Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  Living in a state of constant change set me adrift. So I bought a piano, sold on consignment from a shop a hundred miles up the highway. I imagined the weight and bulk of it as an anchor, something to root me and tether me home. We wrapped it in blankets and drove it down the highway in a borrowed trailer under spitting snow. It took six of us to lift it into the house. But as we moved it from one rental place to the next, dragging this anchor didn’t make me feel at home.

  Unpredictability and change require the sea’s inhabitants to adapt or die. This creates bizarre creatures suited to live near boiling undersea vents, in subzero temperatures, in super-saline waters, in places slapped remorselessly by storms, and in the sometimes dry, sometimes drowned intertidal zone. So, when the tide goes out, anemones close in on themselves and wear shards of shell and stone as armor against the deadly dry world. Eel-like gobi fish linger in the wet spots beneath stones until the sea returns. And limpets tightly clamp their conical shells against the surface of rocks to trap the moisture they need to live. The sea is guiltless, harsh, and sustaining. So you go adrift, leave yourself to the mercy of currents, wear your skeleton on the outside, anchor yourself—or crawl under a rock.

  The town was filled with an odd assortment of people who had found their own ways to live. There was the long-bearded man who carved walking sticks and sold them next to the entrance to the warehouse supermarket. One day, the cabin he’d been squatting in mysteriously burned down. There was a young loner who hiked into town from his cabin ten miles back in the hills. He wore fatigues, carried an army frame pack, and always traveled with a black mutt. In the middle of winter, he walked to his neighbors’ property and shot at them through the windows of their house. There was the woman who sold tie-dyes and lived in a purple bus parked next to the diner. And there was the man who dressed as a woman, showing up at the supermarket with his wife. She was short and dumpy, he was tall and dazzling—long painted nails, gold chains, a beaver fur hat, a touch of color on the lips—a bit like a dressed-up horse.

  Although the sea is fiercely whimsical, it wastes nothing. Sunlight is trapped and never let go. Calcium, which comes first into the ocean from mountains, becomes shells and teeth and backbones and all of those things all over again. The sea’s frugality was contagious. Retired boats were dragged ashore and made into houses, bed and breakfasts, sweet pea planters. Old cabins were picked up and moved, reroofed, added onto. Oil drums became barrel stoves and barbecues. Old fishing nets were strung between spruce posts to keep moose out of vegetable patches. And rubber boots too worn to be waterproof were cut down into slippers, easy to put on and take off for the walk between back door and outhouse.

  The town’s food web was as intricate and efficient as the sea’s. Money shuffled around the community continuously. Benefit parties were held in the biggest bar in town or in local schools for a boat man whose house burned down, for a woman with a gut disease, for the four widows and thirteen children left fatherless after a charter plane carrying fishermen home plunged into the sea. A few coins dropped into a jar at the drugstore helped a mother of four whose husband died of a heart attack while playing soccer with his son in the high school gym. Everyone was connected through a network of buying and selling, giving and needing, through things left at and rescued from the dump, items sold and requested over the radio, gear exchanged at ski swaps, odds and ends bargained for at yard sales. It wasn’t uncommon to see your old jacket or sweater on a friend who had bought it from the local consignment store and didn’t know it was yours. Sometimes “benefits” that accompanied a salary meant fish, bread, a skiff ride. Every skill was taken advantage of, and people in town were sometimes surprised to find themselves suddenly in the role of debate coach, salsa dancing instructor, or board president.

  It was so obvious to eat directly from the sea that the grocery stores sold little seafood. Instead, people put up cases of salmon in glass jars, packed a freezer’s worth of fish, smoked long strips of red flesh to savor and give away all winter. Those with boats threw out lines for halibut, because they knew they’d tire of salmon by midwinter. Those without begged rides. Gardeners lugged mats of eelgrass from the beach to feed their soil. They composted fish heads and tails and fed the slurry to broccoli, pea plants, and greenhouse tomatoes.

