Upstream

by Langdon Cook

  “The morning commute!” Ess said brightly, with a sardonic grin that said he’d spent enough time in the Lower 48 to know the difference. He gripped his coffee in a yellow enamel camp mug and ate a donut. Uncombed brown hair poked out from beneath his ball cap, and he pushed it out of his eyes. Short and trim, he looked younger than his mid-thirties, with sharp, almost elfin features and a wispy beard. Another boat paralleled us across the channel, off our port side. “That’s an angry little boat,” Ess said, refusing to make eye contact with its captain. He had words for the man. Gruff. Uncivil. “I was gonna squeeze him a little bit, but you can’t go there. We went toe-to-toe at the board meeting the other day.” The meeting was for fishermen who were trying to work together to keep their livelihood prosperous in a time of increasing mechanization and competition. This sort of collaboration had already helped to make Copper River salmon the most recognized wild salmon in the world. The fishery had come a long way since Jon Rowley first approached a few gillnetters with his ideas about bleeding and icing the catch for the fresh market. Now other wild salmon fisheries in Alaska were retooling in the same way. Ess said it was crucial for his fellow fishermen to work together.

  The Cordovan fleet has gone through expansions and contractions through the years. Recently it’s recovered from a slump spurred by farmed salmon in the nineties. With consumer education and renewed market interest in wild salmon (and higher prices), the fleet is gearing up again—with bigger boats, bigger catches, more skin in the game. There are more than five hundred boats in the gill-net fleet, and each year the price to buy in increases. While Ess thought his fellow fishermen had done a good job of banding together to promote their fishery, there are always, in a place like this, the go-it-alone types who revere the “last frontier” narrative about Alaska and masculinity and what it means to work in the outdoors. To Ess, the captain of the boat across the channel represented a throwback of sorts—a guy who was resourceful and independent on the one hand yet had trouble with the basic skills of getting along with other people on the other. “He’s just an asshole, is what he is,” Ess said finally.

  For many Americans, especially those on the West Coast, it’s this rough-hewn, antediluvian aspect of the place that’s most appealing. Alaska is the ace in the back pocket, the place to escape to when everything finally goes to hell elsewhere—politically, socially, economically…environmentally. Just build a little cabin somewhere and live off the land. Alaska is essential to the American perception of itself. Without it, we’re just another vote in the United Nations. I wondered how much of this is true. Certainly Alaska is still big and mostly empty, but is it as immune to the pressures of civilization as is generally believed?

  Bald eagles glowered from rock piles that stood up out of the water like haystacks. Ess called them pigeons. To our right was Hawkins Island. It rose steeply from the shore to dark, forested summits. Ess studied its contours as we passed. Hunting season was just around the corner. “That’s the mountain I’ve been scouting,” he said, pointing to a dark knob outlined against a purple sky. Whenever he went by Hawkins, he looked for deer. A pair of binoculars hung from a peg, but it was still too early to see much. He’d whittled down his target to a couple of large bucks that stayed high. “It’s this time of year I look at the tops of those little mountains. I just love to get up into that high country. It’s rocky, with ponds where the deer come down to drink, and all the trees are like bonsais because they’re so windswept and close to the ground and gnarly. It feels like a fantasy world up there, a land of gnomes.” On our left we passed a derelict clam cannery. Before the salmon fishery, Cordova was known for its copper mines and its shellfish, razor clams in particular. The copper mines played out eventually, and the shellfish, I would learn, came to an abrupt, earth-shattering end. A line of green and red markers guided us through the channel, narrowing to less than a hundred feet wide. The depth was barely double-digit.

