Evangel Island Journey 6C (the third of three articles based on Larsen Bay)
The Evangel’s Last Journey to Larsen Bay (1964), and a Return in 1998
By Timothy Smith (revised and expanded in 2020)
Part One: The EVANGEL’s Last Journey to Larsen Bay, 1964
Features photos from 1959-
The village in the early 1960’s. Top left: a small portion of Larsen Bay cannery’s
many large buildings. To the far left is the spit of sand where amphibian planes
loaded and unloaded. Top right: Dad and my big sister Jerilynn put new siding on
the front of the chapel while my younger brother Kelly plays in the foreground (1961).
Above: the beach below the village in the mid-
It is our family’s last journey to Larsen Bay aboard the Evangel, although I am too
young to know it yet. It is late spring of 1964, and the mission boat has been abruptly
sold by a distant and distracted Baptist mission board, and will soon never again
venture beyond the waters of Chiniak and Marmot Bays. But on this particular morning
such thoughts are far from me. I am happy and well-
The first few houses of my first home town are clearly visible before I wake Dad.
Although it’s an unobstructed channel and an uncomplicated cruise to the massive
docks of the Alaska Packers Association cannery, it is still a little beyond my talents
as a learning eleven-
I climb a twisted, rusting steel ladder up to the dock, juggling the first of many
bags, boxes and paraphernalia needed for a week-
Within a few steps I reach what has always been the most terrifying part of my journey,
a passageway between cannery buildings which houses the long row of diesel generators.
The iron grating reveals a series of huge radiators, belching heat. The noise is
deafening, and the exhaust pipes far overhead are not nearly high enough to prevent
diesel fumes from nearly choking me. To a boy’s imagination, walking past this machinery
is the same as trying to survive a gauntlet of dragons. For a boy raised on the water
and well-
The Boys and Their Planes:
Above: Little Timmy Smith, back to camera, watches fascinated as the Kodiak Airways “Easter Egg” Widgeon (for its colorful paint scheme) is unloaded on the sand spit next to the cannery in Larsen Bay, circa 1956. Norman and Joyce are barely visible to the left of the tail. For more on my fascination with the old Grumman amphibians, see the “How to Get to Kodiak” articles at this website.
The plane sequence -
Eventually the massive dock suddenly gives way to a shaggy trail of beach gravel
bordered by tall, pale green beach grasses. The APA cannery superintendent’s house
stands off by itself in a sea of beach grass like a Cape Cod cottage, sporting new
gray paint and white-
Beyond the footbridge, the trail is essentially a worn spot along the beach, subject to the clutter and erosion of tides and storms. Being heavy laden with our summer materiel, I take a shortcut through the yard of the old gray former schoolhouse, now occupied by our good friend, Edith Swan, and her mother, my adopted Grandmother Alice Aga, now scarred and bedridden since a terrible fire destroyed her home. Edith rushes out to greet us; Grandma Aga has a mirror propped up at bedside to observe the bay, and has seen us arrive. We have not even had a chance to reach our warehouse before we have been invited to come to dinner sometime. I will spend some poignant moments at Grandma Aga’s bedside, discussing school and little boy projects as though there were nothing else for her to talk about. And I will be nearly dumbstruck by the wreckage left by her horrible burns, shamed that I can’t act more “normal” around her, yet pleased at all the deep love and friendship that is still there. Within a year, Dad will be flown in to conduct her funeral. But today, I just smile and wave, and call a cheery hello into the doorway before continuing on up the trail with the luggage.
Just past Edith Swan’s home, the old schoolhouse, is the diminutive chapel, its little
bell tower gleaming white against the violent green summer foliage of dandelions,
pushki and assorted other weeds. We have it easier now than when we made Larsen Bay
our winter home in the fifties, for at the crest of the bluff is a new long-
I turn past the chapel to the warehouse Dad built in 1957, a large building by village
standards, which is divided into two large rooms. We will live in the front room
for the duration of our stay, and I will find amusement on rainy days looking through
the amazing assortment of paraphernalia stacked floor to ten-
Left: A Vacation Bible School in the summer of 1961 in front of the little chapel in Larsen Bay. It must have been silly hat day. My sisters are at the far left in the back, and I’m in the middle with my chin in the air for some reason.