  The sea takes then gives back, it cuts and calms, it slaps and laughs and whispers. It constantly leaves small tokens at your feet—a dead seal, a still and eyeless thrush, a wrack of spotless mussel shells as blue as jewels. And suddenly, at slack tide, the wind quiets and the water stops its charging. For a moment, you can believe that everything is normal, that the sea is well-behaved and you are in control.

  AT HIGH TIDE six hours after setting the net, John and I pulled a pale yellow canoe stored in the sloping garage next to our rental and dragged it to the edge of the bluff, leaving a stripe of flattened grass. A breeze was kicking up whitecaps on the bay. During the hours we’d been up at the house, the entire net had been submerged and the tide had arced the float line as it pressed into the bay. From the top of the bluff, we could see the silver side of a fish blinking in the net just below the surface. I grabbed John’s wiry arm and jumped up and down in my rubber boots on the grass. We cheered. The plastic mermaid, her head tethered to the net, swung her tail about wildly as if in celebration. Seeing one fish bobbing in the net made us hungry for more.

  We let the canoe slide almost entirely of its own accord down the bluff, while we slipped alongside in rubber boots. The boat was not a seagoing vessel, and sitting on the gravel beach it gaped open, ungraceful and unseaworthy. But we had nothing else. So we carried it to the edge of the water, where the bay began to stroke its lemon sides, making it dance awkwardly.

  I got in the bow on my knees, and John gave us a shove as he climbed into the stern. We paddled out to where the silver salmon bucked in the net, and John directed me to pull the top of the net into the boat so that I could free the fish. The boat bobbed as I leaned over the bow and reached my hands into the cold water to grab the float line. I heaved the line and the fish trapped beneath it over the gunwale. The fish hung in a mess of net in front of me. It was a handsome silver salmon, nearly as long as my arm. Its skin was fresh, metallic, and alive. The fish had spent more than a year at sea before making its run to spawn. As it had swum up the bay, it had hit the net, which was invisible in the murky shallows in front of our house. Its head had gone through the mesh but the line had cinched the fish behind its gills where the body widened. The more the fish struggled, the tighter it was bound.

  Holding the net with one hand and the fish’s head firmly with the other, I traced its body back through the net the way it had entered. Its scales were slick between my hands. I pulled the blue filament over the head and yanked it out from beneath its gills. The line left dark scars where it had tightened behind the fish’s small dorsal fin. When it was free, I held the contorting body, about eight pounds of nearly all muscle, against the bottom of the boat. Its gills opened and closed, struggling in the air. I reached in my back pocket for a knife and pressed it through the gills and then into the head between its eyes, hoping I was reaching its brain. Though I only half-cared, a knife into the head seemed less cruel than letting the animal bleed slowly to death. Blood leaked from the gills toward the center of the boat and scales gilded my hands.

  From the stern, John worked the bow of the canoe along the float line, and, bit by bit, I pulled sections of the net into the boat and plucked out other salmon. The fish lay twitching in the bottom of the boat. We ferried them back to the gravel beach in small batches. We spent the rest of the afternoon with the fish, taking them out of the net as the tide receded. John unbound an earth-colored flounder, palm-sized with skin like sandpaper, and lobbed it into the water where it smacked and then swam away. We undid jellyfish from the mesh and they dried on the mudflats, each its own gelatinous cosmos. John worked quickly, moved decisively. I was trying to figure out how to do the same.

  By the end of the day, we had n
ineteen fish and had lugged them up the bluff with stringers through their gills. With the evening sun slanting across the yard, we lay plywood planks on the grass, and while John filleted, I cleaned the fish as he had shown me. One after another, I slit the bellies from tail to head. I pulled out sacks of roe—like red-orange pearls, deep red kidneys, other innards of white, browns, and green. I cleaned out the bloodline, scraping the coagulated blood along the fishes’ spines with my fingers. Brown, spider-sized parasites congregated around the tails. John filleted the fish, unpeeling their flesh in deep orange cakes iced in silver.

