Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  As we approached the mouth of the river, a haphazard encampment came into view. Scores of cars and trucks were parked on the beach near the edge of sandy dunes. Among them, people had pitched colorful tents that were ringed by coolers, tubs of gear, beach chairs, campfires, and stacks of firewood. Clothes hung from makeshift lines strung between driftwood poles and dogs barked from where they were tied up at the camps. John parked the car next to a large pickup that sat diagonally on the beach. As we got out, the smell hit me—a combination of fish, piss, and smoky campfires that was wafting down the beach. It appeared that entire families had relocated for a day or the weekend, or longer. All along the beach at the mouth of the river, hundreds of people stood waist-deep in the river with the handles of their nets stretched out in front of them. Kids ran between the water’s edge and their families’ territories on the beach. A cluster of women sat talking and smoking cigarettes on folding chairs in front of the grill of an oversize pickup. Men, taking a break from the river, stood around with the tops of their waders folded down to the waist. Trucks and ATVs fishtailed down the beach in a steady stream and parked in the sand.

  We undid the nets from the roof of the car. Cynthia offered to stay on the beach with the kids, so John and I put the waders on over our pants and long-sleeved shirts. These waterproof overalls were heavy but supple, with shoulder straps and attached rubber boots. It was a cool summer day, and it was always colder on the beach as wind swept off the Inlet’s fifty-five-degree water to shore. I watched as John walked into the water ahead of me with his net outstretched and perpendicular to the river’s bottom. He casually greeted the man standing in the river a few feet in front of him. I carried my net to the edge of the water and then waded into the river, trying to keep the net upright in front of me. I inched it forward until it fell over, then I picked it up and started again. Shoving the circular frame of net along the sandy river bottom, I continued into the river until I was aligned with John and the handle of my net stretched toward the center of the river. Already John was adjusting how he held his net by observing the people around us. I did the same and rested the handle on my left shoulder and held it there with my hand. In the river up to my sternum, I shifted around to stand comfortably, feet spread, both hands gripping the end of the net’s handle to keep it upright. John asked the man next to him how the fishing had been earlier that morning.

  “Nothing to speak of but they hit pretty good last night, ’bout ten o’clock,” the man reported. “My wife’s got a full cooler,” he said, tipping his head toward the top of the beach where, I assumed, his wife sat with the fish. They continued to talk about fishing, the timing of that day’s tides, whether the commercial boats had an opener and were allowed to extend their nets in the Inlet to intercept fish on their way to the river’s mouth.

  “See all them drifters out there?” the man motioned beyond the mouth of the river toward the Inlet where nearly a dozen commercial fishing boats with large spools in their sterns lined up on the horizon. We were vultures, all of us, circling.

  The cold water pressed heavily against me. It was a delicious feeling being held by the river like that. The water buoyed me up and squeezed me. It did not chuck me out. Slack high tide had filled the river’s mouth with seawater—a zealous gulp that swelled the channel far beyond its bounds and would later be spit back out.

  No one was catching any fish, despite the fact that there were scores of people in the water and crowding the beach. We stood there anyway, a few feet apart from one another, holding our dip nets extending toward the middle of the river. These nets looked like giant versions of the green, foot-long nets used to scoop goldfish out of an aquarium. The dip net’s fine filament caught a fish behind its gills, or simply tangled it in the bag of net. Around me, people were using all sorts of homemade nets. A man nearby had fashioned his handle out of a bicycle handlebar. Another had used a crutch. Some homemade nets had been made with long pieces of PVC pipe, which sagged, or copper tubing, which was a little bit more rigid. Other people had extra-sturdy nets they’d welded from aluminum pipe; some had bought nets ready-made. Duct tape patched many of the nets, and a few people had attached empty, capped soda bottles to the top of the mouth of their nets, which provided a little bit of buoyancy on one side of the net to help keep it upright in the water. Our borrowed nets were made from welded aluminum pipe, and knots in the netting revealed many seasons of use. Here was a scene I had come to realize was typical—a mix of do-it-yourself, scavenged parts, failing equipment, and industrial-strength engineering.

