Corked at Karluk: The U.S. Supreme Court and the Karluk Reservation

Note: This article was originally published in Pacific Fishing. To learn more about the establishment of the Karluk Reservation, listen to the Way Back in Kodiak episode, Corked at Kaluk. 

In 1943, Alutiiq people from the village of Karluk became owners of a portion of the Shelikof Strait, the expanse of water that separates the Alaska Peninsula from Kodiak Island. That year, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes created the Karluk Reservation, granting Karluk Natives ownership of a 35,000 acre reservation and the liquid real estate that abutted the reservation’s 15 miles of coast line, out to 3000 feet into the Shelikof. Karluk villagers were thus granted control over the waters adjacent to very productive fishing grounds, including the historically immense salmon runs of the Karluk River.  

Karluk villagers were granted these fishing grounds because it was from this resource that they derived their livelihood. Moreover, competition from purse seiners and fishing crews from Outside made it difficult for local beach seiners to make a decent living from the fish that their families had been harvesting for thousands of years. They were constantly being corked. The Bureau of Indian Affairs worked closely with the Karluk villagers to petition the Secretary of the Interior for the reservation, hoping that it would improve the quality of life in the village.

After the reservation was created, regardless of the fact that the villagers could control who accessed the fish, they didn’t have the equipment necessary to harvest or process the fish. Most Karluk fishermen were cannery fishermen- that is, local canneries outfitted them with gear and supplies. And Alaska salmon canners were not about to surrender control of Karluk salmon or allow the inclusion of waters in Native reservations without a fight.

A.K. Tichenor, president of the Alaska Packers Association (A.P.A.), quickly issued instructions to the cannery superintendent responsible for Karluk fishing operations.

“Nothing must be done… which may constitute any recognition on our part that the Karluk Indian Reservation is valid or legal or anyone has any rights in connection with our property. It is important therefore that we continue our fishing operations as we did last year, hiring the Indians as our employees, furnishing them with our gear, and letting them use our beaches to catch our fish for us. ”

Other Kodiak-area canneries told their purse seiners to ignore the bounds of the reservation. Some seiners purchased the fishing licenses that the Karluk tribe issued, but many just corked the village beach seiners. Staff of the US Fish and Wildlife Service viewed the whole matter with both suspicion and disdain- they didn’t believe that social well-being should be a consideration in the management of Alaska’s fisheries. However, there was little that they could do in the matter, considering that the Secretary of the Interior was their big boss.

The canners rallied to combat the Karluk Reservation, organizing a test case to question the validity of including waters in reservations. They argued that it was illegal to do so, as it limited access to the fisheries commons. What seemed to be a local argument over access to fishing grounds turned into a U.S. Supreme Court case. Hynes v. Grimes Packing Co. was heard in front of the Supreme Court in 1949. The Court determined that it was permissible to include waters within reservation holdings. However, tribes could not limit access to those waters in any way. Without controlling access to the fishing grounds, the economic benefits were rendered moot.

Yet the unspoken truth to the matter was that access to the Karluk fishery had been limited for decades before the creation of the Reservation. Access was granted to those who had the means to own nets, to own boats, and directly limited by the cannery superintendents who determined who fished on which beaches. It wasn’t until Alaska became a state that social and economic considerations impacted the formulation of fisheries policy. In my opinion, we still have a long way to go this regard.

Salmon, Diamonds, and the Alaska Packers Association

Note: This was originally printed in the December 2015 issue of Pacific Fishing. To learn more about the early years of the Alaska Packers Association and canneries more generally, check out the Way Back in Kodiak episode, "Canned at Karluk." 

It’s difficult to miss the towering masts of the Balclutha during a visit to the San Francisco waterfront. This square-rigged sailing ship is now part of the San Francisco National Maritime Historical Park and was formerly the Star of Alaska. This ship was one of the legendary “star fleet” that the Alaska Packers Association (APA) moored at Alameda during the winter months and sailed north to Alaska each spring. Tellingly, the most commonly recognized vestige of the once colossal APA is not even in Alaska. Nonetheless, there are plenty of remnants of the APA that persist in Alaska, if you know where to look.

The APA was founded to cope with the astronomical growth of salmon canning in the early years of Alaska’s commercial salmon fishery. In 1888 there were 16 canneries operating in Alaska. By the next year, that number had more than doubled, to 37. It was canners at Chignik in 1890 that first came up with the idea of joining forces to decrease competition for fish and increase efficiency in operation. It worked so well that the canners operating on the Karluk Spit and Bristol Bay paid attention.

