Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  I smiled back and waved. “Awww,” said the nurse who stood next to me at the rail. There was the man who was the convergence of the life I had left behind and the new one I would create. I felt a split second of disappointment. The end of anticipation is always a letdown; the beginning is already over. Those floating moments on the ferry were done, but I knew John would have another adventure planned, and then another. I threw my backpack on my back, picked up a bag with each hand, and walked through the gate.

  3

  LANDING

  SHOAL: n. An offshore hazard to navigation on which there is a depth of 16 fathoms or less, composed of unconsolidated material.

  I arrived in Alaska just after the sandhill cranes left. These tall, dun-colored birds with red crowns fly north from California every spring to nest on grassy fields and tundra all over the state. Everyone knew as soon as they were gone. I didn’t yet know that they took summer with them and left a particular silence that I wouldn’t recognize for another year.

  Homer, the fishing town and vacation spot where we’d moved, is in Southcentral Alaska, on the coast of the forty-mile-long Kachemak Bay. Across the bay, the Kenai Mountains rose four thousand feet out of the sea. I arrived in October. The peaks had just gotten a new sifting of snow.

  During those first days, as I hadn’t yet found work, when John left in the morning for his job teaching at the small elementary school, I put on rubber boots and climbed down the edge of the bluff with the help of a rope that the owners of the house we’d rented had tied to a tree and thrown over the slope. I walked up the beach to where the scattering of houses at the top of the bluff thinned to none and there was no one around.

  Alone in new terrain, I did little else than explore the beach. The name Kachemak likely meant “high-water cliff” in one of the region’s Native languages, and the bluffs themselves were the layered remnants of rivers. I examined seeps that leaked out of the bottom of the bluff and layers of coal that angled across the bluff’s sandstone face. It was believed that the seams of coal occasionally caught fire, perhaps by spontaneous combustion. The smoldering coal would bake the shale around it. At the bottom of the bluff, I stopped at a spot where gray stones held fossilized impressions of vanished plants. If I looked closely, I could find images of leaves and branches on some of their surfaces.

  Every morning, the beach donned a new garb. Twice daily, low tides pulled the bay out of its basin. The silty water withdrew from shore and left a half mile of mudflats exposed in front of the house. On a flood tide, the water spilled across the flats quickly, until it lapped nearly at the foot of the bluff. Some days, the tidal wrack was a skein of eelgrass; on others it was a braid of yellowed reeds and empty mussel shells. Sometimes spruce chips spilled from barges loading up for Japan, and this flotsam edged the shore. At high tides sea otters floated close to shore, and when the bay flushed out, harbor seals hauled out on a glacial erratic dropped long ago by melting ice. At the month’s highest tides, the bay gnawed the bluff and carried chunks of it away.

  The tides brought a new timepiece into our lives. Governed mainly by the gravitational tug of the moon on the Earth’s seas, the tides lagged behind about an hour each day because the moon lagged too as it circled the Earth over the course of about a month. And so much else was new: moose tracks on the sand at the top of the beach, the varied shapes of tankers that pressed into the bay, an undeveloped shore. I had expected country that was dark with trees, where the canopies knitted together over the roads. But Homer sat on a relatively flat grassy belt of land with only scattered stands of spruce. The highway came down from the north and dead-ended in Homer, which spread between two long bluffs along Kachemak Bay’s north shore. The bench, as people called this meadowed swath, was like a landing between two sets of stairs: One set of bluffs led down to the beach, and the other stepped up into the hills behind town.

  From any location in town, the compass directions are simple. North points toward the only way to get anyplace else: along the highway to Anchorage. To the south are the bay and the mountains across it. East means the rising sun and East End Road, which runs along the edge of the bay nearly to its head. And to the west spreads Cook Inlet, named after Captain James Cook, the British navigator who sent his ships up this long inlet in search of the fabled Northwest Passage.

