Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (40 page)

Curtis had last plied these northern waters twenty-eight years earlier. That ship
was stocked with liquor, cigars and a canteen of costly preserved foods, as the rail
baron E. H. Harriman had spared no expense for the passengers, which included some
of the best-known and most learned men in the United States. By contrast, the
Victoria
carried working stiffs—fishermen, bound for seasonal jobs with the salmon fleet,
and argonauts, still chasing a strike in goldfields that had been played out years
earlier. The trip took almost two weeks. They glided by British Columbia, past the
Queen Charlotte Islands where some of
Head-Hunters
had been filmed, into the Russian-flavored port of Sitka for provisions, north to
Skagway to drop off the miners, onward to Anchorage, and from there west, out beyond
the long finger of the Alaska Peninsula, a sharp right turn north, through the Bering
Sea, then northeast at last to the flat, treeless, dispiriting shell of Nome, coated
in the mustard light of a June night.

Nome was a dump. What had been in 1910 the largest city in Alaska Territory, with
a population of nearly fifteen thousand, was now a few hundred slope-shouldered souls
in a hand-me-down town. Once the easy gold that could be sifted from beach sand was
gone, the prospectors disappeared as well, littering the coastal plain with their
garbage. Nome was left with a boardwalk of uneven planks, shuttered saloons, scraps
of long-abandoned tents and heaps of rusted tin cans on the shore. Curtis looked for
a quick ticket out of town, to reach the outer islands where Eskimos lived. Frustrated
that he could find no one to take him to native villages, Curtis purchased a boat
of his own, the
Jewel Guard,
forty feet long, twelve at the beam, with sails and an engine for windless days.
It came with a skipper, a Swede called Harry the Fish. They could trust him, Harry
the Fish informed the Curtis team, because he’d sworn off alcohol, women and tobacco.
The sea was his only remaining vice.

On June 28, they sailed for Nunivak Island, a distance of about three hundred miles—Curtis,
Beth, Eastwood and Harry the Fish. Curtis felt unbound, restored by an open calendar
in an ocean of possibility. “Anxious, yet thrilled with the joy of riding the high
seas in a tiny craft,” he wrote. The Bering was deceptively calm at first, though
studded with ice blocks. A vigil had to be kept at all hours to avoid a collision
with floating hazards. The sea turned churlish one day in afternoon winds, kicking
up swells the size of beach cliffs. “The waves were ten times as great as our boat
& we were shipping much water,” Beth wrote. They soon found safe harbor, went ashore
and slept on the beach, snoozing until late afternoon. Pulling up anchor, they navigated
by compass reading south through Norton Sound. More ice, the chunks bigger and menacing,
appeared. Winds kicked up again, throwing water over the deck. Temperatures were barely
above freezing.
Isn’t this grand?
“Ice thick, headway slow, fog closed down so cannot see two boat lengths,” Curtis
wrote. Fearing a collision, Harry the Fish killed the engine and dropped sails. They
would drift with the ice. While the others tried to sleep below deck, Curtis kept
watch.

“Gloomy night, wind howls thru rigging and there is constant sound of grinding, shifting
ice,” he wrote, fingers numb, slipping with the churn of the sea. “Not so good a start.
From the wind and movement of the ice I know it is a bad storm but being in the ice
pack there is no sea.” By day five, they were still a considerable distance from Nunivak
Island, and the pace was a crawl—barely a mile an hour. They anchored near a sand
spit, hoping the storm would be short-lived. After another day, they headed back to
sea, only to face even bigger swells. Climbing one of the waves, the ship nearly capsized,
a scare that forced a hard decision: back to the sand spit to sit it out. But visibility
was gone; the customary Alaskan weather made Norton Sound a dreamscape of murk. “We
are headed back, running like a scared jackrabbit,” Beth wrote. Near midnight, they
hit a sand shoal and came to a dead halt. “Solidly aground, parked on the floor of
the Bering Sea,” Curtis noted dryly. They were about twenty miles from shore.

As the wind and water sneered all around them, they could do nothing but wait, the
boat helpless. “One minute our craft was a joyous, free bird skimming off the sea,
the next a crippled thing being pounded across the bar.” Curtis did the only thing
he could: he waded a few feet from the grounding, set up his tripod and took a picture
of the
Jewel Guard
in the grip of Alaskan sand. At least when they found their bodies, a picture would
tell a story.

