A Copper River Almanac
Named by Athabascans for the metal they discovered in the Wrangell Mountains, the Copper River, or Ahtna, is actually gray in color, resulting from hundreds of silty tributaries connected to a vast network of glaciers, spanning four different mountain ranges. Every day from spring through fall, the Copper flows with a staggering volume of water, carrying glacial flour and sediment, much of it in the form of nutrients, toward the mouth of the river and the Gulf of Alaska. The Copper is part of an intact ecosystem that still supports wild salmon, presumably sustaining Alaska Native subsistence for hundreds if not thousands of years, long before our relationship with salmon became so problematic.
For all the life the Copper supports, the place is equally rich in history and stories, where the human element inextricably intersects with the landscape.
The Copper exerts the kind of raw power that transcends human limitations, at the same time shaping humans who occupy the surrounding country.
During all of my trips exploring Copper River country, many of them floating down the river, I’ve experienced the humbling power of the place, often leaving me with a deeper understanding, but also many questions, about our relationship with the natural world, with each other, and the meaning of our values.
On one particular trip with my longtime adventure partner, Steve Johnson, we were thirty to forty miles downriver from Chitina when we found the vestiges of the old railroad grade from nearly a hundred years ago. Tall wooden pilings once formed a bridge across a giant eddy in the river. But ice jams and previous floods destroyed it, shearing off the pilings like broken toothpicks. The remaining railroad tracks spanned the gap, about two-hundred-feet across, but were hanging in the air—solid steel, completely unsupported, but bent violently, manifesting the destructive forces of the river.
The Copper is so powerful it often seems inalterable by humans. Indigenous people living along the Columbia River may have once believed the same thing, perhaps unable to fathom the consequences when a million yards of concrete began flowing in 1933, when the first dam was constructed as part of the march toward progress, resulting in a wide-reaching electric grid that was undoubtedly created with copper from the Kennecott mines in the Wrangell Mountains.
In 1938 copper prices plummeted about the same time the rich ore ran out at Kennecott, signaling the closure of the Copper River Railway. The valley would have begun reclaiming the affected land soon after that.
The Copper River is often studied and many of the river’s qualities are measured. Hydrologists calculate discharge in cubic feet per second and they even use electronic sensors to evaluate nutrients carried in the river. NASA scientists look at the river’s sediment plumes and dust storms, both arriving at the Gulf of Alaska on such an enormous scale that these events can really only be appreciated from space. Biologists and fish managers use sonar to count the number of salmon in the river and when harvested, their numbers and economic value are measured.
But the Copper River has other qualities that are more difficult and perhaps even impossible to measure—in the way it affects people, shaping their identities.
In the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, social scientists focused on the connection between coastal Alaskans and their environment, attempting to quantify the psychological impacts resulting from the devastation, especially the loss of both subsistence and commercial fishing activities. Apart from discussing the tangible economic losses, this research yielded a far more complicated issue—how sacred values are sometimes tied up in a Gordian knot, leaving a question unsolvable by conventional means: What is a way of life worth?
The spill also exposed a paradox. A lot of people made a really good living immediately after the catastrophe, many working for the oil industry. I was among them.
The tradeoffs we make sometimes look like Faustian bargains. It’s similar to realizing my own hypocrisy in my love for wild places, wishing them to remain pristine, but available for my own enjoyment, at the same time knowing that tangible forms of work and the alteration of nature (in other places) is what makes that enjoyment possible.
“Work that has changed nature has simultaneously produced much of our knowledge of nature,” writes historian Richard White.
But if nature is treated only as a resource, and especially if fish are seen only as a commodity, then our knowledge merely preserves the status quo. For example, a volatile commercial fishing industry is being threatened by a growing abundance of farmed salmon, by changing environmental influences we don’t fully understand, and by our tendency to think we can outwit mother nature, rather than learn from her.
In conflicts with nature, as in our conflicts with other people—we often meet the true enemy.
Perhaps we aren’t distinct from the river. Maybe the river is us.
If that idea sounds familiar, it should—it’s thousands of years old.
The sound of the river is something that many people hear, but fewer people actually listen to, like the language of the river that few modern people even know exists: “A language older than words,” is how author Derek Jensen describes this phenomenon. “It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.”
