The Ghost Skiff at No Name Cove
By Roger Topp
We stand outside the tents at 1 a.m., looking east to where someone’s torch flashes across the hills, and pipes through the heavy dew. The light comes towards us and then is gone, fallen into a cleft of the hillside. Our headlamps are off, but the camp light in my tent makes it glow green, a tortoise hiding in the tall grass. “So many stars,” says Jannice. She faces South, and I admire all five of our tents hiding in the beach-side hollow. Each has found a bit of earth amid the jumble of storm driftwood.
Steffi went to bed hours ago, and Mario hiked back to the vehicles where he took one to town and the hotel. Josh and Suzi have gone east to intercept the wanderer with the light. “The spirits,” Suzi said as she left with her headlamp and her broom handle. Josh, also with headlamp, carried the driftwood cudgel we think will be useful tomorrow where we plan to walk under an eagle’s nest to the north along the coast. Josh suggested it was Mario come back, trying to find the camp in the dark.
Jannice says whoever is out there called Suzi’s name, just once. “Mario wouldn’t do that. Why would he call out?”
“If he can’t find the camp,” I say.
“He wouldn’t come this way.”
“Where’s the Big Dipper?”
It’s not easy to find, and I’d have thought the brightest stars would blow out the youthful pinpricks, become great, white-hot blotches on the sky. No. They make room. I’m not used to seeing them in summer. Polaris feels too high, the Dipper too small. The night has become crowded, but the bear is pointing north as usual. The milky film of the galaxy, sprung from the black, makes silhouettes of both the mountain and the little hill our camp is pressed against. The wind comes in gusts.
At our back, the tide has come in, pushing urchins and seal bones up among the kelp bladders and the skipping stones. “Imagine if we’d all been asleep, if someone had come into camp?”
I’d have feigned sleep if I’d woken at all. I think I would have slept through the whole adventure. Déjà vu, I think I have slept through this whole adventure.
“I was a little nervous. My tent is first,” says Jannice.
I agree. I am glad we are outside the tents, waiting in the dark. Camp is a chilly amphitheater above the beach and away from the campfire, now spread out and barely cinders. This dew will make everything rained-on come morning. Jannice the South African wears about three layers. Myself, a scant couple. Maybe it’s living in the north. Maybe it’s adrenaline. Maybe I did my part working through the wine. Maybe I know I can handle the chill for another twenty minutes before I need to run and hide in the sleeping bag. I was about to do just that when Suzi called out to ask if I’d stay up with her, because “There is a light in the dark to the east,” and she was pretty sure someone out there had called her name. I put my shoes back on, and Josh and Jannice joined us.
“A Milky Way in the Aleutians,” I say. All the poor weather has been blown from the island and gone up to the mainland. In the morning, it will ask us what was missed.
I tell Jannice the story of Ida and I getting kicked out of a park by the police on All Hallows Eve. We were teenagers. By day the park was clean-cut suburban. At night, the police jeeps moved across the earth like ghosts following the aquifer. We didn’t know who or what they were. Ida shouted the torches to “Get the fuck away” from her car. The police seemed to focus on that, on what she said and not what we were doing.
Suzi did not call out.
“Nice club,” I told Josh as he left for the light in the hills.
“It’s a walking stick,” he said, shifting his grip. Indeed, it was. And off they had gone, into the dark.
--
Above the beach stones, there’s a gravel rise where campfires are lit. A rectangle of bleached logs makes a spot where the winds become confused against the face of the outcrop. The smoke swirls and everyone on the expedition turns like compass needles at the North Pole.
Seals surf in the larger cove next door, and while our rockey shore is quiet, salmon charge the beach. They can smell a freshwater stream, but it’s choked by rocks and a low tide. They pop out of the water. Men wait like bears trying to snatch them in their mouths.
Suzi builds our fire. She has brought a quart-sized bag stuffed with small bits of kindling and fire starter. She collects driftwood that has dried in the afternoon sun. There are few trees on the island. The driftwood has been stranded here from the mainland, driven by a circus of currents, down one river, surging up another. “We could camp over there,” Suzi says, pointing down the cove, “but there won’t be any wood.”
The beach faces west, and our sun sets beyond Ballyhoo and the promontory of Fort Schwatka. The lights of the Dutch Harbor city docks are only just visible from No Name Cove. Technically, there’s no town called Dutch Harbor, but airlines and shipping companies and reality TV have made demands of the locals. The city and the island are Unalaska, Ounalashka if you’ve lived here most your life, if you are Suzi.
