Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now by Bernard C. B

Author:Bernard, C. B. [Bernard, C. B.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2013-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

Sitting at dinner with a pair of fathers and sons traveling together from the San Francisco Bay area, two brothers and their boys on their first fishing trip to Alaska, I ask who caught the biggest fish. A big teen named Josh, with a diamond earring and crew cut, raises a meaty hand.

“I caught the rarest too,” he says. “A white king.”

One in a hundred chinook salmon have pale flesh rather than the typical red. No one knows why, though theories abound. Once considered undesirable and sold for pennies on the dollar, a marketing genius’s idea to call them “ivory kings” repositioned them as a rare and therefore more expensive market offering. Devotees claim they fight differently when hooked, taste different when eaten, and contain more nutrients and valuable omega-3 fatty oil than their red-fleshed siblings. But they’re exactly the same fish.

Across the table, Bill and Bill Jr. are smaller and wirier, and there’s a fairly clear alpha-dog relationship between the brothers and their sons. Josh’s dad, Tracy, beams as he talks about his son’s fishing exploits. He’s as gregarious as Josh is reticent and physically a blueprint for his son. Pay attention, Josh. In twenty years you’re going to look just like him.

Bill Jr. says politely that he’s had a great time in Alaska. His father seems quieter than he should be, muted by something that happened on the boat. Tracy razzes him a bit, but neither will tell me the story—so I push a little.

“Get skunked?”

No answer.

“Lose a big fish?”

His head pops up, and his son looks away. Ah.

“Happens all the time,” I reassure him. His misery seems relentless as the rain, a preexisting condition, maybe, the bad day on the boat the latest indignity heaped upon him.

“It kind of bummed me out, but I’m getting over it,” he says unconvincingly between bites of dinner.

The lodge employs a full-time chef during the fishing season. Meals are extravagant and industrial: porterhouse steaks, prime rib, grilled chicken, fresh fish, all thrown on the grill two dozen at a time, enough to feed famished clients and guides. Even the small salad in a parfait glass stuffed with fresh Dungeness crabmeat is somehow masculine. There’s nothing delicate in sight, except the lovely Michelle, who holds her own among the clients. At one point, someone tells a joke and she punches him in the arm, just one of the guys.

The guys at my table finished fishing yesterday. They spent today walking around Sitka in the rain before their flight later tonight.

“We walked our butts off,” Tracy says. “The first thing I bought was a pair of sole inserts for my shoes. Then I bought something for my wife.”

“What did you think of Sitka?” I ask.

“Beautiful,” Bill Sr. says, but there’s something in his voice.

“But . . .?”

“I’m really not as much into fishing as Tracy,” he says. “I’m more interested in going to Nome to do some prospecting. I prospect for gold a little bit, here and there, and Nome’s calling me. There’s so much gold still there.

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