Hey Everyone,
I posted back last year in the P&S thread about dredging up some support regarding a P&S centered in Alaska around the small fishing community of Dutch Harbor. I know I'm kind of jumping the gun on this, but as I didn't receive any for or against voices in the open thread, I decided to give this a go and see what happens. For those of you who don't know or don't recognize the name it's the community that the Discovery Chanel show "Deadliest Catch" is filmed in. This is still in its early stages and I'm definitely still gathering information. I've got an introduction written, but I'd love to get some opinions and a few additional sets of eyes. The story would be set mainly in Dutch Harbor, but as there are plenty of fishing boats in the area, I would have them sending out expeditions to check on some of the other communities in the Aleutians and the mainland.
I decided to have this as a stand-alone story, as Chipperback's Land of Flatwater is set in Nebraska and the new P&S fic, The Island, is set in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. None of the other P&S stories have even mentioned Alaska other than in passing to reference the total destruction of Anchorage. Dutch Harbor seems like a pretty unlikely place to set a story in the post-nuclear war era, but its fairly self-sufficient. There's more than enough fuel up there to last at least one to two years, and the large amount of freighters from East Asia that made their way to Dutch even in the early 1980s' should give the community enough breathing room to find other sources of marine diesel. The cast of characters will end up mainly being the captains and crews of the fishing fleet of Dutch. Since my family and I spent quite a bit of time up there in the early 1990's, I know the names of quite a few of the captains from that era, but I'd be changing names as most of those people are still alive.
The Dutch Harbor naval base shut down in 1947/48 and the army base was closed about the same time, so there's no real need for the USSR to target it with an ICBM other than out of sheer spite. There were, however, two military targets in the Aleutians that the Soviets would be happy to take out:
-Shemya AFB, Shemya Island: USAF listening post, site of the COBRA DANE early warning radar station, location of a White Alice Communications System for USAF/USN communications in Alaska (rendered obsolete due to satellite communications but would likely be reactivated as a back-up to satellite coms during any US-USSR conflict, code-named PROJECT BLUEGRASS), location of several RC-135 Cobra Ball ICBM tracking aircraft used for intelligence gathering/ballistic missile tracking in Eastern Siberia and the Kamchatka Peninsula. Shemya would have been the primary Soviet target in the Aleutians in the event of a nuclear exchange with the USA.
-Naval Air Facility Adak/NAF Adak: US Navy base for P-3 Orion antisubmarine aircraft. At least 6,000 navy personnel and their families lived and worked on Adak in 1983 and it would have been a major Soviet target during the nuclear exchange. NAF Adak would have been able to base additional aircraft in a support role for operations at Shemya AFB. Adak served as a mid-way refueling station for USAF B-47's during the early Cold War and was considered the half-way point for flights from Elmendorf AFB to Shemya AFB at the end of the Aleutians.
Anyways, here's the first entry for "Shelter From the Storm." Let me know how it sounds. I'd love input from Chipperback and any others involved in the current P&S writing project! Enjoy!
Prologue/Introduction: Shelter from the Storm
Dutch Harbor, Alaska
July 12, 2013
The marine fog rolled in thick in the early afternoon, obscuring the hills and slowly melting snow banks from view. The tundra had come in later this year, thick green carpets of life covering the crumbling igneous rock that made up most of the islands of the Aleutians. Eagles cawed and called to one another, screeching as they flew low over the gravel roads and rooftops. Crows and smaller robins flew back and forth between rock crevices, black and brown specks against a white fog bank. Off in the distance, one of the new three story apartment buildings was under construction, a bizarre hybrid of American ghetto and Soviet cinder-block design. The population was too large now to be contained in the old base housing, which was itself on the verge of collapse. The army never built the fort to last, and the heavy snowfall and wet marine climate had rotted out most of the support beams in the barracks. It had taken five years to get the local support together to build the new apartment complexes and nobody had wanted to appropriate the money, but as the old Japanese captains would say, Shikata Ga Nai, it cannot be helped.
