Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  I know that love had something to do with my pull toward Alaska. During college, I had never managed to find one of those normal boyfriends—a history major from a Boston suburb, perhaps, or a pre-med student who liked to jog. Instead, I fell for men in the woods—men who knew how to chop wood, pack horses, and hail bush pilots by radio. I fell for men who knew how to say nothing as the full moon rose over the piñons, knew how to recognize the butterscotch scent of Ponderosa pines, and how to enjoy a life of hard work.

  I graduated with a biology degree, and as soon as I found a job teaching science to fifth-graders on the Oregon coast, I quickly packed my bags. Between the snarled pines along the shore and the waves tumbling up toward them, I met John. A teacher in this ecosystem for years, John was a lanky man with a close-cropped brown beard and head of short, nearly black hair that peaked at his forehead. He was often quiet around people our age, but teaching drew out of him a dramatic flair that mesmerized young students. From the beginning, I was impressed by his ability to name all of the creatures in nearby rocky tidepools: buffalo sculpin, sea cucumber, opalescent nudibranch. But it was because of birds that I fell in love with him. Everywhere we went, John knew all of the birds: western grebe, Townsend’s solitaire, ruddy turnstone. He kept binoculars slung around his neck at all times, and with one hand steadying them as he walked, it looked as if he was holding them against his heart. On our days off, John took me to a lush oasis in the middle of the Oregon desert that was filled with birds. We paddled a borrowed canoe to an island where hermit thrush sang from the high boughs of ancient trees. Together, we sought out yellow-headed blackbirds, lazuli buntings, and American avocets, which wade on skyblue legs.

  This sudden awareness of birds was a revelation to me. I had never bothered to look at birds or to learn the names of plants and animals where I had grown up. Although I was a biology major, I had spent more time designing experiments in the greenhouse and lab than in paying attention to what was happening in the woods. I knew maples and oaks and could recognize the cooing of mourning doves, but not much more. Once you know a place’s natural history, I realized, instead of the landscape feeling smaller in its familiarity, it expands exponentially. John and I spotted falcons above an old landfill and bright yellow warblers in a power line right-of-way. We spied hawks in the suburbs and watched a black cyclone of tens of thousands of chimney swifts funnel into an old smokestack to nest. John was attuned to a frequency of sound I had never known before. When we rode bikes around town in the morning, he’d point out robins when he heard their call. When we watched movies together, he’d notice which bird vocalizations had been dubbed in without regard to natural history.

  During those first weeks of training in Oregon, as I became an ardent student of this foreign landscape so that I could turn around and teach it, John took notes on me. He wrote that I had looked harder than the other teachers had at the chitons, barnacles, and anemones that opened like dahlias below the surface of the water. He had seen me linger at the tidepools holding decorator crabs, which attach seaweed to their backs for camouflage, and study the inside of a rock cave, where gooseneck barnacles hung in decadent clumps. These were his field notes, containing pen-and-inks of sculpin and thrush. He tore them out of his notebook and quietly slipped them to me. When I read them, I felt as closely observed as the birds John had dedicated so much of himself to; with a naturalist’s keenness, he had recorded my small movements and the things I said.

  When we weren’t teaching school groups, John was teaching me. When we went for walks, he pointed out which skinny trees with the narrow leaves were Indian plum, one of the earliest to flower in spring. At night, we lay in my single bed in a trailer parked just out of reach of the surf, listening to the coastal downpours against the metal roof. We felt everything was conspiring in our love: the indulgently blooming azaleas, the gracefully sculpted offshore rocks, the way the sun dangled rainbows from the sky.

  John had spent a few summers studying birds in Alaska, and when he told me he was ready to go back there, this time to stay, my eyes widened. “Yes,” I said. His desire to go to Alaska was an urgent craving; mine had been a long, slow ache. So we decided on a town at the edge of a bay that filled with birds each spring, where John had been offered a job teaching at a small elementary school. He drove up the highway to Alaska that summer in a packed Volvo station wagon. I stayed behind to finish my job and counted on him to meet me at the ferry dock two months later.