And this is the way the Copper River and the country around it haunts me, in its forgotten language. Standing on its shores, it’s as if I have one foot in the present and the other in the past. And when I’m floating down it, watching the country pass by, and being carried by the river’s energy, I think about the possibility of human memories transcending generations and cultures, but also overlapping, woven together in the tapestry of a common landscape, a Copper River almanac telling a story about how intertwined we are with the landscape.
During WWII, the Gulkana Airport was built in the southern interior, a hundred miles upriver from Chitina. A mile and a half west of the airport the Copper River passes by, its braided channels meandering through an immense plateau of taiga forest.
In early Spring of 2021 I traveled to Gulkana to meet with two bush pilots familiar with the region. Martin Boniek is a 61-year-old “cowboy at heart” and the owner of Copper Valley Air Service. Rick Snow, 70-years-old, is one of Martin’s pilots.
The evening I arrived I joined the two pilots and Martin’s family for conversation around a big spaghetti dinner.
Before moving to Gulkana, Martin lived with his wife Laura in the historic town of McCarthy, settling there long before its official population of “two dozen or so” expanded with a growing tourism industry. In the early 1900’s the town supported mining at nearby Kennecott, also the terminus of the Copper River Railway.
“We hauled our own water to our cabin,” Laura told me. Fifty-eight-years-old, she’s the mother of two adult kids and manager of the family’s flight business.
“I used to think it was hard work,” she said with a self-deprecating laugh, “until one day it occurred to me that millions of people in the world have to haul their own water every day.”
“We take too many things for granted,” she said.
Having visited McCarthy during the 1970’s and 80’s, before it became a destination, I asked Martin how it might have changed.
“People used to talk to each other,” he replied.
“When the mail plane came in once a week everyone would meet at the Post Office and have conversations.”
“That doesn’t happen as much anymore,” he said.
“People are busy.”
“Now people text on their phones and communicate on social media. It’s not face to face as much anymore,” he said ruefully.
The next morning I watched Rick load the mail plane completely full with packages. Aside from other general air taxi functions, Copper Valley Air holds a government contract flying mail out to remote communities.
After the plane was loaded, I joined Rick for a route he flies at least twice a week, even during the winter. Buckled in, we took off down the runway and lifted off.
“Copper Valley one-one-zero off with two souls on board and three and half hours of fuel en-route for McCarthy,” Rick said over the aircraft radio.
Gaining altitude, we passed over the Copper River and after just a few minutes we traded the formalities of commercial bush flying for a sense of being the only airplane in a giant sky.
Despite being a full time Alaskan, Rick possesses a quintessential midwestern demeanor, his furrowed features reflecting a lifetime of experience, most of it on the farmlands of Illinois. His aviation career began as a crop duster, then later on he worked in agricultural management, helping farmers become more efficient.
“Technology changed everything in this world,” he told me.
“And it changed the people,” he lamented.
He went on to describe the sea change he not only witnessed but helped usher in, professing, “There’s a caliber of men and women we lost with the technology.”
“The harder the land the better the people. The less they have the harder they work, the more understanding they are, the more giving they are, and the more hospitable they are.”
“It’s one thing to preserve history, another to preserve the ideology and the values of the people who made history,” he claimed.
A humble man who chooses his words wisely, Rick has an affinity for rural people, sharing a similar affection for bush pilots.
He admitted, “Flying has to have purpose.”
Curious, I asked what that might be.
“Helping people,” he answered.
After landing at the McCarthy airstrip, Rick unloaded the plane and then left me behind so he could pick up another load of mail back in Gulkana.
Knowing I had 3-4 hours, I wandered around, inadvertently crossing someone’s wooded property, where I met a barking, three-legged poodle who ran faster than most able-bodied dogs.
After exploring for a while I found my way back to the airstrip, completely deserted until a local showed up. Driving a four wheeler followed by a familiar, three-legged dog, he pulled up to me as I rested on a giant snowplow, waiting for my plane ride.
“So,” he said with a hint of vigilance. “You just hanging out?”
His question seemed loaded with the kind of suspicion you’d expect from a resident living in a place that doesn’t see a lot of outsiders during the shoulder season, except misfits, television producers, and journalists from the Lower 48, and I suspect he thought I was one of these.
