by Peter Twitchell
I want to share what I used to hear being talked about around our kitchen table when I was a boy in the early 1950s. Mom, Dad and their friends in the Kuskokwim area often reminisced – recalling the days in their teenage years when salmon came up the Kuskokwim River in abundance every summer and the people of the villages harvested enough fish for their winter feed.
In those years prior to my time beluga came up the Kuskokwim every summer and some were harvested and considered a delicacy. I myself never witnessed any when I was growing up.
That was until I began traveling to Anchorage in the 1960s. I used to see numerous beluga from the Wein Air Alaska F-27 jet as it came in for the landing in Anchorage.
At first numerous white specs in the Cook Inlet Bay, then more when I began commuting back and forth from Anchorage to Kenai in my Chevy ’52 model in the 1970s.
The people who hunted beluga on the Kuskokwim harpooned them.
I have one other fond memory of the Kuskokwim River. Our fishcamp and residence was 3 miles upstream from Bethel on the south bank. Most mornings I got up and went outside and gazed upon our beautiful Kuskokwim. The weather in the 1950s was calm – the Kuskokwim River reminded me of a mirror. It was as smooth as glass and not a ripple on it!
On those calm summer mornings the air was dead calm and warm until noon when the sun started burning. Fish campers always had a dark tan and looked healthy.
