Fish and Chips are Great: Reviving the Muktuk Marston Victory Garden in Unalakleet

Eunice Ryan with a giant Unalakleet grown turnip (Photo Courtesy Jeff Erickson)

I looked out the window at our garden beds after reading the headlines from The Wallstreet Journal and New York Times.  Both sources warned of possible food shortages.

            “If this thing truly does go sideways,” I said to Myra without taking my eyes from the small beds, “these gardens aren’t going to be enough to feed us and our neighbors.”

            “We need to plant more food,” was her response.

            Unalakleet, once the self-proclaimed garden capital of the state, is not covered with the crops that used to be seen in every yard anymore.  Granted, we are blessed by what the country gives us-- berries, fish, birds, moose, wild greens, sea mammals, but we import pretty much all of the vegetables we eat.  We pride ourselves on our subsistence lifestyle, but even with that bounty, there are many homes that don’t have food to last more than a couple of weeks.

            People used to have root cellars filled with potatoes and carrots and shelves filled with home-canned vegetables, but the steady supply of fresh produce in the stores has made life easy, and perhaps arguably not as healthy.

            “There is the potato farm,” Myra voiced.  “We could replant the potato farm with enough food to feed the whole community.  Potatoes are pretty easy to plant, easy to maintain, and give a good yield.”

            We began an online chat with some people in town that we thought would be interested in this kind of project.  The Marston Foundation was mentioned due their involvement in agriculture in Unalakleet in the past.

            The Marston Foundation is online (see resource section on the right side of this blog) and I shot off a quick note through their contact page expressing what we were looking at doing and how great it would be to continue Marston’s legacy on his homestead in Unalakleet.  I left my contact information and figured that was that.  According to their website, we were way past the deadline for any grant help.

            A couple hours later and my cell phone rang with an unknown number.

            “This is Blythe Marston with the Marston foundation…”

            I am not really sure how long it took for me to respond.  In all honesty, since reading Muktuk Marston’s book, Men of the Tundra, I’ve been a little bit of a fan.

            “Blythe Marston you said?”

            “Yes, I got your message about planting at my grandfather’s old homestead.  My dad and I are pretty excited about the idea.”

            “Blythe, I have to admit, I am kind of geeking out right now,” I laughed, “your grandfather is a kind of hero of mine.”

            The Marston foundation is named after Major Marvin “Muktuk” Marston, the founder of the Alaska Territorial Guard.  He was a lot of things: driven military leader, pioneer, advocate for native rights, and a strong proponent for agriculture in bush Alaska to name a few.

            One of the chapters in his book is entitled “Fish and Chips is Great,” and it outlined his plan for agriculture as the future of a self-sufficient bush Alaska with Unalakleet being his proving grounds.

            “Well, my dad and I think it is neat idea, and we would like to help you out.  Put together an informal proposal with what you think you will need to make it work, and we’ll bring it to the board.”

Potato field in front of a cache and fish rack full of fish.  Proof that we can truly feed ourselves with effort. (Photo Courtesy of Jeff Erickson)

             And so, the wheels began turning and a meeting of like-minded Unalakletians was called (social distancing was of course observed).

            “I’ve been meaning to till up that field anyway,” Brad voiced.  “I want to level it, and that seemed the best way to do it.  It would be good to put some hours on the camp tractor this summer.”

            Brad is the Bible Camp caretaker with the field that everyone in town refers to as the potato farm.

            “So how big do we go?” I voiced.

            Jeff who remembers working the old potato field piped up, “Do a whole acre.  We can till up enough for an entire acre and if we can find enough seeds to do that much, we plant the whole thing.”

            “I’ll start calling around for seed potatoes and fertilizer,” I offered.  “Would be nice to go an organic route with fertilizer to start rebuilding the soil.  Do I ask for tools?”

            “Go big- tools, water pump, seeds, fertilizer, worst they can do is say no,” Jeff said.

            Jeff’s wife Donna walked in on the already going conversation.

            “What are you guys talking about?” she asked.

            “Planting the potato field with the Marston’s help,” Jeff quickly summarized.