Below left: a Vacation Bible School group meets in the front room of our “warehouse,” in the summer of 1960. Notice the prehistoric PowerPoint called a “flannelgraph” with figures that stuck to flannel cloth and could be peeled and stuck multiple times. Mom is in the blue top, with my sister Robin beside her. I’m the one sticking his head up at the far end of the table. Notice the plywood walls with white and green paint. The sliding door led to a storage room.
Below: the “warehouse” as it was nearing completion, 1957
Dad and Mom busy themselves with unloading and sorting and cleaning up. Big sister
Robin starts sweeping the plywood floor, and then starts hanging old blankets on
the inside clotheslines to serve as makeshift bedroom partitions. Not much for young
Kelly to do, so he fishes around in his sea bag and finds a little plastic tugboat,
and sets about building a dock for it using some old books he’s found in a Blazo
box shelf. Mom has unpacked the few stored cooking pans and is noisily laying them
out on the stone-
On the way back to the dock, I wonder where my best friends, Stanley and Roy, might
be hiding. Not even Sootball has seen fit to accompany me. I gingerly coax the five-
In a few minutes, the chores are done, all is ready and livable, the stove is lit
and I am cut loose to go play. Judging by the afternoon sun, it will be many hours
before hunger and tiredness drive me homeward. The well-
Boys don’t catch up by talking about stuff, but by doing stuff, and Roy has recently
made a swing in the cottonwoods behind his house, so we amuse ourselves by seeing
how far out over the swampy creek we can swing. The boys have more practice, since
it’s their swing, and it’s a crude affair, no seat, no loop, and only a large knot
tied on the shaggy rope to hold onto. Nevertheless, we invent a crazy little collision
game with the swing and soon lie exhausted and happy among the dandelions. By some
unknown sixth-
Left: A group of Vacation Bible School kids play a game outside the chapel in 1961. The new white siding on the front of the chapel is partially completed. Piles of lumber, empty oil barrels, and logs on the beach all made for impromptu play materials for village kids like me. Right: My brother Kelly and me on the beach at Larsen Bay, summer of 1964. I always thought the pattern of trees on the mountain across the bay looked like secret writing! (My sister Robin took this photo)
Pushing myself away from the table, I get assigned the task of ringing the bell in
the little chapel (nice and slow now, nice and slow—it’s a worship service, and not
a fire!) From out of a dozen or so tarpaper and tin dwellings come young and old,
back to the brown chairs and long benches of the little chapel once again. Our dog
Sootball places himself squarely in the middle of the floor in the bell tower entrance
as if to stand guard, but promptly curls up and sleeps. He is in full snore before
the end of the song service. We’re using the white, red and blue spiral-
Dad announces a closing hymn, #128, “Now I Belong to Jesus,” and we stand for the
liturgical benediction. We recite, “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation
of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight...” We are not even through the first phrase
when Sootball, as if on some angelic cue, leaps to his feet, charging out of the
bell tower at full clip, barking furiously up and down the trail to clear the path
for the soon-
In the strange way of springtime in the northern latitudes, our evening vespers have
left a lot of evening still to enjoy. Even with the mountains that flank Larsen Bay,
the sun still has a couple of hours to kill before setting in orange twilight to
rise again in the very early morning. Overjoyed at the prospect of still more playtime,
I find myself in an impromptu game of tag with a village girl that I have known since
we were babies. The game continues furiously in prepubescent innocence, until we
both collapse on the steps of the bell tower. We stare absently off into space as
is the village custom when conversations get serious. “Do you know a lot about God?”
she asks. I nod, and launch into an earnest, if simple explanation of faith. I quote
one of the verses featured at the end of all those Moody Bible Institute filmstrips,
and give a childlike explanation of it. But I am an eleven-
Our little dinghy is tied down at the beach, and I untie it and row out onto the
bay. The water is glassy calm, and the golden light of the waning sun intersperses
with the ebony shadows of the mountains in the little ripples that my oars create.
