Bush Folk Ask Boatload of Tourists to Cruise On By

TAT-A-TAT-A-TAT-A-TAT.

The clatter, like hail on a metal roof, roused Shelly Wilson from her sleep.

POOSSHH. A heavy splash.

Was that an anchor falling in the channel? The harbor master fumbled with her clock: 6:55 a.m. It couldn’t be, she thought. The only boat to stop regularly at this clump of cabins in the wilderness was the weekly ferry from Juneau, and it wasn’t due until tomorrow.

Wilson snuggled into her bunny slippers, went to the window, pulled back the curtains and groaned.

A cruise ship loomed over the inlet. Its steel hull stretched as long as a football field. Its smokestack puffed a ribbon of blue exhaust high above the spruce tops.

And it had tourists. Dozens of them in scarlet bomber jackets and Gore-Tex parkas, carrying telephoto lenses, video cameras and binoculars in hand.

The World Discoverer had discovered Tenakee Springs.

Tenakee is best described by what’s not here: no hotels, no cars, no ATMs, no asphalt, not even, heaven forbid, a single flush toilet.

Its residents are largely “end-of-the-roaders”--people chased westward across the Lower 48 and on up to Alaska by what others call progress: mall-to-mall traffic, chemically treated lawns, billboard adscapes. At last they’d found a spot as far from civilization as they could be and still remain in the United States.

Then the World Discoverer’s anchor splashed in their inlet that morning last August.

Tenakee Springs, population 80, suddenly had 120 drop-ins. Germans, French, Brits and Americans--240 eyes studying them as if they were king crabs in a tank.

Was there no escape anymore?

Tourism’s Point of Diminishing Returns

“Journey beyond the encroachments of civilization . . . Venture into remote areas, seldom visited by other Alaska cruise lines.”

Wilderness with luxury. Exploration with predictability. That’s the promise of Society Expeditions, a Seattle-based cruise company.

Aboard its World Discoverer, passengers rough it in style. While drifting past glaciers, they can lounge by the pool. After rafting with sea otters, they can have their hair coiffed in the beauty salon. While dining on sauteed salmon and shrimp prepared by European chefs, they can watch walruses out the windows of the Marco Polo Dining Room. A 15-day soft adventure for two: $13,000.

Tourism has never been more important in Alaska. Fishing, timber and mining are hurting. Even “king” oil, Alaska’s biggest moneymaker, is staggering from a worldwide glut. But tourism is up 61% this decade.

The biggest growth area: cruise ship travel. Since 1994, passenger volume has leaped 52%, to 568,000 last summer, according to Alaska’s tourism bureau.

“For the first time, tourism is becoming an important component in the livelihoods of smaller communities,” says John Boucher, an economist at Alaska’s labor department.

Smaller, more mobile cruisers now reach places once considered inaccessible. The World Discoverer, for one, can slip its 3,724-ton, 285-foot bulk in and out of channels where an 850-foot Pacific Princess would get stuck.

But as the tide of tourists rises, so do worries that it will swamp bush Alaskans.

“A lot of folks are finding that their streams can hardly support the numbers of people fishing them,” says Jay Hammond, the former governor and outdoorsman. “With tourism there’s a point of diminishing returns.”

Cruise operators, aware of this apprehension, are trying to make their expeditions less obtrusive, less intrusive.

“We don’t want to make ripples anywhere we go,” says Durnam of Society Expeditions. “But tourism is getting bigger, and people have to make a decision--embrace it or distance themselves from it.”

Expensive Groceries, Priceless Solitude

Around Tenakee Inlet, folks savor the little things: the sharp scent of autumn red alder, the thrash of spawning salmon in Indian River, the sight of fireweed blossoms swirling on a breeze like white butterflies.

They respect the majesty of a humpback flinging itself into the air, the grace of the bald eagle that swoops to a wiggling sockeye. When the last copper light has crept up Red Wing Mountain, the stars show themselves with the clarity of chipped diamonds.

Tenakee Springs is a stone unturned, a refuge tucked in the nation’s largest protected wilderness, the Tongass National Forest.

Once, only the Tlingit Indians visited, spending winters near the steaming mineral fissures. After prospectors arrived in the 1880s, the hamlet became a cannery, a hideaway for gamblers, “sporting girls” and bootleggers, a workingman’s resort.

