Dirt Work

by Christine Byl

  I stood at the dock, on the beach, admiring veteran paddlers and fisher folk and researchers, their gravitas, their matter-of-fact allegiance to those waters, their confidence with the sea’s moods. In contrast, I felt flighty and naïve, a giddy newlywed who’d barely dipped her toes into the cast shadows of true love’s depth. My gaze was on some uncertain future, an anticipated history, romantic, and for the time, still unmade.

  Coastal brown bears made Montana’s grizzlies look like marmots. The first time I saw one on the Sound, I was tightening lag bolts on a bench near the Alaganik Slough, looked up and caught sight of what must have been the biggest male in the Cordova district. But when Steve joined me and we watched it feeding on sedges along the slough’s bank, he said it was just a juvenile. He’d lived in Cordova for years, and he laughed and called me easily impressed.

  Unlike the smaller inland bears, opportunistic omnivores with a hankering for the occasional carcass, coastal browns bulk up because most of their summer and fall calories come from salmon. Spawning stream banks are littered with half-consumed fish, tails and backbones left behind as bears rip out the bellies, rich with eggs and organ meat, and the heads, thick with brains. Eagles and gulls peck out the eye sockets of abandoned skeletons, and always in search of more, they trail bears on land, sea lions on the water, and fishermen in their orange Helly Hansens filleting on the dock. My naturalist friend tells me that in the course of an average salmon’s spawning ritual, it benefits 136 species. Like the biblical catch made sufficient for 5,000, most salmon feed more than one mouth.

  And not just ursine mouths, or avian ones, or the rooted mouths of moss and trees. Coastal people take cues from coastal bears, growing full on what’s near. A midsummer potluck dinner in Cordova offered: sockeye salmon fillet, king salmon croquettes, pickled silver salmon with onions, pink salmon dip. Mountain goat meatloaf, salmon roe, black bear steaks, moose burgers, salmonberry jam, blueberry pie, salmon milt on crackers. In one Crock-Pot, there was stewed alligator brought back from someone’s trip down south, the only meat on the table not shot, caught, gutted, or wrapped in Cordova within the last nine months. Except for half a package of hot dogs, which the kids, like scavenging gulls, scarfed down with $4-a-bag white-flour buns.

  In Glacier, hitch transport was a string of mules, the end of a backcountry stint signaled by the chuff of horsey breath and the smell of sweaty flanks beneath pack saddles. In Cordova, hitch transport was a boat or a bush plane, both signaled by a mechanized roar and the odor of fuel. I definitely missed the mules, but there was something heady about packing tools under the prow of a silvery dinghy in a stiff wind, buckling up float coat as an extra layer of warmth for the ride home, or tossing duffel into the rear of a fixed-wing flown by a salty fiftysomething woman who’d been piloting small craft in Alaska since she got her license at age seventeen. In this new country my hiking prowess, nurtured over years of long miles, was barely necessary. The memorized knots and hitches, all the rules for safe passage on trails with stock, out the window. In land this massive, passage home meant rocketing through sea spray, the thwack of hull on swells, or humming below the clouds with the quilted earth below confirming what I’d already guessed: the usual scale is useless here, everything farther, wilder than I imagined.

  The five kinds of wild salmon that navigate Alaska’s waters are commonly known as king, red, silver, pink, and dog. Their other names are chinook, sockeye, coho, humpy, and chum. To remember the correlations, make up sayings: Chinook is a name fit for a King. If you’re Socked in the Eye, it turns Red. Coho glitters like a Silvery jewel. The parts you use for Humping are Pink. And everyone knows, a Dog is man’s best Chum.

  All spring in Cordova, Gabe and I vacillated between delight in the unusual place we’d landed, and grim comparisons to “how it was in Glacier.” We took to mocking each other gently, waking in the morning to sheet rain on windows, shoveling in cereal with a whine: “This isn’t how oatmeal tasted in Gla-cier.” We parodied ourselves, but here’s what we meant. Glacier meant friends, people we’d known for years. Cordova meant co-workers, often testy, missing home (like us). Glacier had seven-hundred-plus miles of trail; Cordova Ranger District had about thirty. No more eight-day hitches, long miles of sawing, those body-busting ten-hour days. Cordova hitches were shorter and rare; mostly, we worked eight hours local, and returned to an overheated apartment every night, where I played Scrabble with our white-haired landlady, Rose. Delicate and proper, her lacy living room downstairs belied a steely past. She grew up on a fox-farm island in the Sound and ran her own bowpicker for years. This is what we meant: Glacier was ours. Cordova belonged to others.