  AS THE M/V Columbia squeezed through close passages, I could easily spot the brilliant white heads of bald eagles sitting sentry in spruce trees along the shore. Gray gull-like birds dipped into the sea off the bow. I puzzled over my bird guide, trying to identify them. Were they northern fulmars? Flesh-footed shearwaters? Mew gulls? John would have known.

  For years I had wanted to go to Alaska and yet, as I stood at the deck rail, I forgot how I had made the decision to move. I felt as though I were carrying out a plan made long ago, perhaps by someone else. I realized that once the split second had passed in which I’d made the decision to go, the rest of my life had aligned politely behind it. By the time I’d boarded the ferry, I was miles beyond turning back.

  Inside the ship, I studied maps on the walls, posters about Alaskan towns, pictures of Alaskan birds. I realized how little I actually knew about the state. While low clouds wrapped themselves around the ship’s windows, I imagined Homer, the town where I was going to live. I pictured a place dark with spruce, a coast of black rocks beaded with white barnacles, and scattered wooden houses that were neatly trimmed. I imagined that John and I might rent a cabin somewhere in the woods. We might live without running water, as we had heard was common among people living a little ways out of town. While in Oregon, I had subscribed to one of the community’s two local weekly newspapers and in the evenings, I sat at the dinner table reading the police blotter aloud:

  AUGUST 9: A city worker at 9:42 A.M. reported graffiti painted on city property.

  AUGUST 10: A man at 7:56 P.M. reported a black bear in the backyard of his Birch Way house.

  AUGUST 12: A woman at 10:52 P.M. reported an extremely drunk man lying in the middle of Jackson Street. Police arranged for the man to go home in a taxi.

  AUGUST 13: A woman at 2:49 P.M. reported a missing purse.

  I assumed the matter-of-fact, Dick-and-Jane language of these compressed stories captured the town’s worst ills; it seemed quaint.

  When I stood at the deck rails, I remembered how I’d stood there in my mind years before. Part of the assignment for my fifth grade report required that I imagine and write about a visit to my chosen state. Worried that I might not have enough material, I started the voyage at my Maryland home at the beginning of a tedious, six-day drive across the country on major interstates I had located on my father’s road atlas. On day seven, I drove my car onto a ferry in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, for the one-and-a-half-day trip to Juneau. By the next morning, I had befriended an Eskimo man and he was teaching me how to fish off the deck. I saw puffins on rocky cliffs. I ended the story of my trip on day nine, when I drove my car off the ferry at Juneau. There, my imagination faltered, so I mentioned only that I’d spend a few weeks enjoying “beautiful sights.”

  Just as the maps went blank north of California before Alaska’s coast had been traced, my mental map petered out once I crossed the edge of the state. I’d seen pictures of its coastline, glaciers, and big mountains. But my image of this immense state was as incomplete as an unfinished dot-to-dot. I couldn’t know how it fit together—how expanses of tundra gathered like fabric around the foothills of mountains, how rivers cast off old oxbows and curves, how spruce forests scattered into treelessness, how glaciers receded, leaving giant mounds of old mountain parts aflame with stands of cottonwood and birch.

  “I have lived in Alaska for a couple of years,” I wrote at the end of my fabricated visit. “I really like it here. Most of my friends are Eskimos and I have learned to speak Aleut. I am going to school here
and I am not sure what will lie ahead of me in the secret and mystical land of Alaska.” I wonder whether anyone else in my class took their report as personally.

  Two days after leaving Bellingham, Washington, the ship slipped into a narrow, liquid crease between velvety green hills. We were approaching Ketchikan, the first Alaskan port, where I would get off the ferry to switch ships for my final destination of Seward, another three days away. We were at the southern tip of the Alaska Panhandle, the strip of coastland and islands that stretches five hundred miles southeast from the state’s mainland. Southeast Alaska, flush with the kind of temperate rainforest I had become familiar with in Oregon, is dotted with communities accessible only by air or by sea. Low, wet clouds parted the day we arrived in Ketchikan. At the edge of the water, a clutter of tourist shops, wood houses on pilings, and defunct logging mills glistened under the sun. Thirteen feet of rain that washed in each year had scrubbed everything in this small town clean.

