I went over to the cabin on Friday. Hauled over washed sheets and other items on the list from our New Years Day trip. I also had 5 gallons of drinking water, so had to make two trips walking in to the cabin. When I came back for the water, as I started to tie it to the frame pack, I heard a few blows. I thought it was probably harbor porpoises, so I stepped out onto the beach to look. Not harbor porpoises. Orcas. Right in the channel between our island and Admiralty. Watched them till they went around the island and out of sight.

Lost a kid I knew when he was about 4 this week in the Bering Sea. The boat he was fishing on disappeared with only a trace- the epirb and a life ring and some tarps. I still wonder why the life raft never showed. He grew up in Sand Point, where I worked my second job for ADFG. I was able to hire his mother, and she was the best hire I’ve ever made. She knew everyone and everything going on in town. She treated us like family and had us over for dinner often with her husband, daughter and son. Her son got into about as much trouble as a 4 year old in Sand Point can. She had another story about him most every day. One day he got the runs from eating green strawberries in their yard. Another day he threw up from eating a slug inside a salmonberry. He was a funny, happy kid. He apparently started commercial fishing at age 14. I watched youtube videos he made fishing with his crew for salmon near Sand Point and for crab in the Bering Sea. You could tell he was still a funny, happy kid that was raised by people who love him. 29 is too young, but it looked like a good 29.

On Friday, I took out about 6 fillet portions of king salmon from the Craig catch this past summer to thaw. Yesterday, I removed the skin from each fillet, and the ribs. I put some pickling salt in the bottom of a bowl, added a whole fillet, then sprinkled some salt and brown sugar on the top of the fillet, then stacked another fillet, and sprinkled some salt and brown sugar on it, until I had all 6 fillets in the dry brine. I put it in the fridge about 9 am. I rotated the fillets in the bowl a few times during the day as the salt drew out water liquid filled the bowl.

This morning I got up about 7 am and took out the fish, poured off the liquid, and rinsed the fillets. I tasted some of the fish and it was a tad salty but not bad. I cut the fillets into cubes. I noticed some of them seemed mushy and was worried I didn’t brine it strong or long enough. I put the cubes in a bowl and ran water in the bowl for awhile to freshen the fish and draw a little salt out. That seemed to firm the fish up, so I didn’t brine again. I weighed the fish and it was about 5 lbs of cubes including the colander weight so maybe 4 to 4.5 lbs of fish. I put 4 cups white vinegar and 2 cups water and 1/2 a cup of sugar together. It tasted pretty sour, so I added another 1/2 cup of sugar and that seemed about right – still a little sour, but okay. I put the liquid in a pot and hung a metal colander with a long handle in the liquid and added some peppercorns, bay leaf, mustard seed and a hot red pepper, brought the liquid to a boil and simmered 10 minutes with the spices steeping in the collander, then took it off the stove and set it outside to cool. I estimated about 8 pint jars of product, so put in 9 just to be sure and simmered for 10 minutes to sterilize. By the time the jars were sterilized the pickling solution was cool. I took a bowl of the hot water and put in some canning lids. I took out the jars, added half a clove of garlic, a couple cloves to the bottom of a jar, added a layer of fish, then slices of lemon and onion, more fish, lemon and onion, until the jar was full. Then I filled the jar with the pickling solution. Came out to 9 pints exactly with no pickling solution left over. I cleaned the lids of the jars, put the lids on, and tightened the bands and put it all in the refrigerator. We’ll try it in a week and see if it’s edible.

So, I come home expecting to make dinner but Sara is already on it.  Chopping up a big leek just like Lydia on Create TV.  Then a big onion.  She has my ceramic over cast iron pot I garage-saled on the stove.  She says shoot, I didn’t get any stock out.  I’m on it, I say. I walk up to the freezer in the garage and get some stock I made from the carcass of the last hooter we ate.  I get out a couple steaks of king salmon to thaw in a bowl of water.  She gets the pot going with leaks, onions,  and carrots.  Then in goes the stock.  Next is the king salmon steaks.  She takes out the steaks when they are partially cooked and pulls the meat from the bones and tosses the meat back into the pot.  Must be creme went in last I guess.   Wow.  What a salmon chowder, people. 