Note the <KS> on the old APA sign on the right. This sign was once hung on a fish trap, but now is visible in the mug up line in the Larsen Bay cannery. 

The Alaska Packers Association was founded in 1893 when the owners of the major canning enterprises recognized that it would be more efficient to create a “salmon trust” to coordinate the catching and canning of Alaska’s salmon rather than engage in continuous competition, which was leading to an unsustainable growth in the pack. “Sustainability” wasn’t an ecological concept at the time, it was an economic one. The amount of salmon processed in Alaska exceeded the ability of consumers to eat it. The market was glutted, and it was not profitable to continue production at such a rate.  Twenty seven of the thirty three canneries operating in Alaska sold their plants and re-emerged as the Alaska Packers Association. In so doing, the owners created a business which would become one of the most economically and politically potent institutions in the history of Alaska.

Although their assets were in Alaska, APA’s shareholders were comfortably situated in San Francisco (like the Balclutha is today). However, many of the founders of the APA had strong ties to Alaska and considerable expertise in the land that was known as Russian America less than two decades before. Some on the APA’s board of directors, like Louis Sloss and Charles Hirsch, were intimately connected with the Alaska Commercial Company (AC). AC today is a grocery store chain in Alaska, and this is the very same business that purchased the assets of the Russian-American Company following the US purchase of Alaska in 1867. In addition to providing early financing for salmon canneries in Alaska and sharing key shareholders, AC also provided the APA with one of the company’s most lasting legacies- the “diamond” naming convention. 

<C>, the APA cannery at Chignik Lagoon. This photo is part of my personal collection. 

To distinguish AC trading stations in written correspondence, AC employees created a symbol for each trading station. They enclosed a letter in the less-than/ greater-than symbols. For example <K> was Kodiak Station. The APA adopted this shorthand and applied it to their many canneries. <NN>, <X>, <KS> written in letters or stamped on a box became pronounced as “Diamond N,” etc.

Del Monte dismantled the Alaska Packers Association in 1982. Yet many APA-built canneries continue in operation today, and some continue to be referred to by their diamond name. Next time you walk the docks at an old APA cannery, pay close attention and you might even find <> etched onto a board, or fading from the bow of an old double ender. Although that diamond is less regal than the masts of the Balclutha, it is no less historic. 

The following comes from a list located within the John Cobb Papers at the University of Washington Special Collections.

Location and Designation of Alaska Packers Association Salmon Canneries, 1917

<PNJ>   Scandinavian Cannery, Nushagak Bay

<NC>     Clarks Point, Kvichak Bay

<J>         Koggiung, Kvichak Bay

<X>        Coffey Creek, Kvichak Bay

<NN>    Naknek river (upper)

<O>       Naknek river (middle)

<M>      Naknek river (lower)

<E>        Egegik river

<U>       Ugashik

<C>        Chignik Lagoon

<A>        Alitak bay, Kodiak Island

<KS>      Larsen Bay, Kodiak Island

<CI>       Cook Inlet, Kasilof

<FW>    Fort Wrangell, Southeast Alaska

<L>         Loring, Southeast Alaska

<PR>     Point Roberts, Washington

<S>        Semiahmoo, Washington

<T>        Anacortes, Washington

Through the Ashes: The Story of Kodiak's Halibut Industry

Note: This piece was originally published in the May 2015 issue of Pacific Fishing. To learn more about this early halibut prospecting trip and how the eruption at Katmai impacted Kodiak, listen to the Way Back in Kodiak episode, "Prospecting for Halibut."

"It looks like I’ll be taking the Tustumena," my friend told me over the phone this last October. She was travelling to Kodiak bearing the ashes of her longliner husband, who had died the year before. She had intended to fly to the island, but volcanic ash turned Kodiak’s unfettered atmosphere into what seemed a hazy watercolor. A fierce easterly wind whipped up century-old ash from the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes on the Alaska Peninsula, propelling it across the Shelikof Strait, circling the bays of Kodiak Island, obscuring views and halting air traffic. Ash from the 1912 eruption at Katmai, the largest eruption of the 20th century, was making life difficult on the Emerald Isle again.

I quickly noted the irony in this situation. You see, the story of Kodiak’s commercial halibut fishery had its beginning in those very ashes. And now, 102 year later, it was this same ash that hearkened back to the founding of Kodiak’s halibut industry that was preventing the scattering of this halibut fisherman’s ashes in waters that seem increasingly bereft of halibut.

Back in 1912, ash from the Novarupta Volcano near the village of Katmai fell thick on Kodiak for three days. It was the beginning of June, a time when the sun barely sets, but no light was visible as the villagers breathed burning, sulfurous air.  