            “Oh, they are such nice people,” Donna said sweetly, “Muktuk’s grand-daughter stayed with us last year.  She is such a nice lady… what was her name again?  Blythe?”

            I sat and listened to Jeff and Donna’s memories of what the field had been when they were kids. 

            “We had to go and work that field as dorm kids at Covenant High,” Donna explained with a grin.  “We dug potatoes, carrots… we would race into the field and down to where the carrots were planted, pulling a handful out,” Donna’s eyes disappeared in her huge smile.  “Dunk them in the river to wash them and bite right in.  Sweetest carrots ever.”

            “This whole town was full of gardens,” Jeff added.

            “We would dig the potatoes,” Donna continued and pack them in sawdust in the basement of the dorms and eat potatoes all winter.  I worked at Brown’s lodge, and he got potatoes from the farm too.  I’d go down in the cellar and dig them out of the saw dust, come up wash them, run them through the French fry cutter… kerchunk,” she made the motion of operating the arm on the cutter, “made the best fries.”

            We adjourned our meeting and I typed up the proposal based off of the prices I was finding for seed and fertilizer online.

            Ms. Marston contacted me with a tentative $5500 for the project dependent upon board approval.  I scrounged around for seed potatoes.

            “I have some,” the voice on the other end of the phone replied, “how many do you need.”

            “1600 pounds,” I answered.

            “Oh boy, I can maybe get you 300.”

            Seems that in light of Covid-19 that our group was not the only one planting potatoes.  Pretty much all of the seed in the state was flying off the shelf.

            I called around finding seed suppliers that could fill part of my order, and it was beginning to look like we were going to have a collection of seed from every potato dealer in the state.

            “I don’t have a lot of variety,” Jeff at Alaska Specialty Crops told me over the phone, “but I can maybe help you… how much do you need?”

            I went through my spiel explaining the project and that we were partnering with the Marstons.  I expected the same answer I had gotten on every other call concerning the ability to fill part of the order.

            “Yeah, as long as you are okay with Yukon Gold and Cal White, I think I can do that,” Jeff responded. 

            “I don’t have the money yet, but Marstons said I could probably get it,” I explained.

            “I’ll put the seed on hold for you for a couple of days.  I respect the Marstons, and their name is good with me. I have done some work with them going out to bush communities for garden consulting and I have talked back and forth with them about bush food access issues.  I get them for a buck a pound… I can deliver them to the airport for you for a buck and a quarter.”

            Calling around for organic fertilizer was a similar experience until reaching a person at Susitna Organics.

            “Yeah, I can deliver a full pallet of bags (60x 20 pound bags) for a little over seven dollars per twenty pounds, but I can sell you a super sack (900 pounds) for $3.33 per twenty pounds delivered to the airport.”

            Blythe wrote me with an update saying we got the go ahead for the $5500 and that I should check with the air carriers to see if they would be willing to donate freight.

            It was a couple day process, but Everts Air Cargo agreed to haul the first 1000 pounds of potato seeds for free and charge us 83 cents a pound for the remaining 600.  Northern Air Cargo agreed to hauling the 900 pounds of compost for free.

            And now, word is getting around town.  People are excited to see the field planted and growing again.  They are excited to work it, learn the skill, teach their kids, be outside, growing food for themselves and their community.

            The goal, when the harvest comes in, is to sell the potatoes at a low price to the consumer… basically just enough to build a little fund to supply seeds, fertilizer, and increase our variety of crops next season.

            Marston dreamed of a self-sufficient, locally grown Unalakleet.  That vision took a short vacation, but with the help of some very generous sponsors seems to be back on course.

           

Beautiful Unalakleet Garden where the church and parsonage stand today (Photo Courtesy Jeff Erickson)

The Ptarmigan and Rabbit Budget

Two young, happy hunters with meat for the pot.

“What do you want me to get out for dinner?” I asked Myra from the kitchen as she got ready for work.

            “Ptarmigan stir fry sounds good,” she responded from the back bedroom.

            I grabbed a Ziploc of frozen grouse-like bird from the freezer and moved it to the fridge.  I could pull the frozen stir-fry vegetables out as the bird was frying in the cast iron later.  The Ziploc I grabbed was a lot like the other ones in the freezer each containing a couple of birds or maybe a couple rabbits.  The grouse we had shot in the early fall were by this time all gone.

