ROUGH START

George Carte has devoted his professional life to protecting others and dedicated his personal life to their service, but his is an Alaskan story that almost never began.

Like so many wooed by the romanticism of The Last Frontier, the engineering student began working summers as a surveyor on Kodiak Island in 1961. He was on a crew with two other surveyors and an engineer working on a potential dam site at Spiridon Lake.

One day on the job, a storm blew in and kicked up the water on the eight-mile long lake. The crew went out anyway, and because they were on an what was believed to be an unsinkable boat, they did not bring life jackets.

When it became clear the water was going to swamp the boat, Carte said he took off his heavy jacket. The other members of the crew scoffed at this, still convinced the boat would not sink.

The waves stated coming over the bow, and the boat sank like a rock.

As soon as Carte hit the water, he tried to get his sweatshirt off, but it got caught in his mosquito netting around his head. His adrenaline kicked in. He grabbed his chest with both hands and ripped the sweatshirt clean off. He went under the water to untie his shoes, but the leather laces would not budge, he said.

He resurfaced cold and exhausted. He said he saw one of the other surveyors panicking and grasping for something to float on, but soon lost sight of him.

Carte started swimming hand-over-hand for the shore, but he was too low in the water. He flipped over and switched to a slow, methodical backstroke.

“I said, ‘God, this is it. If I make it, I make it. If not, I’m happy to make it to heaven,’” Carte said.

He did not say how far he swam, only that he kept paddling until his head hit a rock. He turned over and found a gravel bar. He found some mossy grass to warm up in, the rocks he had collected while surveying were still in his cargo pockets.

“As soon as I quit convulsively shivering, I started to worry about the crew,” Carte said.

He looked and yelled up and down the shore to no avail. The storm was still blowing and raining, and with no way to make a fire Carte knew he had to get back to camp.

Bear grass named for a reason

When one of his legs cramped up from the cold, Carte found himself crawling on all fours, which turned out to be easier because of the heavy brush. He found a trail through a patch of what he called bear grass and thought the going would be easy from there. Unfortunately, bear grass proved to be all too accurately named.

Not long down the trail, Carte said he saw a Kodiak brown bear walking the same trail straight toward him. The wind was blowing crosswise. Helpless, Carte figured he only had one chance to avoid detection. Back into the water it was.

He got in neck-deep and started to walk toward the bear. The water had the added benefit of making the cramp go away. When he was about even with the bear, it ran off without ever seeing Carte.

Eight miles from where he landed on shore, Carte made it to camp. The cook called the Navy — stationed on Kodiak before the Coast Guard — while Carte warmed up. They were told the weather had grounded all flights for the night.

Carte was picked up in the morning by an amphibious plane, and he directed the pilot to the site of the sinking. There was no sign of life.

“All three had drowned,” Carte said. “The Navy recovered their bodies later.”

Carte said he was offered a chance to go home, but he was a college student who needed the money. So instead, he was made engineer and the company hired two high school students to help him survey another site at Terror Lake. A hydrological power generator was eventually built on that site, he said.

Alaska or nothing

“I was no less enthused about Alaska. The next summer I came back, then I finished college at the University of Idaho in 1964,” Carte said. “I started to interview for jobs with the only requirement being that they were in Alaska.”

Carte moved up to work for the U.S. Geological Survey in Palmer four months after the Good Friday earthquake. For an engineer, it was a fascinating time to be in Alaska, he said. Anchorage had been largely repaired by the time he got there, and the Valley stood fast on its beds of gravel. But, he said, Valdez was decimated and all the bridges on the Kenai Peninsula were destroyed.

The USGS office moved into Anchorage to help with its unemployment rate after the quake, and Carte quit doing the commute after one winter of driving the Old Glenn Highway.

As a consequence of the earthquake, federal funds came in to build the Alaska Tsunami Warning Center. Palmer was chosen as its site because of the little damage it sustained during the quake and its proximity to the communications hub at Neklason Lake, he said. At the time, communication between villages was done via line-of-site microwave transmitters, and the center of the system was at the lake in between Palmer and Wasilla.

When Carte started working at the center in 1967, the tsunami warnings were calculated manually using protractors, wall maps and a 36-inch globe. Carte said it was another eight years before Alaska saw another major earthquake.

“It was kind of fortunate,” Carte said. “The crew was all new. … It gave us a chance to perfect our methods.”

As they improved, and the warning systems became increasingly automated, the center in Palmer was eventually in charge of tsunami warning for the entire west coast of North America as well as the U.S.-controlled islands in the Caribbean.

Helping out is a calling

As Carte watched the changes at the center over his 30-year career, he had an active hand in shaping those that came to Palmer.

“I always had the feeling we had an obligation to give back to our community,” Carte said, and he found many outlets for his civic duty.

First, he joined the Matanuska Valley Lions Club, registering perfect attendance for 10 years and becoming chairman.

He served as a Boy Scout Troop Leader for Troop 222 out of Butte, spending five years as a Scout Master. For 10 years, he trained and scheduled the referees for youth football in the Valley, then did it for another 10 with soccer.

His first foray into politics came when he served for eight years on the Palmer City Planning and Zoning Committee.

“The chairman introduced me at the first meeting, said he was resigning, and appointed me as chairman,” Carte said.

During the same time, he served on the Mat-Su Borough’s Planning and Platting Board.

When he came back after getting his graduate degree, he was appointed to fill a vacant seat on the Palmer City Council.

A year later, he ran for mayor.

Carte was elected in 1981 and served until 1995. He was the longest serving mayor of Palmer, or any other large municipality in the state.

Japan connection

During his tenure, Carte took the Sister City program Palmer had with Seroma, Japan under his wing. Over the years, everything from senior centers to churches found a partner in the Japanese city, but Carte said his emphasis was always on the educational opportunities for children. Every year since 1983, students from Japan have come to Palmer, or students from Palmer have traveled to Japan. The program allows the students to broaden their horizons, or as Carte calls it, become more “internationalized.”

“The fact is all these benefits don’t just sound good, they are good,” he said.

Carte himself spent three years teaching English with his wife in Seroma.

After returning in 2000, he still runs the program and actively works with the Guidians. But beyond that, he is enjoying a quiet retirement.

“I’ve had the strength and ability to juggle all these balls in the air. I’ve been perfectly satisfied,” Carte said. “I hope I am setting an example for other people. We could hire and tax to do all these things, … but I feel it is my Christian obligation to help our fellow brothers and sisters.”

Contact Todd L. Disher at todd.disher@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.