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

by C. B. Bernard

  Two weeks before the fires peaked, I left Homer on a path that took me through Tok, near the Taylor Complex Fire, and into Dawson City, where I picked up the Klondike Loop. I drove across Canada to Montreal, then south to Massachusetts, eight days at the wheel, sixteen hours apiece. Had I made the right choice to leave? I’d made up my mind without giving it much thought, but hurtling across the continent gave me nothing but time to think about it. My job had become toxic, and a bad relationship deteriorated into worse. Then word came that back in Massachusetts, my last grandparent was dying by inches as cancer erased her from the inside out.

  Foregoing a proper good-bye to my home for the past five years for a chance to say good-bye to my grandmother, I gave notice, left the keys under the mat, and lashed my canoe to the roof just as I had half a decade earlier. This time, the bow pointed east.

  With Alaska in my rearview mirror for the first time, flames licked the sky before me, forest smoldering on either side of the road. Every few hours, I pulled into a small highway town for gas, the air sour with smoke, hoping it hadn’t been evacuated yet. Each night I pitched my tent as the fires burned ever nearer. I slept fitfully, ready to flee at a moment’s notice. I knew what I was leaving behind. To a lesser extent, I knew what I faced: family and friends, no job prospects, the death of a loved one, the same New England I’d abandoned. It hadn’t changed much, but I had. Alaska changed me in ways I didn’t fully realize until I was away from it for good.

  In Alaska I first started to become the man I wanted to be. I also lost my way, my life in flames just like the land.

  Along with devastation, wildfires bring renewal. Some species, like the lodgepole pine, depend on fire to open their cones and spread their seeds. Other plants feed on the nutrients created when organic matter burns. Fireweed, a symbol of the natural beauty of Alaska, is a “pioneer plant” because the pink blaze so eagerly colonizes the charred spaces left behind by wildfires, quickly spreading and blooming until the rest of the flora begins to return. When there’s no longer enough room or light, the fireweed stops growing. Its seeds remain in the soil, though, until fire, logging, or some other catastrophic event clears the land again and tender stalks unfurl from the ruined earth anew.

  Aren’t humans like that as well? A pioneer species that adapts to new surroundings and regrows even in the wake of destruction? I had to hope so, starting over yet again.

  In the eight years since, I’ve moved seven times, restless as ever, but I also fell in love and got married, proving that something beautiful can grow from even the most barren ground. I’ve missed Alaska every day I’ve been gone, at times even longing for it. Now that I’ve left it again, the longing has only grown worse.

  Joe’s Alaska had little in common with my own, the landscapes and people in his journals so unlike those that I came to know. Sometimes I wondered if my Alaska was somehow less real than his. When I compared our skills as men in the traditional, romantic sense of the word, and as Alaskans, I always came up short.

  How could I not? Those were diversions for me, but survival for him. Eventually I realized it didn’t matter that my voyages kept within well-charted areas or that I made them in a modern, ugly boat—only that I explored beyond the boundaries of what I already knew. It didn’t matter how well I hunted, only that I tried to take responsibility for what I ate by reasserting my role in the food chain. My skill as a fisherman mattered less than the peace I found in the rivers, surrounded by the calm and quiet forest. It was the same peace Joe sought, the same peace he found.

  So what that we are related only distantly, different branches of the same tree? So what that my family left Tignish, Joe’s birthplace, three generations before I was born? We both chose Alaska. Anchored a century apart beneath the Northern Lights, eating game we’d hunted and fish we’d caught, our two visions of Alaska merged into a single, shared ideal of the forty-ninth state.

  I began to look for other places where our experiences might intersect. Joe had built the Augusta C. and St. Theresa, his little Cordova fetch Islander. What if I tried to do the same? After reading so long about the Teddy Bear, the Mary Sachs, and so many other boats forgotten to history, maybe it was only a matter of time before it occurred to me to build one of my own. By turning a pile of lumber into a wooden boat, I might come to know him better.

