WRANGELL
The ferry trip from Ketchikan north to Wrangell was only six hours, but those hours transpired roughly between 1:00 and 7:00 A.M. A cabin seemed like an unnecessary indulgence. I decided instead to pursue a low-budget option I’d heard about aboard the Kennicott, favored by those travelers for whom saving money trumped comfort: I’d sleep on a chaise lounge in the solarium. The best strategy, I was told, was to line up early at the ferry terminal and run on board to grab a deck chair as if staking a claim in the Oklahoma Land Rush. My taxi arrived at the Ketchikan ferry terminal well before midnight. No throng waited in the rain to board the Matanuska, only a few ticket holders. The boat was dark and quiet. I groggily crossed the car deck and climbed the staircase, hoping to find an empty lounger.
The flaw in my frugal sleeping plan was immediately apparent: The Matanuska, smaller than the Kennicott, lacked both solarium and deck chairs. Its economy-class voyagers were instead sprawled out on the floor of the public lounge, nestled between rows of seats similar to those in a movie theater. The hard floor was covered with a thin layer of indoor/outdoor carpeting. Wise travelers had brought inflatable pads to cushion against the steel and earplugs to block out the snoring old men and one colicky baby who sounded like she was undergoing a difficult exorcism. I crawled into the thin polyester cocoon of my sleeping bag liner and tossed and turned, occasionally opening my eyes to find a teenage girl, also horizontal, staring at me from under a seat two feet away. At four, I gave up and went down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee.
I stared out the window at the green clumps of what John Burroughs described as “small spruce-tufted islands” passing by. A few early risers filtered in. One guy, who looked to be in his twenties, sat at the next table examining the contents of the various pockets that covered his clothing from knees to clavicles. He stood up and turned to leave, then turned back again. “Almost forgot my wedding ring,” he said, plucking a small silver band off the tabletop. “That would be bad. My almost wedding ring, I mean. I’m getting married in April.” His name was Kenny, though he said that “down south”—in other words, any latitude lower than Ketchikan—he was sometimes known as “Irish.” Something about him signaled Alaska-ness: perhaps the combination of his easy demeanor and XtraTuf boots. It might also have been the large tattoo of the state map inked on the side of his neck, with ALASKA scrawled across it in script. He’d just had the shading touched up at a friend’s parlor in San Diego, which gave the state a nice 3-D effect.
I had heard that Wrangell was, to put it bluntly, kind of a dump. “The Wrangell village was a rough place,” John Muir once wrote. “No mining hamlet in the placer gulches of California, nor any backwoods village I ever saw, approached it in picturesque, devil may care abandon.” (This quote is such a point of perverse civic pride that it is reproduced on the wall of the local history museum.) Wrangell was a gold rush town and attracted the sorts of unsavory characters one would associate with prospecting. Two years before the Harriman Expedition docked there, Wyatt Earp spent about a week as acting marshal before escaping. “Wrangell was another Tombstone,” wrote his wife, Josephine, “full of boomers, con men, gamblers, ladies of the night, gunmen, pickpockets, and all sorts of flotsam from every corner of the earth.” My Lonely Planet guide diplomatically described Wrangell as the “least gentrified” stop on the marine ferry route.
Kenny saw things differently. “Wrangell is a nice little place,” he said. He lived in Ketchikan with his fiancée, who made good money in the summer working double shifts as a waitress in restaurants catering to cruise ship passengers. A lot of Alaskans managed their lives like hibernating animals, working insane hours during the months when daylight was plentiful—so plentiful that every hotel room I stayed in had blackout curtains worthy of the London Blitz—and catching up on sleep in the winter. Kenny was going up to Wrangell to work as a deckhand on his buddy’s salmon boat, which he’d just inherited from his father. “Just the two of us,” he said. “I’m telling you, this boat is like a Cadillac. Some boats, when you need to take a dump, you grab a bucket, fill it with seawater, do your business, and toss it overboard. This one’s got a galley and a shower.” He was a little worried about the upcoming salmon season. Early reports indicated that fish numbers were low, and his earnings were a percentage of the catch. One summer he’d made ten grand in a few busy weeks.
A woman in a jacket festooned with Disney characters approached the table unsteadily, asking for a light. She might’ve been thirty; she might’ve been fifty. Her face had the bloated agelessness of the not quite functioning alcoholic just before everything goes to hell. Kenny stood up and gently steered her out onto the deck, saying something about how they could both use a breath of fresh air. A few minutes later, he returned and said, in a low voice, “That’s something you need to look out for in these small towns. I’m no stranger to bars, but some of these people, especially the Natives like that lady, they just drink all day and all night. If you start listening to them, they’ll never leave you alone.”
On a map, Wrangell Island looks like a sparrow taking flight in the direction of Denali. Its namesake town is located on the underside of the beak. From what I could see through the drizzle, as we squeezed between Zarembo Island and Etolin Island (combined size, slightly smaller than Oahu; combined population, fifteen), overdevelopment wasn’t a major issue in these parts.
When our impending arrival was announced, Kenny and I walked past the purser’s office and down the stairs to the car deck. Kenny stopped at the security locker to reclaim a rifle he’d checked. The gun reminded me to ask about a subject that had begun to worry me: bears. Bears, I was starting to learn, are like the weather in Alaska. Occasionally they’re good, usually they’re bad, in certain conditions they might kill you. Were bears something I needed to worry about in Wrangell?
“Wrangell is a blue-collar town full of fishermen who love to hunt and don’t have a hell of a lot to do half the year,” Kenny said, patting his gun case. “I don’t think bears are going to be a problem.”
My hotel was visible from the ferry’s exit ramp, so I hoisted my pack like a merchant marine taking shore leave, declined Kenny’s offer to meet in a couple of hours for an eye-opener at the Marine Bar, and strode off to crawl under the covers. The owner’s e-mail instructions said she’d leave my reserved room unlocked, so I walked in and was about to heave my pack on the bed when a shirtless man stepped out of the bathroom. I can’t say for sure which of us was more surprised, but it suddenly seemed like a good idea to grab a bite to eat before trying to sort things out. I mumbled an apology and walked toward what I guessed was the business district.
I hadn’t gone far down Church Street when I found myself standing in front of a pretty white clapboard building, the First Presbyterian Church. This was its second iteration, the original having burned in 1929. That church had been under construction when John Muir cadged a place to sleep on its floor on his first night in Wrangell, back in 1879. (Unlike me, Muir liked sleeping on hard surfaces.) He had not gotten along well with Sheldon Jackson and his party of Presbyterian missionary officials, who called him “that wild Muir” while aboard the steamship California as it carried them up the Inside Passage. But by the time Muir arrived, Wrangell was Jackson’s town, and it was the minister’s name that the visitor dropped like a password to open the church door.