Once, Chenegans would simply have gone out and built their own houses. In the old village, men hauled wood and made simple structures with their hands and the help of neighbors; when a family left, someone else would move into the house. Villagers carried water from the creek on foot--there were no roads or vehicles other than the boats down on the beach and at the dock.
Native expectations for standards of living changed after the earthquake, but the bigger change came from outside. Federal agencies invaded villages, imposed their values, and tangled up civic life with their acronyms and petty rivalries.
Earthquake reconstruction officials sometimes ignored Natives' wishes when they arrived to rebuild, treating them as dependents or serfs, demanding they work as subordinates without pay, and deciding for them where to put houses and how to arrange and allocate land -- sometimes deciding foolishly, to the lasting regret of village residents, according to Nancy Yaw Davis, an anthropologist who studied North Pacific communities during those years.
But to get government money for earthquake reconstruction and other social programs, village people had to shut up and do things the way agency employees directed. And after the agencies came they never went away again -- outside government bureaucracies became as much a part of village life as outboard motors.
Chenega Corporation needed money -- its funds from the land claim settlement were nowhere near enough to rebuild the village. Most Chenegans were poor, and moving from the city to the wilderness even in a primitive way can be expensive.
With the help of the Corps of Engineers, villagers chose a new site for Chenega. Elders couldn't stand to go back to the old cove--one visit was enough to show them that. It would remain a sacred grave site. They looked instead for a place that would be safe from tsunamis, had a deep port, and fresh water.
A site on Evans Island suited them, 18 miles from the old village over the water, on a bay within Sawmill Bay -- near the Armin F. Koernig Hatchery -- where an abandoned saltery still stood above an old dock. The Evanoffs lived in the saltry for a time, amid the spiders and rot, trying out the new area.
Back in Anchorage, Gail lobbied bureaucrats in state and federal agencies responsible for housing, community development, Indian affairs, and sewer and water systems, among others, a long and complicated task.
One reason they resisted was because no one lived at the place where the Chenegans wanted to build. Larry and Gail solved that themselves in 1981, when President Reagan fired Larry and 11,000 other air traffic controllers who had gone on strike.
Larry said, "I didn't have a job. I had a few dollars in the bank. And Gail said, 'Let's not talk about it. Let's do it. No more talking.' And Gail and I sold everything. I mean everything we had. And we took bags of clothes and we moved down there. We put up a cabin. And then, 'Hey, there's people here.'"
Larry ferried supplies in his 22-foot wooden dory--seventeen barrels of fuel, on one run--over many slow trips, 75 miles from Whittier, crawling along with a 65-horsepower outboard and praying for good weather to hold.
The family was happy. Wannah, at 9, ventured alone through the woods and over the beaches of Evans Island, picking berries, fishing, playing with Barbies on the beach with clam shells and driftwood -- she roamed free, drawn home only by dinner time or the need to help with chores, carrying wood or water.
Larry took her with him in the boat and taught her how to stay quiet while hunting seals. At night she listened to the grownups talk by lantern light, poking her head over the edge of the loft in their one-room cabin. Larry and Gail's partnership, built in adversity, came into its own.
"This was my home," Larry said. "I grew up here. Gail didn't, but she was behind me one hundred percent. I lost both of my parents. This is my destiny. This is what I'm supposed to do. Gail was the brains behind most of it. She was able to get a lot of funds. And I was there to make sure the job got done."
Larry built a tent camp for construction workers who would put in roads. The contractor insisted on hot showers and a flush toilet, so Larry laid a PVC pipe up the mountain to a stream, running it to a shed with a generator that could heat the water, which then flowed through the shower and toilet into the ground.
Next came the twenty-one houses, fabricated by HUD in Oregon and shipped in halves on three huge barges, the first of which went to the wrong village--the old village site--before Larry figured out the mix-up over the radio and brought it to the beach below new Chenega. Huge cranes came along with the houses to offload them. Larry supervised construction and made sure the job was done right.
In 1984, families arrived to move in. Gail said, "They were literally coming off the boat and we were handing them the keys to the house. It was fabulous. Those who had not chosen where their house was going to be, it was -- 'Go over there, there are three houses, take your pick.' "
The first year, families got reacquainted. They already knew each other, but living in a village of fewer than a hundred residents was different than occasionally meeting in the city. Over the first winter on that quiet cove, where the tide rises gently and the stars blaze brightly at night, people learned to go visiting and tell old stories once again, to pitch in when they saw a neighbor chopping wood, or to share a big catch of fish.
Most of the settlers were young families like the Evanoffs. Older people tended to be too established where they were to move back, or they needed medical help the village couldn't provide. Nick Kompkoff Sr., who had held his people together through their diaspora in Anchorage, returned to the village as its priest. But he was fighting cancer. He oversaw the construction of the church, which the men made of pieces from the old saltery. He died in 1987.
Twenty years after the earthquake, most adult residents had never lived in a village. Carol Ann didn't know how to smoke fish, cut game or prepare Native foods. She would plan dinners two weeks ahead using food from Anchorage. She had never learned to sing or dance either; she hadn't asked her grandmother about the old dances, and then it was too late.
Larry said the men all knew how to fish and hunt, but not the old techniques the elders had used. Besides, the places where village memory recorded the seals' favorite rocks and the fishes' gathering places were too far away to use. The young men sometimes harvested as much as they could, wasting fish and meat rather than leaving some for next time.
"It wasn't like the old days where elders were there to coach you," he said. "It would have made a whole heck of a lot of difference."
Larry Evanoff's generation tried to hand off to their children what they did not receive from their parents. Larry has gray hair now. He and Gail project warmth but also unassailable dignity.
Wannah, now in her 30s, never asks him about the earthquake, the boarding schools, or Vietnam--she feels those subjects are off limits--but her parents live just steps away from her house and are a constant presence in teaching her children. When her oldest son took his first deer, Larry presented him with a gift, a skinning knife, as tradition dictates for a Chugach grandfather.
A new generation had the opportunity to grow with the village in their bones. Wannah and her husband, Dennis, with five children, were getting ready to add onto the little house Larry had supervised building twenty-five years earlier. Wannah lives within a stone's throw of the water and still encounters the hermit crabs and sea urchins that low tide leaves there for children to play with. Her children roam as she did, checking in once an hour. In the village quiet she can hear them off in the woods.
At sunset the quiet is total--a single ripple would stand out--as if all living things were poised, waiting to release a breath. The mountain holds the village in an open palm, cradling it in front of smooth water. The sky is so dark and deep that the stars seem to float in it, the bright ones most buoyant, mixed with the planktonic cloud of the Milky Way.
The old Chenegans must have felt as Wannah and Dennis do in this generous universe, watching the seasons bring good food--goose eggs and herring spawn in spring, salmon in summer, berries and venison in fall--as their children rapidly grow. And watching the winter come, when the seventy villagers mount a craft bazaar for each other at the school.
That is when the humpback whales gather in the bay to feed on overwintering herring and the deep rumbling of their underwater song shakes the houses, surprising villagers from their TV watching or dish washing.
"This whole waterfront is all singing with dozens of whales for a couple of months," Wannah said. "You can see the splashing and hear the singing. That vibration sound they do, you can feel it all the way up here. It's amazing. I don't know how you can feel it or hear it, those big notes, with that deep, loud sound. They make the season Christmasy. To me, it's not Christmas without the whales."
TOMORROW: Chenega's next generation and the Exxon Valdez.
Charles Wohlforth, a lifelong Alaska resident and former Daily News reporter, is author of "The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change" and other books about Alaska. Learn more at www.fateofnature.com.
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