Anyone who knew Tenakee then would recognize it now: the one-room cabins, the kerosene lamps, the angular outhouses.

Tenakee’s only thoroughfare, once a boardwalk, is a ribbon of mud and gravel draped on a lumpy shoreline. A traffic sign has sprung up: “Speed Limit: 10 mph--Please drive BELOW the limit.” And the strip now has a name: Tenakee Avenue, “for UPS purposes,” folks say.

The track is a spot for an after-school pine cone fight, the place to troll for conversation when loneliness comes creeping, the starting point for the annual Slow Bicycle Race. The winner takes the longest to pedal 200 feet without toppling.

It’s where “Old Lou,” Tenakee’s 78-year-old mayor, Louis Heins, pokes along with a brown bag of biscuits for lucky dogs. It’s where Pam Nelson, 41, a Canadian who married a roaming logger, sits on a bench with her dog, Griz, reading and rereading love letters from her Larry.

The track leads to the only American flag in town, perched atop the cabin post office where floatplanes drop off mailbags, weather permitting.

Beside the front door hangs the Canine Census. On it are the first, middle and last names of 44 dogs, from “His Honor Toby Pegues” to “Scuppers Wagner-Zeiger.” Beneath paw prints at the top, a reminder: “To make additions or corrections please leave message for the Dog Counting Department.”

Inside is a grid of 121 combination boxes, a sign to remind you that YOU’RE IN THE RIGHT PLACE, yellowing portraits of Tenakee in 1899, 1907, 1911 and 1922 that look pretty much the same, and a bearded, steady-eyed man, Mark Meyer, postmaster of Tenakee Springs, AK 99841.

A South Dakotan, Meyer moved to Juneau to get away from it all, then moved to Tenakee to get away from Juneau. Alaska’s capital had grown to 25,000 residents--”too many for me,” he shrugs.

Meyer addresses everyone by first name, asks them how the family is, gives his take on the weather and only then weighs their envelopes. “On the frontier,” he says, “it’s people first, mail second.”

People throng his P.O. like trout at the mouth of a brook. Here come Sue Scriber, 42, of Marion, Ind., and Paul, 41, a native of Mount Carmel, Ill., expecting a package.

The Scribers married in the Midwest but, feeling “crowded,” they went west to Montana, then to Washington state. Finally, four years ago, they docked in Tenakee. Now they run The Part-Time Bakery, closed Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays.

“It’s not that we dislike people,” says Sue. “We just love the outdoors, and here we get the time and space to be who we are.”

At the Bathhouse, people go “tubbing”--soaking naked in 106-degree water over scuttlebutt and an Old Milwaukee. At Rosie’s Blue Moon Cafe they satisfy cheeseburger cravings. At Robin Hiersche’s Therapeutic Massage Parlour they can treat a sore back.

For everything else, there’s “Snyder Merc”--Snyder Mercantile Co.--the general store that opened in 1899, the year its founder, Ed Snyder, arrived in a rowboat filled with groceries.

Snyder Merc’s runs on “Tenakee time.” It’s not uncommon to find a sign on the door: “Clerk on Dock. Back as soon as possible.”

Once inside, customers get the undivided attention of Ruth Craine, 50, a St. Louis transplant with an uncalculating friendliness. She weighs a sack of flour on a scale manufactured when she was 10, then cranks out the cash drawer of a wood register with brass trim built in 1917.

“Way I see it,” she says, “if you can’t find what you’re looking for on these shelves, means you probably don’t need it. Oh, look, there’s Shelly Wilson and her youngest.”

A cowbell tinkles, and in comes the 34-year-old harbor master from Billings, Mont. In Wilson’s backpack sits Olivia, her daughter, a 1 1/2-year-old with brown swirls of hair just like her mother’s.

After marrying Scott, a fisherman from Seattle, Wilson quit her job at a telephone answering service. They arrived in Tenakee in 1990 with their first daughter, Rebecca, and made a log cabin their home.

Momma and baby scan shelves crammed with beef jerky, compasses, fishing lures, Glacier Bay Rum, Campbell’s soup. No specials here: A gallon of milk, after traveling 60 miles on a plane from Juneau, costs $7.40. Cheese works out to $6.95 a pound. A six-pack of pop is $5.

