Empire of the Winds (April/May 2003 | Volume: 54, Issue: 2)

Empire of the Winds

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Authors: Scott Banks

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

Historic Theme:

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April/May 2003 | Volume 54, Issue 2

One summer 30 years ago, I found myself on a DC-3 bound for Unalaska, my string bass strapped into the seat next to me. I anchored the rhythm section of a high school band in Anchorage, and we were going to show students in this remote village on the Aleutian chain how much fun it could be to play a musical instrument.

Ten years later, I was back, this time with chef’s knives stowed in my duffel. I had signed up to cook for a crew of geologists working on the flank of Makushin Volcano, a 15-minute helicopter ride out of Unalaska. There, we lived in Quonset-style tents anchored to the volcanic rock with aircraft cable thick as your thumb.

During these, my first connections with the most populous of the Aleutian Islands, I learned something of its tumultuous history and constantly felt the astonishing beauty it reveals in all its moods.

One facet of that beauty particularly struck the naturalist John Burroughs when he visited Unalaska a century ago: “The first hour or two out of Dutch Harbor, we sailed past high rolling green hills, cut squarely off by the sea, presenting cliffs seven or eight hundred feet high of soft reddish crumbling rock, a kind of clay porphyry of volcanic origin, touched here and there on the face with the tenderest green. It was as if some green fluid had been poured upon the top of the hills and had run down and dripped off the rock eaves and been caught upon every shelf and projection. The color was deepest in all the wrinkles and folds of the slopes and in the valley bottoms. At one point, we looked into a deep, smooth valley or trough opening upon the sea, its shore line a complete half circle. Its bottom was nearly at the water level and was as fresh and vivid as a lawn in spring.”

Much of what I wrote about in the journal I kept as a camp cook, however, was the pummeling, ceaseless wind. Indeed, the Aleutians came to seem to me to be the place where all the winds of Earth were born. “I thought the wind was bad in the Brook’s range,” I wrote, “but that stuff was just a stray puff compared to here. This is ferocious wind. The camp sits on the lip of a 200-foot drop. The wind travels up that cliff, and peaks at the tents.…I can’t sleep with that noise. The wind makes a tin symphony.” Some 200 years earlier, a Russian priest named Father Ivan Veniaminov had felt pretty much the same way. He called the Aleutians the “Empire of the Winds.”

 

I went back last summer to attend the events commemorating the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Dutch Harbor by the Japanese. No cooking gear and no high school band were in sight on the plane; I saw transient commercial fishermen and