  Around us, the state sketched roughly the shape of an elephant’s head. The Alaska Peninsula extends to the west like a long ivory tusk reaching toward Russia. The panhandle of Southeast Alaska traces the elephant’s neck. The vast Interior is the animal’s broad face, and Southcentral Alaska is dominated by Cook Inlet, the elephant’s maw, which takes a two-hundred-mile-deep bite into the coast. At the back of the mouth sits Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city and home to nearly half the state’s population. East of the Inlet, Homer sits at the tip of the animal’s lower lip, and the Spit sticks out into the bay like a long, errant whisker.

  We were at latitude 59, a line that, going east, traverses Canada farther north than any of the well-known cities; cuts through Hudson Bay; nips the southern tip of Greenland; flies over mainland Scotland’s head; jogs among Oslo, Stockholm, and St. Petersburg; and bisects Siberia into two long, narrow strips. We were 450 miles south of the Arctic Circle, the latitude at which the sun doesn’t set on summer solstice and doesn’t rise on winter solstice.

  From our kitchen table, we looked out wide windows across the bay. I wasn’t used to having a mountain view while I did dishes, and I wasn’t used to being surrounded by wilderness. At night, a few lights blinked from the other side of the bay. Behind town, uninterrupted hills stretched to the horizon. In front of us, the bay opened to the Inlet and the Inlet opened to the wide open sea.

  The town had a year-round population of about five thousand that doubled in the summer. People were employed in fishing and tourism jobs, but the bulk of year-round work was supplied by a hospital, a mental health center, and the public school system. It was just a matter of days before I got a job teaching at a small private school where the students’ ages ranged from six to sixteen. The town’s mix of politically conservative Christians, hippies, ex-hippies, dislocated intellectuals, and the down-and-out created a demand for a number of small, low-budget private schools. When I arrived, in October, the school year was already a month under way, and I was hired on the spot. Over the coming months, I’d see how children around town grew up with or without running water, spending summers in town or out at remote fish camps, with parents who worked nine-to-fives or cobbled together whatever they could. It was no big deal to have an outhouse or take showers at the Laundromat.

  The school where I taught was in town, not far from the beach. Up the road, the community’s two main drags had a few banks, a post office, a living room–sized library, two hardware stores, a dozen churches (including Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness, and Salvation Army), a few coffee joints and twice as many bars, and a handful of other shops selling new and used trinkets and necessities. I taught whatever subjects were needed for whatever students showed up: Science to sixth graders; math to tenth graders; music to all ages. During recess, I walked the students down to the beach, where they huddled in clumps behind a plywood windbreak, played kickball on a patch of grass, or threw stones into the waves.

  JOHN AND I were two of the many people who ranged into town and lingered to make a first pass at enduring the long winter. No one thought we’d stay; our landlord demanded ten months’ rent up front. But people took us in nonetheless. We were invited to countless potluck dinners and to birthday parties of strangers. We befriended the lesbian couple who lived just down the beach. Their ten-year-old daughter, a girl with olive skin and alarmingly green eyes, would wander over for visits unannounced. She had grown up playing on the beach, and a massive fort of driftwood—in a continuous state of being dismantled and rebuilt—stood in front of their house. Like many local houses, theirs was surrounded by a clutter of outbuildings: an old homesteader’s cabin with walls papered wi
th magazines from the 1950s; sheds slanting toward the ground; a large workshop which held lumber, empty canning jars, and out-of-season tires; and a lean-to for firewood. They often had a horse clipping the grass behind their place. He kept the scrabble of wild-growing raspberries at bay.

