Read This: Content
Surfing
COWABUNGA
Floating on your board in the lineup at a surf spot, your thoughts drift. That’s just how it is, the very nature of the experience. Today there’s my seam-split thirteen-year-old wetsuit that, by all appearances is still going strong, despite the rip from a driftwood snag stitched up with dental floss on the back of the right shoulder. Also my wife, my daughter, and the in-laws I’d soon be meeting at the Homer Farmers’ Market. Snickerdoodle cookies, and why I love them so very much. We’re told in primary school that the snickerdoodle was a personal favorite of George Washington, who presumably owned enough human beings to have a fresh batch made every afternoon. At least I still have my own teeth to chew them with. But whatever. It’s a fun day in the water, chest-high peelers coming in from an early storm out of Kamishak Bay. Sunshine, salt, no wind, wet neoprene.
One of surfing’s great beauties is its circular nature the leaves so many nonsurfers standing on the beach scratching their head. Sure it looks fun, but what’s the point? Nothing is accomplished, just endless paddling back out and riding in. This session was not remarkably different from a hundred others at this spot, and I got to wondering for no particular reason how many times I had gone surfing in my life. Like an actual count.
As I’ve said, your thoughts drift. But this was a moment in my life I needed some water time. I mean, seriously needed it. I’d become a father about three years ago, and while there’s nothing especially remarkable about that—lots of guys do it every day around the world—the experience can’t help but be earth-moving. Surfing time, already an increasing rarity in my life, became practically nonexistent. We ended up staying in Florida for a year so my wife could be near her family while she recovered and the baby got its land legs under her, so there was at least the solace of the Atlantic beach nearby. I bought a fifty-dollar sun-yellowed beater board off Craigslist and spent whatever time I could watching the NOAA marine buoy data and doing surgical strike surf missions on the coast between Sebastian and Fort Pierce.
My moments were limited. Florida has surf, but it’s not really what you’d call world-class. And I was preoccupied by about fifty different things, not the least of which were starting a new business and figuring out how to be this guy called Dad. It took up the lion’s share of my time, to say the least, and my surfing ability suffered big time.
I will confess that at six-foot-two, the board I bought was a bit too small for a guy my size. I knew this when I bought it, but my options were limited, and it at least the foam was thick enough to be fairly corky in the water. But every time I made the drop and went to pop up I wound up pearl diving for the bottom. There just wasn’t enough real estate on that little board for me to get up, and somewhere in all those wipeouts and missed waves, something very sobering happened: Surfing, for the first time ever in my life, ceased to be fun. And if surfing was no longer fun, there lurked behind that notion a much more unsettling thought, namely, Can I even still call myself a surfer? And if I’m no longer a surfer, then what exactly am I? Just some guy named Dad?
This is a pretty garden-variety existential crisis, or to say it another way, it’s very much a first-world problem. A good friend of mine, not a surfer, grew up in Cameroon and hit the road when he was seventeen for Cape Town, only to get picked up by the cops and thrown in the hoosegow for having a bag of weed in his pocket. The facility they stuck him in was the infamous prison on Robben Island, and in the twenty days he was there he had passed by Nelson Mandela’s old cell on a daily basis.
So I try not to get too whiny when I don’t get to surf as much as I’d like. Yet I don’t think I’m breaking any news by saying that becoming a father changes you and your life in profound ways. Among the harder aspects of the process is learning how to fit everything else you ever were under the overarching identity of Dad.
But there’s an upshot. Out in the water off the Homer Spit, unnervingly warm because of the record-breaking hot summer we’ve had, my thoughts drifted from the Florida bull shark that blasted out of the water ten feet away from me in pursuit of a mackerel to the idea that perhaps my daughter might enjoy surfing when she gets old enough. That’s not the first time I’ve had that thought, and I’m certainly not dimwitted enough to think she’s going to love surfing just because I do. It’s a running joke between her hippie mermaid mother and me that she’s probably going to grow up with fantasies of moving to Phoenix and working as a Wells Fargo clerk.