  Also, there was the Forest Service. It’s an honorable organization in many ways, and the Cordova district was full of excellent folks. But the rumors we’d heard for years about the “Forest Service mentality” were true. A laxity, a sluggishness pervaded the agency. Paperwork for everything short of a bathroom break, drawn-out weekly meetings, ridiculous regulations. At the shop in the morning, where was the old urgency, the rush to see whose crew got out the door first, which person could carry the most tools? Though Glacier trails sometimes felt like boot camp, all stoicism and hike-till-you-drop bravado, I missed that sense of purpose, that pride in being “industrial athletes,” as a ranger once dubbed us. We worked hard. In Cordova, one crew leader lobbied to “park and disappear” on gruesome weather days. He’d have napped in the truck with the heat on and the windows steamed up long past the end of lunch break. The Glacier guys would rather have died.

  You’ve heard the stereotype of the lazy government worker leaning on the shovel, which fries me, since I’ve never sweated more blood than I have for the feds. But in Cordova, it fit. People leaned. They said, “Good enough for government work” and “We get paid by the hour” and “Job security.” Not that all the folks we worked with were lazy. Many of them worked hard, had solid skills and good spirits. Our foreman Steve busted ass when he joined us in the field, and seemed unaffected by the damp cold that made me whine. But crew chemistry is inexplicable; something was missing. That underlying adrenaline, the push that made you work till you couldn’t stand up, and the satisfaction that went with that kind of effort. I couldn’t find it. Sometimes, trying to infuse the morning, the day, with that kind of vigor, it felt like swimming upstream.

  Even compared to a cherished job left behind, though, Cordova had plenty of charms. Glacier gets about one million tourists in six months, most of whom come through in cars, and popular trailheads are jammed by 9 a.m. Cordova sees a fraction as many tourists annually, spread out over ocean and forest in boats, on bikes, in rubber boots. Without the cruise-ship traffic of Alaska’s deepwater ports, it’s blissfully free of the RVs and tour-bus hordes that flood the rest of the state, buying up key chains. Glacier was a distinctly seasonal place, where everything shut down come September. Cordova’s local population drops by half when the summer fleet leaves, but still, it feels like people’s working home.

  The idea of home kicked me out at the knees that summer, balance awfully hard to find. Despite my penchant for the new adventure, I realized I was not so different from most people, looking over shoulder at the thing I’d left behind. Cordova was magical, one of the most vivid places I’d ever been—sea smell, bird noise, craggy peaks, wide sky. The work was novel, the commute over ocean thrilling. But it wasn’t home. Cordova intrigued me, seduced me, but in the end, did not enfold me. I couldn’t relax into its pace and expectations. With hindsight I see that, like a bad breakup, it wasn’t Cordova; it was me. Glacier ushered me through a coming of age. Like a first love, Glacier occupied a place in my psychic geography that couldn’t be usurped by the grandeur of the next place. To really love Cordova, I needed time.

  What did I even mean by home? One place I’d left but not forgotten. Another place I lived in, and even loved, yet it wasn’t home, either. I was adrift in questions. Can two places both feel as deeply like home? Cou
ld home be somewhere you never lived again? Is it wrong to love two places at once? (If not, why did I feel so torn?) Does being rooted require geographical monogamy, the fealty to place that was once common? Is home where you are, or how you imagine where you are? Can you build a home out of questions, stockpiling them like a beaver dragging sticks, until you have made a structure around you safe enough to crawl into and rest?

