The Ferries and the Last Frontier

Travel Stories: In a four-part series, Eva Holland explores Southeast Alaska by state ferry

03.26.12 | 10:43 AM ET

MV Matanuska, somewhere between Juneau and Sitka, AlaskaDawn on the MV Matanuska, somewhere between Juneau and Sitka (Photo: Eva Holland)

Part 1: The Roughest Place in the World

Skagway in winter is eerily quiet. On Broadway the store windows are papered over, and the wooden boardwalks, frozen solid, creak and crack and pop under the rare pedestrian’s weight. The bright painted facades of the town’s historic buildings—one-time saloons and brothels, now seasonal shops hawking T-shirts, fudge and jewelry to cruise ship tourists—are so cartoonish, so Ye Olde, that you could imagine you’ve shrunk down to Lilliputian size and wandered into a child’s toy Wild West Towne, left out in the yard and abandoned, after the first snow, until spring.

This tiny Alaskan port on the northern end of the Inside Passage draws crowds of summer visitors by selling itself as a historic boom town, but it never feels more like a relic than when the winter settles in.

I arrived in town from my home in Whitehorse, in Canada’s Yukon Territory, tracing in reverse the famous Gold Rush route—from Skagway over the mountains to the Yukon River and the Klondike gold fields. I’d driven south past road crews clearing the debris from avalanches earlier in the week. I’d cleared the summit of White Pass, its highest point marking the international boundary, and coasted the few icy miles down from summit to sea level in second gear. Now I walked Skagway’s tidy, empty streets, past the neatly maintained yards and bright painted houses of its 800 or so residents. American flags flapped on flagpoles, and homemade signs propped up in windows cheered on the local high school sports teams. Vibe-wise, it was more an idyllic Anytown, U.S.A. than a rough-and-ready Last Frontier.

I was due on the 2:30 p.m. ferry to Juneau the next day. I was planning to spend 10 days exploring the ports and waterways of Southeast Alaska, using only the state’s public passenger ferries to get around.

Months earlier, in the Whitehorse Public Library, I’d spotted a copy of the WPA guide to Alaska. It was first published in 1939, before the Alaska Highway was built, and when I flipped through it I was struck by the changes the highway had wrought. For travelers to the interior, the road from northern B.C. to Fairbanks had completely altered the Alaskan experience. River steamers and railroads had been replaced by blacktop; historic travelers’ waypoints had been abandoned, and new ones built up. The standard, beaten-path routes described in the book—the journey down the Yukon River by steamer, for instance—were long gone.

But for the traveler to the panhandle, little had changed. The classic sea routes were unaltered since the WPA guide’s era—largely unaltered, in fact, since the 19th century, or even earlier. Visitors today traveled the same channels, past the same mountain views, and docked in the same ports, that they had for the last 100 years. The ships that carried them had evolved, sure, as had the ports where they docked, but it seemed to me that in a fundamental way the trip remained unchanged. There was something essential, I thought, about seeing Southeast Alaska by water.

I had decided to go in January, when the waterways were uncluttered with summer kayakers, yachties, cruise ships and fishing fleets, and the ferries were stocked with locals. I’d gathered up a handful of Alaskan travel guides and travelogues to get a feel for the experience over the years, and arranged for a media pass with my contact at the Alaska Marine Highway System. Skagway was the logical starting point—the northernmost panhandle port, and the only one, besides Haines, where the road to the rest of the world intersected with the old sea routes.

Skagway is a good place to ponder the past, and the changes time can work on a place. Built as a gateway to the Gold Rush, it had a seriously nasty reputation in its heyday. In The Klondike Fever, historian Pierre Berton writes that “the town of Skagway was conceived in lawlessness and nurtured in anarchy.” He quotes the sober-minded Yukon Mountie, Sam Steele (“the last man to give way to overstatement”), who called Skagway “the roughest place in the world.” Berton notes that in Steele’s memoirs, the police officer wrote about “the nights he spent in the town, when the crash of bands in the dance halls and ‘the cracked voices of the singers’ were mingled with shouts of murder, cries for help, and the crackle of gunshot.”

