“Are you okay to keep going?” John asked, his voice raised over the sounds of engine and wind. More than anything, I wanted to climb aboard the skiff, and put a thick hull and fast engine between me and this rolling sea. I wanted to be on dry land. I wanted to be done with it. I knew that if I told John I was too scared to continue, he would call the man over. But he didn’t seem nervous and I didn’t want to be the one to make us bail out. The man’s concern should have confirmed my fear. Instead, I trusted John’s calmness. And if I couldn’t force myself to keep going, how could I hope to chip away at my fear? I wanted to be rescued but I couldn’t say so. I needed John to read me as carefully as he set about reading the sea.
“Sure, let’s keep going.” The wind blew the words off as soon as they left my mouth.
“We’re okay,” John shouted back to the man in the skiff.
The boat sped off. We were alone again. The noise of the skiff’s idling engine had been a comfort; now it was gone. I paddled as hard as I could and with each stroke felt the weight of the water against the blade. Damp all over from sweat and salt water splashing against our hull, I stared straight ahead at the closest point of land. Mindlessly, I began counting my strokes. One, two, three, four. It kept me focused. I didn’t know what John’s pace was in the stern and I didn’t care. We were moving in too many directions at once: forward then pulled back, buoyed up and then dropped, spun right then pushed left. I squinted at the land ahead and gauged our progress against points on shore. Slowly the south shore of the bay came into focus.
The crossing took us nearly twice as long as it would have in flat water. By the time we reached the other side, we’d given up plans to paddle up a fjord to a campsite we’d located on the map. Instead, we headed over to a nearby gravel beach and got out of the boat. We lifted the bow onto the beach so that the kayak wouldn’t drift away. We exchanged few words as we opened the hatches and unpacked, carrying the gear up above the high tide line. The tide would peak around midnight, and we needed to make sure that everything was safely stowed. Then we carried the boat—John at the stern, me at the bow—into grass above the high-tide line. We would pitch a tent next to it for the night.
“I hated that,” was all I could say as I slumped onto the cobbles, feeling the tension in my body beginning to let go for the first time since we’d landed. “Yeah, that wasn’t much fun,” John agreed. I was relieved that he had been uncomfortable too, but I wanted to scream, why did we do this? Couldn’t you see I was terrified? But I didn’t. John sat down next to me and put his arm around my shoulders. As waves drained down the beach, they raked the cobbles against each other, making a loud but calming sound. We were finally on land. In two days, we would have to make the crossing again, heading home. My stomach would be uneasy until we were back on the other side of the bay.
The weight of John’s arm—it wasn’t enough to comfort me. It never would be. I needed to learn to trust my own fear, to let myself be terrified. I needed to remember that fear helps keep people alive. I thought of my beautiful kayak back home. Would the way it held me so carefully, so specifically, give me the confidence I lacked? Or would it gather dust? There weren’t many weeks left of summer to figure it out. It would take a year before the answers to those questions became clear, but much longer to realize that it was too easy to pick up a man’s dream, his measure of the world, rather than fashion one of my own.
7
FALL
VIGIA: n. A rock or shoal the position of which is doubtful, or a warning note to this effect on the chart.
Fall brought a vibrant explosion of decay. The leaves burst into color before dropping, and grasses in the tidal slough in the middle of town flashed gold and then went drab. Roadsides grabbed colors, it seemed, out of the air—holding red, yellow, green, and brown all at once, while the blue and orange of the few late lupine and daisies that hung on intensified as everything else senesced around them. Birches boldly appeared in yellow where they’d been blending in green all summer long among spruce, and the alpine slopes across the bay came into startling focus during those last moments before snow.
Most people thought of fall as the end of the season; for me, it was a beginning. Since moving to Alaska in the fall two years before, that season had felt like the beginning of it all, of my life here, of the cycle of a year. Fall reminded me why I’d come here—to see what it was to live at the edge of wilderness. I had wanted to see how the life I imagined I might live here would simplify my needs. But instead of paring down my desires, being here expanded them. I needed a freezer full of wild salmon and berries. I needed undeveloped coastline. I needed silence and untracked snow. I needed the abrupt swings between seasons to wake me up. I needed to see owls. Having been raised to think I could do anything, be anybody, I never thought about compromise. There was danger in that.
FALL DIDN’T PASS here lazily as it did where I grew up. There were no weeks of falling leaves, no weekends spent raking them into jumping-into piles. There was no dank earth smell out the back door or strings of evenings when crows would gather in one of the few remaining stands of tulip poplars and shout at rush hour traffic. Here fall was a moment. John and I were eager to experience it before winter settled in. On a Sunday in mid-September, we got in the car and headed east from our house. We were driving “out east,” as people called it, which meant taking the road that ran eastward from the blinking red light along the north shore of the bay toward its head. This wasn’t to be confused with “back East,” which referred to the East Coast. We passed grassy fields interspersed with houses and clumps of alders and spruce. We passed an old bus with a stovepipe stuck out of the roof. I had heard that one of my students lived in there. We passed a low building just off the road that was a bar and package store, a church housed in a double-wide trailer, and another church that was a two-story geodesic dome made out of plywood painted yellow. We passed a greenhouse that had been fashioned out of two-by-fours and plastic sheeting. The couple who lived in the house next to it—a plywood, box-shaped structure—were growing English cucumbers to sell in town. The greenhouse had collapsed during the winter under snow, and the owners had rigged it up again in the spring.
