And then in 1960 the highway was built, and the 1964 earthquake destroyed the infrastructure of Kapilat, and Blewestown’s fortunes began to rise in almost exact proportion to the falling fortunes of the communities across the Bay. The Blewestown Chamber of Commerce website listed a dozen halibut charters, almost thirty restaurants, and over a hundred bed-and-breakfasts, attesting to its place as a tourist destination for locals and Outsiders alike. There was a thriving arts community, including painters, potters, and a musical population big enough to support a chamber orchestra, a jazz band, several rock bands, at least a dozen folk music groups, and an annual music festival that brought musicians in from all over the state and all over the country. A local luthier hosted workshops in building stringed instruments to apprentices from all over the world. There was a fifty-bed hospital and half a dozen clinics, four dentists, three veterinarians, and—Wy counted—two coffee roasters and six coffee shops if you included the drive-throughs. There was even a Starbucks. In the local Safeway, but still. For someone coming from a town of two thousand with no road, this was big-city living with style.

Along with tourism and the arts, Blewestown was the market town for the Bay, where everyone came to buy food, building supplies, and get their hair cut. The mirror image, in fact, of Kapilat sixty years before. There had to be some feelings about that locally.

Wy saw the humpback cow and calf she’d heard the chatter about. They were swimming a lazy circle, until they passed into water cast into the shade by the mountain next to it. With a sigh she left them behind and set a course for the tip of the Spit.

It was a twelve-minute flight from Kapilat to Blewestown, following the string of islands off the south shore before turning left to catch the tip of the Spit and follow it inland. A drilling platform sat on three legs halfway up the Bay. At this distance it looked only parked, not in operation.

The Blewestown airport (so dignified because it had an intermittent ATC presence and was paved) was seven thousand feet long. Under “Obstructions” the AOPA directory warned of moose and seagulls. Since birds were the bane of every Alaskan pilot Wy kept her head on a swivel. She saw a bald eagle and a five-member flock of sandhill cranes but no seagulls and thankfully no moose during her descent.

The airport consisted of a commercial hangar on the north edge, deserted at present because the latest in a string of fly-by-night commercial carriers had filed for Chapter 11 and stopped regularly scheduled service between Blewestown and Anchorage from one day to the next. A distance down the apron was an FBO, a fixed base operator, servicing privately owned aircraft. Today it had a small jet parked next to it, a Gulfstream, she thought.

The south edge was lined with private hangars and two that belonged to two air taxi services, which made absolutely no sense, as people flying in from the south shore communities would then need transportation to go all the way around the airport to catch a flight to Anchorage. It probably had to do with the federal dollars used to build all US airports. Nonsense in Alaska always came back to the requirements placed on the spending of federal dollars there.