  A few weeks after returning from Cordova, I declare my intentions to my wife and a few skeptical friends, purchase plans for a Pacific City dory, and start researching the process in books and online forums. Going online means deviating from Joe’s experience even before I’ve driven a nail, but these are modern times. I’m using power tools and lumber bought rather than milled on my own. I want results, not romance.

  The construction process calls for the dory to be built upside down on a jig called a strongback, with vertical stations to hold each rib in place. One sunny weekend morning in September I take my measurements, mark my lines, and start making sawdust. Like Alaska, woodworking also runs in my blood. Peter Bernard built boats and dogsleds; Joe built his cabin in Cordova; my great-grandfather became a carpenter after he settled in Massachusetts—I keep a rocking chair he made in my writing room. Even my father knows his way around a woodshop, but me? My first woodworking project before I build the boat is the strongback on which to build it. It takes me three tries to make it level and true.

  Through the autumn and into winter, I disappear into the garage for a few hours each day. Some stages of the build go more quickly than others. Without a table or chop saw, I cut all the frames and battens with a circular saw, which occupies needless time. My technique is uneven, my hands unsteady, but each accomplished step gives me confidence. I learn to bend the wood along the hull’s long curves, to think three or four steps ahead rather than backtracking twice as far. I move the photo of the Teddy Bear from over my desk to the garage so Joe can watch over my progress. Each night when I turn off the lights, I imagine him laughing at the clumsiness of my work.

  A friend in Homer built a Carolina set-net skiff. It’s no showboat, the stain unevenly applied, the wood scratched, scraped, and battered, but there’s an elegance to it as to anything handmade by a craftsman. I’m no craftsman, but I’m not an idiot either. If I aim for an unpretentious workboat finish like his—a horse you ride hard and put up wet—then I won’t be settling when I achieve anything less than perfection.

  To my surprise, I enjoy the process, which differs from writing in almost every way conceivable. At the end of each day, demonstrable proof attests to some accomplishment: an hour with the planer, sander, or saw, and the dimly lighted garage becomes a dark, chaotic snow globe of sawdust and ribbons of wood, me in the midst of it all, hypnotized by the fray.

  A severe winter descends upon Alaska, bringing more than 22 feet of snow to Cordova along with national media attention for something other than Copper River salmon. The heavy snow damages city buildings, destroys homes and boats, and prompts Governor Parnell to declare a disaster area and state of emergency. The National Guard, Coast Guard, and other agencies send personnel to help, but a problem you might not expect in Alaska hampers relief efforts: The town runs out of shovels.

  Winter comes to Portland too, a thousand miles south. Far more mild, with almost no snow, the cold nonetheless makes progress on the boat that much more hard-earned. Some nights it’s too cold to do anything but sip bourbon and ponder next steps. Still, by Christmas I have finished the framing, the battens and keelson laid perpendicular to the ribs. Weeks pass without any more headway, the boat a trapped animal that decomposed into sawdust, leaving a ragged wooden skeleton in its place.

  In the spring, Sergeant Cloward e-mails: “The winter was truly brutal, and it’ll take some time to get over that one. Sure glad Billy’s such a good guy, as he saved our bacon countless times.” A small town gets smaller. It’s inevitable that they would have met sooner or later, but he and Bill Bernard didn’t know each other before
I introduced them. Bill’s purchase of the skid-steer paid off. Either a born forecaster or one lucky son of a bitch, he bought it just months before the snowiest winter on the books.

  One morning the national news shows a Coast Guard helicopter rescuing Mac, the fishing lodge owner from Sitka, when one of his boats overturned on a commercial fishing trip. Mac helped a shipmate into a plastic fish tote and set him adrift before being forced into the water himself. He struggled into a survival suit that he found in the wreckage and floated for hours in the icy water before eventually making it to a beach from which the helo crew hoisted him a day later. Twenty-six hours after the boat sank, they found his buddy, still alive, floating offshore in the plastic tub, singing loudly to himself to keep occupied.

  Brendan sends infrequent updates on his progress with the Adak. He’s met a woman in whom he’s found motivation to soften the tug’s features, remodeling her from floating bachelor pad to comfortable home. “I can tell she appreciates the attention she has been getting,” he writes—about the boat.

