Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  Everything else was on the move too. Moose roved into town from the hills, where deep snow made passage difficult for these long-legged animals. They moved between the edges of parking lots and vacant parcels, browsing on willows and the tips of spruce. Sea ducks that had wintered on open water returned and flecked the bay in black. Warblers dashed in and then proceeded to sing for hours from the boughs of birches, cottonwoods, and alders that would soon leaf out. In a matter of days, moths crowded the air and, at night, headlights waded into their midst. Nighttime itself was going someplace else.

  It was late April, and the snow was rotten and patchy, strewn with debris and pulpy in places. The skiing was no good. There hadn’t been fresh snow in weeks. The tops of willows poked through. I wanted spring to get on with itself. I folded myself onto the couch with a book while John set off to work on a project, digging out our wooden kayaks we’d stored in the fall so that we could get on the water before the snow was completely gone, which might not be until June.

  Months earlier, to protect our boats from winter weather, we had slid them side by side in the crawl space beneath the floor of an unfinished building our landlord had started the year before. The plywood surface extended twenty by twenty feet and would, the landlord planned, support a building that was part of a business scheme he talked about from time to time. He would turn the house into a retreat center and build outbuildings where dozens of people could sleep. Already there was a similar structure on the property as well as an outhouse and part of a ropes course. The landlord had stashed his own fleet of a half-dozen brightly-colored plastic kayaks—also part of the business plan—in this spot as well, to protect them from the feet of snow that would fall over the course of the winter.

  That afternoon, the boats had been far from my mind. I didn’t want to think about making the crossing to the other side of the bay. I didn’t want to think about having to read the water, navigate the tide rips. A winter of skiing the hills behind our place had ruined me—the predictable swells of land, the gentle current of one drainage running into another; slack was when you stood still on your skis and took a break. It was a form of subtle protest, my reading on the couch. I didn’t want to help. I wanted to linger in the terrestrial world for as long as I could, but John was determined to get up and go.

  Sometimes I found John’s endless energy exhausting. In his eyes, there was always another project to do. And the moment he’d arrived in Alaska, his dream came into focus: to explore the state’s wildest places by its waterways. Reluctantly, I agreed that this seemed the best way to approach it. John ordered the kit for my boat soon after. But building the boat wasn’t the only thing there was to do; we would also have to refinish the wood every year or two; maintain paddles, life vests, and safety equipment; acquire maps and charts; and constantly glean advice from people with more experience.

  Two pages from the end of the chapter I was reading, John burst back through the front door. “Something’s wrong with the boats!” He was out of breath from sprinting back to the house. “I need a light for a better look.” He ran to the closet to get a headlamp, leaving torn waffle-shaped pieces of snow fallen from the tread of his boots melting on the wood floor. I jumped off the couch, grabbed a jacket, yanked on my rubber boots, and followed him out the front door to the side of the house where the platform was encircled by spruce. More than half a dozen feet of snow had fallen that winter, piling up heavily on every flat surface.

  When we got to the clearing, I could see that drifts had piled up higher than the level of the building’s floor, and John had taken a shovel to the solid, six-foot bank to create a space through which we could drag out our kayaks. But after a few minutes of shoveling, he realized something wasn’t right. When he’d cleared enough snow away to reveal the edge of the building’s floor, he saw that it tilted up toward the sky. The structure had collapsed.

  WHEN THE SNOW melted away, the world of human things rose up: hastily thrown-up cabins, trailers long forgotten, yard junk. The garden patch that had looked tidy for months under snow revealed the knotted mess of pea vines and bolted radish heads you hadn’t bothered to pull in the fall. It was time to work the beds and start seeds. Time to change out your car tires and pick up a winter’s worth of blown trash. It was time to weed through your closets and bring what you no longer used down to the Pick ’n’ Pay, where your neighbor could buy your old shirt back for a quarter. Spring begged for work—so much needed to be cleaned up, prepared. But that afternoon, I didn’t want to budge.

