I don’t normally get writer’s block. I can usually write pretty easily. However, I’ve had some serious writer’s block now that I’m back from Bristol Bay. It’s not that I don’t have anything to write about. It’s just that I have so much to write about that I have had trouble nailing it all together.
Thoughts and ideas have been spinning around in my head for days. But, truth be told, there’s one thought that keeps coming back to me. The truth is that I think this series of blog posts started nearly forty years ago—back in the 1970s when I was a little girl growing up on Long Island.
Every August my family packed our Buick station wagon and headed out to the North Fork of Long Island. My parents rented a wonderful rustic beach house on a bluff overlooking Peconic Bay. Those month long vacations were simply the best. We ran around barefoot and in Danskin bathing suits for a whole month. We saw our wonderful cousins and cavorted with them on the beach and in the bay for days. We dug for clams with our toes, and my dad then made massive pots of Manhattan clam chowder. We caught baitfish with nets, studied blowfish in our hands, and dodged the spiny tails of massive horseshoe crabs.
Then, for some unknown reason, the bay, which is essentially an estuary, started to change. Something called a "red tide" arrived. The sea life went away. I have vivid recollections of standing on the beach with all of the kids looking around in a stupor. The water looked brown and dirty. We couldn’t even see the bottom of the bay anymore. None of us really understood what was happening. We just knew that we didn’t like it. The adults speculated that it had something to do with the pesticides being liberally sprayed on the farms and potato fields in the neighborhood. Hmmm.
Shortly after the "red tide" arrived, my parents stopped renting that cottage. My summer fun shifted forever. Unfortunately, I’ve never really forgotten that change of course. As the years went by, I noticed that a disconnect evolved. There was lots of salt water surrounding Long Island, but there were few local fish to be found at seafood restaurants or on dinner plates at home. This puzzled me and, in fact, annoyed me.
Hence, when I was writing the copy for the new Bristol Bay consumer website, I experienced an inexplicable urge to visit the bay. I wanted to see the home of the world’s largest sockeye run. I wanted to see the king and sockeye salmon coming straight out of the water. I wanted to meet the people who care so deeply about this region. And, I wanted to better understand the risk at hand from the proposed Pebble Mine.
When I started to plan the trip, I realized that I wanted my children to see Bristol Bay as well. Many of my travel articles have been written and researched with my husband and children by my side, so why should this trip be any different I asked myself? Hence, my research trip became a family trip to meet the people, touch the fish, and see the bay. In essence, this trip was more than I ever could have imagined.
Thanks to the generosity of many wonderful people in Bristol Bay, we experienced a true insider’s taste of the bay. Patty Luckhurst, Alaska’s Awesome Lunch Lady, met us at the airport and immediately welcomed us into her family life. Patty didn't just point us to various spots, she called me at 5:55 AM one morning and told me to get to the beach right away, because their subsistence set net was filling up with salmon quickly! I was glad that I already had one cup of coffee under my belt that morning!
In Naknek, Liz Moore and David Nicol of Naknek Seafood, didn’t just tell us about their business. They handed us life jackets and loaded ALL of us, even eight-year old James, onto their skiffs. They introduced us to their crew, and we all picked sockeye from the nets together. David showed us the visual difference between a male and female salmon. And Liz’s wonderful brother, Harry, cheerfully hoisted my kids onto his drift boat for a photo op with a massive king he had caught that day. In Naknek, the highly respected Norm Van Vactor gave us a personalized tour of Leader Creek Fisheries.
In Dillingham, Nancy Blakey of Snopac, gave us a private tour and told us what it was like to start a family seafood processing business up there in the 1980s with four small children underfoot!! Susan and Gorden Isaacs, who own Beaver Creek B and B, rented their log cabin to us. Susan stocked our cupboards with homemade baked goods each day and went out of her way to invite us to the Fourth of July BBQ hosted by the Dillingham Chamber of Commerce. For the event, the sockeye was donated by Peter Pan Seafoods and was harvested from the bay right there at arm’s reach.
Unlike the seafood disconnect that evolved on Long Island while I was a child, there is no disconnect in Bristol Bay. The symbiotic relationship between salmon, people, culture, and life in Bristol Bay is very much alive, cherished, and respected. We clearly saw that salmon and clean water are the cornerstones of life in Bristol Bay. I’m thankful for every moment we had in Bristol Bay. Indeed, in many instances, I felt like a kid again...only this time I wasn't wearing a Danskin bathing suit. I was wearing waders.
I hope you return here again as my series, “On the Pulse In Bristol Bay” will be continued tomorrow…In the meantime, please be sure to check out our photos in my "Alaska Gallery." There are 36 photos and be sure to click each photo for captions.
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