The harbor spit is a quiet sliver somewhere between here and the mountain. Some of the lights in our eyes will be from the spit, closer than those of the docks below Ballyhoo, but just like looking at the stars, it’s hard to say which ones we could touch if we stretch out our arms.
Fishermen are motoring in and out of the harbor, and a small skiff bobs far out in the mouth of the bay. It disappears and then reappears with the swells. At first we call out, “Whale!” the way it comes and goes—but it’s too quick. It’s only a boat, one man sitting in back with the outboard. Without binoculars, he’s a smudge on the horizon, again one moment there and the next moment gone.
Much closer, a lone sea otter drifts across our cove, and a pair of seals swim a little farther beyond, gliding north. They are quit surfing for the day.
Suzi shows us her putchki scar. The sun was hot today, and the cow parsnip were weeping. She tells us a story of her camp over the hills, the way she keeps an unlocked stash of fuel in a shed so lost boaters can take shelter or be on their way—without breaking in—now, after last time. The way she talks, thumbs under the straps of her backpack, I imagine her abandoning the rest of us, crossing the horizon to check on a remote part of her life. She can reach it by boat or by hike.
She keeps a house in town as well. White curtains. Red sashes, a trailer with hollow-boned wings built on a skinny lot on the harbor, a skinny road between the house and the water. The bow waves of passing tugs slap the rocks sounding clear as children in a bath in the next room.
Suzi tells us about the latest shipwreck. The crew, Korean, abandoned ship, but they have no idea if the ship sank or if it’s floating around out there. No one seems to know where it is. Likely, it’s sitting on the bottom against cliffs, but there’s a chance it found a way between the mountains and out to the open ocean.
--
Jannice cooks spaghetti in salt water. She orates on the uses of scorched and un-scorched cook pots. She says she will eat anything edible. At Ugadaga bay, she peels dried kelp from sunbaked rocks. “It’s exactly like out of the package, crisp and salty.” Dried nori follows salmon berries, blueberries, and a relative of buckwheat that tastes like nuts in a field. For protein, we will have to hunt ground squirrels, which are everywhere and camp in the road. We hike on soil and skipping stones, ripe tundra, and matted grass that becomes puddles if we stop too long. Snack on twigs as we go. We find a patch of lady slippers, but all the heads have been chewed off. We picnic on a dry rise favored by lichen and cranberries. Sundews glisten at our feet.
We talk about those things you do between the here and the there: high school sports, gear fetish, children’s books, hiking etiquette. Josh disappears far out in front. Mario lags to take pictures and eventually makes his own trail. I position myself somewhere equidistant, my idea of a geographic center. We agree that everyone is on their own, and no one gets to complain. Still, we are entertained watching Mario navigate clefts in the tundra. There’s a hidden landscape in the ravines, and he disappears for minutes at a time.
In college, my geography instructor demonstrated how we could take a piece of cardboard cut into the shape of the state of Virginia, and if suspended by a thread affixed to the city of Charlottesville, the map would balance. When people ask where I live in Alaska, in Fairbanks, I tell them, it’s right in the middle. Then they know it’s a long way from the ocean.
Jannice swims in the Bering Sea. She’s planned this for days, and when the moment comes she runs through the shallows in shorts and sports bra. The first photograph is only a failure if you expect her to be in the picture. My phone is still set to panorama, and as I follow her path, she disappears herself between the stitched exposures, leaving a sequence of splashes in the water, as if someone has been skipping stones, as if a ghost has run through the scene, leaving footprints in the surf, and if you look carefully, there is one disembodied arm center frame, as if most of her has slipped through a wormhole.
She runs forty meters before the water is deep enough for her to dive in. In the second photo, she’s underwater. In the next two, she’s walking back towards shore and washing the sand from her shoulders. Then there’s the video. She grins. “Yes, cold. Yes, refreshing. Yes, you should all try it.” Salt water in long hair. “A shame to shower later.”
On the beach, there’s a stream and a pair of playful foxes—one of them is inquisitive, one is not. There’s also a sauna at one end, protected by the bluff. A couple islanders beached it by boat a year ago. The sauna is a good spot to change and to eat a jelly sandwich and watch the foxes.
We clean the sand out from between our toes. This takes half an hour. The hike in and out is through tall grass and bog, all the little streams falling out of the watershed. Sweat and rainwater have wicked into everyone’s boots. Dry socks are heaven.
