In the spring of 1975, Captain Oddmund “Ole” Sumstad packed his 160-foot ship – the Husky II – tight with soda pop, candy, and lumber as he had done in prior years in preparation for his journey from Seattle up to Bethel. That year, he also hauled another type of freight: hippies from San Francisco.
"We arrived with, really, 35 cents," said Beverly Hoffman, one of five friends who took passage on the Husky II that year.
For Hoffman, the trip was a return to her Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta hometown, where she was to reunite with members of the sprawling and influential family of Yup’ik and European descent that bears her name.
But for Hoffman and her friends, who had shared a three-story house in San Francisco and a devotion to the Grateful Dead, just what they would do when they arrived in Bethel remained to be determined.
"So when we get to Bethel, we're only going to stay the summer. And this guy goes, ‘I love it here,'" Hoffman said, gesturing to her husband and fellow Husky II passenger John McDonald.
Fifty years after the voyage, Hoffman was seated on a couch in her living room in Bethel next to McDonald. They were surrounded by old friends who had come to reminisce about how their life paths merged in the Bethel of the late 1970s.
The voyage
Prior to accompanying his then-girlfriend Hoffman to Bethel aboard the Husky II in 1975, McDonald said that their friend circle in San Francisco had been scraping by, but living in the moment.
"Sales of stuff, rummage sales constantly and such, that's how we'd make money. And painting Victorians, that was the other thing we did," McDonald said. "And all that money would pretty much go to Grateful Dead tickets, and we'd go see every concert."
But the call of adventure, and the promise of easy work amid a boom time for Bethel drew friends like Rich Trotto into a plan being hatched to head north.
"We were just barely making it. This was an idea to make a little more money and, you know, progress a little bit," Trotto said.
Trotto and his girlfriend, Sylvie Schultz, packed into a 1951 Willys Utility Wagon owned by McDonald and towing a trailer. Along with Hoffman and another friend named Thom Foote, the group took the scenic route to Seattle. They arrived just in time to help load up the Husky II and earn their passage.
"We slept on the deck in sleeping bags, and we had pads, and it was just a life. We thought, 'this is going to be great. This is gonna be like a cruise,' you know," McDonald said.
But McDonald also had his doubts about the sheer volume of cargo on board.
"The inside is solid soda pop and other canned stuff and candy, the whole boat. And then the whole deck is lumber, piled as high as you can imagine," McDonald said. "This thing is way overloaded but, you know, he does this every year. I guess we're okay."
Captain Ole, an immigrant from Norway, had purchased the former World War II landing craft in 1962 and renamed it the Husky II. According to historical records, Ole bought the ship with insurance money paid out after he sank a much smaller vessel, simply named the Husky, off Amak Island in the Aleutians. All aboard survived.
But for the five friends from San Francisco, survival on the Husky II quickly became something that seemed less than guaranteed.
When the ship finally untied from the dock, McDonald said that Ole was coming off a hard winter and was a bit rough around the edges.
"He was kind of a mess, and we're coming into [the] Ballard Locks, and he is really going fast. There's no way that boat's going to stop. He's going to slam into the locks," McDonald said. "And the lock people are on the loudspeaker saying, you know, ‘Stop that boat. It's gonna crash into the locks.’"
At the last minute, McDonald said that Ole's nephew, Ronnie Sumstad, jumped ashore to throw a heavy line around a bollard. When it snapped tight, the force shot through the hull of the Husky II.
"We're right in the bow, you know, that boat just, boom! If that rope had broken or something, we were breaking the locks and we would have been killed," McDonald said.
With Seattle behind them, the fun had only begun. On the first night, the rocking of the boat tipped a can of oil onto the stove and sparked a kitchen fire. Again, Ronnie sprang into action, this time in the nude, to save the day.
As the Husky II struck out on its more than 1,500-mile journey, now with a large barge in tow, the seas became progressively rougher. Seasickness set in. The violent jerking of the towline only added to the thrashing, and McDonald said that the coming days had the group praying for safe passage.
"We're out there and 40-foot waves coming over the deck, and this thing is so loaded, and I keep thinking we are going to die out here," McDonald said.
Hoffman agreed.
"I was sure he was going to kill us, and I was having words with Ole about, you know, my concern about our lives," Hoffman said. "And [McDonald] is telling me, 'you can't talk to him like that. He's the captain.' And I'm going, 'he's trying to kill us.'"
In the end, McDonald said it was around two weeks of hell before the Husky II crossed the Aleutian Chain to find sunny weather in the southern Bering Sea for the last leg of the trip.
For the Sumstads, the voyage had just been another dance with the North Pacific. Less than three years later, Ole would die in Seattle, leaving Ronnie to take over operations of the Husky II as it continued to serve as a pilot boat on the Kuskokwim River.
"It’s a sign"
In Bethel at last, Trotto watched the group’s plans get off to a rough start. Hoffman’s father, Jimmy Hoffman, and her uncle, Chief Eddie Hoffman, had a message for the new arrivals: cut your damn hair.
"We were going to work for her father, until her father took one look at us and said 'I’m not hiring these guys,'" Trotto said.
Trotto’s girlfriend, Schultz, fell ill and returned to San Francisco, and Trotto found work as a fish processor for the summer. He hated it and swore off Bethel, but he said that California suddenly felt ordinary when he returned. The next summer he was back to stay, going on to become a TV news reporter for KYUK, meeting his future wife, and eventually moving away in 1996.
Meanwhile that first summer, the nearly penniless McDonald, Hoffman, and Foote had packed everything on the Husky II needed to set up camp outdoors. Thanks to the generosity of the Hately family, they posted up on a piece of land on the Bethel riverfront that had decades earlier been the site of a fur farm with acres of fox and mink pens. The living at the Hately Fox Farm wasn’t always easy, but one day the group discovered there were others in Bethel who spoke their language.
"The Grateful Dead song came on KYUK radio, 'The Music Never Stopped.' 'Mosquitoes are rising up the river, fish are jumping up,' Hoffman said, referencing the song's lyrics. "I’m going, like, 'it’s a sign.'"
Whether or not it was a sign, in the months that followed the group was taken in and accepted by the community. Foote went on to become Bethel’s librarian, a role he stayed in for around a decade. McDonald found work as a photographer for Rosemary Porter’s “Tundra Drums” newspaper, and he spent two decades at KYUK, including as TV producer and general manager.
Hoffman, the one who started it all, also worked as a reporter at KYUK, ran a guiding business with McDonald, fought for subsistence rights, served on numerous boards, and continues to advocate for her community in numerous ways. To this day, she can’t quite believe she survived the trip home aboard the Husky II.
