Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  The cabin was a mess. Old newspapers and food wrappers littered the painted plywood floor. The place smelled like the bottom of a beer can the day after you thought you’d emptied it. There was no running water, and dirty dishes piled in the dry sink. A plywood outhouse sat among alders too short of a walk from his front door. Tom hauled in jugs of water that he filled at a free tap outside the main supermarket in town. He washed his dishes in plastic tubs balanced on the rails of the deck which stretched around the cabin. He emptied them over the railing when he was through.

  His place would have been called a “shack” by my friends back East. But here, no one used that word. A small house, even a dingy one, was a cabin, an A-frame if it had a steep peaked roof that sloped down nearly to the ground, or just the neutral “place.” People didn’t judge how other people lived.

  Tom decided he didn’t want to learn to use email after all. “Nothing’s wrong with a phone call!” he concluded. Instead, I stopped by Tom’s just to visit. I’d gingerly clear old newspapers and beer cans from the padded blue vinyl van seat he used as a sofa. The mess depressed me, but I was drawn to his stories. Tom would deliver an update on the one-armed woman he was sort of dating. She also worked at the fish processing plant, and had given him the painting of a wolf howling under a full moon that hung crookedly on his gray wall.

  Tom was from Ogema, Minnesota, a tiny town in the state’s poorest Indian reservation, a rectangular patch of prairie interrupted by lakes and hardwood forest in the northwest corner of the state. His father had been one-quarter Ojibwa, his mother a little more than three-eighths, which made Tom, as he described, Indian enough to get free health care at the reservation clinic. He told me about his ex-wife, a beautiful Indian woman who had left him years before, and about his son, who had been badly injured in a motorcycling accident and since then had grown too fond of beer and not enough of work. Tom went back to Minnesota each winter, where he took care of his son and visited his mother, a ninety-two-year-old woman who was deposited once a week at the local library to read aloud to children. Some people back home still lived the Indian way, Tom told me. He described the annual wild rice harvests as he sipped from a can of Pabst in a stained pink recliner. In late summer in northern Minnesota, people took canoes onto shallow lakes where the rice plants grew thickly in the water. They pulled the tops of the stalks over the boat and knocked the kernels into the bottom of the canoe.

  Sometimes Tom shared meals with me—stir-fry he’d cooked with a seasoning packet from the store which turned the whole thing into a salty, brown goo. I knew I should be wary; the hygiene situation was sloppy. But I ate his cooking anyway, and didn’t refuse beer when he offered, which he always did. When Tom went back to Minnesota for two months in the winter to take care of his son, I collected his mail and checked on his place. I forwarded envelopes that looked important. Tom wasn’t the friend I’d been looking for, but he needed the help and appreciated the company of a young woman willing to listen.

  HOMER HAD BEEN Tom’s retirement plan. He had spent his working life as a machinist and he deserved a rest. Instead, he’d gotten himself hired at one of the fish processing factories where he stood at a stainless steel counter cleaning and filleting fish all summer. Sometimes he steaked them out with a band saw. He liked the work. Tom had befriended the owners and he was able to come and go about as much as he pleased.

  The summer before John and I moved to town, the big commercial seafood plant—called Icicle Seafoods—had blown up, sending a cloud of ammonia up the bay. It had been a mythic event, talked about for years afterward. Luckily, no one was killed. Much of Homer’s economy had revolved around Icicle. Everyone we knew had done a stint there or had a friend who had. Tom talked fondly of Billy Pendleton, the man who, with his wife, owned the seafood plant where Tom worked. It was a relatively young business that packaged mainly the fish tourists caught on charter boats; it would freeze the fish and send it back home for them. They had recently expanded their place and dressed up the outside to be cute. They were doing a tidy business, hiring dozens of fish cutters every season who wore orange bib overalls and rubber boots and cleaned, filleted, and packed fish all day at the back of the place. The more photogenic counter crew worked up front where long freezer cases offered vacuum-sealed seafood to tourists at prices no local would pay.

  Tom and Billy Pendleton drank together some days, and Tom worried that Billy drank too much. This could be serious, I thought. I rarely left Tom’s place without having emptied three cans of beer myself, and Tom had often been drinking when I’d arrived and was still drinking when I left. Tom admired Billy, and told me how Billy had promised to gather a crew of guys to put an addition onto Tom’s cabin at the end of the season. He said that Billy would have his guys put a new roof on the place too. Tom would use the extra room as his bedroom when he was too old to climb the steep stairs up to the loft. It was insurance against Tom’s old age.

  When Billy died suddenly from a heart attack the summer after John and I arrived, word spread quickly around town. I knew it would hit Tom hard. For a few days, I tried calling him, but no answer. A couple weeks later, I stopped by and Tom’s eyes grew wet as he talked about his friend. Who would make sure the extra room was built? I wondered. Who would take care of Tom?

