Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  8

  WINTER

  NILAS: n. A thin elastic crust of ice, easily bending on waves and swell and under pressure, thrusting in a pattern of interlocking fingers.

  My second winter was different. Friends and family back East kept asking me when I was coming home. Home? When would they realize that my real life had begun and that I was home?…Wasn’t I?

  On a Sunday morning in early March, when the sky was white and changeless, the light dull and without angle, John and I put on our skis, which we stored tips-up in the waist-high mound of snow outside the front door, and headed downhill into a shallow creek drainage. The previous fall, we had moved into a house in the hills behind town at the end of a one-mile gravel road walled by spruce. We watched the snow pile up outside our windows and ice send lace up the glass, until we could no longer remember what the yard looked like when not covered by four feet of clean cotton batting.

  On weekend days, we’d pack water, cookies, and a thermos of hot soup and ski until dark. We could ski for miles out the front door of the house, dipping into valleys and skiing along the humped backs of hills. We skirted clumps of alder, fallen spruce, and willow thickets that stuck through the snow. We passed abandoned homesteaders’ cabins and carefully furnished summer cabins surrounded by snow untouched by truck, plow, or shovel; we could press our noses up to the windows knowing that the owners weren’t likely to return until June.

  The few inches of new snow that had fallen the night before sat atop an icy crust that held our weight in the coldness of the morning. I pushed off ahead of John, past the browned elderberry shrub which splayed up through the snow like the bottom of an old broom. I moved with a skater’s stride, trying to build momentum to carry me down the hill. I glided my right ski out and then the left. I pushed the ground behind me with my poles, feeling them pierce the hard crust beneath the powder.

  The sky’s white ceiling felt close and heavy above us as we skied along the edge of the driveway. It wouldn’t snow or rain all day. We kept our skis just at the edge of the road; it was a steep drop down to the track. A plow no longer could do the job of keeping the driveway open, so a huge snowblower truck had sucked a channel through the snow, leaving straight snow walls halfway up the windows of our cars. I had just bought my first car, a red, ten-year-old station wagon with four-wheel drive. Now I had my own vehicle to take care of, which meant I had to put on studded tires each fall, change the oil regularly, and watch out for rust spreading along the wheel wells.

  It had been a mild winter to start. It rained for weeks, throwing dead spruce into creeks where they clogged culverts and flooded streets. But by February, snow pushed out the rain and layered deeply outside of town. John and I continued to teach at the small schools where we had been hired the year before. In the morning, we left our place in the dark. By nine, the growing dawn silhouetted the mountain range across the bay, though the sky would still be strung with stars. In midwinter, it wouldn’t be light until half past ten. It would be dark by the time we came home. On days when we returned to our place to find snow too deep on the part of our road the borough didn’t plow, we parked our cars in a narrow pullout half a mile from the house and skied home. In the morning, we skied back to the cars wearing headlamps over wool hats. We stashed our skis in the backs of our cars and drove to work. The city and borough maintained armies of plow trucks so that school was never closed because of snow, but occasionally, freezing rain or high winds canceled school. Because the beetle epidemic had killed so many of the spruce trees around town, strong winds coupled with root-loosening downpours often prompted officials to close the schools: Dead trees threatened to fall onto power lines, across roads, and onto school roofs and buses.

  The director of the school where I taught was a stout, practical woman who had nearly shoulder-length gray hair and wore boys’ sneakers. She missed her sons, who were off at college, but was relieved that her husband had moved away. A string of troubled teenagers moved through her place, which was a collection of buildings without running water in various stages of being built or remodeled about a dozen miles outside of town—a brother and sister whose abused mother walked through town trying to avoid talking to people; a teenage girl from somewhere else who had somehow landed on the school’s doorstep; and a young woman who had lived there for so long that she helped bring the others up to speed: huskies to be fed outside, Chihuahuas and cats indoors.

