Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  So many things that make sense elsewhere make no sense in Alaska. Except for some of its far-flung Aleutian Islands, the entire state—which, if laid across the others, would stretch from Georgia to California—encompasses only a single time zone. And in the fall, we put our clocks back with everyone else so that, as we are already losing five minutes of light each day, we are suddenly plunged into afternoon darkness. The director of the school where I taught told me it took the students months to get over the time change. At least one elected official in Alaska reported that she received more letters about daylight saving time than about any other issue. And here, it makes sense for services to come to people, rather than the other way around. Nurses, dentists, and beauticians fly into remote villages across the state. And Alaskan school districts were using the Internet to deliver classes to the child rather than the reverse.

  HOMER WAS KNOWN as a place where people ended up staying after their cars broke down. The saying was: “It’s all downhill to Homer,” which meant that it was easier to come to town than to leave. A friend who grew up in the Midwest and was now a father of two once told me, “This place isn’t so great, it just has a great view.”

  But people had fought for this place. Nearly three decades before, the state had sold access to patches of the seafloor in Kachemak Bay to oil and gas companies. A jack-up rig, a floating drill rig with retractable legs that stood three stories above the surface of the water, was barged in. But when the rig got stuck in the mud and began to leak oil, fishermen and other residents were furious. A pilot who lived on the undeveloped side of Cook Inlet and referred to himself as “the Bush rat,” campaigned for governor on a platform of keeping oil and gas out of Homer’s bay, and he won. The state bought the access back from the companies. Recently, however, oil and gas interests were creeping toward town by land, in some cases drilling in people’s backyards without their consent, which they could do because the state holds title to resources beneath nearly everyone’s lawns.

  This was a place people had worked to protect, but also, naturally, a place people abused. Some houses were ringed by an obstacle course of junk cars, defunct fishing equipment, earth-moving machines, and building supplies. Although you could leave a car at the dump for free, dead vehicles could be seen all around town, slowly rotting. One day a year the borough towed away abandoned cars, no questions asked. The radio announced this day in advance; all you had to do was push the car onto the edge of a public road.

  In a community so dominated by its natural surroundings, it was surprising how landmarks were often more about people and less about the landscape. When giving directions, someone might say, “You know the tan house with that gigantic spider they nailed to the outside for Halloween years ago? Well turn right there, and go a quarter mile.” Or, “I’m not far past the house of the guy who dragged that old castle into his front yard.” Mostly, people explained where they lived by how many miles from town they were: “I’m eleven miles out East Road.” Or, “You gotta go seven miles up the North Fork, then turn left after the dip.”

  Racial diversity was not something Homer bragged about. It was a white town, save for a few Natives, an occasional black person, the families who owned the two Chinese buffet-style restaurants in town, and a handful of Latinos, many of whom orbited around the Mexican restaurant—owners, busboys, patrons. But Homer did boast diversity of character and constitution. I had never seen so many men who missed digits from fishing and construction accidents, nor known people who could maintain a professional life without a shower or indoor toilet at home. There were the itinerants, the seasonals, the locals who had left and returned and those who’d stayed, had babies, married, and divorced. There was the heels and lipstick set, which was small and drifty, and the men who lived alone in the hills who came into town lusty. People lived in all sorts of homes made out of all kinds of structures, from glamorous estates with million-dollar views to near lean-tos. There were no subdivisions with cookie-cutter houses. One morning, one of the other teachers burst into school and shouted: “The ugliest trailer park in town is on fire. Maybe it’ll finally go!” A year later, the clot of homes was razed and turned into a parking lot for the expanding community college.

  This brand of diversity meant there were a number of characters around town. There were the old cranks who wrote angry letters to the editor every week. A moon-faced Japanese boy who walked all over town, always trailed by a mental health worker. A woman with a long, graying ponytail who biked everywhere in all kinds of weather. (A car accident, someone told me, had left her not quite right in the head.) There was the dwarf, a high school girl with blond hair and a silver sports car that had been tricked out to fit her.

