Bostwick Inlet 1975

After my second year of purse seining, I was flush. I banked the majority of my money, borrowed a skiff from a friend and did a little subsistence fishing. I was putting up Nichols Passage, adjacent to Ketchikan, and ducked into Bostwick Inlet on the northwest corner of Gravina Island. (You may recognize the name of the island from the recent "bridges to nowhere" controversy. One of the bridges was supposed to span the distance from Ketchikan to the Ketchikan International Airport. The airport is on the southwest corner of Gravina Island and two mountain ranges and many miles from Bostwick Inlet.)I passed a lovely little white-beach-lined depression called Seal Cove on the chart. I thought I'd put in there on my way back out the inlet. About a half-mile further in I discovered a small estuary that had no name on the chart. I beached the skiff there. My dog, Isis, a Malamute-Siberian Husky mix, jumped out and ran off into the woods and I began exploring. The place enchanted me--it was love at first sight. A wide beach protected by a couple of sand bars spread out on either side of the mouth of a brush-choked creek. Further inland a broad field of goose grass and Eskimo potato sprawled from one hemlock-and-Sitka-spruce-covered knoll to another. I gathered some Eskimo potatoes, laid a camp fire and cooked a small cod. I et. I sat and contemplated the beauty of the place. Then I put out the fire, called the dog and boogied back to Ketchikan. Within a week I had put together a plan to return to my new-found paradise for at least a few weeks. A friend lent me her tent and I gathered some staples and tools together. I dropped by my favorite air taxi service (the sign over their door read, "They who pass through this door will soon be there.") and made reservations for bi-weekly day-trips out and back to town to re-supply staples and get drunk. A couple of gill netter buddies ferried me over there. (I couldn't have gotten all my gear in the skiff.) I set up household in the field.

The beach turned out to be rich with clams, cockles, dungeness crabs and scallops. I learned 100 different ways to prepare them. The tides in southeast Alaska are phenominal. The difference between high and low tides during full and new moons can easily reach 20 feet or more. My beatiful field turned out to be a tidal marsh. In the middle of the night during the first full moon I had to gather my soaked possessions up and get to high ground fast. Want to hear God laugh? Just tell her your plans.

One day while walking through a section of woods I had traversed almost daily for several weeks, something strange caught the corner of my eye. It was a log cabin I had never seen before. It turned out to be a bunk house for a zinc mine that had been active around the turn of the century and with a little fixing up it became my new home. You know--like Igor in Young Frankenstein said, "A little wall paper, some flowers . . ."

I spent the majority of my time in that place cutting firewood and carrying water. For cutting the wood I used a simple Swedish saw, a splitting maul, a wedge, an axe and a hatchet, in that order. For the water I fashioned a yolk out of alder and hung two buckets off it. I discovered what I call the principal of cumulative awareness. For about the first month or so of my tenure, I got my water from the creek that fed the estuary with no fanfare at all. After that brook dried up (a seasonal thing) I trecked up the inlet to the next stream. Because it was a good distance from the cabin to the creek, when I arrived I sat down to rest before I filled my buckets. During that time I almost unconciously studied the bottom of the creek. I began to see tiny life forms; periwinkles and other little creatures. By the third month I was observing the critters those tiny ceatures were dining on. And by the fourth month . . . well, you get the picture.

After the fifth creek had dried up I went further up the inlet and found a vertical granite wall, some 30 feet across and twelve feet high, over which a waterfall spilled. I climbed the earthen steep on the side of the wall and was overwhelmed. There, behind the waterfall, was a broad pool covered with a high arch of branches. It was dark and cool inside this grotto. I took out my drawing pad and began sketching. From a tree on the opposite side of this vault an adult eagle swooped down and over my head. I took it as an omen. I had just been welcomed.

Once in a while some fellow fisherfolk would drop by to visit. One morning, about 4, I heard a commotion out on my porch and figured it was some of these rascals come to mess with me. So, in a sleepy haze, I picked up a bucket of water and threw some of it out the door. My visitor turned out to be a young black bear sow. From that time forward she came by every morning to get her bath. A couple years later I returned on a nostalgic day trip and discovered she had cubbed. She was no longer my buddy. She even rudely mawwwwed at my dog.

When I finally returned to Ketchikan, the friend who had lent me her tent was going out of state for a while and she begged me to housesit her cabin. She didn't have to twist my arm very far. Her front window looked out across Nichols Passage. I could sit there, emotionally and physically drained, and see the place where I had spent the most wonderful days of my life.