  I was so busy worrying about the fact that many of the kids would never master algebra that for a while I failed to grasp the real point: The director just wanted to get them through school so that they could find jobs, become independent, and move on with their lives. Moving on—and sometimes leaving town—was exactly what they needed to do. But I earnestly stuck to my failed vision. On Monday mornings I posted a riddle on the wall for the students to solve by the end of the week; Friday mornings, I ran science demonstrations. But the kids preferred to socialize rather than solve the riddles, and the science demonstrations usually flopped. And on the day when I looked out the window in the middle of teaching a biology lesson and saw cars swaying in their parking spaces, shaken by tremors deep in the Earth, I was the only one who wanted to run outside. The kids just looked up from their work and laughed.

  IN THE WINTER, as shore ice clutches Alaska’s northern coast like a blanket pulled up under the chin, wind scours the state’s Arctic plain, endlessly drifting and sculpting its light snowfalls. In the Interior, snow piles up—each winter an average of five and a half feet drops on Fair-banks—and the temperature of the still air in this region dives deeply below zero. Far to the southwest, out in the Aleutian Islands, winter storms bring endless snow, rain, and wind. In the Southcentral part of the state, low pressure fronts spin off the Gulf of Alaska, sucking bitter air down from the north, bringing moist air inland, and dropping snow. Along the coast here, winter dumps foot after foot of snow—in the fishing town of Cordova, nestled in Prince William Sound, an average of seven feet falls each winter. As you go south toward Alaska’s Panhandle, snow more often turns to rain.

  Winter’s coldest weather seemed irrational. When it came, dry slush—like some sort of lunar dust—formed on the beach at the edge of the surf. On cold, clear nights under a gibbous moon, ice crystals sparkled fantastically across the surface of the snow, as though it were illuminated from within. Cloudless nights often draped otherworldly colors across the sky—neon green, fuchsia, ghostly white—as though the aurora borealis were dropping silk handkerchiefs to Earth. Sometimes the northern lights just glowed on the horizon like a second moon readying to rise. Cold fronts occasionally slid into town and didn’t budge, depositing a gray ice fog that trapped wood smoke and car exhaust until the air around town smelled like the end of a tailpipe. In the hills behind town, frigid air sank into the creek drainages, lacquering willows with ice. In bitter weather, supple fabric became stiff and noisy, and even the snow squeaked. Our eyelashes and hair grayed when moisture from our exhalations froze onto the strands. Car doors iced shut, engines grumbled to a start more grumpily than normal—or didn’t start at all—and ice spread along the insides of windshields. The coldest days were too cold for snow and brought a dry air devoid of smells that scraped my throat.

  The darkness and the cold, the raging wind and persevering snowstorms, and the incessant, frigid crash of the sea would seem to shut Alaskans in their homes during the long winter. But the time of snow and ice is the time when much of Alaska is its most open. Winter makes the landscape—otherwise soggy, lake-speckled, and river-sliced in so much of the state—far more traversable than during the thawed months. Snow makes the endless rolling land quietly navigable for miles by smoothing rumpled ground, masking tangled shrubs, and bridging creeks. Along Alaska’s northern coast, shore ice makes travel between villages more direct as sinuous bays and inlets could be bypassed. Frozen rivers in the north become state-maintained highways that link remote villages. Fuel trucks, family station wagons, and state trooper vehicles travel the curving
river highways that are marked with stakes and reflective tape and kept open from the incessantly drifting snow by plow trucks. A fleet of taxis—Chevy Suburbans, mostly—carry villagers into town for supplies, or ferry them to and from their ice fishing spots on the river.

  But this mobility often invited disaster. Each winter triggered a relay of deaths. As soon as the old man who sped away from his village into the white expanse on his snowmachine was pronounced gone, a boat would capsize in winter waters. A truck driver was killed when an avalanche spilled him across the highway and into the ocean, and a helicopter dove into cold, gray water. A recluse died of hypothermia when the power company shut off his electricity, and an old woman, suffering from dementia, wandered out of her home to freeze to death alone.