  “You make your own family up here,” a woman who had moved from Wisconsin once told me. Helping Tom out—taking in his mail when he left town, checking up on him every so often—was a way for me to feel useful, to grow roots in a community that sometimes didn’t feel like my home. I wanted to feel connected here—linked by giving and needing. And I never left Tom’s place empty-handed. He often stuffed a plastic grocery bag with treats—bags of wild rice gathered by friends in Minnesota or packages of fancy frozen seafood he’d liberated from the plant because the seals had broken. Sometimes I returned home with smoked halibut, scallops, or king crab legs nearly as long as my arm. But with few skills to offer, I felt I would never be useful enough. Tom could never count on me like he had counted on Billy.

  PEOPLE MOVED TO Alaska to find themselves, but also to get lost. After five years or a decade in the state—where no one bothered you about how you lived, where you could get by working long summer days and then hole up or go south all winter, where freedom from restrictive zoning laws meant you could do what you wanted with your property—how could anyone go back? A young guy I knew who had grown up in Homer but left to get a degree at a prestigious college on the East Coast told me one afternoon, “I just couldn’t find a place for myself back there, so I came home.” High school graduates who did leave—for college, adventure, or work—often found each other Outside, fell in love, and came back. The state is a mixture of back-to-the-landers and misfits; of people who are escaping a life elsewhere as much as they are embracing the particular one they can find here; of well-scrubbed and short-coiffed military personnel dropped in from someplace warmer, or veterans who came here decades before looking for a certain kind of peace; of suburbanites; and of Native people straddling the modern and the old. I was like many other new arrivals: a recent college graduate in search of some indefinable hybrid of adventure, wilderness, and what I imagined would be a simpler life. I think we all wanted to know what we would look like in front of a backdrop of wilderness, who we would become once the fancy clothes and high ambitions were stripped away. For many of us, Alaska seemed the only place to figure this out.

  This state has long been considered a last resort. During the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps scattered the otherwise unemployed across even the most remote stretches of Alaska to carry out federally funded projects; they restored totem poles, raised musk ox corrals, leveled remote forests, and dug latrines. Also as part of the New Deal, in 1935 some two hundred down-and-out farm families were shipped from the northern Midwest to Southcentral Alaska and deposited on a vast stretch of spruce-littered land that was intermittently boggy and dry. This was the Matanuska Colony, and the job of the colonists was to farm, improve
the land, and convince others that it could be done. They arrived in early summer, lived in wall tents that had been thrown up by itinerant workers also brought in from someplace else, and got acquainted with their new world: with the tides of mosquitoes, with the Chugach Mountains shadowing them in the mornings, and with the dampness that clung to the land even though there wasn’t much rain. Little more than a decade later, two-thirds of the settlers had left.

  From early on, everyone had designs on the far-off territory. During World War II, a New York congressman proposed the relocation of unemployed urbanites and Jewish refugees from Europe to Alaska. A group of Rocky Mountain businessmen formed a corporation to invest in the plan, but Alaskans were vehemently opposed. They needed more people on the frontier, they claimed, but those with “fortitude.” And they had had enough of outside interests plotting their future for them. While shipping off the destitute and hundreds, if not thousands, of refugees to the North seemed an attractive plan to entrepreneurs and urban politicians who might otherwise have to deal with them, neither scheme was carried out.

  Many believed that this “fortitude” was made, not born, in the territory. One hundred years ago, government men considered Alaska to be proving grounds: The fickle sea, the sharp cold, and the uncertainty of survival would rear a breed of tough men—sturdy, seaworthy—ripe for the navy. And still, today, there was a sense that if you didn’t toughen up, you had to leave. “They didn’t last,” we would often hear about people who moved south soon after their Alaskan debut.

  Sometimes I wondered about my own fortitude. Could I last in a place where winter mornings required a long ritual of waking up, layering on warm clothes, heating, clearing snow, and de-icing? Where summer morning light shot you out of bed at 5 A.M.? Could I survive in a place where few other people seemed to doubt their own ability to survive?

  I was surrounded by people who came from someplace else. And everyone had a story about how they’d come, why they’d stayed. A young woman who had run the local head shop in the 1980s selling tie-dyes and pot pipes had bought half an acre with a vast ocean view, then left for sixteen years to get career, husband, and kid taken care of before she returned and built a house on the concrete foundation she’d poured more than a decade earlier. It seemed she had come home. Her hair had gone gray, her slinky figure had filled out; she had morphed from party girl to teacher–mother–wife and hoped no one recognized her from before.

  Another woman told me she’d arrived by ferry with fifty dollars in her pocket. Now she owned the bakery in town. I befriended Tammy, a woman in her forties with short brown hair streaked platinum in the front. She had left southern California for Alaska more than twenty years before, when she was twenty-two, beautiful, and in love. She had raised five babies in an aluminum trailer fifteen miles out of town while the father of her children went off for weeks at a time to fish. Tammy remembered the cold, dark mornings of winter when she coaxed her older kids out the trailer door to walk alone to the main road to meet the school bus. Being a mother like that was an act of faith. She sewed clothes, baked bread, and kept the trailer warm. When she couldn’t stand the isolation any longer, she left the fisherman and moved the kids to town.