  I looked down the line of people standing in the river and scanned back across the beach. Everyone was waiting, as in some modern myth in which the prospect of a flood of fish brought every kind of person to this sandy shore that would be—for a day at least—our ark. I was surrounded by people of every race, age, and description. We were only a three-hour drive from Anchorage, where the majority of dipnetters came from, and we were close to a half dozen or so small towns. Here was a diversity of people I’d never seen before in Alaska. There were young urbanites who had come in SUVs, and scruffy types who looked as though this was their first public outing since the same time last summer. There were white, Asian, and black families, and groups of Russian Old Believers, a sect of Russian Orthodox who lived in secluded communities scattered across the region. The women wore long, pastel dresses even on the beach, and the bearded men stood in the water with the high collars of their embroidered shirts sticking up above their waders. There were military families with clean-shaven and close-cropped fathers and people fishing by themselves. There were seniors and kids, wading into the water wearing jeans, and all ages in between.

  Dipnetting began here in the early 1980s as a way to encourage people to skim what managers saw as an overabundance of salmon from the rivers. Salmon runs left to their own devices fluctuated naturally, too widely for commercial fishermen, who wanted a reliable harvest. Years when the river was thick with fish would be followed by lulls; a mass of fish hatching in the river might strip it bare of food, meaning fewer smolt made it out to sea where they became adults and got ready to head back upriver. So dipnetting was initiated to cull salmon from the river before they could spawn, thereby thinning what could become an overpopulation of fish. This, managers believed, would help ensure that commercial fishing for these salmon was as productive as possible. In the beginning, dipnetting was only allowed after the commercial boats were assured a full harvest. If there weren’t “extra” fish, no one could dipnet. But over the years, the activity became more popular and gained higher-priority status. These days, people could start dipnetting on July 10 every year, and didn’t need to wait until the commercial boats got their fill. And sometimes, when low salmon returns halted commercial fishing, dipnetters would still be busy pulling fish in from shore.

  Although this dipnet fishery was a little more than twenty years old, standing in the edge of the river among the enthusiastic throngs of people, I felt part of an ancient ritual of harvest. And we were, of course, repeating what had been done in these waters for countless years. Dip nets had been around long before people figured out how to make them out of aluminum and spare parts.

  Everyone was waiting—for the next fish, for the tide to turn, to reach their catch limit so they could go home. No one knew when the fish would begin to move up the river—or even whether that day they would at all. But people knew enough to stick around until the tide began to retreat, bringing fresh water once again down the river, cuing the salmon to move upstream. As the minutes ebbed with no fish, people dragged their nets out of the water and waited on land. People sat on coolers, went back to their camps and warmed up by the fire, sprawled on tarps to nap, ate fried chicken someone had picked up at a nearby fast-food restaurant. This wasn’t wilderness. We could see fish processing buildings along the bank of the river farther upstream, and commercial fishing boats came up the river, trailing wakes that fanned out to shore and swamped your waders if you weren’t paying attentio
n.

  A LITTLE WHILE after high tide, the sea turned back. The Inlet’s gray water began to pull strongly against us, and my arms started to ache from the strain of holding the net upright against the current. John and I were standing in the river as shouts began to fly up around us. A woman a few yards down the beach ran up the sand dragging her net behind her. A salmon as long as my arm jerked in her net. “Got one!” the man next to John called out before heading out of the water. Down the line of dipnetters, people began jogging out of the river with their nets. “They’re here!” someone announced. The fish had hit. John hollered to me as he waded out of the water with a salmon in his net. I felt a thud in my net and then flipped it flat against the river’s sandy bottom. The weight disappeared. “I lost it!” I shouted to John. “Turn your net downstream,” he called out as he untangled the fish from his net and carried it up the beach to where Cynthia and the kids were sitting on the sand. Everyone around me was catching fish; I was dying to catch my own. A moment later, I felt the thud again and rotated the net downriver until it was flat. I waded out of the water as fast as I could, dragging the net behind me. As the mouth of the net emerged from the water, I could see what had been thrashing in it: my first Kenai River red salmon. It was a few inches longer than the silver salmon we had caught the previous summer and weighed about ten pounds. Fresh from the sea, its bright silver skin darkened to a deep blue-green along the back, and its sleek body hadn’t yet started to contort into its spawning form.