  One evening, Kat, the mother of one of John’s students, took us out in her skiff. It was my first time on the bay, and it had been years since I’d been in a powerboat. As I leaned awkwardly against the gunwale, Kat stood solidly at the tiller with her long blond hair flowing behind her. We flew over the water toward a cluster of islands off the south shore as the evening sun slanted across the bay. We slowed at the edge of a small island topped with spruce. “Radiolarian chert!” Kat shouted over the sound of the outboard as she pointed to cliffs where red rock layers somersaulted over each other. Beneath us, the Earth’s crust dove, bent, and pushed its way back up. This twisted rock was the seafloor rising again. When Kat spotted a cloudy puff above the surface of the bay off in the distance, she opened up the throttle and we sped toward it. She cut the engine as two humpback whales surfaced next to the boat. They were so close we could hear the sounds of their damp exhalations, and I could imagine the wet rubber feel of their skin.

  SMALL-TOWN LIFE STARTLED me. I had never known a life where you ran into acquaintances in line at the post office or while buying groceries. I had to keep my mind from drifting off because invariably I’d need to remember someone’s name and make small talk. I wasn’t used to buying coffee from friends or getting my car fixed by a neighbor.

  The radio was the center of communication in town. The public station brought in news from the outside world in those soothing voices from four time zones away that many of us had come to know long before we came to Alaska. The radio announced important news around town too: lost dogs, missing cats, horses loose on the road. It announced events: bluegrass concerts, public meetings, and funerals. Rides were offered and requested to and from Anchorage, a 220-mile drive north up the highway (“will share the usuals”). And the radio was the way that people who lived in the Bush—off the road system, in remote places without telephone lines—sent and received messages. These bushlines were broadcast twice daily: “For Donny in Blue Fox Bay, Happy Birthday! We can’t wait to see you in June. Love from Rachel and Tim.” “For the Jenkins in Spruce Cove, your order’s in at the Wagon Wheel Nursery. Ready for pickup.”

  John approached our new terrain as a naturalist. Gaining an understanding of this landscape seemed the best way to settle into it, so I followed suit. And as fall progressed, I began to see how much I’d have to learn. The names of things were critical: birds, mountain peaks, valleys, and streams. The timing of seasonal events was important too. To feel at home, I would have to sense the arrival and departure of cranes, the blooming of native plants, the fluctuations in fish. I began to learn how to look at the place. For identifying unknown birds, size and even particular coloration didn’t matter much, as both could fool you over distance. Instead, I had to pay attention to where I saw them and what they were doing. To understand the geography, I needed to see how the drainages of creeks bled into rivers and where the rivers spilled into the sea. For the coast, I looked less at the waves and observed more closely what the tide was doing. I needed to be able to identify, remember, and predict.

  Yet the landscape itself was relatively simple. The number of native species in a place declines as you head toward the poles because the seasons for growth and reproduction shorten. There were only four kinds of trees: spruce, alder, cottonwood, and birch. Only a few species of birds stuck around through fall and winter, including magpies, chickadees, rock sandpipers, and eagles. And you could count the number of common mammals on one hand.

  But there was still so much to see. During walks on the beach, I trained binoculars on rafts of ducks on the bay and tried to see if I could distinguish, at a distance, between ravens and crows. I admired the palette on the beach—the red-orange clay, the blue-black coal, the milk white quartz veins in gray stones, the cobalt of a castaway feather from a Steller’s jay, and the pine green of algae that washed ashore. With the deciduous trees undressed by fall, I could observe the particular treeness of the trees. The birches, now bare, revealed their wiry branches. Cottonwoods had rough, corky bark, and their uncloaked boughs terminated at tiny stumps. Spruce were steadfast, unchanged by the seasons except to offer pale new shoots at the ends of their limbs in the spring. Now leafless, alders reached out of the ground like grasping arms.

  A walk around the boat harbor was an education in itself. White anemones blossomed on the undersides of floats. The pilings provided a lesson in striation: Kelp, mussels, barnacles, then thin green algae grew from below the waterline to where the wooden posts were simply damp. The seesawing ramp from the parking lot down to the harbor floats taught me about the tide: During extreme tides each month—at the new and full moons—the ramp would alternate over the course of the day between being very steep and nearly flat. I studied the docked boats. Like a naturalist, I wanted to know the right name for each kind of boat and how to identify them all. Knowing these things felt necessary to belonging here and also to surviving. I had heard stories: This was a place where a novice’s mistake could kill you.

