5/22/07

After thirteen hours of traveling the dog and I landed in the booming metropolis that is King Salmon, Alaska. Recycled air and gritty street dust clung to oily fir, the dog was pretty dirty too. The scene: an unpaved parking lot outside a sagging airport sprinkled with gaunt commercial fishermen and scruffy, tired eyed young men carrying rod tubes and dry bags; guys like me, fishing guides.

I'm back. I returned, against my better judgment, for another season of massive trout, eighteen hour days and skidding jet boats. I returned for another four months of wilderness isolation living in a glorified tent, professional ego fluffing and wind knot detangling. The biting flies immediately swarmed my face and I realized that there was no one to meet my plane, no dented blue van waiting with keys in the ignition. They either forgot me, or they were just late, neither of which came as a shock. Welcome back.
 

The town of King Salmon consists of two bars, a Wells fargo, two hotels, oh wait, no the Quinnat burned down last year...make that one hotel, a small grocery, a marine supply store, a boat yard, a few airfreight services and a small army of bush pilots. There are fourteen miles of roadway connecting King Salmon to Naknek, a similarly squat town with several cannerys and a larger commercial fishing fleet. Luckily, I will spend little time in town. Our lodge is located on an uninhabited river about fifty miles from the mouth of Bristol Bay. Instead of drunken cannery workers, I'll spend my summer contending with eight hundred pound brown bears and wealthy, rotund white men.



I was in the process of deciding my next move (do I try to hitch a ride, or just go to the bar?) when the weathered van pulled in front of me, our lodge logo peeling off the back window.

One might think that after thirteen hours of travel, my boss would escort me to the house we keep in town and let me rest, or possibly eat, but that would set the wrong precedent for the impending season. Within half an hour of arrival I am hanging off the back of a tractor scavenging a 500 gallon fuel tank out of a ravine on the property of a local inhabitant. From what I can gather, the owner of said fuel tank was short on funds and ran into our lodge owner in the bar. A couple hundred bucks changed hand and now we have a new fuel tank. Chris went back to the bar a few hours later to find the guy drunker and once again broke, and got another fuel tank (this one half full of diesel) for a couple hundred more dollars. I opted not to go to the bar to watch let's make a deal with blackout drunk natives. I decided to try and sleep instead.



Back at the house, I found myself stuck alone with one of the new guides, Dan. Seems like a nice enough kid who's got no idea what he's just thrown himself into. The whole experience of the first day has him wired into a fit of nonstop chatter. From what I can ascertain, he already knows everything about anything, a tough place for only being twenty, where do you go from there? After an hour of him yammering ceaselessly, I excuse myself to get some needed sleep.




5/23/07



We missed the morning tide. I guess hanging around the bar trying to scavenge cheap secondhand items off desperately drunk locals took its toll on the boss. I got to sleep until nine, a luxury that I doubt I'll see again for quite some time. On our way to the boat ramp we swung through town and I picked up some essentials. Beer, whiskey and porn, are all absolute necessities when spending four months in a remote camp full of men. The proprietors of any and all establishments know this and the prices reflect my desperation and their monopoly. Twenty bucks for a twelver of Oly cans, thirty five for a bottle of wild turkey and twenty five for a Chic. Several hundred dollars later, I am ready to depart.



We launched on the evening tide, leaving the dock around eight. We didn't reach camp until eleven but at this time of year sunlight soaks through the majority of the day. Passing through the desolate mud hole of Bristol bay is not the scenic trip one would imagine. Skeletons of abandoned cannerys scatter the shores. Rotting edifice corpses, perfect backdrops for any horror movie. The lower river isn't much better. Spring has not yet infused the tundra with sufficient moisture, so the ground remains frozen and the foliage brown.



Two hours into our trip we began to enter the upper river where the water clears and the landscape changes. The river shifts from a wide muddy crawl into the beautiful freestone river pocked with scrub islands and stretched with reaching fingers of gravel bars. I drank in the familiarity of the place I will call home until September, eyes wide looking for the changes in landscape carved by the ice floes of spring. Along the way we saw cow moose so pregnant they could barely scamper away from the roar of our chevy 350 inboard jet. A lone grizzly, young and emaciated, ambled away from us, startled from his lean season savaging. River otters, beaver and eagles dive, scurry and swoop as pine trees begin to dot the banks. The water is low yet, they couldn't even get john boats up to camp until a week ago, but it's coming up quickly and we only graze a couple of gravel bars on our 53 mile trek up the river system.





5/24/07



We were up at five. Ears still ringing from the previous night's trip, we set out to catch the morning tide and retrieve more supplies from town. The boat I was driving, a twenty two foot aluminum V-hull with a 350 inboard jet, broke down at the mouth of the river. She faltered for about an hour, losing power and nearly coming off plane before surging back to life, finally she just coughed and went silent. The tide waits for no man so I was left to fend for myself, hoping that they would return that day. Such is the way that life goes here, preparing for the season is our priority and so, unless you are in immediate danger, you don't rank. For six hours I sat in the boat, alternately trying to fix the engine, reading a book and sleeping under a tarp. It wasn't such a bad day actually. I had to keep repositioning the boat so as to avoid dry docking in the waning tide but, beyond that I didn't have much in the way of responsibility.



At two I decided the winds were too bad to cross the bay and they had left me. I had the boat running (kind of) and so I started upriver toward camp. I didn't have enough gas to make it. I tried, but failed. I was preparing to spend a long night under my tarp in the rain, anchored in a slough but my fearless compatriots came through for me. They braved a low tide and forty mile per hour winds across the bay. We put gas in, and started back up, but I broke down again, and we had to ditch the boat, we'll tow it to town at a later date and see if we can fix it. After sixteen hours in the boat I made it back to camp, stuffed my face and passed out.




5/26/07



Building in the rain and driving back and forth to town is about all we do here until the clients arrive the seventh of June. The past two days have been simply the former. I have no changes of clothes, no fishing gear, no pillow, no sheets. Things were so scattered on our last trip to town (and I was stuck in the river so I couldn't do anything about it) that they didn't bother to bring any of my gear from town. I have nothing, and will not receive anything for at least four more days. I packed only an overnight bag when I first came to camp thinking that I would return the next morning. Luckily I have my xtratufs, work gloves and a rain jacket. I don't have my own sleeping quarters yet because we're not done building it (I'm sharing with Dan at least until tomorrow, he continues to talk unabated). I have not wet a line (actually I haven't done anything but work and it hasn't stopped raining). One might question why any sane person would do this job, much less return to it knowing what it is like. All I can say is that it is the wildest place imaginable, and every hammer fall gets me one step closer to the season