I row out a few yards from shore and take an appreciative look at the quaint houses
and long shadows. As the dinghy slows to a halt, another consequence of the calm
air catches up to me: a murderous herd of tiny gnats called “no-
Two Grandmas in Town!
Shortly after my brother Kelly was born in 1959, my Grandma Iva Smith, Dad’s mom, flew up to Alaska from her home in Washington State to help out our family. So when we spent a week in Larsen Bay that summer, I got to hang out with my real Grandma Smith and my adopted Grandma Alice Aga from the village. I never got a chance later to ask Grandma Smith what she thought of that visit and our village life.
Left: I’m standing between two grandmas at the entrance to the chapel after a service. Below: Dad is leading singing at a campfire near the entrance to Larsen Bay, and I’m sitting between my grandmas. My sister Robin has a white skirt, and Jerilynn is in a red jacket. Mom is on the far right. Wonder what song we were singing? Beach logs like these feature in the next part of the text below.
Stanley McCormick hails me excitedly from the shore, and I secure the dinghy and
join him. As we run down the beach, he makes good on his previous promise of a raft.
We near the pilings of an ancient and leaning boathouse, and beneath it is the sorriest
excuse for a raft ever invented by optimistic children. Most of the logs are under
water even before we clamber aboard. Its limited buoyancy is the result of using
driftwood from the tideline. Larsen Bay having very few trees, most of the logs are
already designated as fuel for the many wood stoves, leaving only a few well-
We borrow a long pole and one oar out of a nearby skiff, and set off on another adventure.
I get the pole, and I earnestly stab the bottom of the bay until we are well out
beyond the little sagging boathouse. My pole no longer reaches bottom, and so I am
reduced to near-
We slog off without a second glance at our greatly discredited yacht, and make tracks
toward our homes in the twilight, to place soaked Keds beneath our cozy oil stoves.
The next morning I am up early, and I help get the warehouse ready for a room full
of village kids for Vacation Bible School. There will be a flurry of songs, games,
stories, cutting, coloring and pasting, cookies and Kool Aid, and Bible memorizing.
It isn’t long before the pattern of morning VBS and evening services interspersed
with furious playtimes all blur into one happy muddle. It is the best summer I have
ever had, and it is the last time I will see Larsen Bay for over thirty years. How
blessed it is that children are given the gift of Now, with no worry about Next.
Who ever has the luxury of knowing in advance that any given experience is unique
and never to be repeated? What benefit would there be in knowing? The experiences
of a well-
Part Two: A Short, Memorable Return to Larsen Bay, 1998
In the summer of 1998, my brother Kelly and I hopped into a Cessna aircraft operated
by PenAir at ADQ airport at the Coast Guard base near Kodiak. We flew down to Larsen
Bay for a few hours to conduct a private memorial to our Dad, Rev. Norman Smith,
who had passed away in 1996. The last time I’d seen the village, it was from the
stern of the mission boat Evangel in the summer of 1964. It had been thirty-
After the post-
All of these thoughts were clattering around in my mind as our PenAir flight descended out of the clouds above a mountain pass and turned to follow Uyak Bay. As vivid as my childhood memories were, I was not sure how much I would recognize, or even how accurate those memories had been. (Continues below…)
Left: The PenAir pilot uses GPS to snake his way through mountain passes and down
bays to reach the village. My brother sits in the co-
The first thing I recognized was the unmistakable pattern of alders in the crevices
of the mountain across from the village of Larsen Bay. As I glanced to the right,
beyond the mountain, I recognized Harvester Island at the mouth of the bay. As the
plane turned on approach to the airstrip, I was floored by the built-
The plane rolled to a stop and Kelly and I hopped out. The rounded mountain behind
the village, which kept our little shack in the shade for most of the winter, loomed
larger than I remembered it. The roads seemed to indicate that the airstrip was
behind what we knew as the old center of town. We decided to find our way by the
only route we knew: by means of the old shoreline trail. We found the low spot between
the village and the cannery and started to retrace our steps. An old boat house that
I recognized still perched precariously at the far end of the beach. Beneath its
pilings Stanley and I had a soggy misadventure on a misbegotten raft many years before.