This is ash, not snow. W.J. Erskine could be the man to the right, or he was the photographer. The men are standing in front of Erskine's house, which is today the Baranov Museum in Kodiak. Image courtesy USGS. 

The entire village of 500 or so groped blindly through the thick fumes towards the town wharf, stumbling over the more than three feet of ash that had accumulated. The village crowded on the Revenue Service Cutter Manning which happened to be at dock. Villagers feared that another ash-induced land slide would sweep the town into the channel on which it rests. They believed that their only hope for survival was to be found at sea. Before setting out, the villagers ate boiled halibut and potatoes cooked in massive tubs. It was the first meal in days for some of them.

The boiled halibut that ravenous volcanic refugees ate a century ago had been caught during a halibut prospecting trip. Those fillets had been used to quantitatively prove that Kodiak had enough halibut to warrant a commercial halibut fishery.

The US Bureau of Fisheries research vessel, Albatross. Image courtesy NOAA. 

The year before, in 1911, Kodiak businessman W.J. Erskine worked with the Alaska Packers Association to set up a test fishery. He enticed the Hunter and Metha Nelson, two schooners from San Francisco, to come to Kodiak to verify what the Bureau of Fisheries vessel, the Albatross, had recently uncovered: halibut fishing grounds around the archipelago. Of course this wasn’t news to Kodiak Islanders, who had been fishing and eating halibut for thousands of years, but the archipelago’s distance from any population center meant that Kodiak halibut just fed locals.  Erskine wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to deliver Kodiak halibut to the San Francisco market, nearly 2000 miles away. The Metha Nelson was one of the first fishing vessels to be equipped with an on-board freezer on the Pacific Coast. Erskine was wagering that San Francisco residents would eat flash frozen halibut as an alternative to the halibut that was shipped on ice from Southeast Alaska and Puget Sound.

That 1911 season was short but decent. Erskine likely had high hopes for the 1912 prospecting trip, but it was destined to be a rough season. The engine wouldn’t run and then the engineer died. Their seine was too short to catch bait. After procuring a longer seine and bait herring, they finally started fishing. But then, just 90 miles away, a volcano blew its top.

Nonetheless, at the end of the season the Metha Nelson returned to San Francisco with 140,000 pounds of frozen halibut, which the Alaska Packers Association was able to sell. Erskine’s experiment was successful. After Katmai’s eruption, Kodiak might have been a wasteland of ash, but there seemed to be a glimmer of hope for this ravaged island. There was hope in halibut.

But that hope was not realized for decades. It was king crab, not halibut, that turned Kodiak from a summertime salmon town to a year-round fishing port, and it wasn’t until the 1960s. Kodiak also turned to shrimp in the 1970s, turning Kodiak into the "King Crab Capital of the World" and a world-class shrimp port. But then the crab disappeared, and the shrimp disappeared. Many Kodiak fishermen turned to halibut, fishermen like my friend’s husband. He and other highliners really struck gold in 1995 when halibut was rationalized and those with historically high catches were granted private stock in a public fishery resource. But, not totally unlike the boom and bust pattern evident in the crab and shrimp fisheries of the region, halibut harvests have declined over the last decade. It takes commercial halibut fishermen longer to catch their quota, sending the cost of fishing up.

But, just as the ash-ravaged landscape of Kodiak eventually was overcome again by green, biologists with the International Pacific Halibut Commission report that halibut stock is rising after a decade of decline. Perhaps, like those Kodiak villagers one hundred years ago, who, blinded by ash, sought salvation at sea, Kodiak halibut fishermen too will be in the clear. 

The Baptism at Smith Beach

Mission Beach

“Just a seine full of dollys,” my dad said with disappointment, shaking his red beard as he assessed the results of our illicit beach seining trip to Mission Beach in Uganik Bay. I picked up a humpy and hugged it to my slimy chest, pitching it over the gunwale of the wooden skiff that stood about as high as me. I was relatively certain that Dolly Vardens were named in honor of Dolly Parton, and I doubted that the country music star would be pleased to know that my dad thought her namesake fish were wormy, or that he cursed as we weeded through them in order to pick out the few humpies that we’d hauled to the beach. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t deliver them to the tender, who would come around Packers Spit later that evening. They looked close enough to salmon, to me.

“They don’t want them, Anjulooni,” Dad explained as he kicked a dolly from the beach back into the water. My brother Gus struggled to save our unfortunate by-catch by dousing their gills with water. He thought Dolly Parton had nice legs. I wondered if the tender’s affront to the rainbow-hued fish would impact my brother’s tenderhearted affection for the big-busted star.