--
The skiff doesn’t appear to move, and the man—or woman—doesn’t look to be fishing. We expect he’s watching whales. He’s out where the channel meets the mouth of the bay. He becomes the conversation as the sun disappears behind the point, and Suzi is worried the skiff isn’t running to port with the last of the light. He doesn’t appear to have his own beacon.
I check my flashlight is in my pocket. “He’s watching the sunset.”
“He should be getting back,” says Suzi. She knows the water.
An hour later, Suzi calls the harbor master. She goes carefully down to the surf-washed rocks below the foot of our protective bluff. There is just enough signal to call town across the bay.
The concrete lookouts and the gun emplacements at Fort Schwatka are sharp silhouettes in the oven of the day’s dying light. At the exposed, wet edge of the mid-century war bunkers, the iron has aged like flowers blooming. Iron bolts have split their seeds and grown soft as dry crêpe. Corrosion is fragile, the rust decades in the making.
We watch the harbor bed down for the night, the skiff still out at the mouth.
--
Half the expedition team arrives by boat, but I take pictures through the sea grass of Steffi’s plane on approach. In the long lens, the grass is blurry dancers. Across the water, the turboprop is hovering and noiseless. The sounds I hear are the water, the eagles, the airport ventilator, a circular saw on a job site, car doors in the parking lot, a truck switching gears half way around the harbor. Watching the plane, I understand how part of Japan’s 1942 strike force was disorientated by fog and darkness. It’s tricky to land here. The runway is stuffed up against Ballyhoo. Some days all the planes turn around and divert back to Anchorage.
Near my bench, sunk in the sea grass, someone has left two pears on a small paper plate. Poking out of the pears are what might be the remains of firecracker sticks, fuse red, thin as toothpicks, charcoal at the ends. One of the pears is partially eaten as if by the tiny bites of tiny teeth. Around the plate are cigarette butts. An offering? Someone’s lunch for two? Someone’s birthday? Someone’s early morning breakfast? Someone was not hungry. Someone was watching the boats and telling a story that could not wait for the tide. Someone’s late night snack after beers—in the late arena winds when all those other sounds fade, and it’s just the waves on the barnacled rocks and the wind in the grass, the snap of flint lighters, the sizzle of black powder, and the snide remarks of seabirds.
The plane is a bright, white speck set against the mountains. Everything else is grey. It turns towards me, showing me its lights as it makes a gentle turn. It’s on the ground quickly, a puff of dust and then I hear it—the gravel baritone of the propellers, six blades on each motor.
--
The cry of the botanist cuts through the wet silence of the morning, a bright spark on the audio recording. “There’s a forest of cryptogramma!”
Road cuts and rubbly outcrops are staples for discovery.
“The forest of which she speaks is about six square inches.”
Steffi puts the forest in a plastic bag, parsley fern and dimorphic leaves and roots and all. A research professor is a lot like a harbor light, enigmatic and way-pointing. She loves nothing more than to keep a student from getting lost in the maze of twenty-something upheavals. In a morning, she has the research projects of two students sorted. Rockbrakes in a bag are something tangible, and DNA work is all the rage.
Youth is looking and finding only ghosts, a haunted house in the woods, love, fairy rings, a broken boat on an empty shore. But hang with adults! They complain about losing their keys and wallets and minds. But they know the flower they came for will lurk near the crab pots.
The monkey flower is native to North America but now naturalized in Europe, Iceland, and New Zealand. It is a bright yellow perennial favoring wet soil. Some of the island’s monkey flowers are imprinted with a smudge of lipstick on the lower petal, like a thumbprint and a memory of a more garish ancestor. There should be a story, a tale of a hero returned from battle, stopping by an island and a pond. Maybe she reaches for the wildflower, just clips it before she follows the path away. Maybe her old wounds leave a trail behind, tears, sea-salt, and long-remembered bloody breadcrumbs.
Historical records suggest the first monkey flowers reached Europe through specimens collected by Grigori von Langsdorff, a Russian naturalist, while on one of the first botanical expeditions to the Aleutian Islands in 1805. Mario reads to us from Langsdorff’s field notes. The words are as good as seeds, collected, traded, cultivated, and naturalized. He pauses so he can look ahead along the same trail Langsdorff might have used. All the trails here run down to the ocean.
