We make plans to go beachcombing together the next day so that Dean and Tyler can show me how it’s done, and I return to my hotel daydreaming of an extravagant saunter along some wild shore, but that night, I come down with a nasty fever that I must have caught aboard the Malaspina. I spend the weekend alone, shivering and sweating in the smallest, cheapest hotel room in Sitka. On the walls are framed paintings of snowy New England farms. The window offers a view of a neighboring rooftop where two beer cans lie crumpled in a puddle and, beyond, appearing and disappearing from within a veil of fog, of the green slopes of Mount Verstovia. It rains. I sleep. Hours pass. I hear voices from the bar below. The window curtains brighten and dim. My wife calls the hotel—my cell phone is still out of range—to tell me what she learned at this week’s obstetric exam. Her cervix is “partially effaced,” and the baby’s head is low. He or she is ready to be born. Does this mean I should fly home? There’s no telling, no sure sign; the due date is as unpredictable as ever, and I have yet to set foot on an Alaskan beach, yet to go hunting for flotsam on the sand. I am of two minds, and of two hearts, and feverish—it feels—with ambivalence.
When my fever breaks for good, I don my yellow slicker and my quick-dry nylon pants (“Adventure” pants, the label said) and flee into the long Alaskan dusk. After two days indoors, the rainy air feels blessedly cool and smells both of the ocean and of the green mountains soaring up from behind the onion minaret and steeple of St. Michael’s, Sitka’s historic Russian Orthodox cathedral. Made of wood, painted gray and white, St. Michael’s is pretty but looks to me more like an ornate barn than a cathedral. Nonetheless, a cathedral it is. I slurp down some udon at a sushi place and saunter extravagantly around town.
Although the bars are open, and loud, the streets of Sitka are strangely quiet, and I realize why: almost no one’s driving. Tourists like me are mostly on foot and few locals appear to be out and about. In the darkened windows of the gift shops mannequins wear G-strings upholstered in fur from which plastic eyeballs gaze. BALEEN FOR SALE, reads a hand-lettered sign in the window of a Native arts cooperative. Fronds of the hairy stuff are on display, as are instructions telling you what to do “if you come across a dead stranded marine mammal.” Down at Crescent Harbor, gray, molten slivers of Sitka Sound shine like tines between the dark spars of outrigging and masts.
To the northwest, neighboring Kruzof Island shelters the harbor from winter storms and heavy surf, but to the southeast the sound opens wide onto the Pacific, which explains why this spot has become a mecca for beachcombers. The only major town in Southeast Alaska situated on the windward side of the Alexander Archipelago, Sitka lies in the path of transoceanic waves, waves that may have originated in the coastal waters of Russia or Japan.5 Peering from a dock, I search the water for my elusive quarry. No luck.
The residents of Sitka all seem to know the story of the bath toys, which they invariably refer to as “the duckies” or “the ducks.” The one person I meet who has not heard of the ducks is a young commercial fisherman named Fred who came to Sitka a year or so ago. I run into him one rainy night at the Pioneer Bar.
The “P bar,” as locals call it, caters to commercial and recreational fishermen, who keep odd hours. It therefore opens early and closes late. The window blinds almost never come up. Rows of black-and-white photographs, mostly of fishing vessels, hang on the walls above the bottles. I find Fred curled around the bar like a C-clamp, leaning on his elbows, the sleeves of his sweatshirt pushed up, dangling a beer from his fingers and nursing at the foam. Emboldened by whiskey, I introduce myself. I tell him my story, the one about the rubber ducks, and he tells me his. He used to be a corporate copywriter for GMAC in Dearborn, Michigan, and made a decent but anesthetizing living. On top of his job, he had to take care of his brother who has “a psychological problem”