  I left the fish with Cynthia and the kids, and as I was rushing back into the water, John came out with another red in his net. All around us, people cheered in excitement as they felt that particular tug of fish pulling against their nets. I let out a surprised yelp as one bumped against my submerged thighs.

  A man in a plaid shirt and baseball cap a few spots down from me pulled his net out to find a flounder the size of a platter. “That’s a nice size,” his neighbor said. “You gonna keep that?”

  “Na. These things are mush. Even my dog won’t eat ’em.” And before his neighbor could ask for it, he threw it back into the river.

  When the pull of the retreating tide and the river’s current became so strong it was nearly impossible to hold our nets upright in the river, the line of people at the edge of the water began to move downstream with the flow of water like a conveyor belt. John and I followed. Once we got a few hundred yards down the beach, we would pull our nets out of the water and hike back up the beach to the mouth of the river and wade out again. With the tide going out, the river was narrowing and the edge of the water migrated down the beach. Sand sucked out from beneath my boots. We trailed along, always staying about chest-deep with our nets stretched toward the center of the river. Beyond the edges of our nets, a man and woman in wet suits and flippers were floating downstream holding dip nets afloat in front of them. Smiling, they waved at us on shore and we waved back. When they reached the mouth of the river, they got out of the water, slowly walked up the beach in their awkward footwear, and started the process again. But there was hardly a need to go anywhere. A minute after John and I put our nets back into the water, we each caught another fish. A man in front of me caught two reds in his net at once. The gray sea suddenly seemed full of life and a constant rush of footprints turned over the surface of the beach.

  Being immersed in such an excess of fish was dazzling. They were being drawn out of the milky gray water all around me. We couldn’t see the fish, but knew they had to be there in the thousands, moving upstream together toward their spawning ground. I felt a strange kind of mania when the fish came in thickly like that, creating a new kind of hunger in me. I couldn’t feel that water had gotten into my waders and dribbled down my right leg to pool in my boot. I didn’t notice that my arms were drenched past the elbow. I couldn’t feel that muscles in my torso were working in ways they never had.

  As we moved along the beach, a small skiff packed with a half-dozen people zipped by just beyond the edge of our nets. The passengers each held a dip net that dragged through the water, combing out fish. Every time the skiff passed us, the passengers dropped more fish into the boat’s hull.

  Ecstatic cheers went up as a small, gray-haired Asian woman dragged her net onto the beach. An enormous king salmon—about thirty pounds—bucked in her net. It was late for this kind of salmon to be running up the river and it was beginning to look a little bit “spawny”—losing its silver brilliance, turning pink, and gaining hook-shaped jaws. But that didn’t matter. People clapped and the woman’s family crowded around her.

  We continued to ferry fish to Cynthia and the kids on the beach—one, two, six, a dozen. All three of them sat on the sand removing the guts but they couldn’t keep up with us. After pulling in a few more fish, I took off the waders and joined the kids on the beach, while Cynthia headed into the water.

  One of our three coolers was full of cleaned fish, and a few other reds lay twitching in the sand next to a pile of guts. We had no ice, but these fish were fresher than any you could find in the best markets. Kaya and Ghen were excited. At seven, Kaya had an unusually keen sense of observation. She watched half in awe and half in disgust as a boy about her age was vigorously hitting a salmon flopping on the beach with a small wooden club. A sharp smack stunned the fish so that it could be easily untangled from the net. But the boy’s blows were failing to still the fish. By some measures, it was a violent scene for a child to witness. But sentimentality quickly gave way to practicality. “Why doesn’t he just rip its gills?” Kaya asked. “That would work better.” I had looked up from the fish I was preparing to slit open and briefly wondered why it was so easy to surround myself with so much killing, why it was so easy to enjoy it. It seemed there should be some ritual of appreciation before we all drove off the beach lugging these tons of fish home, some kind of celebration to mark the sacrifice, but there was far too much work to do as the fish continued to stream in. The fish would be our food and also a kind of currency. It would provide gifts to send to family out of state; meals we gave to older neighbors, unable to fish themselves; and dinners to be shared on winter nights with friends. At that moment, nothing was more important than the harvest.

