Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  We walked along the barbed wire toward the head of the bay. This was one of the most remote parts of the bay, but the beach here was ugly and felt industrial. There was no sand, just mudflats and above them, the land was chipped up coal and red baked shale—which looked like crumbled clay pots, ground finer under the tire tracks. The mudflats were littered with the dribbled castings of marine worms, and a jellyfish puddled on the mud, looking like a pool of oil. There was trash: large truck tires, a box that once held rifle cartridges, beer bottles, and fleshless scapula that likely were butchering waste from a moose carcass. Figure eights had been tracked into the mudflats by four-wheelers. Algae grew filmy in depressions that once held water, and driftwood stained orange by iron in the mud lay piled like a stack of defunct machine parts. Just over the fence, fifty-five-gallon drums lay half-buried in the mud, and a heap of rubble marked where a building had once stood—snarled metal sheets, torn yellow insulation, cut wires, two-by-fours stuck with nails—and an empty boat form sat beneath a plywood shed that was collapsing around it.

  I found it surprising that this community, which seemed to pay such careful attention to how its members lived, would have let the beach get trashed. I had a romantic notion of the Old Believer life—of an idyllic existence of fishing, gardening, and God—unspoiled by the desires and refuse that cluttered the modern lives of the rest of us. But the communities of Old Believers were a confounding mix of the old and the new. There were few concrete rules, but the Russians shunned modern technology, even computers in the schools. Men didn’t shave their beards, and they kept strict fasts around the holidays. Even their language was old. “That is the Russian we speak,” a Russian aide had told the teacher I knew, pointing to a children’s book written by Tolstoy before the turn of the last century. It was village Russian, a language that encompassed an older, rural life. Yet the men drove new trucks and the women could be seen wheeling around town in shiny sedans and SUVs. I would often see the mothers in the main supermarket in town, wearing their handmade dresses and surrounded by a clutch of children. I’d notice cases of Diet Pepsi, packages of hot dogs, and other modern treats filling their carts.

  The Old Believers weren’t the only Alaskans who cobbled together a life that was a mixture of old and new, modern and traditional. Everywhere I looked, I saw the homestead mentality of self-reliance and resourcefulness contrasting with dependence on modern conveniences. You could find young couples living out of town in dark cabins without running water who took two-week winter vacations in Hawaii. There were houses heated by woodstoves that had gleaming white satellite dishes standing next to them. Though I was fiercely committed to harvesting wild food whenever I could, my life was modern: I drove into town to work and came home to a warm house that had running water, a television, my CD collection. John and I put up salmon but we also bought imported goat cheese. About two-thirds of the state’s population lived in cities, but these “cities” were minutes away from vast tracts of wilderness. Alaska was ranked highest in the country for Internet access, while over the course of a year Alaskans harvested eighty pounds of wild food per capita. Certainly not everyone hunted, fished, or gathered, but the fall issues of the Anchorage Daily News, the state’s largest newspaper, showed that these traditional activities were on many people’s minds; articles discussed duck hunting etiquette, caribou quotas, tips for sizing antlers accurately, alpine ptarmigan hunting, and a successful suburban moose hunt.

  Nowhere was this combination of modern and traditional lifestyles as profound as with Alaska Natives. Their ancestors had been here for thousands of years, and contemporary Natives held on to many of the old ways while picking up many of the new. They used outboards on whale hunts and to bring families to fish camps where they would stay for weeks to net and dry fish to eat throughout the rest of the year. They drove snowmachines for hunting, transportation, and entertainment, and to collect driftwood for traditional sweat baths. They traveled to small villages off the road system by plane. And, like everyone else in the state, they relied on cars and trucks, and on the delivery of groceries and mail by road, sea, or air. Assimilation like this was nothing new. Since the white man first arrived in Alaska, the Native peoples to varying degrees had picked up their dress, their church, their diseases, and their liquor.

