Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  Tide, Feather, Snow

  A Life in Alaska

  Miranda Weiss

  O madly the sea pushes upon the land,

  With love, with love.

  —WALT WHITMAN, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1. Setting the Net

  2. Passage

  3. Landing

  4. People’s Lives

  5. The River’s Mouth

  6. On the Water

  7. Fall

  8. Winter

  9. Spring

  10. The Delta

  11. Staking Claim

  12. Possession

  13. Tidepools

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  SETTING THE NET

  MEAN HIGH WATER: n. Average height of water at high tide.

  Moving to coastal Alaska meant moving to the water life, although I hadn’t known it until I arrived. Nothing is separate from the sea—not the sky, not the land, not a single day, nor my mood. I wasn’t used to this. I wasn’t ready for it.

  IT WAS THE middle of July when John dragged out a tangle of net he’d salvaged from the beach months before. In winter, wind and surf reshuffled the beach, exposing hidden treasures—rusty bicycles, boat parts. He had wrestled the gill net from the sand and now wanted to set the net in front of the house for silver salmon that ran along the shore toward streams farther up the bay. I couldn’t conceive how such a thing should be done—where to set the net, how to check it, what to expect. But John had a way of finding free stuff and asking a few questions here and there—at a potluck dinner, at the gear shop, in the neighbor’s yard—and then he’d know how to do it.

  John’s certainty intimidated me. So I washed dishes and watched him through the kitchen window as he spread the clump of net on the lawn and got to work meticulously unwinding, untying, and straightening the whole thing out. The net took a day to untangle and decipher. When it was done, the mesh stretched sixty feet across the grass and lay ten feet deep. The float line, a line of white floats across the top of the rectangular net, would hang the net from the water’s surface and the weighted lead line at the bottom would sink to keep it open when submerged. I helped John fold up the net in the way he’d learned from a friend: He took the lead line and I took the float line and we walked from one end to the other, bunching it up along the way.

  At low tide the next morning, I followed John down the edge of the bluff in front of our house, lugging the hind end of the net over my shoulder. I liked to believe my lithe, curveless body, though small, was strong and capable of bearing up to whatever I wanted to do. But I slipped under the weight of the net in muddy spots the wild raspberry had left bare. The sky was a wide open blue and the white sides of gulls glinted far out on the bay. In front of us, the retreated tide exposed a mud mirror that reflected the mountains across the water. Clam holes and the coiled castings of marine worms pocked and pimpled the reflection. We weren’t the only ones who had decided to try for silver salmon. Two nets were set in front of houses farther up the bay, and with the tide out, their lines and pink buoys lay idle on the flats.

  John had planned it all out. We staked one end of the net close to shore, stretched the mesh perpendicularly across the mudflats, and then anchored the other end into the mud. Then we dragged the lead line away from the float line, opening the mesh. It was as flaccid as an empty sleeve and so far from the water it looked as though it would never be submerged. But John insisted that silver salmon run through the shallows. For good luck, we tied a buxom white mermaid buoy to the net. Then there was nothing left to do but wait out the tide.

  EARLIER THAT MONTH, we had bought fishing licenses at the grocery store and picked up a colorful newsprint booklet that explained the fishing regulations for Southcentral Alaska. The sixty-page publication included colorful drawings of rockfish and salmon, maps of river mouths and bays, instructions on how to efficiently kill your catch, and detailed directions on where and how to fish. John and I had moved to Alaska not quite a year earlier and had learned that with fishing, as with everything else, there were clear distinctions between locals and outsiders: Only residents could use nets to catch fish for themselves, while tourists were limited to hook and line.

