ABOARD THE TUSTUMENA
Up until Kodiak and Katmai, I’d made every important stop the Harriman team had. To continue to do so beyond Ten Thousand Smokes would have required my own steamship. Many of the most remote places visited in 1899 sounded like the least interesting, both then and now; the less accessible they were, the more they cost in time and money. Uninhabited Bogoslof Island was intriguing—it had just sprouted a new lava addition when the Elder paused there—and I found a group of marine biologists headed there whose ship sounded like a nonsmoking update of Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso. They considered allowing me to join them, which seemed promising until I learned that Bogoslof’s sensitive sea lion habitat prohibited me from setting foot on shore. St. Lawrence Island, where Harriman mistakenly thought he might bag a polar bear, was marginally more promising. Its few visitors today were mostly birdwatchers and artifact hunters, who were permitted to pillage ancient gravesites as a source of revenue.
Muir had visited St. Lawrence in 1881 as a member of a search party aboard the cutter Thomas Corwin. The expedition was a rescue mission dispatched by the U.S. government to hunt for survivors of the USS Jeannette. That vessel had set out for the Arctic two years earlier and was believed to have been trapped in pack ice. The Corwin party failed to find any survivors (most of the Jeannette’s crew perished in the cold), but details of the journey were assembled from Muir’s writings, after his death, into The Cruise of the Corwin. The travelogue is, among other things, a snapshot of the cultures of Bering Sea natives during a period of rapid disruption.
On St. Lawrence, Muir encountered devastation. Two-thirds of the island’s fifteen hundred Yupik natives were dead, victims of a famine two years earlier. The surviving Yupik had drunk themselves into a stupor on liquor supplied illegally by American traffickers. Natives had long hunted slow-moving walruses for food. Newly acquired rifles enabled them to increase their kills exponentially, and, in turn, stockpile valuable ivory from the tusks. American whalers had harvested many tens of thousands more. Walrus populations collapsed. Amid St. Lawrence Island’s flowering tundra, which Muir wrote “swept back to the snow-clad volcanoes,” beneath “the wide azure sky bent kindly over all,” the Corwin crew saw heaps of shrunken corpses. Some were piled atop kitchen garbage still clad in their rotting furs. Others had been picked clean by crows. Muir saw further disaster ahead for the Natives of the Bering Sea. “Unless some aid be extended by our government,” he wrote, “in a few years at most every soul of them will have vanished from the face of the earth.”
According to Burroughs, the Harriman Expedition had initially planned to turn toward home after visiting the seal rookeries on the Pribilofs. To his regret, Harriman’s wife, Mary, had expressed an interest in seeing Siberia, so the Elder set off across the Bering Sea. A thick fog had rolled in, and an hour after departing, the ship came to a sudden halt when it slammed into a reef. Burroughs reported that “some of us hoped this incident would cause Mr. Harriman to turn back,” but resistance to Harriman’s will was futile. He stood up from his dinner, confirmed with the crew that the Elder’s hull wasn’t damaged, and ordered them to continue via a slightly altered course. Within minutes he was frolicking with his children “as if nothing had happened,” Burroughs recalled.
The Elder’s stop in Plover Bay, on Siberia’s Chukchi Peninsula, was brief. Muir had visited there with the Corwin in 1881 and recorded finding a happy Native village whose hospitable residents eagerly shared their uncooked food—wood being extremely scarce—and slept “perfectly nude in the severest weather,” swathed in layers of furs. Merriam was the first Harriman team member to land ashore. He was immediately repulsed by the appearance of the local Eskimos, whose heads were scarred with open sores, signs of syphilis that had been carried by Russian sailors. The expeditioners snapped some photographs, engaged in a little trading, and poked their heads into the Eskimos’ houses, which Dellenbaugh recorded were “smoky and dirty and foul-smelling,” filled with blubber and bloody whale parts. A strong wind chilled everyone but Harriman, who wore a reindeer coat he’d purchased in Dutch Harbor as he handed out tobacco and glass beads to his Siberian hosts. Merriam called Plover Bay “the most barren and desolate place of its size I ever saw.” He had once spent a season in Death Valley.
The Harriman Expedition endured nearly two days of rough travel to earn two hours in Asia. Nowadays, no American gets in and out of Siberia in forty-eight hours. A small airline in Nome offers infrequent charter fights, but between the interminable Russian visa application process and waiting for a seat to open up, it would’ve been easier to fly to Siberia via Anchorage, Frankfurt, and Moscow. Awaiting me on the far end of such an odyssey was the crumbling Soviet provincial city of Petropavlovsk, which one leading travel website enticingly described as “a necessary evil.”
Instead, the day before the Tustumena was scheduled to depart for Dutch Harbor, I flew to Homer, the town at the tail end of Route 1, on the southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula. A kid from the rental-car agency greeted me outside the front door of the airport in my vehicle, a 2003 Subaru Outback with a cracked windshield. “You can drive a stick shift, right?” he asked as he handed me the keys.