  The drilling of the first commercially viable oil well pushed Alaska into statehood in 1959. And ten years later, when ten billion barrels of oil were discovered at Prudhoe Bay in the Alaskan Arctic, legislators rushed to parcel out a land area nearly one-fifth the size of the Lower 48 so that jurisdiction could be determined and a pipeline could be built across the state to get this oil to market. Officials pledged to allow Alaska Natives to retain control over their villages and the land that they used for hunting, fishing, and gathering food. The white man could think of no other way to arrange this control except by organizing tribes into for-profit corporations. This system made sense to people who had been using paper money for centuries. In 1971, through the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, in exchange for giving up aboriginal land claims by Alaska Natives—claims to almost all of the state’s land—the federal government gave title to one-ninth of the state’s land area and all the resources they contained to these new Native-owned corporations. Overnight, Native people became shareholders. In order to turn a profit for their shareholders, the corporations, which were organized by region, would have to sell or develop their land. No longer could the landscape merely provide fresh meat, fish, berries, clams, and wood—it could help you buy a truck. With land now a resource in a cash economy, the tensions between traditions and the corporate bottom line grew fierce. Hard lines of ownership and jurisdiction suddenly appeared. And a way of life built—out of necessity—on self-reliance was whittled away when do-gooder federal agencies doled out housing and food. Welfare undermined the skill and stamina required to provide these things for one’s family, and chipped away at self-worth. Diabetes rates in villages skyrocketed as diets were “modernized” toward mass-produced consumer foods. Urban fashions such as low-slung jeans and cocked baseball caps crept into these communities, while the traditional dress made out of gut, skins, and fur could be found more often behind glass. Over time the Native corporations got savvy. These days some of them were pulling in billions of dollars’ worth of preferential minority contracts with the Defense Department and other federal entities for construction, maintenance, and security. But as consumer culture trampled traditional cultures, and a lack of skills, education, and connections shut many Alaska Natives out of the modern definition of success, alcohol and drug use soared. “Suicide” became a verb.

  Alaska was changing rapidly. We could see it every day: Undeveloped parcels were razed and built upon, roads were widened and paved, new tracks were being punched through spruce woods, and new businesses were bringing in the kind of luxuries we had complained you couldn’t get here—coconut milk, foreign films, fashionable clothes. In Anchorage, the airport was being renovated from a dingy yet practical structure to one of those gleaming shopping mall–like complexes so common in the Lower 48. The city’s demographics were diversifying to match those of big cities elsewhere in the country, and gang violence—a modern echo of frontier vigilantism—was rearing its head. But in Alaska, you still could have that feeling of going someplace undeveloped, of standing on a patch of ancient earth where no one else had been before. This is what makes the frontier so deliciously new and inviting. We were surrounded by wilderness, by landscapes uncluttered by modern facades. Here you could see ancient history around you: primeval ice grinding out valleys across the bay, million-year-old imprints of leaves, seams of coal that recalled a completely different climate. Here you could see entire watersheds, and, if you looked closely, you could see the histories of those watersheds: old beaver ponds grown over with willows; rivers that inched sideways; lakes that were sneaking across valleys, carrying their far shore with them and leaving a trail of new green growth.

  WE TOOK OFF our boots and socks
and rolled up our jeans to cross a swift creek that ran cold and cloudy above knee-deep. On the other side, I sat on a log in the sun to dry off and put my gear back on. John stood barefoot on a large, flat rock scanning with his binoculars. The trail curved around a thick stand of alders and there, the steep bluffs that lined the north shore of the bay pushed back, opening vast flats in front of us. Short marsh plants painted the mudflats yellow-green. This area was the bay’s nursery, refuge, and pantry. Streams dropped inland nutrients to feed a wide network of marshes, cut by river channels; here shorebirds fattened up, seals pupped in large groups, moose dropped calves, bears scavenged, and ducks dabbled all winter long.