Fortunately, there’s not much Tenakeeans need to buy. They hunt their own blacktail deer, split their own wood, grow their own zucchini, pluck their own thimbleberries.

When toilet paper runs out, they use bog moss.

“You don’t just get things handed to you here,” says Ann Kourtman, an Iowan who moved here in 1996. “Better that way. You learn to appreciate the simplest of things.”

Tourists Land in a Shuttered Town

The anchor had barely splashed when news of the World Discoverer’s arrival began spreading from cabin to cabin, faster than the Big Fire of 1993.

The ship had called on Tenakee a year earlier and disgorged tourists who had stomped flower beds, used private outhouses, picked berries from gardens, even snapped pictures of people through their windows. One man entered a home uninvited, surprising a woman in a bathrobe.

That had prompted the Common Council to pass a resolution: “Whatever steps are necessary will be taken to prevent this type of tourism in Tenakee Springs.”

But what did that mean?

Someone suggested it meant greeting the interlopers with a collective moon. Another said everybody ought to stay home until the visitors left.

Some folks wondered if anything should be done. “We shouldn’t stop them,” said Ray Paddock, who at 86 is Tenakee’s oldest native son. “It’s supposed to be free land out here for free people.”

Shelly Wilson hurried to the harbor. A day earlier, Jeff Saur, the ship’s expedition leader, had called to say the ship would be stopping at Tenakee. Wilson says she protested but agreed to the ship’s docking at 2 p.m. because Saur “made it clear there wasn’t much we could do to stop them.”

Saur’s greeting was cordial. Wilson was blunt. Why was the ship 7 hours early? she asked. “We don’t want you here. We’re not built for this industrial-scale tourism.” More Tenakeeans arrived and complained. Tempers grew short. “Some four-letter words were used,” Pam Nelson said.

Finally a deal was struck: The visitors could look. But no more than 10 people at a time on the trail along Indian River. Too many brown bears about. And no dumping Coke cans or photographing the insides of people’s homes.

Within an hour, all 120 tourists had been power-rafted to the dock and were looking around for something to photograph or videotape.

Subject No. 1 was J.C. Tomas, a retired logger who’d be a hit at any Willie Nelson look-alike contest. He’d just put a pot of coffee on the stove when he noticed two pink faces topped with white curls looking in his window.

J.C. squinted and shouted: “What in hell are you doing?”

The Scribers hung the “Closed” sign in the bakery door. The Blue Moon Cafe stayed dark. The only gift shop, Shamrock Artists Co-op, shut. Some Tenakeeans lowered their shades and kept the kids indoors.

Dave Zeiger and Joani McBeen typed up a flier in English and German, made copies and, along with Molly Kemp, Mark Wheeler and Ahnke Wagner, handed them to tourists as they passed along the gravel road.

“Tourists,” the fliers read. “We asked that they not bring you in, as the impact of large-scale tourism is devastating to a community our size.” It invited the tourists to return, but not in “large, organized tours.”

The visitors studied the shuttered town. Several took pictures of Chris Whitehouse, town janitor, burning garbage along the shore. “Stop!” she snapped. “I don’t go to your office and take pictures of you working.”

Four hours later, they regrouped at the harbor. It took close to an hour to ferry them to the ship. Wilson was the only Tenakeean to see them off.

She stood on the dock, watching the World Discoverer hoist the last raft. She waved when it pulled anchor and nudged away.

An Embarrassment Not to Be Repeated

Months after the World Discoverer’s departure, letters kept arriving for P.O. Box 52, addressed to the City Council of Tenakee Springs.

“It’s encouraging to hear that there is at least one town with the character to say ‘we are not for sale’ to the tourist industry,” said a typical one from John Rate, a resident of Homer, 750 miles northwest of Tenakee.

Harvey Kourtman, Tenakee’s one-man public works department, appreciates the support. “Cruise ships are getting a little absurd. They think they can go wherever they want. But don’t we have a right to choose the industry we want?”

John Tillotson, director of operations at Society Expeditions, lamented the episode. “It was embarrassing to us, embarrassing to our passengers, but it was not in the spirit of what we were trying to do.”

The World Discoverer, he added, won’t call anymore at Tenakee Springs.