HAINES
A few years ago, Norwegian television created a strangely popular series of hypnotic, hours-long videos composed solely of point-of-view footage shot during train or ferry trips. The action, for lack of a better word, consists almost entirely of trees, water, and rocks slipping past. Once you give yourself over to a meditative mind state, the appearance of something like a bridge or a bird can be thrilling. The journey up Lynn Canal from Juneau is the real-time version of these POV videos.
Lynn Canal is the longest and deepest fjord in North America. This is the Inside Passage of cruise commercials, a colonnade of jagged snowcapped mountains and, farther north, glaciers. The waters are smooth and quiet. The only interruptions come from the occasional whale or, more frequently, ship. The Harriman Expedition departed Juneau for Skagway, in the northernmost reaches of the passage. I was making a pit stop in the town that might be considered Skagway’s fraternal twin, Haines.
Haines and Skagway are just twenty miles apart. They are the only two real Inside Passage towns connected to Alaska’s highway system; the third, far to the south, is Hyder (pop. 87), which is so isolated its residents use a British Columbia area code and the local bar accepts Canadian dollars. It’s possible to drive between Haines and Skagway via the Canadian Yukon, but it’ll take you eight hours, assuming there’s no hassle at the two border crossings. A couple of Alaskans told me that Canadian border patrol agents are suspicious of Americans who don’t declare weapons. “They’re always like, ‘Come on, everyone in Alaska carries a gun,’” one Alaskan told me. He was thinking of purchasing a firearm to avoid searches.
Ketchikan and Juneau are two of the holy trinity of cruise ship stops in the Inside Passage. Skagway is the third, and certainly the most proudly touristy. Haines was the free-spirited half of the pair, and a rare creature in these parts: a town that had stood up to the cruise ship industry and survived when punished for its impudence. When one major company pleaded guilty to dumping “toxic effluent” in Lynn Canal in 1998, Haines introduced its own per-passenger tax. The cruise lines quickly erased Haines from their itineraries. “Ships enter our lives, small cities on the move, consuming beauty, belching waste,” Haines historian Daniel Lee Henry has written. “At the very least, we expect them to behave.” Almost twenty years later, the town sees an average of only one or two big ships a week. Haines has decided to be itself, and it seems to be doing just fine.
Haines is also a place that can claim John Muir as a founding father of sorts. By the time of Muir’s first Alaska voyage, in 1879, word of Sheldon Jackson’s missionary schools had spread north to the notoriously hostile Chilkat Tlingit tribe. Its chiefs inquired about obtaining a teacher for their people. Hall Young was excited by the missionary possibilities to be found up Lynn Canal. Muir had heard stories from prospectors about extraordinary glaciers at the top of the Inside Passage that might exceed those he’d already seen near Wrangell. With Young’s help, he was able to arrange “a good canoe and crew” in Wrangell, loaded with provisions and blankets.
The crew was made up of four Tlingit. Their leader was Toyatte, a Stikine chief and experienced seaman who owned the thirty-six-foot red cedar canoe they traveled in. His second was Kadachan, whose status as the son of a rival tribe’s chief made him an excellent go-between in a region where a warm reception could not be guaranteed. As the crew prepared to depart Wrangell, both Toyatte’s wife and Kadachan’s mother expressed deep wariness about an excursion into unfriendly territory; the latter warned Young that “if anything happens to my son, I will take your baby as mine in payment.” Filling out the four-man crew were two younger men: another Stikine Tlingit named John, who acted as interpreter, and Sitka Charley, who had traveled widely. Muir later recalled that when Charley noticed his interest in glaciers, he told him that as a boy, “he had gone with his father to hunt seals in a large bay full of ice, and that though it was long since he had been there, he thought he could find his way to it.”
I’d first come into contact with Dave Nanney through the website for his Chilkat Eagle Bed and Breakfast, in Haines. Its home page was designed in a palette of neon yellows and pinks that appeared not to have been updated since the GeoCities era. (Nanney later told me that he did professional Web design.) Nanney was also the founder of the Haines John Muir Association. The online reviews for his B & B weren’t great, but most of the reviewers agreed that Dave was a very nice guy who knew a lot about Haines. Also, he charged seventy dollars for a room—far and away the biggest lodging bargain I’d found in Alaska—and Dave drove the five miles out to the ferry terminal to pick up his customers at no extra charge.