  John trailed his binoculars after a black speck moving across the sky. “Falcon,” he pronounced. “Probably a peregrine.” He’d noticed the bird’s speed, pointed wings, and short tail. By the time I stood up and raised my binoculars to my eyes, it was gone. He wanted to see and name the birds to make sense out of where he was. He needed to know what was there to feel at ease in a place, and to feel as though he’d truly experienced his own life. Not looking and not knowing would be a missed opportunity, a life less full. But when we spotted a bird together, I’d often shout, “Don’t say! Don’t say!” ordering him not to identify it aloud. I wanted to name it for myself. I wanted to know whether I was making progress. Was I seeing the difference between a dunlin and dowitcher at a distance? Could I tell a mallard from a shoveler at a glance? I memorized names and field marks.

  A shot sounded in the distance, then echoed. Far out on the flats, ducks rose into the air like fruit unfalling from a tree. I scanned around with my binoculars and made out a couple of duck hunters on a four-wheeler far out on the flats. A yellow dog bounded ahead of them. At the end of the day the hunters would head home with the supple, streamlined bodies of freshly shot ducks lashed to the back of their four-wheeler. The feathers would bare colors few people saw: the shimmering hues of blue, green, and purple that birds revealed only on close examination.

  It was late afternoon and we hadn’t gotten to any landmarks. There was no sign announcing the head of the bay. Nothing that said this is how far you’ve come, how far you have left to go. I had hoped a trip to the head of the bay would reveal the answer to a question I couldn’t yet form.

  We turned back under a canopy of cottonwoods. In late spring, the trees had shaken out their white cotton flakes. This hint of winter wasn’t subtle. Summer sped by and fall, we knew, would pass in a blink. Back on the beach, the tide had gone out, exposing a million tiny drainages that had carved shallow rivulets in the mud. Chunks of coal and knots of red kelp had been abandoned when the bay pulled back. Nearly half a dozen tidal wracks ran along the beach—empty mussel shells, seaweed that had dried into fists, vacant crabs, the donut-shaped skeletons of urchins—cleaned, spineless, and bleached white. We collected a few clumps of mussels that had washed up with the tide. Their byssal threads, strong hairlike strands that anchored them to rocks and each other, had trapped small stones and empty mussel shells. We ripped off the large mussels and threw everything else back onto the mudflats. This would be dinner.

  Here it seemed we could do it all—collect mussels on the beach for dinner, rent a new release at the video store to watch afterward. Maybe it was perfect. Maybe it was jarring. Sometimes it seemed it couldn’t last. Sometimes I imagined life in the Bush, off the road system, surviving primarily off the land. I felt I needed to prove myself like that—to no one else but me.

  “Alaska’s the only place where a man can be a man,” a rough-around-the-edges bachelor told me. He carried a sharp knife on his belt and lived without running water, with an outhouse and woodstove. Most days he split wood. For much of the year, he had to walk or ski three quarters of a mile to his house. He worked in town as an electrician only as much as he had to. Lately, the bachelor had taken to wintering in the tropics.

  Women here were just as likely as men to seek a physical, demanding life. And they seemed, generally, more adept than men at straddling two worlds—at holding down regular, even professional, positions in town while tending the garden, putting up fish, keeping a modern homestead going. Perhaps they were better at knowing what they needed and seeking it out. We worked and played; we needed the most intimate of relations and to be alone, to get away. Women formed their own social networks: book clubs, dance groups, knitting circles, art collectives, gardening associations. But, as I could see from many women around me—between job and home, harvest and play, meetings and solitude—the search for the simple life could be incredibly complex.

  This mixed life embodied so many paradoxes. To live off the land requires supplies brought in from someplace else. It requires machines that you have to keep feeding with gas and oil. It requires access by highway, plane, or boat. Remoteness is often at the cost of long phone calls to friends and family elsewhere. I traveled more miles by plane those first years in Alaska than I’d done in the whole of my life up to that point. When I went back to the East Coast to visit my family, I was always surprised at the newness of things: late model cars gleaming across freshly paved roads painted with crisp lines; neatly trimmed lawns buttoned up around houses like pressed shirts; people wearing fresh haircuts and new clothes. The glimmer attracted and repelled me. Sometimes I got sick of wearing old jeans and rubber boots. I would buy a strappy sun-dress at the mall and take it back to Alaska where I’d fold it and put it away in the bottom of my drawer. I wanted to be handy, and I wanted to be beautiful.

