap my knuckles against her planks, or clamber over her decking to stand where Joe stood. Just being here is enough, I tell myself. It has to be.

  “Here she is!” Bill yells.

  I exhale and realize I’ve been holding my breath.

  Who was I fooling?

  In her prime the Teddy Bear earned a reputation for herself and became among the most famous of Arctic vessels, her name spoken with reverence and respect from New York to Nome, from Nuiqsut to what is now Nunavut. That she survived all that her captain asked of her and outlasted her years of service makes her a rarity. The Arctic remains a graveyard for many of the other ships that made their names in the North.

  Sir John Franklin’s Erebus and Terror disappeared along with Franklin and his entire crew during an attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage. Joe found artifacts from the lost expedition, including a wooden leg that belonged to one of the sailors. The whalers Concordia, Seneca, and Emily Morgan were among thirty-one ships lost together in 1871 when a severe winter forced more than 1,200 men, women, and children to abandon them near Barrow. Only one ship survived that culling of the whaling fleet. In an album, Joe labeled the photo of its remains “the great wreckage.”

  Even the ships of Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition fared poorly, the Karluk crushed, the Sachs abandoned and destroyed. When first provisioning the expedition in 1913, Stefansson wrote to George DesBarats, a Canadian government official:

  The North Star is of the same capacity as the Teddy Bear, but has a centre-board instead of a keel, and therefore draws only four feet of water as against six feet for the Teddy Bear. . . . Of the five ships wintering in the Arctic, two are from our point of view desirable—the Teddy Bear and the North Star. Each of these is for sale at $4,000 or possibly even less.

  Joe’s friend Martin Andreasen and Ira Rank, who had staked both Andreasen and Joe on their trading ventures, co-owned the North Star. With Joe and the Teddy Bear stuck in Coronation Gulf at the time, Stefansson purchased the North Star. Though she survived the expedition, when it ended, he gave her to Billy Banksland in lieu of payment. Billy used her as a fox trapping base near Banks Island. Around 1928, a storm wrecked her at Baillie Island.

  The Teddy Bear saw her share of troubles too. She endured all the indignities to which a hostile land might subject a working schooner, and Joe’s photos provide a glimpse of the challenges they faced and overcame together. In one she makes her way through the pack ice off King William Island, a man on her bowsprit and two on the frozen sea itself prodding at the ice with long poles to clear a path before her. Inch by inch she traveled, the ice nipping at her heels. In another, taken in Bernard Harbour in 1911, just the tips of her masts protrude from the deep snow. The skins of the animals Joe and his Inuit companions hunted and trapped dry on clotheslines strung between them. Another that same year shows her heeled onto her chines—lines secured to her main mast—Joe and an Inuit crew hauling her over to expose her keel for repairs. Other photos show her makeshift crew loading her in 1910 east of the Coppermine at the Kugaryuak River, drifting with pack ice in Dolphin and Union Strait in 1913, and being put onto skids in Nome’s Snake River harbor at the end of her maiden voyage in 1914.

  Most wooden boats don’t endure such mistreatment, especially not a continuous string that lasts five, ten, twenty years. But when her time came, her captain retired his faithful old friend on her own terms rather than surrendering her to the ship-hungry Arctic. This is the spot he chose for her. This is where the earth welcomed her back. The cradle on which Joe put her to rest has all but disintegrated, her bones sunk into the ground. The ground in turn rose to swallow the Teddy Bear, now in the same condition as Joe’s headstone, moss-bitten, overgrown—both captain and his beloved schooner now and forever a part of Alaska itself.

  She’s unrecognizable as a boat at first glance, her ribs like branches, her hull timbers indistinguishable from the moss-covered forest. But after a minute I can make out the lines of her bones. Her keelson, a solid, heavy timber that ran from stem to stern—her massive spine—has survived the decades of decay more or less in one piece.

  Standing on the keelson of the remains of the Teddy Bear at Mud Bay, outside Cordova. PHOTO BY MIKE HICKS

  “This was the bow,” Bill says, standing at one end. “I remember playing here as a kid.”