We were driving along the bench, which was stippled by a wide range of types of houses—from half-million-dollar second homes with bright blue or green metal roofs and large windows facing the bay to unfinished places with tar paper flapping in the wind, surrounded by generations of old cars and trucks. Local economics were changing as retirees moved in, bringing money they’d made someplace else and leaving behind children who were having kids of their own. This influx of cash changed things: Subdivisions were being stamped out of patches of alder, and tidy houses were thrown up—built on spec—that looked out of place in their neatness and completeness.
Eight miles out of town, the Fritz Creek General Store, a low log structure, offered a two-pump gas station, post office, liquor store, movie rental, fresh bread, pizza, and espresso. In the summer, you could pick a few dusty raspberries at the edge of the gravel parking lot, and in the winter, find underemployed locals socializing inside. Across the street sat the most expensive restaurant around Homer, which served seafood and steaks. During the summer, tourists flocked to the place, which had been written up in all of the guide books.
Past the general store and restaurant, the road gained elevation as it headed through acres of dead but still-standing spruce. Over the previous decade, an infestation of spruce bark beetles, an insect the size of a piece of long grain rice, had killed an area of spruce forest outside of town as large as Connecticut. These beetles crawled under the bark of trees and laid eggs. Hungry larvae emerged and sucked the sap of the tree until the canopy went brown and the tree died. Spruce that had stood dead for three or four years weren’t much good for building. There was a push to tidy things up, to get private companies to log the dead trees even on public land in places that would require new roads. “Salvage logging,” it was called, and it grew more popular as wild
fires raged through the grayed woods. But dead spruce slowly rotting into the ground provided the best nursery for young ones. And when the trees were clear-cut, grass typically choked out everything else.
The beetles had been killing spruce in the region in cycles for hundreds of years. But by the late 1980s, the climate here was warming measurably. The winters got milder and the summers warmer, causing a historic population explosion among the beetles. In less than ten years the forests were leveled. “We were shell-shocked,” an old-timer told me. As the woods fell, houses that had been closely hugged by spruce now stood naked, bare to the road and to neighbors. Some homes enjoyed a bay and glacier view for the first time, but these new views raised property taxes. A couple who had homesteaded this forested land forty years earlier couldn’t get used to the expansive vista and moved into town.
Twenty-three miles out of town to the east, the pavement ended at the school bus turnaround, a geographical point familiar to everyone in town. The school bus was a civilizing factor; if you lived beyond the turnaround, you were really off the map. There, a line of mailboxes sat next to a bullet-pocked sign that warned “ROAD NARROWS.” A brown sign tacked up temporarily beneath it by the state’s Fish and Game department explained moose hunting regulations. It was the season for moose and ducks. This was fall.
A few miles past the turnaround, the dirt road ended at a small clearing where an old sedan missing a wheel was propped on a wood block, and a rusted horse trailer lay on its side in the grass. At the edge of the clearing, a cemetery opened behind a gate topped by a Russian Orthodox cross with three bars—the third low and slanted down to the right. Beyond the clearing, a steep dirt track switchbacked down to the beach. Near where this road met the beach was a village of Old Believers that was represented by a single black dot on the map. I had never heard of Old Believers before moving to Alaska, but I learned of them quickly after seeing entrance and exit marked in both English and Russian on the doors of the main supermarket. Old Believers, a sect of Russian Orthodox, had broken off from the church in the mid-seventeenth century after the patriarch at the time mandated changes in church books and rituals to correct what he considered inaccuracies and inconsistencies. It has been estimated that tens of thousands of Old Believers burned themselves in protest. Others fled their villages and pledged to fervently uphold a traditional religious life. In small communities, they moved to undeveloped areas of Russia or left to roam the globe in search of places—China, Australia, Brazil—where they could live and raise children away from the influences of modern life.
Mainstream Russian Orthodoxy had come to Alaska when the Russians first arrived and raised churches topped by the characteristic triple-barred crosses on the banks of muddy rivers and on patches of wind-swept tundra. You can find these churches in poor Native villages all over the state; their cheap chandeliered and fake-gilded interiors are the most opulent things around. But Old Believer communities, where Russian was spoken even in public schools, came later: They migrated from Oregon in the mid-1960s and formed about half a dozen villages in Southcentral Alaska, four of which were within twenty-five miles of Homer.
John parked the car next to the overturned horse trailer and we got out. The clearing was close to the edge of the bluff, and beyond its edge, the sun shone on the head of the bay, turning it turquoise. Shadows of clouds moved like dark islands over the water. Fireweed, long past its fuchsia bloom, draped the bluff with scarlet leaves down to the beach. Although the flowers were done, the blaze of the plant was even fiercer at this time of year. Across the bay, Dixon Glacier glowed pale blue between treeless slopes that were losing their lush green.
