In the Field. Prof. George Gmelch
situation. It was hard for me to see any humor in our predicament. Judy sat silent, seemingly unable to make conversation. This being the first time I had met her, and still not knowing much about Tlingit culture, I wasn’t sure if her reticence was personal or cultural. Later, I learned it was both.
Around daybreak we finally reached the camp of two fishermen, who built a fire and shared their breakfast, a large can of beans and some granola bars. We collapsed on the riverbank and slept until midmorning. Judy found a logging road that led back to Yakutat, about ten miles away. While they stayed with the Zodiac, I set out on foot, unfortunately outfitted in heavy rubber boots designed more for wading than walking. By the end of the day we were all safely back in Yakutat. Judy returned home to the great relief of her family; Kathryn Cohen flew to Juneau, and I never saw her again. I set to work finishing my preparations for my field research in Dry Bay and resting my blistered feet.
The night before my departure for Dry Bay, Clarence told me a harrowing story about a missing kayaker he had once been dispatched to find. The young man had just passed the Massachusetts bar exam and was a wilderness enthusiast. His parents had given him a trip to Alaska as a graduation present. He wanted to camp and explore Glacier Bay by kayak. When he failed to return home, the Park Service was alerted and a search undertaken. Clarence found his empty camp on a small gravel island at the far end of the bay. Some distance away, he spotted two boots with feet and leg bones but no body. Lying on the gravel nearby was a camera. Clarence removed the film and had it processed. The cause of death was pretty clear from the prints that came back. The last six frames on the roll showed a bear swimming toward the island, then emerging from the water and making its way up the gravel bar in the direction of the photographer. Clarence told the story in graphic detail, and by the end I wasn’t sure whether his intent was to educate me after my “adventure” on the Situk River or to scare me off altogether.
DRY BAY
I chartered a small plane to Dry Bay. Sitting in the copilot’s seat on the flight, I got a good look at the terrain as we left Yakutat. I could see the edge of the Malaspina Glacier, the world’s largest, which covers an area the size of Rhode Island. Our route followed a flat coastal foreland latticed with rivers and small streams flowing to the ocean through muskeg and spruce forests. From their milky appearance, it was apparent they were fed by glacial runoff. I counted three brown bears and four moose. In no hurry to return to Yakutat and proud of the dazzling scenery, the young pilot turned inland toward the mountains and over the pass where a small plane, loaded with rafters, would crash later that summer. Within a few minutes we were above the snow-covered peaks of the Brabazon Range where glaciers descended from U-shaped valleys, their ice and snow streaked black with dirt and rock debris.
Figure 4-1. The Alsek River and glacier viewed from a bush plane window.
Back on course, we soon landed in a clearing near the small Park Service 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