CORDOVA
Cordova, the town that grew adjacent to the Orca Cannery, no longer greets visitors arriving by sea with salmon heads. Which is not to say there isn’t plenty of evidence of fish processing. At certain hours of the day, nearly every inch of every rooftop in town is occupied by seagulls, presumably descendants of the birds that Grinnell described as “great flocks near at hand.” The birds congregate in Hitchcockian numbers to feast on salmon entrails churned out by Cordova’s three waterfront fish plants.
“Tourists come to town and ask, ’Where can I buy salmon?’” Kristin Carpenter, executive director of the nonprofit Copper River Watershed Project (CRWP), told me. “I say, ‘Nowhere.’ Everyone catches their own, so no one needs to buy it. Salmon is the lifeblood of this community.” Virtually every coastal Alaska community south of the Arctic Circle is heavily dependent on salmon, but Cordova may have been the most fishing-centric town I visited. CRWP founder (and fisherwoman) Riki Ott has described Cordova as a place where “one can easily find an O-ring seal for a hydraulic motor or a U-joint for an outdrive unit, but not a bra.”
In many ways, the CRWP is doing the sort of work George Bird Grinnell foresaw as necessary: restoring salmon habitat, monitoring water quality, and finding ways to balance the needs of Cordova’s commercial fishermen with those of upstream communities that rely on salmon for food. The group’s headquarters is in a storefront on First Street, decorated in a style familiar to residents of places like Portland and Ithaca, what might be called “Progressive Cause”: paper-strewn desks in an open floor plan, earnest posters on the walls, stacks of literature—in this instance, pamphlets about fish hatcheries and culverts.
The salmon that feed small towns up and down the Copper River and serve as Cordova’s shadow currency are survivors of two of Alaska’s greatest ecological catastrophes. By the 1930s, historian Bob King writes, canned salmon had emerged as Alaska’s top industry, “generating the vast majority of the territory’s revenues.” But after peaking in 1936, salmon runs began to decline so rapidly that “in the 1950s Alaska salmon were declared a federal disaster.” Salmon fishing was saved by statehood. Once Alaska took control of its fisheries from the federal government, in 1959, fish traps were outlawed, hatcheries were increased to supplement populations, and the numbers of fishermen licensed to catch in particular areas were restricted for the first time. (For example, Cordova has allowed exactly 541 gillnet permits since the 1970s.) By the late 1980s, salmon fishing was once again booming. In just a few years, prices for salmon seine permits in Cordova tripled: Those lucky enough to get one paid as much as three hundred thousand dollars.
Cordova’s first disaster developed over decades and required many more decades to solve. Its second occurred at 12:04 A.M. on March 24, 1989, when the oil tanker Exxon Valdez struck a reef in Prince William Sound. The town still hasn’t completely recovered from the damage.
In Not One Drop, her book about the Exxon Valdez disaster and its aftermath, Riki Ott quotes Cordova’s city manager comparing the town, before 1989, to Shangri-la. Local boosterism aside, he has a point. Like the paradise in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon, Cordova is cut off from the rest of the world by high mountains, so you can’t drive there. It’s the sort of place city slickers from Anchorage and Juneau go to get an authentic outdoors fix: hiking trails branch off its few paved roads in multiple directions; both the Copper River and Prince William Sound are prime paddling and fishing spots; and Cordova even operates its own low-key ski area, within walking distance of downtown, serviced by the old single-chair lift from Sun Valley. I doubt any Cordovans live to be two hundred years old, like the high lama in Lost Horizon, though all the omega-3s in the fish consumed here presumably yield certain life-extension benefits. Shangri-la is a place of heightened consciousness. Against its will, Cordova has become perhaps the most environmentally conscious town in Alaska.
The second thing one notices when arriving in Cordova, after the gulls, is the brand-new Cordova Center. If you walk south from the CRWP (noticing on your way out that much of the informational literature concerns potential pipeline spills), past the drugstore and the intriguingly seedy Alaskan Hotel and Bar, you arrive at an enormous, modern building that would be impressive in Juneau or Anchorage and not out of place in Vail.
The Cordova Historical Museum, on the ground floor, was preparing an exhibition of gansey fishermen’s sweaters, opening that evening, which had drawn yarn enthusiasts from as far as Scotland. (“At the risk of sounding slightly ridiculous, a lot of the heavy hitters in the knitting world are here this weekend,” Carpenter told me.) The museum had only recently opened, and its eclectic collection was still being reassembled from its old location across the street. Staff members were marveling at the town newspaper’s old linotype machine, which resembled a church organ. Nearby were hung an Eyak canoe and a six-hundred-pound leatherback sea turtle that had taken a wrong turn somewhere far to the south and gotten tangled in a Cordova fisherman’s net. A draft version of a new timeline highlighting major historic events was taped along one wall, with edits and emendations scribbled on the text. Cordova’s recorded history is as old as that of any place in Alaska. Vitus Bering first set foot in the New World on Kayak Island, sixty miles south of town. Spanish explorers gave the area its Iberian name in 1790. The write-up of the Harriman Expedition’s 1899 stop in Orca had a Post-it stuck to it, flagging a minor spelling error.