  In Alaska, where many people ended up scrabbling a life together that would be considered nontraditional anyplace else, the politics of libertarians and liberals sometimes overlapped. Shuffling into city council chambers to vote, ardent conservatives who wanted to be freed from government and hippies who wanted to move back to the land and be freed from modern life could find some common ground on the far side of the political curve. Alaska’s first elected officials after statehood had been Democrats; they saw statehood as a way of gaining home rule and independence from outside interests. But over the decades, the politics shifted. Most of the state’s elected officials could best be described as paradoxically Republican: They hailed from the political party that seeks to shrink government, but worked to build expensive infrastructure of dubious necessity and did their best to funnel federal funds into the state for outlandish capital projects, such as a $300 million bridge to a tiny island and a $700 million port expansion for no obvious purpose. Despite the state’s mythic character as fostering independence and rewarding the pioneering spirit, the Last Frontier relies more on federal assistance than any other state.

  Even half a century after Alaska became the forty-ninth state, thereby gaining (residents thought) significant autonomy over what happened within its bounds, some people still view Alaska as a colony controlled by corporate investors and federal managers. More than half of the state’s land area is held by the federal government, and corporations from elsewhere feed off Alaska’s natural resources. Outside capital is pumped in to extract wealth from the state’s remote and weather-beaten landscapes: oil and gas from the shore and below the waters of the Arctic Ocean; zinc, lead, and silver from a vast hole in the ground in Northwest Alaska, where a single fifty-five-mile-long road leads to a port that is ice-free only in midsummer; gold from vast pits dug deep in the Interior; old-growth timber from inconvenient rain forests that cloak Southeast Alaska’s coastal mountains.

  Although many Alaskans boast of their fierce self-reliance, Alaska is in many ways a welfare state. There is no income tax here; the state did away with it during the boom following the 1968 discovery of the nation’s largest oil deposit in Alaska’s Arctic. The state pays each resident merely for living here. This annual check, called the Permanent Fund Dividend, the PFD, was instituted in 1976 and is a payment of earnings on oil and mineral revenues invested by the state.

  Oil wealth has had the surprising effect of making Alaska more dependent on outside investors, not less. Oil and gas activities provide nearly all of the state’s income; oil pays our teachers, paves our roads, and puts troopers in their shiny white SUVs on our highways. No one knows what will happen when the wells run dry. And because state income ebbs and flows with the price of oil, what happens in the Middle East can determine whether a hockey rink gets built, a library buys new books, or a cop shop gets a revamp. But no politician would dare tamper with the PFD, let alone reinstate an income tax. And hunger for the PFD checks, which arrive in post office boxes each October, ensures that every Alaskan has an interest in development of resources in the ground around us. During the weeks before the checks are sent, ads blare for big-ticket items: new cars, high-octane snowmachines, tickets to Hawaii. “Put your PFD down and pay no interest until January!” The first year I was eligible to receive the PFD, the payment was the second highest it had ever been: $1,850.28. Like many Alaskans, I used the money to buy a plane ticket to see my family back East. As much as I wanted to make my home here, the windfall helped me and many people around me practically live in two places at once.

  HAVING GROWN UP just outside the Capital Beltway, I had to adjust to the way most people here weren’t racing to get ahead. They were not concerned about their professional growth, about adding stripes to their resumes, or about finding challenging job opportunities. Here, people weren’t defined by their jobs. The paper girl had a degree from Stanford and was bilingual. One of the local cab drivers was a lawyer. Doctoral degrees meant nothing when your car slipped off the road, when it was moose season, or when the northern lights struck us all dumb with awe.

  Many people had come to the state for adventure, silence, and wide vistas. But the landscape could be as debilitating as it was liberating. As soon as I started teaching, I heard about FAS, fetal alcohol syndrome, which is caused in babies when their pregnant mothers drink. The syndrome results in an odd assemblage of characteristics, including mental retardation, short noses, small chins, and thin upper lips. I learned that Alaska had the highest FAS rate in the world. Babies born to alcoholic mothers in Bush villages had been adopted by families in town, where they grew up, went to local schools, and tried to live normal lives. But the statistics were dismal. Alcohol killed proportionally more people in Alaska than in any other state. And here, we had high drunk-driving rates, too. T
he radio played public service announcements that warned against huffing gasoline, paint thinner, glue, and other toxins that teens could find in nearby workshops and garages. In Alaska, suicide rates were twice the national average, highest among young Native men in rural areas, and most common in the spring. Was it enduring the long, dark winters? The unceasing wind that could find any chink? The constant blare of the summer sun? The fragile—often failed—economies? That was a level of desperation I couldn’t imagine; these hardships were still novel to me.

  Some people thought the melancholy was a result of a lack of things to do. In the spring, we dug out from winter. In the summer we stocked food. In the fall, we got ready for winter. And then we just waited it out. The only thing there was more of in town than bars was churches, and we weren’t sure whether these things were unrelated. Typical Friday night entertainment was local kids performing in a play or dance show, a band from up the highway playing covers of Led Zeppelin and Foreigner at a smoky bar, a Hollywood blockbuster showing at the single-screen theater three months after it was released in the rest of the country. But when something special came—a band from Outside, an unusual art exhibit, a well-known author—everyone went. It was like having a party with all of your friends that you didn’t have to clean up after.