Looking for Alaska (24 page)

Being able to drive away, to listen to great long and winding road songs, is not that big of a deal to Alaskans. You cannot even drive to Juneau, the capital of Alaska. Alaskan citizens who are tough on politicians say that the governor, state senators, and representatives like being isolated and hard to reach. They claim Alaskan politicians hide behind their mountains and glaciers. In Alaska it's difficult to get mad enough at what the politicos are doing to go to the capital and protest when you can't drive there.

Roads in general are difficult to build and maintain in much of Alaska, always have been. Just as you'd imagine, the state gets massive amounts of snow in many parts. In some passes they get over seventy-five
feet
per winter. Valdez, the community closest to Cordova to the northwest, but still really hard to reach from Cordova, has so much snow they have in the past used the resulting banks as movie screens. The abundant snow around Valdez is one of the main reasons they host the extreme-snowboarding championships every winter. Then there is permafrost, ground that never thaws completely. In some places in Alaska they only have roads
after
everything freezes. They build them on the frozen foundations of snow and ice. All in all, though, there aren't many roads in Alaska, and what roads do exist are deeply appreciated and even loved for the freedom of movement they allow, just as long as they don't bring too much interference too. Alaskans are a stubborn, strong people; they must be to survive. Please, don't get in their way.

Cordova is just up the coast from Seward, but there is no easy way to get there from our Alaska home. Cordova is considered one of Alaska's larger “cities,” even though it has only twelve hundred residents in the winter and twenty-five hundred in the summer. It is a city where, so far, fishermen and the people whom they support rule. The local voters have had several opportunities to vote on whether to build a road to connect them to the outside world. The road has never passed, although the last vote was the closest ever. The voters who oppose the road say the reason the vote is getting too close is because too many nonfishermen are moving into town. Even if they had a road, it would only be open in the summer, the time when most people in this fishing village are involved one way or the other in catching fish. The summer is their harvest time, when the fishermen of Cordova attempt to catch enough salmon and halibut to make the majority of their money, enough to get them through the year until the salmon and halibut return. They wouldn't get to use the road much, anyway. More important than a road is a protected place for their boats, and Cordova does have a fine natural harbor.

That the road would only be open in the summer aggravates plenty of Cordovans. Such a road would be loaded with tourists. Many Alaskans don't like driving on the same road with tourists. It would be like putting NASCAR drivers on the same racetrack with thousands of drivers like my grandfather at eighty-five. Lots of Alaskans drive like they're on the last lap of the Daytona 500 and they're one one-hundredth of a second in the lead. Tourists, on the other hand, often drive like my grandfather did right before he couldn't drive anymore because he couldn't hear and his sight was failing. They tend to speed up, then slow down to fifteen miles per hour, cross the centerline, weave onto the shoulder, and stop when there's no stop sign in sight. They drive like this not because they can't hear or can't see, but because they can. All around them their eyes and ears are filled with sights and creatures they've never seen. A bald eagle just plucked a salmon from the river running along the road. Eight tourist vehicles pull over, though there's no place for them to get completely out of the way. I once stopped right in a curve in Cooper Landing on the way to Soldotna to watch two eagles fighting over a salmon squirming on the icy bank of the river. It was not smart—there was even ice and snow on the road—but Alaska can overwhelm you until you do dumb things.

But tourists' driving habits are not the main reason certain Cordovans don't want a road. What would happen if outsiders could reach their lovely town? Cordovans aren't sure, but they have seen what's happened to the ranchers and small-town folk in Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming. Their high desert, their mountain valleys, their inspiring lands, have been discovered and much of it has been bought up. Alaskan fishermen are intelligent as well as ornery. They read national commercial-fishing magazines. They've read about their fellow fishermen in Florida. First people arrived as tourists, then they moved in and tried to take over the world that belonged to the fishermen. In Florida, some of these newly arrived used vicious tactics against the unorganized fishermen to push through a net-fishing ban in a statewide vote.

Cordovans know what has happened along all U.S. coastlines, where everybody wants waterfront property. They've read about the lobstermen of Maine, about others who harvest the sea on the West Coast, on the Gulf Coast. People with more money and more lawyers discovered these quaint, scenic fishing villages, where folks had been making a living at the world's second-oldest profession for generations. These Alaskan fishermen are worldly enough to understand what could happen to their quirky and attractive hometown if it was “discovered” by some Ted Turner type, who after making his hundreds and hundreds of millions decided to let everything go back to the bears or wolves or buffalo. One of these “know-it-all” people might try to buy up a chunk of the town as a personal retreat, have something to brag about at parties now that Aspen has been in the movie
Dumb and Dumber.

Cordova.
P
HOTO BY
R
EBEKAH
J
ENKINS

These fishermen know these kinds of people can have inordinate power in Washington and with the media. Alaskan commercial fishermen have more political power than any other fishermen do in the United States, but mostly that influence is in Alaska. It is shrinking. Sport fishermen like me want our fish too. The commercial fishermen don't mind these kinds of people coming to visit or even getting a summer place, just as long as they respect what Cordova is and what they do. Just don't try to tell the fishermen how to make their living or where to store their boats. These fishermen and their families are ready to fight for their world, without surrender.

I imagine many people would side with the Cordovans who don't want a road. The slogan No Road sounds so cool. No Road sounds almost as good as Save the Rain Forest. Who could be against it? It's easy to be against roads and oil drilling and the harvesting of wood when you already have as much of them as you could possibly use. How many would be against a road if they had none? Most of us have never spent a second thinking about roads, because there are so many, enough to take us in every single direction our lusty hearts might desire.