They waited out a cycle of the tide, an eternity, counting on the rising water to
lift them. The inbound slosh moved the boat, but not completely off the spit. They
sat for another cycle, and this one brought just enough of the sea to liberate the
Jewel Guard.
“Oh, boy!” Curtis wrote. “What a relief to feel her floating.” That night, they killed
an eider duck and cooked it with dumplings, followed by a desert of tapioca pudding
and apples.

On July 10, the vessel came within sight of Nunivak Island; it had taken them as
many days to go 300 miles as it had to sail 2,300 miles from Seattle to Nome. Spirits
lifted as soon as they came into the harbor: the island was free of the clutter of
modern life. Joy! People rushed up to greet them in well-crafted kayaks made of tight
animal skins, chattering away, pointing and laughing. Curtis was euphoric. “The natives
here are perhaps the most primitive on the North American Continent,” he exulted.

Beth was happy to see her father giddy and locked into his work. They had heard, back
in Seattle, of a resident of Nunivak Island named Paul Ivanoff, the son of a Russian
father and an Inupiat mother. A pleasant companion, he was hired as a guide. He knew
everyone on the island, and ran a reindeer herd that was marshaled around the mosquito-infested
tundra like a crowd of cattle. Curtis feasted on the images. And more than any other
time in the field, his pictures showed . . . smiles! Native children, native women,
native elders—they grinned wind-shined jack-o’-lantern faces back at the Shadow Catcher,
exuding a deep beauty. Their nose rings and chin piercings were dazzling little orbs
of jewelry, sparkling in the sunlight. This was a place like no other he had seen
through three decades of portrait foraging. “Think of it,” he wrote. “At last, and
for the first time in all my thirty years work with the natives, I have found a place
where no missionary has worked.”

The most memorable image he called
Woman and Child,
a baby clutching the backside of his serene-looking mother, both clad from head to
toe in the soft loft of duck-skin parkas; it was just two faces in a joined bundle
of avian hide. The light at Nunivak was not the best—too bright to bring out the deep
topography of an Inupiat face—but good weather made for long days of exploring, story-gathering
and picture-taking. Eastwood, working with Ivanoff, conducted the language and historical
tasks, while Curtis floated around in a kayak taking shots of Eskimos at work and
play in the halo of July. Carvers of ivory and hunters of whale, they were active
people for a man who loved a purposefully peripatetic life. Curtis could not get over
his good fortune.

“Should any misguided missionary start for this island,” he wrote, “I trust the sea
will do its duty.”

They left Nunivak on July 26, hearts heavy with regret. A day later, at the village
of Hooper Bay on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, they found a scene of squalor and grim-faced
toil among three hundred or so Yup’ik Eskimos. What struck the Curtis party was the
filth. The people smelled as bad as they looked, reeking of rotten seal meat, smoked
fish and sea detritus. “The Hooper Bay natives have the reputation of being the filthiest
human beings on the Globe,” Curtis wrote. “I have not seen all the world’s dirty natives
but I can say that no human can carry more filth than those here.” Beth had the same
reaction, though without her father’s lifetime of perspective. “It is positively the
most disgusting place I have ever seen & the women & children have never bathed or
combed their hair.” Eastwood was appalled too, though he tried to give his observation
some gravitas: “Living as they do in mud and dampness, it is estimated that 75% have
tuberculosis.” The Curtis crew stayed offshore, choosing to sleep on their boat rather
than spend a night among the unkempt denizens of Hooper Bay. One evening, desperate
to clean the stench of the village from his body, young Eastwood stripped naked and
dove into ice-choked waters. They anchored at Hooper Bay just long enough for Curtis
to get the picture he was looking for—a beluga whale hunt—and then beat a quick retreat.

Back in Nome in early August, the long days disappearing in gulps of daylight, it
was time for Beth to say goodbye. She had allotted most of the summer for the grand
northern odyssey with her dad, but had to return to the studio and her husband in
southern California. Curtis, Harry the Fish and Eastwood would press on, north to
the Arctic Circle. Beth left town for Fairbanks on a clattering, clumsy cargo plane,
expressing fear in the last words of her log that “I would never see him again.”

