Down in Bristol Bay: High Tides, Hangovers, and Harrowing Experiences on Alaska's Last Frontier

PROLOGUE

THE BALLAD OF BRISTOL BAY

¹

Bob Durr

Come you sailors and you fishermen and listen to my song

I’ll sing it to you right, but you might think it’s wrong

May make you mad, but it’s true what I say

It’s all about the fellows down in Bristol Bay

Hard times on the water, down in Bristol Bay

Well, you run down to Bristol Bay

Gonna catch a lot of fish, make a big payday

I come around to see you and it’s flip and flop

You’re in hock to the cannery for everything you’ve got

Hard times on the water, down in Bristol Bay

The fishing’s hot at Naknek, I heard it today

Gas her up and head her out of Nushagak Bay

You meet a bunch of boats a-coming back the other way

They say the nets are all smoking back in Nushagak Bay

Hard times on the water, down in Bristol Bay

Come the Fourth of July and the Big Run is here

Open up a jug and a case of beer

Sit on the beach, boys, and take your ease

Fish and Game needs escapement for the Japanese

Hard times on the water, down in Bristol Bay

Fishermen are sober down in Bristol Bay

High boat or average got no time to play

You open up a jug and ol’ P. G.’ll say—

You got smashed last night: no advance today

Hard times on the water, down in Bristol Bay

The Bristol Bay fellows like to hang around bars

Some’ll get you fish, and some’ll get you scars

Both are kind of rough, and both are kind of wet

If you’re looking for trouble, either one’s a good bet

Hard times on the water, down in Bristol Bay

1

GETTING THERE: PHASE 1

The restiveness that underlay my days for so many years before I made my move to Alaska had no obvious origin in the circumstances of my life. At forty-three I was still fairly young, in good health, well married, with four bright and happy kids. My job as a professor of English at Syracuse University was respectable, tenured, and moderately well paid, with lots of time off, and I was considered a good teacher and scholar, liked by my students and colleagues. But many men and women have enjoyed these kinds of advantageous circumstances, which our society considers reason enough to be content, and yet have not been content. We learn of their nervous breakdowns or suicides with disbelief and dismay. Someone like Howard Hughes or Ernest Hemingway might come to mind.

If the conventional wisdom of our culture can be so wrong so often about the ingredients of contentment, and if your survey of your own life uncovers most of those ingredients in adequate measure and still you know that something is wrong, that you are not content but obscurely yearning, behind all the easy day-to-day facades, for some unknown factor, some imponderable missing quality of life, you will eventually refuse to run with the pack after the accepted goods of the world. And should it happen then that you come upon one or another of the authentic expressions of the ancient and universal wisdom of our species, the perennial philosophy—the teachings of Jesus and the Christian mystics, say, or of Siddh e9781429973274_img_257.gif rtha Gautama or Lao-tzu or the Zen patriarchs, or perhaps a poet like Thomas Traherne or William Blake or Walt Whitman—you will be irresistibly drawn in search of the missing ingredient, the philosopher’s stone that will transform your leaden life into imperishable gold. You will, perhaps without realizing it, start upon a singular quest. In my own case all the signs pointed to wilderness and a life reduced to elementals. I wanted to set my feet on bedrock again, to wriggle down through high-sounding ideas and enticing images onto the solid ground of mere existence, the fundamentals of human life. I wanted to come as close as I could to the life of primitive man, the original people. So, on summer vacations, while my colleagues toured Europe to savor history and culture, I traveled north and then northwest into prehistory and the aboriginal in search of the straight and narrow passage to more than India, in Whitman’s words, to realms of primal thought and innocent intuition.

At first I headed blindly north into Canada, driving as far into the bush as the gravel and dirt roads could take me, camping along the way with my son Steve, who was then about ten years old. But northern Quebec and Ontario were predominantly flat, bushy: The country didn’t appeal to me, I had no positive feeling for it. And I could see no way in those provinces that I could live in the woods and still earn the few necessary dollars. At home, when heated to the subject, I might rant and rave about finding a cave for us to live in, subsisting on nothing but birch bark and berries, but in actuality I knew we would need some cash income to make it.

In the third summer of exploration I took my whole family, in a Jeep station wagon with a rack on top loaded with camping gear, all the way across the continent to British Columbia. There, as far west as I could go, I again followed whatever dirt road there was leading away into the backcountry. Though the land was magnificent, a wild, high terrain, not only did it promise to be difficult and costly to get a little piece of it to settle on, but once more I could see no way to earn the necessary dollars. Finally, in the summer of 1963 we traveled the rest of the way north to Alaska: We were Americans, and maybe it would be easier in the Great Land to find a way.

One day in that summer of 1963, while driving down the Kenai Peninsula toward Homer, I stopped at a scenic bluff overlooking Cook Inlet, and we all piled out of the Jeep. The younger kids ran about, glad to be released. While my wife, Carol, watched them, Steve and I stood looking out across the inlet. It was a brilliant windy day, the sky swept pale blue, and cool for July by our New York standards, even though at the same time the northern sun struck us as peculiarly intense, as if its rays passed through the thin atmosphere without resistance, or as if the atmosphere couldn’t resist its power, so much fiercer than the mild sun of New York skies.