Right now the only way out of Cordova is on the Alaskan State Ferry, on your own boat, or by plane. None of the options are cheap. The way out on the sea is real slow, and you're still on foot when you get where you're going. For those who don't want a road to Cordova, such as the people I was going to visit, it's not about the romance; it's about the desire to save their way of life.

If you live in Cordova, you can drive fifty-one miles without going around and around. In Alaska, that's a bunch of road. In Angoon, on Admiralty Island, they are proud to have just three miles of road, “all paved.” Some Cordova locals think their mostly Mayberry police department should not have gone so Rambo and bought the used “high pursuit” police cars from that police department in Nevada. In Nevada it's dry and flat and people can try to outrun the police. In Cordova, all you can do to get away from the police is go out the road and past the airport before you have to come back. No one would even try to walk away from here but Wild Gene, and he would never have caused the police any trouble anyway. You could use the slowest police car in the country and just ease out the road past Lake Eyak, park, and wait. Technically, you could just wait in town until whomever you're chasing comes back. Besides, in a high-pursuit police car you could hit a nesting trumpeter swan if you ran off the road.

If Rebekah and I had been ready one day earlier, we could have taken the Alaska Marine Ferry over there from Seward. It takes eleven hours and covers 144 nautical miles, which is 164 “normal” miles for those of us road-addicted people. Many, many Alaskans gauge their travel more by nautical miles, air miles, or hours down the trail. The cost for the ferry was only $64.

HANGING BASKETS

Rebekah, my firstborn child, who is almost twenty, was sitting next to me on the milk run to Cordova. They call this Alaska Airlines flight the milk run because it stops so many times. Anchorage, Cordova, Yakutat, Juneau, Ketchikan, and finally Seattle. When the salmon are running into the Copper River delta, which is the main catch of Cordova fishermen, the jets on the milk run have large cargo sections loaded with fresh king, red, and silver salmon, high-dollar fresh fish, headed for the markets and best restaurants in Seattle and beyond. Reds and kings are worth more as cargo than any human per square foot. Rebekah was in the middle seat; a handsome, blond Scandinavian-looking guy with earrings in both ears was in the window seat next to her. She handed me her CD player and asked me if I'd heard of Dave Matthews. I wasn't sure, I said. I never thought I'd lose track of who made the best music, but I wasn't paying so much attention to popular trends anymore. She said I must have a listen, she just knew I'd like it. I was a Dave Matthews fan after hearing her two favorite songs. Responding so intently this quickly to new music was rare for me. I closed my eyes, laid my head back, and listened.

When I opened my eyes to tell Rebekah how awesome I thought her music was, she was lost in conversation with the strong blond. Turned out he was headed to Petersburg, Alaska, the fishing village they call “little Norway,” to crew on his dad's long-line halibut boat. He was a sophomore at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Being with Rebekah was an almost constant replay of my younger life. I watched her relate to people; I remembered what it was like. I listened to her music, some of which was mine first—Van Morrison, the All-man Brothers. I was honored she would even go to Cordova with me, but I got the feeling sitting on the plane she would have liked to change her plans and head to Petersburg. There was no way I could have hung around with my mother when I was Rebekah's age.

Landing the 737 at Cordova, if that's what we were doing now, was at once frightening and otherworldly. As we made our approach, if that's what it was, I couldn't even see a runway or any airport buildings, just the many fingers of the Copper River delta. It looked almost like the Mississippi River delta, except it was surrounded by plane-humbling mountain ranges and glaciers. It was raining one second, sunny the next, foggy here and there, over this chunk of Alaska. The jet engines seemed to be making a noise I hadn't heard before, but then I've learned that flying experiences in other places have little to do with Alaska.

We landed. There was no fence around this runway, which appeared to be hacked out of the wilderness by renegade bulldozers; what if a moose or a bear had been standing in our way? We could see one small building. Everybody got off and walked down some stairs into the real world. Inside the building were plaques celebrating that 2 million pounds of wild salmon and halibut had passed out of Cordova's airport on their way to the outside world. Some mounted salmon were on one wall alongside a diagram of the Copper River delta, which is one of the world's most alive, productive, and clean wetland areas. How did they ever get bulldozers out here, not to mention gravel and asphalt to make a runway? All over the state, Alaskans land planes on surfaces you have to see to believe.

We had arranged to meet up with Per Nolan, a local salmon fisherman. His wife, Neva, had invited us to come stay with them after she had heard me interviewed by the guru of Spenard, Alaska, Steve Heimel of Alaska Public Radio. She said she had known me from my earlier writings, and they wanted to show us their slice of Alaska. Alaska is one big pizza. Neva said it would be good if I could go out with a gillnetter while I was here, but her husband was a big guy and there was only one small bunk on his boat. We'd have to see about that. I asked Neva if it would be all right if I brought my daughter Rebekah with me. Neva said, great, bring the whole family. That was a typical Alaskan response. They always seem ready to take you in, feed you, provide you with shelter. It's been that way forever up here. Imagine Per as a cross between John Candy and an offensive lineman for the University of Idaho. He is funny; large-framed, not cut like a bodybuilder, he is surprisingly spry on his feet when he needs to be. Until you experience Per in a bar, you wouldn't know he is also a pool shark and the life of the party. Per is an observer. He was in college in Hawaii when John Travolta and disco hit, and he told us he had had the “disco fever” shiny suit, the open-at-the-chest shirt, the gold chain, and the platform shoes. After being in Cordova only a half hour, I could not imagine him wearing anything like that. Cordova is a flannel-shirt, blue-jeans, and work-boots kind of place.