Fall Floods Devastate Northern Alaskan Fishing Villages
Episcopal News Service. October 5, 1994 [94167]
Scott Fisher
With tired, shocked eyes, the man sat in the Carlson Center in Fairbanks, Alaska, on the last night of August. Normally an ice hockey rink and community center, this night the center was filling with makeshift cots.
Oscar Nictune, a 93 year old Inupiaq patriarch, was already stretched out sleeping on one of the cots, a small bag on the floor beside him. Carefully he had placed uneaten cake in his bag when the evening meal ended. The small bag now contained everything he owned in the world.
The man with the tired eyes sat at a table, sipping coffee in the darkness. He had just returned from a 500 mile round trip flight north to his community. "It's gone," he explained. "It's just gone."
"Devastated," echoed his companion, who had flown with him. "Total devastation."
From its head waters high up in the lost mountain valleys of the Brooks Range, the Koyukuk river flows from 500 miles before it meets the Yukon river in northern Alaska. Flowing clear and cold across graveled bottom, twisting and turning around the hills and through the spruce and birch forests, the Koyukuk river is home to four isolated and scattered Episcopalian communities.
Northernmost of the four, some 200 miles northwest of Fairbanks, located on the Koyukuk as it crosses the Arctic circle where the Alatna river empties into it from the west, are the communities of Allakaket and Alatna.
Long an historic trading ground between the coastal Eskimo people and the Koyukukon Indian people, Episcopal Archdeacon Hudson Stuck established Allakaket in 1906, when he built a mission and school at the confluence. Soon people gathered, forming Ahiakaket on the south bank, around the mission, and the smaller community of Alatna on the opposite shore.
Staffed by deaconesses and missionaries across the years, until Bishop William Gordon ordained the Rev. Joe Williams of Allakaket in the early 1970s, the mission of St. John's-in-the-Wilderness Episcopal Church and Allakaket grew and thrived.
Sunday after the Sunday the great bell, originally hoisted by Stuck and inscribed, "O ye frost and cold, bless ye the lord," called Koyukuk people to worship. When the most recent church was built in the community several years ago, the last action was moving the bell over to its new tower. The old church was left standing, out of respect for the years and prayer and faith it contained.
As August was nearing its end, the people of the region were busy. Life along the Koyukuk has always been life based on the land, the river, and the great cycle of the seasons. Fall is the time to get ready for the coming winter -- and the winters are long and hard and cold along the Koyukuk. Temperatures are often colder than 50 below.
This August most of the young men of the village were away in Montana and Washington fighting forest fires, to gain money for trapping and winter supplies. At home in Allakaket, the women, children, and elders caught the last of the summer's fish, picked berries, thought about cutting wood, and talked about the coming moose season. Overhead the ducks and geese were leaving. Two men were up-river prospecting (for this is historic gold mining country) and scouting out possible hunting sites.
The August rains had finally stopped, the birch trees were already turning yellow, and the chill in the night air meant winter was coming.
Downriver 80 miles, squeezed against the bottom of the hills, in the smaller community of Hughes, church volunteers from Chattanooga, Tennessee, worked with village residents building the first Episcopal church in the village. Over the years church services had been held in schools, homes, and stores, but now Hughes was finally getting its own church.
As Allakaket people carefully put away the fish and the berries, the rivers to the north of them, swollen with rain water, were flooding south through the Brooks Range. Sunday evening, August 28th, as parents prepared for the next day's opening of school, the swollen rivers hit the Koyukuk.
Twenty four hours later, Allakaket and Alatna would no longer physically exist and almost all of the residents would be wandering shell-shocked around an army barracks outside of Fairbanks. Evacuated during the night by Army helicopters, now they sat in the sunshine of a Fairbanks afternoon and wondered what the flooding waters were doing to their homes. Someone brought photographs taken from the air that day over the communities, and the reality of the destruction began to hit. "My house," cried one young mother, "My house is gone."
So were most of the houses.
Tony Moses looked at the photographs and reached into his pocket, pulling out his skinning knife. "I'm 70 years old and this is all I have left in the world."
As the Red Cross made plans to move them to a more permanent shelter at the Carlson Center, warnings were telephoned to Hughes about the high water pouring their way and diocesan officials worried about the Chattanooga church volunteers. Later that night power went out in Hughes, and all communication stopped. The waters had hit.
By Wednesday evening, August 30th, the population of Hughes, including the Tennessee church volunteers, had also been evacuated into Fairbanks, joining Allakaket and Alatna in the shelter now at the Carlson Center
Joe Beatus, as he left Hughes on one of the first flights, had warned the volunteers to run a line from the church still under construction to one of the village telephone poles. "Maybe it won't float away," he told them. He was right -- it didn't. But Joe had seen all of his own belongings swamp into the raging river when the raft he'd constructed for them overturned. "Well," he said later, "I don't worry about us, my wife and I. We're old and we're going to die soon and we don't need a house. We can live anyplace. It's the young people, the young families I worry about."
By August 31st, the first flights back to survey the damage in the three communities were confirming what air photographs had revealed. Buildings, houses, city offices and out-buildings had all shifted, been destroyed, or disappeared in Allakaket and Alatna. Five houses sat now on the runway and the new, log community hall of Allakaket sat three miles down river in the middle of a forest, surrounded by other houses that had floated away.
Floods, though comparatively rare along the Koyukuk, are not uncommon in the interior of Alaska, but they almost always occur in the spring, with the breaking up of the rivers. The summer allows for a time of re-building. The surrounding hills are always capped in snow and the cold north wind that blows down from the Brooks announces that winter is coming. How long the window will last, before the hard freezes come and the snow covers the debris is the unknown question. And what happens next spring, when it all melts again?
Three weeks after the flood, the last missing house from Alakaket was found. The river had carried it 70 miles, abandoning it behind willows only 10 miles above Hughes.
Most of the evacuees attended the Sunday Eucharist on Labor Day weekend at St. Matthews, Fairbanks. Bishop Steven Charleston rushed back from General Convention to be at the service and announce emergency relief contributions donated by the national church.
"It's good to be here," Joe Beatus announced during the open forum that developed during the service. "It's good to be here with you. I was baptized Episcopalian and raised Episcopalian and you are my people. We have lost everything. All our moosemeat, all our fish, all our berries, all our winter clothing. All we had put away for the winter is gone. But we can still pray together, and that's good."
Is Allakaket destroyed? Ask Johnson Moses, layreader, chalicebearer, and elder. "People say Allakaket is gone," he said. "But Allakaket isn't gone. Allakaket is here," he said as he pointed to his heart. "And have you noticed," he said, "that the only building not shifted or destroyed is our old church? Our church is still standing and God is still with us."
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