KCAW

Piles of white plastic sacks line both sides of a small gravel lot in Sitka’s Gary Paxton Industrial Park. There’s around 90 of these bags, each about the size of a washing machine, stuffed with marine debris.

“I’m not sure what these buoys are for,” says Zofia Danielson as she picks up a bundle of oblong buoys resting near one pile’s base. Their red plastic has faded into a translucent orange from salt and the sun. “In the last two years, Sitkans have been finding them all across the sound.”

Danielson is the Sitka Sound Science Center’s managing scientist. She oversees the marine debris program that’s been gathering scraps along the coastline for the past year and a half. This summer, the team made a puzzling discovery at Inner Point on Kruzof Island.

“I imagine somebody scribbled it out and dropped it in the ocean as a reflection of how they were feeling at the time,” she says.

An ambiguous seven-line poem sprawls across a small piece of lined paper. It’s rolled up inside a glass bottle dotted with algae and sealed with a plastic cork.

“We all love to wax poetic about the ocean, about her many currents and storms, and I think truly the perfect storm brought the message in a bottle to Inner Point.”

Danielson says the crew isn’t sure where it came from or how long ago it was written. She says finding a message in a bottle is actually pretty common. But this one is a bit more cryptic than others they’ve stumbled upon in the past.

“Sometimes they have more of a story,” she says, “and sometimes they’re a little more of a mystery.”

And she’s leaving the contents of the poem a mystery too.

“It’s a message for the person and the sea,” Danielson says.

They found the bottle nestled in a stack of driftwood logs.

“It’s always a lucky find when you find something fragile in such a rugged landscape.”

Danielson says the wind, waves, and currents along the outer coast are the perfect recipe for marine debris to accumulate on the shore. They plan to go out on a total of 35 cleanup days this summer. When they do, a crew of four travels an hour or two from Sitka on a small vessel, then rows into shore on a dinghy.

“They crawl through the jungle gym of alder trees up in the high intertidal and wade through the dense beachgrass and cow parsnip to pick up plastic bottles and other smaller pieces of debris that can be hidden by the summer’s vegetation,” she says.

After several hours on shore, the team passes the debris in an assembly line onto the dinghy to take back to the boat. Once in Sitka, the collection is driven out to the lot at the industrial park to be weighed and documented.

The science center has a statewide database for marine debris cleanup efforts dating back to the early 2000s.

“Marine debris is an incredibly powerful tool for communication,” Danielson says.

With their findings, they can learn more about where debris washes up, how much accumulates over time, and the impact it has on intertidal plants and animals. Whether it’s a message in a bottle or a fishing net, Danielson says every piece of debris has a story to tell.

Steve Bethune, wildlife management biologist from ADF&G, joins KCAW for the Morning Interview to share best practices regarding bear activity this year in Sitka. Bethune oversees bears, deer, mountain goats, moose, and more on Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof Islands. Listen to the conversation here:

The 55th Sitka Music Festival wraps up this weekend. Violinist Yuriy Bekker, pianist Dominic Dousa, and Zuill Bailey, the festival’s artistic director, join KCAW to talk about the bonds created between the participating musicians and Sitka community. Bailey says the festival is “like a dinner party” that brings together some of the greatest musicians in the world. Listen to the conversation here:

“A loveable idiot, an obnoxious nuisance, and dramatic.”

That’s how Ben Hedrick describes their clown persona, aptly named Drama.

“Clowning is an art form where you essentially make yourself the butt of the joke,” they say.

You might spot Drama performing for tourists waiting in line for shuttles outside Harrigan Centennial Hall. 

“It’s like having a captive audience,” Hedrick says. “It’s a lot of fun, and I’ll just walk up and down the length, telling the same five bad jokes, because it’s a different audience every time, and I’ve only got so many.”

When lines are long and slow, Drama serves as a distraction. 

“I like to go out downtown, mostly when two criteria are met: when it’s a nice day out — because I don’t want to be out when it’s raining and windy and miserable — and if I have a day off from work, because it takes a while to put on the makeup and get all ready,” they say.

Before performing, Hedrick coats their face in white, adds black triangles above and below both eyes, and draws a red smile across their lips. They paint a bright red star over their right eye, in homage to one of their favorite artists. 

“The star is a nod to Paul Stanley from Kiss, just because I’m a fan of classic rock,” Hedrick says.