  In the middle of spring chores, you realized the enormous amount of time spent acquiring stuff and then taking care of it. Some people joked about how many motors they had to keep running: two cars, an old plow truck, a boat, lawn mower, four-wheeler, and a generator just in case. This didn’t include the fridge, oil heater fan, and well pump. Just the sheer number of shoes needed to get by in winter was astounding: rubber boots for wet days, snow boots for cold ones, ski boots, ice skates, inside shoes for work, slippers for the cold floor at home. Life here required a new set of possessions I gradually acquired—things I would never use if I moved almost anywhere else: clam shovel, sturdy down parka, a collection of five-gallon plastic buckets, rebar cut into garden post–lengths, jars for pickling fish in, an assortment of fishing nets for various purposes, scrap wood, milk crates, and hardware salvaged from the dump. I accumulated and collected; sometimes it all seemed like too much junk.

  But there was a culture of junk here, and a few locals were lauded and despised for their exceptional ability, or tendency, to accumulate it. Les Wilson owned one of the most beautiful parcels around: thirty-nine sunny acres of meadow, birch, and some live spruce. His property, about three miles out of town, was flat, perfect for farming, tending a nice grassy yard, or just lying down in the meadow when the fireweed was aflame and staring up at the sky. He’d bought the place a decade before for a price that would make local subdividers salivate, and then began covering it with junk. Now it was a compound of the neglected, a community of odds and ends. A muddy loop road across the property ringed his stockpiles of junk: propane tanks, old cars, trucks, camper vans, stacks of car door panels, beer cans, tires, steel beams, welder’s tanks, buoys, blue tarps. Les had hauled in a few dilapidated trailers salvaged from someplace else that he dropped in rows at the edge of the mud road and rented out for too much money. There were a couple of hand-built cabins occupied by men who helped Les continue carting stuff in. You could look at it as a sign of resourcefulness and industry. Someday he might be able to provide for someone in need—and that’s what kept him going. But you could also see it as a scab on the land, an insult, even a tragedy. The planes to and from Anchorage flew over the place half a dozen times a day. The view from above—of junk creeping into untouched meadow, pooling up around birch trees—was not pretty.

  But salvage, Les said, was part of the Alaskan mentality. Living for years far from stores and supply shops, off the road system or during the days before a highway and town rose up around you, you learned to keep stuff, to scrimp, save, and be resourceful. “That’s not a junk car,” he philosophized, “that’s the parts for the car you’re driving.” Why get rid of something—even an eyesore—when someday you, or your neighbor, or a guy with some cash in his wallet, might want it? “I’m not in it to get rich,” Les declared. He realized that wasn’t likely going to happen, of course, but for him, piling up junk—living off the opulent bycatch of our lives—seemed a higher calling.

  Over the years, the city council had made numerous rules about junk. What would happen if the whole town were cleaned up? No derelict boats out on the Spit. No junk cars in people’s yards. We could be as spotless a tourist destination as Disney World. But there were quiet incentives to the contrary. Space wasn’t much of a limiting factor, so there was always room for more junk, even though the landfill, barely two miles out of town, accepted almost anything for free. And outside city limits, people could do just about anything with their properties: gravel mine,
airstrip, dog yards.

  A junkyard here or there was no big deal. We could handle it. Things were worse in the Bush, far off the road system, where nearly everything was flown or barged in—televisions, generators, snowmachines, refrigerators, sofas—and nearly everything stayed. “Combi” jets heading to hub communities off the road system had half of their fuselages blocked off for cargo. Passengers sat in the aft section of the plane behind a bulkhead on the other side of which sat cases of soda, stereos, and power tools.

  A new school arrived in pieces by the planeload to a remote village: lumber, metal roofing, nails, sacks of concrete. But Bush life depended on air transport for more than just bringing in stuff. “You see the whole cycle of life,” a pilot explained. “You haul a young guy to a village where there’s a girl waiting for him. Then you haul the wedding party. Then you haul the young mom with a new baby.” He added, “You fly Grandpa out to the hospital when he’s sick and then his body back to his village to be buried.”