Sara’s had the woodstove going full bore since just after I left for Liberia when the cold set in.  On Saturday, she took out a batch of deer ribs from the freezer to boil on the woodstove.  I took out 4 packages of berries – two blue and two red huckleberry – to make pies.  She boiled the ribs all day, then took the pot off the stove to cool.  I pulled out the bones with tongs. I boiled the berries in separate pots by color for about 45 min.  During the boil, we put the store-bought crusts in the oven to bake.  When I took the berries off the stove, I added flour and a little sugar and let the berries cool. Then filled the pie crusts. The next morning, I skimmed off the fat that had hardened on the top of the water with the deer ribs.  Sara cut up celery, onions, and potatoes and added them to the pot and put it back on the stove to boil for the afternoon.  She baked some bread with cheese in it. The rib meat made excellent soup, and we had blueberry pie for dessert. 

When I was about 20 years old, I was a fishing guide on the Nushagak River.  I worked for Wood River Lodge about an hours float plane ride away.  We’d run 2 or 3 flat bottom skiffs with outboard jet motors down the Agoulawok River, across Lake Aleknagik, down the Wood River, into Bristol Bay, then across the tide flat by Dillingham and up the Nushagak River.  I set up a camp and lived there during the first 2 or 3 weeks of July.  Guests would be flown over in float planes, and myself and the pilot or a guide from the lodge would take them fishing from boats or on the beach at the camp for the king salmon migrating up the river to spawn. The land our camp was on was owned by Choggiung, the local village corporation.  The lodge leased the land from them each year.   In my second year on the river, Choggiung hired two people to camp on the river to monitor the lands, and their camp was right below me – a walk down the beach.  The two Chog representatives there were Bryce Edgmon and Dugan Nielsen.   We became fast friends.  I was eager to learn how to smoke fish, and they were happy to teach me.  I found an old 55 gallon barrel, and they showed me how to make a smoker from it and we made some good fish when the king salmon showed up. Like many chance encounters in Alaska, I would see these people again, though not in Dillingham or Bristol Bay.   I saw Dugan once in an airport or waiting for a plane somewhere – I can’t quite remember now- maybe in Anchorage, Kodiak or on the Alaska Peninsula somewhere.  We talked for hours. Bryce I saw when I moved to Juneau and he came to town to work for his state legislative representative.  He’s been coming here now for close to 20 years, and we still talk, albeit mostly be email now.  He’s now one of the rational voices at the legislature.   A former Bristol Bay legislator – Jay Hammond- guided the state through the oil discovery and boom, and worked to establish a savings account called the Permanent Fund, that turned our non-renewable oil fund into a renewable economic asset.    Part of the earnings from that fund is handed out to every Alaska resident each year, and in recent times has been $2,000 each.   The money, called the Permanent Fund Dividend, has now become not a gift, but an entitlement to many.     Up until just a few years ago, extremely high oil prices allowed oil production taxes to pay for 90 percent of the state’s share of the state budget.  Now, with low oil prices, oil production tax revenue no where near covers the state budget, and the legislature has used savings accounts to make up the difference.  Those savings accounts are about gone.   Some legislators are still in a fantasy world where they they think they can cut government to match oil revenues without implementing any taxes (income, sales, etc.) or using the earnings of the Permanent Fund.  They say it can be done, but they don’t say how they would cut 3/5 of the government now here, which is what it would take.  Many living in this fantasy world are now former legislators, as wise voters replaced them in the last election. Back to Bryce – he’s now quietly risen to House Speaker at a time when a rational voice is required or the Permanent Fund itself – and not just the earnings – will be necessary to fund even a fraction of government services people now take for granted.  That would mean that not only will the free entitlement money go away that people here get just for breathing,  but also the fund itself that generates those earnings.  And once that fund is gone – well, our taxes here would make even my hyper-taxed home state of New York an attractive place to live.   We pay no income tax now, and many communities have no sales tax or property taxes either.
Bryce has tried to put in bills for a balance of using income taxes, permanent fund earnings, etc to pay for state services but neither party would have any of it.  Democratic leaders think that a recent oil tax bill was too generous to the oil companies but even if it was repealed, we’d still be broke.  The Democratic leaders, too, feel that the free money from the Permanent Fund is an entitlement like Social Security, and don’t want it touched, regardless of the consequences. Likewise, Republican leaders want nothing to do with an income tax.  Some have called for a statewide sales tax, which would not work here like it does in other states.  A gallon of milk in remote places may cost 3 or 4 times what it does in Anchorage, and so people will be paying 3 or 4 times the sales tax for the same commodity, depending on where they live. After the last election, though, those new comers that one were of a like mind with Bryce.  And those that managed to win or weren’t up for election and previously holding on to pie-in-the-sky non-solutions to the state’s problems must have seen the light and selected Bryce for the speaker position.  He’s another Bristol Bay lawmaker that, like Hammond, will guide the state through this transition to a more balanced system of funding state government, with the nest egg that Hammond left behind.    With all that, I’m sure he still smokes his own fish.