We were fishing behind the markers. That my dad had brought his 5 year old and 3 year old children as crew that day doesn’t mean he lacked complicit partners in this fishing expedition, since there were plenty of misfits who fished on the Spit who disregarded the law. It is more likely he doubted we’d make a big haul and he didn’t need the muscle.

It was a typical summer day for my family in Uganik Bay, since my dad rarely caught lots of fish and he was prone to illegality in many of his dealings. The only thing that makes it remarkable is that it is my earliest memory of Mission Beach.

Gus’s earliest memories come from that same summer: first, pulling in a beach seine. Second: being convinced he was drowning. It was at Mission Beach that Gus was baptized.

---

Forgetting and Changing Names

“Why it’s called Smith's Beach, I don't know,” Deedie Pearson spoke with a dry throat. “When there were a lot of people on the Spit they started calling it Mission Beach. I'm trying to get it converted back to Smith's Beach.”

Deedie and I were talking in her house on Alder Street, overlooking the boat harbor. My memory of breaking fishing laws on Mission Beach as a child took place around 30 years ago. Deedie’s tenure in the bay stretches back 70 years, to 1947, when her parents purchased a house and saltry in Mush Bay. Each day in June, she would skiff by Mission/Smith Beach, which is located on the west side of Mush Bay. She would pass it as she brought back to her family’s saltry the reds that she and her siblings had caught in their setnet. If Mission Beach is actually Smith Beach, she would know.

“Why do you think they call it Mission Beach, then?” I asked. 

“Why Mission Beach? Well, because Reverend Smith. But it was Smith Beach long before he knew about this place,” Deedie clarified. She was speaking of the Reverend Smith who circumnavigated the archipelago aboard the Evangel. Supposedly, Reverend Smith would anchor the Evangel in front of Smith Beach. From Smith Beach, it became Mission Beach, seemingly renamed in honor of the Smith who tried to evangelize the wilds of Kodiak.

But Deedie didn’t know for which Smith the beach was originally named. In the catalog cards of my brain, the name was definitely classified as pertaining to the history of Kodiak’s seafood industry, but I couldn’t quite articulate the connection. Since our conversation, I uncovered that it was named for Oliver Smith, the founder of the first cannery on Kodiak. He beach seined at Smith Beach and sold his salmon to the cannery that was then located at Packers Spit.

“My brother was baptized there, at Smith Beach,” I said acknowledging the precedence of Deedie’s preferred name in the hopes that it would improve the reception of the next bit of information: “Coyote Bowers dunked him in the water during a party.”

---

Iron Born

This summer, I skiffed passed Smith Beach on my way to Mush Bay. I recognized it immediately, but before it was within sight, all I could pick up were memory-pulses.

Pulse: beachseining with my dad and Gus.

Pulse: Taking a skiff over to Mission/Smith Beach for a party during a fishing closure.

Pulse: My mom running into the water to extract her frantic toddler.

Pulse: seiners coming in close to the beach and Coyote shouting after them, “See you down the trail!” as they pulled away.

I remember much more clearly the retelling of the story of when Gus unceremoniously was submitted to the first sacrament, a story that has become part of the Grantham-Trueman family canon. But I don’t recall the answer to a question that pervades my adult sensibilities now: why? What possessed Coyote to toss a terrified toddler into the sea and not fish him out?

Gus isn’t too concerned about it. “I remember he asked if I was baptized, picking me up and walking out to his waste into the water. He said, ‘I baptize you in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit,’ and he flung me into the sea,” Gus told me over the phone. He remembers trying to swim, sinking below the water, and looking upward to see our mother’s hands, yanking him back out.

“Why do you think he did it?”

“I don’t know, sister. We told the story many times together, but I don’t think I ever asked him why.”

 “Iron born,” Gus now claims. “I tell my friends that I was iron born, like in the Game of Thrones. I survived drowning to become a warrior,” he chuckles.

---

1988

I could as easily ask the beach’s namesake, Oliver Smith, about his history within Uganik as I can ask Coyote of his motives for tossing a toddler into the sea, or my parents about their memories from that day, since all are dead. So, I sought another avenue of familial information: the Grantham-Trueman family photo box. Photos from the day of Gus’s baptism are slipped in the pages of a mini-album that contains one roll of developed images. Examining them, I see the details that my memory did not hold on to- the supersized lifejacket that I sported that summer that tied around my chest and reached down to my knees, for example.

