We flew southwest down the Inlet, over Fire Island, past the Susitna Flats, still mostly August green, Denali far upriver to the north, a heap of white against the blue sky. Derricked gas platforms went under the plane, flames jetting from vent pipes, shadows of cranes leaning over the muddy water, and then we flew into the mountains of the Alaska Peninsula. The season was farther along there, the mountains brown on their sides where the frost had already come, the ridges black and sharp as flint blades. A gravel road followed a creek along one side of a valley, the last sign of humans for an hour and a half. We kept flying over a Pleistocene landscape of rock and mountains and glaciers and lakes and rivers and floodplains struck with yellow and silver September light, past Mt. Redoubt and the glaciered mountains of Katmai, and the rumpled land at their western knees fell and spilled, littered with lakes, into the Bering Sea.

The plane landed in King Salmon for a ten minute refuel and the trees and grass, yellow and red, ran in the sunlight from the end of the runway across the flat land past the last houses to an overcast horizon. We took off again and got over the cloud layer and a line of volcanoes, Veniaminof and Isanotski and Shishaldin and Pogromni, rose out of the clouds, white cones against the dark high altitude blue sky. We flew past them off the end of the continent until the pilot cut the power and the plane descended through the mist and the Bering Sea appeared beneath us, dark under the clouds, and the slipstream blew the rain sideways across the Plexiglas and summer was gone and ahead of us the mountains of Unalaska were the color of wet lions.

They looked the way I remembered them. I had come out to Dutch Harbor to attend a historical society conference. On a “World War II Tour,” a few days into the trip, our guide, a local high school history teacher named Jeff Dickrell, took us around to various sites connected with the Japanese bombing in May 1942, and stopped the van to point out a depression in the side of a small hill above the fuel dock, a crater made by a Japanese bomb.

One of the historians in the van mentioned an American fighter plane that had gotten shot down by the Japanese during the raid. The damaged P-40 fighter plane had managed to land safely and survived the war intact. It’s stored, bullet holes and all, in a hanger at the Alaska Aviation Heritage Museum at Lake Hood, where it’s undergoing restoration work. I had seen that plane once, and touched the bullet holes.

Everyone on the bus looked out the window at the hole in the side of the hill. Some of us took pictures but the grass and fireweed stalks were thigh deep and wet from a morning rain so we skipped the close-up inspection. “This is a small crater,” Dickrell said. “There’s some real big ones on the other side of the hill.”

I first came to Dutch Harbor in 1976, when I was 21, on a crab boat called the Calista Sea that sailed from Kodiak to the Bering Sea two weeks before Christmas. Dutch Harbor was a sanctuary from the winter ocean, the point of contact between the wilderness of the Bering Sea and the rest of the world. It was a place of coming and going from the land to the sea; we were always touching and leaving it, and for most of us it was never a place for staying.

But in the time between that December and when we went back to Kodiak the following June, I had lived as fully and intensely as I ever would, and that ocean and that particular time in Dutch Harbor had become a permanent part of my dreams, and still drifted often into my daylight consciousness. If every life has a story or myth that informs and holds and bends and explains that life, mine was the realization that that winter had been a passage across a territory no one had been aware of but me, and that the things I learned in the crossing would be useful, even essential, in other, still unimagined places. And for a long time, that winter, and that Dutch Harbor, were never far away.

A friend of mine in Kodiak, a student of military history, would refer to the Bering Sea crab fishery in those years, especially the opilio crab season in Feburary, as the “Russian Front.” In his living room it seemed a hilarious label, an ironically exaggerated conflation of the misery and cold and death that supposedly comprised the Bering Sea crab fishing experience and Hitler’s army, starving in the snow at Stalingrad. We laughed because, yes, the work out west was hard and the weather was awful, and people died sometimes, but truthfully, as much as we understood that and sometimes looked at ourselves through that melodramatic lens, most of us knew that really, almost anybody could do the work; it wasn’t that cosmic. And you could die on the freeway in Seattle too, you didn’t have to be on a boat a million miles from home with too many crab pots on deck to manage that. And most of us had fallen into crab fishing by accident anyway,—following an older brother to a cannery job in Kodiak or coming to Alaska on a flyer. And because there was a boom on and more fishing jobs than people to take them, we all ended up on crab boats. Most of us were inexperienced, naïve, romantic fools when we started out, but as the winters wore on, this changed. Amongst ourselves, we talked about how bad the weather had been on the last trip, discussed the details, if we knew them, of a boat sinking, or how someone we knew had gotten yanked overboard in a tangled line, or crushed by a crab pot. I would go back to Connecticut on Christmas visits and try to tell the guys I had gone to high school with about the work and the ocean out there—Fifty foot waves! Buildings that were bombed by the Japanese! But mostly I was not taken seriously and I understood eventually that there was no common reference point in Connecticut between that world of low hills and suburban housing to the wind in the Bering Sea in December, or to the lost planet landscape of the Aleutians or the tribal culture of fishermen and processing workers and Aleuts who lived there. The cartoon of Deadliest Catch—which eventually packaged the Bering Sea in a moronically simplified narrative that was more about what people in Van Nuys thought about the Bering Sea than it was about the actual place—was still a long way in the future. In the ‘70s it was easier to just keep drinking and smiling, and keep an eye on the calendar for the day of my flight back.

