The first thing you see when the shuttle drops you in downtown Sitka is an onion dome.
St. Michael’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral has stood on the corner of Lincoln and Maksoutoff Streets since 1848, and its silver-painted dome rises above the cedar storefronts like a small piece of Moscow that wandered onto a Pacific shoreline and decided to stay. The Russians built the cathedral when this was the capital of Russian America. They left in 1867 when the Tsar sold the territory to the United States. The cathedral stayed. It is still a working parish, holding services in English and Slavonic, drawing a community that has carried the Orthodox liturgy across one hundred seventy-eight years and three empires.
What the Russians left is more than a building. They left a calendar, a faith, a set of family names still on the doorbells. They left a layout. Lincoln Street still runs the way they drew it.
Castle Hill takes 83 steps to climb, if I’m not mistaken. There is a stairway at the base, on the west end of Lincoln Street where the road meets the harbor. The top of the hill is a small flat lawn with benches, a flagpole, and a bronze plaque marking the spot where the Russian-American flag came down and the United States flag went up on October 18, 1867. Nothing else commemorates the moment. No museum, no docent, no audio tour. You climb the thirty steps, you read the plaque, you sit on a bench, you look out over Sitka Sound at the cloud-wrapped peaks of Mount Verstovia and the volcanic cone of Mount Edgecumbe across the water, and you understand that an empire changed hands here without ceremony. The hill had been Tlingit land first. The Russians took it by force in 1804. The Americans accepted a deed in 1867. The benches accommodates all three claims by sitting still and offering the view to whoever climbs up next.
What the Russians did not leave is sovereignty. The Tlingit had lived on this shoreline for ten thousand years before the trading post went up. The Battle of Sitka in 1804 forced them off Castle Hill but did not remove them from Sitka. The Sitka National Historical Park on the other side of town tells that part of the story properly, with thirty-some totem poles in coastal rainforest. I did not get to the park on this trip. The next visit will start there.
What the cruise ships bring is a different cosmology entirely. The first ship of the morning blows its horn around seven. Sitka has no deep-water dock downtown, so the big ships either anchor in the Sound and tender passengers in or they tie up at the Halibut Point Marine cruise terminal five miles north. A free shuttle runs the gap. On our shuttle, three passengers shared an off-season-quiet bus with a driver who had retired early from a career in Wyoming and now spends four months a year in Sitka because he keeps a summer home here and a seaplane in the harbor. He pointed out bald eagles on snag trees. He pointed out the old seaplane runway from the days when most Alaska passenger travel happened on water. He gave us a tour that the busier days would not have allowed.
Downtown Sitka becomes a different town when the ships arrive. Lincoln Street has six or seven gift shops, three or four jewelry stores, two coffee places, a Russian-doll specialty shop with floor-to-ceiling glass cases of hand-painted matryoshka, and a small handful of restaurants. They open when the first ship lets passengers off and close when the last ship pulls out. A late-afternoon walk through downtown means watching shops actually flip their signs to CLOSED as you pass, because the population they serve is leaving.
The math is brutal and necessary. Sitka has about eight thousand five hundred year-round residents. Cruise season brings six hundred thousand visitors through the harbor over five months. The downtown economy cannot run on the eight thousand. The downtown economy can run on the eight thousand plus the seventy-times-larger tourist overlay, briefly. So Lincoln Street is calibrated to someone else’s schedule, and the locals know it. They built a town around a tide that does not always come in.
In the working harbor underneath the boardwalk, the real economy is at its slip. Bowpickers, longliners, and trawlers crowd cleat-to-cleat, masts a forest of vertical pencil-lines against the cloud-wrapped peaks behind them. Salmon, halibut, and Pacific cod are why the town existed before the cruise industry showed up and why it will continue to exist if the cruise industry leaves. The boats outnumber the cruise ships in any honest count of what holds the place together.
On our walk back to the shuttle stop, a Saint Bernard mix named Kathy escorted us for two blocks. She wore no leash. She moved with the easy purpose of a dog who knows which corners attract the most petting, which tourists carry leftover bagels, and which days the shuttle drivers slow down to let her cross. She did not so much greet us as include us in her rounds. When we got to the shuttle stop she gave us a polite glance and continued up Lincoln Street toward her next assignment. Kathy may be the most permanent resident of downtown Sitka.
What the Russians left and what the ships bring are two cosmologies, and the older Tlingit one rests underneath both. The Russian one ended in 1867 and persists in the church on the corner and the names on the doorbells. The cruise one lives by a schedule that arrives in May and leaves in September. The Tlingit one survives without either of the others’ permission, which is the only kind of permanence any of these places really has.
You arrive at Halibut Point. You ride the shuttle to Lincoln Street. You photograph the onion dome. You sit on the bench on Castle Hill. You walk the working harbor. You buy a Russian doll for a friend who once gave you one from Iceland. You try to find lunch and discover that the restaurants close when the economy leaves. You ride the shuttle back. And by five PM, when your ship lets go of the dock and turns south into the Inside Passage, the town behind you starts going dark, and Kathy goes home to wherever her family lives, and St. Michael’s bells ring vespers, and the harbor boats stay where they are because they will be there tomorrow whether anyone else comes back or not.