But the presence of my little sister, Carrie, is the most surprising bit of information, since I don’t remember her being there that day. But there she is, less than a year old, holding a fishing pole, reaching for her dad’s can of Rainier, being snuggled by our Uncle Ronny. Suddenly, what were just pulses of memory have a fact to affix themselves to- the existence of my sister.

Gus was baptized during the summer of 1988, then. It was the same year that we lived in the cabin that had three sets of triple bunks within its ten by fifteen foot tar-papered walls. Richard would sit on a middle bunk and play his electric guitar. He strummed without an amp, because the only power on the Spit came from batteries. Still, he would play just loud enough so that I could hear the notes of “You are My Sunshine,” as we sang together. He was called the Pup because his father was Coyote. He had stringy hair, big glasses that matched his big teeth, and a poor complexion like other teenaged boys.

That summer, my baby sister fell from the top bunk in the middle of the night, right into the pit in which the barrel stove was rooted. But the fire had gone out and she was wrapped in blankets so she didn’t even wake during the fall. I recall that my dad was frantic, even though my sister was not his daughter. She was the daughter of Cliff, my stepfather. But we all lived in the cabin that summer, my mom, dad, stepdad, Gus, Carrie, Richard, Danny Bowers. Others too, who I can’t remember.

It was 1988. The best price ever paid for reds in the state of Alaska. It was 1988. The summer that the Nickerson brothers were killed up the bay at their Noisy Island set net site. A man named Cue Ball found their bodies. I remember their surname being repeated, over and over again: The Nickersons. The Nickersons. The Nickersons. The Nickersons. Could they have been there, at the party, the Nickersons and their crewmember who killed them both? It’s more likely that they had already gone missing. Perhaps their bodies had already been found in a ravine.

I wonder if Coyote was feeling his own mortality during the party at Mission/ Smith Beach. Maybe in that summer of disappearances, he considered the eternal soul of those around him. He considered the unbaptized being of my brother, and for good measure, determined to dunk him.

---

Consider

Sometimes I wonder if places have memories. Think: words are flung from the mouth, each accompanied by a particle of saliva that drops to the ground. The spit becomes absorbed and a part of the environment, still bearing the energy and bits of the tetrahedral architecture of the speaker. We disturb a rock on the beach and a strange thought enters our mind, a bit of unexpected wisdom, a dream of people we’ve never met. Of course memories are suddenly excavated when reinserted into places one hasn’t been for years. Could it be that these memories are shared between both the human and the place, like a conversation with a long-held friend as you work together to remember an event from your mutual past?

Maybe names, stories, and hunches stick like static to places that they are naturally connected to. Just as elements arrange themselves to create compounds, so too do spoken bits of heart, guts, and will travel to cling to where they most make sense. Like beaches that attract the same shells, or eddies in which a similar assortment of marine debris conglomerates- once told stories circulate until they find their way back to a familiar home. There is identity inscribed on landscape that goes beyond what has been or can be recorded. There are sticky remnants of history that are magnetically attracted to place and picked up by the sensitive observer, to the intuitive listener.

Perhaps the day that my dad, brother and I hauled in a net full of Dolly Vardens, my dad smelled the lingering sweat of the beach’s namesake, Oliver Smith, as we pulled in the seine. Perhaps he heard an echo of Smith’s voice rustling in the beach rye. After all, that day we were mimicking what Oliver Smith did in the previous century: beach seining at Smith Beach and delivering to Packers Spit.

Maybe the day of the baptism, Coyote caught a note of a hymn, sung by Reverend Smith and it was this Christian association that inspired him to fling a toddler into the sea. Coyote, filled more with spirit water than the Holy Spirit, reenacted what he imagined the Reverend Smith did on that very beach. Drunk and rowdy, maybe upset over the disappearance of his fellow Uganik fishermen, he thought he’d continue the evangelizing legacy of Mission Beach.

Whatever the case, it seems we persist in keeping history and ritual, both known and forgotten, alive. 

Yesterday I held a beach seining permit in my hand, as I started installing the West Side Stories exhibit at the Baranov Museum. At that moment, the daughter of Coyote called the museum to speak with me, after 25 years of not seeing one another. She told me she wanted to start using her dad's beach seining permit again. She told me she has an envelope of photos from Packers Spit with my name and my brother's name on it. She said that when her dad was dying, he gave her a poem I had written about Uganik Bay, which I don't remember writing. And, she said she took the photo posted above of Cliff holding Carrie, which means she was there, at Gus's baptism. I didn't ask her about it, since I had to get back to work, but the uncanny timing prompted me to post this story which apparently is still in draft form. 

