In Bethel, everything is seemingly connected to fishing in one way or another. The beginning of summer really means the beginning of the fishing season, and with the frantic passage of thousands of smelt through Bethel last week, summer had begun.
In front of the Joe Lomack building on the Bethel riverfront, people with extended dip nets jockeyed for position along the sea wall to catch the peak of the run swimming upriver from Oscarville. Bill Howell has been fishing the smelt since 1987.
“It’s all about timing. They can just come through for six or eight hours and then it’s done,” Howell said.
But this isn’t combat fishing by any means. What appeared to be on people’s minds was spreading as many fish as possible around the community.
One man claiming that his legal name was Ricky Spiderman tirelessly scooped up a dozen or more smelt in each net load to dole out to passersby.
“I’m tryin’ to fill up as much of these as possible and just give it to the people that come until the people quit comin’,” Spiderman said.
On a Bethel Facebook group, calls went out for sharing the harvest. Some volunteered their dip nets. And for those who couldn’t make it to the riverfront, there were multiple willing delivery drivers. One man was even reportedly seen going door to door offering up fresh smelt to any takers.
Moses Duny didn’t even plan to fish the smelt, but he hadn’t been able to return to his home village of Russian Mission on the Yukon River due to the runway being flooded. So he decided to give it a shot.
“We’re getting homesick, but I’m very happy to get some smelts,” Duny said. “I will share these with my family members at Russian Mission. We don’t get these at home.”
The day before, Connie Pavilla had gotten ahold of some of the smelt from near Napaskiak on their journey upriver to Bethel.
“The ones we worked on yesterday, they’re smaller than these,” Pavilla said. “These are bigger. It’s too fun; you get carried away. You overcatch, too. Holy moly, these are bigger.”
Paul Roehl and Katie Daniels only had to walk a few feet from their offices at the Lomack building to get a piece of the action.
“This is amazing. Where else can you go smelting 30 yards from your office door?” Roehl said. “And we’re off the clock too, by the way.”
By early evening, the flow of smelt began to subside. Thousands of the nutrient-rich fish are being spread throughout the community thanks to a culture of sharing going back millennia.
The smelt run marks the beginning of the season of harvesting, and for those living along the Kuskokwim River it is just one example of nature’s bounty.
“Subsistence in general is the highlight of living in Bethel. Not having to eat all that factory-farmed junk from all over the planet,” Howell said. “We get all this beautiful, natural, indigenous protein here and it just can’t be beat, man. You can’t do it better than mother nature.”
