Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

July 21, 2008

Rainbow over the salmon net. Seth Kantner photo.

5 a.m.: We wait—too windy to head out to set net. My thermometer reads thirty-seven degrees. It’s going to be cold out there on the water, picking salmon out of the webbing.

At 6:15 my dad and I climb into stiff waders and heavy Helly Hansen raingear, wristlets and gloves. I dig through a box of winter gear for knit hats and winter neck warmers. Northwest wind chases catpaws in the lagoon. We clamber into my boat and motor out of the lagoon. In front of Kotzebue the channel dances with standing waves where the ocean chop collides with currents from the Noatak and Kobuk rivers.

At South Tent City we bury an anchor on shore in the beach gravel. We rush around, shoulders up and cold, hands wet, stiff. We tie lines, preparing to set nine hundred feet of net straight into the wind. Oran Knox motors up on a dark green Honda four-wheeler. Oran is an umialik, a whaling captain, from the village of Kivalina a hundred miles up the coast. When he sees my dad he stops the machine and bellows over the wind and waves.

Oran is thick and powerful, jovial but nobody to mess with. My dad strides up through the beach grass to shake his hand and grip his shoulder. My dad is 73, Oran in his late sixties; they have been friends for half a century.

Shaking hands with Oran is like grabbing onto a two-by-four. His palms are like the sea mammals he hunts, his huge fingers are random lengths, half of them missing pieces.

“Alapaa (cold)!” He laughs against the sheets of driven drizzle. “Real windy four o’clock.” He and his family are living in a wall tent, with a stove. He turns to me. “You bring me pallets.” In Kotzebue, hardwood pallets come in on the freight planes; they don’t go back out; people burn them for firewood.

We set our net. Fish start hitting right away, the white splashes rising out of the gray waves. No other fishermen appear on this side of town. We work through the net, one of us fighting to hold the boat against the wind while the other untangles salmon.

We motor to the outer end, repeat the process. I drop my dad on the beach; he strides around, waving his arms in his yellow raincoat while I give my outboard gas and head to the fish buyer. I return; we run through the net. Over and over. By afternoon the wind falls, and a rainbow dips into the ocean. We have to pull out, get the webbing out of the water for the period closure at two p.m. Our hands are curved like claws, we’ve caught 1,150 salmon, broken a record for coldest July 21, and joined the rest of Alaska in one of the coldest summers on record.