KETCHIKAN
About thirty minutes from Ketchikan, houses started to appear on the shore, sporadically at first and then close enough together that one neighbor could spy on the next one’s barbecue. Probably half of the Kennicott’s passengers went out on the front deck to snap photos of our arrival. From a mile or so out, most of what we could see was three enormous cruise ships, each several times the size of the Elder. Their white masses walled off Ketchikan’s downtown and contrasted with the deep green mountains that stood behind, their summits obscured in mist. Seaplanes buzzed in and out like dragonflies.
I was particularly fascinated by the bow activity of the Kennicott deckhands, who were arranging thick ropes with the care of python wranglers. Mine was the interest of a long-retired professional, since I had some experience in that line of work. For several summers during college and graduate school, I’d worked on tour boats that cruised up and down the Chicago River and onto Lake Michigan. Whenever I worked an especially long day on the water—we sometimes ran trips from 7:00 A.M. until 2:00 A.M. the next morning—I’d get home and fall into bed, only to feel the mattress rocking from side to side.
Had there been a deckhand emergency in which the lives of everyone on the Kennicott depended on finding someone who could tie knots such as a monkey’s fist or a cleft hitch, I probably could’ve stepped in. The only other lesson about working on a boat that had stuck with me was that the waterfront tends to have the same moths-to-the-flame effect on weirdos that Alaska does. One of my fellow deckhands was a World War II veteran who couldn’t read or write and frequently handed me slips of paper with five- or six-digit numbers scrawled on them, insisting that this was the phone number of his doctor and getting indignant when I asked if perhaps he’d copied it down wrong. Another, who went by the name Slim, was an ex-convict who’d killed two brothers in the early sixties. Twenty years later, he’d been paroled for participating in a government malaria-vaccine-testing program. We knew this because Slim carried his prison release papers with him everywhere in a gym bag, along with a very large knife that he called his “shiv.” He once pulled it on my sister, who also worked there, when he thought she’d messed up his pizza order.
The novice seaman E. B. White met a lot of guys like Slim belowdecks on a steamship cruise that brought him to Ketchikan in 1923. He’d departed Seattle expecting to find “a land of deep snow, igloos, Eskimos, polar bears, rough men, fancy women, saloons, fighting sled dogs, intense cold, and gold everywhere.” To his unpleasant surprise, he found in Ketchikan not the Alaskan winter wonderland of his dreams but “a warm, mosquitoey place smelling of fish.” For decades, salmon canning was the primary business in town, and when the Elder steamed through in 1899, tiny Ketchikan consisted of a salmon cannery and a few buildings, not worthy of a stop when world-famous Metlakatla was just twenty miles to the south. Before long, Ketchikan had established itself as Alaska’s “First City,” not because it had the territory’s largest population (which it did by the 1920s) but because it was the first port of call for cruise ships coming up the Inside Passage. More recently, it was the almost home of the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, a four-hundred-million-dollar project to replace the ferry that runs from the airport (which, because level ground is hard to come by near Ketchikan, is located on a nearby island), most of it to be paid for with federal earmarks.
Ketchikan is now the sixth-largest city in Alaska, about eight thousand people crowded into a fairly tight space along the coast. Houses clung to the slope above like ivy. When the Kennicott pulled up to the dock, I walked the mile or so along the waterfront toward the center of town.
There was a time when Ketchikan was the wettest city in America, in the alcoholic sense. “In the eighties, we had the highest percentage of liquor licenses per capita in the country,” Dave Kiffer, a local historian and city council member, told me. Nowadays most of the drinkers were day visitors from the cruise ships, who thronged the Front Street shops selling jewelry, sweatshirts, and other mementos. From what I could tell from looking through the windows of congested stores, the sale of useless junk to transients was the biggest driver of Ketchikan’s economy. I asked Kiffer about a rumor that all the waterfront shops were secretly owned by the cruise companies. “I’ve been trying to answer that same question for ten years,” he said.
Among other things, Ketchikan is home to the southernmost district headquarters of the Tongass National Forest. The Tongass is one of those things—like the book and movie Into the Wild—that seems unquestionably wonderful to many of us who live Outside but is viewed more skeptically by Alaskans. The Tongass was the creation of Theodore Roosevelt, who never set foot in Alaska but was good friends with Merriam, Grinnell, and Burroughs and devoured the volumes of Harriman Expedition reports as soon as they appeared in print. Less than a year into his presidency, following the assassination of William McKinley, Roosevelt set aside the Alexander Archipelago Forest Reserve in 1902. A few years later, he expanded the area to include most of the Alaska panhandle, today’s seventeen-million-acre Tongass National Forest.
A national forest is not a national park. It is public land overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, set aside to be managed. Conservation is only one purpose. In the Tongass, old-growth forests were one of the resources to be administered. Bernhard Fernow, the Cornell University forestry expert aboard the Elder, was doubtful that logging the trees of Southeast Alaska would ever be financially viable. “The conditions under which lumbering on the rugged slopes would have to be carried on are extremely difficult,” he explained in an essay from the second Harriman volume. What neither Fernow nor Roosevelt foresaw was the arrival of technology, such as the chain saw, that would make clear-cutting possible. From the 1950s until the 1990s, large pulp mills operated throughout Southeast Alaska. The closing of Ketchikan’s mill in 1997, the result of declining prices and environmental lawsuits, took five hundred of the town’s jobs. It did not, however, completely end the practice of clear-cutting, whose ugly evidence is visible on mountainsides throughout the Inside Passage, scaly patches of eczema amid the lush greenery.
Singling out one enemy for environmentalists to protest against is harder than figuring out who owns all the souvenir shops. Often, the villain wears a white hat. When I arrived in Ketchikan, the Alaska Mental Health Trust, which provides services to those in need, was hoping to sell its logging rights to Deer Mountain, the scenic green backdrop to every wide-angle tourist photo of Ketchikan. Other timber rights were held by Vietnam veterans’ groups, native tribes, and the University of Alaska.
After the timber business dwindled in the nineties, Ketchikan went all in on tourism. Brochures now touted visits to totem carvers and flightseeing trips and the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show. On Creek Street, there is an old-timey museum in a former house of prostitution. The sign outside billed it as the place WHERE MEN AND SALMON BOTH CAME TO SPAWN, which I hope is the last tourist slogan I ever see related to ejaculation.
Ketchikan is still extremely wet by precipitation standards, receiving an average of 141 inches per year, some of which fell on my head as I searched for a place to eat that wasn’t thronged with cruise ship guests. Rain is such a constant in Southeast Alaska that everyone I met seemed to own a pair of knee-high brown XtraTufs, whose ubiquity and versatility make them roughly analogous to cowboy boots in Texas. (Should you find yourself stumped for conversational topics while in the company of Alaskans, ask for their opinion about whether XtraTuf quality declined when the company outsourced manufacturing to China.) A good pair of rubber boots is a wise long-term investment. Unlike much of the world, which will be facing drought and famine in the not too distant future according to current climate change models, the Inside Passage is actually expecting an increase in precipitation by the year 2100.