Now it leaned out toward the water like a runner preparing for the starting gun.
But beyond it gleamed a recently-
We soon discovered that there was no shoreline trail anymore. Roads now snaked through the village, and none of them had been built along the shoreline. The beach had eroded quite a bit in three decades, but I soon found more things I recognized. Beyond a sea wall of creosote planks stood Edith Swan’s old place, which had been our older siblings’ schoolhouse in the early 1950’s. That was where I last saw Alice Aga, my adopted grandmother, in that summer of 1964. She passed away soon after from burns she had suffered when her stove exploded. Almost every childhood memory included that house, because it served as one of the boundaries of my play area as a youngster.
Close by was a low building surrounded by weeds and underbrush. A cute little bell tower with white siding lifted a fading white wooden cross skyward. This was what remained of the old Evangel Chapel, where I learned all those old hymns as a child. It had been the Smith family’s home church from 1952 until 1957, and our summer headquarters for extended visits until 1964. As we walked around the bell tower, we noticed a dilapidated door hanging open, the sure sign of an abandoned building. We walked gingerly inside, through the sagging, rotting entryway, and took note of the clever apartment that had been tacked on since we saw it last. Colorful murals of fishing boats covered many of the walls. But the newer changes were of little interest to me, for the door to the right led to the old meeting hall. (Continues below…)
Top: Kelly snaps a photo of me changing rolls of film with the old cannery behind me. The big dot on the last building to the right was there when I was a little kid. Above: Kelly stands between the old schoolhouse (Edith Swan’s house) and the water pump mentioned in the article, which made our lives so much easier than climbing down the bluff to the spring. In the photo it is hard to tell that he’s on the edge of that bluff above the tideline.
Two views of the old Evangel Chapel as it looked in 1998, both taken by Kelly. Someone planted two spruce trees by the front door in the bell tower, and now they nearly block the entrance. Someday Larsen Bay may have forests like the Kodiak area does.
Notice the differences in cameras. Above was my supposedly superior SLR, while Kelly’s point and shoot (right) got much more of the color and clouds. The chapel was abandoned and probably irreparable when we saw it in 1998.
We turned our attention to the sanctuary, which was filled with clutter and debris.
My first reaction was shock: the room was tiny! It might hold forty people packed
wall to wall, but it was hardly the huge church that I remembered as a small child.
A folding bed frame occupied the center of the room, and various empty boxes were
piled everywhere. This had also been someone’s bedroom for a time. But beneath the
debris the evidence of our Evangel Chapel still remained. The beautiful lectern with
honey-
The most amazing thing, however, was found at the front of the room. A bench that I had occupied in so many church services was pushed up against the front wall. And piled high on it were the old familiar dark green Broadman Hymnals that we had used for years. Examining a musty copy, I saw that the inside cover had been stamped “Baptist Evangel, 1955.” I turned inside the cover to one of the hymns; I could almost hear Dad’s strong voice singing, “Sing the wondrous love of Jesus…,” or “Praise Him, praise Him, Jesus our blessed Redeemer…” The pile of hymnbooks was the only thing we disturbed in that place. We took a copy for every member of the family, using one of the many empty boxes, and left the building, still shaking our heads in amazement at finding such a family artifact after all these years. Outside, Kelly and I paused a few moments to remember Dad. We looked in vain for any traces of the bell in the bell tower, sent to Dad by the congregation of his first church in Elma, Washington. Someone had removed it years before. So we moved to the rear of the building, where an even more obvious trace of the Smith family still remained. (Continues below…)
“Timmy” Smith in the winter of 1953-
Directly behind the sagging old chapel, surrounded as always by pushki and elderberry
bushes (and at the end of a road that led to the airport, as it turns out) was the
old warehouse Dad built in 1957. It was built from the timbers and corrugated tin
panels of the old Uyak cannery which once stood opposite Harvester Island. The cannery
is long gone; Dad’s scavenger work looked like it was just built yesterday. Locked
up tight, the building was used by a local bear guide (he later bought the property)
so we only got to look outside. The original stairs still led to a now sealed-
“The original stairs still led to a now sealed-
Our exercise in private nostalgia was largely over, and we walked past city offices and the post office, buildings far newer than our memories, on roads that had never existed in our day. The old cannery would still yield a few memories. We crossed a little stream, and were nearly overcome by the stench of the dead, spawned salmon. A large group of weary fish still weaved their way upstream to finish their tasks. We paused to chuckle at two boys playing among the patiently swimming line of fish. Their other friend, an energetic black lab, was having a field day collecting the lethargic fish from the stream and depositing them on the bank, barking at them as they tried to flop back to the water. One of the boys emerged from below the footbridge where we stood, holding approximately half of a salmon, and announced loudly, “This one’s dead for sure!” Can you imagine those two boys at bath time?
