September 14, 2021 — Gene Carlson drove the streets of the remote Chignik Bay, between quiet wooden houses and old cannery buildings on an afternoon in July.
“That used to be a restaurant there,” he said. “That’s a web loft over there, which is shut down now. Here’s another one of my cousin’s houses. He’s not living there anymore.”
The Chignik River’s salmon runs have sustained generations in the century-old small fishing communities along the Alaska Peninsula, Chignik Bay included. But, for the fourth year in a row, for reasons no one can definitively pinpoint, the runs came in severely low.
For years, residents have struggled to earn a living fishing and to put up enough fish for the winter, and some worry their villages will disappear if the low runs persist, taking with them a fishing tradition that connects their families to home.