  Dealing with solid waste is a tricky problem in the Bush. Plumbing has come slowly to rural Alaska, which means that residents in many Native villages collected their waste in honey buckets lined with plastic bags. The plastic bags were then dumped into a lagoon dug out of the ground a short distance from the village. I had flown over communities where you could see the blue bags slopped into these shallow pits. Honey buckets presented a public health disaster, and millions of state and federal dollars were being pumped into the Bush to build water and sewer systems. But in many cases, not enough money was socked away for maintaining these systems, which are extraordinarily expensive to build and operate because of months of subzero temperatures, extensive waterlogged ground, and permafrost. One village, facing a decade-long project with a price tag of $43 million just to plumb its two hundred homes, turned to raising funds through pull-tab gambling.

  Most villages dumped trash in open landfills. On weekends, people went there for spare parts. Making junk go away, out of sight in a flat, treeless landscape, was expensive or impossible. Why shouldn’t used cars be dumped along a river in hopes they’d shore up an eroding bank? Well-meaning people were arranging empty DC–10s to fly steadily accumulating junk out of the Bush to scrapyards and recyclers in Anchorage and as far away as Seattle. In one year, more than a million pounds of used cars. Alaska’s most remote places had become sinks not only for trash, an insult to the eyes, but worse, to the invisible jetsam of modern life: toxins leaking from landfills, radioactive materials on abandoned military sites, pollutants from other parts of the world that collected in the north as if it were a giant river eddy. We couldn’t see this trash, but knew it littered our lives.

  But in town, most of us wanted the lifestyle here we’d known elsewhere. We wanted wine, food from far away, books, clothes we liked. Two companies delivered nearly all of the cargo that came into the state, which arrived by ship at the Anchorage port. A single ship of the four that arrived weekly could pour out two hundred cars. Vast quantities of construction materials were shipped up to erect structures to hold other stuff. Machines and materials came in ships to be trucked north to Arctic tundra oil fields. Tons of groceries arrived every week by ship because so little food was grown instate. I tried to picture just the number of bananas shipped north each week. Shipping companies operated on a policy to keep eight days’ worth of food on store shelves or in transit. People were beginning to recognize the disaster that would ensue if a link fell off the chain, but, despite the state’s independent mindset, we were becoming more reliant on staples—on milk, eggs, bread, and everything else—from hundreds and thousands of miles away.

  Alaska produces almost nothing; the ships come up full and leave mostly empty, except during summer when they cart seafood away. Each day is a parade of stuff into the state: doughnuts, sneakers, car tires, lumber. As the snow melted away that spring, the question rung out: Where did it all end up? Landfills swelled, backyards filled, warehouses restocked, houses shot up on cleared slopes.

  In early summer, it was hard not to detest the arrival of so much equipment: RVs the size of eighteen-wheelers towing shiny SUVs, trailers spilling out four-wheelers, trucks trailering thirty-foot fishing boats. Like seeds set to the breeze, tents were strewn across the Spit, sprouting fire pits, parked rental cars, driftwood and tarp structures that struggled against the wind. Each year, a few took root and stayed.

  It was impossible to resist the urge to surround ourselves with what we knew, what we owned, what we bought and created. Recently, I’d complained to John about not having a spot for my books, the few knickknacks I’d brought with me or recently accumulated. When I’d moved to Alaska, I had abandoned my meager amount of furniture—scrounged from yard sales and friends—and instead brought only what I could carry in a backpack and two bags I’d loaded onto the ferry. With so few things of my own around, life felt transitory, like a rental. So, I started collecting: rocks shaped like squares, small gray beach pebbles smoothed by the sea, gull vertebrae scrubbed by surf, driftwood sculpted into pleasing forms. I covered the windowsills and wanted more space. I thought if I had my own spot for my own things, it might make my life here seem less provisional. Over the winter, John had encouraged me to build a small bookshelf using the landlord’s shop and scrap wood he’d salvaged. John showed me how to use a table saw, circular saw, jigsaw, and router. The shelf emerged as a stunted piece of furniture, made to fit below a window, and impractically short for anyplace else. I’d get rid of the shelf a few years later, another piece of junk that moved through my hands and then out of sight.

