A Drive to Overcome Isolation

On this narrow finger of dank marshes, growling volcanoes and fog-shrouded valleys wedged narrowly between the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea, many lives depend.

There is the dusky sea goose known as the Pacific black brant. Each fall, 100% of the world’s black brant population swoops down onto this 5-mile-wide isthmus at the tip of the Alaska Peninsula to feed in its chilly lagoons before commencing one of the most arduous migrations in nature, 3,000 miles of uninterrupted flight to the warm waterways of Baja California.

There is the diminutive Steller’s eider. Two-thirds of the world’s population of the downy fowl, threatened with extinction, pass through these few miles of marshlands, as does every Emperor goose known to exist.

Then there are the rough-faced fishermen of King Cove, a cluster of Department of Housing and Urban Development homes, rusted fishing boats and roaming dogs on the lip of the Pacific.

One blustery night some years ago, the 7-week-old son of Lydia Mack fell ill with the flu and began weakening. Mack waited for a plane to take him to the hospital, but none would brave the 70-mile-an-hour winds roaring through the hills. Three days passed. They attempted a boat evacuation, but the 10-foot seas were too savage. “It was blowing cold sheets of ice,” Mack remembers of that January night when she held her son, soothing his whimpers, until he stopped breathing.

Which, Mack wants to know, is the endangered species in this perilous land?

It is a question that Congress will be asked to referee in the coming weeks, in proposed legislation that would authorize a 26-mile-long road, straight through the 300,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, linking this remote Aleutian fishing village with a modern, all-weather airport at nearby Cold Bay. It has become one of the most controversial pieces of environmental legislation this year.

Part of the reason is the battle of souls to decide which species--bird or man--has dominion over a rough land that guarantees safe harbor to neither. Part of it has to do with the nation’s declining stock of places that can still be called wild; in the 34 years since passage of the federal Wilderness Act, Congress has never authorized a permanent new road through a protected wilderness.

The entire $7.6-billion budget of the U.S. Interior Department rests in part on the fate of the road, one of a number of environmental measures attached to the bill that have elicited a veto threat from the Clinton administration.

Few other environmental issues in recent months have attracted as much national attention as this proposal for one lane of gravel through the middle of nowhere.

Some Fear Road Would Set Precedent

Among conservatives, there is mounting impatience with growing restrictions on logging and recreation in the nation’s few remaining roadless areas.

King Cove, analysts say, could provide an important precedent for pushing roads into other wilderness areas across the country.

On the other hand: “The Izembek National Wildlife Refuge contains some of the most important wilderness wetlands areas in the world. This road would go through the absolute heart of the refuge, and have devastating impacts on both its wilderness character as well as on its biological integrity,” said Deborah Williams, the Interior secretary’s representative in Alaska.

But driving the issue is the safety of the 870 King Cove villagers, nearly all native Aleuts. Alaska’s congressional delegation is determined that no more of them will die trying to get out of town.

They have been residents of this stretch of coast for about 3,000 years--87 years at the current village site--and “it isn’t the Aleuts’ fault that Congress completely isolated them from the rest of the world by creating a huge refuge surrounding their community,” Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) said recently.

There are hundreds of bush communities in Alaska with no roads. Even the state capital in Juneau can be reached only by air or sea, and villagers throughout much of this century have relied on the trusty bush plane to ferry in supplies and fly out residents to urban Anchorage and Fairbanks.

The Aleutian Islands and adjoining Alaska Peninsula, however, are home to some of the worst weather in the nation. The sharp temperature difference between the Pacific, on the south, and the Bering Sea, to the north, leaves the thin strip of land between them a perpetual storm front, clouded over more than 300 days a year. Hellish winds howl through the valleys and set the seas pounding.

“In February, we had winds of 83 miles an hour that came through one day, and the next day, from the opposite direction, they were 77 miles an hour,” said Sam Simpson, National Weather Service observer in Cold Bay. “They’d be evacuating the East Coast if this was happening out there.”

A small, gravel airstrip services King Cove with 10-minute flights to nearby Cold Bay, whose long, wide airstrip, built by the Army Air Corps during World War II, can provide reliable jet service under all but the poorest weather conditions.

But flying the 10 minutes to Cold Bay is often either not possible or so frightening one might not wish to hazard the trip. Nearly every King Cove resident has harrowing tales of flying into the tiny strip, surrounded by mountains. They recall the turbulence that knocked a plane on its side, the wind shear that suddenly cut airflow over the wings, or the fog that shrouded the runway.

“A 10-minute flight, a lot of people call it the flight from hell,” said Della Trumble, administrator of the King Cove Corp., a native village corporation backing the proposed road. Trumble flew to Washington, D.C., seven times over the last year to lobby for the road. Three times, she had to reach Cold Bay by boat, 2 1/2 hours over rough seas.

Economic Benefits Also a Factor

A road could represent a new era of economic opportunity for King Cove, which markets nearly all of its fish via a local cannery that is one of the largest in North America. A road to Cold Bay could, for the first time, allow King Cove to tap into the lucrative fresh fish market.

But more important, villagers say, is the potential danger of a medical emergency and no way of getting help. The town clinic, staffed with two nurse practitioners, says it is helpless in the face of a heart attack, major illness or trauma injury, all too common in a town full of snowmobiles and a $20-million fishing fleet.

