This sense—that almost nothing could be used up—gripped the state. There were no contingency plans for when the oil and gas tap dried up, and regulations on development were lax and enforcement was even laxer. There were always so many more wetlands, so many more miles of shoreline, and so many trees, that individual transgressions often went overlooked.
And Alaska’s plenitude fed the hunger; its resources were hankered for all over the world. Japan took the state’s natural gas. China bought Alaska’s raw logs. Taiwan sought the state’s coal and Mexico bought fertilizer made out of Alaska’s natural gas. Canada dug its silver, zinc, and lead, and Alaska’s seafood was snatched up all over the world: choice king crab in Japan, pink salmon in Korea, and halibut and cod in Germany.
We all were romanced by this sense of bounty. Even people who considered themselves conservationists didn’t think twice about scraping a level pad in order to build a house on land that had no other marks of human contact. We collected clams and mussels—which were not restricted by regulations—whenever we could without regard for scarcity. On the biggest days during the weeks of dipnetting on the Kenai, fifty, sixty, sometimes seventy thousand fish pushed upriver in a single day. Whole fish piled up in the Anchorage landfill during the peak of dipnetting, dumped there by people who’d brought home more than they could handle. We took anything we could, enough for now and plenty for later. Perhaps this is what it felt like in the rest of America before the commons were commodified, before our own hunger hemmed us in.
JOHN AND CYNTHIA continued to ferry flopping salmon over to where the kids and I sat in the sand. All down the beach, people were gutting fish on whatever surface they could find. Some worked on the sand, while others used the lids of coolers until blood dripped down the sides. Others had carted down pieces of plywood or light folding tables. There were even a few ironing boards standing on the beach. Kids ran around with buckets collecting roe that people chucked onto the sand when they cleaned fish. The fish eggs could be cured for bait or eaten fried, salted, or prepared in many other ways. Although I hated to waste anything edible, the eggs were fishy and gelatinous and with pounds of beautiful salmon fillets in our future, I had no interest in keeping them.
In the middle of the chaos, Kaya and Ghen were thrilled. Ghen danced around the dying fish, and when John ran over with another, I ripped its gills to kill and bleed it and then asked the kids to help me clean it. I first clipped the tips of the tail off the salmon with a pair of scissors we had brought with us. As with the restrictions on gillnetting for personal use, the law required us to mark the fish in this way to ensure these fish wouldn’t dilute the already struggling commercial salmon market. Around me, people had tied scissors gunked up with blood, slime, and sand onto cooler handles so they wouldn’t get lost on the beach. The chances of getting caught were minimal but the risk—losing the ability to dipnet—was too great. I took a short knife and sliced the salmon’s belly, tail to head. The kids reached their hands inside the body and pulled out multicolored innards and tossed them onto the gut pile. I slid my hand inside and scraped the tips of my fingers against the backbone to clean out the bloodline. I could feel the ribs under a thin layer of slick tissue. Then I reached up toward its head and pulled out the heart. I unfolded my hand in front of the kids to show the grape-sized organ pulsing against my palm. They squealed with delight and each took turns feeling the shudder of the heart against their skin.
BY THE TIME we had nearly three dozen fish, the tide had receded far down the beach. All around us was a carnal scene of death and destruction. Fish guts and blood littered the beach, graying in the open air. A wrack of fish heads had formed at the water’s edge. A slurry of blood and fish slime pooled in the bottom of the coolers. Gulls swarmed as thick as gnats, fighting over fish heads and guts, though the beach was thick with it all. “I never hated seagulls before,” a woman cleaning fish nearby said. She had camped on the beach the night before and been kept awake by the birds’ incessant cries. There were no outhouses so people stole off into the dunes, leaving a rank mess. People cleaning fish for their families had lost hope of keeping up with those catching them. In their haste, people often discarded strips of belly meat because they contained small fins that were difficult to remove. This was the fattest part of the meat, succulent and oily, and white-skinned curls of flesh lay scattered across the sand.
It felt at once like a massacre and a celebration. When the fish were coming up the river in large numbers, everyone was excited, talkative, and helpful. There was more than enough fish for everyone, and we’d have it all winter long. It was this sense of plenty that was beginning to tie me tightly to the life here and make me wonder if I could ever leave.
