Читать книгу The Ship, the Saint, and the Sailor - Bradley G. Stevens - Страница 14

CHAPTER 7

NEW

DIRECTIONS

SUMMER-WINTER 2002: ONE DAY IN the summer of 2002, Dave McMahan walked into my office at the Kodiak Fisheries Research Center (KFRC). Dave was the chief archaeologist for the State of Alaska Office of History and Archaeology and worked in Anchorage. His job primarily involved managing, documenting, and protecting archaeological resources on state lands, including submerged lands. He investigated historical sites, such as “the Castle” that Alexander Baranov had built as his home and headquarters in Sitka, and occasionally human bones that turned up when modern humans disturbed ancient (or not-so-ancient) gravesites. Dave had just completed his certification as a scuba diver and had developed an interest in marine archaeology. He knew Mike Yarborough, who had suggested that Dave should come see me.

“What do you know about the Kad’yak?” he asked.

“Oh, a little bit,” I teased. “Let me show you.” It was like taking the cork out of a champagne bottle. I opened my mapping program and showed Dave all the lines I had drawn on the computer. After many years of drawing with pencils on paper charts, I had finally graduated to using electronic charts. I could draw lines all over them, then just as easily erase them and start over. Somewhere in that morass of red lines lay the Kad’yak. Dave’s eyes lit up. He knew I was interested in the ship but he didn’t know that I had done so much work on it. Over the next hour we talked about the Kad’yak and what it meant for the history of Alaska. There had been lots of shipwrecks during the period of Russian Colonialism, but none of them had ever been found. Most were poorly documented, and their locations were not well known. But the Kad’yak was well documented and still could possibly be found. If discovered, it would be the first ship from the Russian period ever to be located. Dave knew a number of other archaeologists around the country who he thought would be willing to help. He put me in contact with Dr. Tim Runyan, Director of the Maritime Heritage program at East Carolina University (ECU), in North Carolina. As soon as Dave walked out of my office, I was on the phone with Tim. That connection was the missing link in my quest.

Tim’s specialty was investigating shipwrecks of the East Coast. His biggest accomplishment to date was locating the Queen Anne’s Revenge, reputed to be the flagship of Blackbeard the Pirate. It had been scuttled in Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, and Tim had been working on it for several years. But he was also interested in the Kad’yak. In fact, he had a Russian graduate student who wanted to do her thesis on the ships of the Russian-American Company. We immediately agreed to collaborate on a proposal to search for the ship. I would provide the local expertise, and Tim would provide the archeological credentials.

We put our heads together and came up with a plan. By early December, we wrote and submitted a pre-proposal to the NOAA Ocean Exploration Program (OEP). Now all we had to do was wait.

JANUARY 2003

On January 15, I received a letter from the Ocean Exploration Program saying that our pre-proposal had been approved and a full proposal was requested. I was ecstatic. I spent the next three days working frantically on the proposal, putting in all the details I could and poring over the budget details. When I had done as much as I could, I emailed it to Tim. I expected to submit the proposal through my agency (NMFS), and I needed the budget details for the ECU folks. Over the next few days, I checked my email hourly, expecting some response from Tim. It wasn’t until Wednesday, January 22, that I finally got a message from him, saying that he was working on the proposal and would get back to me as soon as he could.

The next morning, I called Tim to ask about the proposal. We decided that it would be better for ECU to submit the proposal, with my agency as a subcontractor. That was easier for me because I would not have to fill out all the paperwork required to have it approved by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC) in Seattle, a process that would add two or three days to the preparation time. Tim also said they wanted to beef up the methods descriptions. I was fine with that, though I thought it was fairly complete when I wrote it.¹

TIME DRAGGED ON. I WENT in to my office at the KFRC over the weekend and checked my mail several times but found no messages. On Friday, I contacted Dave Kaplan, Director of the Baranov Museum, and Balika Haakanson, a teacher at Kodiak High School, and requested letters of support from them. They responded positively and provided us with very supportive letters of recommendation. I was very happy with that, especially with the opportunity to help Balika develop a lesson plan around the project for middle school science students. I also received a letter of support from Stefan Quinth, a Swedish filmmaker who wanted to videotape the search. Stefan was an internationally recognized nature photographer who had spent several years crashing through the brushy thickets and salmon streams of Kodiak Island to film the great Kodiak bears, and he was well known around Kodiak as somebody who could film just about anything.

The day before the full proposal was due to be sent out, I finally got an email from Tim. He wanted to keep the budget under $90,000 and wondered if we could cut the boat schedule from fourteen to eleven days and include more salary for one of his employees. I originally had only wanted six days of boat time. Eleven should be plenty, but I felt like the budget was getting whittled away with salaries. What were all these people going to do? The real work was in the logistics, diving, and on-site supervision, and I was reluctant to see too much of the budget go into salaries. We needed boat time and equipment. I needed a new drysuit. At this rate, I didn’t think I’d get to see Tim’s budget until it was too late to change anything.