  On the Sound, weather changes with sunrise and sunset, moon phase, seasons, the tides. Ocean turns from chop to glass in minutes. You might predict it if you’ve read your barometer right, or heard a forecast, but change will sometimes catch you unaware. Before crews board the Whaler each morning, we file a float plan. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is the federal agency in charge of, for all practical purposes, weather reports, and we use their forecast. The acronym, NOAA, combined with the computerized male voice that delivers most reports, births the colloquial reference to the invisible weatherman as Noah, and upon hearing his digital pronouncements, through echo and static, how can we not think of Genesis, Noah sky-turned, awaiting the deluge and making notes? “Winds out of the southeast, 10 to 15 knots,” he drones, robotically. “Seas, three feet.” No flood in sight. Work-worthy weather. Two by two, and we’re off.

  The forecast was shit. Today bad, tomorrow worse. NOAA predicted heavy rain all week. But a hitch was scheduled. Across Orca Inlet, work needed doing, a landing on a beach we’d never been to, and the weather could always clear. (Ha.) In Cordova, canceling plans because of rain meant you’d never go anywhere. We all wanted out of town for a few days, craving a break from the monotony of day work, wet rides in damp trucks, the nickel-and-dime tasks that can spend a week. A hitch beckoned, and since hitches were infrequent, it was welcome, even in the rain.

  So, we went. And it rained. Water dripped in tin pans under the tarp’s edge so fast, it took ten minutes to collect our daily drinking water. It poured for five straight days. It never let up for even a second, not a tiny lapse before a new squall blew in, not a general lessening in the middle of the night, not a slivery break in the billowing gray above us, not one single shred of unfiltered light. It seemed as though nothing had ever mattered as much as weather. The sound of rain was a constant drone, an aural Chinese water torture. Every day I thought about quiet.

  The work was bloody wet—hiking through thick brush, sometimes over our heads, we ran chainsaws all day with arms above our waists and pointing upward so the water funneled down the cuffs of our raincoats, soaking the armpits of our poly-pro tops. At dinner under the tarp, we peeled off rubber raingear and hung it from the guy lines, not to dry, impossible at 40 degrees in saturated air, but at least to air out the odor of an Italian meatball sub on a moldy bun. After scarfing down cold stew from cans, too chilly and numb to bother with real cooking and dishes, we’d take hot drinks to our tents, shucking the fly from where it was plastered to tent skin like a wet T-shirt worthy of Fort Lauderdale. Inside, we swapped wet Capilene for the drier pair, kept in a Ziploc inside the sleeping bag, somehow still damp. The wetter set went to the bottom of the bag (synthetic—a down bag would kill you) in hopes of drying it slightly before it went back on in the morning. The temptation to keep the dry pair on was great at 7 a.m., just to prolong relative comfort, but after work when there was nothing dry to change into, you’d regret it. We pulled on the damp stuff, each howling from our separate tents.

  The ten-hour workdays passed in a hallucinogenic state borne from no-end-in-sight and the dreary brain of borderline hypothermia. We tried not to look at our watches, the faces too fogged to decipher anyway. On day five, our foreman motored across the inlet from Cordova, the lights of which had been mercifully obscured from us by a ridgeline between camp and the beach. As we loaded our gear to the gunnels and boarded the puddled Whaler, Steve told us this low-pressure system had dumped a record amount of rain in four days, which is saying something for a place like Cordova, whose regular rainy days would set records anywhere else. And to top that, said Steve, we were the only ones in the field all week, the only ones in the entire district who went out—the cabin restoration crew, the wildlife techs with planned oystercatcher surveys, everybody else bailed. He wasn’t out here, Steve, but his crew was—we were—and he was proud. We’d been crabby and wet and miserable for five days, but by the time we pulled away from the beach, damn it, we were proud, too, and by the time we entered the harbor and docked the boat in its slip, by the time we heaved our sopping gear to the dock in fish-gut pools, we were high-fiving each other, stomping in puddles on the pier, arguing over what to get on our pizzas at the bakery whose warm glow beckoned across the jetty like a lighthouse calling sailors in from a storm.