The more I learned about this particular way of life, the more rooted I felt. I learned the unspoken rules about harvesting wild foods. You would tell people about the spot where you’d had good fishing luck but not about the wild blueberry patch you’d found on a hike. Nobody hoarded fish; it was what you shared. And you had to be creative about how you put up your fish. While Kenai River red salmon fillets carefully packed and frozen were tastier than what was sold at upscale markets in East Coast cities for nearly twenty dollars a pound, people didn’t think twice about stuffing salmon steaks—bones and skin and all—into glass jars and blasting them with higher-than-boiling-point heat for over an hour in a pressure canner. Once they had cooled, you could stack them in your pantry where they would keep for years. What you didn’t can or freeze could be pickled, smoked, and salted. John and I had learned some things through our mistakes, such as how salmon fillets vacuum-packed and flash-frozen by the plant on the Spit always lasted longer in the freezer than if we packed and froze it ourselves.
NEARLY TWO HOURS later, the fishing had slowed. It was almost slack low tide, and the original surge of freshwater that had triggered the salmon to run upstream was long past. We had about three dozen fish. Although by law we could take many more—twenty-five for each head of a household and ten for every other family member—we had enough. John and Cynthia came back from the water’s edge, nets balanced on their shoulders. Cynthia dropped hers to the sand. Her wide, pale face was lit with excitement and exhaustion. “Beautiful fish!” she cheered. John beamed quietly. This, I knew, was what he’d dreamed of in moving here. As with me, the day had made him feel useful and strong, self-sufficient and resourceful. He felt this as deeply as he felt birds: the deep soul-satisfaction of a day well lived. John, Cynthia, the kids and I—something had come alive inside us in the midst of it all. For us, work was play. Survival and leisure commingled.
All around us, people were cleaning and packing up fish. At the water’s edge we rinsed each salmon—its belly sliced open and its head still on—and rinsed the coolers free of blood, slime, and sand. We packed all the fish back into the coolers. It took two of us to lift each one into the back of the car. As we loaded up the rest of the gear, I could feel the exhaustion settling into my body. My arms were so tired, I couldn’t make a fist. On the drive home, only John, who was at the wheel, didn’t doze off.
I woke up the next morning with the weight of exhaustion still in my muscles. Cynthia brought over the kids and a sharp, Japanese knife around noon and we laid the fish out on the grass next to the picnic table: thirty-three red salmon, cleaned, but with the heads on. For hours we stood at the table filleting the fish. We pressed our knives into the fish behind the head, down to the backbone, and then across the side of the fish to the tail, slicing the flesh free from the spine. Cynthia kept some heads to make soup stock, and we stacked the backbones which still held small bits of flesh against the ribs off to one side. Scales glittered like sequins across the table’s grayed wood top, and from time to time we rinsed everything clean with a garden hose until the silver flecks dripped into the grass.
By late afternoon, when we had finished the last fish, we were exhausted and hungry. Soon we would drive the coolers of fillets out to the Spit where we’d wait on line behind tourists just off
charter halibut trips to have our fish packed and flash-frozen. They’d look in awe at the piles of deep red fillets we’d hand over to the packing plant for pickup in a day or so. For less than a dollar per pound, this frozen fish would last us well into March. But before we took off, we could think of nothing but taking a break and stemming our hunger. We put a few backbones on a cookie sheet and broiled them briefly in the oven. When we took them out, the meat was cooked and glistened with fish oil. The muscle along the ribs and spine clutched the bones in tasty strands. We gathered around the tray and picked the meat off with our fingers.
6
ON THE WATER
CONFUSED SEA: n. A highly disturbed water surface without a single, well-defined direction of wave travel which may follow a sudden shift in wind direction.
Do you think it’s too rough?” I asked John. We looked out across the water from the cobble beach at the tip of the Spit. We were standing in rubber boots, waterproof pants, and raincoats on a sunny summer evening. In an unpaved parking lot at the top of the beach, the Jeep sat with a double kayak strapped to the roof and two days’ worth of food and camping gear in the back. We were planning to paddle across the bay—a four-mile crossing—to camp for a couple of nights, but, knowing that we couldn’t gauge the conditions of the sea unless we were at the water’s edge, we looked out onto the surface, trying to decide whether it was safe to make the crossing.