The monkey flower likes picturesque ravines, mossy waterfalls, road cuts under a convocation of eagles—and the rocky spit sheltering the port, where crab pots stack like office blocks. The proud flower goes to seed in between, berthing in the pits between the iron and nylon. Hitching rides in both steerage and first-class cabins, this plant has spread round the world on account of good looks. It blooms over a warm spring in a broad grass valley that ends, somewhere between here and the grey horizon. The water smells faintly of sulphur, and someone has placed wooden boards to make the crossing. The spring is bath-warm on a cold morning. I find a bee on the underside of a purple geranium and call to Mario to see if he wants a photograph. He laughs. He has already found this specimen, but he comes over to see how his friend is doing. “Sometimes it’s just too cold for them to flower. It’s not worth it, maybe. Just curl up in the rain.”
“I think she should want to go home,” I say.
“Yeah,” says Mario. “But sometimes they get caught out in the weather. On Kodiak, there were lots of bees on the artica. I grabbed one of the flowers, and I think they sensed the warmth, and they started climbing over my hand—so they started warming and became more and more active—on my hand. When I tried to put them back on the flower, they weren’t going.”
We park on a high gravel road. When we arrive, mountain peaks poke through the fog. By the time we pack the specimens and get back to the trucks, there’s nothing at all to see.
--
Suzi says she spoke with the harbor master. He apologized for his boys. They should have been out in the harbor looking for the skiff, not for Suzi on the shore. Everyone knows Suzi.
“The story of Unalaska goes back 9,000 years,” she says. The islands separate people, plants, and animals. The populations become distinct—as do the languages.”
“More and more flowers, less seed as we go west,” says Jannice.
“It’s a fascinating place between two continents,” says Suzi. “Botanists will call and ask me to collect this and that, to see which way the plants are moving. How long has this been here? Eastern most range of some. Westernmost range of others. Birders too.” Suzi will upload a photograph to our global, online milk carton and she and a lost bird from Kamchatka will once again become famous. Birders armed with life lists will fly to the slopes of Ballyhoo, and Suzi will drive them to see the lonely creature foraging in a foreign bog. Do they talk about how it might never going to go home again?
Alaska is a melting pot of the melting pot that is the United States. Unalaska follows this theme. Our man in the skiff might be a seasonal worker. He could be from any nation and speak any language. He could be local and know exactly how to get home in the dark.
At the Grand Aleutian, crews wait on rooms or a shuttle van to the long-liners. This is the only hotel in town, and we can run into old friends crossing the lobby. Fishermen and fisheries observers talk predation by whales and rate of return on fish. 1.86 for cod—three weeks at sea before it looks profitable, six weeks to be sure. Less time in port is less time spending money—more time fishing for salmon, for halibut, for crab and rockfish and mackerel and opilio, hake, shrimp, herring, pollock, and yellowfin sole. The big boats are feeding the nation’s pets. The smaller ones are bringing it back fresh. Twelve to sixteen hours on deck. The girls and the boys bunk together. The work is continuous: blood and otoliths, the safety of the crews, the health of the fish stocks, the conservation of an ocean in a time of dying.
As night fell, our man in the skiff never moved from the mouth of the harbor. Today, no one is reported missing.
--
I have a favorite story, sitting in a train station late at night. The station is under renovation. Plywood walls are erected between some of the tracks and platforms. A man sits on a bench, some dozen feet to my right. Dark glasses, cane, veteran’s cap. It is clear he is blind. He stands and signs ‘peace’ as a train rattles through the basement terminal two platforms over. He signals to the onboard passengers, though none can see him because of a plywood barricade he doesn’t know is there.
I tell Mary the story of the blind man. We’re riding a train between Boston and the Capitol. I begin the story with a broader context. I was in the city, nights, working on a play. Each night, I walked across West Philadelphia pretending I belonged there. Then I took the commuter train most of the way home. That is where I saw the blind man. “Maybe the passengers are not the audience,” I say, because theatre and memory are always in the present.
Mary and I talk because it’s a courtesy to say hello before you adventure with strangers, and to ask if you can sit next to someone on a train. I’m in the window. She joins me. The clock starts. If we share stories, they will determine everything that happens next. I notice Mary’s ball cap on her lap is from the University of Virginia, a big, orange, stylized ‘V,’ a pair of crossed cavalier sabres. I could ask her if she fences. I don’t. I ask her when she graduated UVA. She hasn’t. She’s in her second year. I tell her I graduated in ’93, and she says she wasn’t even born then. I nod. Yes. I think about this a lot now.
“Charlottesville’s been in the news, recently,” she says.