  Living in Cordova, I became a birder. Of course, I’d noticed birds before: admired fishing osprey on Montana lakes, listened for the call of the violet-green swallows nested in the eaves of our West Glacier house. Still, except for the obvious sightings anyone would stop for, most birds passed above my radar. But when you hunker at the confluence of Prince William Sound and the Copper River Delta, you start to notice birds. How can you help it, in May, when more than twenty million individual birds pass above your head, when you get out of your truck at a trailhead to deafening birdsong, the air full of ruckus and symphony? Some birds in Cordova are resident (crows, which I’d never seen elsewhere in Alaska); others stay for the summer (noisy passerines who sing in midnight light); many more pass through quickly, bound for feeding grounds in the Arctic. Sandhill cranes and Canada geese travel in huge flocks, while others—eagles, ravens—hover singly, or in pairs. During spring migration, that many birds in one stretch of sky make a hell of a spectacle.

  I didn’t become a birder because of any special inclination to notice. I am missing that innate watcher’s sense that my birding friends have. I don’t have a life list or an Audubon membership. I can’t identify many songs or wing profiles, I have no fancy binoculars, I know only a handful of Latin names. I became a birder because to not be a birder would have taken far more effort. Professionals or dedicated amateurs would scoff at my use of their label. But I don’t know what else to call it. I’m a person who has learned, taught by birds themselves, to notice winged creatures. I am a birder because once I started watching—preening crossbill, sandpiper’s leggy steps—I could no longer quickly look away.

  In Cordova, trail crews carry guns. Pepper spray is fine and good, but Forest Service regulations require that, in salmon and bear country districts, you also pack heat. This seemed absurd, since I’d worked among bears in the mountains for years unarmed, and never felt vulnerable to impending death by tooth and claw. But, rules were rules. Extensive post-9/11 security paperwork granted us firearms clearance and our crew spent a day in the ranger station learning safety measures, how to clean the barrel, the difference between a rifle and shotgun. (We’d use both.) Our training culminated in target shooting at the firing range, for me the first time since grade school summer camp that I’d shouldered a weapon. The kick of the twelve-gauge beat the pants off my preteen rifle.

  In spite of my sneer at the silly requirement, I had to admit that the shooting range was . . . fun. Gunpowdered air, rifled slugs in my pocket, the satisfaction of a hit target while boom echoed through the lot. Six of us lined up, all firing, emptying, loading, round after round, a racket I’d heard only in Hollywood wars. We logged a few hours at the range each month, and Trent, our cowboy ranch kid, laughed at Randy and me as we overcame our tendency to handle the weapon at arm’s length like a venomous snake. At first, Randy took the gun tentatively, but by the second week he cocked it like a bandit and hooted with a fist in the air at a bull’s-eye. Though Randy would’ve liked to be immune to the gun’s charms, it seemed no one, not even a diffident “granola,” could resist the allure of firing off a shot.

  Fun and games aside, even Trent in his NRA hat agreed that packing a shotgun on the trail—another eight-pound load to lug, awkward over pack straps, a shovel
in the other hand, a chainsaw on the shoulder—was plain old ridiculous. Only certain wage grades could legally carry it, but Randy and I conceded it was even stupider for one of us to tote the gun when Trent, though a minor and the lowest on the totem pole, was the only one who could use it effectively in a pinch. We took the saws and Trent took the gun.

  It wasn’t clear exactly when that pinch would be. Not when we passed by the bears feeding on stream banks, oblivious to us, intoxicated by salmon. Not when we approached a beach for landing to find a bear on it; then we’d wait it out or moor elsewhere, not shoot. Certainly not if I was being bluff-charged by a bear I’d surprised. The prospect of dropping backpack and chainsaw, chambering a round, shouldering the butt, and finding any kind of accuracy with wet, cold fingers while a bear was charging seemed daft. In this situation a shotgun was a shortcut to confidence, a false one at that, side-swiping senses and alertness and notice. Gun strapped to your back, you moved faster, head down. It was easy to stop paying attention.

  In the Tlingit’s complex relationship with the grizzly, bear is cousin and the best way to head off conflict is to acknowledge him, speak to him with respect, and request co-existence. Such graciousness appealed to me, as did the advice, traced to several American Native lineages, that a woman lift her shirt to a charging bear because her breasts will indicate her sex and, since bears and humans have intermarried, remind him of their kinship. It sounds naïve to modern ears, tuned as they are to the realism of science and the pragmatism of food chain, but the tenor of these old ways of being with animals indicates a critical understanding about interconnection: vulnerability need not always trigger fear.