Looking for Alaska (13 page)

“Jerry, good to see you,” Sam said first. “Have you and Peter met yet?” Sam's words were sort of clipped off at the end.

“In a way,” Jerry answered.

“Hey, Sam,” I said. “Whoever Jerry is, I think I owe him for guiding us in here through the fog. I wondered a few times if we were going to make it.”

“Welcome to Alaska.” Sam had an amused sense of calmness that made me wonder if anything could surprise him. “Peter, this is Jerry Mackie. He's from here, grew up here, he's Haida, he's the local state senator, he's going to fish with us.”

We shook hands.

Sam's Native Alaskan side comes from his mother, who is Tlingit. The Tlingits settled in the farthest northern places, the land mass and islands of Southeast Alaska. They share more culturally with the Indians of British Columbia than they do other Alaska Natives.

“You lose any weight on the way over?” Jerry smiled at me.

The woman with the chain saw chimed in, “I about … Oh, never mind.”

Then she spotted her partner, who had a red ponytail, and jogged toward him. When they met, she grabbed him and lifted him off the ground.

We walked up to a small wooden building that was used for ticketing and luggage and waited a few minutes for our bags. On the outside wall was a For Sale sign. It said, “For sale 100' × 35' float house. 30' × 30' full working wood-shop. Located near Saltery Cove, POW Island. Wood stove. Propane refrigerator. Full-size gas range. Two generators. This is a legally permitted float house. Fly or boat to house. $85,000.” It listed the name of the man in Craig to contact.

A plump Native woman in jeans so tight she could barely bend her knees hauled our luggage up to us on a Yamaha four-wheeler. We jumped into a white van—there are lots of roads on Prince of Wales Island—and drove less than a mile to the lodge where we would stay. In less than an hour, two fiberglass fishing boats full of Native leaders and me were headed out to the fishing grounds. We had changed into rain suits and XtraTuf rubber boots. Local people call these boots “Southeast tennis shoes.”

In our boat were Sam, Jerry, thirty-seven, Bill Thomas, Senator Al Adams, and me. Sam and I had met a few years before fishing for king salmon on the Kenai River. When I'd decided to explore Alaska, I knew that to have a “true” experience I would have to spend time in Native villages. I was sure it would be difficult, or even impossible, without some Native leaders who would be willing to speak for me, to open some doors.

I had read something revealing in J. Daniel Vaughan's dissertation, which was entitled “Alaska Haida and the New World Drama,” that had concerned me while preparing to explore Alaska. Mr. Vaughan wrote about the difficulty in getting Native people to answer questions, to speak about their history, to open up, to trust outsiders. He wrote an account of a woman trying to interview an elderly Haida man. His anecdote ends:

“Satisfied with what she had learned, the woman soon left the house. ‘Did you notice how she called me uncle?' the man asked me. ‘She did that so that I would have to talk to her and answer her questions.… Now she has her story on tape, she'll go back … and write it down just the way she wants to, as though it is the real story.… Those people I told her about were not real people at all.… They weren't people, they were mind stuff!… Well, from now on, Dan, you can ask me anything you want about the Haidas. I'll tell you anything you want to know and you can write it down just the way you like.”

Every year Sam invites some Native leaders here to Prince of Wales Island for an annual salmon fishing trip, and this year he'd asked me if I wanted to join them. He said it was one way for the leadership to get to know me—a bit—to determine if I could be trusted. Sam had explained that for hundreds of years whites and other non-Natives had been coming to Alaska, either trying to save them with their God or their different ways of life, resulting in a strong, deep-seated resentment and distrust of outsiders.

Over several decades Sam has become one of the most influential if behind-the-scenes Native leaders in Alaska. Alaska has so few people that little goes unknown. Sam makes a living as a lobbyist for certain Native organizations; he also represents the dentists of Alaska, the community-college federation of teachers, the Aleut community of St. George on the Pribilofs, and so on. Native Alaskans have had to fight hard to get where they are today. They have learned the hard way that getting represented fairly in the United States is still a war, but fought without guns or war canoes or whalebone clubs. Today, it is fought by lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians (or if you prefer, politicians, lobbyists, and lawyers).

