Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  But John worked on, decisive and undeterred. Part of me wanted to torch everything, the other part wanted to examine it all as if sorting through an ancient midden. What clues did this junk provide? What could we save to use again? My uncertainty bred deliberation; the deliberation bred inefficiency. While I debated what was useful and what was junk, John dismantled sheds, hired a man to tow the trailer away, rigged up an outhouse. He kept one eye perpetually scanning for deals, for tools, for things we would need on our land. As the days passed, his vision of the place came into sharp focus, yet mine began to waver.

  As John labored on optimistically, I began to doubt whether I could hack it. The amount of work we put in didn’t translate readily into results. The cabin no longer seemed like our perfect homestead, but a dark, close space. As we nailed down tongue and groove spruce flooring in the sleeping loft, I stopped being able to picture myself lying on the futon there next to John. Instead of the property making me feel closer to him, I felt acres apart.

  After a weekend spent in my grubbiest clothes, I started wearing lipstick to work during the week. That fall, my skin turned colorless like the terrain outside—washed out, as fall always was. On the weekends, I strained to imagine how John and I would fix up the cabin—where a small fridge and a wood stove would go; how we’d build kitchen countertops and shelves; how we’d rig up a simple bath; what we’d plant in garden beds next to the house. Come Monday, I marked the movements through my office window of the yellow truck owned by a shy crab fisherman I barely knew. Somewhere along there—in the muddle of pry bars, rusty nails, the smell of old fiberglass insulation, rotting spruce posts, and sinkholes in the yard that we thought might hold twenty-year-old sewage—part of me had wandered off.

  Figuring out—and fixing—what’s broken is so much harder than building anew. At the ready we had level, chalk line, and square. Our measurements were clean and we knew that as the ground shifted beneath the skids on which the cabin sat, we would have to shim the corners to make it right. But I had no shims to prop up myself. Despite our six acres, and the neighboring eighty we believed the moose would willingly share, the boundary of our ownership became a string of impossibilities to me: impossible to have the freedom I wanted, the space I craved. I felt monstrously cruel and couldn’t find the words to describe what was wrong: I want my own desk was all I could manage to say. In the two-room cabin we’d devised, there wasn’t space.

  I wanted to freeze time. I wanted to stop the mushrooming of our to-do list out on the property. I thought if the clock paused, I could make sense of everything. Instead, winter smothered fall and one night, huddled near the heater at our rental place, the words were choking me. I need to go. John went in to the bathroom and closed the door. When he came out, he lay on the bed. I wanted to lie down next to him; we were each other’s comfort.

  “Please leave,” he said.

  Four years had whittled down to this: Words stuck in the throat. A desire to cling to the very thing I was running from. An inability to say what I really felt, because I didn’t yet know how to describe it. I had hurt John beyond measure and I hated myself for it. But a quiet wave of relief washed over me.

  In the weeks that followed, I emptied our place of my things. It wasn’t hard to figure out which stuff belonged to me; I realized in my mind, my things had remained separate all along. My old red station wagon proved a second home; it could carry everything I needed and it always started up. Friends helped carry my piano across the snow. I hadn’t realized that, called to provide a little muscle, they’d witness this unraveling. I didn’t want to see them again for a while. In the winter air, the instrument’s soundboard shrank. But it kept tune enough. I clung to the keyboard, to Chopin nocturnes, Bach preludes, and those ponderously melodic pieces of Russian Romantics. Now there was something immensely practical in the lacy scores that had gathered dust for months.

  FOR A LITTLE while, I’d had what I thought I’d always wanted: a little piece of Alaska. But that January, I took off. This was a tenet of the modern back-to-the-land lifestyle: You could abandon it. The land, the project had been a choice. I realized I was done with it: the sense of idleness I felt next to John’s industry, a partnership that had squandered passion for practicality, months spent sorting through the jetsam of others’ lives. I moved alone to a place on the beach where the constant flux of tides felt reassuring.

  12

  POSSESSION

  DEAD RECKONING: n. The process of determining the position of a vessel at any instant by applying to the last well-determined position the run that has since been made.

