Travelers' Tales Alaska (7 page)

The smooth faces of a young Inupiaq family gazed up at me from a glass bowl a few winters back at a neighborhood potluck near my home of Haines, Alaska. Dark, shining eyes found mine as I daubed away sauce-drenched morsels of Thai stir-fry while the rich steaming clatter of feeding friends swirled around the hewn-log room. Wolverine ruff flared from self-assured faces etched into smoky glass, faces so beatific and rare that I stared long enough for a friend to reveal the bowl's garage-sale lineage. Part of a Curtis set traded locally, over and over. She showed me her Chief Joseph, his powerful jaw set in pride and sorrow, and another bowl containing the haunting visage of “Papago Woman,” whose deep eyes peered from behind yellowish globs of tapioca.

From each set of burnished eyes peering eternally into Curtis' lens, I sense a profound love of place; the oneness beaming from Inupiaq faces, or the yearning in Joseph's. Each possesses tribal knowledge of sunken halibut ledges and meadows of wild asparagus, bear trails, and sea lion haul-outs. Like others who came from someplace else to set roots in the glacially scoured soils of Haines, I moved here for the same reasons that local Tlingits used to justify their aggressive defense of territory: fish, birds, wild game, berries and plants for the gathering. Access from tidewater to trade routes penetrating a dry Interior in Alaska and Yukon. Most important, it was where they belonged. Home.

The Chilkat and Chilkoot watersheds proved an ample homeland for up to a thousand residents in four villages. That they were fierce proprietors of an extraordinarily rich territory was widely understood, earning ethnographer Aurel Krause's nomination for “the mightiest of all the Tlingit
tribes.” Their wealth was measured by the sweep of legendary terrain as well as the fabulous artwork used to prove their ownership, carved in totemic design or woven into Chilkat blankets. But among trading partners they were known best for eulachon oil, a treasured food that supplied the namesake for their closely guarded route to the Interior, the so-called Grease Trail.

In 1879 the tribe's sense of ownership shifted when a preacher-explorer named John Muir delivered his “brotherhood of man” oration to hundreds in Yendestucke, at the mouth of the Chilkat. The shaman followed Muir's speech with an acknowledgement that, “for the first time, the Indian and the white man are on the same side of the river.” Crossing the spiritual gap was a piece of cake for Muir compared to the epicurean gulf to come.

At the invitation of Chief Don-na-wuk, Muir partook in a celebratory meal, a “feast of fat things” prepared for the “Ice Chief” and his missionary friend Samuel Young. In a memoir published a year after Muir's death, Young described the meal served to the two white men in “huge washbowls of blue Hudson Bay ware.” The first course consisted of dried salmon stacked in each guest's trencher like kindling, drenched in seal oil. Then the tubs were washed out and returned with a second
course, “great long hunks” of deer back fat drowned in seal gravy. Following this, bowls were again washed and set before the visitors, this time heaped with walnut-sized Russian potatoes ascending from a puddle of oil. For dessert, fleshy rosehips as big as plums overflowed from their bowls, again dripping with grease. After a period of exquisite moans and lip-smacking by his gracious hosts, Muir leaned toward Young and exclaimed, “Mon, mon! I'm fashed we'll be floppin' about i' the sea, whiles, wi' flippers an' forked tails.”

Traditional foods were discouraged at the Presbyterian mission that followed two years later. Beef, poultry, and flour became staples in the boarding school through which each Tlingit child passed. The same language used expertly by Reverend Young to translate his and Muir's speeches was banned among Native speakers. However, despite non-Native efforts to squelch an identity centuries in the making, Tlingit ways persist today. Even the gradual settlement of a couple thousand non-Natives in this venation of green valleys walled by glacier-draped crags has not deterred the rule of citizens waxing Tlingit by blood or association. They never signed a treaty, never relinquished the power that they now share with the strangers who came to their table. And I have felt the grace of their generosity.

Consider the contents of these pages a tribute to the generous spirit of subsistence people. Their blood flows with blueberry shine, sockeye wiggle, rain, wind, and impetuous sunlight. Described herein are two pathways, both of which I have trod. Each leads to a scene made familiar in the history of the world when people share food: one, like Muir's banquet, is by auspicious invitation. The other, like the roadside scene, is a bungling intrusion. I carry the lessons from these occasions as reassurance and warning, reminders of my place as a guest at the table.

Green-bottle tones glint from the clear water that tumbles a rocky mile from Chilkoot Lake to the sea at Lutak Inlet. Filling the narrow wooded valley is the same liquid conversation that once spoke to a village of about one hundred twenty L'koot Tlingits, people of the Sockeye clan. On this day in late May, 1991, perhaps two dozen descendents scurry between work stations, their spirited palaver punctuating the river's drone with ancient grammar and laughter rarely displayed on Main Street in Haines, ten miles distant. Their chief, Austin Hammond, is called Donawak, after the leader who invited John Muir to his banquet. Austin has asked me to come out, take pictures, pose “good questions,” and watch with white man's eyes as clan members attend to the business of cultural survival.