The mayhem is long gone—Skagway’s violent crime rate today is 74 percent below the national average. I had dinner at the Skagway Brewing Company, a small-scale brewpub with high ceilings and a long, polished wooden bar. This was a ritual stop whenever I made the drive down from Whitehorse, and as I ordered my usual—mac’n'cheese and a spruce tip ale—I waved hello to the owner sitting a couple of tables away.  The bar was quiet: half a dozen people turned up through the evening, and we all watched Tom Brady end Tim Tebow’s playoffs on the big screen.

The next morning I ate breakfast at a bright, cheery diner, eavesdropping on the gossiping locals at the next table. When the time came to leave, I parked outside the ferry terminal and went in to collect my ticket. I asked the woman behind the counter whether my car would be safe enough in the parking lot for the next week and a half. She waved a hand as she reassured me. “We’re really lucky we don’t have to worry about all that stuff here,” she said, “all that stuff” seeming to represent the collective ills of urbandom, the Lower 48, and Alaska’s more troubled communities, large and small. “We have a real nice police chief, too.”

I thanked her and took my ticket, handed my passport over for a quick check at the door, then headed down a long enclosed tunnel to the dock. The ferry, the MV LeConte, loomed above me, black hull muted by a thick crust of ice. I stepped onto the boarding ramp. A half-hour later, after I’d settled into the observation lounge, the PA system crackled to life with the ritual words: “All ashore that’s going ashore.” A horn sounded. We were off.

An officer on the bridge of the MV LeConte looks out at the Lynn Canal, between Skagway and Haines (Photo: Eva Holland)

Part 2: Storytellers

The LeConte is one of the smallest ships in the ferry fleet. It holds 300 passengers and 34 vehicles, but on the day we sailed from Skagway for Juneau its population was sparse: I boarded alongside a half-dozen other passengers and a handful of cars. The crew greeted most of my fellow passengers by name, and paused in their rounds, leaning on armrests to chat. I snagged a large table with a power outlet tucked underneath it, and soon the outlet drew a seatmate, Heidi, to join me.

Heidi’s a ferry veteran, a longtime resident, and she was keen to tell me her favorite ferry story. She’d been on the boat to Bellingham a few years back, a three-day ride all the way down the labyrinthine, fjord-riddled coast, and as she always did on that longer route she’d set up a small campsite on the ship’s deck. Around her, other tents sprouted as locals and tourists made themselves at home, lugging sleeping bags and sleeping pads, even full-size inflatable air mattresses, packing coolers full of food. It was a three-day village.

For two and a half days, Heidi watched as a single mom attempted to contain her two inexhaustible children, who were wild about the floating campground. On the third day, reinforcements arrived—the mother met another family that was camped on another part of the ship, with children the same age, and a play-date was arranged. The over-worked mother would let the second shift take over, for a little while at least.

When they met on deck, the two groups of children approached each other cautiously. One little girl asked the other, “Do you live here, too?”

Leaning forward, Heidi lifted her closed fist above the table between us as she explained the point of the story—and, for her, the point of the ferries. “Safe,” she said, raising one finger. “Reliable. Affordable.” Another finger, and a thumb. “No security BS.” And, raising her last finger: “Community.”

“People that don’t ride the ferries a lot don’t always get this,” she said, “but ferries build community. People say, ‘Oh, the ferries don’t pay for themselves.’ But how do you measure their real value?”

This would become a theme in my conversations with ferry passengers and staff. Apparently it was a perennial debate in Alaska: Some people—people, my fellow passengers were eager to point out, who didn’t rely on the ferries; people from the interior with its roads and highways, people who didn’t understand their way of life—thought the service was too expensive, unnecessary, old-fashioned. In a state that was firmly Republican red, where independence and self-sufficiency were prized above all else, a public ferry system spanning hundreds of miles of thinly populated coastline made an easy target.

I left Heidi chatting with an ex-neighbor she hadn’t seen in awhile (“If it wasn’t for the ferries, I’d never see some people,” she said as I got up to leave). I went upstairs, to the bridge, to meet the captain and his officers. We were approaching Haines—after a quick stop there to take on more passengers, we’d carry on down the Lynn Canal to Juneau. I’d flown over this body of water in summer; then it had shone a clear turquoise, almost Caribbean in the sunlight, but now the water was dark, impenetrable. We were hemmed in on both sides by tall cliffs, and even taller, snow-capped mountains grew on the horizon, tinted sunset yellow and pink. The captain looked at me and smiled. “It’s not a bad office,” he said.

