John’s boat, too, had been broken in half; a joist pierced its white hull. It looked like a compound fracture. We were wading through the silent wreckage of it all as the snow slowly melted around the edge of the floor. The collapse could have happened weeks ago; we would never know. Now, there was only the still scene of disaster: varnished plywood—millimeters thin—punctured; joists snapped; pressboard failed. It was such a waste.
There was nothing to do with the boats but burn them. We slid the kayaks out of storage through the hole we dug in the snow, then we threw them onto a pile of spruce stumps in the yard, poured some gasoline on top, and set it alight. I had to watch. I stood on the snow in the yard staring at the air watery with heat and the stream of smoke being bullied about by switching breezes. The smell of burning gas lingered; the fire warmed my face, chest, the fronts of my legs. As the flames gathered around the remains of my boat, a sheet of silvery white fiberglass cloth, which had covered the entire kayak lifted off the broken wooden form like a ghost, hovering for a moment in the air before collapsing back into the fire which smoldered around it ineffectually for hours. Over the course of the afternoon, the heat of the bonfire fingered into the snow around it, melting it into parallel ridges that radiated around the fire. Dozens of feet away from the flames, the burn left a record in the snow.
As soon as the burnpile cooled, John shaved his beard clean and began building a new kayak. I had never seen his bare face before, his thin upper lip or the expanse of skin between his nose and mouth. He looked like someone I didn’t know. It was like erasing a memory and suddenly creating a new one. In six weeks, the new boat was done and John carried it outside into the yard, where the grass was now almost completely green. He lowered himself into the cockpit, rocking the boat on its keel and feeling it hold him at the hips. John wanted nothing but to get it in the water and go. And soon he would. But later that afternoon, with the boat still under the sun on the grass, a bull moose lumbered into the yard to gnaw on an elderberry shrub steps away from John’s new boat. We watched nervously from the window, afraid to startle the animal lest it put a hoof through the deck. The moose lost interest and moved on.
There are seasons in life when things seem to disappear. That was one of those seasons. The boats gone, the snow, John’s beard, a black cat with a white bib we’d adopted from the pound in the fall who didn’t come home one day. Picked off by a hawk or coyote, we assumed. The landscape naked of snow was bony and sullen, sallow and emptied out. Beneath our feet, the earth was waterlogged and cold; it waited.
In a few weeks, John would find the single picture he’d taken of me in my boat on its maiden voyage. You couldn’t tell it was me, the image was so small. But you could see the slick gleam of the boat on the surface of the bay, a slice reflecting the sun. He put it in a frame and set it on the windowsill. Now I could brag about the accomplishment of building it, but didn’t have to face the responsibility of owning it, or the obligation to explore by sea. I felt an indefinable sense of relief—one that I could never share with John. I hated that sense of relief, but knew it was true. A tie to this place, to this man, had come undone.
10
THE DELTA
NEAP TIDE: n. A weak tide that occurs near the quarter moon phase when the gravitational force of the sun and moon are perpendicular to each other with respect to the Earth.
It was early June, the week before John and I would be going to far western Alaska, where he had secured summer jobs for us, working as field assistants on a bird research project. There were a few days’ worth of work in Anchorage, sorting through and packing up equipment and buying gear, before we would fly out to the research camp. We drove north up the highway. Dirty piles of snow lingered near the road where small avalanches had bulldozed down and come to a halt. Rushing snowmelt whitened every drainage, but everything else was green.
We’d been hired by a biologist John had worked for during two summers while in college. We stayed in a back room at the biologist’s house and spent our time driving from one side of Anchorage to the other, buying stuff John knew we needed for the field: hip waders, work pants, books and magazines. John and I considered the state’s largest city not a destination but a place where we found ourselves out of necessity, usually on the way to somewhere else. Aside from visiting nearly every rubber boot outlet in Anchorage, we stuck tightly to our usual spots: the Asian market where we could find the curries and Thai spices not sold in Homer, a couple of giant thrift stores, a mediocre bagel joint, and the huge new and used book store.