Sometimes even now, 30 years later, the winter light in Kodiak will assume a particular aspect, transforming the overcast daylight of the moment into the Aleutian light of 1977, turning the mountains across the harbor into the mountains of Unalaska in the moment when they separate from the mist as we come in from the north on a December afternoon. Men I knew will appear beside me, ducking their heads against the wind as we tie the boat up in a jumble of wet black hulls, cable and masts, the water around us glinting in the deck lights. A girl will call down from the dock to tell us the truck from Alaska Ship Supply is there with our groceries, and the hair on her forehead will blow out from under a kerchief. The wooden houses in Unalaska lean into each other, yellow light in the windows, blue tire tracks in the snow in the just-before-sunset light, and the air in the galley of the Calista Sea is blue with cigarette smoke and the tops of the beer cans are littered with cigarette ash. Dean and Laurie are laughing at a cowboy joke and out on deck the aluminum hoppers full of tanner crabs are banging against the steel hatch coaming as they come out of the fish hold. That’s the sound of money being made! Dean says, and we laugh because it is true and later, much later, we are sitting in a 12-foot aluminum bass-fishing skiff going across Iliuliuk Bay to the Elbow Room, and a guy from Akutan holds the outboard tiller rock steady despite being almost too drunk to stand when we came out of the Unisea, and he aims the skiff like a spear through the bitter cold air into the creek behind the Russian church. The skiff grounds in the frozen tidal mud and we stumble up through the thigh-high stalks of last summer’s grass and a foot of snow. A streetlight is shining like zebra stripes through the picket fence around the church. The sky is screaming with stars.

One gray afternoon, after the conference was over, a friend and I drove out of town and north along the shore of Iliuliuk Bay in a borrowed car. The road passed a muddy yard filled with heavy equipment and shipping vans, and then wound up and over some grass hills to a bight in the coast called Summer Bay. The fog grew thicker the further out the bay we went, so that from the top of the pass before we went down to Summer Bay, the ocean, close enough to hear, was invisible. We came to a gate across the road and parked the car. The surf pounded the beach ahead in the fog. The beach grass was thigh deep and green. The smell of rotting salmon from the creek draining across the beach eddied in the wind.

On the way back we stopped to read an interpretive sign mounted beside the road. Black sand had gotten under the glass, obscuring some of the text. An archeological dig had been done in a dune behind the beach. Photos showed people standing in pits squared off with white string on sticks. A drawing showed a circle of hearth rocks. The sign described how people had lived on this beach for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, hunting sea lions and birds with bone and wooden weapons, fishing for halibut with bone hooks. The wind blew the fog across the sand, the ocean broke on the beach. The people were long gone. Their artifacts had been taken to the new museum in town. There really wasn’t much to see if you were looking for anything besides the beach, the wind and rain, and the grass behind the sand dune.

I went to the Museum of the Aleutians the last day I was in Dutch Harbor. Except for the girl who took my admission money, the building was empty.

I walked through the display cases of Russian coins and buttons, a Japanese Army rifle from Attu or Kiska, pictures of fishermen during the crab boom days, the Aleut hunting tools from Summer Bay, all expected pieces of the past of this place.

And then I saw a pencil drawing of a young Aleut woman made by John Webber, Captain Cook’s designated artist, when the Endeavor visited Unalaska Island in October 1778. The drawing had been made in English Bay less than ten miles from where it was now displayed. Webber and his companions had gone ashore and happened upon a small party of Aleuts including a young woman and her husband. Webber was struck by the woman’s beauty and asked if he could sketch her. They sat in the autumn grass while Webber drew. The pencil lines were still exact and delicate, the dust of the graphite nearly as fresh as the day Webber’s hand had moved across the paper. The face of the woman radiated with youth and beauty and apparent happiness, her enigmatic, knowing smile carried across two centuries on a sheet of paper. The drawing was all that was left of the people who had been there on that October day. In its wordlessness it shimmered with something unknowable, and infinitely human.

At a reception the previous day, as part of the annual convention of the Alaska Historical Society and Museums Alaska, Scott Carlee, a curator of the Alaska State Museum in Juneau had told me about touching the hull of one of Earnest Shackleton’s boats at an exhibition of Antarctic exploration materials. It had been a defining moment for him.

“I’m a museum guy—I believe in artifacts.” he said. “Certain objects, if you can preserve them from their time to our own time, can illuminate the past, make it real, like nothing else.”