There was a kind of panic in the air at this time of year. The light rapidly dwindled, and you knew that snow, which would begin falling at any time, threatened to hide everything uncovered for the next seven months. You sealed cracks, brought in lawn equipment, and set your mind to withstand the dark and cold. Winterizing was a process of getting your affairs in order. I never seemed to have things figured out. The days were perpetually falling out from beneath me; my feeling of unpreparedness swelled.
ON FOOT, WE headed down the steep dirt road that switchbacked to the beach. This road was the easiest way down to the head of the bay and the only route to the Old Believer village. But we’d heard that the road belonged to the village, and that only “the Russians,” which is how people referred to them, were allowed to drive it. The track was narrow and steeply pitched, with vertical walls cut into the bluff along it. As we descended, I pictured the road during spring breakup, when frost heaves would crack its surface and leave deep ruts and dangerously soft spots.
By most standards, we were in a remote place—more than twenty miles to the nearest hospital, half a dozen off pavement, far from city water and sewer lines. As you traveled out east, the houses got less frequent, in many cases more rustic. There were dozens of rental cabins out here without running water and parcels of land on which young couples were clearing to build. You could see black and brown bears out here, moose, wolves, and lynx; you never heard a siren, and couldn’t count on fire crews if your house caught on fire.
The sound of an engine approached, and a late-model white Jeep passed us on its way up the switchback. A Russian woman sat alone at the wheel as the car bucked up the rutted track. She wore the characteristic head scarf, which we’d seen on Old Believer women who came into town to shop and do errands. In town, their traditional dress set them apart from the rest of us. The women wore ankle-length, pastel dresses and kept their hair in two long braids tied up in a fabric that matched their dresses. The men wore high-neck, embroidered shirts and grew beards. The children dressed like miniature adults. Although the Old Believers kept to themselves, everyone in town had something to say about them and it was usually not good. “They drink too much and throw beer cans out the windows of their trucks.” “They skip out on taxes by buying their cars through their church.” “They abuse their women and work their girls too hard.” A few minutes later, two trucks passed us—driven by Russian men—and then two four-wheelers roared by, loaded with two Russian boys apiece. The remoteness of the head of the bay, we realized, didn’t mean peace and quiet.
After about a mile, the road flattened into a track along the beach. It was nearly high tide, and the mudflats had been overtaken by a shallow layer of cloudy water that pressed mussel shells, eelgrass, and driftwood toward the shore. John stopped, raised his binoculars, and looked out over the bay. “Snow geese,” he said. “About two hundred of them. They must be gathering before going south.” I lifted my binoculars and saw grains of gleaming white way off in the distance. I wouldn’t have known what they were, but as soon as he said it, I saw that they could be nothing else.
Just off the beach sat a slanted but well-kept log cabin on a fenced patch of grass. A dozen cows grazed in the yard. The cabin belonged to the oldest of eight children of a Swiss family who staked out property near Homer in the 1930s. The parents had fled the rise of Nazism, and sought to create an agrarian utopia in which to raise a family. It was a life of hard work. Two generations later, the wide face of one of their grandchildren—Jewel, the pop music star—gleamed from the covers of celebrity magazines.
Beyond the cabin and a log bridge that spanned a small creek, the road turned away from the beach into the Russian village. From our vantage point on the beach, the village was a collection of drab-colored houses enclosed by a fence of metal posts and barbed wire. NO TRESPASSING signs had been tacked to the trunks of nearby trees. Cows grazing along the edge of the fence lifted their heads as we walked by, but no one else was around. About 250 people lived in the village, which was owned in collective by the community. The school building, too, belonged to the village and was leased to the district, which ran a small school where American teachers, assisted by Russian aides, taught classes of only Russian children. I had never been in the village—the signs were enough to keep me out—but a woman I knew who had taught there for sixteen years told me it
was a beautiful place with neat gardens overflowing with vegetables, wood-sided houses, the school, and the church. Every morning, she parked her car at the top of the road and hiked in. For most of the school year, the mornings were dark and she used a headlamp to illuminate the way. At the end of the day, she hiked back out. Often, she had to attach cleats to her boots for traction on the steep road. She loved teaching there, she told us. She felt accepted and appreciated by the community. Russian kids typically didn’t attend school past their mid-teen years; none from the village had made it through high school. Boys took off to begin careers as commercial fishermen, while girls, once married, became responsible for a growing household. In her late-forties, my friend was already teaching the children of some of her first students.
Although many of the Old Believers had been born here, they spoke Russian at home and maintained a distinct separateness from town life. We never saw them at restaurants or community celebrations; they didn’t go to the movie theater or local bars. The children learned English in school, yet it might be years for them between trips into town. It was a village life, and the role of mayor passed among the men year to year. I wondered about the Russian women my own age: toting around huge families while wearing high-waisted dresses—maternity clothing year in and year out—they seemed ultrafeminine, yet must have been indomitably tough.
Aside from the old cabin, the village, and one house beyond the village with a fenced horse pasture, there was no other development around. There was no pavement, no streetlights, no stores or restaurants. The only way out was back up the dirt switchback.
Tide, Feather, Snow Page 11