  With just two days left on the harbormaster-imposed deadline, he and Marat managed to start the Adak’s engine and moved her across the harbor to her new home. That success will have to sustain him, at least for now. “That whole love thing didn’t work out so hot,” he writes a few months later. “Onward.”

  By late spring I’ve rough-planked the hull of my own boat, and for the first time she looks like a dory instead of scaffolding, an oversize coffee table, or the world’s largest collection of wood clamps. When I sustain a mild chemical burn while working on her, Kim runs to the pharmacy and returns with a carton of Epsom salts.

  “It’s what Joe would have prescribed,” she says.

  In July Bill writes that he and Bob have bought the cabin and boathouse at Mud Bay. Great-uncle Joe’s land has returned to the family for the first time in decades. “It’s a dream come true,” his letter says, “I’ve been out there every chance that I get. I spent last weekend over there, my first overnight in over fifty years. It was awesome.”

  When we visited Mud Bay, I gathered pieces of the Teddy Bear and brought them to Portland with me—a few rusted nails, the firmest slivers of wood I could gather, souvenirs really, just something tangible by which to remember her. That was before I decided to build a boat. Her rotted wood is too soft, the pieces too small, but I sand them down into dust and mix them with the glue I use to build the dory. With every countersunk screw hole, every joint and seam, Joe’s boat becomes a part of my own.

  In 1921 he chartered the Teddy Bear to run passengers to Seattle. A gale blew them ashore on the Chukchi Peninsula, tore open her hull, and smashed her keel, stranding them for the winter. “A southeast gale blowed us on the Siberian Coast and shipwrecked us near East Cape and compelled us to winter there without the means to communicate with the outside world, so that explains the reason I could not keep our appointment in Montreal,” he explained to a friend the following year. Joe kept his passengers alive without provisions until summer. When the weather improved, he repaired the Teddy Bear’s hull using, according to the Toronto Star Weekly, “the wood from an old dog sledge, bits of rust iron, whale ribs found on the beach, and the covering of an old cotton mattress,” relaunching her from the beach where she’d run aground. Halfway back to Nome, they met the US Coast Guard Revenue Cutter Bear in the Bering Sea, sent to find the remains of the schooner and her passengers—all presumed dead.

  Whale ribs? A mattress cover? His journals reveal other stories of improvisation. When four Arctic winters wore his schooner’s hull to bare wood, he made “paint” by mixing soot from a seal oil fire with a barrel of motor oil. It was black, thick, and ugly, he wrote while wintered in Lady Richardson Bay, but “the best paint the Teddy Bear ever had.”

  By late summer the dory is almost done, the hull planked, sanded, painted, and flipped off her strongback. At 17 feet long, she’s just a third the size of Joe’s schooner. I read somewhere that it’s hard to build an ugly wooden boat, and maybe that’s true. My workmanship is not without flaws, but right side up, she looks beautiful in the sun. I put down my tools long enough to admire her with the friends who helped flip her, but the next day she’s back in the garage to begin receiving her interior: bench seats with hinged lockers, curved inwales, a slotted, removable deck.

  At the same time, I rebuild an old trailer to carry her. When she’s nearly done, we winch her atop it, and I hang an old 25-horsepower outboard engine on her. I name her Epilogue—as the last chapter both of this book and of the Teddy Bear’s long life—and paint her name across her transom.

  With close to a thousand hours of labor behind me, all that’s left is to launch her. On an August day so hot that it breaks records, we tow Epilogue to a ramp on the Willamette River, where I officiate a brief christening. Friends and neighbors join us, as do strangers who wandered over to compliment the boat. We toast with champagne for tradition and with pilot bread and dried meat to symbolize Joe’s Arctic diet. He is very much present. This isn’t wholly his story or mine, but a story of the two of us together, separated only by the years, and of Alaska, the place we both left home to discover and explore each in our own way. That the essence of his boat binds the pieces of my own seems an apt metaphor for the role of his journal entries and experiences in this book and my life.