  PEOPLE HERE WERE always gathering things. Coal was collected from the beaches to heat houses. Driftwood—from small, sinuous pieces to huge trunks of redwood—was taken from the dunes for construction and art, until a city mandate forbade it to protect the beach from erosion. Still, people hauled away heavy tree trunks that washed ashore each year. People collected sand to add to garden beds or to scatter across icy front steps. People took stones for their yards and to weigh down the backs of their trucks for traction in the snow. Dead trees were leveled to feed woodstoves. Water was piped off streams for the garden or from a spring to the kitchen tap. Nothing edible was ignored.

  In a way, this sense of abundance reminded me of my childhood. The strip of woods on the far side of the creek behind my parents’ house was the source of all the raw materials my friends and I needed for a Saturday afternoon. But as I’d grown older, few things seemed free anymore. And there was so little raw material left at my disposal. Adult life seemed circumscribed by scarcity: never enough money, enough time, enough happiness. “Excess” had become a pejorative. But here, at this time of year, it was hard to feel anything but rich with the profusion of resources here. A few weeks earlier, John and I had dug dozens of long, thin-shelled razor clams from the Inlet’s muddy shores during a particularly low tide, and we collected steamer clams and mussels across the bay. Gardens were beginning to fill out all over town; people were picking radishes, greens, and their first broccoli heads. King salmon had already run up some of the local rivers. People were pulling the last packages of moose meat from their freezers to make room for fish. Potluck dinners felt extravagant: clam chowder; moose ribs, halibut, and salmon fillets for the grill; smoked salmon of all kinds; octopus salad. Each shared dish represented so much effort, its own story, a recipe perfected by years of tinkering and
passing around. The bounty was staggering.

  And yet the abundance of resources had been changing. Those days, the main commercial fisheries in the region were for salmon, halibut, cod, and herring. But what was harvested for profit and for the pantry had changed drastically over the years. By the late 1920s, when a handful of homesteads had been staked out around Homer, twenty herring salteries hummed busily on the south shore of Kachemak Bay. Soon after, the foot-long silver fish that were caught by net when they came to shore by the millions to spawn disappeared. They had been over-fished, and their spawning grounds had been ruined by offal from fish packing plants. Although no commercial herring fishery has existed in the bay since then, fishermen still net them up Cook Inlet. A stable shrimp industry once existed in the bay. Using nets and trawls, fishermen harvested shrimp commercially until the fishery went bust in the mid–1980s. These days, the most readily available shrimp were from farms in Southeast Asia and came in one- or two-pound frozen packages at the warehouse grocery store. People around town talked about the time, as recent as the mid-1980s, when you could wade off the tip of the Spit during low tide and pull a king crab with two-foot-long legs out of the bay. Now, there were no king crabs to be found. Tanner and Dungeness crabs, smaller but tasty species, had also been harvested commercially in the bay, but these fisheries had been shut down too. A few years before John and I moved to town, people would drop crab pots off the ferry dock on the tip of the Spit to catch a few Dungies for dinner. Because of scarcity, this too was now forbidden.

  Researchers attributed the fluctuation in fisheries to something called “regime change,” which referred to long-term cycles in weather, ocean currents, and temperatures. The regime, they said, had shifted from shellfish—crab and shrimp—to finfish, namely salmon and halibut. A local scientist, however, had found that a few of the region’s rivers had gotten warmer in recent years, making conditions less favorable for salmon. People were beginning to suspect the rivers were getting warmer for good, and it was clear that fishing regulations could only do so much. They might be able to save a single season of fish or protect a faltering market, but they couldn’t bring back the past, couldn’t stem the hunger, couldn’t stop the oceans from changing in ways no one could fully understand. But standing in the river, we didn’t think about any of this. It seemed that this run of red salmon would last forever.