West Side Love ~ Salmon Life

To Joe on the Northern Brazil, to Joe on the Northern Brazil. Come to town to meet your new red-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend, read the newscaster over Kodiak’s KVOK radio station. It was the summer of 1982.

My father, Joe, was anchored in Uganik Bay on the west side of Kodiak Island, waiting for the salmon strike to settle and waiting for his first child to be born. While he should have been pitching slippery reds into the fish hold, my mom was pushing a slippery redhead into existence. It’s a good thing the fleet wasn’t fishing: he motored to town to meet me. I’d like to think his first-born would win out over salmon, but I know of other summer-born children of fishermen who were not lucky enough to be born during a strike.

Maybe when I yelped my first cry, it bounced clear over to the other side of the island to beacon my father home, because for as long as I can remember, my heart has sung out for the west side. For much of my childhood, my family lived at Packers Spit in Uganik Bay during the summer, beach seining for salmon. My brother Gustav’s earliest memory is pulling in a net with our family and our friends, all of whom fished and lived together. We didn’t have electricity or running water and we scraped salmon scales from our arms in a banya, the beloved Kodiak-style sauna. Before my parents fished in Uganik, my grandfather did. Following statehood, he worked with the cannery superintendent to grubstake setnet sites where fish traps had previously been. Spending the summer salmon season on Kodiak’s west side marked not just my family’s year, but our very identity, reaching back to when my grandfather came to Alaska as a young man.

I stopped commercial fishing when I was still a minor, but I never really left it. Now I’m a historian, curator and writer and sharing the history and culture of commercial fishing is what I do. This last summer, I was graced with the opportunity to document how salmon fishing is a part of the essence of other folks with an abiding connection to the west side. Through the Kodiak Historical Society’s project, West Side Stories, I conducted oral histories with over 20 fishermen, cannery workers, and bush residents and worked with photographer Breanna Peterson to capture documentary photos and portraits of west side fish camps, lodges, and canneries. You see, big things happen on the west side—catastrophic shipwrecks, monumental fishing years, suspicious deaths—but the experiences of west side folks are poorly recorded. This summer, we set out to change that and to share these experiences with others through producing radio programs for KMXT from the interviews.

At times, we would put a call out over the radio a few minutes prior to our arrival to warn our would-be interview subjects of our approach. Not only was I hoping that these busy individuals would share their life story with me, I was relying on them to feed me (I brought cheese as an offering), house me (I never actually needed to take my sleeping bag out of the garbage sack that kept it dry) and haul me to the next site (thank you, friends!). And it worked! Between me and Breanna, we visited 42 setnet sites, lodges, canneries and homes of bush residents.

These people feel as if they belong within the bays of the west side—not that the bays and beaches belong to them. In our conversations, people often mentioned the same reasons for returning to the west side, year after year, transferring their lives each summer to a remote piece of shore. Their stories were distinct, but the themes and values were as persistent as homing salmon. Let us distill these stories to four key elements:

Community—Fishermen and bush residents are independent folks, but who of them brag about going at it alone? Very few, because as much as the fishing or the landscape draws them in, it’s the people that bring them back. I interviewed Dianne Herman about the off-kilter folks she encountered beach seining at Packers Spit, my own slice of the west side, back in the 1970s. Take a listen.

West siders make the somewhat crazy choice to entrust their lives and livelihood to salmon.

Taking a chance—West siders make the somewhat crazy choice to entrust their lives and livelihood to a natural resource (salmon) and the natural conditions in which the salmon exist (mean seas and rocky shores). Setnetter Jane Petrich nearly drowned after her skiff swamped, only to return to Larsen Bay that evening to find her skiff tied to the running line and her outboard flushed and purring. Here’s her story.

Family—Both natural and self-made. Kids run on the beach, mothers pick fish and make pies- the most treasured portion of my own childhood were those summers at fish camp. Salmon is business, but the salmon business is a family business for many west siders. One of my favorite stories of the summer came from Alberta Laktonen, who back in 1953 insisted that her three children would be fine in the bow of the skiff when her husband questioned her crackpot idea of setnetting alone, even though she’d never fished a day in her life. You have to listen to her tale.

Salmon—The west side is like a metaphorical book. If the land and water are the pages, and the individuals are the words that make you want to keep turning the page, salmon are the binding. I want to be clear about this: if it wasn’t for the salmon, the west side would be just a place on the map, not a place that grips our senses and marks the cadence of our hearts. If it wasn’t for the salmon, we would have no story. If it wasn’t for the salmon, we would not be us.

Salmon Life

West Side Love

The Story of Anjuli Grantham

By The Generations

Mother Kuskokwim

West Side Love

The Story of Anjuli Grantham

By The Generations

Mother Kuskokwim

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