Diaphanous boundaries of kin and culture keep Tlingit folk distinct from non-Native residents, but their presence in Haines insinuates itself on nearly every level: politics, religion, education, business, food. Subsistence sets Alaska Natives apart from most other shoppers on the continent. Their traditional ways define an ancient culture with each recipe for salmon or seal gut, with each prayer for bountiful harvest. Beyond consumerism, though, Natives operate with a set of principles based on stewardship of the places that supply their groceries. Overharvest threatens their identity, disrespect can insult the spirits of plants and animals on which people depend. Food usually arrives when it is supposed to arrive, although fish stocks and other species have declined dramatically in parts of the state. Even the legendary tribes of eulachon, whose runs still contribute to local Tlingit status, have become sporadic.

“Now you get to see how Tlingits really act,” Hammond says as he steps out of a thick coil of steam vapor to shake my
hand. “Like our eulachon brothers, we are the last who know the ways.” A purplish flush creeps up the eighty-one-year-old man's wizened neck, tinting his already dark face with burning radiance; his eyes twinkle with lipid-induced euphoria. He grins, a kid eating birthday cake. Guffaws burst from the other elders sitting in lawn chairs just up the riverbank. They dip celery and Ritz crackers into a salad bowl brimmed with honey-colored solution while calling out advice and jokes to the younger tribal members who work below. Austin nudges me, revealing ravaged dental work, and spreads both arms broadly toward the workers and the river gushing past them. “I am a wealthy man,” he says. “To be here cooking eulachon with my children and grandchildren. This is my wealth.” He runs a gnarled hand across his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, widens his eyes. “It gets so your ears tingle. Then you know the eulachon's working for you.”

Young men shoveled a truckload of the oily fish into a pit ten days earlier, then covered it with a sheet of plywood until today. Sammy carefully lowers himself into the hole until he is out of sight. His hand reappears grasping the bale of a steel bucket overfilled with fermented eulachon. Fumes emanate from the putrefying mass. Insect clouds hover over the eight-by-ten-foot excavation. A potent bouquet punches me when I peer into the pit. Tears well in my eyes and a fist of nausea clenches my stomach. Austin lightly touches my elbow to bring me back from the edge.

The bucket goes to Ozzie, a young man I usually see in town swimming through a bottomless pool of alcohol, who now sloshes the bucket's contents into a washtub. Ozzie and his friend Pete waltz gingerly to the fire with their precious haul, then pour it gradually into the forty-gallon cast iron cauldron. Thick white steam erupts from the bubbling stew which envelopes Austin's middle-aged granddaughter, Lena, as
she stirs with both hands pushing a sawed-off canoe paddle. She recognizes my wife, Jeannie, and waves her toward another paddle on the ground near the woodstove. Jeannie and Lena fall into a rhythm of slow, steady stirring, meant to thoroughly break apart the fish bodies to release every molecule of the precious oil.

The chief steps into the white steam and inhales sharply. Clouds billow and thicken each time fish is added. Austin wraps himself completely in the hot vapor blanket. When a slight breeze unravels his ethereal cloak, the man's eyes meet mine, smiling. The steam has restorative powers, Austin says. “It can cure a bad sunburn; does the same thing to your insides.” Lena hands me her paddle and walks up the bank to take a photo of Jeannie and me stirring, swaddled in steam. “Say cheese,” she says, giggling. Flash. One at a time the old men and women in lawn chairs stand with effort and hobble down to the cauldron for their turn in the steam. I lean into it and suck long draughts. Instead of the heat blast I expect, steam slides down my throat and coats my innards completely with warm velvet. Instantly, my body relaxes. I step back from the vat as others move in to skim the creamy froth for oil. A grin stretches across my face.

The elders nod and laugh and point at the white guy wearing an eulachon smirk. One of the grandfathers, George Lewis, waves a long stalk of wild celery and points with it to an empty lawn chair. Like passing a baton, he slaps the peeled stalk into my palm, points with his open hands to the salad bowl on a firewood round. “Try our elixir of life,” he urges. I dip into the bowl and withdraw the stalk drenched in what could pass as olive oil. Tastebuds prepared for rancid shock are disoriented by a mild, cloying flavor that only hints of fish. When the celery is gone, my hosts offer crackers and bread sticks. George says that during the 1898 gold rush the trading
value of eulachon oil was many times that of the precious mineral that lured at least 20,000 adventurers past these waters to Skagway, just fifteen miles up the fjord. Another man adds that his grandfather was paid in gold to be a packer escorting crowds over Chilkoot Pass, but traded his wages for oil when he came off the mountain.

Someone passes around a Mason jar of darker oil, prompting a lively discourse on the varying grades, tastes, potency. Braids of steam drift and unravel through our semi-circle facing the sonorous river. More jars are tested. My ears begin to tingle.

Two eulachon seasons later and more than a thousand air miles across Alaska, Jeannie and I are exploring the tundra north of Kotzebue. On the eighth day of a cross-country walk through the Igichuk Hills we climb to the wind-blasted summit of Mt. Noak for a view across the Bering Strait. We imagine a brooding Russian horizon, although our actual view is obscured by low fog far out to sea. Crouched behind lichen-gold boulders for hours of squinting and imagining, we commit to film and memory the rare summer scenes of a green Arctic land slumping into ice-free seawater.