Looking for Alaska Page 9

  “One time flying this same route to Prince of Wales Island I saw a pool of orcas attacking a humpback whale,” the biker babe said. I could not really think about that, I was too consumed with who this guy was, acting like he was going to fly the plane.

  The guy revved up the engine; I thought he must be warming up the motor for the still unseen pilot. It was now raining directly over us. A hundred yards to our left I couldn’t see through the fog, yet a half mile behind us the sun was shining and it was clear blue skies.

  Some guy, even younger, appeared beside us on the dock. He reached down and untied us from the dock’s moorings. The young guy in the Broncos hat, who didn’t look old enough to be a weatherman at the smallest TV station in Alaska, let the current take us, then powered up the motors and we headed out. He was the pilot. There were boats everywhere. I knew there was no way we were going to take off with this much boat traffic in our way. Right?

  I glanced over at this guy in the copilot’s seat, Jerry. He was looking out the window.

  “Excuse me, what kind of plane is this?” I asked.

  I had to speak loudly, in the direction of his ear.

  “You ever flown on a floatplane?” he answered. I detected a strong energy in his voice.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, you’re on a DeHavilland Beaver.”

  “Oh.” We sped across the waves, through the pelting rain. I could feel the aluminum floats on the plane pounding so hard on the water it was as if we were taking off from a fresh-plowed, furrowed dirt field.

  “They stopped building these planes in the fifties,” Jerry volunteered.

  “In the what?”

  “In the fifties.”

  That’s great. This plane could have been built the year I was born. I sure don’t fly the way I did when I was younger.

  When would we ever take off? Were we having some kind of trouble? Hopefully, I had guessed close to my actual weight, and so had everyone else. “Come on, plane, come on, come on, plane, please lift off the water.” I think I even spoke my hope out loud, though no one could have heard me. It was very noisy inside the cockpit by now.

  For a time just as we began to lift, maybe three seconds, though it felt like much longer, it looked as if we might run into a slow-moving, black-hulled tugboat. Finally with the plane off the water, the pilot banked it hard to the right. The pilot upped the power dramatically to get us over the green mountains in front of us.

  Ahead spread out before us was an ever-changing shutter of white-gray clouds dangling from the silver walls of rain. Would there be the holes in the clouds to fly through? If you had to wait for ideal weather to fly in Alaska, there wouldn’t be much flying.

  These planes were not flown using autopilots; the human pilot must be able to see. We climbed and climbed; the plane seemed to have plenty of power. I heard Jerry say something to the pilot about this plane having had a turbo conversion done to its engines, whatever that meant.

  Without warning we hit something and the plane dropped, then slammed into some kind of fierce air. I don’t understand much about air masses, but these didn’t like each other. If I hadn’t had my seat belt on, I would have popped up and hit the ceiling of the plane with my head. The plane had no windshield wipers, and the overwhelming rain blasting at us had to be pushed off the glass by the wind. It sounded as if machine guns were shooting BBs at us.

  I pressed my face to my side window, but when I did, it fogged up. I could see nothing in front of us but banks of clouds. If I were just a spirit, capable of passing through physical reality, which is the way I felt in the clouds at times, this could be joyful. If we’d cleared Gravina Island, then we were supposed to be flying over Clarence Strait. I tried to look down; there was nothing but clouds and fog. Were we over a glacier? How would we know if we were headed left or right? Was the pilot disoriented?

  There, below us—if that was below us—something dark appeared, then it was gone. There it was again. It looked like the ocean. Then it was gone, then it was back. I saw another hole in the clouds, and in it I saw something that was not the open ocean. It was the land, covered with evergreens, mature and tall. Then into the hole came large boulders, perched on the edge of the ocean. Then, as quickly, the gray hid everything again. I could feel my body tightening with every droning moment. The muscles in the back of my neck were strung so tight it felt as if they could pull my head back until my skull hit my back.

  It seemed just a matter of time before we would hit something that would tear the plane and all of us apart. I’d always wondered about when a plane crashes. How much force is required to tear it into so many tiny pieces, with people actually missing body parts here and there? The impact must be unimaginable. Right now we could be headed straight into a mountain and wouldn’t know it. Or what if we landed in the water? Would we hit so hard that I would be dead on contact? What if my legs or arms were broken? Was there any kind of life raft on board? Did the plane float? No one survives long in Alaskan salt water. Would the Coast Guard be upon us quickly enough? If we were trapped inside the plane, would the girl crank up her chain saw and cut us out? Damn my imagination. I wished I could turn it off.

  Another large hole was below us. We were over the ocean; I spotted whitecaps through the hole, even from this height. Had the pilot circled away from the island, was he turning around? I was totally disoriented; was he?

  The young pilot seemed to be taking the floatplane higher. It did not respond as effortlessly, as powerfully, as before. Was something wrong with the engines? The next bit of reality I saw through the clouds was a slab of green mountainside right outside the window, not below us, but next to us. No wonder so many planes crash out here. Surely the pilot had a route he was following, but how did he know where he was, or if he had drifted off his route? There was no radar, no screens in front of him showing him where he was, where to go. For me, the worst thing about this dire situation was that I was completely powerless to do anything about it.

  “Hey, see that hole in the clouds? I think you need to head through there,” Jerry suddenly said to the pilot, but calmly, as if he were directing a blind grandfather to the bathroom at a restaurant.