I nod again. Yes, I know.
Mary is applying for the Commerce school at UVA. She needs to write an essay on, “A difficult time and how I dealt with it.” 250 words. On the train, she alternates filling online forms and reading Harry Potter fan fiction. When I tell her the story about the train and the blind man at the station, and my theme that all unfamiliar architectures boil down to a curious form of theatre where we have no idea who the audience is, I leave out the loose detail where I fell in love with my makeup artist. Because there’s a difficult situation beneath every story, because the falling in love had nothing to do with her, only her power to turn me into someone else—and that she’d been assaulted on the street the year before—and she had ‘won.’ Small woman, she’d beat up her attacker. She also led the production, and every night I demanded she kiss me, and she broke a sugar vase over my head. There’s a bright torchlight in my memory. I forget her name, but I’m sure it is something that, lacking details, sounds too vulnerable.
I like spending time with people comfortable in their city, their camp site, their lonely promontory. I can fall in love for a short while, but I’ve needed to keep moving.
Mary says the story about the station platform is, “Deep.” I think I wince at that. She says there is another essay question on her application. She forgets what it is.
In a month, I will look up Mary’s questions. I won’t find her “difficult situation” on the form, but there’ll be one about hindsight and identifying something you could have done better. A second one will highlight the proud diversity and incoming experiences of those in the program—and asks what you have to offer.
“People get confused by my accent,” Mary says.
“I can’t place it.”
“I have no accent,” she says.
I understand. She was born in China to parents who do not speak English. Now she’s nineteen and hasn’t just learned English but learned to be American. Her given name didn’t used to be Mary. Her family name is Lyu, so that makes me smile.
When we pass through Philadelphia, I call out my home town, but this is more so we can look at the people on the platforms. I don’t sound like I come from there either. I tell Mary the story of how my family moved back and forth between the U.S. and England. Technically, I was born in New Jersey, but never thought of myself as American until I left for college. By then, school had scoured my Yorkshire accent. While Mary’s English is timeless and everyman, mine is thick with the influence of British parents, school in Philadelphia, college in Virginia, and then life and sitting on sandbars in Alaska. It’s complicated and paradoxical.
On the way through Delaware, I ask Mary if they still swap the electric engines for diesel in Washington. She says she doesn’t know.
Yes, they still do that. I leave her on the train just before all the lights go out. As I walk along the platform, I wave to several windows, not knowing exactly which one was ours.
--
A botanist, a geneticist, and an evolutionary biologist walk into a bar. It’s quiz night, and they are going to lose. Some other table is searching the answers. “This is the only possibility.” Jannice tries to get us to use our phones.
She is from South Africa, but now lives in New York. Steffi is from Germany but lives in Alaska. Mario is from Mexico City. He now lives in Scotland.
Mario tells the story of Jannice liberating coffee pods from the cleaning lady’s cart at the hotel. Jannice talks justice and the ways to get around overpriced drinks on the ferry.
I tell the crew the story of my project. This is why I am here, attached to their National Geographic expedition to Alaska’s Aleutian chain. I tell them about the podcast’s original incarnation, a hybrid tale following fictional, nay steam-punk, continent-hopping characters on the trail of a climate mystery. The characters run into a large number of actual scientists, pursuing their own real-world riddles. These conversations are interviewed on location.
But then the U.S. Congress, the real U.S. Congress, on the floor of the Capitol, railed on one of many days that climate change awareness was a waste of public money. They named our project in particular, spooking the leaders in New York. Since then the project has paddled in circles, as they say, going through the motions. I was still angry New York hadn’t stood their ground.
My pocket recorder is running again. “What got you into science?” I ask Jannice. “What surprises have you discovered so far?” I ask Mario. These are boilerplate questions, and while the answers are interesting, I want to know more about how the crew came together. What are the arguments the boys have had behind the scenes? Why did Mario really leave the campsite before we went to sleep? When he met the harbor patrol on the road, why didn’t they take his word Suzi was fine? She was worried about a skiff on the water, not her own safety. These feel very different. Why did the searchers, pressing on, not find our tents and the water our backs were to? Hunt abandoned, they and their torches were gone again before Suzi and Josh could find them.
In the meantime, let us continue our performance. Standing on a beach, we must be a strange site to a man in a skiff. No matter what way we turn, we’re looking right at him, characters gesturing blindly. I like theatre, because you stay for the whole show. It’s a neat little package guided by the comforts of a script—and still there’s room for the making-up of things.
END