Wes Loe - Story

 

By Dave Kiffer

For the Daily News

If you got together with Wes Loe, you always knew you were in for a good story. Or two. Or three.

So, on March 18 when word of the passing of Loe, a long time Ketchikan resident, and the unofficial "mayor" of Hyder, started going around social media, that was the common thread of most of the comments.

"You always stayed longer than you intended to," said Stewart Mayor Gina McKay last week on podcast produced by the CBC called "Daybreak North." McKay said she had known Loe for more than a decade and had enjoyed meeting with him every so often, even before she became Stewart's mayor two years ago.

"He told me about growing up in California and serving in Vietnam," McKay said. "It was a huge difference, a different perspective from my life experience. He was a wonderful person to get to know."

Loe was born in 1946, in California and graduated from El Segundo High School in 1964, according to a Facebook post by his sister Linda McCorkle. He served in Vietnam as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne and was also an Army Ranger, according to his former wife,  Donna Loughran, who now lives in Portland.

Loughran said last week that Loe moved to Ketchikan in 1986, originally to manage a stereo store in the mall.

"He was the best storyteller I have ever known," Loughran said. "You could say any thing and he could spin out a story. He was the best at making people laugh."

McCorkle said Loe followed in his father's footsteps into the grocery business, living in Montecito California, before ending up in Ketchikan, where he managed Newtown Liquor for 20 years.  He was the president of the local CHARR chapter for 15 years and especially enjoyed the annual salmon derby that it ran.

"I once spent eight hours in a skiff trying to catch and tag fish for the annual CHARR King Salmon Derby," said former Ketchikan resident Cathy Newton LeCompte on Facebook last week. "I learned to bait a hook and many other tips on fishing and running a skiff that day. Rest in Peace my friend."

In 2008, Loe relocated to Hyder, telling several friends that Ketchikan was just too "big city" for him.

He ran the Hyder General Store and served as the president of the Hyder Community Association, making him the unofficial "mayor" of a community that was just how he liked it, without an actual government.

"He came here for the same reason that a lot of us come here," McKay said. "You love (Hyder/Stewart) for the way of life, the nature, the people. He loved it because you were free of the stresses, the hullabaloo, of everyday life."

He also loved the idea of making things happen, McKay said, whether that meant getting on the phone with important government officials, or just bombing around Hyder in the town dump truck.

"He was just that easy going, laid back, kind of guy," she said. "And he cared about Hyder. If you asked him how he was doing, he'd say he was fine, but he was worried about the other people in town, especially with Canada closed off."

Over time, Loe became the "face" of Hyder, often being quoted in media stories about his isolated piece of Alaska cut off the rest of the state by the snowcapped mountains of the Misty Fjord National Monument and highly dependent on neighboring Stewart and its road out of Portland Canal.

And he certainly looked the part, big and burly with a bushy white beard and sometimes long white hair.

"I talked to him several times before I saw what he looked like," said Andrew Kurjata of the CBC last week.  "He really looked like just the sort of person who should be running the general store in a small Alaskan town."

In Ketchikan, he was often likened to a local version of "Grizzly Adams," a popular television character in the 1970s.

But his favorite role, at least in the last decade, was advocating for Hyder.

In a 2013 article in the National Post newspaper in Toronto, Loe was asked about using Canadian electricity, Canadian money and Hyder getting most of its supplies in Canada.

"There is not a hair on my head that feels Canadian," Loe responded.

He echoed a similar sentiment in a 2014 travel story in the German newspaper, the Augsberger Allgemaine Zeitung.

" 'Everything here is completely different from Canada, although it is only 100 yards away,' Loe said. The white-haired Vietnam veteran runs one of two stores in Hyder. There is no police in Hyder. 'If we have problems here, we solve them ourselves,' says the shopkeeper in the style of a western hero."

But only up to a point, Loe told the Anchorage Daily News in 2015 during a brief dispute with the Canadian government over the closure of the border between midnight and 8 am.

During the closure, a "reality" film crew came to town to shoot a pilot for show it intended to call "Trapped in Alaska." The idea was to portray a "wild gun toting Alaskan town pissed off because the Canadians trapped them in their own country," Loe said.

The film crew convinced Low to "walk about town with his shotgun looking mad, scowling at things off camera."

"They had me doing things I would never normally do," Loe told the Daily News. "I don't sit on my porch cleaning my shotgun."

But the proposed overnight border closure was serious business, as Loe noted in 2015.

In a letter to Canadian officials, Loe said that some Canadian workers who needed to transit "through" Hyder to projects in Canada up the Salmon River were being given keys to the otherwise "locked" border gate.

"Meanwhile, U.S. citizens needing to get to their homes in Hyder but having missed the 'curfew' are locked out of the US," Loe wrote. "I do not want to be sitting on the Canadian site of the gate at 7 am waiting to reach home, watching a Canadian with a key letting himself into the US. It raises the question if it is legal for Canada to refuse to allow Americans to leave Canada, if they are not being charged with any crime?"

In 2018, Loe was interviewed by the Bloomberg News Network, when a plan was floated to run a Canadian crude oil pipeline to the head of Portland Canal and have oil tankers come into Hyder and Stewart.

"Over my dead body," Loe said. "No, that ain't happening. It's just ridiculous. That is about as likely as a spaceship launching pad being built here. I don’t want oil tankers coming up this canal. I don’t think anyone else who lives out here would.”

In the last year, Loe had been a passionate advocate for the community in terms of easing the problems Hyder faced when the Canadian border was shut down by COVID 19 restrictions. He spent hours on the phone with state, national and Canadian officials advocating for a local "bear bubble" that included Hyder and Stewart and would allow residents to continue to freely cross the border.

The Canadians eventually relented, allowing Hyder residents to come into Steward one day a week for up to three hours to shop. But they did not agree to let the five school-age children in Hyder come into Stewart for school as they have done for years. The students are being homeschooled instead. The Canadians also prevented their own citizens from crossing into Hyder.

A few months ago, Mayor McKay said, she was trying to get a new puppy and the only way to get it to the northern end of Portland Canal with all the COVID restrictions involved flying it to Ketchikan and then to Hyder. Loe got up early in the morning to meet the puppy which he then delivered to her waiting at the border.

After having a lengthy chat with the pilot who flew the puppy in, of course.