ALASKA
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TONGASS WILD LANDS: Ushk Bay, Deep Bay, Poison Cove: PAC
Southeast Alaska
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But for Esther, the sea and sandy beaches are not just about fish. She has grown up on the beaches of Hoonah Sound—camping, playing football, building bonfires, and eating freshly-gathered clams. Motoring on the boat, the wind in her hair, she loves watching Dall’s porpoises play in the bow wave. This year, she is learning to kayak. When the water is calm, her mother lets her put her 5-year-old brother in the kayak’s stern hatch and paddle him between the boat and the shore.
Esther’s mother is often amazed at her daughter’s energy and zeal about protecting the forests and waters of Southeast. “I try not to preach to her too hard and try to show her other points of view,” she says, “but she’s pretty passionate about it.” Then again, as a born and raised Southeast Alaskan, Esther has had a very different childhood than her mother’s. After all, as Esther’s mother says, “I never took naps on a beach in Hoonah Sound when I was eight months old.”
Her life on the water, she says, “is just really fun, and I don’t want it to stop.” Young as she is, Esther is worried that her family’s fishing could end someday. “Right close to where we fish they want to log Ushk Bay. It’s just the next bay down, and we’re afraid that if they do that it’s going to be really ugly and the fish are going to start dying….It would be really sad, too. The trees are really big down there.” As with the decline in sand dollars in Sitka, the prospect of logging in places around Hoonah Sound like Ushk Bay, Deep Bay, and Poison Cove has made Esther fiercely opinionated. “I think logging is really bad because they make all these roads, and I think it’s really mean to the trees. If there are birds’ nests in the trees, they kill the little birds, and it’s hard on the bears because the salmon runs get trashed because of the slash.” Courtesy of Laurie Bower
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