Two days out, the birders start to lose it. The ship has gone past flocks of shearwaters and thick-billed murres two miles long and more, millions of birds, an ocean full of birds, broken only by waves and the occasional impossibly long back of a fin whale. Puffins crash into the ship’s wake because they’ve eaten too much to take off.

And surrounded by birds, the ship has made whistle-stops at tiny villages where bright red salmon are drying on racks in front of powder blue houses. Between stops, we’ve idled where the odor of sun-baked aquatic mammal rises like ground fog at sea lion haul-outs, where 2000-pound bulls know exactly who’s boss.

We’re headed as far as you can go in the United States on public transportation, the end of the ultimate yo-yo ride. Just a half-dozen times a year, the Alaska Marine Highway’s ferry, the M.V. Tustemena, makes the five-day round trip from Kodiak Island, home of the world’s biggest bears, to Dutch Harbor, midway out the 1,400-mile Aleutian chain. The Alaska Marine Highway has nine different ships calling at 34 ports over the longest ferry route in the world, but the Aleutians is the glory run. Crews stay on board for as long as six months straight without a day off, and there’s a waiting list of people anxious to work the ship. On this ride, you’re as nowhere as you’re ever likely to be; at Dutch Harbor, you’re closer to Vladivostok than you are to San Francisco.

The ferries are the Aleutians’ lifeline. Leaving Kodiak, the Tusty not only carries supplies for the island villages—if you skip the store the day the ship comes in, you can forget about buying groceries for another month unless you want to pay air freight—but also locals headed home after days of gorging themselves on fast food in the big city; a half-dozen new trucks that will soon look like Swiss cheese, eaten by rust and weather and sea salt; and a crewman who is quite pleased he’s finally found a ship he can cross-dress on.

For the bird freaks, who make up more than half the passengers, it’s the last run of the year, and there’s a seven-inch whiskered auklet out there in that billion square miles of ocean and low islands, just waiting to be checked off a life list. Be the first one on your block. It would be fun if you could stereotype the birders, but you can’t. They’re young, old, and none of them look like Miss Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies.

They are all intense, though. They’re running up and down the corridors, clutching spotting scopes like clubs. It could get ugly, very soon.

Part of the reason why the birders are pissed and desperate is because somewhere around the smoking cone of a volcano called Pavlov’s Sister, my wife and I saw some incredibly rare kind of albatross and they didn’t. There were pictures of the bird—so endangered it doesn’t even appear in bird books anymore—all over the ship, so we recognized it right away when the albatross swooped us while we were standing on the fantail. We were busy practicing four-ball juggling tricks like any sane person would do when you’re on a boat for five days and in scenery overload within five hours, but took a break to report the bird to the ship’s naturalist. The bird nuts started screaming. "Did it have . . ? Did you see . . .?" Yeah, we did.

Right off, there was the sound of bottles opening as moping birders started serious drinking, tripping over the high lintels on all the doorways.

Because make no mistake about it, the Tusty is a ship designed for bad times. These high doorways are so the ship can batten down. Everything on board has hooks and catches and locks and straps, like a bondage lover’s favorite dream. This clear blue sky trip is nothing but freak weather. Usually, if the ship runs within a day of schedule, it’s a near miracle. Between the bird posters are framed certificates of thanks from the captains of ships that have been rescued by the Tusty. The usual trip is rain, fog, twenty-foot seas, and most of the passengers paralyzed with sea sickness. After late August, when the Aleutians weather really gets cranking, nothing moves out here but the crab fishermen who have to use baseball bats to smash the ice off their ships. A friend who lives in Dutch during the winter calls it "the Gulag," but for dealing with it, she makes more money in a month than you make in a year.

Because of the weather, the Aleutians have always been a big empty, a perfect place for the unexpected. Estimates are that before the Russians came in, there were maybe only 3,000 Aleuts living in the island chain. They wore birdskin parkas—murre, puffin, and cormorant skins worked best—and made waterproof clothes out of treated animal intestine. They hunted from baidarka—kayaks—and managed to hunt down whales. Villages had communal buildings, and burial was usually by mummification.

Then the Russians showed up. The S.V. Pavel and Petr arrived in the Aleutians in 1741, with the bright idea that killing everything that moved would be a lot of fun. Their first landing was in the Shumagin Islands—the Aleutians are a superchain, made up of eight smaller groups—which the ferry passes on its second day out from Kodiak. The slaughter began almost immediately. As many as 70,000 sea otters were killed that year, more the next. Meanwhile, as a matter of "self-protection," the Russians destroyed all the Aleut boats and weapons, so when they weren’t on official hunts, the Aleuts were busy starving to death because they didn’t have the tools to get food. If that weren’t enough, as with local vs. outsider contacts all over the world, the Russians also brought a nice big crop of new diseases. Within fifty years, the population of the Aleutians had dropped to around 200 people, and the Russians had moved their show further east.

