FUTURE OF VILLAGE IN DOUBT

By DAVID HULEN
Daily News reporter

CHENEGA BAY- One by one, the reasons that this little village exists are vanishing, or turning up dead in inky black water and on oil soaked gravel beaches. And the people who live here will have to decide, all over again, whether to stay or find new lives somewhere else.

Chenega Bay is the smallest village in Prince William Sound, a collection of 20 bright colored houses on a hillside above the water. Most of the 60 or so people who live here are Natives, a mix of Aleut, Eskimo and Indian blood, and the ones who work for money do it by fishing.

But as filmy blankets of wandering oil from the Exxon Valdez have drifted here and clogged the bays and passages that surround Evans Island, fishing has become unimaginable, at least anytime soon.

So has hunting, the main source of meat in at least half of the kitchens. Several families routinely kill and eat seal and sea lion, but no one has seen a nearby sign of either for more than a week. Dead deer and smaller animals, like land otters, are starting to be found on the shores. Ducks are coated with black goop.

A small navy of boats has sealed off the bay below the village with long inflatable booms to keep oil from reaching the Port San Juan salmon hatchery at the end of the cove. On television and at the crowded news conferences in Valdez, they're calling it the Battle of Sawmill Bay, and, for the most part, it remains the one patch of uncontaminated water in this part of the Sound.

But the people who live here just shake their heads or mutter when they look out at the water and shores beyond the bay, at the places where they used to catch halibut and salmon, hunt seal and bear, dig clams and cut wood.

"I know it ain't gonna be no short term damage," said Mike Eleshansky, as he stood on the village dock. For days, a procession of oily hulled boats have been pulling in for fuel, food and a hosing down.

"All you got to do is look at it to see it's going to be around a long time . . . Long time."

Possibly longer than the village has existed. Chenega Bay is only five years old, born from another disaster almost 25 years to the day before the Exxon Valdez ran aground.

On Good Friday 1964, a giant wave generated by Alaska's great earthquake swallowed the old village of Chenega, on an island 20 miles north of here. Villagers ran for their lives up a snowy hillside, and the water washed away every house, every boat, almost every sign there'd been a town. Twentysix of the 70 residents were lost.

The survivors scattered all over Alaska, but kept a community alive for the next two decades, a sort of governmentinexile with annual gatherings where people talked of building a new village. After years of planning and an act of Congress, they picked Chenega Bay. Planners said it was the best place in this part of the Sound to build a town, and as the government financed houses went up five years ago, some of the old Chenegans and their now grown children began coming back.

Many of them came from Anchorage, where they'd grown used to fast food and supermarkets. Most started mixing the new ways and old commercial fishing a couple of months a year, then hunting and fishing for their tables and freezers the rest of the year; taking steam baths at the end of the day, then going back in the house and watching satellite TV.

Eleshansky and his cousin, Pete Selanoff, share a baby blue skiff and motor and are on the water almost every day, usually with their guns, spears or fishing gear.

These days, they're still on the water every day, only now they're on the payroll of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, serving as tour guides for visiting bureaucrats and reporters.

Saturday afternoon, Selanoff guided the boat out of the boat harbor, out toward where a Coast Guard cutter and the state ferry Aurora were anchored, and where more than a dozen other boats were laying boom or skimming oil off the water. Outside the booms, the water was a dull black, with long streaks of reddish foam.

A lone sea otter, the only visible form of life on the water here, poked his head out of the oily sheen, then flipped over and disappeared under the surface. Two weeks ago, the bay was full of otters and seabirds.

Back at his house, Pete's wife, Norma, said she's being stingy about using the sea lion and salmon packed away in the freezer.

"I don't know when we're going to get more," she said. "You can have your Tbone steak, but this is all the Native food we're gonna have in this house for a while. I'm trying to save it."

Some households rely much more on food shipped in from stores outside, but they depend on commercial fishing to pay for it.

A neighbor, Carol Ann Wilson, said her husband, Philip, asked her a question the first day of the spill. "He said, "Are you still gonna want to live here?" At first she said yes, but now she's starting to wonder, Wilson said.

"Are my kids gonna be able to hunt here? I don't know. What's gonna happen to those salmon fry when they get past the booms into the oil? Is there still gonna be fish here?"

No one has left yet, and no one in the village says they're even considering it yet very seriously. But the reasons people moved back are starting to evaporate, and what was one of the loveliest and most wildliferich areas of the Sound has turned into a combat zone.

Before the spill, the far off buzz of the twice a week mail plane was enough to draw a crowd at the dock. Now helicopters and planes roar almost continuously outside, and villagers are being interviewed by Japanese and Australian TV crews. Environmental experts were walking the paths through the village Saturday testing the air for toxic gases from the oil.

By Saturday, most of the men in the village were gone, hired by the state or Exxon to ferry people around the islands or to work on cleanup crews to the east.

A couple that had a baby in Anchorage last month has decided to wait until later to come back.

"People are wondering what the future will be around here," said John Totemoff, the stocky village council president. Will he move away? He thought for a moment.

"You see," he said. "We can't get a job if we move to the city. We'll live on welfare and people don't want to have to do that. People moved here to get away from the city."

On Saturday night, with their home still under siege and no relief in sight, the people left in the village did what they always do on Saturday night: they walked down the hill to the little Russian Orthodox Chapel and prayed.

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