A week went by, during which I checked my email anxiously, waiting for a copy of the proposal. Nothing. Finally, I received a notice from NOAA OE that they had received the proposal. But where was my copy? Another week went by. Again, I called Tim to ask him about it. He had been too busy to send me a copy, but he’d get it out as soon as possible. A few days later, it showed up. As it turned out, it wasn’t radically different from my original version. The ECU folks had added in costs for leasing their equipment, the magnetometer, and side-scan sonar—the latter of which I though would be useless in Icon Bay—plus their overhead costs. The final budget was a whopping $136,000. This seemed crazy. I supposed it really cost that much to do what we said, with travel and salary for all those people. But I really was beginning to wonder: Was all this necessary just to go search for a ship? After agonizing over it for several weeks, I finally decided just to let it go and hoped that the proposal would get funded.²

MARCH 2003

Over the past two months I was extremely busy in the lab, since I didn’t have a field research project this spring. Nonetheless, I managed to let other things get in the way, like travel. I got invited by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans to help review their stock assessment procedures for snow crabs, and for some reason I agreed. Two weeks later, I was flying off to frozen Newfoundland. St. John’s was cold, windy, and bleak, but I enjoyed spending time there. As I got used to the place I began to realize how similar it was to Ireland. The little pubs, fish & chip shops, and tea shops were so similar. If I sat and listened to the brogue, I could easily imagine myself in a pub in Galway.

A week after returning from Newfoundland, I learned that I had been awarded a year of funding by the North Pacific Research Board to study blue king crabs. I was surprised and elated. I would have enough funding to buy a new microscope, hire a full-time technician, and travel to scientific meetings. But that same week, I also heard that the Kad’yak project did not get funded. My high was brought to a low. To say I was greatly disappointed would be an understatement, and I couldn’t bring myself to read the reviews and comments on the project. But I didn’t have time to think about it or talk to Tim about it because I had to leave town again.

APRIL 2003

Early this month, I took a bunch of middle school students in a hand drumming group called the Kodiak Island Drummers, or KID, to perform at the Camai Fest, a big Alaska Native Dance Festival. KID was started by Michael Daquioag, who was the director and teacher. Having been a drummer (professional and otherwise) since the age of thirteen, I offered to help co-teach the group. The group included about fifteen students and a few adults, and we played on African drums called djembes and djun-djuns, as well as congas, bongos, and tube-shaped drums called tubanos. I wrote and taught some of the arrangements. Most of the time we played in Kodiak, but every year we took the kids on a trip somewhere in Alaska with funds we raised from our concerts.

Camai Fest was held in Bethel, way out in Western Alaska, though it took only an hour by jet from Anchorage. People came in from villages a hundred miles away on snow machines, traveling down frozen rivers or across the tundra for the festival. KID performed three times for a half hour each, a very generous performance schedule, especially compared to our fifteen-minute set that we were allowed at the Anchorage Folk Fest last year. There were many Native dance performances at the festival, and the more I watched, the more I was able to see the differences in costumes and dance styles from all the different villages. It was a wonderful trip and helped me forget about work for a while.

But I was back to crabs the following week when I traveled to New Orleans for a meeting of the National Shellfisheries Association. I thought I would have an incredible time enjoying the music there, but after a day and a half wandering around in the French Quarter without finding much in the way of real jazz, I was ready to go home. Eventually I found my way to Snug Harbor Bistro, outside the tourist zone, where I sat in the front row listening to Charles Neville wail away on his sax with a quintet in a tiny historic bar. The drummer was amazing, barely eighteen years old. I sat back and sighed. This was what I came for.

ALMOST AS SOON AS ARRIVING in NOLA, as they call it, I had a sore throat, and soon I was coughing constantly. Even though I had planned to stay an extra day past the meeting, I went home a day early instead. As it turned out, several of our adult drummers also caught the same coughing crud during our trip to Bethel.

I was sick for over a month with the cough. It just wouldn’t go away. I couldn’t do any scuba diving, and I was still depressed about the rejection of our proposal. I was in a complete funk. Eventually I resigned myself to the fact that we would not be searching for the Kad’yak this year. Only then did I finally get enough courage to read the reviews of the proposal. It must have been pretty bad to be rejected, especially with Tim Runyan as the project leader. In scientific research projects, the lead researcher is called the principal investigator, or PI for short. Tim would be our PI.

The proposal reviews included a number of minor comments, but two in particular seemed to be the source of rejection. All my worry about budget inflation were for naught because one reviewer concluded that we had not asked for enough money for various aspects of the project, particularly the public outreach section and materials to develop a school curriculum for teachers. The other reviewer’s comments were particularly stinging; he did not think this project was of national significance. Never mind the difficulties of the search, the unknowns, uncertainties, and general crapshoot nature of the project. It wasn’t of national significance. In other words, even if we did find the ship, it wasn’t important enough to the nation to spend research funds on it. Imagine. I was steamed.

One aspect of the rejection took on a positive side, though. I realized I wouldn’t have any major obligations toward research projects this fall. Usually at that time of year, all of our crab projects go into maintenance mode. The molting and mating season would be over, my experiments with juvenile crabs would be wrapped up, and then the fall would be spent mostly just keeping things alive while I analyzed data and worked on manuscripts and publishing. With the crab work slowed down and no funding to search for the Kad’yak, that meant I could go do something I had thought about for a long time. It was time to think about going to work on a temporary assignment somewhere else for a while.

The somewhere I had in mind was NOAA headquarters, and the particular assignment was something I wanted to develop at the National Undersea Research Program. Besides, my boss, Bob Otto, was dropping hints that he wanted to retire or resign his position as lab director. If that happened, things would certainly change for me. Either I would be hired to replace him and have a lot more responsibilities as the new director, or someone else would be hired for the job and would be putting a lot of Bob’s responsibilities on me. If I was going to leave town for a while to pad my resume, this was the time to do it.

Once again, plans to search for the Kad’yak were put on the back burner. But not for long.