Treasure, Trash, and Two Messages in a Bottle

The first message was inside a plastic water bottle, the label worn and faded. The letter inside traced the bottle's origin to a cruise ship passenger, who, like the bottle, passed time ambulating around the Inside Passage. Julie Yates-Fulton was out on a beach combing excursion with her family when she found it, boating around the inlets and isles of Prince of Wales Island.

For the last several years, beach combing for Julie and a group of POW residents had turned into marine debris removal. This message in a plastic bottle befuddled the slippery classification system between sea treasure and sea trash. Plastic: trash. Message: treasure. 

Julie's house and that of her friends in Craig are full of marine treasures. Glass balls from Japan, antique bottles, keys, marbles, molded feet from cast iron bath tubs--- these mementos from beach walks sit on the windowsills of many coastal homes. Switch the manufacture of these very objects from glass or metal to plastic, and from antique craftsmanship to recent production, however, and beach combing treasures become marine debris.

Beach treasures are precious and rare artifacts, they beacon the imagination. Marine debris is mundane, without individual merit. But even the most coveted of beach finds- the glass float- demonstrates that the divide is malleable. Japanese and Russian glassblowers made them on deck and attached them to trawl nets in the Bering Sea. These very factory trawlers fished right outside of the three mile limit delineating international waters before the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act, angering Alaskans. Glass floats= foreign draggers. 

The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the resulting onslaught of debris from the disaster continues to befuddle the distinction between trash and treasure. Trash: Japanese oyster floats, pieces of dock, packaging, household goods. Treasure: crates with expressive kanji characters, toys, castaway fish, and the basketball from the Kesen-Chu Middle School in Japan that washed up on a Prince of Wales Island beach. Julie is a teacher, and she started a pen-pal program with Kesen-Chu. Craig students exchanged letters and gifts with these other Pacific shore dwelling youngsters, connected by ocean and a single piece of marine treasure/trash. 

Marine debris gathered from Prince of Wales Island beaches is available for viewing through the windows of the old Columbia Wards cannery office building in Craig. 

Julie was pleased with her message in a plastic bottle that day, but she was supremely happy to be motoring on to her favorite cove of all. As the family cruised along, they passed canoe runs on the rocky shores, where stones had been cleared to the side to create safe passage for Haida and Tlingit canoes to launch and to return to shore. She and her family passed the remnants of traditional fish traps, some of which her own ancestors may have tended. These are special waters to the family. 

They arrived at the cove and jumped ashore, toeing rocks and eyeing where beach and forest meet. Julie felt acutely present to that very moment. Her husband, Chad, said it was time to go and walked back to the boat; the others fell in line behind him. Chad started the motor but Julie persisted on shore. She was called to a certain corner, and although the boat started to pull away, she ran to the spot that beckoned her. 

There, at her feet, was a glass float. Next to that was a green glass bottle stopped with a cork. A message was furled inside. In one day, Julie found two messages in a bottle. 

She ran to the boat and hopped on board, clutching the glass float and the glass bottle in her hands. She paused, marveling at her intuition. Later, an elder relative told her, "You slowed your spirit down enough so you were in the moment and feeling everything."

Julie uncorked the bottle and inside was this:

Truly, marine treasure. 

The Legend of Waterfall Charlie

Charlie insisted that his body be brought back to Japan. 

Before he fell ill, Charlie was part of the Waterfall Cannery's summer crew. Water was everywhere in Charlie's world. Each morning he woke in the Asian bunk house. It was constructed on pilings, straddling where the southeast muskeg gave up pretending to be solid earth and surrendered to the inevitability of becoming a lagoon. From the sky water dripped, from the west it drove ashore in lapping waves. From those waves came the slippery salmon that he helped convert from wild, live creatures swimming in the sea, into pink pieces of processed protein, floating in a can of its own juices.

It was by water that Charlie came to Prince of Wales Island, and it was that very aquatic passageway that turned into a roadblock when it came to bringing his remains back to Japan. 

Charlie was dying. He made the superintendent, Mr. Kurth, promise- PROMISE- to deliver his body back to his natal homeland, or else. Mr. Kurth assured his worker that he would fulfill his last request. Once Charlie lay cold, Mr. Kurth pondered the situation. There was no mortician at the cannery; pumping Charlie full of formaldehyde was not an option. Moreover, sending him across the Pacific via airplane was not going to happen, either, given the current state of hostility that characterized the relationship between Japan and the US. Charlie, then, would have to wait to be shipped to his motherland, and his body preserved in the most practical manner, based on the infrastructure and capacity of that fish processing plant. Charlie would be canned.

