Authors: Christine Byl
Prince William Sound is a geologic wonder that is rarely described without superlatives. Oldest, longest, coldest, most diverse, best, clearest, wildest. In the decades-long aftermath of the 1989 Exxon oil spill: most delicate, most fragile, richest, most heartbreaking, at greatest risk. A 10,000-acre inlet off the Gulf of Alaska that laps at the southern coast of the state's mainland, the Sound is a saline depression born of plate tectonics and eons of glaciation, home to the array of northern maritime wildlife: sea lions, puffins, seals, whales, pelagic birds of all kinds. Kittiwakes by the thousands nest in rookeries. Murrelets and guillemots bob on the waves in rafts. Cormorants hunch on rocks; oystercatchers patrol beaches, protecting their hidden eggs.
Where birds live, of course, there are fish. All kinds of fish. Schools of swirling herring and eulachon have been integral to native diets and are critical calories for predatory fish, birds, and mammals. The eulachon, (or “hooligan,” following its phonetic pronunciation) is an anadromous fish so oily it's called “candlefish” because when dried, strung on a wick, and lit, it will burn. Fishing has been a lynchpin of Sound communities since the first Eyak fished from kayaks, and in today's economy, fishing is a commercial industry, a sport for tourists, and a subsistence pastime for residents of coastal towns and villages. Halibut and salmon are the cash crops, the catches that draw most commercial boats and seasonal tours to troll the Sound. Halibut is a type of flounder, a deep-sea flatfish with a migrated eye atop the head. They can live at depths beyond two hundred feet, along with harvestable rockfish, cod, and the occasional ill-tempered and unappealing skate (perfect for fish sticks). Catching a halibut is no rush, akin to hauling in a sheet of plywood, but its meaty flesh and delicate flavor are incentive enough.
On the other hand, an ocean salmon run is a hoot. Five species of salmon spawn in the Sound in summer. Salmon gorge themselves in the ocean to prepare for the long haul to their birthplaces, where they'll drop their eggs and sperm. Bright and lively, they arc above the waves with the vigor that attends reproductive rituals. Gulls and eagles hover, waiting for an exhausted fish, a seiner's slurry cast overboard, the easy protein snag.
The Sound is destination for all manner of boats: bowpickers and gillnetters, cruise ships and cargo barges, Kleppers and purse seiners and Zodiacs. Its countless coves, fjords, passages, and arms are particular paradise for kayakers. The semiprotected waters confer safer travel for small crafts than the open seas of the Gulf of Alaska; frequent landforms and the sinewy curves of glaciated topography give respite from fetch, tempering the winds that billow over open water. On Prince William Sound, you could poke around in a kayak for decades and never visit the same place twice. Even at a faster traveling pace, say a twelve-glaciers-in-twelve-days push or a months-long expedition, the breadth of the Sound is difficult to fathom. From the air it looks like a shape-shifting amoeba, organic limbs snaky on all sides.
Like any ecosystem of such scope, the Sound encompasses contrast, with ecotonesâplaces where distinct biological communities abut each otherâat every turn. Forest slopes to shoreline, shore meets tide line, tide line drops to shallows, shallows deepen. Bus-size whales slip beneath boat keels, beginning or ending migration, while microscopic plankton drift the currents, awaiting direction. In a day of paddling you might glide beneath the ice-aged face of a glacier, katabatic winds watering your eyes, and half an hour later tuck into a plate glass cove with swampy kelp draped on the water, plovers after bugs at the shoreline, a torpid sea otter tailing your boat. Batten down hatches for a long crossing, and as you weave between grimy container ships bound for Japan and cruise ships decked with toasting retirees, the Sound seems the world's crossroads. Then find land again, duck into a long, slim arm where your buddy's boat is the only one visible, and the sea seems like a private away you've entered via wardrobe.
The lure of the Sound is wide cast. Tourists and Alaskans alike wax eloquent on its “extensive charms,” its “lifetime of exploring possibilities.” True as they are, these accolades can ring as hollow as a chamber of commerce brochure. Longtime Sounders, those who have worked and explored the waters for years, speak of Prince William in intimate tones, tinged with possessive humility. They've seen the panoramic vistas on a day trip, and have also lived weeks out in damp fog under head nets to keep out mosquitoes, or been turned back from a destination by a wind that lasted days. They've admired the photo-shoot puffin colonies, and have also held crude-soaked birds in their gloved arms. They've hauled out fish-heavy nets and also mended them at night in oil-lamp cabins, puked in the cockpit while riding queasy swells, and fallen to sleep in narrow berths, cradle-rocked with cramped knees. Such an old-timer is a partner to the Sound, like half of a long-married couple who have shared the span of years, only to realize how much they still don't know.