Cook Inlet in actuality didn’t correspond at all with the small wedge of blue it had appeared to be on the maps I had studied on the dining-room table of my house in New York State. The inlet was a very big body of water, stretching away infinitely south and across into the distance, where the pale mountains on the far side seemed suspended in a sunlit haze above the land.

Just below us a small boat, light gray and white, slowly made its way against wind and wave. In the distance the inlet seemed merely to be sparkling with whitecaps, but closer up, where that little boat was, the waves looked big and dangerous. The boat lurched, pounded, and rolled, periodically disappearing in spray. Nets were coiled in the stern: a fish boat. It came to me in a rush that there—down there with that boat crashing through the waves—was the missing piece to complete my idea of the good life, linking it to the pragmatics of making a living. Commercial salmon fishing could be the way to make it out of the world of words and back to earth. How I was to become a fisherman I had as yet no idea, but I was sure it could be done. That a way was to present itself out of the blue within the next couple of days would have seemed to me at the time most unlikely, and that it happened seems to me now what—in a religious context—would have to be called providential.

We drove on down to Homer, once more to the end of the road, and pitched camp on Homer Spit, the sandy finger of land extending from town and pointing across Kachemak Bay. The campground was only roughly developed, a dozen or so random clearings with fireplaces among the scrub spruce and willows. A man named Les VanDevere and his wife, Betty, and small son, Dyer, had pitched their wall tent in the clearing nearest ours. They had driven down from Kenai to do a little crabbing, and we got acquainted in the casual way of families sharing a campground.

Les had fled New Jersey and a mechanic’s job ten years earlier. The boss had called him into the office one Friday afternoon. He had good news: Les could work right through the weekend. But Les failed to experience the expected elation at the prospect of overtime. He had made plans to go deer hunting. He decided on the spot that he would rather have the deer than the dollars, even if he didn’t get the deer. He quit, sold his possessions, and headed north to Alaska. Now he made his living fishing for salmon in Cook Inlet, and I could tell from the way he held himself and cocked his cap that it had been the right move for him.

Before two nights had passed around the campfire, we had made plans for me to fly up alone the following summer to fish with him—but not in Cook Inlet.

Bristol Bay, he said, glancing at me from behind his thick glasses with a curious sort of mocking smile, like a man who knew something he was sure I would want to know. He took another swallow from the whiskey bottle, which he called a jug. If you’re really after salmon, Bristol Bay is where you want to be. He paused, as though he had said everything that needed to be said. I waited. When I came to know him better, I realized he had been uncharacteristically talkative that night, thanks partly no doubt to the company of Jim Beam but also because we had started making plans and he was warming up to Bristol Bay. He poked at the fire with a stick. I’ve wanted to get over there myself in the worst way for years now, he went on in the introverted voice of a private utterance, as though he were thinking out loud. That’s the big time in salmon fishing, over there. He glanced at me with a grin coming to his face. Christ! In a good year the runs are so thick with fish you don’t even need a net. You just lean over the side and shovel them on board! He laughed explosively, as habitually silent men often do, as if the laugh had to force its way out through little-used channels under backed-up pressure.

VanDevere was tall and slim, along Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart lines, with a clean sweep to his jaw. He was silent again, leaning forward now, gazing into the fire, with his elbows on his knees, the stick dangling from his hands. In the flickering light, with the bill of his cap pulled low and the fire’s glow accentuating the lines on his lean cheeks, he looked seasoned, chiseled to a clear-cut form. I felt he was the kind of man I had come here to know, and I was ready to shake hands on a partnership with him.

I asked him about the country over there, what it was like. He came out of himself and replied in the same quiet, absorbed voice as before.

They say it’s really beautiful. Not so much right around salt water. That’s mostly flat, endless stretches of flatland, tundra, and pothole lakes. But two guys who fished over there a few years ago told me north of Dillingham it’s all forests and mountains, and there’s a long chain of clear-water lakes that’s still pure wilderness. It’s real big country, spectacular as anything left anywhere in the world. There’s only a couple of native fish camps in there and maybe some Eskimos hunting or trapping up from Dillingham or the villages along the Nushagak River. It’s wide open and wild.

Les knew what I was after, why I had come to Alaska that summer of 1963. He eyed me and passed the bottle.

How about game? I asked. Is it good game country? You know, that’s important— I hesitated, not wanting to come across as though I was trying to sound like an old-timer —I mean, can a man figure on feeding his family?

The fire reflected in his glasses, and where his eyes had been, flames danced as he spoke.

Moose and black bear all over the place—and some grizzly too: though you might be less interested in eating him than making sure he doesn’t eat you. He laughed again, with a whoop, white teeth flashing. And in the northern parts there’s caribou. And if you like fish, well, those lakes and streams are so thick with hungry char, rainbow, and grayling you have to hide behind a tree to bait your hook. Then there’s the salmon every year, too. And there’s fur …

He paused and reached for the bottle—the jug.

Wolves? I asked, as he probably expected I would. To me, as to many people, the wolf was type and symbol of the old wild life. The chance to live near such animals, just to know they were there, wild and freely roaming the land, even if I never saw or heard them, seemed a rare privilege in a world where everything wild and free was being destroyed or turned into dollars. I knew I would never kill a wolf. I knew I needed