  The fall’s first snows on the peaks across the bay brought out the cracks and wrinkles in the rock. Rain at the lower elevations toppled the grasses and wild-flower stalks left standing at the end of summer. Sunlight lengthened until its angles were sly, and each day had five minutes less light than the last. At this latitude, there were still six hours of light to lose over the next three months as the northern hemisphere leaned away from the sun. The radio announced sunrise and sunset, the minutes and seconds of light lost from the day before, and the time of the next high tide. This is how we began to keep track of our lives.

  AS THE DARK sky cinched down around town that first winter, my new world shrank. It was dark when I left the house in the morning to teach and dark when I returned. By dinnertime, the view from our place vanished and the windows turned to mirrors, reminding me that I had moved here knowing only John and that it would be a long, dark winter. The house clamped around us against the cold and we turned on all of the lamps. They feebly threw small patches of light out the windows and into the dark yard.

  But after the first snowfall, light rose up from the ground. And snow made the endless roll of hills newly navigable. We put studded tires on the car and headed to the hills with skis in the back. Sometimes we skied to a vacant homestead cabin—a new green metal roof had been nailed on, but nothing else was square. Inside, the log walls—once chinked, no doubt, with moss—had been more recently filled with yellow spray-foam insulation. A barrel stove stood firmly on the floor and a pair of wooden skis had been tacked to the wall. The cabin hadn’t been heated for years and it smelled dank. We had heard about a couple who had lived there long before. They had fished and saved money while squatting in the cabin, and now had enough cash to spend the cold part of the year someplace warm.

  John would pull out the map and locate our next adventure, and our life rode this momentum of exploration. We had an endless list of new things to do together: places to ski, parts of town to explore, aspects of winter to learn about. And during these months, the sun’s cold warmth forged an intimacy between John and me based on new things we shared: a flask passed between us during a ski, a thermos of hot soup sipped while sitting in the snow, our mutual distaste for the smell of exhaust that lingered long after passing snowmachines were out of earshot. We did everything together and were perfect companions—enjoying the same kind of snacks on long skis, moved by the same scenes of beauty, eager for a long day out in the cold and equally content to return to our warm, pillowed house at the end of it. These adventures weren’t athletic or overly rigorous; the point was to really see the world in which we lived. It was this insistence in John that made me love him.

  But he was more confident in this new terrain than I. He could talk to the neighbor about his
broken snowmachine engine just as easily as to a local scientist about native birds. I was tongue-tied. And so I remained on edge, quiet and uncertain, while I began to recognize John in this life. I saw his capability around boats in a way I’d never known before. He knew how to tie them up, how to push us off, and what to do with ropes. He quickly memorized the names of all the peaks and coves across the bay while I couldn’t keep them straight.

  Next to John, and surrounded by dozens of capable acquaintances, I began to feel alone in my incompetence. I was in need of a friend, the kind I could laugh with uncontrollably and feel at ease with despite my inabilities. The women here seemed practical, no fuss. I introduced myself to a woman about my age who had recently moved to town. She was a Republican and a churchgoer, I learned, two qualities that might make us incompatible. But I invited her to join John and me for an afternoon ski, and we drove up to our favorite spot and parked at the edge of the road. From there, you could look to the horizon and see endless valleys and hills: black, spruce-filled creases in an otherwise white expanse. I had learned to ski as a kid; John had learned when he was a bit older. We both loved stepping our skis through deep powder and navigating quietly around animal tracks, fortresses of alder, and the places where the snow broke through over thickets of willow. But my new friend got her skis tangled in the alders and didn’t seem to like our idea of fun. So we packed up and drove back to town, and I didn’t see her again. Soon after, I heard she had moved away. Half of me scoffed: I guess she wasn’t up to this life. The other half wanted to run away, too.