I stood at the dock, on the beach, admiring veteran paddlers and fisher folk and researchers, their gravitas, their matter-of-fact allegiance to those waters, their confidence with the sea's moods. In contrast, I felt flighty and naïve, a giddy newlywed who'd barely dipped her toes into the cast shadows of true love's depth. My gaze was on some uncertain future, an anticipated history, romantic, and for the time, still unmade.
Coastal brown bears made Montana's grizzlies look like marmots. The first time I saw one on the Sound, I was tightening lag bolts on a bench near the Alaganik Slough, looked up and caught sight of what must have been the biggest male in the Cordova district. But when Steve joined me and we watched it feeding on sedges along the slough's bank, he said it was just a juvenile. He'd lived in Cordova for years, and he laughed and called me easily impressed.
Unlike the smaller inland bears, opportunistic omnivores with a hankering for the occasional carcass, coastal browns bulk up because most of their summer and fall calories come from salmon. Spawning stream banks are littered with half-consumed fish, tails and backbones left behind as bears rip out the bellies, rich with eggs and organ meat, and the heads, thick with brains. Eagles and gulls peck out the eye sockets of abandoned skeletons, and always in search of more, they trail bears on land, sea lions on the water, and fishermen in their orange Helly Hansens filleting on the dock. My naturalist friend tells me that in the course of an average salmon's spawning ritual, it benefits 136 species. Like the biblical catch made sufficient for 5,000, most salmon feed more than one mouth.
And not just ursine mouths, or avian ones, or the rooted mouths of moss and trees. Coastal people take cues from coastal bears, growing full on what's near. A midsummer potluck dinner in Cordova offered: sockeye salmon fillet, king salmon croquettes, pickled silver salmon with onions, pink salmon dip. Mountain goat meatloaf, salmon roe, black bear steaks, moose burgers, salmonberry jam, blueberry pie, salmon milt on crackers. In one Crock-Pot, there was stewed alligator brought back from someone's trip down south, the only meat on the table not shot, caught, gutted, or wrapped in Cordova within the last nine months. Except for half a package of hot dogs, which the kids, like scavenging gulls, scarfed down with $4-a-bag white-flour buns.
In Glacier, hitch transport was a string of mules, the end of a backcountry stint signaled by the chuff of horsey breath and the smell of sweaty flanks beneath pack saddles. In Cordova, hitch transport was a boat or a bush plane, both signaled by a mechanized roar and the odor of fuel. I definitely missed the mules, but there was something heady about packing tools under the prow of a silvery dinghy in a stiff wind, buckling up float coat as an extra layer of warmth for the ride home, or tossing duffel into the rear of a fixed-wing flown by a salty fiftysomething woman who'd been piloting small craft in Alaska since she got her license at age seventeen. In this new country my hiking prowess, nurtured over years of long miles, was barely necessary. The memorized knots and hitches, all the rules for safe passage on trails with stock, out the window. In land this massive, passage home meant rocketing through sea spray, the
thwack
of hull on swells, or humming below the clouds with the quilted earth below confirming what I'd already guessed: the usual scale is useless here, everything farther, wilder than I imagined.
The five kinds of wild salmon that navigate Alaska's waters are commonly known as king, red, silver, pink, and dog. Their other names are chinook, sockeye, coho, humpy, and chum. To remember the correlations, make up sayings: Chinook is a name fit for a King. If you're Socked in the Eye, it turns Red. Coho glitters like a Silvery jewel. The parts you use for Humping are Pink. And everyone knows, a Dog is man's best Chum.
All spring in Cordova, Gabe and I vacillated between delight in the unusual place we'd landed, and grim comparisons to “how it was in Glacier.” We took to mocking each other gently, waking in the morning to sheet rain on windows, shoveling in cereal with a whine: “This isn't how oatmeal tasted in
Gla-cier.
” We parodied ourselves, but here's what we meant. Glacier meant friends, people we'd known for years. Cordova meant co-workers, often testy, missing home (like us). Glacier had seven-hundred-plus miles of trail; Cordova Ranger District had about thirty. No more eight-day hitches, long miles of sawing, those body-busting ten-hour days. Cordova hitches were shorter and rare; mostly, we worked eight hours local, and returned to an overheated apartment every night, where I played Scrabble with our white-haired landlady, Rose. Delicate and proper, her lacy living room downstairs belied a steely past. She grew up on a fox-farm island in the Sound and ran her own bowpicker for years. This is what we meant: Glacier was ours. Cordova belonged to others.
