FORT WRANGELL
The Elder spent only a few hours in Wrangell after its stop in Metlakatla, but Muir already knew the town intimately. It had been his base of operations for the 1879 excursions as well as subsequent travel stories that would establish the Inside Passage as a destination. When Muir disembarked in Wrangell on July 14, 1879, Sheldon Jackson introduced him to S. Hall Young, one of his missionary associates in Alaska. Young recalled his first glimpse of “a lean, sinewy man of forty, with waving, reddish brown hair and beard, and shoulders slightly stooped.” Unlike the missionaries on the California, Young fell under Muir’s thrall the moment he shook his hand.
“From the first,” Young recalled decades after their first meeting on the Wrangell docks, “I began to recognize him as my Master who was to lead me into enchanting regions of beauty and mystery, which without his aid must forever have remained unseen by the eyes of my soul.”
That Muir connected so quickly with a missionary ten years his junior isn’t entirely surprising. He was, of course, fluent in the language of spirituality, from his father’s compulsory Bible studies. But Muir was also someone who, like so many people who’ve been drawn to Alaska since Wrangell’s gold rush heyday, marched to the beat of his own drummer. In the years following the pipeline project of the 1970s, which served as a homing beacon for single men with undefined career goals and questionable social skills, the male-to-female ratio was large enough to inspire a dating platitude still repeated by Alaskan women today: “Alaska, where the odds are good, but the goods are odd.” Muir certainly could have been categorized as odd goods when he arrived in Wrangell in 1879. For starters, he did not seem to have what might be considered a real job. S. Hall Young recalled his new friend being introduced as “Professor Muir, the Naturalist,” but the Californian had no credentials. When not occupied roaming the mountains of the Sierra, Muir made his living in San Francisco as a freelance writer of adventure and nature tales. (A notoriously unsteady vocation then as now.) Only a month before departing for Alaska, Muir had finally gotten engaged to Louie Strentzel, at the age of forty-one.
Within days of arriving in Wrangell, Muir “inadvertently caused a lot of wondering excitement among the whites as well as the superstitious Indians” when he scaled a hill on the north end of town during a late-night rainstorm and built an enormous bonfire. Its plume, he wrote, shot up “a pillar of flame thirty or forty feet high.” His intent was “to see how the Alaskan trees behave in storms and hear the songs they sing.” A group of Tlingit converts, perhaps drawing parallels to the pillar of fire that guided the Israelites out of Egypt, knocked on Hall Young’s door at 2:00 A.M. seeking spiritual guidance. Young explained that Muir had started the fire simply because that was the sort of thing he enjoyed doing. This seemed only to cause more confusion. The natives “ever afterwards eyed Muir askance, as a mysterious being whose ways and motives were beyond conjecture.”
And yet, for all his quirks, Muir was almost universally regarded as brilliant, engaging, magnetic, and charming. His piercing eyes, one of them offset slightly by the carriage-parts accident, conveyed his optimism and boyish enthusiasm. “From cluster to cluster of flowers he ran, falling on his knees, babbling in unknown tongues, prattling a curious mixture of scientific lingo and baby talk” is how Young described Muir encountering a favorite species of blooming flower. He was above all things a great talker. His speech on glaciers at the Yosemite event where he met Sheldon Jackson “fairly electrified his audience,” a hundred of whom had followed him afterwards on a hike, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The bad reviews I’d gotten for Wrangell seemed to have been influenced by Muir’s original thumbs-down. The only visible evidence of lawlessness was abandoned lots filled with rusting pickups, boats, and household appliances. One impromptu dump site sat next to the neatly groomed grounds of one of Wrangell’s nicest churches. “That’s what happens when you’ve got a car worth two hundred dollars and it’ll cost you a thousand to ship it out of here,” a Wrangellian told me. Mount Dewey, the four-hundred-foot-high hill where Muir lit his towering inferno, was just a few minutes’ walk from my hotel, via zigzagging residential streets and wooden stairs. Nailed to a tree at the top of the trail was a “no fires” pictogram, which I hoped was the work of a Muir fan with a sense of humor. Beyond the harbor, the view probably hadn’t changed much in centuries—green lumps of small islands clustered like a family of sea turtles. In the distance, the higher elevations were dusted with snow, the first I had seen.
Wrangell’s downtown was small and geared toward the local marine economy rather than Inside Passage cruise ships. A sign outside the Elks Lodge at the main intersection advertised steak night on Saturday. The supermarket was closed on Sunday. Politically, Wrangell was a dark crimson spot within a deep red state. At the diner where I ate breakfast following my run-in with the seminude man at the hotel, the TV sets were tuned to a low-budget network somewhat to the right of Fox News, and the counter held stacks of Guns & Ammo and Soldier of Fortune. I flipped through a three-year-old issue of North American Whitetail and brushed up on bowhunting techniques as I ate my oatmeal. One of the most contentious presidential races in U.S. history was brewing down south, but in Wrangell the only posters hung in store windows hyped the contest between Kyla and Alex for queen of the 4th of July Celebration.