Sam's Japanese father and uncle had come to the States to work in canneries, first in Seattle, then in Alaska. Their plan was to make some money and go back. They never did. Sam's father met and married a Tlingit. Sam grew up in Petersburg, Alaska, a mostly Norwegian-American fishing village not far from Prince of Wales Island. During World War II, Sam's family was put into an internment camp because his father was Japanese. In Sam's early days, when they would go to town to get ice cream, signs directed the whites to one place and nonwhites—Tlingits, Haidas, Japanese, whatever—to another. One of the bars in Petersburg is called Kito's Cave, a rough and rowdy fishermen's bar owned by one of Sam's cousins.

Al, another of our fishermen, is about Sam's age, and also has dark black hair, no gray yet. He's from Kotzebue, over twelve hundred miles northwest of here. Al is an Inupiat Eskimo and an elegant man. People love him immediately, a great trait for a politician to have. Some call him the Giorgio Armani of Kotzebue. To put these three words together only illustrates how extraordinary Al is. You may have a sense of Giorgio, and if you have been to “Kotz,” as the locals call it, you know what I mean.

In Alaska, now, the Republicans rule, and since Jerry changed from the Democratic to the Republican Party in 1998, he has become a powerful young man. Jerry is majority leader of the Alaska State Senate. He's fiscally conservative but definitely not a part of the right-wing extreme social agenda. He is a natural leader and politician. For example, when he was sixteen, no one seemed to want to show up to fight the fires that broke out around Craig that year. So, Jerry organized the disorganized volunteer fire department and soon there were twenty-plus volunteers.

Bill Thomas could pass for a retired professional football player, a middle linebacker. He is a Tlingit; Vietnam vet; a professional halibut fisherman; CEO of Klukwan, Inc., his local Native corporation; and a lobbyist. He lobbies when he is not fishing. Bill lives in Haines with his wife, Joyce, a gifted artist of Tlingit-based designs.

The testing, the judging, of me, the lone WASP, began early on.

“Peter, you ever seen an Eskimo fish without a spear before?” Al asked.

I wasn't sure what to say, so I didn't say anything. I'm not sure I'd ever seen an Eskimo before.

Bill chimed in, “Don't worry, Pete, you can't tell them Eskimos apart from any other Native when they're not in their igloos.”

Bill was not a man you would want to make angry. I could picture him in a raiding war canoe, the kind his ancestors used to stab fear into their adversaries. It would probably be a good idea to laugh at his jokes.

“Peter, you ever been with this many Natives before?” Al asked, his dark brown eyes dancing, I hoped, with mischief.

“No,” I said faintly.

“You look nervous. You think we might be planning to have you for dinner?” Al began to laugh. “You know how much we like raw meat. You ever eat stink flipper?”

“Yeah, Al, I, uh, teethed on stink flipper back in Connecticut.” Here's hoping Al has a good sense of humor.

At one time, when the Democrats controlled the Alaskan House and Senate, Al was chairman of the House Finance Committee and quite powerful. Now that the Republicans rule, it was frustrating for Al, and he would be retiring soon.

“What are we using for bait?” Sam asked me.

“How about Al,” Bill replied quickly.

“Nah, I'm too skinny, we need to use Sam, we'll catch more,” Al said.

Jerry, who was driving, didn't slow down as we made our way through a pass that went between two outer islands, west of Prince of Wales Island. We were close to Canadian waters. Once through the pass, which was edged by massive rocks, we came to the open Pacific Ocean. The Pacific was rolling under us, big rollers, white foam at the top of some of the waves. A rain came down on us that was really a mist. People around here call this mist “liquid sunshine.”

When we stopped, the tiny drops felt cool and soothing on my face and beard. I love being on the ocean, sitting, riding waves with distances between them, in a small boat, feeling like a cork. We pulled along one island, steep-sided with bare rock at the ocean level. Jerry told me this was Cape Addington. The smashing, pounding waves on the ocean side of the island kept anything from growing wherever they crashed. Spruce trees grew above the rock, and elegant waterfalls were here and there just waiting to be seen, meant to be painted into nineteenth-century landscapes. The dramatic lighting would not need to be manipulated by the artist; everywhere I looked was like a classic painting. We pulled up next to a boulder about the size of a two-story home coming out from the shore. It was time to fish.