Also, there was the Forest Service. It's an honorable organization in many ways, and the Cordova district was full of excellent folks. But the rumors we'd heard for years about the “Forest Service mentality” were true. A laxity, a sluggishness pervaded the agency. Paperwork for everything short of a bathroom break, drawn-out weekly meetings, ridiculous regulations. At the shop in the morning, where was the old urgency, the rush to see whose crew got out the door first, which person could carry the most tools? Though Glacier trails sometimes felt like boot camp, all stoicism and hike-till-you-drop bravado, I missed that sense of purpose, that pride in being “industrial athletes,” as a ranger once dubbed us. We worked
hard.
In Cordova, one crew leader lobbied to “park and disappear” on gruesome weather days. He'd have napped in the truck with the heat on and the windows steamed up long past the end of lunch break. The Glacier guys would rather have died.
You've heard the stereotype of the lazy government worker leaning on the shovel, which fries me, since I've never sweated more blood than I have for the feds. But in Cordova, it fit. People leaned. They said, “Good enough for government work” and “We get paid by the hour” and “Job security.” Not that all the folks we worked with were lazy. Many of them worked hard, had solid skills and good spirits. Our foreman Steve busted ass when he joined us in the field, and seemed unaffected by the damp cold that made me whine. But crew chemistry is inexplicable; something was missing. That underlying adrenaline, the push that made you work till you couldn't stand up, and the satisfaction that went with that kind of effort. I couldn't find it. Sometimes, trying to infuse the morning, the day, with that kind of vigor, it felt like swimming upstream.
Even compared to a cherished job left behind, though, Cordova had plenty of charms. Glacier gets about one million tourists in six months, most of whom come through in cars, and popular trailheads are jammed by 9 a.m. Cordova sees a fraction as many tourists annually, spread out over ocean and forest in boats, on bikes, in rubber boots. Without the cruise-ship traffic of Alaska's deepwater ports, it's blissfully free of the RVs and tour-bus hordes that flood the rest of the state, buying up key chains. Glacier was a distinctly seasonal place, where everything shut down come September. Cordova's local population drops by half when the summer fleet leaves, but still, it feels like people's working home.
The idea of home kicked me out at the knees that summer, balance awfully hard to find. Despite my penchant for the new adventure, I realized I was not so different from most people, looking over shoulder at the thing I'd left behind. Cordova was magical, one of the most vivid places I'd ever beenâsea smell, bird noise, craggy peaks, wide sky. The work was novel, the commute over ocean thrilling. But it wasn't home. Cordova intrigued me, seduced me, but in the end, did not enfold me. I couldn't relax into its pace and expectations. With hindsight I see that, like a bad breakup, it wasn't Cordova; it was me. Glacier ushered me through a coming of age. Like a first love, Glacier occupied a place in my psychic geography that couldn't be usurped by the grandeur of the next place. To really love Cordova, I needed time.
What did I even mean by home? One place I'd left but not forgotten. Another place I lived in, and even loved, yet it wasn't home, either. I was adrift in questions. Can two places both feel as deeply like home? Could home be somewhere you never lived again? Is it wrong to love two places at once? (If not, why did I feel so torn?) Does being rooted require geographical monogamy, the fealty to place that was once common? Is home where you are, or how you imagine where you are? Can you build a home out of questions, stockpiling them like a beaver dragging sticks, until you have made a structure around you safe enough to crawl into and rest?
On the Sound, weather changes with sunrise and sunset, moon phase, seasons, the tides. Ocean turns from chop to glass in minutes. You might predict it if you've read your barometer right, or heard a forecast, but change will sometimes catch you unaware. Before crews board the Whaler each morning, we file a float plan. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is the federal agency in charge of, for all practical purposes, weather reports, and we use their forecast. The acronym, NOAA, combined with the computerized male voice that delivers most reports, births the colloquial reference to the invisible weatherman as Noah, and upon hearing his digital pronouncements, through echo and static, how can we not think of Genesis, Noah sky-turned, awaiting the deluge and making notes? “Winds out of the southeast, 10 to 15 knots,” he drones, robotically. “Seas, three feet.” No flood in sight. Work-worthy weather. Two by two, and we're off.