A new set loomed on the horizon, marked by a dark smudge against the farthest reach of the water. I paddled myself into what seemed to be a better position (maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t—my wave timing has gone more or less to shit lately), then spun my board and charged as the wave stacked up behind me. I felt the board glide down the face, got up and leaned into a turn only to realize too late that I’d come in just a board-length too late. Whitewater surrounded me as I did a lazy el rollo into Cook Inlet.
Maybe it was the warm sunny day and the complete lack of a crowd. Or perhaps the happy thought of my wife and daughter. Or maybe just the silky caress of the cold saltwater. These things are often complicated beyond human ken. But when I came up I was smiling. The wave was hardly a contest winner, but for the first time in what seemed like forever, I was having fun on a surfboard. I was both Dad and a surfer. And I’d read somewhere on the internet that you can by wetsuits for kids as young as three.
Restaurants and Food Trucks
SURPRISE OVER FRIES:
Running a Food Truck at the Very
End of the Road
It was a chilly fall day at the Valdez harbor in 2013 when Rebecca Bard paused to study the empty shuttered café that had just been put up for lease. The café, a slide-window type operation with a covered seating area out front, lay in a high traffic area, just across North Harbor Drive from the public docks. Bard happened to be in the food truck business over the mountains in McCarthy and she knew a prime location for slinging hamburgers when she saw one. On a lark, she pulled out her cell phone and called the owner to see how much they wanted.
The following April, she’d forgotten all about it when they called her back to ask if she was still interested. Bard hemmed and hawed a bit—her initial interest had been more on the level of idle curiosity, and she had her own eatery to get ready for the upcoming summer season. But when they gave her a mere week to decide, she thought, sure, what the hell. “I’m always up for a good challenge. Let’s see if we can open a whole new business in a month and a half.”
One might detect a frozen smile and a hint of panic creeping into the eyes of that statement, but Bard knew what she was doing. She and her business partner Ian Gyori have been running the Roadside Potatohead, or “The Potato” as it’s known among McCarthy folk, since 2008. They’re the third team of owners to run what has become a legacy of great food in the tiny town near the foot of the Kennicott Glacier. They’re also among the more creative and innovative food truck teams you’re likely to find, and have elevated the truck experience to levels you wouldn’t expect.
Gyori, a professionally trained chef, makes the pastrami, sausage, and bacon they serve on a menu that ranges from the basic burger and curly fries combo to Vietnamese bahn-mi sandwiches to vegetarian wraps and my personal favorite, the rosemary garlic fries. Lately they’ve also started doing what they call surprise over fries, which consists of hand-made pickled vegetables and sauce over a pile of their signature hand-cut French fries. There’s a different surprise every day, and it’s proved quite popular.
Bard is a very capable cook herself, but she gives most of the credit to Gyori for the Potato’s diversified offerings. “Ian’s worked at a lot of restaurants in San Francisco,” she says. “Almost every winter he goes and stages at these really awesome restaurants.” Staging is a sort of brief, unpaid internship at a restaurant, but they don’t just take anybody off the street. You have to be a pro with an impressive resume just to get in the door. Gyori brings back everything he learns to McCarthy and pours it into their tiny food truck.
Indeed, during the years I lived in McCarthy, I ate regularly at the Potato, both for the excellent food and for the breezy screen-porch atmosphere. It’s a refreshing change to step out of the dark wood and brass of the town’s only bar, blinking against the glare of the sun, perhaps pushing a hand toward the sky to shield your face from the glare. You walk around the block on a dirt street, then enter through the porch’s spring-hinge door at one end. You order off the hand-chalked menu nailed to the wall, then sit and visit with whoever else is waiting while delicious sizzling smells waft out from the kitchen. There’s a couple stacks of magazines, a soda fridge, a trash can, some cottonwood fuzz caught in the screen. All about you the life of McCarthy carries on at its usual languid pace, with the noise of the nearby creek, the rustling of the leaves and the buzz of fourwheelers forming the pleasant background hum.