“The stress of working in this clinic and knowing the limits of what we can do is scary,” said Marilyn Mack, a rescue squad member. “You wake up in the wintertime, and it’s raging 80 or 100 miles an hour, and you just think, ‘I hope nothing happens to my kid today.’ ”

Often enough, something has happened when the wind was blustering too strong for a plane to land or a boat to sail, or when fog or 30-foot snowdrifts had blanketed the airstrip.

Annette Kuzakin, 58, was boiling water in her pressure cooker last year when it blew up, scalding her face, chest, arms and feet with third-degree burns. For two days, in terrible pain, she waited for a plane. Finally, she took a fishing boat to Cold Bay, hanging on in turbulent seas, and then had to mount a 30-foot ladder at the Cold Bay dock. She spent two months in an Anchorage hospital.

Mariene Newman’s 5-year-old daughter broke an arm cartwheeling through the house, just as a storm with fierce winds and driving rain bore down on the peninsula. For four days, she kept the arm on ice, quieting her daughter’s cries, holding her when she began vomiting.

“She just whimpered, and there was nothing I could do. It was the most helpless feeling I ever had in my life,” Newman said. By the time her husband returned from fishing and carried his daughter off in the boat, she lay prostrate in his arms. “It was like she was dead. And I felt like I was dying right along with her.” By the time they reached Anchorage, the girl was down to 40 pounds, but she recovered without permanent injury.

For about 20 years, King Cove residents have lobbied for a road, with varying promises from state government. The present legislation, tacked on to the spending bill by U.S. Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska), is the closest they’ve come yet.

The bill would provide no funding for the road, which could cost $14 million to $29 million, but it would authorize its construction through 10 miles of the Izembek refuge, seven miles of it within the protected wilderness area. Supporters would initially seek state funding for the road but might later seek a federal appropriation as well. In exchange, the King Cove Corp. has offered to trade 664 acres of private lands adjacent to the refuge, resulting in a net increase of 579 acres of wilderness.

The problem, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is that the proposed road traverses a crucial strip of land between the Izembek and Kinzarof lagoons, the most critical habitat for migrating waterfowl--birds that come from as far away as Tahiti, Hawaii, Japan, Korea and China and have found the 300,000-acre refuge one of their last safe havens on earth.

For migrating birds traversing the Pacific, Izembek represents the first rest stop in an over-water journey of thousands of miles. How would even a few cars a day, biologists ask, affect the Pacific black brant, stocking up on eelgrass in preparation for a grueling four-day trans-Pacific journey that will eat up a third of each bird’s body weight?

“They’re about to take off on this heroic journey, and we don’t know at what point physiologically they can’t make that trip,” said Mike Roy, wildlife biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service. “If you take away 30 minutes a day of feeding time, how much less could that bird fly? How many are going to drop out of the sky on the way to Mexico?”

The refuge is also home to one of the densest grizzly bear populations in Alaska and, depending on the season, the entire caribou herd of the Alaska Peninsula.

For all of these reasons, Izembek was the first wetland in the United States designated by treaty as a site with international significance. It is also, for a number of conservation groups signed on to fight the King Cove road, important in the fight to protect national wilderness areas from encroaching roads.

“This would be the first new and permanent road authorized through a congressionally designated wilderness, ever. And that is of extreme importance from a national perspective. That would set a precedent for other wilderness areas,” said Tom Uniack of Defenders of Wildlife in Washington.

A car traveling along a one-lane road might not be expected to have a devastating impact on wildlife. But this road, wildlife biologists say, traverses a narrow isthmus; moreover, any road will render wildlife more vulnerable to hunters and the more subtle impacts of encroaching civilization.

In areas near the 40-some miles of road constructed during World War II, grizzlies are 15 times less numerous than in roadless areas of the refuge. “What more recent research is showing is it may not be related to the volume of cars,” said Roy. “As long as there’s an occasional car coming across it, that disturbance zone exists.”

Local critics, including some of Cold Bay’s 80 residents, say a road would be almost impossible to keep open during the very blizzards that make air travel impossible.

“I just don’t believe any doctor would say, leave the safety of the King Cove clinic and start driving 30 miles in the blinding snowstorm with no communications,” said Terri Mach, a Cold Bay road opponent.

“I hate to suggest that even one life is not important. But it just doesn’t make sense. There are villages all over the state who have no connection by road to medical facilities,” Mach added. “Should we build roads to connect all those villages to Anchorage? I hope not. We would be destroying the whole idea of what Alaska is all about.”

Marine Link Would Serve Broader Area

Williams of the Interior Department suggests a marine link--a marine ambulance, perhaps also a ferry, along with dock improvements in both communities--would be cheaper and more reliable. And improved telemedicine and helicopter service would help not only King Cove, but other isolated communities nearby that would not benefit from a road at King Cove, she said.

Trumble shakes her head. No one is going to take off in a helicopter in 70 mile-per-hour winds right next to a mountain, she said, nor is a marine ambulance crashing through heavy seas an alternative for the victim of a serious head injury.

A road, by contrast, would be there no matter what the weather. In a blizzard, she said, an ambulance could follow a snow grader all the way into Cold Bay and be assured of arriving before the next plane.

“It’s so disgusting that people who don’t have any stakes in a place can be heard louder than people who have lived here for thousands of years,” she said.

“They don’t see what we go through here. They don’t have to live it, year in, year out,” added her brother, Nick Bear, whose daughter was born, two months premature, on a fishing boat rushing toward Cold Bay. “They’re worried about their birds. I mean, what about human lives?”