Salmon Extravaganza, Part I

As everyone who's been to Alaska knows, are measured in flying time, not miles. Our flight was two and a half hours southwest, to the fish-processing town of Sand Point, on an island called Popov in the Shumagin Islands, part of the Aleutian chain. (The Russians first came, for fur; the island was settled for fox farming.) Here the "money fish" is not king but sockeye, also called "red" for its diet of krill and other pink and red small shrimp.

Sand Point isn't a tourist destination. Its modern incarnation was built for people who catch and process fish, and most of the buildings are low, new, and look prefab. (On a boat we were taken to see a town on Unga Island, built during the turn-of-the-century Gold Rush and finally abandoned in the 1970s. Its clapboard houses were weathered and sinking slowly into the soft volcanic soil and looked, as Auden said of his face, like wedding cakes left out in the rain.) There's essentially one paved road, and it leads from the airport to the harbor, site of the large Trident processing plant.

"Everyone here is in the fishing business and everyone is related," Carol Foster, a native Sand Pointer, told us when we boarded a yellow school bus to take a tour of the town. This is something that can be done in short order. There are very few public buildings: the Harbor Cafe, a blue freestanding garagelike building at the harbor; a Chinese restaurant; a nice bar; an even nicer and new school; and a PX-style supermarket and general market, where we were told to marvel at the six-dollar-a-pound nectarines and island prices. We city folk didn't marvel. With typical succinctness, Marion called them New York prices.

Everything is low. Trees snap in the strong and constant winds of the Aleutians. The land is tundra, covered with moss and low scrub. As with peat, which it looks like, you can sink several feet without warning. The organizers gave each of us the state shoe: a pair of Xtratuf boots, high as Wellies but much warmer, solider, and a dull tan rather than bright green. We all fell in love with these boots—you really do need a pair—and could think of no finer swag. The winds that keep everything low also carve grottoes and arches in the rock outcroppings around the many islands, almost as dramatic as the limestone calanques of Sardinia. On a later boating excursion we were told to look out for "elephants," high narrow arches forming, with a bit of imagination that took the denser among us (I was the densest) a while to use, the head and trunk. Oddly, herds of buffalo still roam the hills of the tundra, and odder still they are said to be the descendants of three buffaloes stolen in Oregon, one of them pregnant, that escaped a boat in 1955 and swam to shore. (I have yet to follow up with the elderly local who evidently knows the story.)

Most spectacular for us, there were several families of bald eagles, which roosted on telephone poles as we passed. One nest is beside the Russian Orthodox church, Bob Barnett, a local fisherman, told us; nests can reach six feet across. So how big are the eggs? "I don't want to get close enough to know." Pets need to be kept indoors, paritcularly cats, and people aren't immune, either, especially if they inadvertently come close to a nest. Ravens, fellow carrion-eating raptors, are big as wild turkeys. No wonder puffins, of which we saw dozens on the boat (their wings beat like hummingbirds) nest in rookeries in the high, jagged island cliffs.

We stayed at Carl and Elma's Marine View, a bed and breakfast whose owners, Carl and Elma Dirkers, gave us a welcoming lunch that was a high point of the trip. As I was leaving Sand Point, they told me that they'd met online, and that after a long correspondence Carl had spent a month in the Philippines meeting Elma's family before bringing her over. (In an email responding to my question of whether I could mention this, Carl said yes, adding: "Quality people do this when circumstances line up, and we are not crib robbers, misfits, or exploiters of these women.") Carl also works as director of special education for the school district. Practically everyone we met holds down several jobs, and one person can also hold several official roles in town government. We didn't talk to any of the seasonal workers who sleep in barrack-like apartment buildings and essentially live in the processing plants while they're there.

The welcome lunch was surpassed only by the farewell banquet Michael will describe in an accompanying post: fresh salad and vegetables, the luxury of which we already knew from the store to appreciate; fresh-baked rolls; and endless quantities of baked sockeye—three Pyrex pans full, the fish wrapped in foil. This was really the visitor's dream come true: all the extremely fresh sockeye you could eat. Though I'm in the minority, I much prefer sockeye, with its intense, deep color and meaty, firm texture (good for canning) to the richer, soft, fattier, pinker king.

Elma had baked the thick, dark-salmon—they vividly define the color, and make king, not to mention paint-chip, feed-fed farmed salmon look anemic—simply, with onions and a bit of parsley in foil packages. She'd also cooked it till it was very firm, the texture of kippered salmon. My fellow guests were sparing, as if they were jaded, or plain polite. I was not. I kept going back and cleaning up the ragged pieces others had left, standing on ceremony. Then I dove into the one unopened foil package, and kept going back to that, too. I still dream of those three panfuls.

Part II tomorrow: Hauling up salmon and watching chef Michael Cimarusti clean them—and a post from him on catching and cooking his own.

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This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/07/salmon-extravaganza-part-i/59048/