“You want the full John Muir tour?” Nanney asked hopefully from the driver’s side window when he pulled up to the dock. His hair and mustache were silver, and his outfit was eclectic: a frayed visor adorned with flames, black sweatpants, and a fleece vest embroidered with a Tlingit bird pattern. He wore fingerless gloves and a timepiece on each wrist—one smartwatch and one analog. When he opened the back of his SUV, he had to move some kites to make room for my bag. “You never know when you’ll get the sudden urge to fly a kite,” he said.
Dave had moved to Haines after a couple of years in the military and studying computers at Stanford in the 1960s. “The guys I was at Stanford with spent all their time talking about how someday we’d have computers at home and everyone would be connected,” he said as we drove through the few blocks of downtown. With a population of twenty-five hundred, Haines wasn’t very big—“Sometimes people drive off the ferry and go straight through town, looking for Haines, and then have to turn around”—but it had all the hallmarks of a picture-postcard Alaskan town: a library and bookstore that towns ten times larger would envy, a pedestrian-friendly layout (I never did find an explanation as to why Inside Passage towns had been laid out with such fine sidewalks, which predated cruise ships), an excellent coffee shop with picnic tables outside where dogs lounged in the shade under their owners’ feet, a brewpub, and at least one oddball tourist attraction (a museum devoted entirely to hammers). The town was also surrounded by some of the most beautiful scenery in Alaska: snowy peaks on three sides standing over the serene waters of Lynn Canal, all of it likely to be visible, because a row of tall mountains blocks most of the rain that soaks other Inside Passage cities. It was a Tuesday just before the start of summer, and half the cars in town had mountain bikes and kayaks lashed to their roofs. A trio I sat next to at the Bamboo Room restaurant had sunburned faces and white raccoon circles around their eyes. They’d just finished a photo shoot for a snowboarding catalog.
“All over Alaska, people dream of moving to Haines, and I can’t blame them,” Nanney said as we drove up Route 7 toward the airport.
Nanney’s interest in Muir had been kindled when he got involved in community planning and began to explore possible things to market about Haines other than its natural beauty and abundance of eagles. “The Chilkat ran this region, and they knew all about the coming of the Americans,” he said. “Muir came right up this canal in 1879 and landed right around here.” What had been the village of Yendustucky, site of one of the most important cultural exchanges in Alaska history, is today covered by the tarmac of an airport runway.
Nanney knew the story of Muir’s time in Haines almost verbatim from the account in Travels in Alaska. The Chilkat, ensconced in the natural citadel of the northern Lynn Canal, were “the most influential” of all Tlingit tribes, Muir wrote, and the most feared. “Whenever on our journey I spoke of the interesting characteristics of other tribes we had visited, my crew would invariably say, ‘Oh, yes, these are pretty good Indians, but wait till you have seen the Chilkats.’” As his crew approached the Chilkat Peninsula, Toyatte and his men asked to stop and “prepare themselves to meet their great rivals,” Muir wrote. From boxes that had remained unopened for weeks during their journey, his Stikine companions removed new hats and boots, clean white shirts and neckties. Muir was startled by the sartorial transformation and attempted to spiff up his own shabby attire with an eagle feather in his cap. Several miles from the Chilkat village, the canoe was spotted by an observer who shouted, “Who are you? What are your names? What do you want? What have you come for?” Their replies were shouted to another messenger a quarter mile away, “and by this living telephone the news was delivered to the chief as he sat by his fireside.” As the canoe neared the village, a volley of musket balls was fired over their heads as both a welcome and a warning.
The moment the canoe touched the shore, a team of forty or fifty men charged forward and lifted the craft and its occupants out of the water and carried them to the door of Chief Daanawaak. Muir’s team was feted with a sumptuous meal heavy on seal grease, a delicacy. (“Mon, mon!” Muir said to Young after yet another such course had been laid before them. “I’m fashed we’ll be floppin’ about i’ the sea, whiles wi’ flippers an’ forked tails.”) After the meal, Young made his appeal: It was time to leave old ways behind and embrace the teachings of the Lord, through whom one may find everlasting life. Amen. When Young had finished, the Chilkat requested that the Ice Chief, as they called Muir, speak as well. Muir reluctantly gave a speech that he would repeat over the next three days, praising the natural bounty of their land, sharing his belief that it was fed by the grinding of glaciers, and “dwelling principally on the brotherhood of all races of people, assuring them that God loved them and that some of their white brethren were beginning to know them and become interested in their welfare.”