            I put the frozen birds still in the bag in the sink to thaw out.  It was just the meat: skinned out breasts and little stubby drum sticks.  Mixed with some Yoshida’s, the stir fry vegetables, and served over a fresh bed of long grain white rice, and we had the makings of a gourmet, organic, locally sourced meal.

            We felt like we were adulting pretty well, two twenty-five-year-olds walking down the hill to work from our trailer house where meat was thawing for dinner that night.

            The thing was, it wasn’t about being organic, healthy, trying to join some back to the land movement, or being locally sourced.  We were young, newly married, and broke.

            Myra, God bless her, had married a man who had gone to a private Christian liberal arts college and now was carrying the bill that went along with it.  Granted, she also went to a private Christian liberal arts college… there was a $20,000 difference between the four years she intelligently took to make it through and the five I took.  Scholarships and summer work had pretty much covered all of her schooling, and had covered the first four of mine.

            Shortly after getting married, we sat down and discussed our finances and the strategy we were going to take to manage them.

            “We have no money and we’ve got a bunch of debt,” Myra pointed out as she opened the discussion.

            “We have jobs, and can try to almost buy nothing,” I added.

            “Yeah,” Myra agreed, “if we keep spending to a minimum, do very little travel, and put one of our checks a month toward the loans, we can have them paid in a couple of years… and, we can sell my truck.”

            “Are you sure,” I asked knowing how much Myra loved her new truck.

            It was a fully loaded, brand new, Chevy S-10 with the off-road package.  It was very much Myra.  

            “We don’t get a chance to drive it very often, but are still paying on it every month,” she pointed out.  “It makes sense to let it go.”

            I can still remember her being brave as we walked (didn’t have a ride or money for one) away from the dealership on the day we sold it.  We really didn’t say much as we made our way to the airport to fly back out to the village.

            We walked everywhere.  I’m not sure if things were really built to last longer then, or we were just built to make them last longer, but our hiking boots saw multiple seasons even with the mileage they were getting put on them.

            Myra would grab a hold of one end of our cooler, I’d take the other, and we would walk the couple of miles out to Mukluktulik to see if we could manage to put a couple of silvers in it.  People would pass us on four-wheelers on our way. 

            Roger Nassuk, an elder in the community, stopped next to us to talk as we took a break, “You two are the only Eskimos left in this town,” he laughed with his characteristic heh, heh, heh.  “Walk to fish, walk to hunt, walk, walk, walk.  Nobody does that anymore.”

            I smiled at hearing the pride in Roger’s voice.  He was giving us a compliment, and as a man new to Alaskan life with Irish genetics evident in my glowing white skin, I appreciated it.  Myra’s dad had known Roger when they were both younger, and his comment gave a nod to her upbringing.

            On good days, we would walk back with a half-dozen thick, orange silver filets (filets were lighter than whole fish) in the cooler.  On slow days, we would still walk back.

            When in Anchorage, each time I would enter a sporting goods store, I’d check the price of shotgun shells and pick up a couple boxes if the price was right (this is still a habit I have).  I averaged around four bucks a box for #6 lead 12-gauge shells.  20 shot shells per box made for 20 cents a shell.  If I was careful, I could put enough meat on the table for both of us for 60 cents.

            I would put on my hiking boots, strap on my snow shoes, and head north of town where ptarmigan had been spotted.  Though no longer stylish, my Columbia Bugaboo ski jacket was the perfect ptarmigan coat.  It had a million pockets.  I’d stuff loose shells in three or four of them and trudge across the snow banks looking for white birds on a white landscape.

            Once I got used to seeing them, they stood out like sore thumbs: little white footballs waddling across the open tundra.  If I was by myself, a couple quick shots would put two down and I watched to see where the flock landed after their short flight away from me.  If Myra was with me carrying our other shotgun, we’d count three and each drop a bird before they could take off.  I’d stuff the two birds into a coat pocket and then follow the flock, repeating the process until light had waned, my shells were gone, or my pockets were full.  Unloading my jacket was an interesting process when I got home, much like watching clowns come out of a car, ptarmigan would just continue to materialize out of my pockets.