Three days later, we boarded the flight from Anchorage to Bethel, which took a little over an hour. Heading west, the jet rose over the sharp peaks of the Alaska Range and the blue glaciers in between. Beyond the range’s western foothills, the land flattened and stretched without interruption as far as I could see. John and I, along with two other biotechnicians, were the spike crew, the group that goes out early to get the project going before the ice flushed out of the rivers and the rest of the crew could arrive by boat. Susanna, a cheerful college student from the Midwest, made a third in our spike crew. Paul, a surly Gulf War veteran on his first trip to Alaska, appeared uninterested in everything around us.
We landed in late morning. Bethel’s one-gate airport was crowded with Yup’ik families—reuniting happily, kissing, and calming babies. Some twenty-five thousand people, mostly Yup’ik, live in this community and the more than fifty small villages scattered along the region’s many rivers. No roads lead here from the rest of the state. The service center for the region, Bethel is by far the largest community for hundreds of miles around, and has a runway that accommodates daily jets to and from Anchorage and a dock for cargo-bearing barges coming up the Kuskokwim from the Bering Sea. Uniformed white federal employees who worked for the vast national wildlife refuge surrounding Bethel moved decisively to gather gear and head out the door. Half a dozen men in clean camouflage getups milled about carrying fishing rod cases. They were on vacation and had spent a fortune to fly here and be taken to remote fishing camps. Many villagers didn’t have cars—bringing them out by barge was prohibitively expensive—and taxis crowded the airport’s curb.
As people milled by, moving duffels, plastic totes, and boxes, I stood at the edge of the curb and looked straight out ahead of me. From my vantage across this far edge of Bethel, the only signs of permanence were the power lines strung across the community and a few low houses that sat like paperweights on the tundra. I remembered how the land had looked on the maps at home—about as solid as cheese cloth. Except for unbroken, pale green strips on either sides of the rivers wide enough for the uppercase labels of “Yukon” and “Kuskokwim,” the terrain had looked mysteriously gauzy, as if you could punch your fingers through the land and into the sea. And there was nothing beyond Bethel but small villages widely scattered across the tundra. Chakwaktolik, Nanvarnarluk, Tuluksak: the village names sang the stunted melodies of the Yup’ik language.
This was my first time off the road system in Alaska, and I was giddy. I was getting into a landscape with no limits and no easy passage to anywhere else. And the strange assemblage of people at the airport—the feds, the Natives, the tourists—meant there were many things about this place I didn’t yet know. I stood in my stiff, new workpants; in six weeks they would be supple, even threadbare in places.
We were picked up by a man from a local floatplane company that would fly us the rest of the way to camp. He drove a diesel pickup with two rows of seats. Sixteen miles of gravel roads webbed through the flat, drab town, which was littered with the refuse of a windswept life. As we drove across Bethel to the company headquarters, we passed a hodgepodge of low-slung restaurants that revealed the remote community’s surprising diversity: Mexican, Chinese, Albanian, Italian.
We loaded our gear into the back of a single-engine floatplane and took off from a wide eddy in the Kuskokwim River at the edge of town. While the pilot hummed to Jimmy Buffett singing through our headsets, one hundred miles of tundra
rolled by beneath us, brown with a blush of early green and scattered scabs of snow. Rivers wound across the land inefficiently and between them, thousands of small, shallow lakes glinted like half-buried dimes. Below us, a few Native villages clumped messily on the land, radiating scars of four-wheeler and snowmachine tracks.
A lucky break in the traffic of truck-sized chunks of ice flushing out of the Manokinak River provided an opening for us to land on its wide, gray surface. The pilot watched for ice that could crumple his pontoons, and we quickly unloaded onto the muddy cut bank, where a couple of fuel barrels and a stack of grayed wood—anchored with rope and rebar stakes into the tundra—marked camp. As soon as the gear was out of the plane, the pilot jumped back into his seat, the engine roaring even before he had closed the door. For as far as we could see, nothing on the land rose higher than our knees. No trees, no shrubs, just watery mountains far in the distance. When the plane took off and was out of earshot, we were left only with a pile of gear, the vast dome of sky, and the wide river pushing ice out to the Bering Sea.