The Chilkat liked what they heard from Young. They loved what they heard from Muir. The Ice Chief and the Preacher Chief (as Young was called) spoke five times, not only to the Chilkat but to their neighbors the Chilkoot. Spectators crowded around doorways and poked their heads through the smoke hole of the roof of Daanawaak’s house. Young heard the sound of tearing coming from the building’s walls and realized that “they were prying off the planks in order that those outside might hear.” Following Muir’s last talk, an old shaman rose slowly and said to Muir, “It has always seemed to me while trying to speak to traders and those seeking gold-mines that it was like speaking to a person across a broad stream that was running fast over stones and making so loud a noise that scarce a single word could be heard. But now, for the first time, the Indian and the white man are on the same side of the river, eye to eye, heart to heart.”
After four days, the Chilkat agreed to consider accepting a missionary and teacher. Their overwhelming preference was Muir. They even put together an enviable compensation package, according to Muir: The chief “promised that if I would come to them they would always do as I directed, follow my counsels, give me as many wives as I liked, build a church and school, and pick all the stones out of the paths and make them smooth for my feet.” It was the second generous offer he had received. Early in their visit, Muir had been disturbed by the cries of a newborn. The child’s mother had died, and he was starving to death. Muir fetched the cans of condensed milk he and Young had brought to serve with their coffee and mixed some with warm water. This he fed the boy through the night as he walked the baby to soothe him. In appreciation, Daanawaak told Muir he could take the boy with him, but he declined the offer. Seven years later, Young returned to find the boy alive.
Before his visitors departed, Chief Daanawaak escorted Young down to the harbor while Muir went off to climb a mountain. The chief apparently motioned with his arm to indicate a spot where the Presbyterians could build a mission and school. Young interpreted the motion as indicating hundreds of acres—land claimed by the church, which now constitutes the center of Haines.
“The natives didn’t know surveys and deeds,” Nanney said as we drove back through town. “In their minds, they were granting the use of the property. They were incredibly surprised to learn they’d given all this away. The whole downtown had been surveyed and sold off for lots.”
Nanney’s B & B was a little cluttered, and certainly the interior indicated that whoever had decorated lost interest in the late eighties. I had a brief moment of panic when I saw that amid the VHS tapes and inexpensive jewelry for sale, Nanney had assembled a large number of instruments, including a one-man-band arrangement that allowed him to play flute and keyboards simultaneously. “Do you like to jam?” he asked. “We’ve had some great jam sessions here.”
I was the evening’s only guest. At day’s end, Dave invited me to help myself to anything in the kitchen for breakfast and showed me where the extra blankets were stored. “I heat with wood,” he said, indicating a large black cast-iron stove, “but I don’t think we’ll need it tonight.”
When I woke the next morning, the temperature outside was forty-eight degrees. Judging from my visible breath, it wasn’t much warmer inside. I came downstairs to find Dave zonked out on the couch, oblivious to the laugh track of The Bob Newhart Show blaring from the TV, his fingerless gloves pulling the blanket up to his chin.
Haines has long been rumored to be the model for the oddball Alaskan town in the early-nineties dramedy Northern Exposure, which, for those of you too young to remember, was the quirkiest show on TV outside of Twin Peaks. I didn’t give the comparison much thought until I walked downtown for a cup of coffee. The local station KHNS was playing quietly on the stereo. The DJ played a Moody Blues song, followed by the local weather and an announcement about a change of location for the weekly vinyasa class, followed by a long fiddle instrumental, followed by an interview with one of the local museum’s curators about its Tlingit art collection. My favorite part was the listener personals.
“Tyler lost his wallet, has searched the house high and low, and, yes, even in the couch. It’s brown leather, so if you find it, please call him at 766-XXXX, because he’s running really low on cat food. . . . Maureen is driving to Whitehorse this weekend and has room for one more in her car; call her at 766-XXXX. . . . Amy, Sylvester is trying to reach you and you probably know why, so please call him at 766-XXXX.
“And now, a little something from the Jerry Garcia Band.”