Drama’s full get-up includes a thrifted red button-up and vertically striped tights. Red and black scrunchies on their wrists act like cuffs. They wear suspenders clipped onto a pair of bloomers Hedrick sewed themself. 

They say they are aiming for a Shakespearean look because their clown name is Drama.

“I’m very into theater. I wanted to kind of embrace that with this clown character.”

20-year-old Hedrick remembers their first foray into theater. Despite the stage fright, they knew they found their calling after performing in a second grade play. And they’ve been stage acting ever since.

In middle school, Hedrick attended a two-week circus workshop at Sitka Fine Arts Camp, a yearly arts summer camp for kids from around the world. They say the first week was dedicated to showing the students things like clowning, juggling, and basic acrobatics. By the end of the second week, the campers had to choose one skill to showcase as a final performance.

“I noticed that nobody said that they were doing the Rolla Bolla,” Hedrick says.

That’s a wooden plank that rests on top of a rolling cylinder. It’s a prop used to boast one’s balancing skills. Hedrick says they initially went with the Rolla Bolla to be different, and the whole class — including the teacher — was shocked they didn’t choose clowning and was “practically yelling at me to change my answer.” 

So they did, and they ended up performing a pretty memorable clowning routine. 

“I didn’t think what I was doing was particularly special, but apparently my basic information on clowning that I already had struck a chord with people,” they say. “They enjoyed what I did, so that’s really where it started, and it laid dormant for a very long time.”

It wasn’t until last December that Hedrick, now in college, gave it another go. 

“I was bored, wanted to pick it up, and I just really committed this time,” they say.

Hedrick began documenting their progress and performances on social media. Since starting their page at the end of last year, they surpassed 33,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok. One video got over 1.3 million views. They taught themself how to juggle and make a clown horn sound with just their voice. 

“People have asked me several times if I’ve attended a clown college. I have not. It is harder to get into most clown colleges than Harvard.”

Instead, Hedrick studies theater and communications at the University of Alaska Fairbanks with the dream of becoming a professional actor one day. For now, though, they’re satisfied with the spotlight Drama has garnered. 

“Clowning is a very cutthroat industry if you’re trying to get into it seriously. Luckily, I have been fortunate enough to be in places where clowns aren’t a widely discussed topic,” they say. “I’m the only clown in Sitka, as far as I’m aware.”

And Hedrick intends to be the town’s only clown for the foreseeable future. 

Brave Heart Volunteers (BHV) is a nonprofit that offers free support services for Sitkans experiencing loneliness, grief, and end of life. BHV Director Nicole Miller and BHV Board Vice Chair Bridget Hitchcock alongside Liz Zacher, an art professor at the University of Alaska Southeast, join KCAW to share the mission of the organization and details about BHV’s upcoming fundraiser. Community members can purchase handmade bowls and enjoy free soup and bread from local restaurants June 28 at Centennial Hall starting at noon. Donations support the work of Brave Heart Volunteers. Listen to the conversation here:

Sitka Farmers Market kicks off this Saturday at ANB Founders Hall from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Debe Brincefield, the market’s manager, joins KCAW to share what visitors can expect to see: produce, pottery, and much more. The Sitka Farmers Market is every other Saturday starting June 27 through September 19. Listen to the conversation here:

Correction: A previous version of this story said the Sitka Farmers Market takes place every Saturday from June 27 to September 19. It only takes place every other Saturday.

Officials with a U.S. Department of Defense agency are preparing to exhume the remains of an unidentified WWII soldier known simply as “X-3” who is buried in the Sitka National Cemetery. They say it could be a man named Eugene Christensen, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Forces who they believe died in a plane crash in the Aleutian Islands Campaign in 1942. 

“We really don’t ever want unknown soldiers. We want them to be identified and returned to their family,” said Michael Livingston, a WWII historian who grew up in Cold Bay, Alaska, who’s been advocating to get X-3 disinterred and identified through DNA testing. “For the families that I’ve talked with that have unidentified [family members], it’s like a nagging hole that’s tearing at them that they want fixed.” 

In December of 1941, the Japanese Imperial Navy bombed Pearl Harbor, prompting the U.S. to declare war on Japan. Six months later, the Japanese Navy bombed Unalaska — also known as Dutch Harbor — a community about 800 air miles from Anchorage in the Aleutian Islands. The U.S. military responded, sending resources from Anchorage to the island community to help defend against the attack. 

“One of the planes crashed outside of Cold Bay, roughly between Cold Bay and Nelson Lagoon on the north side of the Alaska Peninsula,” Livingston said. “All the service members on that plane perished.” 

