It was six a.m. when Doug and I boarded one of a pair of water taxis—along with all the other fishermen and half the guides from the lodge—for the hour-long run down to Dillingham to catch an early plane to Anchorage. Our flight from Anchorage to Denver was a red-eye that didn’t leave until almost midnight, and we were idly wondering what we’d do with the twelve-hour layover. Killing that much time in a city usually runs into more money than you care to spend, while killing the same amount of time stuck at the airport can result in fatal boredom. (There is a mount of an albino beaver at the Anchorage terminal that’s worth seeing, but it’s not what you’d call endlessly entertaining.)
But of course, we’d gotten ahead of ourselves. By the time we got there, Dillingham was socked in with pea-soup fog, and our flight was first delayed and then canceled. It was more complicated than it should have been to get ourselves booked on an afternoon flight, but not as complicated as it was for the guy in front of us, a surgeon who’d been at the lodge with us. He had to rebook his entire trip so he could make it to a city on the East Coast by about the same time the following morning. Why? Because he had six operations scheduled for that day. I wondered if there was a way to warn this guy’s patients that he’d be cutting them open after going for twenty-four hours without sleep, but I couldn’t think of anything.
Then we went looking for a cup of coffee but couldn’t find any. “What the hell kind of airport doesn’t have coffee?” Doug asked rhetorically.
Eventually some of us took the lodge van into greater downtown Dillingham—all three blocks of it—and had lunch across the road from the docks at a place called the Muddy Rudder, which is a common nautical euphemism. A commercial fisherman who runs his boat aground will say he got his rudder a little muddy in the same way that a bush pilot who crashes a plane and lives will admit that he may have “dinged up the aircraft.”
Back at the fogbound airport we learned that our new flight was also delayed indefinitely. We came to understand that this was a different flight number but the same airplane. It had been diverted that morning from Dillingham to King Salmon, where it had been sitting all this time grounded by the weather. Among its passengers was the next batch of clients for the lodge, and I spared a kind thought for those other stranded fishermen. Some would be pissed off at the delay, while others would be at peace with the knowledge that the largest part of the adventure in Alaska is often just getting where you’re going; but either way they’d have anticipation to keep them going.
There’s nothing like that on the return leg. Coming home after a trip is one of life’s simple pleasures, but a stack of unpaid bills and a full answering machine don’t hold a candle to de Havilland Beaver floatplanes and salmon. Even the stories you hear in Alaska have the peculiar flavor of the place and could not have just as easily happened in Pittsburgh.
For instance, at a fly-in camp where we spent some time there was a walrus skull in the usual pile of collected antlers and bones that accumulates around a spike camp. I’d never seen a walrus skull before, but there was nothing else it could have been. It was missing the valuable tusks (they’d been traded to a native ivory carver), but the shape of what was left was unmistakable.
The story was that this enormous dead animal had washed in from the Bering Sea on a high tide and settled within sight of camp. Apparently a decomposing walrus smells about like you’d expect, and within twenty-four hours it had attracted a dozen brown bears. A walrus can weigh well over a ton, so for much of that season bears could be seen and heard at all hours feeding on and fighting over the carcass, and were sometimes found wandering through camp belching and farting and looking for a comfortable place for a nap.
Business went on as usual, and somehow there were no serious incidents, but late one night a fisherman woke up with an urge to relieve himself, stepped out of the tent—still half-asleep—and came face-to-face with a large bear reeking of putrid walrus blubber. The way the man told it, he quietly stepped back inside the tent, pissed in the corner, and went back to bed. Did he sleep? I don’t know; that wasn’t part of the story. Would you have slept?
I have many firsthand memories from the time we spent at that camp, but one of the most vivid is of something I can only imagine: namely, the expression on that guy’s face when he bumped into that bear. For some reason, I imagine him looking as tight-lipped and vacant as George Washington on a one-dollar bill.
This is the kind of thing guides, outfitters, and lodge managers regularly deal with in Alaska. The backcountry is actually a fairly benign place as long as you either know what you’re doing or are with someone who does, but bush planes, small boats, and large wild animals still pose inherent dangers that are complicated by the remoteness of a region where emergency-response times are measured in days rather than minutes. The list of things that can go south is so long that it’s amazing trips go as smoothly as they usually do, but the potential for serious trouble is always there.
Some adopt a cavalier attitude and begin to cut corners and take chances, while others get as careful and deliberate as little old ladies, but it doesn’t seem to matter. If you spend enough time at this, the odds are good that you’ll either live through a real horror show or at least get a couple of bad scares. Most of the folks at these lodges love what they’re doing, and it shows. Furthermore, they understand that they’re essentially in the hospitality business, so, with the odd grumpy exception, they tend to be pretty hospitable. But in quiet moments you can still catch glimpses of the thousand-yard stare. It’s a look that says, without rancor, You’re here for a week; I’ve been here for ten years.
My own tendency is to prepare for the mishaps that are foreseeable and otherwise hope for the best, but I can understand the come-what-may attitude you sometimes see, because so many of the things that go sideways in Alaska fall outside the purview of anyone’s backup plan.