  But Ketchikan was filthy with salmon. Pink salmon were running up the creek in the middle of town so thick the whole place reeked. At the mouth, fish stirred the surface of the water into a fierce froth. Two local men stood on the bridge which spanned the creek near its mouth as their children dropped fishing lines over the edge. The men joked about how bad the town would smell in a couple of weeks.

  After checking in to a small hotel, I clambered down to the creek. Female salmon shimmied their tails over the creek bed to dig depressions called redds where they would lay eggs. Males surged upstream, vying for the chance to fertilize. Stepping from stone to stone, I saw fish in every stage of dying and decay. For miles upstream, the bodies littered eddies, rotted in rock crevices, and lay splayed and decomposing along the banks. All around me, gulls attacked the rancid flesh.

  Later, I hiked up a squat mountain on the back side of town that was flush with rainforest. The spruce and hemlock trees, which I had become familiar with in Oregon, were wide and tall. Ferns leaned over the trail, and moss fleeced the trunks of trees and every surface otherwise left bare. Below me, sunlight silvered the sea between green islands. And inland, these dense woods, striped here and there by timber harvests, stretched to the horizon. For two days, enormous cruise ships, like supine skyscrapers, pulled in and out of port. They poured out passengers who swamped the local shops for a few hours and then sucked them back in and took off.

  Ketchikan looked just like the town I’d imagined was my final destination, and the doubts I’d been having about my move were replaced by the near-electric feeling of possibility that was an undercurrent of my two days there. Each step I took up the fish-strewn creek was charged with the fear of bears; one might prowl in for a meal of sluggish salmon at any time. The rancid scene of life and death playing out so pungently in the middle of town was just a small part of the life that was sparking off everywhere around me. I got hints of the locals, the community of people on the other side of the fresh coats of paint that colored the buildings within a walker’s radius of the cruise ship dock. I knew there were many stories the façades didn’t tell. And I recognized a new potential within myself as a young woman traveling alone, new to this town, infinitely intrigued and intriguing. If these were my first few steps on Alaskan soil, what would the next hundred bring?

  In Ketchikan, where industry once thrived, it now faltered. Tourism was taking over a greater share of the market, and people were figuring out new livelihoods. The town had a jumbled appearance: Charmless store-fronts abutted public displays of elegant Native art. Drab houses crawled up the mountainsides near town where lush forest was pulled in like a cloak. The timber industry left acres of scars in the foothills while tourism painted a sheen of cuteness on the few blocks that made up downtown. The riches of the place lay in its wild coastline, its acres of forests, and in the opulence of salmon that thronged in from the sea.

  Forty-eight hours later, I boarded the M/V Kennicott, the state’s newest ferry. It was smaller and emptier than the Columbia, and I dropped my bags in an abandoned observation room on the upper deck. Having little money and eager to exercise the sense of self-reliance I associated with Alaska, I never bought a meal on either ship. I had stocked up on dried soups, instant oatmeal, and fruit before I left and used the ships’ microwaves for primitive cooking tasks.

  For two more days, the ship continued up the Inside Passage in still seas buttoned down with islands and hemmed by an infinitely furrowed coast. As the mountains along the shore grew sharper, I thought about how I had grown up without topography. The land I had come from had been flat and tame. Here, undeveloped land stretched from the edge of the water as far as I could see. Whole mountain ranges were left to their own devices. Entire watersheds flowed unbothered from their head-waters to the sea. Great plains of ice were free to grind mountainsides into dust and shoot out chalky rivers.

  As I leaned against the gunwale, it occurred to me how much I couldn’t see, and how hard it was to grasp what I could see. A few years later, I read the account of a similar voyage to Alaska by John Muir, the naturalist and conservationist. In 1879, twelve years after the United States purchased Alaska from an indebted and overextended Russia, Muir took a mail steamer northward from Portland, Oregon. After a childhood in Scotland and then Wisconsin, he had explored the country at a naturalist’s pace. He walked a thousand miles from Indiana to Florida, and traversed much of California on foot. He fell in love with the Sierra Nevada Mountains and became an ardent voice for conservation in the West. At age forty-one, he traveled to Alaska for the first time and stood on the deck of the ship gawking at what he saw around him. He called the landscape off the bow “hopelessly beyond description,” which was, for a man who spent his time scrupulously observing and documenting the natural world, no insignificant admission. I imagine what he meant was that the very scale of Alaska’s coastline was dizzying, and to comprehend it all would take more than a lifetime.