  I stand at the other, nearer her stern. Her starboard ribs have collapsed into the ground, but, just back from the bow on her port side, the first few feet of her ribs rise from the dirt in the familiar curve of her hull, the remnants of a few planks clinging to them with admirable tenacity. The wood has shrunk away from the nails and through-bolts that held it together, the exposed metal rusty, damp, and cold to the touch.

  Pieces of the cradle on which she rested now form part of the schooner itself, the schooner part of the ground, the ground part of the land that her captain designed her to explore. There’s not a piece of her left that isn’t soft with rot, moss-slick, half-composted. If you didn’t know to look for her, you’d mistake her for a crumbling old retaining wall and walk right past her.

  Joe never married. He never had a long-term partner. The Teddy Bear was his mistress, his longest relationship, and why not? Theirs was built on trust and fidelity, forged in trials, and they were always there for each other. Despite her insubstantial size, she covered more water miles in the Arctic than any single vessel before her. She bore the Arctic flag for the modern world, the first sign of white civilization many Eskimo and Inuit ever saw. Joe’s photos hint at some of what she witnessed over the years, surrounded by a huddle of curious walrus, towing Inupiat hunters in skin umiaks, tied to ice floes as big as warehouses. Hundreds of Eskimo and Inuit crossed her decks to trade with her owner, slept on her decks in furs and skins, and a few even learned to help sail her. Some of the most famous explorers and scientists to sharpen their teeth in the Arctic relied on her, none more than Joe himself.

  No matter what he asked, she delivered. She survived each encounter, each trip. Ultimately she survived everything but time. I gather a handful of rotted wood splinters and rusted nails, holding them tightly. These are the bones of the Teddy Bear. This is my handshake with Joe Bernard.

  Soon it’s time for us to go, the outgoing tide draining the bay. If we wait too long, we’ll be stranded. I’m not ready to leave yet—Mud Bay or Alaska—but my flight leaves for Portland tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be glad to see Kim and the dog again, happy enough to be back, but Portland is no more my home than New England, which I left behind. In my forties, I’m still a ship without a flag, no homeport on my transom.

  For all his exploration, Joe liked Cordova enough to call it home for more than half his life. How many of us get to love the place where we live? I sometimes thought of living in Alaska as a compromise measured by everything I gave up to be here. But to nearly everyone I know here, the opposite is true: Living anywhere else would be a compromise. I love it here—the patience of the glaciers, the endless miles of forest, the stubbornness of the mountains, the forgiving rain�
��but I don’t belong here. Maybe my restlessness is not a casualty of my choices but of my nature. Maybe I’m not meant to live and love a place wholly, but to keep looking for new places to explore in my own way. Or maybe Alaska ruined me for anywhere else. Being back has reminded me of how much of an exaggeration it is, a superlative that defies hyperbole. Alaska makes everything ordinary impossible to bear.

  Quiet, we all head back to town, the wind in our faces, the day threatening rain until the clouds part to reveal a deep blue patch of sky directly overhead. A halo of sun appears around the edges, warming my skin and reflecting off the surface of the water, immeasurably brightening the day. It’s only temporary—just a sucker hole—but I don’t care.

  Epilogue: Forty-Ninth State of Mind

  By the time I was ready to go home in the summer of 1920, I had only one crew member left. . . . We had no gasoline so we made quite a record for such a small vessel. I was at the wheel night and day with occasional relief in the daytime. . . . We sailed over 1,200 miles in less than 13 days.

  Alaska was in flames when I moved away. The warmest summer on record and one of the driest made the wilderness a tinderbox. More than 700 distinct wildfires burned through the state, most caused by humans. They destroyed 6.5 million acres, the most of any wildfire season to date, smothering the Interior beneath a low ceiling of smoke as the largest burns concentrated near Fairbanks, the Dalton Highway, and Dot Lake. Forty-six states sent firefighting crews, but, even at 2,700 strong, what could so few men do to calm Nature once she decided to rage? The most widespread fire began near Tok in early July 2004 and burned until snow extinguished the flames in late September, Nature changing her mood.