Sixteen soldiers were on the C-53 aircraft when it went down. The plane and 10 service members were never found. But Livingson said a local trapper found the remains of six soldiers who washed up on the shore and buried them in a temporary grave near his cabin until he could notify authorities. The military later recovered the remains and buried them locally in Fort Randall Post Cemetery. Five of the six recovered soldiers were identified. 

“Then, after 1945, when the war ended, the United States military dug up those remains and moved them to their respective communities,” Livingston said. “One of the remains was X-3. He was moved to Sitka, and we’ve been trying to get X-3 identified for a long time.” 

Livingston has been coordinating with 70-year-old Chris Pfeiffer in that effort. Pfeiffer believes X-3 is his maternal great uncle, 2nd Lt. Eugene Christensen of Nebraska. 

“We’ve always known that we lost a great uncle in the Aleutian Islands,” Pfeiffer said. “And here we are, 83 years later.” 

Pfeiffer, a military vet himself, said his great uncle went to college for one year before, at 21, he enlisted in the Army ahead of the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

Pfeiffer has gathered more than 800 pages of documents about Christensen and about the plane crash to help piece together the puzzle of his death. 

“Could it be my uncle? Yes. Could it not be? Yes. We have to manage our expectations on this,” he said.

Dr. Ian Spurgeon, a military historian and disinterment manager with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), agreed. He said all 11 unidentified soldiers from the plane crash are considered “likely candidates.”

“We have good, strong historical circumstances and association for these remains to this specific airplane crash, but because there’s 11 individuals still missing, in the past, the grave registration personnel could not confirm exactly who it was, and rather than make a misidentification, they declared the remains to be unidentifiable and buried them as an unknown service member,” Spurgeon said.

The DPAA is the agency under the Department of Defense in charge of recovering and identifying missing service members from World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Cold War. 

“We’re looking for over 80,000 Americans missing from conflicts worldwide, in the Pacific and Europe,” Spurgeon said.

He said their job is to combine the historical information — like circumstances of the crash and soldiers on board — with modern scientific techniques, including anthropology, odontology (studying teeth), and DNA testing, to identify remains. 

And the case of X-3 is kind of a big deal. Spurgeon said the DPAA has been looking at this case since 2017, and there aren’t many unknowns in the Sitka cemetery, or in Alaska as a whole. 

“This will be the very first unknown to be exhumed from Sitka, at least during DPAA’s time. Before that, it would have been previous Army efforts decades before,” he said. “So we’re kind of breaking new ground, both literally and figuratively.” 

But the disinterment could be a bit challenging. The grave is on a terraced hill, which won’t accommodate heavy equipment, so it’ll have to be excavated by hand. Spurgeon said Sitka’s cemetery is also prone to “subsurface movement.”

“There’s concern that the casket may have shifted a little bit underneath the ground and may not be directly located under the headstone,” he said. “And we want to make sure we do not dig up the wrong casket.”

If the casket has shifted, Spurgeon said they’ll have to stop the excavation and make a game plan to try again. He said it’s part of the military’s promise to its service members and families of soldiers to leave no one behind. 

“World War II may seem like a long time ago, but there are many, many living people who remember their brothers or their fathers or uncles who were lost during World War II,” Spurgeon said. “This is still within living memory, and a lot of those families passed down the memories and the mission of trying to bring their loved ones home.”

If X-3 turns out to be Christensen, Pfeiffer said he hopes to bury his great uncle’s remains in a Lutheran cemetery in Nebraska where the rest of his family lies. But if it turns out that X-3 is another unknown soldier, Pfeiffer said that’s okay too. 

“This is a positive story,” he said. “However it ends up, this is a really positive event.”

The DPAA will be in Sitka this week to disinter the remains of the unidentified soldier, known as X-3. If they’re successful, it could still take up to four years to officially identify the remains. 

Casting for Recovery is a national organization supporting women who have had breast cancer. Carol Butler, a volunteer with Casting for Recovery, joins KCAW to talk about the upcoming Alaska Native Women’s Retreat that seeks to create community and foster emotional healing. The all-expenses-paid fly fishing retreat will be on the Kenai River from Sept. 11 to Sept. 13. Applications are due July 16. Listen to the conversation here:

Sitka Fine Arts Camp will host Jazz on the Waterfront on June 27, honoring the music of Detroit with a 20-piece band. The sold-out event looks to fundraise for the restoration of North Pacific Hall where campers stay on the Sheldon Jackson campus. Roger Schmidt, the camp’s executive director, and Lucy Poulson, the development coordinator, join KCAW to talk about how these donations will transform the residence hall and what’s in store for Jazz on the Waterfront. Listen to the conversation here:

Law enforcement euthanized two more bears in Sitka, bringing the total to five this season. KCAW’s Lauren Salemo sat down with Steve Bethune, a wildlife management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, to discuss bear season so far and how the decision to dispatch a bear is made.