“Waiting for the mail plane,” I replied. “I think I might have accidentally crossed your property earlier.”
“Yah, I saw you,” he said, “when I heard my dog barking.”
I explained what I was doing, telling him I last visited McCarthy in the late 1980’s.
Nodding, he pushed back into his seat and relaxed a bit.
“That’s Odie,” tilting his head toward his energetic black poodle. “He had an accident with a truck, but as you can see it didn’t slow him down,” he said with a laugh.
I soon learned I was talking with an affable longtime local, Malcolm Vance, 60-years-old, entertaining me with stories about his arrival in McCarthy in 1982.
In 1983, Malcolm and his then-girlfriend were two of the five surviving residents left in McCarthy after the infamous mail day murders. The experience was so traumatic his partner abandoned her rural life, leaving Malcolm behind, then 21 years old.
“The murders were too much for her,” he told me. “But I stayed, I had already begun carving out a new life for myself.”
The following years provided a clean slate for Malcolm, with the harsh winters and wilderness lifestyle a steep learning curve.
He persevered and ended up becoming a bit of a renaissance man, part of McCarthy’s more modern history, also a summer Bristol Bay commercial fisherman.
I asked Malcolm what McCarthy was like with the newfound attention.
“You know,” he answered, “my old man once said to me: Don’t be that guy who says—remember the good ole days.”
“If you don’t like the changes you’re seeing,” Malcolm’s father said, “you better just pack up and leave.”
“I stayed,” he admitted.
“I may not agree with my neighbors about things, politics or whatever, and we might even fight about stuff, but if my house burned down, they’d be the first to help me start over.”
“So yeah, some things have changed, but that sentiment hasn’t,” Malcolm said.
While Malcolm and I were still talking, Rick landed, and the three of us unloaded the mail plane.
Flying back to Gulkana we detoured toward the confluence of the Chitina and the Copper River, where all my river trips exploring the lower valley have begun.
One of these was in the early summer of 2013, when Steve and I floated downriver and camped on a gravel bar about ten miles south of Woods Canyon.
A sunny evening, we traded our tent for the open air, both of us stretched out in the sand next to a driftwood fire.
Before long, my partner dozed off, hypnotized by the poetry of popping embers and the constant sound of the river.
About that same time something got my attention in a nearby back eddy, a hundred yards away. Slowly emerging from the silty water, a black head as big as a bowling ball, followed by a pair of round eyes. A large harbor seal.
Seconds became minutes while I held still on the gravel bar, and it did the same in the lazy current.
I found myself wondering about its history, and its ancestors. Did they watch Athabascans dip netting for salmon, long before the Russians came, before Henry Allen?
Did its ancestors watch the construction of the railway, curious about noise and the dynamite explosions?
Did this particular seal have these memories in its DNA?
Down on the Copper, I’ve come to expect these sorts of experiences—the oddity of a large marine mammal swimming more than a hundred miles from its home, up a freshwater river, following salmon.
Eventually, it seemed to lose interest and dove back into the current, doing what it needed for survival. And that’s when the dichotomy struck me.
I wondered then, if contemplation is a luxury or a curse, endeavoring to grasp something intangible, then watching it elude you.
As I watched alpenglow forming on the peaks high above us, the seal was off eating salmon, whose animated bodies breaching the surface of the water were followed by a big mouthful of teeth.
With my partner still sleeping I drifted off to a much different time, when trains moved up and down the valley more than a hundred years before. I could hear it coming up the valley, emanating from around a mountainous corner, the distant steam engine chugging and hissing. The squealing of steel wheels grinding against the tracks. It was a rhythmic sound, carried by the wind. And then it got louder, and louder, and closer, and even more unmistakable.
And then it was gone, replaced by the ever-present rumble of the river, so constant it forms a strange kind of silence.
The immediacy of hard ground shook me from my daydream and it was then when I looked over at Steve and noticed he was wide awake, his gaze set on the river.
“Did you hear the train?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“I heard it too,” he said.
Neither of us elaborated on the experience more than those simple words. That glimpse into the past belonged to the place surrounding us as much as those steel rails we saw on another river trip, bent by the powerful forces of the river.
The Copper River may be so powerful, it can bend time as well.