  The small house perched at the edge of the bay was just what I needed. It was a few miles out of town, distanced from passing cars by a field of spruce stumps and elderberry shrubs. I didn’t know the neighbors.

  The house belonged to an older woman I knew through a class I’d taken at the college. She had left town to spend the winter in Arizona, where she was seeking treatment for debilitating arthritis. I had tracked her down by phone and mumbled into the receiver something about “going through a hard time.” “Can I stay in your place for a little while?” I asked. There was a pause. “Okay,” she said. “Just pay the heating bill.”

  I got keys from a neighbor and brought a carload of boxes and bags to the house. I swept a small upstairs room clean of dead flies and spread out my things. As I unpacked my books, I remembered the way I had looked at these same books sandwiched together with John’s on our shelves. His library of reference books—on natural history, home building, geography—were the kinds of resources one needed, I had thought, to live in and understand the world. At the time, my volumes seemed only to prove something lacking in me, my inability to store and use important information. But wedged together on this small, empty shelf, the books formed an odd assemblage that traced my history—novels that had taken me into worlds I wanted to keep within arm’s reach, books that had been gifts over the years from people I loved, an assortment of poetry volumes I turned to from time to time.

  Because of her arthritis, the woman who owned the place had been confined to the downstairs. Friends had wheeled a hospital bed into the middle of the living room. And as she was a widow and had no one around to remind her, she left messages to herself on yellow sticky notes posted around the house: “Think of 10 good things that happened today.” “Smile.” “Don’t strain your wrist—hold phone loosely.”

  That winter was a cold one. A blue-white skin of ice formed on the surface of the bay in a small inlet protected by the Spit. The kitchen windows looked out onto the bay, and the shape-shifting ice was mesmerizing. The tide floated sheets of ice close to shore and then dropped them onto the frozen mudflats. The ice rolled and pulsed above the water and split and heaved as the bay changed shape. The ice could look blue, or white, or gray; it could seem solid or liquid, like great planes or millions of shards. The sea was a welcome distraction.

  At night, however, when the windows turned to mirrors, they threw reflections at me. I saw how my small breasts had started drooping and how my cotton underwear sagged. I saw how winter dulled the blond streaks that summer had laid in my hair and I recognized the angles I’d never liked in my face. It was impossible to look away.

  Almost daily, I walked out the back door down the snow-covered trail that crisscrossed the slope down to the beach. Along the edges of the trail, dry branches of wild roses punctured the snow and offered shriveled, rust-colored hips. On the beach, I pushed my rubber boots through dry salt slush at the edge of the water. On these cold days, the receding tide glazed over the cobble beach in ice. As I walked along the beach, I tried to see everything I thought John would see on a walk like this: the raft of scoters out on the open water, the direction of the wind and what that might mean for tomorrow’s weather, the ferry that arrived only on Tuesdays. Without John’s keen eyes, however, I felt I never could see enough. Doubts perched in the periphery of my vision and squawked at me. I called friends, family, past boyfriends. I felt as though
my motor had stalled and I was drifting toward the Inlet on an outgoing tide.

  Leaving a man you love, a best friend, feels irrational. There is no way to think your way out of it. So I read novels that sucked me in while dozens of crows gathered on the metal roof above my bed. I left the television on for hours, the radio on after that. I shuddered at the thought of the pain I’d caused John. I knew it was harder to be left than to leave.

  Through the kitchen window, I watched sea otters on the ice. Whenever I saw these animals, usually floating on their backs with their blond faces to the sky, I thought first of what he had taught me—that sea otters have more hairs per square inch than a medium-sized dog has on its entire body. This density of fur keeps their skin dry even when they dive. It is also what makes their pelts so valuable.

  Although they had been hunted to near extinction, first by the Russians and then by Americans, the otter’s life seemed a carefree one. They spent their days in the open water or slipping clumsily across the ice. They dove for crabs and urchin and ate their catch while floating on their backs. They played with each other in the surf.

