This is the first part of a three-part series. Part Two | Part Three
Norm Carson examines some of the objects left behind inside Pelican’s abandoned fish plant. (KCAW photo by Ed Ronco)
It’s breakfast time at the Lisianski Inlet Café, where Victo Stepanenko is working on some corn beef hash behind the counter. Victo and his wife Karen have run this café since 1987. Karen is also on the city council.
“When I first moved here, there were 300 trollers and 90 longliners that fished out of here,” says Karen Stepanenko. “And there were longline seasons — two-day openers — and we would have boats lined up — like, seven boats tied up to each other — because our harbor was so packed. And that doesn’t happen anymore because they set a season from March until November.”
She’s talking about IFQs or individual fishing quotas, which federal fisheries managers adopted in the early 1990s. Instead of short openings where fishermen could catch as much halibut as possible, they’re now assigned an amount of fish to catch over a several-month season.
“You could now fish out of your home in Sitka and just take your time about catching your fish,” said Norm Carson. He runs Pelican’s Chamber of Commerce, and is the town’s unofficial historian. “There was no incentive to be fast anymore. All you had to do is catch what’s allotted to you.”
With no need to hurry and unload and head back out, Pelican’s claim of being “closest to the fish” suddenly became a lot less important to those doing the fishing. Carson says the IFQ system made a big impact, but wasn’t the only factor in Pelican’s struggle.
“The market just changed so much that there was no desirability for a whole frozen salmon that had been stored for three months,” he said. “And that hurt. The fact that it’s labor intensive – fish are being moved from the first floor to the second floor to the third floor, then brought back down to the second floor to be shipped out — just too much labor involved.”
Carson would know. He worked here in the late 1960s. As we walk up to the building we see that one of the doors is wide open and Carson, a retired state trooper, jokes that he’s in good with the local gendarme, so we might as well take a look around. Up on the third floor, we find a darkened room. They stored fish here. The room clearly has seen better days.
“There’s water on the floor,” Carson says, as our boots splash through about a quarter-inch of it. “And the roof is separated up above, so for the last, at least, year and a half all this fresh water has been seeping into this old wood. It’s bound to be rotting. But again, you don’t need a plant to store 5 million pounds of fish anymore. This is really obsolete. This room will never be full of frozen fish again. When I worked here, this entire room was nothing but stacks of frozen fish. We actually ran out of room.”
On the second floor, the break room door is open. Yellowing paperbacks are still on shelves here, and a canister of sugar still sits on the counter.
“It’s just like the whistle blew and the crew walked out and didn’t show up for the next shift,” Carson says.
Kathie Wasserman was mayor of Pelican from 1997 to 2004.
“It didn’t shut down on one day, that’s the trouble,” Wasserman said during an interview in Sitka. “It shut down stage by stage by stage. So it was not one point where it shut down.”
Wasserman witnessed firsthand a lot of the cold storage’s troubles. Today she’s executive director of the Alaska Municipal League in Juneau, a nonprofit that lobbies on behalf of municipal governments. And she says Pelican’s issues are not unique.
“Not many jobs, no industry, high unemployment, high utility prices, not good access to transportation: I mean, that’s Alaska in a nutshell,” she said. Or at least small communities in Alaska, she says.
Still, Wasserman believes this town will begin growing again. “I think someday Pelican will be — and I hate to use this word — discovered by someone,” Wasserman said. “The question is: Is it going to be the way in which the majority of Pelican people that are still left there want to see it discovered? Half the communities will say ‘Well, we don’t want to be another Skagway with 50,000 cruise ships.’ However, at some point Pelican’s going to have to make a choice: Is it better to go down a road that everyone’s not comfortable with, or is it best just to shut down?”
Back on the boardwalk, Norm Carson says the cold storage has some life in it yet, if in a slightly different form. “There’s hope,” he said. “A small scale cold storage, maybe a value-added fish processing here. Perhaps a fish hatchery down here at Pelican Creek.”
He’s optimistic. “Well, why not?” he says. “Just take a look at the country. It’s a beautiful place to live. Why wouldn’t you want to be here?”
This story is part one of a three-part series.