  Even small things could spell death in winter: car keys dropped—and lost—in the snow on a frigid night, a stalled-out snowmachine far from help, a minor miscalculation on an icy highway. A single page of the Anchorage Daily News reported two days’ toll of winter deaths: A boy died when he sledded into a stationary truck; a couple was killed when a young man lost control of his speeding truck on an icy highway; an avalanche tumbled an experienced skier down a mountain and buried him under five feet of snow while his friend watched; and a young man was killed when a downdraft smashed the single-engine plane his father was piloting into a remote, snow-covered valley. The radio, too, droned with disaster all winter long. We kept the statewide news on while we cooked dinner. That winter, there was nearly one death a week from snowmachine accidents alone. Winter united this broad swath of continent. Here, Alaskans all over the state heard of the misfortunes everywhere else. Winter was winter for us all.

  And the cold months meant a new set of precautions. You considered backup heat in case the power went out for an extended time. You checked the level of fuel oil in your tank before the snow made the driveway impassable to oil trucks. You made sure the pipes didn’t freeze during a sudden cold snap or when you went away. If roofs weren’t designed right, they sloughed off snow at the foot of the front door, and you kept a bucket of sand nearby to scatter on icy steps and paths. For long road trips, we often kept a snow shovel in the back of the car, as well as water, a sleeping bag, food, and matches.

  WEAVING BETWEEN STANDS of spruce, we passed the nearest neighboring home, an A-frame cabin that shared our half-mile drive. We often saw our neighbor, a young guy with curly, strawberry blond hair who was trailed by an overweight black lab, splitting wood in front of his place with a hand-rolled cigarette drooping from his lower lip. Derek made his rent by transcribing music sent to him via email by composers in the Lower 48. He had moved up the previous summer with his girlfriend, a friendly woman who had left two kids with her ex-husband in California and quickly gotten work at the local bakery. By midwinter, she had gone back. She sold her skis to me before she left. The A-frame’s metal roof sloped down nearly to the ground, making the place dark and look a bit like a silo. Two other homes shared the gravel road: a wood-sided house surrounded by spruce that was built by a fisherman who came up from Colorado to fish during the summer, and a two-story round house being built—and lived in—by a young couple with a collie who walked into their place (or traveled by snowshoe in the winter) the quarter-mile from where they parked on the edge of the road.

  We continued westward, under a white sky which afforded the kind of muted, directionless light that made seeing subtle topography in the snow difficult. There were so many different kinds of snow for skiing. In early winter, heavy powder layered in the hills, and you sank almost to your knees. In the spring, a clean icy crust often formed on the surface of the snow; you could careen across it at high speeds, but gaining purchase to make a turn was difficult. The best was a combination—a crust with a few inches of fresh snow for a soft, clean glide, and a bit of cushioning if you fell. But by afternoon, we would likely pierce through the crust. As the day warmed, it would cave in, but this late in the season, the snow had settled and we wouldn’t sink in far.

  John and I skied side by side. I loved to feel every muscle in my body strain and then stretch itself out with each stride. I could feel the backs of my thighs and upper arms, my stomach and calves all pushing to get ahead. The only sounds were of our skis gliding across the snow, the poles puncturing the crust, the squeak of our boots against their bindings and the rush of our exhalations. Sweat was forming on my forehead beneath my wool hat, under the waistband of my pants, and between my gloves and the palms of my hands. I stopped to unzip my coat, remove layers, and catch my breath. Up ahead, John flew down a hill, his maroon windbreaker opening like wings under his arms. When he fell at the bottom, his skis sliding out from under him, he laughed and then lay back in the snow to take a break. I relished the sensation of full-body exhaustion I would feel by evening, and pressed on to catch up with him.

  We skied downhill through spruce and across the deep, cloven pocks left by moose. In a couple of months, moose would come into town to drop their calves. Photos of young calves born in people’s backyards would appear on the front pages of the two local newspapers. Their oversized heads, miniature horselike bodies, and spindly legs seemed illogically proportioned. By midsummer, most of the moose moved back into the hills. In the fall or winter bulls shed their antlers, which were often hidden by snow until spring. As we skied into the creek drainage, the snow broke open in places, revealing deep black seams where water ran darkly five feet below us. The sound of running water, which was normally absent in the winter landscape, was evidence that things were starting to wake up again.