John took the lead in setting things up, mostly by just getting to work himself. We put up our sleeping tents and then a tent for gear, where we huddled to cook and eat dinner. Our field camp sat at the edge of the muddy Manokinak, which wandered slowly across a vast expanse of tundra. Half water, half earth, the region is dominated by two immense rivers, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. The deltas of these rivers, which drain nearly half of the state, combine to form a flat, waterlogged landscape larger than the state of West Virginia. The region, called the Y-K Delta, is a wildly productive nursery for birds. Each summer, millions of waterfowl and shorebirds flock here to nest and raise young.
Once we had settled into camp, John trained us in how to get the project going. The goal of the research was to gather data about red-throated loons, duck-sized diving birds that nest in northern parts of North America, Europe, and Asia. The population of these birds in Alaska had dropped by half in less than twenty years and no one knew why. The Y-K Delta is the red-throated loons’ most important nesting grounds in Alaska: More than a third of the population that nest in the state do so here, and this region had seen the most profound decline.
We began by working as a group of four, locating nests of our study species. In the spring, thousands of pairs of red-throated loons land on the Delta’s shallow lakes and build nests along the shores. With legs set far back on their bodies, the birds are useless on land, so they assemble the wet mats of mud and vegetation that serve as their nests at the very edge of a lake. Their downy, gray chicks hatch in midsummer, and the parents feed them by mouth narrow silver fish that flash like blades. In the evenings, they wail out across the tundra.
We unpacked aerial photos that served as maps, and John showed us how to locate our position on the images by looking at the shapes of lakes, the curve of sloughs, and the minute changes in topography, and then how to carefully search for the nests and record the necessary data. Immersed once again in a world where John was teacher and I was student, I felt relieved when, once he showed us how to locate and record nests, we worked alone on the tundra, carrying a day’s worth of food, water, and gear on our backs. Most days, the work wasn’t difficult or exhausting, but engaging enough to make me forget about all the things I didn’t know how to do around camp, such as build sturdy furniture out of the pile of wood or assemble the VHF antennae.
Before leaving camp in the morning, we put on heavy rubber raincoats against the constant wind and hip waders to traverse the landscape, which was pocked by lakes and severed by sloughs. We fanned out into the tundra, scanning faraway lakes through binoculars, searching for the dark silhouettes of loons, with their characteristic upturned bills. The red-throats were skittish and flushed from their nests into the water long before we got close to them. As we approached, they would paddle nervously and then flap madly across the surface of a lake before flying away. We walked the rim of every lake carefully scanning for the loons’ dinner plate–sized nests that held one or two chocolate-brown, speckled eggs. Most of these nameless lakes were smaller than swimming pools and no deeper than my thigh. Permafrost just a few feet beneath the ground kept them from getting any deeper. We waded out to every island, feeling the hardpan of frozen ground beneath our feet. On our plastic-coated photos, we marked every loon nest with a black dot and a code to distinguish it from every other nest we would find that summer. The work required little beyond the ability to walk long distances in hip waders and to locate yourself at a specific point in the midst of a landscape that looked nearly identical all around you, as well as a tendency to care about the project’s success.
