Southeast Alaska’s picturesque peaks and larger-than-life characters have made their way into stories for centuries.
Don Stuart’s latest novel “Secret Places” is one of the latest to try to capture the region and its people, this time through the lens of commercial fishing.
The novel about a fisherman gone missing is set in the 1980s, in a fictionalized town called Sweetwater, where a diner/hair parlor combo serves as the town’s gossip hall. The town and the story are based on Stuart’s nostalgic recollections of his time trolling out of Hoonah, from the muddy spring roads and false-front jail, to the dynamics of the town’s multi-faceted identity as a Lingít community with an influx of outside fishermen.
Stuart, now an 81-year-old retiree living with his wife on Vashon Island in Washington State, fished Southeast with his parents to pay his way through college and law school in the 1960s, and then returned to trolling in the 1980s with his wife after they decided life as a lawyer (him) and teacher (her) wasn’t the one for them.
The couple fished the F/V Nightwings mainly in Northern Southeast. Spots like Yakobi Island, Deer Harbor and Hoktaheen Cove are favorite places that made it into the book.
Another true part of the fictional story is the book’s cover, which feature a real troller, Gordy Pederson, who Stuart knew and fished with. Pederson’s wife, Tina Dinzl-Pederson, drew the image. Stuart also credited her as an early reader of the novel.
This was not Stuart’s debut novel. His personal catalog includes nonfiction titles, a few other mysteries, and a military courtroom thriller co-written with his wife, Charlotte. (She has also penned other works solo.)
Although Stuart hasn’t been back to Alaska since he and his wife drove their fishing boat south for the last time around 1990, he said their Alaska experiences were a memorable part of their life.
“Of course, I have a very sentimental attachment,” he said. “It was a pretty significant, memorable period of time in our lives, and Alaska is a memorable place. It’s an amazing place from just about every point of view, not the least of which is geography, and it made a big impression.”
Stuart shared some insight into his inspirations during an interview with the Chilkat Valley News. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What is your connection to Southeast Alaska?
After a year living on our sailboat, my wife and I spotted a hull for a sailboat fishing vessel in Port Townsend. We turned it into a 47-foot sailing fishing vessel and liveaboard. We spent a year working on it in Port Townsend, then brought it down to Seattle, spent a year there finishing it up. 1980 or ‘81 must have been our first year back in Alaska fishing.
By that time, my dad had just completed a 47-foot troller, a very standard commercial salmon troller. Mine was a little bit more obnoxious looking ’cause it had a full sailboat hull and a mast, but it was set up as a power troller.
We fished with our own boat but alongside my parents for a couple years until they retired, then my wife and I continued trolling in Alaska through the 1980s.
Have you always been a writer? When did you transition from fisherman to writer?
Since retirement. When I retired from American Farmland Trust, I basically had this book in me, it was called “Barnyards and Birkenstocks, why Farmers and Environmentalists need each other.” That’s basically the battlefront on which I’d worked for American Farmland Trust for several years.
What made you decide to write an Alaska mystery next?
I had actually started this book, probably in the ’80s, when we were fishing.
I was writing about it back then, in wintertime when I wasn’t working. It had struck me that a mystery is all about suspects who have motives. You’re talking about someone’s life, motives, what they’re thinking and worrying about, what problems they face. It was an opportunity to capture the Alaska salmon troll fishery, which is pretty darn unique.
Here was an opportunity to capture it from the various points of view of the various characters that inhabit the fishery. I wanted to write about a fish buyer, a highliner, an oldtimer, someone from Seattle who commutes up there, and then of course the fish cop, Fish and Game, and the trollers’ union. All of those people became suspects in a murder and it became a mystery.
Your book starts with quite the list of characters. Were any based on folks you encountered in your time in Alaska?
I should refer you to the place where it says “this is a work of fiction.” The fact is, they all are, but they’re all kind of composites.
Hank Weller was definitely based on Mike Thompson (the former owner of Hoonah Seafoods) in a very general sense. Dennis Cleveland, the handtroller, he was kind of based on people I know and I kind of appreciated his way of thinking about the world. Across the board, it’s all based on people that I knew and situations that we’d seen.
How did you develop the community of Sweetwater?
It’s definitely based somewhat on Hoonah. I’ve seen more recent pictures, and boy has it changed.
The place very richly had this strong sense of Lingít culture. You’re experiencing it as a white person. I go in and I sell my fish, talk to a few people, shop in the store, get my mail, and then I’m out of here again. So you have this very tenuous connection. But it’s pretty memorable.
At the time — I was young. When you get away from it, you look back on it and think, how might people have felt about each other, and how might people have felt about me coming in there with my fiberglass boat.
I wanted to treat it honestly, fairly, and hopefully well in the writing of this book. I was very self-conscious about doing that too, cause I was writing as an outsider.
Where did you come up with the idea to keep the Lingít name for the community secret, and did you work with anyone in the Lingít community to develop that portrayal?
It was something that came to me as an idea that I could do.
It felt like an opportunity to portray what I had experienced about the community without hopefully being offensive. I wasn’t probably as sensitive to it at the time as I became since, but I don’t think that Alaska Natives had any picnic as second-class citizens in the good old US of A.
I did talk with Tina Pederson in some detail and she read the manuscript early on. She had lived in Hoonah for many years, she and her husband had lived there, she taught in the school, was an artist. She’s who I used, a non-Native, but someone that was pretty conscious of it and sensitive.
Are there any favorite stories of your own fishing days that made it into the book?
Probably a lot of them.
That whole experience of on the one hand being frustrated you couldn’t catch more fish. At the same time, down underneath it all, being pretty aware that they’re doing the best they possibly can and that it’s a very difficult job trying to manage to regulate this wild crazy fishery, especially trolling.
Certainly all of the stories about confrontations on the grounds — that happens.
In the book, Dennis Cleveland sitting on the dock and getting a kick out of some jackass in a power troller who can’t find a place to tie up. I do remember coming into harbor, in a crowded harbor, and having no place to tie up. I believe I did in fact tie up once to two boats.
I fished pretty much all the places that I described. Having gear damaged and having to go make repairs to your fishing gear, repair a broken pole, losing a lead while you’re dragging around some rocky area trying to figure it out, all of that is grounded in personal experience.
I wanted all of the sense that you’re working with this freaking machine that breaks all the time, things go wrong.
Like Dennis Cleveland, you’re down in some damn engine room with your head down trying to tighten a bolt you can’t reach. That is all boat stuff. I’d been through all the boat-building experience and before I had the fishing boat I had been with my parents and I had owned boats, the sailboat that my wife and I owned, I had pretty dramatically rebuilt that. I’d replaced the engine and done a great deal of work on the hull. A lot of work. That was a wooden boat.
The people I hope will read it are Alaskans. I really hope that Alaskans read it and get a sense out of it of the wondrousness and the worth of the lives they lead there. They are living a kind of life that is hard to find elsewhere.