In lieu of visiting Siberia, I drove north to Nikolaevsk, home to a religious sect called the Old Believers. Originally from Siberia, they split with the Russian Orthodox Church in 1666 and had settled in Alaska after stints in South America and China. Many of the villagers still wore traditional clothing—you could see women in long dresses and headscarves in Homer, which was a fairly progressive town—and spoke Russian. The Old Believers were a closed community, and thus the source of much speculation. One Alaskan told me Nikolaevsk was the second-wealthiest zip code in the state; Kyle McDowell, who lived nearby, thought the men all drove suspiciously expensive cars. I found Nikolaevsk’s onion-domed church fairly easily but saw no sign of the alleged riches. The roads were deserted, and the only business appeared to be the aggressively kitschy Samovar Cafe, which was closed, depriving me of an opportunity to sample the borscht while stocking up on local intel and wooden nesting dolls.
At the Land’s End hotel, my alarm went off at three o’clock the next morning. I grabbed my backpack and walked in the chilly dark across a strip of asphalt that represented the final few feet of the American road system. The Tustumena was already buzzing two hours before departure. I stopped at the purser’s office to put my name on the waiting list for a cabin. Prospects didn’t look good—a travel club from Anchorage had booked most of the beds all the way to Dutch Harbor—but she told me she’d announce my name over the loudspeaker if something became available. “Once,” she said, not looking up from her clipboard.
The forward observation lounge on the main level had already been colonized with sleeping bags and coolers, so I resigned myself to a spot in the open-air solarium upstairs. Again, the chaise lounges touted by guidebooks proved to be fictional. I inflated my mattress on the non-skid deck under the canopy and unrolled my sleeping bag. The Tustumena’s engines thrummed loudly, but heat lamps above kept the space warm and dry, conditions I appreciated acutely because Kyle had called to let me know that the storm we narrowly escaped in Ten Thousand Smokes had drenched the entire southern coast of Alaska for days. We’d probably still be trapped in that cabin atop Baked Mountain, eating powdered eggs and playing rock-paper-scissors. Two other unlucky souls joined me in the solarium: a snowboarder who had approximately five hundred pounds of gear in two wheeled trunks (he was moving to Kodiak Island “to find a real job”) and a scruffy recent college graduate in overalls, whose tiny knapsack of belongings could have fit in a bandanna tied to a stick. I propped my head against my backpack, checked the Internet for what would be the last time for a few days, and saw that the Crystal Serenity and its five-star amenities had just departed Nome for the Northwest Passage. Then I rolled over and fell asleep on the floor.
When I woke, my hair was wet. We were at sea in a drizzling rain that streaked across the plexiglass roof and dripped intermittently onto my sleeping bag. I dragged my stuff to a drier spot and went downstairs. Other than the tiny Lituya, which I’d taken from Ketchikan to Metlakatla, the Tustumena was the most austere ferry I’d seen. The state had been discussing a replacement for years, but with the current budget crisis, the future of the Aleutian run itself (which was heavily subsidized) was in jeopardy. There was no urn of free-refill coffee on the Tustumena, just a two-dollar Keurig machine. The food service was different, too, more like a truck stop diner than a cafeteria. Meals were served for only one hour, three times a day. You sat at a table with metal flatware and ordered from a waitress, who shouted to the short-order cook in the kitchen. Signs were posted to remind passengers that tipping onboard was prohibited by state law.
The booths in the observation lounge were so full of sleeping bodies that their collected mass radiated humid warmth. I took my coffee back up to my goose down cocoon and ate handfuls of trail mix, standing up occasionally to look for signs of land.
We had a layover that afternoon in the town of Kodiak, where I picked up a shatterproof bottle of bourbon and some sleeping pills. Overnight, the seas grew rougher as we moved into the open ocean. The swaying—from inside a sleeping bag, anyway—was less like the ups and downs of a teeter-totter than being slowly swirled around a washing machine. Every couple of hours, my solarium neighbor in overalls would slip into the men’s room for a few minutes. When the door opened, a cloud of pot smoke wafted out. We exchanged pleasantries whenever one of us caught the other’s eye—he was celebrating his liberation from the educational system with a big Alaska adventure—but each casual conversation quickly veered into a stoner-logic monologue. The Elder crowd heard lectures from some of America’s finest minds. I got soliloquies from a twenty-two-year-old about how science and history were “total bullshit, no offense.”
Around lunchtime on the second day, we arrived at Chignik. Having spent almost two months in coastal Alaska, I should have known to moderate my expectations, but the phrase “fishing village” had lodged in my unconscious, so as we approached the cluster of buildings nestled among some steep green hills, I was somehow anticipating the American version of a Portuguese coastal town: fishermen in thick wool sweaters and caps, drinking rough vinho tinto over plates of grilled octopus. It seemed a promising sign that a crowd of parents and kids were waiting with excited faces for the ferry to dock. Maybe this was the sort of warm welcome you could expect in bushiest Alaska, where everyone felt like extended family.