  Even though the bay was rich, what you ended up combing from the sea was always a mystery, a surprise, a gift. And despite the hours of setting and picking the net, of carrying fish up the bluff, of cleaning, filleting and packing, what we pulled from the water felt free. We could scavenge a net and borrow a canoe to fill our freezer.

  It was after midnight by the time we had wrapped all of the fillets in plastic and stacked them in the freezer. A rich indigo had begun to pull across the sky, east to west. John unraveled the garden hose and we rinsed off everything on the grass—knives, planks, canoe. My hands and arms throbbed from the carrying and cleaning, and my skin smelled like fish.

  The next morning, we clambered down the bluff to where we had stashed the net in a wide plastic bucket. Neighbors down the beach, with whom we’d shared bonfires and beer, had asked to borrow the net. Emboldened by our success, John had offered to set it for them so they could pick it later in the afternoon. As we pulled the net from the bucket, we realized something was amiss. The float line had severed from the net. It had been cut. And the mermaid buoy was gone. We’d been vandalized, and I had that sick feeling in my stomach of having been robbed. It was a mixture of rage and embarrassment. I knew John was already calmly scheming about how to reattach the float line and get the net back into the water as questions spun through my mind. Who did it? What had we done wrong? Had we taken someone’s fishing spot? Was it because we hadn’t lived here for long enough? It was too purposeful to be random. Whoever had cut the line had to have been carrying a knife and had to be willing to walk away with a voluptuous mermaid under his arm.

  We walked up the beach then down. Wind had picked up on the water and it nattered in our ears. We looked for signs: the mermaid buoy abandoned in front of someone’s house, resentful neighbors, suspicious tracks in the sand. We found nothing. There was no way to know who did it or why.

  We trudged up the bluff to call the neighbors to let them know it would be a while before we could set the net again. John went out to the garage to look for odds and ends he could use to fix the net. I sat at the kitchen table and watched the birch tree in the yard lean against the wind. I wondered whether it was wind that helped make birch such a strong wood, and wind, too, that made these trees bear canopies of such delicately sinuous branches.

  Here was the push and pull of this place. At one moment it felt like your own. But then the tide flipped, the high pressure broke, night swung its curtain in front of your eyes. The tide was beginning to turn, and soon it would rush across the mud flats toward the beach, first in a thin sheet and then in small waves, each tripping over the last. Within hours, the impressions our boots had left on the sand would be covered by water; there would be no evidence we had been there at all.

  2

  PASSAGE

  FORECASTLE, ALSO, FO’C’SLE: n. The section of the upper deck of a ship located in the bow forward of the foremast.

  On the day of my departure for Alaska, I sat at an empty picnic table near the edge of the dock eating my last meal on terra firma: Alaskan halibut fish and chips. The ferry I was about to board was tied up in Bellingham harbor—its most southerly port of call—and it heaved a bit, making preparatory grunts and murmurings like an orchestra warming up. The late summer sun scattered sharp shadows across the grass and wind snapped the ship’s flags. It was my first time traveling on my own, and, sitting at the edge of the continent, I was completely, terribly, and excitingly alone. I would be retracing the voyage of countless others who had traveled to Alaska before me: gold rushers, early pioneers, thrill-seekers, miners, surveyors, fur hunters, fishermen, law makers, sightseers, and naturalists. By sea, the trip would take one week.

  After finishing my meal, I boarded the M/V Columbia, a stately white and navy blue–hulled ship. Like many of the passengers, I made the low-budget choice and didn’t pay for a cabin. Instead, I claimed a lawn chair that folded flat as my bed in the “solarium,” a deck enclosed by three walls and roof, with radiating heaters on the ceiling. I stashed my bags and set off to explore the ship. These ships had been the workhorses of Alaskan sea travel for many years, used for commuting between coastal communities and for delivery of cars to towns where they’d never been before. More recently, the ferries had become popular with tourists as a more modest alternative to cruise ship travel.