  We passed a much larger boat, a tender, with booms sticking out like the arms of a scarecrow to operate hydraulic winches, which transfer and weigh the bowpickers’ catch. It rocked gently at anchor, its lights still out. This was one of many tenders currently on the water to buy fish, most of them owned by large seafood processors like Trident and Ocean Beauty. Back in the harbor, the fishermen could also sell their catch directly to local land-based processors. At Copper River Seafoods, a huge workforce of mostly immigrants—Mexican, Filipino, Vietnamese, more than fifty of them in orange waders and white hard hats—brought the fish into the processing plant from containers via big vacuum tubes to a conveyor belt, where each salmon was headed, gutted, and graded before being shipped off to market. It’s a bloody business, the slime line, with one employee continually hosing down the floor. There was even a room devoted to making ikura, the cured salmon roe beloved in Japan. The processors dictated the terms. Each fisherman had a relationship with a particular company, one based on time, experience, and loyalty. Usually all the buyers were fairly close on price, so other perks might make one more attractive than another, and some of the buyers enforced fidelity through loans that the fishermen had to pay off. Ess didn’t want to put himself in that position, but next year, with a new, bigger boat, he might have no choice.

  Ess radioed his half brother, Ashton, who was a quarter mile ahead of us. “How’s it look?”

  “Wide open,” crackled the voice on the other end of the two-way. Though younger, Ashton owned one of the nicest boats in the fleet, a large aluminum state-of-the-art bowpicker with big inboard jets that could muscle through some of the rougher water the flats routinely doled out. Ess laughed at himself. He’d put his money into a little farm in Colorado, where he and his wife had a peach orchard; his little brother had bought a nicer boat. Ess wasn’t ready to decide which was the wiser choice.

  Up ahead, the water boiled and sprayed and made a commotion as we approached a shallow bar that marked a psychological boundary of sorts between the protected inner coastline and the wide Gulf of Alaska. Ess told me to brace myself. “We’ll shoot through a tiny gut between the beach and the breaker patch. Sometimes these waves can be six, seven, eight feet, and you need to be on your game so you don’t get smashed in the side by one of them. It’ll be exciting.” Even though today’s swells were only three feet, it still seemed slightly iffy. “If you add a little wind, they can get big quick.” Ess throttled up and punched through a regiment of standing waves, crossing a turbulent stretch about the width of a football field, and that was it. We’d crossed the bar.

  Following the southern shore of Hinchinbrook Island, we headed west. “This is a really powerful place for me,” Ess said. He’s seen grizzly cubs scampering along the beach in the past, and he considers the island’s bear population to be one of the most ferocious anywhere because they’d adapted to hunting deer. “You’ve got to be careful packing out a kill from here. I carry a little chunk in a game bag that I can sling to the bears.” Right now there was just a lone raven, jet black against bone-white sand, looking around mischievously. Bears, ravens, eagles, salmon. It’s a land of totems. Virtually every living thing is freighted with myth and meaning. Ess repeated an old tale, the story of the Woman Who Married a Bear, which taught generations of Tlingit children to respect the bears that lived in the forest among them. He figured he was about one-eighth Native American—White Earth Ojibwe—from his mother’s side of the family in Minnesota. “She came up here from the res when she was eighteen.” Ess said she had decided to face the natural environment rather than an abusive relationship at home. Directly or indirectly, nature is the arbiter of all fates in a place like this.

  ON GOOD FRIDAY, MARCH 27, 1964, the Pacific and North American tectonic plates collided. In what’s known as a subduction-zone earthquake, the oceanic plate dove under the continental plate, causing a magnitude 9.2 “megathruster,” with an epicenter seventy-five miles south of Anchorage. It was the strongest earthquake ever recorded in North America. It rumbled for four and a half minutes, and when the i
nitial shock was over, solid ground from Anchorage to Kodiak Island had liquefied. Thirty people in the town of Valdez died when the ten-thousand-ton freighter S.S. Chena listed and destroyed the city docks. A tsunami swamped the native village of Chenega, killing another twenty-three. In Seward, an oil-tank field exploded in a ball of fire, incinerating twelve. Landslides rearranged the city of Anchorage, demolishing schools, toppling the airport’s control tower, and obliterating some neighborhoods entirely. Buildings in Seattle swayed. Even Houston, Texas, hopped up for a moment. One source reported that for two weeks “the entire planet vibrated like a giant gong as the seismic waves circled the globe.” In all, nearly 140 people lost their lives. Cordova, the self-proclaimed razor clam capital of the world, saw its waterfront upended. Tidal flats disappeared in an instant—and the shellfish economy with them.