BETHUNE: People ask me all the time, is this a better year than last year? How does it compare to prior years? And I’ve been doing this a while now, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that every year is the same and every year is different. We always have bear issues. Nothing ever happens exactly the same as it did the year before, but I’m not surprised, necessarily, at what’s going on this year.

KCAW: What happened with the two removals from this past weekend?

BETHUNE: So, right off the bat, I just want to say that we don’t kill bears in Sitka just because there’s bears in Sitka. We take those decisions very seriously. No bears are ever killed for no reason. Anytime we remove a bear, it’s because we think there is a high likelihood of additional property damage and a potential threat to public safety. So we could choose not to remove these bears —and there’s a chance that nothing would happen — but we’re not willing to take that chance. People are more important than bears, and if there’s a potential that somebody could get hurt, we’re going to take that bear then out of the population.

This year, things seem to be very related to livestock and chickens, in particular. And so we were kind of watching that and seeing, oh, this is going to be be the year of the chickens. We had a sow and two grown cubs that seemed to be keying in on that food source, and then they killed a goat, and that was kind of like over the edge. What’s next is potentially somebody’s pet. So that was like the moment where, like, okay, the decision we’re gonna make is to remove this bear.

So we started looking for those bears. And so one of the bears this weekend was kind of a case of mistaken identity — a bear in the wrong place, the wrong time — that we thought might be the sow that we’re looking for, but still exhibiting behavior that warranted removal. And then the bear in Totem Park was a bear that had been allowing people to get pretty close to it. And there was information that suggested that bear might have a gunshot wound from a previous incident with the police department. Well, now we have a bear that’s potentially wounded. Those bears can be aggressive and tend to be more dangerous, and also we have people approaching, and so we needed to check out this bear. So we did, and we determined it was not that sow, it was just a bear doing bear things in its natural habitat.

We kind of left it at that, and kind of handed it off to the park service, like we’re going to have to do some people management here. But then later that night, that same bear did have a negative interaction with a person where it acted very aggressively and bluff charged somebody. And so that, combined with people approaching this bear closely, we decided this is too dangerous of a situation for people. So we’re going to protect people even if people are behaving poorly and making poor decisions, because, again, people come first even when they’re not acting wisely.

KCAW: How exactly do you come to that decision, and why is it necessary, as opposed to, say, just relocating a bear?

BETHUNE: Relocating bears doesn’t work. We’ve demonstrated that over and over and over with the department over the past 50 years. We’ve tried it on numerous occasions that it rarely works. Every situation is a little different, and I guess that’s kind of where my expertise and experience dealing with these over the years comes into play. Sometimes it’s a very quick decision; a bear will have some sort of action that we’re like, “Well, we’re going to do this now.” For instance, bears that kill pets, bears that break into homes, bears that break into garages, that’s an absolute over-the-line. Other times it’s a series of events that kind of escalate. It’s on a trajectory that it’s not going to come back from, and we often take preventative measures in these cases.

KCAW: What happens to the bears’ remains after they’re put down?

BETHUNE: The hides get skinned and we send them to Anchorage, and they get sold at it. We have an annual hide, horn, fur auction. The carcasses generally are taken to the transfer station because the meat is not palatable. Oftentimes the raptor center doesn’t want the meat because they’ve been shot with lead bullets, and so that poses a hazard to the birds they have there, and the meat’s not fit for human consumption, it’s not fit for animal consumption, just because of the high parasite loads in them.

KCAW: Anything else you’d like to tell Sitkans?

BETHUNE: Because the bears were focusing on livestock this year, I just want to reiterate electric fences for your livestock. Your electric fence needs to be part of your action plan before you even start to gather your animals. You need to have those in place rather than getting your animals and then figuring out what your fencing is going to be like, and you’ve got to do a really good job of it. You can’t just string one one line of electric fence around the top of your chicken coop and call it good. These are very resourceful animals. They’re going to figure out a way to defeat weak electric fence systems.