DUTCH HARBOR
Europeans had been drawn to Dutch Harbor’s sheltered waters for more than a century before the Elder arrived in 1899. Captain Cook had anchored nearby in 1778, just before departing for his fateful visit to Hawaii. His crew found that in a single generation, the Russian traders had suppressed the area’s Aleut population. The Alutiiq of Kodiak Island and the Tlingit of the Alexander Archipelago would maintain their independence for a few years yet, but the era of gold rushes had begun.
By the time he arrived in Dutch Harbor, Cook had begun to doubt the existence of his expedition’s primary objective, the Northwest Passage. He had sailed into the Chukchi Sea, between the northernmost regions of Alaska and Siberia, and encountered an impassable wall of ice that “seemed to be ten or twelve feet high at least.” Cook followed the ice west all the way to Siberia, hoping to find a breach, but eventually gave up. University of Washington mathematician Harry Stern recently studied ships’ records since Cook’s frustrating voyage and determined that this Chukchi Sea ice formed more or less regularly around seventy degrees north until the 1990s, when it commenced a retreat of hundreds of miles. The Northwest Passage was now navigable for a brief but lengthening period each year. The Crystal Serenity had stopped in Dutch Harbor a week before I did and was now docked at the tiny Canadian town of Ulukhaktok, first seen by white men in 1911, when the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson arrived by dogsled.
As I walked down the ramp of the Tustumena, Jeff Dickrell was waiting for me at the dock. He was attired in shorts and sunglasses, as if we were headed to the beach. By the usual climatic standards of Dutch Harbor, or Unalaska, as it is alternately called, we probably should have been. (Dutch Harbor is a port inside the city of Unalaska, but the names are used more or less interchangeably by people who don’t live there. The name Unalaska means “Island Next to the Mainland” in the Aleut language, Unangan.) Unalaska is known for its Category 5 winds and pea-soup fog, but the temperature was in the mid-sixties and the sky was clear. “Don’t bother buckling up,” Dickrell told me as I slid into his passenger seat. “This is definitely a no-seatbelt, leave-the-keys-in-the-ignition kind of town.”
Dickrell was the history teacher for the Unalaska City School District and had written extensively on the town’s past. “There were probably just a few buildings when Harriman got here,” he told me, including the Orthodox cathedral built by Father Veniaminov in the 1830s, with the help of the Aleut Natives. For decades, the all-powerful fur-trading companies used Dutch Harbor as a base for their Alaska fiefdom, Dickrell said. As seal and sea otter numbers declined, a pattern of boom and bust in Unalaska was established. The posh tourist clientele aboard the steamer on which E. B. White traveled couldn’t hide their disappointment at the melancholy scene they encountered on their Dutch Harbor stop in 1923: “A few deserted houses, a family of Indians, a sow and her three young ones—hardly a place made to order for San Francisco ladies bent on sightseeing.”
Unalaska’s doldrums continued until 1940, when the U.S. military, concerned about the expansion of the Axis powers, selected Dutch Harbor for the Aleutians’ major naval base. “Every bit of infrastructure in this town came from World War II,” Dickrell said, including all the roads and the power station still in use, a gray slab next to the ferry terminal, built with five-foot-thick reinforced concrete walls to withstand aerial bombardment. “This is actually a terrible place for a naval port—there’s no place to turn a ship around and no place for an airfield.”
Driving around Unalaska today is like taking a magnifying glass to one of those recycled medieval parchments on which a monk calligraphied some dogmatic drivel over a poorly erased ancient text. At first glance, one sees an industrial fishing town, with several processing plants larger than any I’d seen in Alaska. Bald eagles congregate like pigeons on stacks of enormous crab pots. Unalaska consistently ranks as the biggest fishing port in the United States, and the boats in its fleet were two or three times the size of those in places like Cordova. Cranes capable of hoisting forty-foot shipping containers towered over the docks. “That big one there came down in a gust of 175 miles per hour,” Dickrell said as we crossed from the harbor to the main island. “If you drive across this bridge on a windy day, you definitely feel the car moving horizontally.”
A closer look at Unalaska reveals that the treeless green hills that once called out to John Burroughs are carved with zig-zag defensive trenches and dotted with rusting Quonset huts; near the shore, it’s easier to find a World War II–era pillbox than a U.S. mailbox. Dickrell handed me a guidebook to the area’s historic sites, which I flipped through as we drove. Visiting hikers were cautioned to keep an eye out for pointy metal antipersonnel stakes installed in tall grass seventy-five years ago. Not that anyone in Unalaska was expecting huge growth in its travel economy anytime soon, Northwest Passage cruises or not. “Nobody in this town could give two shits about tourism,” Dickrell said. “A one-way airplane ticket, in or out, is five hundred dollars whether you buy it a year in advance or an hour before.” You weren’t guaranteed to get in or out even with a confirmed seat. Local lore dictated that fog could cancel flights for days, and that the only way to know whether planes were flying was if the top of sixteen-hundred-foot Mount Ballyhoo was visible.
Mobilization all through Alaska accelerated after the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941. Dutch Harbor is roughly equidistant from Tokyo and Seattle. Admiral Yamamoto, planner of the sneak attack on Hawaii, was planning a major offensive in the northern Pacific.