I once heard an awful first-person survival story. A party of four bear hunters was flown into a remote location and dropped off. They were in a small plane, and the outfitter said he could take only them but that he’d return in a few hours with all their gear and provisions and the guide. The man who was telling the story said that since they’d be left in bear country, he insisted on bringing a rifle and a box of shells, but that was it. It was fall. They were dressed in street clothes, tennis shoes, and light jackets. The plane dropped them off and never came back. They would learn much later that the so-called outfitter had set them up. There was no bear hunt and no guide. The guy had taken their money, gear, rifles, and the plane and vanished, leaving them to die.
They waited for several days with a gathering sense of panic and then started walking roughly in the direction they’d come, skirting bogs, climbing hills, and trying to go in as much of a straight line as the terrain would allow. They walked for weeks. Weeks! They were wet, cold, and exhausted, and although they had a rifle, they saw no game, so they were also starving. They assumed they’d die—the only question was when and in what order—and finally one of the four sat down and refused to go on. The narrator said he slapped the man in the face as hard as he could and said, “We’ll rest for ten minutes, and then we’re leaving. You can either stay or come along; it’s up to you.” Ten minutes later the man struggled to his feet and came along.
Eventually they came to a lake where fishing boats were passing a few hundred yards out, presumably heading back to port, given the time of day. They yelled and waved and fired the rifle in the air trying to attract attention, but the fishermen assumed they were drunken locals whooping it up and ignored them. Finally, in desperation and with only two shells left, one of them put a round into the hull of a passing boat. A few hours later a boatload of police officers arrived to arrest them and they were rescued.
These four men had all been friends, but the one who almost gave up and was saved by that slap in the face never spoke to the others again.
I’ve run into quite a few guys who have retired from decades of guiding or outfitting in Alaska. (None of them was rolling in money, which is something to think about if this kind of life appeals to you as a career opportunity.) I can’t exactly spot them from a distance, but they do all have the grizzled look of lifelong outdoorsmen on Social Security, and they’re typically full of stories that they’re not shy about telling. Some are about big fish, but most involve the plane crashes, boat wrecks, maulings, heart attacks, disappearances, and dozens of other close calls that are bound to happen over time and that wear on your nerves. These guys sometimes beat around the bush when it comes to why they finally pulled the plug on Alaska and moved back to civilization. “It’s a young man’s game” they’ll say, or “Your heart has to be in it,” although a few come right out with “I just got too old for that shit.”
One day at that fly-out camp with the walrus skull we motored far up a small coastal river to where the guides said there’d be large Dolly Vardens and maybe some big rainbows following the spawning chum salmon. Part of me wanted to stay in the lower river and fish for king salmon as we’d done successfully the day before, but the guides, Tyler and Matt, whom I knew from a previous trip, really wanted to go upriver. “You’ll love it,” they said, adding that they hadn’t fished up there all season, and if they hadn’t, no one had.
Doug and I talked it over and thought, Why not? When guides want to do something outside the normal program, it can be fabulous or a wild goose chase, but it’s always interesting.
It was a long, harrowingly fast run upriver in the jet boat. Doug and I sat side by side on the middle bench. Matt was ahead of us with his hood up and his head down against the drizzling rain. Tyler stood in the stern running the motor and listening to Pink Floyd through earphones, which he said helped his concentration.
Where we stopped the river had shrunk to the size of a respectable creek, flowing through thick alders and willows that grew right down to the banks. Tyler had mentioned offhandedly that there “might be some bears up there.” That didn’t register back at camp, because it’s true anywhere you go in this region, but when I saw how tight the cover was, I realized that any bear you saw here was likely to be at desperately close range. I mentioned that to Matt, and he allowed that they did “loom up unexpectedly” from time to time.
Doug and I strung up our rods and began to fish downstream. Before they began following along behind us walking the boat, Matt slipped a short-barreled .44 Magnum revolver into a shoulder holster and Tyler chambered a round in a 12-gauge pump and laid it conveniently on the bow. That was comforting, even though the presence of firearms isn’t a guarantee of safety. In fact, guns can have the opposite effect by causing you to swagger confidently into places you shouldn’t go.
No need to pointlessly build drama here. We never saw a bear, although they were as thick as raccoons and had left multiple fresh tracks and impressive turds on every available sandbar. Some of the scat was glisteningly fresh and steaming and couldn’t have been more than a few minutes old. One set of tracks was made by two cubs and a large sow, whose maternal instinct would make her the most dangerous animal in North America.
We caught plenty of Dollys and a handful of rainbows. My snapshots reveal that many were large but not record-breaking, and I have to rely on my memory of how pretty they were. It was a wet day with uncertain light, and I don’t know how to operate a camera beyond which button to push to take the picture, so they came out as either black silhouettes or translucent silver, like ghost fish.
I felt that I’d fished brilliantly that day, owing to hyperalertness and the creepy sense that something large, carnivorous, and unsympathetic was breathing down my neck. On the other hand, I have to admit that dragging orange plastic beads through pods of wild fish gorging on salmon eggs isn’t the most challenging thing you can do with a fly rod. Still, there was the uncomplicated purity of doing a simple thing in a place as old as the world where no one else had fished that year. For those few hours there was no past or future, just an undeniably vivid now.
When we finally boarded our plane in Dillingham, six hours late, that’s what I thought about on the way to Anchorage.