I freely admit these two are old friends, and this naturally introduces a certain amount of bias into the writing. But then this isn’t a restaurant review. It’s a story of two business people with the moxie to make an undeniable success out of a difficult business proposition at the very end of one of Alaska’s roughest roads, all with a commitment to sourcing as much of their food locally as possible.
“Operating a business in general in McCarthy is difficult,” Bard says, “because you are responsible for your own power, and you are responsible for your own water.” The Potato, like all businesses in McCarthy, has to produce its own electricity with a generator. Trash disposal is always a headache in a place noted for its rather healthy bear population. Inevitably, things break down, and repair professionals are far away. Gyori once had to take apart their espresso machine while on the phone long distance to Kaladi Brothers in Anchorage so they could walk him through it step by step. “You gotta be part chef and part mechanic,” says Bard.
Then there’s the food expediting. Things like ketchup and hamburger buns have an irritating tendency to not arrive when scheduled. Bard reckons she lost 20 flats of eggs last summer to the bumps and washboards of the McCarthy Road. This can bring on a minor existential crisis when you are hung over on a Sunday and all you want from life is one of their egg, ham, and English muffin sandwiches, a delicacy that is to the wretched Egg McMuffin what the poems of Pablo Neruda are to the lyrics of a Ted Nugent song. But there’s always something else good on the menu to soothe your jagged edges.
Through all this the Potato crew perseveres, and this has paid off in spades. After their first year of operation in Valdez, the community has embraced their operation and they’re heading back for another season. Business, in fact, has been so good at both locations that they’ve recently turned a major corner—they’re going to be leaving the food truck business. But fear not, the Roadside Potatohead is not disappearing. Rather, they’re getting ready to start construction this summer on an actual honest-to-goodness sit-down restaurant in downtown McCarthy. That’s about as major as commitments come, but it’s not surprising from two individuals so devoted to providing top-quality meals at a reasonable price.
The new McCarthy Potato restaurant will face all the same challenges as the truck, but there’s no doubt the food will be as good, if not better than ever. There will still be days when the hamburger buns and tomatoes don’t make it in, but improvisation is what makes their business such a wild success. According to Bard, sometimes you just have to tell them, “I’m sorry we don’t have tomatoes. We’re at the end of the road and they didn’t come in this week. But the fact that we have food like this is already pretty awesome.”
Science Content
DON’T CALL THEM BUFFALO:
An Ecological and Bureaucratic History of Wood Bison in Alaska
Robert Albert, an Athabascan Indian born near Tanana, was 14 years old when he and his dad were running their trapline in the winter of 1918. Elsewhere around the globe, the First War was turning in favor of the Allied powers with the arrival of U.S. forces on the battlefields of France. President Woodrow Wilson had formally declared his support for universal women’s suffrage. And in haberdashers’ shops around the world, men’s shirts were being marketed with the amazing new invention of pockets on either side of the front placket.
None of this, however, was in Robert Albert’s mind when his father, known in English as Pretty Albert, stopped suddenly in his snowshoe tracks. Robert saw straightaway what had caught his attention—a dark, shaggy animal in the brush ahead. It was massive, bigger than anything the teenager had ever seen. Much later, as an old man, Robert Albert would recall being terrified at the sight. It was hard to make out just what it was, but the likely candidate seemed to be a bear, judging from the size, shape, and color.
Pretty Albert pulled the moosehide cover from his lever action rifle and racked a shell into the chamber. They watched the big animal, waiting to see what it would do. Their breath, and that of the beast, steamed in the frigid air.
Eventually, Pretty Albert found a good shot. He raised his weapon and fired. The creature went down. When father and son finally dared to snowshoe up to the dark mass they were astonished to discover that what they had killed was not a winter grizzly but a wooly horned animal none of them had ever seen before. Yet they had heard stories of animals such as this, tales that came down from the skin-clothes days, before White men, guns, matches, and ready-made cloth clothes. The old people upriver sometimes spoke of them, and you would occasionally hear that a wandering hunter had found an old skull with horns just like these washing out of some cutbank on a distant creek. Nobody, however, had seen such a creature within living memory.