The first memorial to the war had been built down on the waterfront, next to the memorial plaques placed by the 86th Naval Combat Battalion during the war to commemorate the dead from the Japanese air raid. It was a simple thing, granite, with the Lord’s Prayer carved into it, below the phrase, “We Remained.” People out here did not need flowery rhetoric or oratory to remind them. Life was always harsh for the men and women who went down to the sea in ships. The Revenue Cutter graveyard with its row upon row of white crosses, Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic and Protestant, dug into the hillsides was reminder enough. No war would change the realities of life for the men who made their living taking sustenance and prosperity from the ocean. The ocean had always been a harsh mistress who gave as freely as she took. Storms would roll in, boats would roll over, and crews would disappear into the rolling black waters of the Bering Sea. No bombs or radiation would change that. Shikata Ga Nai.
Memory in this place was difficult to pin down, not because no one remembered the war or their lives before it, but because there was not one unifying memory to speak of. Refugees had filled the empty corners of the island, turning one thousand into ten thousand in a matter of five years. By nineteen-ninety-nine, the population had grown to almost twenty thousand. None were from the same country. Thousands made the journey across the Bering from the Kamchatka Peninsula, Soviet refugees came to seek refuge on an island where their ancestors had once forced the locals to hunt seals for profit. Thousands more came from Japan, one or two had even participated in the air raids during the Second World War. Still more came from the mainland, refugees from Anchorage and elsewhere fleeing from the radioactivity from the detonations at Elmendorf. Still others came from Asia, Koreans and Vietnamese who signed on with freighters and fishing boats who brought their families to the only safe haven that they knew of. Khmer Rouge survivors who had come to this place before the war in search of a better life for their family lived alongside Soviet sailors and Midwestern bomber pilots. Shikata Ga Nai.
Life was and still remains harsh in this place where the winters linger and where the unforgiving sea does not give up her bounty easily or without a price. Before the fishing boats came, and before the men of the fishing fleet arrived to make their fortunes on the rolling seas, the Aleuts had known hardship and deprivation. The island had given to them sustenance on the tundra and in the ocean, but they had always suffered. Their way of life had disappeared when the Russians arrived, bringing with them religion and the insatiable demand for seal pelt, but there had always been hope that they could return to the old ways again. When the bombs fell and the refugees arrived, the hope that the prosperity the crab fleets had brought could be leveraged to support the native communities disappeared along with the federal government that had only recently recognized their land claims. Whatever might have been was erased on that February day. Shikata Ga Nai.
For the refugees themselves, most of them left the war on the tarmac at Unalaska Airport or at the docks on arrival. Straggler Soviet patrol boats and American FB-111’s came to rest a half-mile from one another, but their conflict was left at the door. Above all else, survival was more important than winning. Even in the dark days of ’84, when Soviet and American forces killed one another in the radioactive ash, somehow or another Dutch Harbor survived and the peace was kept in the small town. Weather would kill as quickly as a .50 caliber round. Storms, hurricane force winds, freak gales, all threatened life and limb just as much as a Soviet thermonuclear warhead in this isolated place. Aircraft and ships found their way to the bottom of the Pacific in this place easily, either from cruise missile, torpedo, or freak wave. As the Japanese learned during the last war, fighting the elements in the Aleutians was a larger war than fighting the enemy. And so, in a community of refugees and immigrants seeking a quick profit in a community built as much on the dream of profit as the reality of hardship, the peace was maintained. Shikata Ga Nai.
Alaska was the last frontier of the United States, and this place was the frontier of the frontier. In the three decades that followed the day of fire, it was transformed into a place of sanctuary and refuge, a shelter from the storm. The Aleutians would always be wild and unspoiled, but civilization, even the truncated civilization that survived the nuclear holocaust, had found its way to this place. The irony for most residents was that it had taken the near-destruction of global civilization to transform this place from frontier into a center of civilization, even if just for the North Pacific. The fringes of society became the center of society, and those who made their lives and their homes on this small island believed that maybe when the history books were written, their little town would be more than a footnote. And still, through the travails and trials of the aftermath, men still went down to the sea in ships, seeking their livelihoods and fortunes upon the storm tossed black waters of the Pacific Ocean. Shikata Ga Nai.
