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The Ferries and the Last Frontier

Part 3: In Sitka Sound

I caught an overnight ferry from Juneau to Sitka, slept on a long leather couch in the observation lounge, and was up and pacing the ship well before the late winter sunrise. When it came, I watched the clouds turn pink against a pale, pale blue sky. A thin sliver of white moon hung above the mountains off the ship’s bow, their snowcaps turning pink to match the clouds. It was cold out on deck, and I hunched down in my jacket while the wind tangled my hair, but I stayed outside until the colors faded. Much later that morning, the sun would finally clear the tops of the mountains and light up everything in the ship’s cafeteria—shiny tabletops, metal trash cans and even the sugar caddies turning gold.

We docked around lunchtime. So far, each port had surpassed the last in the sheer beauty of its natural setting—Haines and its looming snowcaps one-upping Skagway; Juneau’s enormous urban glacier outdoing Haines. And Sitka was now upstaging them all. A snow-streaked, Mt. Fuji-esque cone, Mt. Edgecombe, sprouted at one end of town, and Sitka itself was a bristle of church steeples and colorful houses and fishing boat masts. The water in Sitka Sound was mirror-smooth, spotted with rocky islets, and the mountains marched away on all sides.

In 1939, the WPA guide described the former state capital and longtime Russian enclave this way: “Straight ahead from the steamship dock through the center of town runs Lincoln Street, the Governor’s Walk of Baranof’s day. Along this thoroughfare, the principal street of the town now as in Russian days, Indian women spread out articles of their own manufacture on steamer days for sale to tourists.” Now, more than 70 years later, I walked a Lincoln Street that seemed modernized yet largely unchanged—still the main drag, lined now with formalized souvenir shops aimed at cruise ship passengers: native art, Russian dolls, T-shirts and postcards and the inevitable jewelry stores.

Several years ago, after my first visit to New Orleans, I told a friend that I’d never been anywhere else where the residents were so proud, so fiercely devoted to their hometown. Now, I was seeing a similar devotion in the Alaskans I met. The difference, though, was that while many of the NOLA loyalists I’d talked to were born and raised there—a good many, in fact, might never have traveled all that far from home—most of the Alaskans were imports, lifers by choice and not by birth. A park ranger at Sitka National Historical Park, the site of the final battle between the Sitka Tlingits and the invading Russians, told me that after postings to Yellowstone and other big-name spots in the Lower 48, he’d settled here. He never wanted to leave. And in a pub near the marina, an old man sitting at the bar hollered the words that might as well be the state motto: “I came here 32 years ago for a visit. I’m still here.”

Of course it wasn’t all mountain views and quotable locals. I saw signs of the same social issues that occasionally strained life at home in Whitehorse, and across North America: a toxic mixture of alcoholism, substance abuse and mental illness, tangled even further, in native communities, by the lingering injuries of colonial violence and cultural destruction. On my first afternoon in Sitka, I was sitting in the public library, reading and waiting for the hostel lockout to end, when a heavily bearded native man in hunter’s camo came in, carrying a canister of camping fuel in a plastic bag. He smelled like a bar floor in need of a mopping, sticky with stale beer. He sat down on the couch next to mine. “You fat fuck,” he said to nobody in particular. “Fucking assholes. Fuck you.” He fell asleep a few minutes later, and the sound of his snoring rippled through the library.

A couple of days later, I boarded my third ferry—the MV Taku—for the long ride to Ketchikan. In the cafeteria, two high school sports teams were spread out across several tables—a girls’ basketball team from Haines and a boys’ basketball team from Wrangell, both en route to a tournament. Their coaches were enforcing mandatory homework time, and I wondered whether the Inside Passage had become mundane to them. Here was a trip that some people spent years, lifetimes, dreaming of and saving for, and for the local teenagers it was a milk run, a long commute to a high school ball game. I settled in to a designated study area, a quiet room stocked with carrels and chairs. Behind me, a young man sat for hours, painting miniature army figurines as the ferry wound its way south.

Around 9 p.m. I headed to the Taku Bar, a dark little corner of the boat furnished with a bench and a handful of tables. I sat at the bar, ordered an Alaskan Amber and got to talking to Mary, the bartender. She was from Michigan originally, and one of her brothers had moved to Alaska after he got back from Vietnam. She came to visit, and—I knew what was coming next—she never left. She’d been tending bar on the Taku for 10 years.

As I sipped my beer, she told me about her friendly rivalry with Larry, the bartender on the MV Matanuska. She’d had a customer come in once and ask her if she could make a Bloody Mary as good as Larry’s. “I taught Larry how to make a Bloody Mary!” she said. I promised that when I sailed back to Skagway on the Mat in a few days, I’d ask Larry if he could make a Bloody Mary as good as hers. She laughed. “He’ll probably say he taught me how to make them,” she said.

Mary’s husband had had cancer, and during treatment he’d talked to another patient who asked him, “What do you want to do before you die?” Jack, her husband, had answered: “Build my own house.” And so Jack and Mary had bought some land of their own in Gustavus, cleared it and gotten to work. When Jack died, Mary wasn’t sure if she wanted to keep going, but in the end, she said, she decided to finish it. She was excited about creating a big tile mosaic around the bathtub—she’d been practicing in smaller scale, calling it her “arts’n'crap.”

I was still in the bar a couple of hours later when the ship docked in Petersburg. Two new passengers, fisheries management guys from Ketchikan, joined me on the short row of stools. The younger one told me he’d grown up in Ketchikan, but he’d gone away to college, and while he was down south his folks had left Alaska. “I had nothing to come back to,” he said. He’d moved around for a few years, but he’d always had an urge to get back north. Finally he got in touch with some commercial fishermen he used to know, and got work on a purse-seiner out of Ketchikan for awhile, before his degree allowed him to move into government work. “It was hard to stay away,” he said.

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