  New to the town of Homer and eager to fit in and stake out our own territory, we quickly realized that Kachemak Bay, on which we now lived, was already a crowded place. Even with its convoluted coastline and dozen islands, every bit of nature’s real estate had been claimed. All five species of Pacific salmon populated the bay, fattening off its rich waters and swarming local streams. Humpbacks, orcas, and fin whales regularly plowed the water, sending the sound of their exhalations over the surface of the bay. Forests of ribbonlike kelp grew thickly from the seafloor, feeding urchin and harboring sea otters, who napped while wrapped in the green fronds. Long strands of kelp washed ashore and quickly became whips and jump ropes for children playing on the beach, or were sliced and pickled in jars. When the bay withdrew at low tide in the spring, shorebirds up from California and Mexico on their way to nesting grounds farther north crammed the flats, needling their bills into the mud for pink, thumbnail-sized macoma clams. Above, marsh hawks patrolled for the stragglers and the weak. Hundreds of snow geese owned the head of the bay each spring, and the rocky shore on the south side of the bay, which was dimpled and nicked endlessly, was as populated and compartmentalized as the oldest city block. Sea lions claimed Sixty Foot Rock as their haul-out spot and occasionally lorded over the harbor, eyeing passersby with dogs. In summer, a clump of nearly naked rocks became a boisterous colony of nesting gulls, kittiwakes, puffins, murres, and cormorants. The chatter clattered loudly above the sound of the surf, and the ammonia smell of guano could burn your nose from more than a quarter mile away.

  The town we had moved to called itself the “halibut fishing capital of the world,” and all summer long, charter boats ferried tourists to the mouth of the bay so they could drop lines to the bottom of the sea in search of these flat bottom fish. From time to time, a hook brought up a monstrously large halibut, which might bring its captor the annual derby loot, a prize large enough to buy a new luxury car unfit for local roads. These barn-door halibut are taller than a man, weigh more than three hundred pounds, and have to be shot dead before they are hauled onboard lest the flex of their tails swipe someone off the deck.

  The commercial fishing fleet streamed out of the harbor starting in the spring. Seiners nosed into narrow fjords on the south side of the bay when salmon ran thick and followed fish up the inlet to net the oily-fleshed red salmon that pulsed by the millions into glacial rivers that emptied there. Crabbing boats docked until fall, when their harvesting frenzy would begin in the icy Bering Sea. Long-liners, gillnetters, and tenders brought fish-filled hulls back to the harbor to be unloaded by cranes. A long pipe that pumped waste from fish processing and packing plants back into the bay attracted a storm of gulls at its mouth. The commercial vessels, which docked closest to the entrance of the harbor, were being pushed aside by an expanding army of charter boats and water taxis, pleasure skiffs, and private yachts.

  THE CENTER OF town squatted between the end of the highway and the beginning of the shore, and I quickly realized the sea was the backdrop for everything that happened here—a witness to weddings and deaths, to visiting dignitaries as well as to small, daily indignities. It hosted a beach barbecue for a visiting Kennedy and embraced a truck, stolen from a gay high school teacher, that had been charred and abandoned at the edge of the surf. Every house in town faced the bay or wished it did. And in places where
there were no views of the sea, they had been painted on earnestly in colorful murals—inside the bank, on the side of the middle school, on a concrete wall next to the Christian bookstore, on the exterior of a shop that sold electronics for boats.

  Like any seaside town, the community was continuously fortifying itself against the very thing everyone had moved here for. Years before, a sandy spit that stuck four and a half miles into the bay and marked the remains of a glacial moraine had been deemed reliable, and before long a boat harbor, hotel, souvenir shops, and fish packing plants crowded its tip. But the powerful 1964 earthquake dropped the Spit six feet into the sea, so the Army Corps of Engineers reinforced it with wood, steel, and rock. They came back again and again, each time bolstering up the sandy handle, though at high tides during storms, waves still washed over the road that ran the length of it. And to keep the sea from claiming real estate within city limits, the town built a seawall to anchor the eroding bluff. But during the first winter, waves harassed the seawall so fiercely it gave way.

