ABOARD THE M.V. TUSTEMENA – Two days out, the birders start to lose
it. The ship has passed flocks of shearwaters and thick-billed
murres 2 miles long, an ocean full of birds, broken only by waves
and the impossibly long backs of fin whales. Puffins crash into the
ship’s wake because they’ve eaten too much to take off.
This is as far as you can go in the United States on public
transportation. Just a half-dozen times a year, the Alaska state
ferry, the M.V. Tustemena, makes the weeklong round trip from
Homer, at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula, to Dutch Harbor, midway
out the 1,400-mile Aleutian chain.
The Alaska Marine Highway, the longest ferry route in the world,
has eight ships calling at 33 ports, with another two ships
expected to start in May. You can cruise the Inside Passage on the
ferry, but the Aleutians trip is the glory run. On this ride,
you’re as nowhere as you’re ever likely to be; at Dutch Harbor,
you’re closer to Vladivostok than San Francisco.
For the birders – more than half the passengers – this is the last
run of the year, and there’s a 7-inch whiskered auklet out there in
that billion square miles of ocean, just waiting to be checked off
a life list. It would be fun if you could stereotype the birders,
but you can’t. They’re young, old, and none look like Miss Hathaway
on the Beverly Hillbillies. They are all intense, though, running
down the corridors, clutching spotting scopes like clubs.
They’re already horrified that somewhere around the smoking cone of
a volcano that filled half the horizon, my wife and I saw some
incredibly rare albatross and they didn’t. We wouldn’t have known
what they were if there hadn’t been pictures of them all over the
ship, requests to report the bird immediately to the Department of
Fish and Wildlife.
Wild waters and weather
Those albatross posters were framed around certificates of thanks
from fishing boats the Tusty has rescued. The Aleutian waters are
some of the wildest in the world, and the Tusty is designed for bad
times. Everything on board has hooks and catches and locks and
straps. The usual trip is in brilliant sunshine occasionally
punctuated by sudden rain, fog, the occasional 20-foot sea and
people clinging to the walls, paralyzed with sea sickness. After
late August, nothing moves out here but crab fishermen who use
baseball bats to smash ice off their ships.
Because of the unpredictable weather, the Aleutians have always
been a big empty. Before the Russians showed up, there were maybe
3,000 Aleuts living in the islands. They wore birdskin parkas –
murre, puffin and cormorant worked best – and made ingenious
waterproof clothes, such as the seal esophagus raincoat displayed
at Dutch Harbor’s Museum of the Aleutians. The Aleut hunted from
baidarka – kayaks – and brought down whales four times the size of
the boat. Villages had communal buildings, and burial was usually
by mummification, although some groups also used bits of the corpse
for seal bait, believing the dead had power to bring luck in the
hunt.
Then the Russians showed up. They arrived in the Aleutians in 1741
with the bright idea that it would be fun to kill everything that
moved.
They took more than 70,000 sea otters that first year, more the
next. Meanwhile, as a matter of “self-protection,” the Russians
destroyed the Aleut boats and weapons and, as a bonus, brought a
big crop of new diseases. By 1800, the population of the Aleutians
had dropped to around 200 people, and the Russians, fresh out of
furry things to skin, moved their show farther east.
Fishing is big business
Today, the towns where the ferry stops – Sand Point, False Pass
(where the odor of sun-baked aquatic mammal rises like ground fog
from passing seals) and Akutan (where bright red salmon dry on
racks in front of powder-blue houses) – still look like the quiet
aftermath of a confused war, but for a different reason. There’s
nobody around but old women and small children.
Anybody able is at sea, fishing. These towns, on a per-capita
basis, are some of the richest in the United States – in 2002,
Dutch Harbor processed 908 million pounds of fish, a record – but
the houses look temporary and the sidewalks are mazes of crab pots
and nets and acres of yellow and orange Styrofoam floats.
Dogs walk down the middle of the road, never thinking of the
possibility of cars.
We leave False Pass, at the tip of Unimak Island. It’s nearing
midnight. Heaters pump warm air into the fog banks that aren’t
doing much to disguise the fact that the sun is still up. The ship
has become a dosshouse. Birders wrapped in down sleeping bags
litter the decks. They still haven’t seen a whiskered auklet, the
sole reason most of them shelled out almost $600 for round-trip
passage. But as Claire, the shipboard naturalist, tells me, “The
only way to tell a whiskered auklet from the more common crested
auklet are by two feathers that stick out if the bird is dry.”
I’d point out that we’re in the middle of the ocean here, and a
pelagic bird ain’t gonna be dry, but the birders are still sulking
over the albatross. It’s best not to provoke.
By the time the ship gets to Dutch Harbor, on the third day out,
nobody’s sure any more if real life is on the ship or on the
islands. Dutch Harbor, with about 5,000 people, feels as big as New
York. On dry land, we sway with the movement of a ship we’re not on
anymore. Taxis swarm the dock like life from another planet. It’s
five bucks to get anywhere, cheap because there’s almost nowhere to
go that you can’t walk to faster.
World War II history
Dutch Harbor is where the Japanese were stopped during World War
II. They occupied islands as far east as Amchitka – 500 miles west
of Dutch – and at the war’s peak, more than 40,000 U.S. servicemen
were fighting in the Aleutians. There was a final, decisive battle
for Dutch Harbor, lasting about as long as the average commercial
break. Ten Japanese aircraft were shot down; 43 civilians were
killed.
The double domes of Holy Ascension, the Russian Orthodox church,
built in 1824, saw it all. It’s the oldest cruciform-style Russian
church standing in North America, and it’s the peak of Russian
architecture – it makes Moscow’s St. Basil’s look like it was put
together by children on a Ritalin bender. Holy Ascension’s stark,
white walls rise over the ocean backdrop; the pale green of the
domes blends into the mountains.
Alaskan Russian churches were built by shipwrights, the only people
skilled enough with wood to satisfy both God and the sea. Now,
ravens imitate the sexton’s prayers. Forget the whiskered auklet
(which the birders will finally see tomorrow, near Kak Island);
this is reason enough for the ride.
And thankfully, it’s not over yet. From Dutch Harbor – at nearly
the same longitude as Samoa or Tonga, and as far north as Oslo –
you can hop a plane to Anchorage and cut two days off the boat
trip, but what fun is that? Better just to turn around and head
back.
This is as far as you can go on public transportation in the United
States. Everything is east from here.
Ed Readicker-Henderson is the author of several books about Alaska.
He lives in Arizona in the winter and Alaska in the summer.
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If you go
Call the Alaska Marine Highway, 800-642-0066, or go to
alaska.gov/ferry to get the sailing schedule. The Aleutians run is
in summer only.
Catch the M.V. Tustemena in Homer, an easy drive from Anchorage.
Also, there is bus service through Homer Stage Lines, 907-235-7009,
or airline service on ERA Aviation, 800-866-8394.
The Tustemana has staterooms ($245 each way for two) and a pretty
good restaurant, but most people camp and picnic on deck. Be
prepared for wind, and take at least twice as much film as you
think you will need. The scenery is like nothing else on earth.
Dress is casual but warm, sometimes accented by seasickness
patches.