  The Pacific City dory that I built incorporated pieces gathered from the remains of the Teddy Bear. PHOTO BY JEFF HANNON

  I unclip the winch strap, lean my shoulder into the bow, and watch the Epilogue float free of her trailer. A hundred years after Joe slid the Teddy Bear off her skids into Lake Washington, part of her sails the waters of the Pacific Northwest once again.

  Notes

  1 Bob wrote a book about this impressive trip: Voyage in a Dory by R. N. DeArmond (Arrowhead Press, 1999).

  2 Inuit broadly covers the culturally similar indigenous people of the Arctic, including Greenland, Russia, Canada, and Alaska. In Alaska the term Eskimo is more widely accepted and encompasses both Yupik and Inupiat people, the Yupik not traditionally considered Inuit. In Canada and Greenland, Eskimo is not an acceptable replacement for Inuit. Joe used the terms more or less interchangeably, and I’ve not corrected him. I have tried to use the appropriate, specific name when possible or the more usefully generic term Native. Cultural distinctions and catch-all names are sticky areas, and my intention is only to make it easier to follow, not to minimize distinctions.

  3 The language of the Inuit and Eskimo people is more accurately seen as a series of related, unique dialects, or multiple languages. It’s likely Joe spoke enough of all the different dialects he encountered across the Arctic and that his Native associates picked up enough English from him and other explorers to piece together a workable pidgin that they all used to communicate.

  4 Rumor has it that Peter Bernard ran a brothel out of the back of his Nome sled shop. The rumor remains unsubstantiated—but not for lack of trying.

  5 The USDA in 2012 announced nearly $29 million in grants to plan and build water and sewer systems in sixteen villages where residents still use honey buckets and collect rainwater to drink.

  6 One reservation remains, the Annette Island Reserve in Southeast Alaska, where about 1,400 Tsimshian, Tlingit, and Haida live in the settlement of Metlakatla.

  7 Though Joe immersed himself in Eskimo culture, even he had limits. March 1917: “Kolok, his wife, put on a pot of seal meat with the stomach of a seal with its contents still in it. When it was cooked she dished up a large spoonful for me. The spoons are made of muskox horns and are used to dip the soup. The dipper contains a big portion and the stomach contents were mostly decomposed fish. They began to eat this and of course, Okomea offered me some. I refused.”

  8 Kedging, or warping, is a method of moving or turning a ship using a light anchor.

  9 The Alaska Board of Geographic Names recognizes the name Denali, or �
�the Great One.” The federal board recognizes Mt. McKinley, or “the Great Politically Motivated White One.” Since 1975 the state has petitioned for official recognition of the name given by the Koyukon Athabaskan people, but legislators from Ohio—McKinley’s home state—perpetually block the request.

  10 Technically, the westernmost point is actually a few miles outside Homer, in Anchor Point.

  11 A few months after my visit, a Cessna 206 like the one we flew disappeared into the 40-degree water just seconds after takeoff.

  12 The Virginia reel is an English country dance popularized in America in the late 1800s. The “Ruben talking records” were a series of recordings made by humorist Len Spencer about the fictional character Reuben Haskens from Skowhegan, Maine. In another eerie coincidence, a college professor friend made me a tape of Spencer’s Reuben collection to listen to on my drive to Alaska in 1999.

  13 In addition to Bernard Harbor, there’s a Bernard Spit and a Bernard Harbour in the Canadian Arctic, plus a Bernard Island and Bernard River both named for Uncle Pete. There’s also a Teddy Bear Island off the coast of Nunavut.

  14 Scarborough’s account saw publication circuitously more than half a century later. “The Voyage That Failed,” C. W. Scarborough, foreword by Alfred M. Bailey, The Alaska Journal, Winter 1974, vol. 4, no. 1.

  15 Niven’s interview with Rhode Island College professor Russell Potter, who has written at length about the Arctic and who has studied Joe’s involvement with Eskimo Village displays in California, is available online at www.ric.edu/faculty/rpotter/niveninterview.html.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks first and foremost to James Jayo and Laura Strachan for shepherding this book into print, to my lovely wife for her patience and support, and to my family.