What Pretty Albert had shot was a wood bison. His kill in 1918 was the last known encounter with an animal that once had thrived all across Alaska’s Interior, then disappeared.
Anybody alive in the twenty-first century can close their eyes and see the flash of images conjured up by the word bison, or buffalo if you prefer, though biologists cringe at the latter name, so famously misapplied. There are the Hollywood movies, the paintings of George Catlin and Karl Bodmer. Comanche, Blackfoot, and Sioux men on horseback at full gallop, aiming lances and arrows at a massive thundering herd of bison. Bearded, unwashed market hunters aiming their big Sharps rifles, then pulling the trigger to take only the tongue and the hide. Genteel railroad passengers taking potshots at “buffalo” next to the tracks as the iron horse speeds them westward to fulfil the nation’s bombastic notion of manifest destiny. General Philip Sheridan declaring that the only way to pacify the Indians was to extirpate the bison. The vast herds reduced to just piles of skulls by the century’s final quarter.
Wood bison are close cousins to these more familiar plains bison, but their history has nothing whatsoever to do with these scenes. Their historic range stretches from the northern portions of Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia northward through the western half of Canada’s Northwest Territories, then westward through the Yukon Territory into Alaska’s Interior.
This is not a land of vast open prairie; wood bison live in a world of smallish meadows growing up from dried-out lake beds, surrounded by spruce, birch, and aspen forest. They were not hunted by whooping painted riders on fast ponies, but by Athabascan men in leather shirts with pointed tails, using dogs, snowshoes, and birch bows with draw weights of up to 80 pounds. They were—and are—bigger than plains bison, and rather than forming herds as big as the sea they were found in small family groups of perhaps a couple dozen.
The project to restore these animals to Interior Alaska began back in the early 1990s when Bob Stephenson, a wildlife biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, was doing moose research along the Yukon Flats. He and his field crew started noticing excellent and widespread habitat for wood bison. “Lots of meadows,” Stephenson says of the area. “All kinds of sedges and grasses. It’s pretty classic wood bison habitat, really. And we found the same thing in the Minto Flats and in the Innoko-Shageluk area.”
Stephenson was aware of wood bison living in similar latitudes and ecosystems far to the east in Canada’s Northwest Territories, but the gears really started turning when he asked the local Gwich’in about bison and whether or not they might survive in the Yukon Flats. “People in Fort Yukon said, ‘Oh yeah, my grandpa talked about bison being here in the old days.’”
With all this in his head, he went to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency in charge of the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, and pitched the idea of reintroducing wood bison to the area. His proposal met with a frosty reception. Fish and Wildlife was, to put it bluntly, dead-set against the idea.
“It’s a long story,” Stephenson says with a sigh. “It’s all about policy, sensitivity to environmentalists. ‘Don’t do anything’ was basically the theme.” The position of federal managers at the time was essentially that there were no bison in the refuge when it was created in 1978, so there should not be any bison there, and under their watch there never would be any bison. If this sounds just a tad myopic, that’s because it is, but then federal land managers are notorious for this particular view of the world. It’s not as if Stephenson wanted to bring in some exotic species from another continent. Some have suggested, off-record, that the refuge director in the 1990s was opposed to wood bison simply because he didn’t want to deal with the paperwork. Whether or not that’s true, there were legitimate concerns about how reintroducing wood bison would impact the refuge’s breeding waterfowl.
“They have some good people,” says Stephenson of the Fish and Wildlife Service, “but they’re a very bureaucratic outfit, and we just ran smack into that wall.”
