Leaving for Alaska

My family owns and operates a fishing vessel, the Beryl E. She’s a fish packer, or fish tender and the boat was designed for carrying fish from the Alaskan salmon traps to remote northern canneries where the salmon was unloaded, processed and canned. The Beryl E started packing fish in 1925 shortly after she was built and she continues to pack fish today – with our help. We start preparing for a coming season in late winter or early spring with preseason maintenance that always includes sanding and painting, checking the main engine and both auxiliary engines, the refrigeration system and so on. That process gets frantic as the day approaches where we have to untie the lines. We contract with a processor for our services and it won’t do either party any good if we’re late to Alaska. The departure process is fraught with multi-tasking during the last week at home. Bills to pay, stores to procure, projects to finish and it usually culminates with late nights and anxious glances at the calendar. I constantly count the days it takes to run the thousand miles from Gig Harbor to our destination in Southeast Alaska and recalculate the hours a day we have to be underway – the goal being to try to avoid running around the clock, day and night. The last night home we put the fresh food aboard and maybe the last few overlooked personal items. If the process is moving according to plan we time our departure for high water, early morning, the ebb tide will help push us north and out of Puget Sound. The morning of our departure, in the dark, I stop for a newspaper on the way to the boat. Aboard, I go to the galley and light the diesel stove. It will stay lit all summer. I start the coffee and climb down to the engine room to crank up the main and the ‘hotel’ genset. Once in the wheelhouse I’ll turn on the VHF radios, the radar, plotter, AIS, and running lights. Then I’ll lean out the wheelhouse door to ask the crew to untie the lines. It takes 10 minutes or so to back away from the dock, turn around and exit the harbor. On rounding the sand spit, at the harbor entrance, we throttle up to 1500 turns or so – at that engine setting the Beryl E makes about 9 knots. The 5 foot propeller rumbling and churning with its attendant rattles and thumps always takes me a few minutes to re-acquaint with. Finally after a couple months of long work days I exhale, sit down, relax and drink a cup of coffee while the autopilot keeps the Beryl E’s bow pointed north for Juneau, a thousand miles away.

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This past November a friend described an innovative masters program he had enrolled in. Curious, I reviewed the program curriculum and read through the Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability promotional material which contained the following description: “The world’s traditions, customs, stories, rituals, and styles – our common human heritage – are at risk as never before. Goucher’s Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability arms today’s activists with real-world tactics for preserving and enriching these precious resources.” Someone was speaking to my grassroots activist soul. I had known for some time that being an active citizen within a community was the only method that could counter the tidal wave of gentrification and/or corporatization that has been displacing the vernacular landscapes of our coastal communities. As cultural landscapes vanish, the contemporary cultural traditions and ways of life that are tied to the community are also displaced. Within a few short weeks of my learning of the Cultural Sustainability program I was three thousand miles away from home in a classroom with 10 strangers and my friend.

Vernacular landscapes as described in the ‘National Register Bulletin 30’ are landscapes that “mirror the endeavors of people who pursued everyday work in farming, fishing, mining, or related activities.” Dolores Hayden, a Professor of American Studies at Yale University, in the forward of  ‘Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America’, defines the challenge for local communities that struggle to find ways to retain their local vernacular landscapes. “As ever, commercial speculation and exploitation lurk as enemies of the unique, the authentic, and the local.” I believe her statement to be accurate. Each and every time a vernacular or heritage property in my coastal community has been lost it has been replaced by what is characterized as a ‘highest and best use’. The term tends to be rhetorically lofty but in fact champions land-use that makes a property the most economically valuable, which isn’t always the most desired or valuable use of land to the greater community. On most waterfronts the ‘highest and best use’ development trend tends to erase diversity. As a development strategy it is not a recipe for the retention of what Hayden describes as the unique, the authentic and the local. Here in Gig Harbor recreational marina use is displacing the working waterfront and has become the dominant use, threatening to become a single use. In Juneau cruise ship piers have swallowed up thousands of feet of waterfront leaving little room for other uses. As the twelve of us discussed culture, sustainability, folklore, museums, and heritage in an attempt to define cultural sustainability I realized that to sustain culture at the local level community members would have to preserve more than their past heritage. Finding methods of sustaining viable existing culture would need to be found, and that means preserving heritage properties that support existing culture. Commercial fishing, boatbuilding or farming, for example, can’t compete economically with recreational marinas, the cruise industry or warehousing but does that mean that those occupational traditions have lost value to their communities? Redefining ‘highest and best land-use’ as a term that considers economic value and the cultural value of a landscape would be a logical place to begin.

Guy Hoppen – 2/1/2010