The Chief Engineer, a large man named Tiny, invited me down to the engine room for a tour of the LeConte’s guts. I wore a set of Peltor earmuffs as we passed through the clanging, roaring workings, and then took a seat in a small office, a soundproofed room with walls covered in buttons and switches and dials. On one blank section of wall, between the door and a window looking out on the engines, a flow chart had been taped up. It was titled “U.S. Nuclear Chain of Command,” and it read: President -> Secretary of Defense -> Unified Combat Commanders - and then, doodled in above President, “The Engineer Who Installed the Red Button.”

Like Heidi, Tiny had a favorite ferry story. His was about the time he’d met Simon Winchester, who’d been traveling on assignment for Conde Nast Traveler. Tiny and Winchester had hit it off, and they’d been eating breakfast together in the ship’s cafeteria when another passenger had started choking. Tiny found himself performing the Heimlich maneuver in front of the bestselling author. “We’re Christmas card friends now,” he said.

I wound up eating dinner with the captain, Tiny, and most of the ship’s officers. I sat and picked at my halibut and listened as they all swapped ferry stories. The ships were characters in the stories, and beloved ones. “She has such beautiful lines,” the captain said about the MV Columbia, the ferry service’s flagship. “She’s got a personality all her own,” Tiny agreed.

Eventually, as we ate, it came out that I planned on hitchhiking the 12 miles from Juneau’s ferry terminal into town and to my hostel, since there was no bus. Tiny rolled his eyes. “We have a spare room in the basement,” he said. “I’ll let my wife know you’re coming.” I looked around the table, surprised, needing confirmation that this was a real offer, and one I should accept. The captain shrugged and smiled. “It’s an Alaska thing,” he said. Tiny added, “I bring people home from the ship all the time.”

I woke up the next morning in a suburban house with a big mountain view. Tiny had already returned to the ship, and I spent the morning chatting over coffee with his wife, Marcia, before she drove me into town. Sure enough, she had her ferry story, too.

Marcia had dreamed for years of driving the Alaska Highway from end to end. Her father had been one of the civilian contractors who helped build the road during the war, and she’d wanted to see the area where he’d worked, but it wasn’t until after he’d died that she got around to it. She packed up her truck in Montana and drove north, through Alberta, across the Rockies, to mile zero of the highway in Dawson Creek, British Columbia. Then she followed the highway through the Northern Rockies as they curved west, across the Yukon, and into the Alaskan interior. From Fairbanks, she drove south to the coast, to the Gulf of Alaska. She planned on taking the ferry back to Washington and driving home to Montana from there. “It was supposed to be a one-time trip,” she said. “I thought I’d never see Alaska again.”

But she met Tiny on the ferry south, and a year later she left Montana and moved to Juneau. Marcia laughed and shook her head. “I can’t believe he gave Simon Winchester top billing.”

Not long after the move, her college-age daughter boarded the ferry in Bellingham, sailing north for a visit. In a Hollywood-style twist of fate, she met her future husband on the ferry, too, and now Marcia and Tiny had two young grandchildren in Anchorage, and any plans of heading south for retirement were on the shelf. A one-time ferry ride had turned into an Alaskan lifetime.

Sunset in downtown Sitka, AlaskaSunset in downtown Sitka, Alaska (Photo: Eva Holland)

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.

Passengers in the observation lounge of the MV Matanuska (Photo: Eva Holland)

Part 4: At the Potlatch

It was 2:30 on a Saturday afternoon, and Ketchikan was offering me a mixture of snow, rain, and hail as I attempted to explore its steep, narrow streets. I gave up on sightseeing, walked down the boardwalk above the Thomas Basin, where fishing boats dozed quietly in their berths, and opened the door to The Potlatch Bar.

As I stepped inside, everyone paused. It was a moment plucked out of a spaghetti western: the stranger outlined in the saloon doorway, the line of locals looking up in unison, silence descending upon the place.