I posted back last year in the P&S thread about dredging up some support regarding a P&S centered in Alaska around the small fishing community of Dutch Harbor. I know I'm kind of jumping the gun on this, but as I didn't receive any for or against voices in the open thread, I decided to give this a go and see what happens. For those of you who don't know or don't recognize the name it's the community that the Discovery Chanel show "Deadliest Catch" is filmed in. This is still in its early stages and I'm definitely still gathering information. I've got an introduction written, but I'd love to get some opinions and a few additional sets of eyes. The story would be set mainly in Dutch Harbor, but as there are plenty of fishing boats in the area, I would have them sending out expeditions to check on some of the other communities in the Aleutians and the mainland.
I decided to have this as a stand-alone story, as Chipperback's Land of Flatwater is set in Nebraska and the new P&S fic, The Island, is set in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. None of the other P&S stories have even mentioned Alaska other than in passing to reference the total destruction of Anchorage. Dutch Harbor seems like a pretty unlikely place to set a story in the post-nuclear war era, but its fairly self-sufficient. There's more than enough fuel up there to last at least one to two years, and the large amount of freighters from East Asia that made their way to Dutch even in the early 1980s' should give the community enough breathing room to find other sources of marine diesel. The cast of characters will end up mainly being the captains and crews of the fishing fleet of Dutch. Since my family and I spent quite a bit of time up there in the early 1990's, I know the names of quite a few of the captains from that era, but I'd be changing names as most of those people are still alive.
The Dutch Harbor naval base shut down in 1947/48 and the army base was closed about the same time, so there's no real need for the USSR to target it with an ICBM other than out of sheer spite. There were, however, two military targets in the Aleutians that the Soviets would be happy to take out:
-Shemya AFB, Shemya Island: USAF listening post, site of the COBRA DANE early warning radar station, location of a White Alice Communications System for USAF/USN communications in Alaska (rendered obsolete due to satellite communications but would likely be reactivated as a back-up to satellite coms during any US-USSR conflict, code-named PROJECT BLUEGRASS), location of several RC-135 Cobra Ball ICBM tracking aircraft used for intelligence gathering/ballistic missile tracking in Eastern Siberia and the Kamchatka Peninsula. Shemya would have been the primary Soviet target in the Aleutians in the event of a nuclear exchange with the USA.
-Naval Air Facility Adak/NAF Adak: US Navy base for P-3 Orion antisubmarine aircraft. At least 6,000 navy personnel and their families lived and worked on Adak in 1983 and it would have been a major Soviet target during the nuclear exchange. NAF Adak would have been able to base additional aircraft in a support role for operations at Shemya AFB. Adak served as a mid-way refueling station for USAF B-47's during the early Cold War and was considered the half-way point for flights from Elmendorf AFB to Shemya AFB at the end of the Aleutians.
Anyways, here's the first entry for "Shelter From the Storm." Let me know how it sounds. I'd love input from Chipperback and any others involved in the current P&S writing project! Enjoy!
Prologue/Introduction: Shelter from the Storm
Dutch Harbor, Alaska
July 12, 2013
The marine fog rolled in thick in the early afternoon, obscuring the hills and slowly melting snow banks from view. The tundra had come in later this year, thick green carpets of life covering the crumbling igneous rock that made up most of the islands of the Aleutians. Eagles cawed and called to one another, screeching as they flew low over the gravel roads and rooftops. Crows and smaller robins flew back and forth between rock crevices, black and brown specks against a white fog bank. Off in the distance, one of the new three story apartment buildings was under construction, a bizarre hybrid of American ghetto and Soviet cinder-block design. The population was too large now to be contained in the old base housing, which was itself on the verge of collapse. The army never built the fort to last, and the heavy snowfall and wet marine climate had rotted out most of the support beams in the barracks. It had taken five years to get the local support together to build the new apartment complexes and nobody had wanted to appropriate the money, but as the old Japanese captains would say, Shikata Ga Nai, it cannot be helped.