“Looks like they’re still making corrections,” said Nancy Bird. Bird’s deceptively modest official title was museum assistant. In the 1980s, she had been editor of The Cordova Times. She was also the former executive director of the Oil Spill Recovery Institute, established by Congress to monitor the long-term effects of the Exxon Valdez disaster.
Events following the 1989 catastrophe dominate the historical timeline to the same degree that the Cordova Center dominates its downtown. People remember where they were when they heard that a supertanker had run aground. By morning, when word began to spread, ten million gallons of crude oil had poured through its breached hull and into Prince William Sound. The Valdez’s crew was slow to report the incident, and essential spill-response equipment was in dry dock, buried under snow. The gravity of the situation was slow to sink in. Kristin Carpenter’s husband, Danny, was watching the spill unfold on TV with some fellow fishermen; one of them wondered aloud if they’d be able to get back to work the next week. Hundreds of newspeople swarmed into the town of twenty-five hundred, including my father, who was working as a cameraman for the CBS Evening News. (His chief memory was getting up at 5:00 A.M. to take a shower, because that’s when the hotel ran out of hot water.) Images of dead birds, sea otters coated in crude, and people wiping down oil-slicked rocks with paper towels were all over the national news and remained there for months.
Cordova’s isolation is a big part of its charm, but during the crisis, it amplified the feeling of living in a city under siege. The dribbles of information given out by Exxon and by Alyeska, the consortium of oil companies that operates the pipeline, did not always match what people saw with their own eyes. Bird worked on a daily newsletter put out “to quell rumors,” she said. “For months and months, everyone in town was working seven days a week,” Bird told me. “We had oodles of bigwigs visiting—Dan Quayle, senators, congressmen. Our own Senator Stevens declared that fishermen couldn’t have oil on their anchors, because oil doesn’t sink. Fishermen looked at their anchors and said, ‘Umm . . .’”
Day-to-day business in Cordova almost came to a halt as clerical workers, bartenders, and day care providers quit suddenly to cash in on the $16.69 an hour that Exxon was paying (plus overtime) for miscellaneous decontamination duties. Exxon promised a complete cleanup, and went to great effort to erase the spill’s most obvious effects. Among other wildlife, twenty-eight hundred sea otters were killed; for some of the animals that survived, an estimated eighty thousand dollars per sea otter was spent. “Early on, the NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] folks came in and said they’d do a hot-water rinse of the beaches,” Bird said. The shores of Prince William Sound, some of the loveliest in Alaska, looked as if they’d been hosed down with WD-40. “I thought, Isn’t that going to kill everything on the beach? And lo and behold, years later they admitted that yes, it did.” The power wash killed off the microbes that form the bottom of the food chain and forced oil deeper into cracks. It still seeps out in some places.
After the busy summer of 1989, the newspeople left town, and Cordova’s residents waited for things to return to normal. The 1989 fishing season was a near-total wipeout. In 1992, the population of herring, an important source of fishing income and a food source for other species (including salmon), collapsed. It has never rebounded. A pod of orcas went into irreversible decline. Salmon eventually stabilized, but not before many fishermen went bankrupt. “One day your permit is worth three hundred thousand dollars, and the next it’s worthless,” Carpenter said. There were suicides, divorces, signs of PTSD. An Alaskan jury awarded five billion dollars in punitive damages against Exxon, which the company appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2008, the amount was reduced to 507 million dollars plus interest.
Nancy Bird and I walked out of the rear entrance of the Cordova Center and hopped into her orange Honda Element, which had a rich scent of old dog and, like many cars in Cordova, a NO ROAD bumper sticker on the back. The road in question was the Copper River Highway, a classic Alaska megaproject that proposed to connect Cordova to the state road system. Not surprisingly, one of the project’s biggest boosters was Governor Wally Hickel, famed for bulldozing his own highway to the northern oil fields. For years after the Exxon Valdez spill, Kristin Carpenter told me, “the road issue became a litmus test for a person’s politics,” revealing his or her stance toward development versus preservation. If there is any silver lining to the Valdez disaster, it is that the accident made it politically impossible for Governor Hickel, who returned for a second term in the early 1990s, to fulfill his dream of expanding oil drilling into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s nineteen million pristine acres to make up for declining yields in Prudhoe Bay.
Bird drove north, her powder-blue fingernails providing a little cheery contrast to the gray sky over the sound. Main Street quickly became two-lane Route 10, and we followed the winding coast until the pavement ended abruptly a few minutes later. The terminus was at the former Orca Cannery where the Harriman team had witnessed the horrors of salmon processing. The complex had since been converted into an adventure sports lodge and, aside from a few improvements (such as a heli-skiing pad), still looked just like the line drawing of Orca in the Harriman Alaska Series. We wandered the first floor, which was deserted, then returned to Bird’s Element and drove back toward town. If the Copper River Highway were ever extended, we’d be able to drive on to Chitina, Glennallen, Tok, and—assuming we didn’t take a wrong turn and end up in Chicken (pop. 7)—keep going all the way to Daytona Beach if we felt like it. It would be the epic road trip of a lifetime. I hope no one ever gets to take it.