Kodiak, Alaska: Among Salmon and Spruce
By Toby Bielawski

Shale—wet shale, and moss.  I’m in Alaska again.  This time it feels even more remote, more Alaskan; I’m visiting friends on Kodiak Island, and we’ve gone straight from the airstrip to the trails for a little hike.  Moss covers the forest floor, and it clumps on the branches of Sitka spruce.  The moss is more like snow—like a green snow—than anything else.  It’s a soft carpeting that makes me wish I had skis for a moment as I look downhill through the trees.  A rich bright green, like freshly boiled snowpeas, it contrasts the black of the soil and bark.

These trees are dark and strong, the Sitka spruce.  My second night, we sit around on the couch drinking wine, and Tom starts talking about the trees.  His first season in Alaska, he says, he tried to chop a chunk of this spruce; the sledgehammer bounced off the wedge. Tom tried harder, took a running blow. The wedge sank in a few inches, water squirting out. A second later, the wood popped the wedge out.  He smiled and shook his head, remembering.  “Unchoppable,” he chuckles.

Then there was the first Christmas, Tom continues, when he and Laura went out to search down a holiday tree.  The spruces are so beautiful—shapely, and short-needled.  They made their choice, conquered it with the chainsaw, and hauled it home.  Pretty soon they realized they’d made yet another Alaska greenhorn mistake:  Sitka spruce needles fall so bountifully and quickly, you have to cut the tree on the 24th, get rid of it on the 26th, and you’ll still go through three vacuum cleaner bags just getting the living room cleaned up.  So here on Kodiak amidst thick forests of gorgeous spruce everyone buys Christmas trees shipped in by the Kiwanis club.

Tuesday on Kodiak Island, it’s fishing.  I’ve learned to memorize the two names of each of five kinds of salmon, using a handy hand memory trick that Laura taught me: the pinky finger is to remind you of pinks, also called humpys (but hopefully our hands don’t help us remember that second name!); and the ring finger is to make you think of rings and remember silvers, also called Coho; the middle finger is the longest, so it reminds you of the biggest salmon, the King or Chinook salmon; and the index finger could poke someone in the eye, so it’s used to remember the sockeye, or red, salmon.  Then there’s the thumb, which rhymes with chum, the fifth kind, the kind no one cares about.  Its other name is dog salmon.  Chum sort of sounds like something no one would care about, and something you would feed to dogs, so that name fits.  But with the other types, on top of remembering both names, I also need to have a sense of what these fish are like, which ones are desirable, which ones are the stuff of fishermen’s dreams.  Otherwise how will I know what we’re fishing for, and when we’ve made a good catch?

The pinks, I learn, are very easy to catch and good for canning, but nothing to ship home.  They don’t freeze well, and they’re not worth it.  It’s the silvers that everyone’s after right now.  They’re big and pretty, and apparently delicious.  The Chinooks are even bigger, and buttery in flavor, the duck of salmon.  But catch one?  Good luck – and better luck would’ve been a few months ago in the spring.  Sockeyes, not too many around right now, and I’m sussing out that they’re somewhere around the level of a silver in terms of cachet. 

So that’s the salmon story – it’d be a lot better if I ate fish, but I still want to know the scoop.  The mouth of the Pasagchak River is about as narrow as a single-lane road.  Intermittent waves crash in sets onto the stony shore.  Fishermen line the far side of the river, and I cast from the beach, a real rod and reel neophyte.  The beach consists of large, rounded dark stones, and slopes steeply into the clear dark water.  I wear shorts, and have the fantasy that I won’t wade in above my knees, but between the waves and the lure of the catch, I’m soon wet mid-thigh.  Then it happens:  a scurry of activity on the opposite bank, and one fisherman takes the lead over the others, casting his fly rod furiously, while the others point and call out.  I see the fish, a big silver glimmer turning in the water.  Suddenly he’s coming towards me, and the fisherman yells and waves at me wildly.  With horror I realize he’s telling me to go for the fish, that it’s mine.  Everyone’s looking; and as I frantically try to cast, I slam the hook flat down on the water a couple of feet in front of me.  Trying to reel it back in, I unreel more line uselessly.  The fish heads elsewhere.  Still, the early excitement was enough to get me hooked.  As several fishermen land several Coho over the next hour, I focus on my form; and when a fish jumps out of the water in my vicinity, I feel the fishing fever set in.  Like being in Las Vegas, salmon fishing in Alaska grips you with the assurance that in just one or two more shots, you’ll hit the jackpot. 

But that afternoon it was not to be.  After three hours, wet up to the waist now, I head back to town for dinner at Henry’s, a dark lively fish and burger joint, where Laura and Tom say it’s standard practice to order salmon for dinner on a day when you didn’t catch any, just to get revenge.  But I feel no animosity and eat no fish.  Driving back to the house in the dark, the black shadows of spruce stand along the road; I think of the camera in my pack and am already dreaming of dawn, which will be wet, deep green, and full of trees to catch.

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