  Twenty-five years later, on another Good Friday, March 24, 1989, a different sort of environmental disaster struck, its effects still felt today. The Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound to the northwest of Cordova and disgorged its cargo of crude oil. The tanker hit Bligh Reef (named after the ill-fated captain of the Bounty) with a hull filled with 55 million gallons of oil, spilling anywhere from 10 million to 32 million gallons, depending on which source you believe. This time the fishing economy of the region was even more devastated. Herring and shrimp fisheries vanished overnight in a plume of muck. For months, TV-news cameras flashed images of oil-soaked sea otters and blackened shorebirds; they were many Americans’ introduction to the wild beauty of Alaska and its mighty oil industry. A quarter century later and oil still clings to beaches. “We had an Alaskan dream, and that dream was intact for several thousands of years,” an Eyak tribal member from Cordova told NPR on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the spill. “Our way of life and our Alaskan dream was stolen from us.”

  These are the twin events that shaped modern Cordova’s fishing economy and undoubtedly its psyche. The first ended its renown as a shellfish producer, and the second threatened to take away everything else. Copper River salmon had not yet become a recognized brand name when the oil spilled. Micah Ess was a little boy at the time, living in Prince William Sound. His memory of the disaster, especially what would follow in its wake, was hazy. It was more of a feeling that he kept inside, the feeling that his place in the world could be taken away in an instant. He and Ashton were being homeschooled on a houseboat while their parents shrimped. “My dad had a big huge beard, long hair. He looked like the Creedence Clearwater Revival guy. My mom was totally hippied out. I was a little snot-nosed kid. Super patchy, woolly, old hand-me-down clothes. We were dirt-broke.” There was no money in shrimp, and it was hard work. The family could barely live off their meager earnings. “When we went to town we’d shy away from people. We were homesteaders.” Instead, Ess learned to love the wildlife that surrounded him. “I’ve got this great connection with the earth and animals. Humans are my sticking point.” Shrimping ended with the oil spill. Ess and his brother left Alaska for college in Colorado, but neither could stay away. “My head was always out the window, in the trees. I have a hard time with the teacher–student relationship, probably because I’m a know-it-all and I don’t take directions very well. I didn’t handle the classroom politics. Plan B was staring me in the face. I could just go fishing.” Now he was in business for himself as a gillnetter, married, and ready to start a family.

  I suppose I imagined the populace of Cordova—of Alaska in general—to be mostly born-and-raised frontier folk, springing right out of the womb in flannel and side holsters. And it’s true that the town can seem like a regression to simpler times, full of resourceful citizens living off the land and its bounty. But it’s also full of seekers from all over the globe, armed mainly with a willingness to work hard and learn. Earlier that week I met a young woman named Blair, who had graduated from college in Seattle and was now working to promote the fishery. She arrived with fifty dollars in her jeans and pitched a tent at Hippie Cove, the free camping area just outside of town. Before signing on with the Copper River Marketing Association, she went to work for a hunting outfitter. By the end of the season Blair could dress a moose and make an excellent camp dinner with a freshly killed Dall sheep. Now, a year later, she had traded her tent for a house on the hill shared with a fisherman named Curly and a couple of other folks. Curly, with a sonorous voice that suggested a former radio career, had been fishing the area since 1968 and was eligible for Social Security, not that he wanted a government check. He lived half the year in Portland, Oregon, where his wife was a schoolteacher. In between salmon openings we went mushroom hunting together. He introduced me to the nagoonberry, a blackberry relative that grows close to the ground and has a tropical flavor that belies its tundralike habitat. Later that night Curly grilled up some of his home-pack salmon with a wild cranberry barbecue sauce. After dinner someone played a YouTube video of commercial sockeye fishing in Bristol Bay to the west, arguably the most famous salmon fishery on the planet, and we all gathered round, marveling at the proximity of the fishermen to one another in a little inlet jammed with boats. The intensive competition in Bristol Bay was not for them, though they admitted that tensions could mount on the Copper River flats too.