  I dashed around the ship those first few minutes aboard. A forward viewing area at the bow had movie theater–style fold-down seats. A large deck opened at the stern. A dining room, cafeteria, and lounge sat amid-ships. Scores of cabins with small, rounded doors were scattered around the ship, and cars, trucks, and RVs were strapped down on the lower deck. It was the tail end of the tourist season and although the ferry—the largest of Alaska’s fleet of eleven—had been built to carry five hundred passengers, the ship was fairly empty.

  I planted myself at the bow to watch the ship untether itself from land. Deckhands detached ropes as fat around as my thigh from the dock and wound them up onboard. The anchor chain with links the size of loaves of bread was reeled into the hull. We were off. On my first trip to Alaska, I was going there to stay indefinitely.

  I had wanted to move north slowly in order to watch the landscape metamorphose and to feel the true distance that separated the life I was leaving from the one I was going toward. As the ferry chugged through British Columbia’s Inside Passage, the landscape regressed: Buildings were plucked off shorelines, roads erased from treed slopes, boats disappeared from the water. Green islands emerged from the sea like knees and rounded hills of spruce and hemlock became stout mountains along the shore. It looked as though a monstrous needle had been stitched through the very fabric of the land and smocked it along the coast. The ferry moved through narrow passes where seals bobbed their bulbous gray heads off the ship’s gunwales, and one morning I awoke at 5 A.M. to see the fin of an orca knife the black surface of the sea. The region wasn’t entirely devoid of human artifacts. Navigational markers alerted captains from atop hills, and great swaths of forests had been clear-cut, leaving them looking naked and shaved.

  Somewhere in those narrow passages the ship crossed the invisible boundary between British Columbia and Alaska. Minutes of latitude ticked by. Each hour pressed new sights against my eyes: wood cabins graying near the sea’s edge, grasses combed right up to the shore, a hundred kinds of green. I was enchanted.

  My romance with the largest state had begun years before, in the fifth grade, with an assignment to write a report on the state of my choice. I chose Alaska because I knew it still held undeveloped territory and pictures of it evoked wondrous things I’d never seen with my own eyes: brown bears as large as station wagons, glaciers like icy interstates through mountain ranges, peaks so sharp they looked like saw blades against the sky.

  I turned in a 43-page assemblage of cursive paragraphs on lined notebook paper, magic marker drawings, magazine cutouts pasted on blank pages, and photocopied geography handouts I’d carefully filled in with erasable pen. The next week, the class held a banquet in which each student brought a dish from his or her state. My best friend studied Idaho and toted in a pan of scalloped potatoes. I brought the only dish my mother and I could think of, Baked Alaska, which involved carving a cavity in a store-bought angel food cake, packing it with ice cream, slathering meringue over the entire thing, and baking it quickly at a high temperature. One thing on the outside, something very different within: Alaska was l
odged permanently in my mind.

  The summer I was fifteen, I went backpacking for two weeks in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. Tall rhododendrons reached pink blossoms skyward at the tops of twisted trunks, and creeks ran cold and clear, unlike the one that puttered warmly behind our house. At night, I lay under a clear sky and saw more stars than I’d ever imagined and spotted satellites zipping across the Milky Way. And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about Alaska. The mountains of the East were humped with age and the forests, crisscrossed by logging roads, seemed tame.

  Eager to go north, I applied for jobs in national parks in Alaska. They were all taken. So I settled on stints of trail work in the Rocky Mountains. Here the land cleaved and towered dramatically rather than shifting gently into the kind of shallow creeks and short hills I knew back home. In the Rockies I got my first real tastes of life in wild places: hiking thigh-deep in July snow on one day and soaking in natural hot springs the next; not seeing anyone else besides our small trail crew for days at a time, then suddenly coming upon a well-appointed lodge where the lonely caretaker cooked us an enormous dinner of linguini and wild mushrooms. I drank straight from cold streams and washed in whatever trickle we had camped next to. Mail and groceries came by plane to a backcountry ranger station, where we’d return once a week for gas-powered laundry and a one- or two-day respite from our fifty-pound packs. This was the largest and wildest landscape in the contiguous states, but still I hungered for more.