Chenega wrestles with complexities of past and future

I'm not repeating what I heard, because I don't want to make matters worse. Besides, the causes are too old and complex to sort out -- Chenega has been through so much, with its historic traumas, the earthquake that killed a third of the population, the oil spill that spoiled traditional foods and relationships, and the changes in culture, with the village's division into the corporation, traditional council, and non-profit organizations, the associated elections and so on, and the disagreements over oil spill money and land sales.

Carol Ann Kompkoff, whose father saw two daughters slip away in the tsunami but kept the strength to be the village's Moses and bring his people back to Prince William Sound -- even Carol Ann said she felt lonely in the village at times, because she'd been sober since the oil spill and it could be socially uncomfortable to visit hard-drinking friends and neighbors.

In a human community, as in an ecosystem, there is no rewind function. What's lost is lost, and hope lies in creating healthy relationships that are new. The grief must die for the next generation to rise.

Sandy Angiak's sons James and Ian impressed me by trading Alutiiq words and showing off the carvings and other cultural objects they had made on many visits to cultural education camps at Tatitlek and Nuchek. Sandy taught traditional dance at the school. At the session I watched she sat back and let the young people lead themselves, with James, a high school senior, guiding those around him with a stern, serious voice.

James would graduate that spring, the first graduation in many years at the Chenega school, where he, his brother Ian, and Wannah Zacher's son Ray were the only teens. The entire community was looking forward to the ceremony, all rooting for James to complete his credits in time. He worried about a speech he would be` expected to make.

Sandy, with streaks of gray in her long black hair, did not try to hide her pleasure at having raised these two strong, proud Chugach men on her own, standing with them as I took a picture. But when I asked about her own history she suddenly began to weep and they stood uncomfortably away.

Wannah and Dennis invited James to go along on a picnic with the family. That sunny spring morning the hummingbirds had arrived in Chenega and villagers were out on the road telling each other about seeing the first of the tiny, hovering birds. Wannah and Dennis could stay home no longer, and set off in their little fiberglass skiff to get a seal for lunch and to gather goose eggs.

After adding me to their family of seven, James, and two dogs, the boat floated low in the water and traveled slowly. We followed the mountain-serrated shore of still-snowy LaTouche Island, motoring over smooth, undulating water, toward a cove where Dennis knew there would be harbor seals. Spring had made the channel new, mountains and water metallic in their brightness. No chance at all of seeing other people that day, although the island once had a mine and a sizeable town, now long gone.

Melonie sat in the bow with the dogs. The big boys, James and Ray, cradled their rifles. Little Toni Rae and Tyler sat between their parents at the outboard motor in the stern, pretending to help drive. Wannah, with an irrepressible smile, looked over their heads at Dennis, whose eyes concentrated instead on the horizon and his responsibility.

Joey, the middle boy, manipulated a hand-held Game Boy computer, watching Japanese Pokemon characters rather than southwestern Prince William Sound -- I remembered feeling as he did as a child, unimpressed by the overly familiar grandeur of Alaskan scenery, and I respected his parents for letting him think about what he liked.

We landed well short of the cove where the seals would be found and Dennis sent the two boys with guns ahead on foot. He taught without saying anything, letting them find blinds behind two boulders -- he had put them where they could have their own success. Dennis stayed in the boat, ready to retrieve the kill. He hadn't even brought his own rifle.

James and Ray hesitated. They sited powerful scopes on the heads of the seals, which barely poked through the surface of water halfway across the broad cove. Two shots thundered, but the bullets skimmed over the surface of the water beyond the seals, which were gone as quickly as the splashes.

Dennis's voice from the boat urged the boys on to another spot for another shot, but they missed again. Likely their gun sights were out of alignment. Dennis uttered no word of criticism, but James made a rueful remark, imagining the seals under the water now discussing the hazard of men pointing sticks at them.

James lit a damp campfire with a well-chosen clump of grass and moss and a single match. We cooked wieners on sticks rather than pieces of seal. Dennis didn't bother with the stick: he stuck a hot dog in the hot coals and then ate it in his fingers, without a bun, saving time for his work.

He walked miles down the shore, fast, checking for goose nests in the dry grass beneath the eaves of alder branches--nests which could not be found because they hadn't been built yet. While the girls played with shells, rocks and sticks and the big boys lay by the fire, Dennis never stopped moving, and in the evening, after arriving back in the village, he went out again, fishing, and brought food home after all. He always seemed driven about catching food, but became maniacal when he saw a fish jump.

"I wanted to be a seiner when I was young," Dennis said. "That was my dream, to be a seiner when I grow up. Then that oil spill happened, as soon as I grew up. No more seining."

Almost twenty years after the spill, conversation kept coming back to that topic. Dennis believed the otters and seals were still down, and the herring eggs had never reappeared as thick and plentiful as they once were, when he was a boy and you couldn't even see the seaweed under the eggs. But to the next generation, James and Ray and the others, the oil spill was just something their parents talked about from before they were born. They didn't remember a more plentiful Sound. Their own dreams, still rising, included learning to hunt and fish like Dennis, and other, less-formed ideas.

Ray began fulfilling his destiny when he took his first deer and shared it with each of the village elders, just as they would have done in old Chenega; what that meant to his grandparents, Larry and Gail, I could hear in their voices, but the meaning for Ray himself surely was only beginning to form.

The teens answered all my questions respectfully and as well as they could, but with faces put on specifically for diplomatic relations with an adult. I could no more enter into their world than I could see through the eyes of a seal as it slips birdlike through the water.

Free of us, the boys' young muscles surged forward, powerful and unburdened by the grief of previous generations, toward a place that we could hardly imagine, except for our hope that, in the future, the sea will remain alive, able to envelop the human heart as it has since the first mind woke to its spirit long ago.

Charles Wohlforth, a life-long 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.