  To head where this guy Jerry had directed, the pilot would have to make an almost ninety-degree turn. Surely we weren’t that far off course. And who was he to tell the pilot where to go? The pilot didn’t say anything, but I could feel that he had slowed down, possibly as slow as the plane would go. I remembered hearing something about going too slow and stalling the plane out. For a moment it seemed we were standing still; then we hit another batch of rough air and lurched down like a rock falling off a cliff until we hit another batch of invisible air and bounced back up.

  “Listen, I’ve flown here hundreds, probably thousands, of times. We need to be over Kasan Bay. I see too much ground below. Fly through that hole in the clouds.” Jerry spoke with a calm assurance.

  This conversation was beginning to remind me of what I’d heard on the news from recovered black boxes, when professional pilots are trying everything to avoid crashing, talking to each other as calmly as if they were out fishing on a warm summer afternoon. Why didn’t they scream, raise their voices, lose control? I wished for a parachute so that I could take my chances floating to the ground or the water. The pilot still said nothing. He just looked around too much.

  I felt like screaming out to him, “What do you think about what Jerry is saying!”

  Jerry again pointed to the hole in the clouds, which was closing, and the pilot finally turned the plane and bolted through it. I’m not sure why, but I trusted this unknown Jerry more than I trusted the pilot.

  Jerry pointed down and said, “There’s Hollis, the ferry dock, okay, we’re heading in the right direction now.” The pilot never said a word.

  Shortly afterward, we dropped over a medium-size mountain into a narrow valley. The pilot got close to the long spine of mountains on our right. More rough, up-flowing air hit us. At least we could see
. Jerry pointed to some deer that were actually above us near the mountain ridge. Their golden hair stood out vividly in the Irish-green grass. Below us sat several homes, spaced far apart, built along a road. The land around the houses had been logged. The plane was now bouncing around like a Ping-Pong ball in a wind tunnel, but it was almost enjoyable compared to what we’d just come through.

  Soon the pilot swung wide again. Why was he doing that?—Jerry hadn’t said anything. I looked and found it was because we were headed for a gorgeous bay, surrounded by evergreen-covered outer islands. A sawmill was below us; several huge piles of sawdust stood around it. The pilot threaded his way between some anchored salmon-seining boats and landed right in front of the little village of Craig (pop. 2,043). It is the largest community on Prince of Wales Island, which is the third-largest island in the United States. Only Kodiak Island, north of here, and the island of Hawaii are bigger.

  The pilot maneuvered the plane up to a floating dock. Most of the fog that had so imprisoned people earlier this morning was now evaporated. If you’d just woken up, you’d wonder why all the flights were coming in late this morning. Rays of golden sun shot through the little bit of fog that still floated on the water. Slivers of clouds, highlighted by the deep yellow sunlight, poured down from the surrounding mountaintops like waterfalls. Our whole world was clearing up. The mysterious closed-in world of gray-white clouds and fogs was gradually being overtaken by a rich blue sky and a bronze sunlight that together colored everything regally. The world now seemed perfectly clear and evident.

  While we squirmed out of the plane, a bald eagle screeched from the tall spruce trees that grew on a point across the bay. I was surprised the pilot didn’t thank Jerry. The pilot said nothing. Maybe he was stunned, or maybe I was too new to Alaska to realize what I had just come through. Could that trip have been normal? We didn’t crash, everyone survived—just another flight in Southeast Alaska.

  THE LONE WASP

  Sam Kito, sixty-two, the half-Tlingit, half-Japanese-American man who had summoned me here to Craig, was waiting at the dock. He is an influential Alaskan Native leader, a wise man, and an elder. He doesn’t want to be called an elder, possibly the most respect-filled word in the Native world, because it is given to men and women who are the oldest in the community, usually in their seventies and eighties. I think Sam thinks he is in his thirties; sometimes he acts like he is still in his twenties.

  Sam’s hair is naturally coal black. He is stocky, short, kind of bowlegged, and he dresses fashionably. I’m not sure what I was expecting; you would think after all my years of traveling and living in other worlds that I would have stopped previsualizing people and places. Had I expected Sam and the others I would be fishing with to have Chilkat blankets draped over their shoulders, their heads protected from the rain by woven cedar hats painted with stylized ravens? No, but I hadn’t expected them to be so universally stylish. These Native leaders dress in a uniform that allows them to be twenty-first-century warriors for their people. Sam wore black silk T-shirts, fine blue blazers, Italian sweaters, Dockers khakis, and Florsheim black loafers, with tassels. His assistant, Linda Sylvester, told me that he spends a large sum at the Juneau shoe shop having tassels put back on his loafers. This may be because Sam loves to dance and people keep stepping on his tassels. Almost no one steps on his toes, though.

  In Alaska you don’t hear the word Indian very often—the word is Native. “Native politics.” “Native musher.” “Native women writers.” “Native issues.” “Native arts.” Then several phrases are used all the time in Alaska that have paired Native with a word of the outside world. “Native corporation.” “Native Olympics.” “Native airline pilot.” “Native orthopedic surgeon.” “Native lawyer.” “Native oil-field worker.” “Native comedian.”

  Making up Alaska’s Native population are five major groups. Starting with the top of Alaska and working down, there are the northern Eskimos, the Inupiats; the interior Indians, the Athabascans; the southern Eskimos, the Yupik; the Aleuts, whose place is on the Aleutian Islands and the Alaska Peninsula; and the Tlingits and the Haidas, the Southeast coastal Indians. Although not long ago some of these groups warred with each other, now they have banded together to fight for their piece of Alaska, which was once all theirs. Their organization is called AFN, Alaska Federation of Natives.

  “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.