In 1902, Eric Lee’s grandfather, Harold, emigrated from Norway and moved to Petersburg, a tiny fishing village on Mitkof Island.  Harold wrested his living from the sea, as did his son, Eric’s father, who helped pioneer the area’s king crab fishery with another fisherman in the 1960’s.  Eric himself began his career on the sea when he was twelve, and has spent most of the last thirty years fishing the waters of Frederick Sound and Chatham Strait, eventually as the skipper of his own boat.

The wild lands and waters of Mitkof Island have for decades sustained and inspired the Lee family.  As a youngster, Eric’s father, Eldor, roamed the forests on the southern half of the island, climbing mountains and swimming and fishing in Blind Slough, a sparkling inlet of calm water rich in king and coho salmon.  Eldor so loved the area that, soon after he married, he and three friends floated an old garage up the slough, where they skidded it up onto a bank. The garage became a cabin retreat where the Lees have gone ever since to fish, hunt, picnic, and pick berries in summer and ice skate in winter. 

One summer when Eric was still a boy, his family spent six weeks in the one-room cabin while his father helped build a water pipeline from Crystal Lake, which is tucked between the knees of the mountain overshadowing the slough.  Each morning, Eric’s mother packed a lunch for Eldor and canoed him down to the nearest bridge so he could climb the mountain in time for work.  Meanwhile, six-year-old Eric reveled in the gifts of the slough.  There was a day, he remembers, when he caught a minnow and, hands cupped, showed it to his mother.  “If we really had to live off the land,” he asked, “I’d have to eat this, right?”  Taken aback, she said, “Probably.” Before she could do more than gasp, Eric swallowed the fish whole.  He can still recall the struggling minnow tickling the inside of his stomach.

Quiet and introspective, Eric spent more and more time in the forest as a teenager, hunting, fishing, or patiently watching the wildlife around him.  As a young man, he left for Los Angeles, where he struggled to make a living writing screenplays.  When he eventually returned to Southeast Alaska, he was stunned by the changes that had taken place near his home.  “The rate of logging in the late seventies and eighties was just alarming,” he says.  “Many of the best places to hunt had been turned into hillsides of stumps and log slash.”

Eric joined with local conservationists to fight Forest Service timber sales on Mitkof Island.  He has experienced both victory and defeat.  Today, Mitkof is scarred by large clearcuts; the second-growth spruce and hemlock that are returning to the older sites provide poor winter habitat for the island’s Sitka black-tailed deer.  Other areas are slated for logging, particularly the southeastern corner of the island.  Eric has had the satisfaction, though, of seeing some prime bear and deer habitat near Blind Slough protected as an old-growth reserve. 

Today, Eric continues to reap the joys of living in Alaska’s temperate rainforest.  From the banks of the slough, he watches beavers renovate their lodges, weasels stalk the boundaries of their territory, and bears battle over spawning salmon in the shallows of the slough. 

In the stands of second-growth, it is quiet. The tightly packed trees have cut off the light to the forest floor and few plants or creatures live there.  As Eric says, “Wood pulp is renewable. Wilderness is not.”