The first memorial to the war had been built down on the waterfront, next to the memorial plaques placed by the 86th Naval Combat Battalion during the war to commemorate the dead from the Japanese air raid. It was a simple thing, granite, with the Lord’s Prayer carved into it, below the phrase, “We Remained.” People out here did not need flowery rhetoric or oratory to remind them. Life was always harsh for the men and women who went down to the sea in ships. The Revenue Cutter graveyard with its row upon row of white crosses, Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic and Protestant, dug into the hillsides was reminder enough. No war would change the realities of life for the men who made their living taking sustenance and prosperity from the ocean. The ocean had always been a harsh mistress who gave as freely as she took. Storms would roll in, boats would roll over, and crews would disappear into the rolling black waters of the Bering Sea. No bombs or radiation would change that. Shikata Ga Nai.
Memory in this place was difficult to pin down, not because no one remembered the war or their lives before it, but because there was not one unifying memory to speak of. Refugees had filled the empty corners of the island, turning one thousand into ten thousand in a matter of five years. By nineteen-ninety-nine, the population had grown to almost twenty thousand. None were from the same country. Thousands made the journey across the Bering from the Kamchatka Peninsula, Soviet refugees came to seek refuge on an island where their ancestors had once forced the locals to hunt seals for profit. Thousands more came from Japan, one or two had even participated in the air raids during the Second World War. Still more came from the mainland, refugees from Anchorage and elsewhere fleeing from the radioactivity from the detonations at Elmendorf. Still others came from Asia, Koreans and Vietnamese who signed on with freighters and fishing boats who brought their families to the only safe haven that they knew of. Khmer Rouge survivors who had come to this place before the war in search of a better life for their family lived alongside Soviet sailors and Midwestern bomber pilots. Shikata Ga Nai.
Life was and still remains harsh in this place where the winters linger and where the unforgiving sea does not give up her bounty easily or without a price. Before the fishing boats came, and before the men of the fishing fleet arrived to make their fortunes on the rolling seas, the Aleuts had known hardship and deprivation. The island had given to them sustenance on the tundra and in the ocean, but they had always suffered. Their way of life had disappeared when the Russians arrived, bringing with them religion and the insatiable demand for seal pelt, but there had always been hope that they could return to the old ways again. When the bombs fell and the refugees arrived, the hope that the prosperity the crab fleets had brought could be leveraged to support the native communities disappeared along with the federal government that had only recently recognized their land claims. Whatever might have been was erased on that February day. Shikata Ga Nai.
For the refugees themselves, most of them left the war on the tarmac at Unalaska Airport or at the docks on arrival. Straggler Soviet patrol boats and American FB-111’s came to rest a half-mile from one another, but their conflict was left at the door. Above all else, survival was more important than winning. Even in the dark days of ’84, when Soviet and American forces killed one another in the radioactive ash, somehow or another Dutch Harbor survived and the peace was kept in the small town. Weather would kill as quickly as a .50 caliber round. Storms, hurricane force winds, freak gales, all threatened life and limb just as much as a Soviet thermonuclear warhead in this isolated place. Aircraft and ships found their way to the bottom of the Pacific in this place easily, either from cruise missile, torpedo, or freak wave. As the Japanese learned during the last war, fighting the elements in the Aleutians was a larger war than fighting the enemy. And so, in a community of refugees and immigrants seeking a quick profit in a community built as much on the dream of profit as the reality of hardship, the peace was maintained. Shikata Ga Nai.
Alaska was the last frontier of the United States, and this place was the frontier of the frontier. In the three decades that followed the day of fire, it was transformed into a place of sanctuary and refuge, a shelter from the storm. The Aleutians would always be wild and unspoiled, but civilization, even the truncated civilization that survived the nuclear holocaust, had found its way to this place. The irony for most residents was that it had taken the near-destruction of global civilization to transform this place from frontier into a center of civilization, even if just for the North Pacific. The fringes of society became the center of society, and those who made their lives and their homes on this small island believed that maybe when the history books were written, their little town would be more than a footnote. And still, through the travails and trials of the aftermath, men still went down to the sea in ships, seeking their livelihoods and fortunes upon the storm tossed black waters of the Pacific Ocean. Shikata Ga Nai.
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