Mr. Kurth was a butcher in the off-season. He got to work, packing Charlie into the very cans that Charlie worked to fill with salmon when he was alive. The cans of Charlie were brights- that's canner parlance for unlabeled. These bright cans of Charlie were stacked in a back room, where the home pack was stored, awaiting a thawing of international relations and the eventual return to Japan. 

Summer became fall. Fall became winter. And someone broke into the cannery, making a mess and stealing cans from the homepack room. Cans including Charlie. 

Charlie never made it back to Japan, and according to Waterfall winter watchman, Wanda, he has never left Waterfall. He pushes over stacks of windows and makes mugs fly off the wall. But to show that he doesn't have anything against her, he once dropped a heart-shaped burl from the rafters of a warehouse to her feet. Wanda doesn't think that Charlie is malicious, just a bit spooky. Sometimes, she hears work boots, tromping around the upper floors of one of the old warehouses, even though there is no one around, at all. Perhaps it's Charlie, rifling around, looking for those missing cans. 

Last weekend, I traveled to Prince of Wales Island for the first time, to take part in Craig's Whalefest. I traipsed around with a group of beach combing, cannery picking, wild women who regaled me with tales of messages in bottles and uncanny coincidences. I was there to talk about the cannery history initiative and help promote the preservation of the Columbia-Wards Cannery in downtown Craig. But we also made it out to visit Babe and Wanda, the watchmen at the Waterfall Resort, which is within the old Waterfall Cannery. Babe and Wanda gave us a comprehensive tour of this exceptionally well preserved cannery.

Upstairs in one of the warehouses, Wanda told us the story of Charlie. I giggled at first, but she insisted that it was true, and that multiple individuals have verified the event, including the son of Mr. Kurth. Cannery history buffs have heard of dead Chinese cannery workers being packed in barrels of salt in order to preserve their remains for shipping back to San Francisco at the end of the season. Yet Charlie's story is even more gruesome... and fantastic for retelling! 

Charting Packers Spit

Sixteen years passed since I had last slept in Uganik Bay, on the west side of Kodiak Island, Alaska. Yet there is something about the summers of childhood that stretch on and on. They persist in dreams. Perhaps they are the soil in which our character takes root. No, we are fishermen, not farmers; they are the redd in which the roe is spawned.

Uganik Bay on Kodiak's west side; Packers Spit is circled. 

This I knew: on the chart, Packers Spit swooshes out like a reverse comma into the East Arm of Uganik Bay. But would I remember its three-dimensional form as we made our approach? I was sitting in an aluminum skiff, and in my lap were my stepdad’s ashes. It was summer solstice and, coincidentally, it was Father’s Day. The day before I spent conducting oral histories with fishermen, but today I wasn’t the historian. I was the daughter of Shutup Joe, Pam and Clifford, and I was returning to the fish camp where I spent summers as a kid, the place where my parents go after they die.

When the float plane that delivers mail twice a week dropped me off on the beach, Clifford’s ashes weighed more than the produce that I carried as my food contribution for the remote fish camps that were to host me. I was flippantly eschewing the line between the personal and professional as I set out to document the bay through oral history and, for myself, convert places on the chart to places that I’ve stood. There was no practiced disinterest, no professional distance here. In August of 1982, my father was fishing in the bay when he received a message delivered via FM radio: “Come to town to meet your new girlfriend.” The girlfriend was me. When I was planning this project, I went to the home of Floyd, one retired Uganik fisherman, and saw a framed portrait of my stepfather’s father hanging on the wall. I learned it was my grandfather who had taught him and many others in Uganik Bay to setnet for salmon- a type of fishing in which one end of the net is affixed to land and the other juts into the sea like a hook.

Floyd and other Uganik old timers took out their charts to show me fish camps, and I tried to imagine the landscape but I couldn’t clearly grasp in my mind. I became familiar with their index fingers as they pointed out capes and crannies of coast line. Their fingers jumped from small islands to miniscule outcroppings that were an eighth of the size of their fingernail yet managed to hold a lifetime of their summers. Like tracing constellations across the sky, these fingers indicated fish camps instead of stars, old canneries instead of planets. Miners Point, Trap 6, Daylight Harbor, Gull Light, Packers Spit- the utterance of names over lips as they pointed at each place reminded me of the devout performing a daily rosary, with familiarity and with respect.