  Two days from Ketchikan, the ship turned west and left protected waters. As we crossed the Gulf of Alaska’s stormy threshold, twenty-five-foot seas thrust the bow skyward and drove seasick passengers to seek open air in which to vomit. Having swallowed the appropriate orange pills, I stood valiantly at the bow, feeling it thump in each swirling trough, until the captain called us all back inside. Rough seas came with winds that blew so hard a cargo door was torn off its hinges. The state’s brand-new boat was forced to backtrack to its last port, and the purser announced a seventeen-hour delay and free cafeteria meals for all.

  In this close world, I made friends easily. A short, muscular blond guy about my age who had claimed a reclining deck chair near mine confided in me that his handgun was stashed in his truck (which was belowdecks) and that he would never be so stupid as to travel without one. I met a high school teacher from Los Angeles who had decided one day to escape his life and head north. Another man had left behind a girlfriend and young baby in hopes of finding work. He said that he would send for them. I met a nurse moving alone to a remote Native village, and a man from Long Island who had just been hired to be the director of a prestigious science center in Alaska. His girlfriend had come along for the trip, but wasn’t going to stay. I couldn’t help wondering whether one of them would change their mind.

  We traded cameras and took pictures of each other at the bow with the coastline spread grandly behind us. We gathered at the gunwales when someone spotted a pair of whales. We swapped magazines and books. We were all in suspension—awaiting a new job, a remade life, an adventure, newfound solitude. There was no other choice but to take people as they were, which meant without an identity tied to job or geography, and with little baggage. We were in it together, bearing the two-story-high swells, the smell of vomit, the limitations of comfort. We became tribes, banding and disbanding easily—over dinner or a Scrabble board, at the deck rails, with a pack of cards. We were in the midst of in-betweenness, neither in our old life nor in the new, standing on our own clean slates. Off the stern, the sea flattened the ship’s wake and erased our tr
acks.

  Soon after the cargo door was repaired and we were again on our way, the ship slipped into Prince William Sound between glassy waters and a low ceiling of clouds. I parked myself at the deck rails and watched black and white Dall’s porpoises play in the bow’s wake. They dashed in and out of the emerald water that raced against the hull. Dark mountains rose like sleeping giants at the water’s edge and two long islands—Hinchinbrook and Montague—closed behind us. In front of us, the sea was pulled taut. Wooded islands foregrounded the mainland darkly. Waterfalls flung thick, white cords down black slopes, and everywhere the undulations of the coastline produced an endless string of bays, inlets, and coves.

  Ten years had passed since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which had leaked at least eleven million gallons of crude oil into the Sound. Tides had washed the crude out of the protected Sound and swept it westward, greasing 1,300 miles of coastline—enough to blacken the beaches from Boston to Cape Hatteras. I was fourteen years old at the time, and the news stories of the spill had left indelible images in my head of birds blackened with oil, workers in rubber suits and masks trying to rinse beaches with heavy hoses, and one dead sea otter after another. But now, viewed from the ferry, the region looked pristine. I didn’t know that you could dig into nearby beaches and still find oil blackening the sand. Nor that the spill had spelled both bust and boom for many Alaskans.

  We stopped at Cordova, a fishing town of about 2,500 people, squeezed between mountains and the Sound. Low wet clouds had settled comfortably in town, and from the bow I couldn’t see past the docks where locals lingered in rubber boots. After a few passengers and a truck or two left the ship, we were off once again.

  Eleven hours later, the ship muscled into a narrow bay under a fat moon that spilled a path across the black sea like a film of milk. At the head of the bay sat the town of Seward, a community of about four thousand people who lived mainly off of fish and tourists. In the moonlight, I could see buildings cluttering a narrow shelf of land between steep slopes and the sea. My eyes scanned down a series of pools of yellow light beneath streetlights at the edge of the dock. There was John, standing in rubber boots waving up to me with both arms. He looked like he’d been here for years.