            The birds would get skinned, rinsed, and thrown into Ziplocs.  Myra has forever been an accountant at heart, and she would figure out how many birds we needed to last us to spring.  Each subsistence activity received the same accounting exercise.

            “1 filet per meal, 2 filets per fish, 1 meal per week, 4 weeks per month, September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May,” she would count through until we would be on summer break again.  “36 filets, 18 fish we need to put away.  More, and we have fish more often.”

            Not only did we forget what beef tasted like, our bodies refused to digest it when we did get a taste.  Flour, sugar, and butter were cheaper than baking mixes and so everything was made from scratch.  I felt like a pioneer when we would go through the checkout on our rare trips to town: coffee, sugar, flour, rice, bacon, and ammunition.  The clerk must have thought we had a covered wagon parked in the lot out front, but we were slowly climbing out from under our debt.

            Easter day 2004, Myra and I headed up the road (we bought a last year’s model snow machine with a small loan) toward Devil’s Hill where we put on snow shoes and walked the draw that went between it and Star Mountain.  Rabbit seemed like an appropriate budget meal for Easter Dinner, and so a tradition was born.

An Easter rabbit hunt

            People would ask how we prepared our rabbit and ptarmigan.  Considering it was a meat we ate sometimes two or three times a week, we had quite a collection of recipes.

            “There’s ptarmigan fajitas, ptarmigan stir fry, ptarmigan and noodle soup, roast ptarmigan, breaded ptarmigan, ptarmigan on the grill with salt, shish kabob ptarmigan, bbq ptarmigan, ptarmigan sandwiches,” in my best Bubba from Forest Gump voice, “yeah, that’s about it…  that’s about all you can do with ptarmigan.”

            One evening Myra was feeling extra brave in her culinary experimentation and recommended ptarmigan breakfast burritos for the next day made with breast meat she would grind the night before.

            “So what do you think?” she asked the next day after I took my first bite.

            “I may need some water,” I answered.

            “A little dry?” she asked concerned.  “Oh boy,” she continued after she took her first taste, “yeah, probably not.”

            She walked to the pan, picked it up, and poured it into the garbage.  Ptarmigan and rabbit are pretty versatile meats, but even they have their limitations.

            Finances were pretty tight still when we added kids to our family.  Ptarmigan and rabbit became not only food, but a means of teaching our young hunters how to provide for themselves.  And, it meant that with kids who wanted to go look for birds every day that we had a constant stream of ptarmigan and rabbits making its way into our freezer and frying pan.

            Grouse season would open up in the fall, and we would hunt the trails for them.  Snow would fall and the grouse would be scarce in Koyuk, but then the ptarmigan would show up in flocks, sometimes crashing into the power lines of town, and we would put on snow shoes and walk the willow lines for them.  Summer would come and we would start putting fish and berries in the freezer.  We lived on the subsistence calendar with the school calendar being placed over top of it.  Money was not as scarce and so we did a little traveling, but we pretty much relied on the countryside to fill our freezer and help stretch our dollars, paying down our loans.

            Small game like grouse, ptarmigan, and rabbits have populations that go on cycles.  They boom, with predator populations following suit until reaching a peak and crashing before starting over again.  Life goes in seasons.  When we were in need, the bird and rabbit population just happened to be there.  The population began to go down in the cycle, but our financial need was not as large, and life found us in a season with less time to hunt.

            We have started over with another batch of kids… Ellen is 3 going on 4 and has expressed a desire to begin hunting (interestingly enough, the rabbit and ptarmigan populations are on the upswing again).

            “Let’s put the boat in the river and go fishing,” Ellen said as we drove across the bridge spanning the ice-filled slough.

            “It isn’t quite time yet, Bub,” I explained, “it is more spring duck season right now.”

            Ellen’s eyes were drawn to a pintail flying across the road as she continued, “So let’s go shoot ducks then.”

            Who knows what seasons and cycles life will hold in the future, but hopefully they will involve chasing birds and rabbits with our little girl. 

Black hair on my head, white hare in my hand, and one of my best friends with me.