  THE DAY I found the dead otter on the beach was a mild one. Continents of clouds moved quickly overhead and wind stroked dark patterns on the surface of the bay. Later, I wouldn’t remember exactly why I walked back to the house, drove my station wagon down to the beach with a wheelbarrow in the back, and wheeled the carcass over loose cobbles to bring it home. I knew that taking any part of a sea otter was illegal. But at that moment, there didn’t seem to be any way around it. I felt I had to.

  The animal was heavy, perhaps sixty pounds, and I used a piece of plywood to lever it onto an old garden table in the yard. The otter stretched about four feet long and its dry fur was a rich brown, like good earth. I turned the carcass over and found no wound or sign of disease. Then, it was like being on automatic pilot. I went into the house and sharpened a small, wood-handled knife against a slate I found at the back of a kitchen drawer. I collected my leather work gloves.

  The first cut was hard; the skin resisted the edge of the knife. But when I pushed the tip of the blade into the belly of the otter, it slid in easily. As soon as the carcass was open, I felt terrified and disgusted with myself. But I worked quickly, remembering the cuts I had seen a man make on a dead seal at the local museum. I made shallow slices nearly perpendicular to the skin, detaching dark red muscle that connected the skin to the tissues beneath it. The pelt slowly unpeeled, revealing a sea-green network of tissues that encased the body like woven cloth. A faint smell of rawness dissipated into the winter air. Nothing was stiff like I’d imagined it would be. Yet there was something familiar about the feel of the pelt—its weight and suppleness and the way its edges curled in—though I’d never felt a fresh skin like this before.

  I worked all afternoon and when it got dark, I moved into the porch and kept cutting under a yellow light. By then, the burgundy-colored muscle had become blaring red from exposure to the air. It was hard to cut around the legs where a mess of pink fat clutched tightly to the skin. When I got to the first paw, I held it in my hand, and it felt very much like my own. It was worse at the head, which appeared, as animals often do on close look, quite human. The otter’s eyes were closed, and small, leathery ears stuck out on the sides of its face. Its jaw was clenched shut, hiding short, sharp teeth, but there was a slight smile on the face. I cut around the head as if slitting the animal’s throat and then the pelt was completely free. Exhausted, I covered the animal and fur in plastic, took a shower, and went to bed.

  The next day, I drove to the small library in town and found books on preparing hides. I brought home a few small volumes in old-fashioned type written by fur trappers and homesteaders. The hardest work, I learned, was yet to come. Over the next weeks, I would spend hours scraping fat off the skin with the edge of a spoon. I would soak the pelt in salt water multiple times, rinsing and draining, as I had read in one of the books, and then I’d tack it to a piece of plywood and lower it into the crawl space beneath the house where a small heater that kept the pipes from freezing would slowly dry the skin. But that night, as soon as it was dark enough so that no neighbors could see me, I loaded the skinned body back into the wheelbarrow. It was strangely lizardlike now—a bright red body with deep brown head, paws, and tail. The ribs and backbone protruded. I wheeled the carcass down the snowy path and over the cobbles to where the ice ended, freeing gentle waves, and dumped it at the edge of the surf.

  In the morning, I walked down the beach to see what had become of the otter. The previous night’s high tide had rinsed the bay clean of ice. Already, I missed that blue-white moonscape. Eagles and crows had found the carcass, which had washed down the beach. As I approached, the eagles flew off but the crows stood firm, cawing irritably. When I got close, I saw that the birds had already taken the heart and guts; the otter lay empty.

  Weeks later, when the skin dried, the fur was luminous. The longer guard hairs shone silver throughout the brown pelt. When stroked, the fur changed colors like the surface of the sea when wind blows against tide. For a long time, I kept it in a box beneath my bed. The pelt’s jagged edge, the nicks, remained a testament to the sense of necessity I had felt, that moment of urgent appropriation. I had taken hold, on my own, of this place.

  13

  TIDEPOOLS

  LUMINOUS RANGE: n. The maximum distance at which a light can be seen under existing visibility conditions.