At the airport for the flight out, I looked into the bar. It appeared that nothing had changed since the last time I had flown out of it, in 1991: The same gray window light and the red neon beer signs lit the faces of fishermen and cannery workers in their sweat pants and hooded sweatshirts. I had been opilio crab fishing in the Pribilofs then and was flying back to Kodiak to go herring fishing. I’d gone into the bar to wait for my flight and sat next to a guy in insulated Carhartts and Xtratufs. We drank in contented silence for a while and then he said something about boats and we talked about the ones we’d been on, the weather, the fishing. He’d been brown crabbing out in Adak. A sea bag and a cardboard box were piled under his barstool.

The bartender went to the other end of the bar.

“Hey, want to see something cool?” the deckhand said. I said sure, and he lifted the cardboard box onto his lap. The box was maybe eighteen inches square. He pulled back a corner flap to reveal a large brown and white bird with a hooked beak and a fierce stare.

“Check it out,” he said. “Some kind of Asiatic hawk.”

He told me the bird had landed on the mast of his boat one night while they were pulling crab pots. They hadn’t noticed it until the next morning, when it got daylight. “We figured he got blown across from Kamchatka or maybe the Kuriles,” he said. “Must have been one tired puppy. I won the draw on who got to keep it.”

He kept an elbow across the open flap on the top of the box and took a hit off his beer with his other arm.

“There’s a big market for these things,” he said. “Guys in Saudi Arabia use ‘em to hunt with. Y’know, the sport of kings and all that. I figure it’s worth at least as much as my brown crab crewshare, not that we caught very many of ‘em.”

Even the tiny feathers on the bird’s face displayed an essence of predatory power and perfection. The bird remained quite still and looked directly into my eyes. There was a trip-wired ferocity in its quietness. Neither the box nor the deckhand’s arm across the top of it seemed likely to hold the bird if it wanted out.

The deckhand folded the top of the box shut and put it back on the floor between our chairs. No one else in the bar seemed to be aware of the small bundle of wildness it contained. Then my flight was called and I finished my beer and stood up. I nodded at the box on the floor. “Good luck with that,” I said. We shook hands. I never saw him again or heard what might have happened with the bird.

And now, 18 years later, standing in the brightly lit terminal outside the bar, waiting for the gate agent to start boarding us onto the aircraft, I thought of the hawk—wondered how much ocean had it crossed, what islands had it missed in the fog before it had seen the boat lights and found that mast on a shitty night out by Adak?

And I thought of those lines in William Blake’s “The Tiger,”

When the stars threw down their spears,

And water'd heaven with their tears,

Did He smile His work to see?

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

I had touched that P-40 in the hangar in Anchorage, felt the torn metal edges of the bullet holes in the wing, looked at that drawing of the young Aleut woman and understood that the physical presence of Dutch Harbor, going back centuries, was deeply embedded in those things. And somehow I had expected the hillsides, the processor buildings, the Elbow Room, even the gravel on the beach, to still be alive with the echoes of my own life, still glowing with the emotion I had burdened them with 30 years before, with the heat of the myth I had carried away from that first winter of crab fishing. The hawk was part of that too, alive in some present, but unaccounted for moment, still making the crossing from Kamchatka to that mastlight in the fog.

But the past does not rise out of the ground the way it went in. The town I expected to find was a set piece construction of my own nostalgic delusions, alive in the past, not the present. Whatever I thought I would find in Dutch Harbor was gone. The building that had once been the Elbow Room was still there, but it was now painted purple, the door boarded over. Through the window overlooking the sea I had once looked out of with a beer in my hand, I saw scattered dusty chairs. The creek ran beside the church as it always had, and I could see the place where we had landed the skiff coming in from across the bay. But the fence around the church was new and the church itself was looking spruced up too.

For a day or so I tried to conjure some awe at the time that had gone, at the supposed power of the past to intrude on the present, but nothing much came of that. Applied to the physical ground where they had happened, the memories of the Dutch Harbor of my youth felt weightless as old photos, presumably still accurate as narratives of a particular part of my past, but drained of whatever emotional content I had expected to find in them. The past had gone away unnoticed, buried by the cumulative layers of winters and summers and winters again.

The town now seemed more alive than I remembered it: a new school, new city hall, rec center, even a Vietnamese/Mexican restaurant serving pho and nachos and burgers. There were new foot bridges across Iliuliuk Creek and the main road through town, Broad Street, was paved. The ghosts I had expected to find there, the spirits of people I had known well—including myself in those years—had gone elsewhere, displaced by kids on bicycles and teenagers in baggy shorts, grinning Ethiopian processing workers and the kindly Unangan lady giving the church tours.

I walked around Unalaska among the new buildings, talked to the guy behind the cash register at Dutch Harbor Fast Food: “Pizza – Burgers – Vietnamese – Chinese Food,” and realized he had been born in Vietnam not long before I had first come to Dutch Harbor and that we were unrelated by anything but the moment we were now in. The present was as present as it had been when I had first arrived in Dutch Harbor.