  The word “Alaska” was likely taken from the Alutiiq word Alaxsxaq, which refers to the thing the sea throws itself against. And, more than any other state, Alaska is defined by water. In Southeast Alaska, days and days of rain souse temperate rainforest, where spruce can grow to two hundred feet tall and as wide as cars at their bases. Southcentral Alaska, which was carved and recarved by icy glacial waves, is dominated by rushing salmon streams. Each summer, fishermen spill out of RVs in chest waders and line the edges of the region’s waterways like human riprap. Much of western Alaska is low-lying river delta that gets flushed by the sea. Extreme spring tides bring the Bering Sea dozens of miles inland, so you can be standing calf-deep on tundra with no land in sight 360 degrees around you and the sea creeping ominously up your boots. The topography of the Arctic is dictated by the habits of frozen water. A waterproof layer of permafrost below its surface traps rain and snowmelt so that the landscape is freckled with lakes, in some places creating terrain more aquatic than terrestrial. And each winter, ice drives wedges into the tundra that split the ground into polygons so regular it could be the surface of a soccer ball stretched flat. Even the interior of the state, hundreds of miles from the coast, is at the whims of giant rivers, namely the Yukon and Kuskokwim. Around the hem of the state, the sea has laced a coastline so frilled it would wrap nearly twice around the waist of the earth if unraveled. And the sea surrounds Alaska’s thousands of islands and claims them as its own. Here, the sea and its rivers serve as highways, supermarkets, landing strips, sewers, mail routes, and navigational markers. Water includes and excludes, carves the land, and ferries it away.

  As if that weren’t enough, fish carry the ocean into the very middle of the state: Each year, millions of salmon swim more than a thousand miles up the Yukon, and countless more make their way up smaller rivers and streams all over the Alaskan coast. They work their way against whitewater and fling themselves up waterfalls. So singular is their purpose that they don’t eat during this time and instead digest their fat reserves while alive. The fish turn rainbow colors and white fungus spreads along their skin. The males sprout grotesque humps and their jaws contort fiercely in their fight to fertilize a female’s eggs, which she lays on the gravel bottom of a stream or lake. When this work is done, they slowly die. Creeks become scenes of death and decay, strewn with stinking fish carcasses. First, gulls come to peck out the eyeballs. Then bears creep in to scavenge. And everything else arrives too: flies, beetles, eagles. Years later, when those bodies have been replaced by countless others and that sea-fed flesh has long since soaked into the ground, pieces of those fish appear as chemical signatures in the leaves of Alaska’s trees. Here, the sea surges far inland to feed the terrestrial world.

  MINE WAS A landlocked childhood. In the Maryland suburbs where I grew up, there was no evidence of the sea anywhere. The earth was clay, not sand. Heavy, gray-trunked trees cluttered the horizon. The air smelled of wet leaves. And when the months of summer’s swampy heat arrived, we craved a breeze blown off the sea. So we piled into the family station wagon and lumbered out to the beach. First past the cornfields and chicken farms, then through the sandy stands of short pines and the tiny getting-to-the-beach towns with clapboard houses and small wooden churches. We spent a week lying on towels spread over sand too hot for the bottoms of our feet and diving through dingy waves. On the other side of the break, I floated on my back with my toes to the sky and at night I would fall asleep feeling the rise and fall of the sea inside me. I took shells home to arrange along the windowsill to remind myself of where the land stops and the water begins.

  Perhaps this pull to the sea is in my genes. My grandfather was a captain in Britain’s Royal Navy and served during World War II. As a young officer, he kept a scrupulous journal that documented the activities of the ship and included hand-drawn diagrams of ports, riggings, and engine parts. Later in his career, he wrote a manual about piloting the waters off Ireland’s rocky coast. Maybe deep in my cells lies a need to know these things: how to navigate rocky shores, how to name the parts of a ship, how to feel comfortable with the sea.

