cabin where Clarence had recommended I stay. Within minutes I had unloaded my gear and stood watching the plane disappear over the horizon. The only sound was the distant and receding hum of its engine. I never felt more alone. As I lugged my gear toward the cabin, my shotgun perched atop each load, I noticed large bear tracks in the sandy soil, and then claw marks on the cabin door and window frame. That night, and each night thereafter, I put the gun next to my sleeping bag. “Put the buckshot in first and then the slugs,” Ken Schoenberg had instructed, “because if you have a bear inside your tent at night, you won’t be able to see him well, and you’ll want a wider pattern of shot to make sure you hit something.”
While I had dutifully recorded all of Ken’s advice in my notebook, privately I had thought that he was overdoing it. Now, I wasn’t so sure. That evening I wrote in my journal, “For the first time this trip, I feel a little lonely for home and wonder if it was really wise to accept an opportunity like this just because it offered a new experience.” I stayed in bed the next day until 1:00 p.m., unable to face the uncertainties of my situation. Adding to my woes, my Coleman stove would not light even after I took it apart and reassembled it, so I could not boil water or make a hot meal.
When I finally did get up, I attached the noisemaking bells to my shirt, put my whistle around my neck and my shotgun over my shoulder, and set out downriver, hoping to meet a few of the local fishermen. I walked several miles before reaching the first fish camp; the next one was another mile away. It was immediately apparent that Clarence, by recommending that I live at the cabin, either didn’t understand that anthropologists need to live among the people they study or didn’t want the study to succeed. Though the cabin was cozy, staying there would mean that I would get little work done. The only feasible alternative, which turned out to be a good one, was to move all my gear six miles away to a small fish-processing station that was little more than a few WWII-style Quonset huts where the fishermen came to unload and sell their fish. A small work crew gutted the salmon, iced them, and packed them to be flown to Yakutat in an ancient DC-3. It was only here that the fishermen met, some lingering to relax and socialize.
A TALE OF TWO RIVERS
The fishermen worked on two rivers. Monitoring the salmon that returned to both, while also keeping an eye on the fishermen, was an ADF&G fisheries biologist named Alex Brogel. Raised in Germany, Alex had been drawn to Alaska as a young man by its wilderness. Now middle-aged, Alex became my teacher. The Alsek and the nearby East River “are as different as rivers can be,” he explained to me as we sat on a riverbank the morning we met. Despite being only a few miles apart, the Alsek River is huge and flows through some of the most remote land in North America. It’s the only river along five hundred miles of coastline to have muscled its way through the high Alaskan coastal ranges. Over two hundred miles long, it has a volume greater than any river along the entire Pacific Coast other than the great Columbia. The East River, in contrast, springs from an artesian source and runs just seven miles to the sea. The following day, Alex invited me out in a small boat to illustrate their differences, which I dutifully recorded in my notes.
The Alsek’s current is swift, averaging six knots; while the East River is a gentle two knots. The Alsek is extremely cold (38 to 42 degrees) since most of its volume is glacial melt water; while the East River is shallow, warm (55–65 degrees) and non-glacial. The Alsek is turbid; its milky gray color gives it the appearance of watery cement; while the East River is crystal clear. Yet both rivers have large salmon runs, and spawn all five species of Pacific salmon: sockeye, king, coho or silver, pink, and chum.
In both rivers, salmon are caught with gill nets, which are staked from the riverbank and then stretched across the current by small boats and anchored. The nets hang vertically in the water so that salmon migrating upstream to spawn run into them and become entangled, usually around the gills (hence the name gill nets). The trapped fish are then “picked” from the nets by the fishermen, who pull themselves along the nets in their boats, and taken to the fish processor once or twice a day where they are weighed, gutted, and iced until they can be flown out for further processing and distribution to West Coast markets.
In the succeeding days, sometimes while sharing a meal on the riverbank, Alex showed me how differences between the two rivers pose unique challenges to the fishermen. Since the East River is clear, salmon can see the gill nets. For this reason, fishing was traditionally done at night when the nets were less visible. The turbidity of the Alsek River, in contrast, means that the time of day has little effect on fishing success. One benefit of the East River’s clear water, however, is that fishermen can see the migratory fish and know exactly where to set their nets.3 They can also chase visible schools of fish into their nets by driving their boats back and forth across the shallow pools where the fish pause to renew their energy before continuing upstream. The warmth of the East River also produces lots of underwater vegetation or “moss” that clogs the nets, forcing fishermen to shake them regularly. It is exhausting work and means that East River fishermen spend far more time at their nets than those who fish on the Alsek.
Figure 4-2. A Tlingit fisherman watches for salmon striking his gill net on the Alsek River.
While the Alsek lacks moss, it has drifting logs and chunks of ice flowing down it from calving glaciers upstream. Both can foul or destroy nets. I watched one fisherman lose two nets to an iceberg the size of a car. Harbor seals are another headache. They are clever, understand how gillnets work, and feed on the salmon trapped in them. After a severe storm once caused fishermen to abandon their nets temporarily, they returned to find a seal behind each one, driving fish into the net and then eating them.
Another animal predator that competes with the fishermen is the brown or grizzly bear, which is attracted to the caught fish. Bears will wade into the water or haul the nets onto the bank to get at them. Not only are fish lost, but the nets’ webbing is damaged as the bears tear at it to remove the fish. Consequently, fishermen on both rivers pack guns. Over the summer I heard a lot of local lore about bear encounters and the behavior and movements of individual bears. To protect their nets, fishermen use different strategies. One man spread his dirty laundry on the bushes near his nets to give the area a strong human scent; another used a noisemaking cannon, like those used to scare birds from cornfields. When fishing at night, some men kept a lantern or fire burning on the riverbank. And some fishermen shoot bears illegally. One Alsek fisherman claimed to have killed more than twenty bears in his twenty summers on the river.
STRUGGLING TO GAIN RAPPORT
In Dry Bay, like Yakutat, I was again met with suspicion, although of a different sort. The NPS had informed all the fishermen about the research and who I was—an anthropology professor from New York. In this case, I might have gotten a better reception had I been an IRS inspector. The fishermen had been opposed to Dry Bay’s becoming part of the National Park Service. The land had previously been under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service which, in large measure, had let the fishermen and hunters do as they pleased. Now they feared new regulations would restrict their activities. And they did not want anyone, least of all the federal government, telling them what they could or could not do. As one non-Native fisherman pointedly told me, “I came here to get away from Big Brother.”
Yet my job was to document the very activities—fishing and hunting—they feared might be restricted, or taken away altogether. That I was a college professor didn’t help, and worse, I was from “back East.” “A pointy-headed intellectual,” I overheard one fisherman say. Had I been from the University of Idaho, I might have been more acceptable. I told the fishermen that I was really from the West, having grown up in California, but that seemed to make little difference. During my first week camped at the fish processor, a young, grizzled fisherman named Virgil, high on drugs or alcohol or both, came up to me on his three-wheeler, pistol visibly at his side. “Keep your fuckin’ nose out of my business or there’ll be trouble,” he threatened, looking down at his pistol. I wrote in my journal that night,