  In June, when the tide dropped to its lowest level of the year, kelp fronds collapsed like dull tresses on the shoulders of the rocks. No longer suspended by water, they lay heavily heaped over one another, naked and entwined in the open air. Without water, the undersea world was suddenly subject to gravity, a force that seemed clumsy and coarse. Falling to the earth was such a mundane thing.

  The sound of drying out drenched everything. It was the sound of the sea draining from rocky pools and crevices, the sound of limpets clamping down on rocks, the sound of barnacles closing up shop, like a thousand doors shutting one after another. It always seemed this world was never meant to be exposed. Never meant to feel the weight of sunlight directly upon it, never meant to be slapped open palmed by wind. Such was the exile of low tide. Forgotten for hours by the sea, this margin, this extraordinary edge—it was a coyote’s heaven, an oystercatcher’s dream.

  When the moon and sun aligned with the Earth at new and full moons, they yanked on the sea in consort, tugging it out of bays and passes, snatching it from coves and shores. These minus tides came twice a month and were printed in the tide books in bright green ink. People scanned the pages for good clamming tides, generally daytime minus tides in the warm months. Green ink also signaled mediocre halibut fishing conditions, as it was harder to keep the bait on the bottom as the shifting tides dragged boats, leaving weights and lines trailing behind.

  All week that month there were extremely low tides, while the moon had disappeared from a sliver to nothing. At the beach in town, a vast expanse of deliciously flat sand invited Frisbee and soccer games, gangs of dogs, a man driving golf balls from one end of the beach to the other and back again for hours. A few friends from work and I planned a short camping trip across the bay around the lowest tide at a site that was perfect for exploring rocky tidepools. There were Joel and Marla, the couple building a circular, two-story house in the hills behind town, and Dale and Sharon, who lived fifteen miles out of town. And there was Sue, a biologist who rented a small place not far from town where she lived with a gray cat that a friend had found abandoned in the woods.

  We hired a boat that served as a water taxi, stowing our gear in the cabin and under the gunwale to keep it from getting wet, and set off from the harbor for the half-hour ride to the other side of the bay. It was a white sky day, where the movement of clouds overhead was barely perceptible. Common murres zoomed by like bullets. Tufted puffins, with bright orange bills and pale yellow cowlicks of feathers against their black heads, bobbed about and dove out of sight when
we approached. We saw sea otters and seals on the way over too, and scanned for the puffs of wet air that signaled whales.

  When we landed, the young guy hired for the summer to run the twenty-five-foot boat nosed it up onto the gravel beach and lowered a ladder off the bow into shallow water. I climbed out with two of the others. Those on board passed gear—packed in duffels, backpacks, canvas bags, and dry bags—from the deck to those of us standing in rubber boots in the ankle-deep sea at the bow. Then we unloaded three kayaks and carried them up the beach.

  After the boat took off and the sound of its engine faded, we ferried the rest of the gear to the top of the beach. We pitched our tents in spruce needle–strewn depressions between the trees that grew just beyond the border of beach grass and lovage, a tall plant with white, umbrella-shaped flowers and edible leaves that tasted like parsley.

  IN THE MONTHS after I left John, I grew more sweet peas than I’d ever imagined, rented four different houses, and forgot about the crab fisherman. I got drunk at bars late into the night, taking over the dance floor with a couple of girlfriends. I’d put on brand-new red lipstick I’d bought from an Anchorage department store makeup counter, where a woman with dark hair slicked back into a perfect ponytail, eyes lined coal-black, and a white lab coat over a streamlined black outfit convinced me she knew exactly what I needed. She pulled out a deep red; I trusted her entirely. Before heading to the bar, I’d grab the sheepskin coat I had found at a used clothing store; the coat was stained and worn, but its wide furry collar made me feel glamorous. On Saturdays, I spent hours thinning carrots or rigging up mini-greenhouses to warm the struggling zucchini plants in my garden. These contraptions of plastic sheeting and wood stakes encouraged the squashes to grow and then rot. I used a borrowed posthole digger to build a fence of spruce posts and gill net to keep moose out of the broccoli, kale, and beets. Most nights, I returned home alone, but occasionally I’d bring home a member of a band touring through from out of town.