  One of my students was an eighteen-year-old girl, six feet tall and thickly built, with bugged eyes behind bottle-bottom glasses and a head of wildly curly brown hair. She had been born on an Indian reservation in the Lower 48 and had been adopted by a family who lived in the hills behind town in a modern, fortress of a house surrounded by a wide well-trimmed lawn. The girl was awkward in her movements, high-voiced, with the careful penmanship of a scrupulous fourth-grader, and an unpredictable intelligence. After a year, I understood her to be a young woman who had climbed out of a novel by a South American magical realist. At lunch, she whispered to me about her visions of ghosts, of chickens, of angels who flew down to touch her skin.

  In a small town, there’s room for everyone. Everybody needs someone worse off than themselves. But a small town is, of course, the worst place to go to hide away. People trying to escape stood out even more: those who lived far out of town and drove in only as often as they had to; those living off the road and telephone network who were contacted over the radio; people who were particularly hermitic, reclusive, or weird.

  As in any small town, rumors spread like oil slicks, and people’s histories trapped them like boom. Before you knew someone, you might know intimate details about their life. “She’s the one who threw the glass of wine in her husband’s face at the restaurant when she found out he was cheating on her.” “Oh them? They’re coke fiends.” “He sells pain pills over the counter of his store.” Domestic tangles were covered by the local newspapers, revealing more information than you thought you wanted to know about your neighbor, a friend of a friend, the guy with the backhoe you might someday need to hire. Gossip webbed the community together and sometimes felt like a trap.

  Most news was good news, however. Front pages had photos of local kids skiing, performing, or catching fish. Letters to the editors were typically laudatory and formulaic: Event X Declared a Success! “And so many thanks go out to all of those who helped make this year’s canned food drive possible.” But there were real controversies around town: Should the city be able to annex land outside its bounds? Should the city replace the blinking red light—the only traffic signal in town—with a three-color one? Should the city let people dump fill over the bluff to shore up their disappearing properties? Growth and change brought conflicts, which played out in the local papers, in signs planted in front yards.

  As the year passed, people moved in and out of town like a slow tide. In May, king salmon flushed into nearby streams and RVs followed nearly as thick. They parked in view spots, huddled close together as if for warmth. As the weather warmed, it became nearly impossible to make a left turn onto the main thoroughfare through town. You stopped at the blinking red light but never could go. The lines at the supermarket got longer, with retiree couples arriving in matching windbreakers. They looked clean, and if you hadn’t been washing much yourself, they smelled clean too. Fishermen in rubber boots who were stocking up for another hitch on the water brought full carts to the cashiers loaded with the necessities: soda, chips, preformed hamburger patties, and buns.

  The hotels filled up, floatplanes moved in swarms, and even the occasional private jet touched down at the airport. The bed and breakfast fad had hit Homer. Sometimes it seemed as though half the town ran a little side business in an extra bed
room. There was even a B and B in a homely yellow house on the road out of town that had an awkward painting of a moose in bedroom slippers on its front side. It was called “The Cozy Moose.”

  The distinction between insider and outsider played out all summer long. Visitors lingered around the public fish cleaning tables next to the harbor where locals cleaned dozens of salmon they’d netted in resident-only fisheries. “Vat kind of salmon?” a pair of spectacled Germans asked, standing out of reach of flying fish slime. “I’d be happy to take over for ya,” said a gray-haired tourist from out-of-state, “just for the practice.” Beneath the signs that reminded people it was illegal to sell or barter fish caught for personal use through resident fisheries, so as to not compete with commercial markets, what he meant was: I’ll do a little work for you if you slip me a fillet. A gray-haired, wide-beamed man named Chris stood at the fish cleaning tables with an array of sharp knives within reach and a cigarette drooping from his lip. He charged two dollars to fillet a fish and knew when all of the charter boats returned to the harbor. In two agile sweeps of the blade, he’d pull a clean fillet off a hundred and fifty-pound halibut. Then he’d cut out the cheeks, the succulent rounds of meat on the fish’s head, and toss the carcass over his shoulder into a fish dumpster, where fat gulls were waiting on the metal rim. Chris didn’t live in town in the winter, but he was a fixture in the summer, and despite his grimy rubber bibs and unkempt head of gray hair, he must have been making a killing.