Because the pass was so narrow, the tidal currents were strong in the pass, and therefore the small fish, the herring, the needlefish, were funneled in here. This in turn brought all the local ocean predators to feed here; about twenty bald eagles sat on the boulder, and that was just the mature eagles with white heads and tails, the ones we could see. Immature eagles are brown and white and were hidden by the colors of the rock. Many more eagles were diving into the water here and there, too many to see or count. There were also Steller's sea lions lounging on the rocks, huge and brown, fat and warm, laid out on their beds of stone.

The halibut can weigh over three hundred pounds and be well over six feet long. They too come here where the herring and the salmon thrive. Hopefully, the king salmon were here, thrashing, dashing, and feeding, gaining weight and power. They needed all the pent-up strength they could gain in order to reach their spawning rivers and creeks where they would lay their eggs, or fertilize them, and then die. And now we were here, the human predators, inept compared to the others, but attempting to catch our share.

All I could hear were the loud, absolutely pure sounds all around us. The notes made by the world here were boisterous and overpowering. The sounds made me feel more powerful one moment and intimidated the next. Ocean waves broke on the sheer rock of the west-facing islands they met. Mature bald eagles fought and taught their young, both activities requiring different sounds. Our motor gurgled when the propeller was raised out of the water by a passing wave. But none of these sounds compared to the blasting, concentrated whoosh of air that overcame all the rest the instant it occurred, less than twenty feet from the boat.

One moment there was just the surface of the water, and the next there was the black, bumpy, glistening back of a humpback whale. It exhaled, then inhaled and dove back to be completely surrounded by the water of the ocean, where it is the most massive predator of all. Apparently the whales were here too.

I put a piece of herring on my hook and dropped it to the bottom. We were in about seventy-five feet of water. Once the weight hit the bottom, I began reeling it up; the king could hit the bait anytime. We did this over and over and over, not talking, concentrating intensely to feel the slightest nudge that would mean a salmon had been hooked. We all wanted to be the first to catch one. Then Sam's line went limp as he dropped to the bottom—the weight below the hook was no longer keeping the line tight. Bill had said that the kings would often hit the bait on the way down. Sam set the hook and—
zoom
—the fight was on. Line instantly began peeling off his reel. The king salmon swam straight toward Japan and didn't stop until Sam bore down enough to turn it, after it had stripped off a large bit of line. What astounding power for a fish that probably did not weigh more than thirty-five pounds.

Sam pumped and reeled and pulled and fought. Tourists have been known to have heart attacks fighting these Alaskan kings. Sam is tough, though, and has serious sea legs. Waves, six feet and higher, were rolling into our boat, occasionally hitting it on its side, making it hard to stand. We had to hold on with one hand or sometimes both for extra balance. Sam could not spare even a finger in this all-out battle. He fought the king to the surface.

In the pristine, dark blue and green ocean I caught occasional flashes of its bright silver side as it neared the top. It was thrilling to watch. Sam reeled in the line, then the salmon would answer and take back whatever line Sam had reeled in and more. Sam said nothing; he knew from over sixty years of living in Alaska that you should never lose your focus when fighting the life-and-death battle with a king salmon. They will somehow win the struggle with those who can't keep total concentration. Even with fantastic focus, the kings can break your equipment or wear you out—anything to win and regain their freedom.

Jerry had the net ready. The fish made another run, this time off the back of the boat, almost wrapping Sam's line in the motor. It took more line than at any time before. Sam's strong back worked and fought and brought the king back close enough again to where Jerry thought he could net it. Jerry, a longtime fishing guide before he got into politics, knows you don't net an ocean-run king too soon. When they see the net, they seem to get a new burst of energy, enough often to break the line, get tangled—somehow, some way, to get away. To net one takes precise, definitive moves. Strike with the net if the king is not close enough to the top or is still too energized, and there is possible ruin. There may be nothing worse than fighting a magnificent king salmon with great skill and expenditure of strength, only to have the person with the net lose your fish. Jerry came within a foot of netting it; it responded by heading straight down to the bottom.