I walked through the room and took the last empty bar stool. On my left, two bearded men watched me, and as I sat the older one leaned down and whispered something in the younger one’s ear. They both laughed. Two seats to my right, a native guy in bulky beige coveralls looked up from his Bud and said, “You’re the second good-looking woman to walk in here today.” He nodded to the old woman between us, deep wrinkles around her mouth and a Pall Mall wedged between two fingers. “She was the first.”

“I figured,” I said, and the old woman laughed and wheezed.

The bartender asked me for some ID, and as I handed it over I heard a woman down the bar mutter “passport.” Then, louder, she asked me the question that everyone in the place had already answered.

“Just visiting, are you?”

I told her—them—that yes, I was. “Well you came to the right place,” said the old woman on my right. “The Potlatch is the best bar in Ketchikan.”

I settled in with a beer and tried not to look entirely out of place. After my silent entrance, the bartender greeted every new arrival by name and drink of choice. “Hey Les,” she’d say. “Screwdriver?” She poured freehand, filling glasses half or two-thirds or three-quarters of the way with rum or vodka or rye before adding a splash of mix. The Righteous Brothers leaked out of the jukebox, and cigarette smoke curled around the fluorescent Miller sign on the wall.

After a few minutes, Beige Coveralls bought me a beer. Several minutes later, Les the screwdriver-drinker sent one my way, too. The woman next to me—Miss Carol, the bartender called her—sipped her beer and started talking. She told me she’d been coming to the Potlatch since the bartender had been a child, tagging along while her mother poured an earlier generation’s stiff drinks. Miss Carol told me about herself—how she’d moved south for a few years, to Nevada, where her husband’s family lived, and how after she’d been widowed she’d come right back to Ketchikan.

“I called my daughter and I said, ‘Daddy’s gone. Come on down here and get me,’” she said. The woman down at the end of the bar—the one who’d spotted my passport—hollered for the younger bearded man on my left to pay the bartender for her next drink. “Aw, come on, ma,” he said, and up and down the bar the Potlatch locals laughed together.

After another couple of rounds I’d been accepted into the family, however temporarily. I’d beaten Young Beard at pool—“Kick his ass!” Les yelled from the other end of the bar—and bought Miss Carol a drink and had her buy one for me in return. Coveralls had played “When a Man Loves a Woman” on the jukebox, just for me. It was still shy of dinnertime, and I could feel myself being seduced by the easy, smoky, boozy familiarity of the Potlatch. This would be an easy place to lose yourself every day.

I watched the regulars come and go. They arrived alone, and for the most part they left the same way. The Potlatch wasn’t a place where you came with a crowd of friends and huddled around a table together. It was a place where a collection of individuals, loners, could opt in to society for awhile. In that way, it seemed like Alaska in miniature to me—Alaska, a paradoxical community of people whose dearest shared values are privacy and isolation, individuality and the right to a life free of crowds.

It occurred to me that each of the ferries was a sort of floating Potlatch Bar, too. The boats offered a chance for the locals to emerge from their roadless communities, wedged tight between mountain and ocean, and come together for a short while—for a chat in the observation lounge, a game of cards in the cafeteria, a drink in the bar. The essential nature of ferry travel in Alaska was about more than its seagoing history, or its seemingly unchanging scenery: It was about the lives people had carved out for themselves here in the hard north, all the strings they had cut when they left their homes down south, and the new, untethered existences they’d designed instead.

The next morning, I boarded my final ferry with a hangover. It would be nearly 30 hours before we docked in Skagway. In the cafeteria, I knew, dice were rattling on tabletops, and cards were being dealt. The MV Matanuska’s bar was open for business—Larry might well be on duty, serving up Bloody Marys just like Mary taught him—and wherever I went on the boat, I knew I’d find an Alaskan local with a story to tell. But I didn’t have the energy to keep my promise to Mary, or to hear any more ferry stories. All I wanted to do was go to my cabin, stretch out on my thin bunk, and watch the coastline go by until the ship rocked me to sleep.

As I locked the cabin door and pulled back the blankets, I told myself I wasn’t being antisocial. I was, instead, participating in an essential Alaskan tradition: a retreat from the crowds, to a view of the mountains and a place of my own.