Boardwalk Footsteps: Memoir of an Artist at a Remote Alaskan Cannery

Boardwalk Footsteps paints a piece of Alaskan history that could have easily been forgotten. Dot Bardarson brings Chatham, a Southeast Alaska cannery, back to life in her clearly expressed memoir giving us a chance to relive life at an off-the-grid, functional cannery. Only reachable by float plane or boat, it functioned with a hierarchy of multiple cultures working together to put salmon in cans. Dot feels privileged to have been a part of this history, recording her adventures and personal love affair, inspired by letters she wrote daily to her parents.

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Dot Bardarson began her marriage on a fish tender working as a deck hand for her husband. She arrives in Alaska with her children in the summer of 1963 when the state is only four years old. She's there to be with her husband, Linn, now superintendent of the Chatham Cannery at Sitkoh Bay.

There she raises their children, works in the fishing industry with no cell phone or internet. She delights in the scenery, taking photographs, writing letters, observing nature with the eye of a writer and painter, and perfecting her obsession. "Art is a disease. Once you have it, there is no escape," Dot writes.

You'll find everything in her story from life in the cannery mess halls to the characters in the beach gang, from Fourth of July celebrations to medical emergencies, from the art of sign painting to Dot's learning about Alaska Native culture, from her friendships with the Filipino cannery workers to guitar songfests with her musical family.

But this is more than a book about an Alaska cannery and the fishing industry. It's also the tale of an artist's journey, a woman and mother in a man's world with few female companions. It's a story about an Alaska long gone, a different world in a new state living the last days of its territorial culture. It's about family and painting, fish and fun, the sea and its bounty.
Dot's ghost writer, Tara Neilson enhances the story with the kind of historical research that puts personal experience into a larger context with fascinating quotes that introduce each chapter.

We're fortunate to have these memories preserved with many photographs that bring the story to life.

-Doug Capra, author of The Spaces Between: Stories from the Kenai Mountains to the Kenai Fjords and The Last Homesteaders