  In late summer, the town uncluttered gradually. As the raspberries became ripe on the stalk, the fishing quieted down. The RVs headed out of town before the cranes. By the time the heavy frosts came, the traffic had thinned and the floatplane lake had quieted.

  As the seasons in Alaska went by, I kept in touch with friends in other parts of the country. Suddenly, even people I’d met elsewhere and had known barely more than a year felt like old friends. Once you move so far away from anything you’ve known, all things familiar become dear. By then, John and I knew some other young couples. At least one or two pairs of people like us—married or not, from someplace else—seemed to drift into town each year and set anchor, at least for a while. Even so, surrounded by strangers and a looming panorama of mountains, sea, and sky, I often felt out of my element. But I wanted my element to change. “I felt now a part of the land of Alaska,” is what I’d boldly written years before in my fifth-grade report. At eleven, I was unambiguous. Would these words turn out to be a prophecy?

  TOM NEVER DID get that room added onto his place. But he stuck it out at the fish packing plant, returning every summer, and then later coming up for a month or so in the winter to work the Christmas rush. During the winter stints—when frozen fish was being sent all over the country but no fresh fish was coming in—the owner let him live in a small room above the cutting tables. This way, he could avoid the icy steps down to his place while helping to make sure the plant didn’t get vandalized during the winter, when most of the Spit was deserted. This was no retirement plan and I wondered what would happen when Tom got too old to cut fish, to climb the stairs at his place. This was the stopgap life that so many people here subscribed to. They’d come up from someplace else to make a bundle of cash. Some would go home; others would make one here.

  What I would do, I didn’t know and couldn’t predict. Some days I wondered how many ties I would need to stay here. Visits with Tom were nice, but they reminded me that I’d broken so many other ties to come here. And my attraction to this odd friendship—and the work of maintaining it, which I kept to myself—reminded me how love had entangled my life with John’s in ways I’d never experienced before. It was at once comforting and alarming. Lately, however, I had begun to want a few more things for myself. I started taking an evening art class at the community college and playing pickup soccer a couple of nights a week. I kept my eyes out for potential friends. I needed to be connected here apart from John. I felt like the transplants that I put in my garden in the spring, the ones whose tightly bound roots I’d had to tear apart in order to help them grow new roots in the tilled bed. But you have to wait and see whether they take.

  5

  THE RIVER’S MOUTH

  RUNNING LINE: n. A continuous line that runs between shore and a mooring buoy that allows a small craft to be moved between shore and deep water.

  This is an announcement from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game,” said the man on the radio. By now, I recognized all of the station’s announcers, but his voice was unfamiliar. “The Kenai River personal use dip net fishery will be open to Alaska residents at 5 A.M. on July 10 until midnight on July 31, unless closed by emergency order.” Ninety miles up the highway, the Kenai twisted a wide, turquoise path from the mountains into Cook Inlet. Every summer, tourists and residents packed its banks to fish. Tourists were limited to hook and line, but over the next few weeks, hundreds of Alaskans would fish with dip nets in the glacier-fed river. These arm span–wide bags of nets were strung off solid frames with pole handles a dozen or more feet long. All over town people pulled nets out of wherever they’d been stored during the winter and spring, patched holes, strapped them to the roofs of their cars, and headed north. During these midsummer weeks, the all-around houseware, drugstore, and trinket shop prominently displayed dip nets for sale. People had been waiting all year for this.