At least part of the problem is one of perception. Wood bison appear to have all but disappeared from Alaska before Euroamericans first arrived. As a result, most folks don’t really think of wood bison as an Alaskan species. Just convincing the public that wood bison used to live in Alaska until the very recent past was a major stumbling block. Stephenson knew he was going to have to change that, or at least provide solid evidence of his claims.
Working with paleontologists from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, he assembled carbon-14 dates on skulls found in Alaska and neighboring Canada that were positively identified as belonging to the species Bison bison, of which wood bison are a subspecies (Bison bison athabascae; plains bison are given the comically repetitive Latin name Bison bison bison). They found several dozen B. bison specimens dating back to about 8000 bc, with nine dating to within the past 1000 years.
Meanwhile, anthropologists from UAF went out to the villages and started chasing down oral histories of this mysterious phenomenon of wood bison in Alaska. They worked with Gwich’in, Tanana, and eastern Koyukon elders, asking them what their grandparents had told them long ago. Among the dozens of accounts they collected was the story of Pretty and Robert Albert, as related by Robert Albert’s elderly daughter Virginia Titus.
The obvious thought here for a debunking scientist was that perhaps the Indians were confusing bison with musk-oxen, not an unreasonable notion given that musk-oxen are known to occasionally wander south over the spine of the Brooks Range into the timber. There was also the fact that the Gwich’in use the same word—dachantèe aakk’ìi—for both species. The local elders, however, were emphatic that they knew the difference between the two. Traditionally among the Gwich’in, there was a hand signal used to denote which species the speaker was referring to: For a musk-ox you placed your palm on your forehead, swept it down, then curved it up in imitation of the musk-ox’s downward-hooking horn. For bison, you put both your hands near your temples with the index fingers extended and curving upward like the horns of a bison.
Another obvious thought was that maybe these stories of hunting bison were remnant tales from thousands of years ago that had somehow survived the ages. Again the elders shook their heads. They weren’t talking about thousands of years back in the dim past—they were talking about a couple hundred years ago, just prior to the arrival of the first White fur traders in the Yukon Flats. What emerged from all these oral history interviews was a tradition of Athabascan bison hunting in Interior Alaska previously unknown to western science.
Those original fur traders on the Yukon Flats were agents of Canada’s Hudson Bay Company, by far and away the biggest player in the global fur trade of the nineteenth century. In 1847 they sent a party of six voyageurs under the command of Alexander Hunter Murray over the divide that separates the Mackenzie River watershed from that of the Yukon. Murray and his men established a trading post they dubbed Fort Youcon at the confluence of the Porcupine and Yukon Rivers in what was then still called Russian America.
Murray’s journals make no mention of bison along the Yukon and Porcupine corridors. He undoubtedly was familiar with the animal; there were at the time still thriving populations of wood bison in the Mackenzie drainage, and both First Nations and Hudson Bay men there actively hunted them. It would seem that a group of fur traders coming straight out of good bison country would be keen to ask the local Natives in a new district a simple question: Are there any bison here? But if this was asked, Murray is silent on the answer. He does note that moose were abundant in the area, and with plenty of salmon in the river come summer it’s not like they were going hungry, so perhaps the lack of bison simply didn’t warrant recording in his official log.
Yet it seems there would have been older Gwich’in coming to the fort to sell their fur catch who not only knew of bison but had personally hunted them. In fact, the Porcupine River that the traders followed into Russian America skirted the southern flank of the Brooks Range, which had traditionally been known as an excellent bison hunting area. In particular, there was a mountain the Gwich’in called (and still today call) Buffalo Shirt Mountain, because in former times so many wood bison could be seen on its slopes that they covered it like a shirt.
There were, evidently, still a few random wood bison in Alaska during the 1840s and later, judging from the accounts of individuals like Robert Albert. But the question remains, what happened to the species? Why did they all die?