  AS JOHN AND I walked along the beach, I thought about the future of the Old Believers. In a few years, a pair of teens would graduate from high school in this village, pulling other students behind them in the years after. Already a few young women from other Russian villages were attending the community college in town. More would soon follow. Would the village suddenly pick up and move to some untrammeled patch of land in Canada or Argentina or who knows where else in an effort to stay intact? Would they have to choose between maintaining their traditions and holding onto their geography?

  Sometimes living here, I felt I had to choose between the wonders of nature and the wonders of human ingenuity. On the East Coast, every old city block was a reminder of human potential: prewar apartment buildings with intricate facades, highly engineered parks, old churches. Concerts, galleries, and museums exhibited extraordinary talent while here, most talent was homegrown. In Alaska, the beauty of the land and sea was unparalleled and the extent of undeveloped terrain was greater than anywhere else in the United States. But sometimes for me, this wasn’t enough. I wanted to lead both lives.

  John seemed sure he wanted this life, wanted to buy, build, stay, while for me it was more complicated than that. The future came into focus in his mind with perfect over-the-shoulder light. For me, it was a fuzzy thing in the distance, as when I forgot my binoculars or rain blurred the view of the mountains across the bay. “Are you going to stay? Are you thinking about buying a place?” I was asked one day at the bookstore by a woman I barely knew. Her questions drilled too deep into me. People here talked about foundations, frames, and property lines. I couldn’t grasp this language of permanence. Even so, more than anything, I wanted to feel at home here—at home catching and putting up fish, running a skiff, knowing whom everyone was referring to when they mentioned names around town, knowing the bird calls when they sounded new once again in the spring. Yet sometimes the landscape here repulsed me. The stunted spruce seemed sickly and pathetic. The few deciduous trees were short and scrawny, the array of spring warblers dull. The bars too smoky, the Friday nights too quiet.

  “You’re having a great experience,” friends back East would say. I wanted to explain that this was just life, that it wasn’t hard enough or extreme enough, that I hadn’t proved anything to myself about how I could live or whether I could take care of myself. That I hadn’t let go of my lust for fancy shoes, I had just lost the opportunity to wear them in this life dominated by gravel, snow, and mud.

  Somewhere among all of
our dreams and disappointments, we have to piece together a compromise. Nothing is clear-cut—not how we live, not our desires, not one love affair from its predecessor, not the differences between the life we lead and another we could make for ourselves somewhere else. If you really looked at anything—the Russian village, life in Native villages, the lives adopted here by those of us who had come from far away—you would see a confounding amalgam. But compromise wasn’t yet part of my language. Wanting so many different things left me with a quiet, constant ache.

  AFTER TURNING BACK, we spotted two Russian girls, about nine years old, on the beach up ahead. They were dragging pieces of driftwood twice their height up the beach as the wind tousled their long, white dresses. Their braids swung across their backs as they lunged with the wood, trying to balance the tops of the trunks against each other, making a tepee. “Hurry up!” one of the girls called to the other. “Get that one under!” The English surprised me. The other girl responded in Russian as they fitted the ends against each other. Then the construction began as they balanced more sections of driftwood, closing the walls of the wood tent. They laughed as they worked, and then stopped to watch us as we walked by. We waved and they waved back.

  In a few weeks, rain would extinguish the colorful burn of fall. Birch and cottonwood canopies would fizzle out like embers. After the season of bounty, life would pare way down. The grasses would die back; the trees would undress. The bay would scour the beach clean and snow would simplify everything: hummocks flattened to a white plane, gnarled mountain slopes made smooth. The landscape would become a husk of its former self as the night sky hunched up behind the daytime dome. But the tide would always bring gifts. We would eat well.