Petersburg, Alaska
AAlaska, that wild state of affairs up north, has occupied a place in my mind like the corner that gathers cobwebs in an attic. To its inside passage my love fled ten years ago, and to its mossy, creosote-soaked pillars I have been tied since. In a manner of speaking. He worked at the fishery, slept in the woods like an animal, and sent me postcards to let me know he was alive. He read Notes from the Underground as I waited, but he stayed too long in this place where my voice, my hands, couldn’t reach him.
This story occurred so long ago that its telling is positively maudlin; we were children then, we’re good friends now. However, when I picture Alaska it always takes on this tint, this bruised color beneath the snow. I am sure that my visit to Petersburg was a bit bluer, a bit truer for the memory. In the strange way people can be, I felt better having seen the patch of trees where he slept, the coffee shop where he sat. I felt as though these places were telling me a story. The story of–I don’t know–the story of a young man running away from love? A youth gone wet-faced into the wild? or just a story of boredom?
“Lots of people moved here to escape the law,” Kira explained to us, kicking a rock with her foot. Our ferry arrived early and quietly, slipping into town and without much fanfare slipping away. Tom and Kira know everyone in Petersburg: waving at passers-by, it seems like they all have a story to tell. This guy lives in a filthy trailer and builds wood furniture so beautiful it’d make you weep, that one drinks his own urine–for the health benefits, he swears! Most everyone here is here only seasonally; they subsist on the fish.
I asked Tom, who has worked at the Petersburg fishery for over a decade, if the Alaskan salmon are being depleted beyond conscionable levels. Of course, the next question is, “whose conscience?” That of the owners of the canneries? Or of the fishermen whose lives depend on each season’s yield? The consumers’? As it turns out, it does seem that the yearly cull of Alaskan salmon is highly regulated and that the fish have a swimming chance. This was not always so. Overfishing in the region prompted President Ike to declare Alaska a “federal disaster area” in 1953, meaning that his government (which was responsible for funding the management and research necessary to prevent a, umm, disaster) had failed. Upon statehood in ‘59, this responsibility transferred to Alaska, and the situation improved, then dipped, then improved again, till the Happy Now: thirty-three state hatcheries releasing 1.2 to 1.4 billion juvenile salmon per decade, and a limited entry permit system controlling the volume of fishing allowed.
Bully for you, Alaska! Oh, state of Midnight Sun, of the Northern Lights. The word “Alaska” comes from the Russian “Alyaska”, which came from the Aleut “alaxsxaq”, meaning literally, “the object toward which the motion of the sea is directed”. As game hunters have argued, an animal’s usefulness to us is what guarantees its survival (sigh…this is the sort of animal we are), a theory so neatly exemplified by the wild salmon who–for goodness’ sake!–have steps built for them in particularly steep upstream areas. If we can save these shimmery and dumb creatures from extinction, where are the government-funded elephant orphanages? The laws that curtail the use of heat-seeking weaponry, fired from aircraft, against fleeing wolves?
Now that Kate and I are back in the “lower 48″, staying with Amanda’s parents in Centennial, CO, I remember Alaska the way I saw it: spare, chilly and through a haze of drunkenness. We had arrived on the last day of fishing season; everyone taking to the streets in a great bellow of exhaustion–the kind of exhaustion you feel when, at 2 am in a bar in a strange town, the prospect of walking home seems more tiring than that of having another drink. It is a happy, smiling exhaustion. When finally we did make it back to Kira and Tom’s place, we’d tipped over into that magic zone where nothing at all was tiring, and stayed up late making pizza, taking pictures and laughing so much my throat hurt for days. Petersburg is a picturesque, quirky and altogether disquieting place. I woke early the next day to shoot pictures of the misty mountains and found myself chatting with one scruffy local after another. Nowhere is loneliness more profound than in a fishing town at six in the morning. It’s touching, really…all these renunciates, misfits and young summer workers mashed together…at once running from and striving toward women.
And what else is there?
I’ll never know why my friend went to Petersburg, Alaska. But now I have seen the town, I have felt its allure. Like a woman, like the “object toward which the motion of the sea is directed”, this wild place which called to (and claimed) Chris McCandless at twenty-three, Alaska has left me with a new sort of hunger. More of an itch, actually. It’s really no big deal. I’m sure there’s a topical cream for it.
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