A WEEK LATER, a couple of hours past midnight, the sound of outboards drifted into my sleep like a mosquito in the ear. I awoke as John was leaving our tent. The rest of the crew arrived after a cold, six-hour trip on the river in two small skiffs and two wide aluminum boats. Five biologists, including the project director, were aboard the skiffs, which were heavy-laden with gear. The larger boats were run by four stocky Native herring fishermen who had broad, brown faces. They were hired to haul gear that couldn’t fit in the small camp skiffs. These men lived in Chevak, a village of eight hundred people who spoke a unique dialect and called themselves Cup’ik. The skiffs we used all summer long were stored there between field seasons. Wearing every layer they had brought, topped off by sturdy rubber rain gear, the five biologists moved stiffly as we all gathered on the cut bank in the dusky light of the middle of the night to unload the boats. The Cup’ik men wore jeans, sweatshirts, light windbreakers, and baseball caps. The tide was out, and without much talk, we lugged dozens of heavy plastic totes from the boats onto the bank, now about ten feet above the river’s surface. Four guys steadied themselves to heave the generator. With the engines cut, the night was quiet—even the birds were silent—but the banging of gear against the boats’ hulls sounded like the striking of drums. The light was like that moment of dusk when trees rise as paper cuts against the sky. Here, that quality of light lingered.
I was curious about the new biotechs—these people I’d be living so closely with over the next few weeks. But more than that, I sought some kind of insight into the men from Chevak, into how they lived, how they looked at the Delta. They said little, just chuckling with each other softly as they worked. John brought a pot of tea out of the gear tent once the unpacking was done. We stood on the bank of the river, in that extended twilight and silently drank tea, holding the mugs with both hands so as not to lose any warmth. One of the Cup’ik guys, who I realized on closer glance was perhaps only fourteen, quietly broke the silence by telling us he had just written a school report on a tundra plant called Labrador tea. “It’s got a lot of antioxidants,” he said, that health magazine term knocking around strangely in his mouth. Soon afterward, the Native men got back in their boats and took off as the sky was beginning to get light.
Over the next few days, camp blossomed from a basic shelter to a comfortable outpost. The project leader, Joel, was in his late thirties and bumbled around camp in the same pair of stained red sweatpants every day. He was quiet but enjoyed the opportunity to laugh, and was an easygoing boss. Field crews changed from season to season, and the rest of our nine-person crew was a motley assortment of college and graduate students in biology on their summer break, and a volunteer in his sixties who was less interested in work than in adding rare Eurasian bird species to his life list.
We put up a weatherport, an uninsulated platform tent tall enough to stand up in, which served as kitchen, living room, and office. We furnished it with an oil heater, a two-burner propane stove, folding chairs, shelves, and a kitchen table. One of the biotechs stapled a flowery plastic tablecloth to the table’s ragged surface; spices, marinades, dry goods, canned food, and chocolate bars emerged from plastic totes.
Mornings at field camp normally passed leisurely. We packed into the weatherport, where the oil heater created the only warm, dry, and windless space for miles around. Unless someon
e decided to make pancakes for everyone or big omelettes from powdered eggs, we fended for ourselves, toasting bread on a cast-iron pan on the gas stovetop, passing around the drip coffee funnel, and rereading the dog-eared newsmagazines that had been sitting around the weatherport for a couple of weeks. Sometimes Joel relied on John, the only biotech in our group who had worked at this camp before, to help him plan the day’s work at breakfast so we could all go off and do it on our own. After an hour or two of getting the morning going and packing lunch and gear, we departed on foot or by skiff for a day in the field.
But a week or so after the rest of the crew arrived, a wildlife vet flew into camp, igniting a buzz among the nine of us, and not just because he had brought a new crop of newspapers and magazines. The main goal of the season’s research was to figure out where the region’s population of red-throated loons spent the winter. The vet’s job was to implant a satellite tracking device into the abdomens of a few red-throats. Provided everything worked correctly and the birds didn’t die in the next few months, the implant would reveal where the birds migrated, which might yield a clue to why their numbers had declined so precipitously. That day, we were going to trap the first bird. Because Joel knew we all wanted to watch the surgery, he gave us this day “off,” which meant we could linger around camp. We all knew that trapping and operating on these birds was risky. In previous cases, some wild birds reacted badly to the medication, abandoned their nests, or even died. With each individual bird seemingly important to the success of the entire species, the stakes were high and no one wanted to screw up.
Tide, Feather, Snow Page 16