“The Americans had broken the Japanese code,” Dickrell said as we pulled into the parking lot of my hotel, the Grand Aleutian, easily Alaska’s finest lodging whose name is a homophone for a Styx album. “They knew they were getting bombed, they just didn’t know when.” Shortly after the early Alaska sunrise of June 3, 1942, Japanese bombers and Zero fighters attacked. Finding no airfields to destroy—Unalaska’s scarcity of flat land had required locating air bases on nearby islands—their pilots instead targeted the army barracks at Fort Mears, killing thirty-five soldiers. “The bombs fell right here, where the hotel is,” Dickrell said. The next day the Japanese raided again, inflicting additional casualties but relatively minimal material damage.
Almost no one remembers the Battle of Dutch Harbor today other than World War II buffs, because it transpired at the exact same time as the Battle of Midway, the crushing defeat of the Japanese that marked the turning point of the Pacific War. As that battle raged, Japanese forces withdrawing from the Dutch Harbor raids occupied the islands of Attu and Kiska, at the far western end of the Aleutians. (Longitudinally, Attu is further west than Auckland, New Zealand.) A radio operator was killed; his wife and forty-four Aleut residents, including children, were shipped to a prison camp in Japan, where more than a third of them died from malnutrition and disease. Ten Americans were captured on Kiska. The battle to retake Attu, in May 1943, was one of the fiercest and bloodiest of the war as Japanese soldiers fought to the death rather than surrender. Japan lost 2,351 soldiers; only twenty-eight were captured. Once again, news from the Aleutians was overshadowed by simultaneous military action elsewhere, this time at Guadalcanal.
For the Aleuts, Japanese attacks were only the beginning of their wartime misery. “You know how Japanese Americans were ‘interned,’ during the war,” Dickrell said, making air quotes. “They did the same thing with the Natives here. It was one of the most messed-up things in American history.” A month after the Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor, 881 Aleuts living in Unalaska and elsewhere—who were American citizens—were informed that they would be evacuated within twenty-four hours. They were allowed to take one suitcase, containing clothes only, no personal effects. Unalaska’s whites were allowed to remain. The Aleuts were deposited at abandoned canneries in the southern Alaska panhandle, where they lived in squalor until the war’s end. “After three and a half years, they were brought back and dropped off here in Captains Bay,” Dickrell said. “Of course, while they were gone, ten thousand GIs had been here kicking in doors and pissing on everything.” Dutch Harbor’s cathedral, which the army had used for storage, was severely damaged from rain, snow, and wind. When Attu’s survivors returned from Japan, they were prohibited from returning to their home island because it was too expensive to provide government services there.
After another period of decline following the war, Dutch Harbor’s fortunes were reversed again, in the 1960s, by a new method of quick-freezing king crab, which rebranded what had been a cheap canned food as a luxury item. Crab fishermen suddenly had more money than they could spend. “There are stories of guys coming up in the 1970s and making a million dollars in a couple of years,” Dickrell said. For years, Unalaska was rife with the sorts of bad behavior that occur when young men make too much money too quickly—drinking, drugs, the occasional stabbing. Then, in 1983, king crab populations plummeted and the season was canceled. Stocks still haven’t fully recovered.
Once again, Unalaskans beseeched the Deity with what Dickrell called “the age-old Alaska prayer: ‘Please, God, send us another boom.’” The wish was granted in the 1990s, when bottom-fishing for species like pollock took off. Unalaska’s enormous processing plants convert most of it into fillets for fish sticks or a paste called surimi, much of which is frozen in blocks and shipped off to Japan to be reconstituted into budget sushi. “By the time they’re done, it’s odorless, tasteless protein,” Dickrell said. In a century, the local economy had evolved from fur to war to king crab to fake crab.
The next day was a beautiful Sunday and, while I probably should have been out exploring the hiking trails that Dickrell had recommended, I recovered from the Tustumena by lounging in a king-size bed with clean sheets, watching political talk shows, and gorging myself at the Grand Aleutian’s famous buffet. I was scheduled to fly out midafternoon, and the possibility of my flight being canceled hadn’t crossed my mind, until someone told me what happened when a famous astronaut visited Dutch Harbor. A man who’d calmly walked on the moon almost snapped when his flight out of the Aleutians was canceled by fog for five consecutive days.
Sure enough, while I wasn’t looking, the fog rolled in. My flight was canceled. I felt a twinge of envy the next day when I ran into the ladies’ travel club from the Tustumena. They were departing in the Grand Aleutian shuttle van for the morning flight to Anchorage, on which I hadn’t been able to get a seat. An hour later they returned with their luggage. Their flight had been grounded at the last minute due to fog.
“I wouldn’t plan on getting out tonight,” said the waitress who served my lunch.
“Supposedly, there’s a fog coming in from Cold Bay,” said the agent at the ticket counter when I checked in later that afternoon.
“They won’t fly unless you can see the top of Ballyhoo,” said everyone in the airport bar, which was doing a brisk business in shots.
Ticketed passengers could stand at the plate glass window and stare straight out at Mount Ballyhoo. For an hour, people scanned the horizon to the east, watching the world’s least thrilling duel, fog versus mountain.
This time, the mountain won.