At this point we suddenly realized that we were being eaten alive by a cloud of “no see ums,” the pernicious gnats that persist frequently in summer. They had detected our warm blood and were coming in for lunch. We waved them away and walked briskly toward the cannery, leaving the bugs in the fetid air of the stream. A quick walk works as an escape, because “no see ums” can’t fly very fast. A trip out to the dock would supply the added advantage of a breeze off the bay, so we hightailed it out of there.
The cannery always was a wonder to me, and it did not disappoint this time, either. Row upon row of corrugated tin buildings crowd the shoreline on a narrow spit of sand, with buildings facing both directions. Some of the structures had at least three levels, and most were huge by comparison to today’s canneries. The old Alaska Packers Association cannery, now run by private investors as a much smaller operation, occupies only a few of the buildings on what was once the longest dock in Alaska. Two of the buildings were getting new red enameled roof panels for the first time since when? The 1930’s? To the left as we walked out toward the face of the dock, two unused bunkhouses, each as large as a good sized apartment building, were slowly rusting away. I remembered every building. Including the long, low building that housed the power plants. (Continued below…)
The roaring diesel generators and whine of multiple fans and gears just sounded like your average commute on the 10 freeway approaching the 605 in Southern California. But the look, feel and smell of the place brought back waves of memory. I stepped out on the walkway covering the water pipes and walked to the far side of the vast cannery, taking several photos to splice into a panorama. Even at some distance, I could not fit all of the buildings into a single shot. The cannery was still huge, but impressive now for its slow and picturesque decay. I met the owners in Kodiak a few years later and they offered me a tour; one of these days I’d love to take them up on it! Kelly, who knew the cannery better from his days working for Kodiak Airways than from when he visited as a toddler on the Evangel, occupied himself inspecting an old Boston Whaler skiff pulled up nearby in the beach grass.
We paid our respects to Dad again out at the end of the long dock he had used so frequently while running the Evangel, and then decided to drop by the city offices. We explained who we were and why we were in town to a nice lady who worked for the city, and found out she was the daughter of my childhood friend Stanley. I had brought a packet of enlargements of old photos with me in hopes of running into someone I knew, and was able to leave her with some of the great photos I’ve included in these three articles on Larsen Bay. It was a pleasant way to end our memorable journey back to the village. I am pleased to be able to record (with my limited memory and child’s perspective) a little of the history of the great village of Larsen Bay, by means of my stories and especially my family’s wonderful photos.
Scenes of the old Alaska Packers Association cannery in Larsen Bay, 1998
Top: Tim on the dock close to the power generators. Right: Kelly on the long dock near where the first photo in this article was taken. Below: Three photos combine for this shot of the old bunkhouses and cannery buildings
Conclusion of the three-
The next article is
“Evangel Island Journey: Shelikof Strait Stops”
Including Harvester Island, San Juan Cannery, and the Village Islands
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