We Alaskans

Dutch Harbor - Austere and voluptuous

Editors' note: We asked 14 of Alaska's best writers spread across the state — from Tenakee Springs to Dutch Harbor to Utqiagvik — to grapple with a question we all face in our lives: Why do I live where I live? This piece is part of that collection.

DUTCH HARBOR — Hawaii North. I call it that only partly in jest, for in the summer, when the sun comes out after a shower, the wet, black cliffs rising hundreds of feet from the sea and capped with a mat of emerald green tundra do rather remind me of Hawaii. But who would believe that this almost perpetually cool and cloudy, wind-and-wave-battered island could be so beautiful? And anyway, if they did, we Unalaskans might find ourselves overrun with vacationers, thronging to a new wonderland!

It was late 1990 when I first arrived in Unalaska. My Mark Air flight landed near twilight and by the time I'd gotten my bags it was fully dark outside. I got into a taxi with mud-covered windows, and some time later, several others and I disembarked for a cold, wet wait on a dark, deserted dock. A ship came out of the gloom, a gangway was dropped, we boarded the boat … and then we left. To this day, in spite of having now lived here more than a quarter century, I haven't the foggiest idea where I was.

It was another month before I saw Unalaska again, this place I would come to love and call home, and when I did, I thought it was the ugliest place I'd ever seen. The piles of what I came to know were nets, pots, roller gear, sorting tables and trawl doors looked like little more than rubbish heaps, liberally spotted with dirt-speckled, slushy snow. Shabby bald eagles by the dozen jostled unceremoniously for space and scraps of food on the net piles, in the dumpsters, at the landfill. Rusting hulks of metal and shattered glass supported, in some cases, by deformed tires completed this portrait of dilapidation. These then were my first impressions, my first images, of this place I now call home.

We are an island in the midst of two oceans, battered by waves and in some places stripped bare by wind. It's cloudy more often than not. Rain, sleet and snow are the norm, and all forms of precipitation tend to move horizontally. Stark, austere and even forbidding at times, Unalaska is also voluptuous, sybaritic, both a siren and a provider of bounty beyond measure.

Here, I feel closer to nature than any other place I've lived or visited. Here, too, I feel both more vulnerable and more aware of what it means to be alive, to actually live in the moment, than any other place I've lived. Island life moves at the pace and the whim of the weather and the seasons. We don't have the luxury of being able to ignore nature here, and so our lives, both the daily and the seasonal patterns of them, are governed by her. Mother Nature isn't cruel, but she is demanding, and it often seems that we pay for every sunny day with three or four or five wet, cold and windy ones, the days when graupel slashes your face and the wind sucks the air right from your lungs.

But every moment spent waiting for nature to spend her fury is rewarded tenfold with the kind of special effects only an unlimited budget can bring: dozens of humpback whales breaching and tail-slapping a couple hundred yards from the road. Geese cackling on a calm winter night and wrens burbling in the late summer bracken. A red moon peeking out from the clouds at midnight. Triple rainbows dancing on the ocean. A shimmer of pink and gold on the mountains at sunset. Salmon and halibut, ducks, crab, berries of all shapes and sizes, tightly furled fiddleheads and secretive morel.

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Life here is full to the point of bursting, and there's great reward for those who are patient, who don't demand that every day be a carbon copy of the one before, without surprise or change. That's what keeps me here, what makes me smile every dawn and every dusk. It's good to simply be, here.

We still have the nets and the pots and the roller gear and not quite so many rusted, decrepit vehicles. I just don't see them anymore.

Jennifer Shockley lives in Unalaska with a gimpy, gasping Akita. From her house she can watch both the sun and the moon rise and set over the Bering Sea and Unalaska Island.

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