  But once in Alaska, I felt adrift and confused. I was a stranger in a place where days were quartered by the tides, where the year was marked by seasons of fish. I was marooned by words I didn’t know: beam, bilge, pitch, draft. People spoke about the surface of the sea with common words made foreign: lumpy, messy, calm as glass. There were so many words to learn—no fewer than three dozen to describe sea ice, including pancake, rind, fast, and brash—and countless more to describe boat types and parts. John learned new terms quickly and used them easily, confidently. For me, learning each word became a small act of appropriation, and I felt my mouth form around these foreign sounds tentatively. “Skiff,” I said to myself many times before I used it aloud. These small, open boats are as ubiquitous as cars in coastal Alaska. Skiff, skiff. The sound traveled backward from the front of my mouth, between the tip of my tongue and the space behind my top front teeth to the round hill of my tongue. Then back out to my lips, where the sound of “iff” dammed up between my lower lip and front teeth.

  For years, Alaska had been the territory of my dreams and aspirations. And once I arrived, I wanted nothing else than to feel at home here. But, having grown up in East Coast suburbs where dead ends were referred to as cul-de-sacs and where my main skills were playing Chopin nocturnes and getting good grades in school, nothing I had known before seemed useful here. I was surrounded by people who boasted local know-how and carried around the knowledge of fish, tides, boats, and weather as ballast. This was how people navigated this place, and how they possessed it. And from the moment I arrived, gaining this knowledge seemed the only way to feel like I belonged.

  But becoming comfortable with the feel of new words in my mouth was not enough. I had to learn their meaning, and the patterns in fish and weather, the behavior of the sea, which governs life here. I learned that on sunny summer days a strong wind would pick up across the bay. This day breeze was created when warm air rose up from the land and sucked in cold air lurking above the sea to fill its place. It could lift the surface of the bay two or three feet and aggravate tiderips, but would predictably lie down in the late evening when the temperature dropped and fishing boats returned to the harbor. I learned the cycles of the tides and studied the seasons of fish—when to expect herring, halibut, hooligan, or salmon. I needed to know the difference between a seiner and a longliner, between reds, pinks, silvers, and kings. I needed to know the feel of a following sea and the risk of wind against tide.

  I learned too that to live by the sea was to be pummeled by constant change. One hour, you watched waves batter the cobbles at the foot of the bluff, and then later, the tide receded, leaving the beach silent and open-palmed. And the weather was shifty and capricious. It snowed in spring, hailed in summer, froze and melted and froze again all winter, and fall could be long and dark and wet. You could watch fronts spinning off the Gulf of Alaska, pinwhe
eling bands of clouds over the mountains across the bay. Some days, wispy clouds raked the sky; on others, cumulus tumbled over the bluff. Rain in town turned to snow as you drove out, and fog pressed in so thick you could barely see past the hood of your car—then you’d get up to the top of the hills behind town and find the sun blaring. Because seaside folks are used to an unpredictable sky, constancy makes them nervous. People here got antsy with day after day of sun. And they knew to wait out squalls beneath a tree or in a coffee shop, to wait out the wind in a cove rather than make the crossing from the other side of the bay.

  Nothing was predictable. Nothing stayed the same. On sunny days, the water looked deep blue or as green as jade. Under clouds, it was a skin of mercury pulled taut or gray, windblown silk. And, as if to mimic the sea, the town itself was constantly metamorphosing and evolving. The school bus garage became a pizza place and liquor store; the travel agency moved into an old restaurant, and a hair salon took its place. The biggest bar in town closed and sat empty and the pottery shop became a burrito joint. Remaining patches of green were graded and built upon, giving the town an awkward stepped arrangement: The end of the community college’s parking lot was at eye level with a tiny church right behind it, and a vacant shop sat on the slope below the gravel pad it should have been built upon.

  Insistent on change, the sea cares nothing for history. The black seams of coal that lined the bluff’s edge contained ancient plants. But the sea made everything new again. Coal dropped to the beach in rectangular chunks and, after storms, people drove trucks onto the sand to collect it to heat their houses. Waves wore down what was left to black grains that gathered like shadows around the bases of rocks and in pools in the sand. Near the sea, the earth is never still. John and I would wake to find a few more feet gone from the edge of the bluff in front of our rental house.