Actually, they were eager to come on board and purchase takeout hamburgers and fries, because Chignik had no restaurant. The biweekly ferry stop was a special treat. I wandered around the tiny town for an hour. The school was empty—students, teachers, and parents were busy ordering burgers—and the only commercial establishment was a shop selling candy bars and cheap trinkets.
“I just came in on the ferry,” I said to the woman behind the counter.
“I sort of guessed that,” she said.
“Anything interesting I should see while I’m here?”
“Not really.”
In the afternoon, the Tustumena’s captain, John Mayer, stood at the front of the observation lounge and answered questions from passengers, as if holding a press conference. He explained that we’d left Chignik a little late because he’d been moving ballast around the ship to maintain balance. “We’ve got a whole dump truck full of sand for the airport at Sand Point,” he said. (Captain Mayer, whose knowledge of maritime matters verged on omniscience, did not know why the town needed to import the granular substance with which it shared a name.) He talked about the challenges of the open ocean (“That scares the bejeezus out of some captains, but I never get bored”) and what would happen if the GPS system went out (“Don’t worry, we’re still tested on celestial navigation”). I asked if sailing here was much different than it had been in 1899. “Just look out there,” he said. To one side of us was the ocean, and to the other empty hills with snowy mountains in the distance. Green, white, and blue were still the prevailing tints of the run to Dutch Harbor. “Very little has changed since Captain Cook was here.”
As Burroughs had been reminded when he attempted to trade his pilfered nest to Merriam, secrets are hard to keep on a boat. I was sitting in the observation lounge when a woman with a long white braid and a batik headband approached, introduced herself as Judy, and asked if it was true that I was a writer. I reluctantly admitted I was. When such information spreads around a group that’s traveling together, people tend to start acting like they’re the pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales and I’m Chaucer: As we find ourselves on a long journey, kynde scrybe, I shall tell you why I’m here and perhaps share an interesting story or ten to pass the time. Hey, why aren’t you writing this down?
Judy said, “Oh, good, I’m a writer, too,” and showed me a spiral-bound notebook she was carrying. My gut reaction was Oh no, cat poetry, but I offered to take a look. Three sentences in, my gut stood at attention. Judy could write! She’d sketched a prose portrait of the Alaskan coast that was easily good enough to publish in a travel magazine.
“This is terrific stuff, Judy,” I said.
“Oh, I know.”
Judy and her husband were from Maine, vagabonding around Alaska. Happy wanderers accounted for maybe a third of the passengers. Another third were residents of the tiny towns along our route, returning home from Anchorage and Outside with new trucks and supplies to get them through the oncoming winter. The final third was the travel club: mostly women of retirement age who’d signed up for the round-trip excursion to Dutch Harbor. The sun was shining and the shore views were lovely as we passed between an island and the mainland, but after two days at sea, a round-trip tour seemed approximately 50 percent more Aleutian maritime fun than was strictly necessary. When the purser announced, “We’re going to put on a movie about smoking fish in the entertainment lounge,” twenty people crowded into the room. About halfway through, the DVD skipped back to the beginning. No one complained. It wasn’t like we had anything better to do.
The further west we traveled, the flatter and more sparsely forested the land became. Rows of volcanic mountains stood in the distance, one of which, Mount Pavlof, was smoking, just as it had been in 1899. Passengers went out to the bow to snap photos. Judy handed me her binoculars. The pointy peaks of Pavlof and its twin, Pavlof Sister, resembled the silhouette of a Chihuahua’s head, a clever observation I couldn’t resist sharing with a fellow writer.
“More like an owl, don’t you think?” Judy said.
By the third day at sea, a pervasive languor had enveloped the ship. People fell into deep naps wherever they happened to cease locomotion. I’d boarded with two rolls of quarters, hoping to stash my valuables in a locker as I had on other ferries, but the Tustumena had no lockers and, I soon understood, no need for them. As we neared the end of the Alaska Peninsula, I was leaving my backpack unattended and my iPad charging in the men’s room like everyone else. (The quarters went into the Keurig machine.) We stopped at more lonely little towns: King Cove and Cold Bay and False Pass, where locals lined up to come on board for burgers. The Tustumena’s crew took obvious pride in providing what amounted to a public service. They were a tight-knit bunch, and extremely fond of Captain Mayer. I once snuck around the side deck of the boat to peek into their tiny private dining room, which had two round tables covered with white cloths. The diners seemed to be enjoying one another’s company tremendously.
The number of passengers disembarking to explore the limited tourist opportunities at each stop dwindled, until no one got off for the 6:00 A.M. stop at Akutan on our final day at sea. We had crossed into the Aleutians, into the land beyond bears. The dawn was so beautiful that even previously unseen Tustumena crew members in coveralls emerged from the bowels of the ship to take photos. Three African men who boarded at Akutan told me they’d come to the United States as Somali refugees and worked summers in the cannery. Two were going to Dutch Harbor because sailing three and a half hours each way beat hanging around Akutan on their day off. The third was flying out to see the dentist and showed me his aching tooth.
“You should visit Mogadishu sometime,” he told me. “It’s a nice city if you know how to avoid the violence.”