The Aleutians are made up of two kinds of islands: towering, jagged volcanic cones, many of them still active and pouring smoke; and low table islands, where nothing moves but waving grass and nesting birds. Sometimes a rat makes it to shore on one of these islands, escaping from a sinking ship, and wipes out the entire ecosystem as deftly as the Russians did. "That’s what probably what happened to the Aleutian tern," one of the birders, a businessman type who you’d never call for an obsessive, says. The tern used to lay pale lavender eggs in hollows scooped out of sand dunes. Forget it now.

At the towns where the ferry stops—Sand Point, Akutan, False Pass—there is almost no trace of the Aleuts who once lived here. The Russian culture, though, was laid on thickly. The first thing you see of any settlement are those odd, two-pronged crosses in the graveyards, neatly set off by white picket fences.

And the villages still look like the quiet aftermath of a bad war. There’s nobody around but old women and small children. Anybody able is at sea. Houses look temporary. Sidewalks are mazes of crab pots and nets and acres of yellow and orange styrofoam floats. It’s not hard to spend a half million dollars on your boat, but that’s only possible because these towns have the highest per-capita incomes in the country. You make it by working months on end without a break, fishing in seas the size of skyscrapers.

Dogs walk down the middle of the roads, knowing no car will be coming for a very, very long time,

We leave False Pass, at the tip of Unimak Island. It’s nearing midnight. Heaters pump warm air into the fog banks that aren’t doing much to disguise the fact that the sun is still up. The ship has become a doss house. The Tusty has staterooms, but they’re cramped and expensive and if you can find space in the solarium, a bench in the lounge, you’re ahead of the game. Just bring a blindfold. Empty cups of instant soup roll with the gentle pitch and yawl of the boat. Birders wrap up in down sleeping bags. They still haven’t seen a whiskered auklet, the sole reason most of them shelled out $600 for the ride. Claire, the shipboard naturalist, who is here between gigs on cruise ships to the Antarctic, where she gives between-meals lectures on penguins, tells me, "The only way to tell a whiskered auklet from the more common crested auklet, are by two feathers that stick out if the bird is dry."

I’d point out that we’re in the middle of the ocean here, and a pelagic bird ain’t gonna be dry, but the birders are still sulking over the albatross. It’s best not to provoke.

Months later, I realize I didn’t even bother to write down what kind of albatross it was. First people to spot one in years, and we don’t even know what it was. Put it on the list of crimes of inattention.

By the time the ship gets to Dutch, on the third day out, nobody’s sure any more if real life is on the ship or on the islands. Dutch Harbor, with a population of around 5,000, is the only thing out here that could be called a town. We’re unsure on dry land, and the taxis that swarm the dock seem like life from another planet. It’s five bucks to get anywhere, but it’s only that cheap because there’s almost nowhere to go that you can’t walk to faster. There are arctic terns like whirlpools circling in the air above us, and parasitic jaegers that chase half a dozen species of gull, making black smudges against the sky.

Dutch Harbor is where the Japanese were stopped during World War II, when they had the idea that the Aleutians made a nice set of stepping stones to the mainland U.S. They were wrong, which they found out pretty quickly when the snow hit them like it hit Napoleon on his way to Moscow. They occupied islands as far east as Amchitka—500 miles west of Dutch—but at the peak of the war, there were more than 40,000 U.S. servicemen stationed in the Aleutians. There was a final, decisive battle for Dutch Harbor, which lasted about as long as the average commercial break. Ten Japanese aircraft were shot down, 43 civilians were killed.

The steep hills behind town are covered with waist-high grass, and dotted with more than 500 graves, some from the war, some from the Russians, and some older than either. They’re still finding more. Empty gun turrets look over the deep natural harbor, rich blue, laced with wakes from fishing boats headed out or coming back to the processing plant, the busiest in the country. And watching it all are the double domes of Holy Ascension, the Russian Orthodox church, built in 1824. It’s the oldest cruciform-style Russian church still standing in North America, and really, it’s the peak of Russian architecture—9,000 miles plus from Moscow, it makes St. Basils, the church in Red Square, look like it was put together by children on a Ritalin bender. Its stark, white walls rise over the ocean backdrop, the pale green of the domes blends into the mountains. These early Russian churches were built by shipwrights, the only people skilled enough with wood to satisfy both God and the sea. Now, ravens that live nearby have learned to imitate the sexton’s prayers. Screw the whiskered auklet (which the birders will finally see tomorrow, at Kak Island); this is reason enough for the ride.

And thankfully, it’s not over yet. We get back on board, watching the afternoon sun turn the low hills pure gold. From Dutch Harbor—at nearly the same longitude as Somoa or Tonga, and as far north as Oslo—you can you can jump on a plane to Anchorage and so cut two days off the boat trip, but what fun is that? Better to just turn around and head back. The possibilities are endless. This is it, as far as you can go on public transportation in the United States. Everything is east from here, a whole continent.