Oral tradition among the Gwich’in tells that the bison died out from overhunting. Interestingly, the same tradition states that bison disappeared just as moose, once almost unknown on the upper Yukon, began to arrive in numbers. It’s important to note that moose don’t compete with wood bison for food—the two species occupy completely separate ecological niches. Moose are solitary animals that eat willow browse, while bison are communal grazers. But as bison began disappearing from the landscape, willow and birch saplings that had always been continually trampled by their hooves were suddenly free to grow, which is likely what attracted the moose.
This was, according to Stephenson and his researchers, the end result of a process of thousands of years of reduction of bison habitat. At the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago, Alaska’s interior was chock-full of bison. The cold climate of the Pleistocene had created a frigid, treeless steppe ecosystem that favored large grazing herd animals, and there seem to have been several different bison species living here. As the earth began warming during the Holocene—the geologic age we’re currently living in—the trees and shrubs of the modern boreal forest began slowly taking over the steppes, cutting into the vast open range the bison herds relied on. Some species could adapt to this change, others couldn’t. Wood bison were not only evolved to thrive in the Far North, they could easily acclimate to a forested environment, and even thrive there, so long as the meadows held out.
Over time, though, the meadow habitat became more and more fragmented as the forest took hold. There was still plenty of food, in certain places, and wood bison could still do well, but the various populations of B. bison athabascae became isolated from one another. Bear in mind that humans had been hunting them all through the millennia. They were a favorite prey because they provided a high return for the hunting effort, and it is well known that human hunters can and do have profound impacts on populations of large mammals like moose, elk, and bison.
“As time went on,” Stephenson relates, “They [the wood bison] became increasingly restricted to local meadow systems, usually at low elevations, near rivers, which is where people were concentrated.” As one isolated population after another was hunted out, it became harder and harder for the remaining ones to remain viable.
For all the hippie-dippy notions of hunter-gatherers living in balance and harmony with their environment, there is a mountain of anthropological data from tribal societies around the world that shows pretty clearly that this is frequently not the case. Make no mistake, Alaska’s Athabascan societies have very clear traditions of conservation and not taking more from the land than you need, but these generally represent the best-case scenarios. When times get lean in a harsh place like the Yukon Flats, and grocery stores don’t exist, you’re probably going to kill that last bison because you don’t want to watch your kids starve to death. That may mean that there won’t be any bison for them to hunt when they grow up, but hunger is both an ancient and powerful motivator.
The current effort to restore wood bison to Alaska’s Interior was a long, difficult road for Stephenson, and the nature of the Fish and Wildlife Service bureaucracy is such that there never really was a catharsis, no big Aha! moment in the process of gaining their acquiescence. It amounted to a 24-year slog of paperwork and conference rooms, and Stephenson ended up retiring from Fish and Game before the effort finally came to fruition with the recent reintroduction of wood bison to Shageluk on the lower Yukon River. In his words, “The bureaucratic side of this isn’t pretty.”
Part of the reason for the success was a change in management within the Fish and Wildlife Service, but the lion’s share of the credit goes to Stephenson and his team for both the original concept, and for two and a half decades of relentless work. Through careful, painstaking scholarship, they were able to document that wood bison were until very recently an important part of Alaska’s fauna. They were able to convince federal policy makers that bison would have no negative impacts on currently extant wildlife, including waterfowl, and that in many cases their presence could actually be beneficial. And most importantly, they restored a species to Alaska, bringing it back from the rolls of the extinct. There are not many wildlife professionals who can point to a conservation success story in which they personally had a hand.
But new roadblocks continue to be thrown up. Doyon Limited, the ANCSA corporation that represents the Athabascan Native people of the Interior, has a number of gas drilling leases in regions slated for wood bison reintroduction. Stated simply, they don’t want the hassle of dealing with a species that is still classified as endangered under federal law. For the small Shageluk herd, the only way to get around this was to have the reintroduced bison be designated as a non-essential, experimental population. Whether or not this will work in the Yukon Flats, and the Minto Flats as well, remains to be seen.
Yet Wood bison belong here in Alaska. Theirs is an ecological niche that has stood empty for two hundred years. The meadows are still there, waiting for their return.