  SOMETIMES THE FIRST snow flew long before Halloween. In other years, cold rain pierced us long into November. But when winter came in Alaska, it made the landscape bloom again. On clear, cold mornings, crystals blossomed on the surface of the snow, catching the sun like peach fuzz on young skin. Hoarfrost petaled the dead, saucer-sized umbels of pushki that still stood shoulder-high out of the snow, and ice sprouted like asters along hollow fireweed stalks. Icicles dropped glistening taproots from the edges of roofs, and on bare patches beneath spruce, ice crystals extended like vines. Snow made spruce trees look as if they had grown new white boughs on top of the old. Along the beach, frost spread like a gardener’s groundcover among the cobbles. Sometimes snowflakes dropped from the sky like cherry blossoms set to the wind and you could catch these flowers in your mouth. Other times, snow left a dust as fine as pollen.

  As a kid, I had longed for snow, knowing that just the threat of it—an inch or two predicted for that afternoon—could cancel school. A dozen miles outside the nation’s capital, snow and ice meant that everyone was worried about getting sued. But I had noticed very little about the snow itself—all I cared about was whether it was sticky, which meant good snowball fight conditions. Here, snow reinvented the landscape. After months of fall darkness, when we lost more than a half hour of daylight in a single week, the first snowfall whitewashed everything. The snow damped noise, silencing the grumble of the trucks we heard all summer long. Gray clouds piled into the bay and dropped flakes so silently all you could hear was a gentle static that seemed like the absence of sound. Snow insulated houses, blocking drafts and layering heavily onto roofs where it trapped warmth. Around town, winter brought an incessant falling and melting of snow. Cottony clouds gripped the top of the bluff behind town, then let go, having powdered the brown hills as white as talc. Snow made everything shipshape. All of those messy in-between areas—vacant lots around town, yards filled with parts cars, horse trailers, rusting trucks, stacked fishing gear—looked neater after they were dressed in a starch-white snow.

  The drastic changes each season wreaked on the landscape forced people to think about making drastic changes of their own. Some decided to take off in the winter for life in a hot climate. Others downsized, upgraded, cut their hair, got a divorce. Over the course of the year, the land around us morphed from bloom, to green, to brown, to white. Six feet of growth died back to nothing and then was replaced by head-high snow. The di
fferent selves emerged: the melancholy, the manic, the purposeful, the lazy.

  Although the changes winter brought to coastal Alaska were extreme, the season here was much milder than in the Interior. The sea, which absorbs and releases the sun’s heat slowly, tempers the extremes of summer and winter. As the days shorten and the temperatures drop in the fall, the sea cools more slowly than the land, keeping coastal areas mild. By late winter, the temperature of the sea drops to its lowest point, and as the days lengthen and the sunlight increases in intensity, the cold ocean cools coastal regions. Although true celestial mid-summer and mid-winter occur on the solstices, the sea’s sluggish pace of storing and giving off heat helps cause the bulk of cold winter days to come after the shortest day of the year and summer’s warmth to run long after summer solstice. In Homer, winter temperatures rarely dropped below zero, but the tempering influence of the sea faded in the higher elevations even a couple of miles from town, where temperatures were often significantly colder and winter lasted a month longer. And just ninety miles up the highway in more inland communities, you could count on the temperature being ten degrees colder in the winter and ten degrees warmer in the summer. But each winter erased the memory of the one before. At the end of every winter, people around town agreed that it had been the coldest, the mildest, the sloppiest, the driest, or the most rainy winter ever.

  Although the sea dampened the extremes of winter, the beach was magical during the frozen months. By morning, hoarfrost had wrapped each beach cobble individually, and as the day passed, sunlight melted the ice on the south faces of the stones until each dark cobble was merely capped with white. Then the tide came in and painted the beach black again. Ice crystals powdered seaweed on the beach and froze it into solid gnarls. Creeks that normally spilled across the beach froze into shelves of ice, and seeps along the bluff shellacked the dusty earth. During the coldest weather, high tides quietly deposited shoulder-high continents of sea ice at the top of the beach and slushy waves rolled in languidly.