  John had set his mind on dipnetting months before. Nowhere else in the country could you fish like this. He’d heard that the red salmon you could catch up there were special; they had high oil content that made them fatty and delicious. Silver salmon—like the kind we’d caught the previous summer from the beach in front of our place—were nice, but people said that they didn’t keep as well in the freezer as the reds, and the silver’s pale flesh had a milder taste.

  I was always eager for the next adventure John conjured up. I wanted to learn something new, experience something different, go to a place I’d never been before. But as John schemed, I floundered. Where could we find the equipment? What day should we go? How did it all work? We didn’t know much about how fishing was done up there, but we knew we needed nets and waterproof chest waders so that we could stand in the river holding the nets out as the fish ran upstream. But we couldn’t afford to buy the nets and waders new, and used gear was usually passed from friend to friend to friend.

  John’s mind was set: We would go. He started looking for ways to borrow equipment or otherwise get it for free. He was good at this. A few days later, Cynthia, our friend who lived in the yurt, asked us if we wanted to go with her. She had borrowed two nets and two pairs of waders from her neighbors and would share them with us. Her husband, Taro, was out of town, commercial fishing for salmon at the mouth of the Copper River about two hundred miles east by boat.

  Cynthia was in her mid-thirties, nearly ten years older than I, and she had become my closest friend. I didn’t think she’d ever understand the accumulation of my inabilities, but I felt close to her anyway because she had a secret sweet tooth, despite an otherwise wholesome diet, and because of the way she seemed to hold within her, as I did within myself, the desire to talk about things that often went unsaid. From time to time she would ask me to cut her curly brown hair. I would pull a stool into the middle of the kitchen, wrap a towel around her shoulders, and snip curls inexpertly, until they were all a few inches shorter but no less wild.

  The five of us—John and I, and Cynthia and her children Kaya and Ghen—would go up together that Saturday. The kids, now seven and five, would stay on the beach while we took turns fishing. We checked the tide tables to figure out when to head up to the river. Cynthia, who had fished there before, said that we should plan to arrive before high tide and stay until it was nearly low tide. Because the river’s mouth opened farther up Cook Inlet than our bay, the tides were about two hours later there than they were in Homer. Cynthia and the kids pulled up to our place before 8:00 A.M. The day was overcast. We strapped the nets to the roof of John’s car—a ten-year-old Jeep he’d bough
t off someone in town when he realized that his old Volvo wasn’t much good in the snow. We packed lunches, snacks, and water, fastened the kids’ seat belts, threw the waders in the back and took off.

  The drive up the highway was one we, like everyone else in Homer, were familiar with. It was the only way out of town, the only route to Anchorage and to a medium-sized town along the way that was primarily a strip of gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and souvenir stores. Though it wasn’t much more populated than Homer, people drove up there anyway to shop at an enormous supermarket where you could buy everything from winter boots and California oranges to clam shovels, underwear, and kitchen tables. West, to our left, a string of volcanic peaks stretched along the far side of the Inlet. On clear days, from town, you could often see the two highest peaks letting out dainty puffs of steam. Along the right side of the road, stunted spruce grew at the edges of bogs and around small lakes. A tiny espresso stand had sprung up just before the bridge over a narrow, clear-running river, and houses intermittently dotted the edge of the highway. When the trees broke to our east, we could see the northern arm of the range of mountains that curved around the bay.

  After a little over an hour in the car, John turned left off the highway onto a road that bowed out along the shore of the Inlet. Spruce- and birch-flanked driveways led to hidden houses off the paved road. A few miles later, we made another left onto a gravel road down to the beach. The Inlet opened up in front of us. The snowy peaks across the water scraped a high, white ceiling of clouds. The sea looked gray and cold. Small waves purled down the beach. John put the Jeep into four-wheel drive and drove it off a wide parking pad onto a well-rutted track in the beach. The back end of the car swung sideways as it lost traction in the soft sand. The kids were beginning to fidget in the backseat. They craned their heads to look out the windows because they knew we were almost there. Up ahead, a clutter of trucks and cars parked on the beach.