It was only after a few days in Wrangell—a quirk in the ferry schedule had left me with an extra-long layover—that I realized why everything seemed familiar. Wrangell was like those small western towns, now almost completely vanished, that my family used to stop in during multi-day drives out to national parks in the 1970s. Even my hotel, the Wrangell Extended Stay and Trading Post, had the sort of name that could only be used whimsically nowadays outside of Alaska, perhaps for a mustache wax emporium that served home-brewed rye whiskey. It was certainly the first establishment I’d stayed in that had a sign in the front window advertising the proprietors’ interest in buying animal skins. WANTED: BEAVER IN THE ROUND ALSO MINK, OTTER AND WOLF PUT UP. (“In the round” and “put up,” I now know, refer to skinning and drying techniques.) The owners, Mike and Lydia Matney, could be seen through the front window at all hours, seated at their sewing machines, transforming furs into hats and slippers. In addition to the ferry, intermediate-size tourist boats stopped in Wrangell every few days, and local businesses would put out hand-painted signs and card tables stacked with knickknacks. Having come from Ketchikan, it was like visiting a yard sale after a trip to Macy’s on Black Friday.
Alaskans are a diverse bunch, but I feel safe making two generalizations about them. First, they are unusually welcoming people. Anyone who listens to public radio in New York City will eventually hear some version of the pointless debate over whether someone is or isn’t a “real” New Yorker. If you move to Alaska and like it enough to stay awhile, you’re an Alaskan. Maybe because life can be harsher up north than it is elsewhere, people are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt. Whenever I approached someone in Alaska during my travels asking if they’d have time to talk, that person would usually politely answer my questions and then invite me over for coffee or dinner or to sleep in their spare bedroom for a few nights. It was clear within about thirty seconds of my entering his fur emporium that Mike and I could not be further apart politically. He kept railing against the “Soviet state of Washington,” where he’d lived previously, and hated Obamacare so much that in spite of a long, deep scar on his neck that made clear his familiarity with hospitals, he’d dropped his medical insurance. But he also told me to borrow his truck if I needed to drive anywhere. (He left the keys in the ignition. Anyone stupid enough to steal a vehicle on Wrangell Island wouldn’t get very far.) A lot of the Wrangell Extended Stay’s clientele are men traveling solo, laborers in the seafood business or itinerant health care workers who move around between Alaska’s small towns. Lydia, sensing correctly that I was a little lonely, strongly suggested I come out with them on their boat to check their crab pots.
The other observation I feel safe in making is that Alaskans see themselves as an extremely self-reliant people. They like to chop and burn their own wood so much that in winter, the smoke in places like Fairbanks can cause worse air quality than Beijing’s. Mike liked to go out alone trapping for a week at a time. Above all, Alaskans take advantage of what Muir called the territory’s “foodful, kindly wilderness” by hunting, fishing, and gathering. “Never before in all my travels, north or south, had I found so lavish an abundance of berries as here,” Muir wrote of his first trip to Wrangell, and it’s still true. In early summer, bushes heavy with wild berries poked through fences and threatened to encroach on the roads.
As we motored out of the marina toward open water, Mike sat behind the wheel, and Lydia and I stood in the back. Lydia told a story that encapsulated how living in Wrangell was different from living in the Lower 48. After they’d purchased the Extended Stay, they needed to move a safe upstairs. Four local men were recruited and completed the job. When Lydia asked how much she owed them, they seemed confused. “They wouldn’t take any money,” she said. “They said it was just the sort of thing you do for your neighbors.”
“I sometimes feel bad for kids who grow up on Wrangell Island,” Mike said. “They go to Seattle and they’ve never seen a stoplight. But then I think about kids like that”—he pointed at two boys in a small boat with an outboard motor. “Ten and twelve years old, not allowed to leave the marina, and they pulled in a king salmon the other day.” Wrangell’s annual salmon derby was under way, and some eleven-year-old had landed a twenty-two pounder.
We continued on toward Etolin Island to check on some crab pots. Lydia said that they liked to use halibut heads as bait; she sometimes baked cookies for the guys down at the cannery, in exchange for some choice ones. We stopped at a buoy marking the spot of the first pot and reeled it up with a mechanized winch. It was the size of a laundry basket and filled with huge Dungeness crabs, at least a dozen. At the bottom, the halibut head had been picked as clean as a Georgia O’Keeffe cow’s skull. Lydia pulled the crabs out one by one and measured them against a wooden stick to make sure they were big enough to keep. After an hour on the water, we had two massive plastic tubs of shellfish, most of which would be cleaned, frozen, and shipped off to Lydia’s daughter in Washington.
“I always tell Lydia, ‘If the world ends, I’ll make sure you don’t go hungry,’” Mike said. “‘You might not get a lot of variety in your diet, but you’ll eat.’”
There was zero variety in my lunch, which consisted of nothing but boiled Dungeness crab and butter, consumed at the Matneys’ dining room table. I wasn’t hungry again for twenty-four hours.