A few days out of Nome, drifting toward the Bering Strait, Curtis was drawn to a village
clinging to the rocky skin of King Island. It was a terraced, seasonal town for walrus-hunting,
perched above a narrow migratory passage. Curtis counted twenty-seven houses, each
built from driftwood, standing on tall, rickety stilts. Should a resident step outside
for a midnight pee, he might well tumble down a cliff into the sea, a hundred feet
beneath the huddle of shacks. A huff of hard wind could blow all of it down. The Curtis
crew shouted for a voice; nothing echoed in return. Not only was this village free
of missionaries, it was devoid of natives as well. Everyone was away, Curtis surmised,
and would take up residence only during the peak of the walrus migration.

“King Island is one of the most picturesque spots in all the North,” Curtis wrote
in his log. “The island is but a rock pinnacle standing out to sea. The village is
like no other village on the continent. These people can well be called North Sea
Cliff Dwellers.” He managed to find a small place to tie up his boat, and climbed
up the hill to investigate the town. His hip was killing him, barking pain with every
upward step, but Curtis lost track of the physical irritation and time—“almost exploding
with joy at our success of getting pictures of the village.” In one image, he shot
the stick community from the water, with the
Jewel Guard
in the foreground. This picture reinforced his diary conclusion of King Island: “Truly
humans pick strange places in which to exist.”

From there, with wind and current on their side, they sailed to Cape Prince of Wales.
Curtis took some quick shots of a few native hunters and promised to return when more
people were around. The next anchorage was off Little Diomede Island, a dollop of
gray rock, only a third of a mile from the International Date Line. The rock was within
shouting distance of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, on Big Diomede Island.
Curtis went ashore with Eastwood, walking through a village of fewer than two hundred
Inupiat. A flu epidemic the previous decade had devastated these people, an elder
explained. Curtis spent almost a full week on Little Diomede, rarely resting—sixty
hours of work for every four hours of sleep, he estimated.

When they left the far northwest of Alaska for the town of Kotzebue, it was already
the third week of August, and Harry the Fish was worried, because the natives were
starting to haul their boats out for the year. Winter preparations were in full swing.
Curtis wanted no hesitation, but also no shortcuts. There was still too much left
to photograph. They moved through the Bering Strait, around Cape Prince of Wales,
crossed the Arctic Circle and took a sharp right turn to the east, aiming for three
communities around Kotzebue.

“Fought the mudflats all day,” Curtis wrote of trying to tie up in Kotzebue. “Ran
in every direction looking for water deep enough to keep us afloat.” He planned to
get a decent night’s sleep and then work flat out for days on end. The morning of
August 19, he went ashore. It didn’t take long to see that Kotzebue would be no Nunivak.
“Meeting considerable opposition from the missionaries.”

The next day. “Worked ashore. Raining; storm too bad for whaling trip.”

August 21. “Worked ashore. Still too stormy for whaling.”

August 23. The storm abated. They started upriver, looking for pictures and stories,
Curtis, Eastwood and a translator. “Camped with our old man that night and he talked
until midnight. Bad weather. Rained all night and we had no tents.”

August 24. “Cold night, the first real freezing night we have had. Reached the Noatak
Village at midnight . . . a fine supper, mostly of salmon trout, nothing equal to
them in the salmon family except the small blue salmon of a small stream on the West
Coast of Washington.”

August 25. “Nice morning. Up early and looking over village. Spent the day making
pictures. Eastwood talking with old man. Worked with old man until midnight.”

August 26. “Day stormy. Worked with old man. Made some pictures.”

August 28. “We are back at Kotzebue and at work.”

September 1. “Up at 3:30 and on our way. Storm, wind, rough water. Arrived at Seliwik
Village at 7:30 a.m. Work started badly, too much missionary. Missionary has sent
out word to all natives that they must not talk to us.”

September 2. “Moved up stream three miles to be near an old informant. This man has
been driven from the village by the missionaries owing to his refusal to be a Christian.
The old man is a cripple and a most pathetic case. Missionary will not allow relatives
to assist him in any way.”