  Curly’s son, Alec, tall and lanky like his father, was also in town. I found him one afternoon mending a net on the docks. “This isn’t what catches fish,” he said, pointing to a fancy new bowpicker moored next to him. “This”—tying knots and fixing holes—“catches fish.” Alec hadn’t planned to be a gillnetter. “I got a degree in economics. I tried working in that world for about a year.” This was a common refrain among many of the gillnetters. Then he taught English in Japan. “I wasn’t outside all day long. That’s when it clicked that my dad had it figured out. Part of the allure is being your own boss. You have your own boat. You fish when you want to fish. You’re a business owner, running your own operation.” When he told his mother, she had a look of complete and utter disappointment on her face. “She’s coming around since I bought in with my own boat,” he quickly added. His bowpicker was called the Cheryl and I. He bought it for twenty-five thousand dollars from a fisherman who’d named it after his ex-wife. “I had every intention of changing the name, but there’s a lot of bad luck associated with changing boat names if you don’t go about it the right way—if you’re superstitious.” Come wintertime, Alec teaches snowboarding in Girdwood, an hour east of Anchorage.

  Dennis, another gillnetter, had also tried the straight and narrow. “I was going to college to be a mechanical engineer and realized I’d probably be wearing a tie, sitting behind a computer.” The summer before his senior year he came up to Cordova and got on a boat. “Within two weeks of being here I fell totally in love. I went back, finished my degree, then came up the day after I graduated.” Besides selling to the processors, Dennis was trying to market smoked salmon directly. Michael and Nelly Hand, whom I’d joined for sunset on the Reluctant Fisherman’s deck, were trying to do the same thing, with a new business called Drifters Fish. You could make a lot more money selling direct, but it also required time to package and ship the salmon and even more time to market and build a clientele. Sometimes in the off-season Dennis ran a trapline. He also guided for moose, brown bears, and sheep. “This is a harsh country in the wintertime,” he said. “Everything’s looking for something to eat.” Another gillnetter I had hoped to meet, a friend of Curly’s, was in the hospital. She’d been torn up and nearly killed by a grizzly a few weeks earlier, while walking a friend’s dog.

  Many of Cordova’s gillnetters head south in the winter. Before returning to Colorado, Ess dry-docks his boat for four hundred dollars in a gravel lot up by Six-Mile, on the road to the airport. Each year he writes a letter to himself at the end of the fishing season, with a to-do list. Then, when he arrives back in Cordova the following spring, he knows exactly what needs fixing. He uses the lead time to make purchases or fabricate metal parts for the boat. He has friends who own a machine shop in tow
n. “I can weld aluminum and do some machining. I drop off a case of beer and they open their doors for me. If I see anything that’s cracked, I’ll pop it off the boat and throw it in the truck and take it up there and hammer on it.”

  This year he gave himself only a week of lead time. There were no big projects. The boat was musty, of course, and needed to be dehumidified and scrubbed. He washed linens and restocked food. The atmosphere around town crackled, as usual. He loves the run-up to the first opening. “People are pumped. We’re all getting together and talking.” The season opener is usually in mid-May, which is before it gets really good, so there’s time to iron out any issues. “You want to be on your game and get some fish. This year the opener had some weather, which was disconcerting because you don’t trust the boat the first time out after winter storage.”

  The season starts with king and sockeye. By the end of July the sockeye fishery is over and there’s a brief lull before the silver season gets going. Most of the fishing takes place around the Copper River Delta, one of the largest contiguous wetlands on the Pacific coast of North America. From the air it looks like a boundless marsh, nearly fifty miles wide at the mouth, where the river empties into the Gulf of Alaska with countless braided channels. It’s wild country. The day before, I’d taken a bush plane over the delta for a bird’s-eye view. A mama grizzly with two cubs stood up on her hind legs and stared at us as we went by, her massive head turning in the direction of our props. The pilot wondered if this was the same bear that had been surprising recreational anglers on the Ibeck River outside town and pilfering their catch. “I wouldn’t fish too far from the road down there,” he said.