  If you thought about it long enough, it could make you weep or feel sick to your stomach: We were ruining the very thing we’d all moved here for. We were bringing in so much stuff, our footprint was always spreading into places where no human development had existed before. We were clearing land for more refuse: for buildings that would rot away within a generation or two; for level land on which to park cars that would eventually break down and fall apart; to raise up storage units to hold things we rarely used. Developers felled trees, scraped the rolling landscape flat, subdivided, hauled in truckloads of gravel for an access road, and planted a sign: PANORAMIC VISTA: NATURE OUT YOUR FRONT DOOR.

  As with life anywhere else, the rubble of our lives held our histories. You couldn’t give Dungeness crab or shrimp pots away anymore, so they piled in yards as evidence of busted fisheries, an ocean changing faster than people’s ability to forget. A mechanical clam digger with wheels more than six feet high sat rusting in the mudflats on the Spit for years. Originally a military vehicle used to haul equipment across snow, it had been outfitted to dig into sand for razor clams as part of a pilot commercial clamming project that went belly-up. When the city launched a beautification project that encouraged people to haul away junk, a local machinist who had snuck beers with friends behind the massive digger during high school dragged the thing eight miles out the road to his front yard. One day, he planned, he would turn it into a snow-roving rig again, complete with cab, heat, and tunes, and set up to haul broken-down snowmachines out of the backcountry, or at least he would salvage its steel frame. The Double Eagle, a sixty-five-foot wooden boat built out of cypress and used off the Gulf Coast as a shrimper was brought up during the Exxon Valdez oil spill to assist with cleanup efforts and afterward, sat in the boatyard for a decade peeling paint. People said it had been used as a brothel during the cleanup, when hundreds of men lined up for high-paying jobs doing work that was too little, too late. The big boat was a reminder of our clumsiness, wastefulness, and constant hunger.

  Our middens exposed us—the clamshells we tossed under a shrub in the yard, the refuse we left at the dump: In the future, these would tell stories about us. Someday, they would be sorted through, decoded. I was afraid of what they would say. These accumulations of things tied us down. Sometimes they remembered too much. Sometimes we needed to break away, to cast off and start afresh. Each year, we watched it happen before our eyes: Trees dropped their leaves t
o save up for new ones; ducks molted their flight feathers and waited flightless for new primaries; the bay scraped its beaches clean and started over. Sometimes I wanted to do the same: swipe every last stone and shell from the windowsills and chuck them into the yard; toss every knickknack that was some relic of the past; take off through the front door with a backpack and just walk away alone. But it was easier to stay put; there was comfort in the clutter. On the days when the ugly mess of our daily lives grew too much, the view across the water was a necessary distraction. We oriented ourselves to the south.

  THE FLOOR HAD been built about three feet off the ground and was completely buried by snow. John had already begun to dig along the structure’s north side, and we shoveled together quickly until we hit the pocket of snowlessness beneath the structure so we could get a look at the boats. John put the headlamp on, lay on his belly on the snow, and stuck his head through. “My boat’s totaled,” he said calmly. “I don’t know about yours.” We continued to dig until we were up to our middles in a trench along the north side of the platform, and then we crawled below the edge of the sunken structure. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness beneath the floor; the snow made everything bright everywhere else. But then what lay below the failed structure came into focus: A floor joist had fallen through the deck of my kayak, splitting it like taut skin. The gash was ragged, the torn edge raw and unfinished. The two-by-twelve supporting beam that held up the edge of the floor had cracked around the bolt that held it in place. A collection of fissures below the bolt formed the perfect outline of a horse’s head in the wood. I couldn’t remember what my boat had looked like before. My memory of its perfectly gleaming deck was instantly erased.