I opened my own atlas of Alaska and ran my finger countless times along that comma of land that constitutes Packers Spit, rubbing to conjure memories. Many times I’ve flown over it, heading to another destination but sneaking a glimpse of the rotting hull of my father’s last salmon seiner, a speck high and dry in the lagoon. In archival collections for the Alaska Packers Association, the company from which Packers Spit derives its name, I encountered plats on which buildings like “China House” are noted. The salty marsh that never had a name when I was a kid was marked as Mathew’s Lagoon. It was known as Uganik Fishing Station then, according to the 1893 land commissioner’s report. I tried to recall where the nubby pilings protruded from the sand and correlate them to the cannery building hand-drawn on the old survey. But the sad truth was that after so many years, Packers Spit was more familiar to me as a birds-eye landform than an actual landscape.

Even though I couldn’t remember it before that moment, it was a startlingly familiar site as we neared Packers Spit’s sandy beach on Father’s Day. The crewman jumped over the bow and walked the anchor up shore. I followed him and looked up to see the cabin that my family slept in barely visible behind the towering beach grass. There was no path to it, so I made big steps and hoped to not squish any voles underfoot in the process. The cabin was standing but rotten; all windows were broken and gray sky was visible through a large hole in the roof. It was insulated with old salmon can boxes, but mostly the cardboard had drooped to the floor. I looked out the window from which I used to watch Clifford plunging from the seine skiff, making bubbles to scare salmon deeper into the net. But the grass was so high that I couldn’t even see the beach. I picked up a key to an outboard motor and slipped it into my pocket. The cabin might last another few winters, or not.

More skiffs arrived filled with fishermen who were friends with Cliff. A salmon seiner anchored off the spit, close to shore, and the husband and wife walked to the bow. I opened the bottle of my stepdad’s drink of choice, Bacardi, took a swig, and passed it to the fisherman sporting orange rain gear to my right. I opened the plastic box in which Clifford’s ashes were packed, tore the plastic, and held the bag by its bottom. Light particles floated in the wind, heavy chunks of bone thumped in the sand. I wondered if what looked like smooth, white shells were actually the weathered bits of my mother and of my father, whose ashes my siblings and I had scattered in that very spot years before. The captain of the seine boat rang a bell. We sipped the bottle of rum until it was empty and I put Clifford’s photo and a handful of ash within it. I screwed on the lid and threw it into Uganik Bay.

We jumped back into the skiffs and powered away from Packers Spit. I looked back across the wake to see Packers Spit moving further away. Then I saw: it isn’t a comma. It rolls out like a green and slate-grey carpet from a wall of mountains. It is outspoken flat land in a bay made of peaks and cliffs. Its appearance was again fixed in my mind, relieving the burden of faded memory. But if it was closure that I was seeking, it was not something that I found. And if it means leaving Uganik Bay behind for another 16 years, it’s something I don’t want, either.  

Note: This February I attended the Fisher Poets Gathering for the first time. This annual gathering of fishermen writers and their supporters in Astoria, Oregon includes a variety of literary events and nurtures a community of folks whose creative energies are fueled by the sea.  It was an honor to take part in this growing event that pays homage to the oceanic literary arts. I shared Charting Packers Spit there. 

SeaLives: A Manifesto, in Draft Form

In Alaska, the fishing industry is serious business. It's serious in terms of enterprise- this is a lucrative industry spawning billions of dollars in investments and profits. It's serious in terms of its spirit- hard working hard-liners battle the ocean and one another for a piece of the fish pie. But, the fishing industry is more than biological and economic projections tied to political gamesmanship. And our fishing communities are much more than spots of industrial detritus on wave-battered coasts (ahem Kodiak and Dutch Harbor) or quaint tourist traps (ahem Ketchikan and Homer). There is more to the industry than what managers, marketers, biologists, and trade groups promote.  There is more to us coast dwellers than what the visitor bureau touts. 

Here, there's spirit, history, art, and stories as wild as the resource. And these parts of our communities are tired of being neglected.

We derive our identities from the sea. We aren't all in the seafood industry, but we are all fishfolks. We fishing town dwellers match our communities. We are soulful, damaged, scrappy, tenacious and creative. And there are those of us who are ready- begging- for the human-side of our fish-lives to be recognized. For our art, our music, our culture, our celebrations, to be given validity. For our livelihoods to be recognized outside of the realm of money.

Here, at Salt and Gale, I hope to create a space dedicated to the culture of fishing towns and the culture of the seafood industry. My dream is to share projects, insights, and host conversations about growing and sustaining that culture. 

Let's honor our sealives. Let's foster our creative wildness amidst the wilderness.