It was nearly nine o’clock; the bay should have already lay down. Instead, the water had a small chop; I didn’t like the look of it. I was scared of paddling across unless the bay was glassy. I wanted so badly for John to say we shouldn’t go.
“It looks OK to me,” he said. “What about you?”
The gravel shifted under my feet. “Yeah, yeah. I guess it’s okay,” I managed. I stared across at a cluster of rocky islands called Gull Rocks, where thousands of seabirds nested each summer. Once we reached them, I would be close to protected water and could relax. It wouldn’t take that long, I told myself, only about an hour.
“You checked the forecast, right?” I asked.
“Winds to five knots. No big deal.”
“Do you think it’s okay?” I asked again.
He looked at me. He knew I wanted him to decide, to tell me either that everything would be fine, or that we shouldn’t go. He resisted. “Let’s make this decision together. Are you comfortable with this?”
I knew I could say no, that we could drive home and try again in the morning. But John was willing to go. I didn’t want to be the one to hold us back.
It was only a few weeks past summer solstice, so the evening sunlight was strong, picking out the whites of gulls and murres on the water. Although Kachemak Bay was fairly protected, wind could pick up at any moment and rile the surface of the sea. Tankers rumbled in and out of the bay, and droves of charter and commercial fishing boats left imposing wakes across the water.
We had paddled across the bay twice earlier that summer, both times leaving in the early morning, when the water was flat and glassy. The bay’s surface was typically smooth at this time, before the sun had warmed the air over the land, making it rise, and stirring up the day breeze. I felt fairly comfortable paddling when the water lay smooth and cleanly reflected the mountain range on the other side. I liked the sea to be silent, the tide slack, and the sky static and dull. But even then, out in the middle of the bay, half an hour from land on either side, I felt that just the depth of the sea could pull me down.
Few people crossed the bay in kayaks, though they’d been designed thousands of years ago as sturdy, seagoing hunting craft. These slim, low-profile boats, originally made from skins stretched over wood frames, were light and stable in the water. Many of the modern versions had foot-controlled rudders for easier steering. And these boats had enough storage space to pack a week’s worth of gear. Rather than make the crossing in kayaks, most people rented kayaks from one of the outfits on the south shore or went on guided paddling trips offered during the summer. Even among locals who owned their own kayaks, most hired water taxis to take them into the more protected inlets and fjords on the other side of the bay. But people did paddle across, usually young, experienced sea kayakers with the holds of their boats packed for a few nights of camping.
John was an experienced paddler. A few years before, he had built his own wooden sea kayak, a sleek, seventeen-foot craft of plywood as thin as two stacked nickels, with fiberglass and epoxy to make it strong and water-tight. He had grown up near Washington State’s Puget Sound and had been in and out of boats for years. As we set out to explore our new home together, my inexperience with the sea betrayed me. But this was my home and I wanted to explore it. If you didn’t get out on the water, you missed so much.
The past winter, John had sent off for a kit so that we could build a boat for me like the one he had built for himself. The kit arrived in two boxes by truck, and we laid out the plywood pieces on the basement floor. It was a puzzle: Two spear-shaped sections for the deck would be joined at the cockpit and trimmed to size. Four plywood blades would form the hull. Wooden pentagons would become bulkheads, and rib-shaped pieces would be used to trim and strengthen. Everything was flat. Over the next few months, we drilled tiny holes into the pale wood and then stitched the plywood pieces together with copper wire. Winter was a perfect time for this kind of extended project, but I often didn’t feel like descending into the cold basement to work on it. The project required a kind of patience and strict attention to detail I lacked. One mismeasure, I feared, and I would ruin the entire boat. But John coaxed me through it, showing me how to use a plane, mix epoxy, make a joint. As the light began to return in late winter, we articulated the craft; the boat gained dimension like a pile of bones articulated back into its skeleton. I came to love the deck, with the camber of a thigh, and the hard chine of the hull, which would help keep me upright.
I did the finishing work alone that spring, spending hour after hour sanding and varnishing until the hull and deck shone flawlessly. I lay tape midway down the hull on either side of the boat, then painted the wood creamy white between the lines. If I overturned on the bay, the white stripe would be more visible to passing boats than a wood-brown hull. When I finished, John and I carried the boat down the bluff to the gravel beach. Gentle waves unraveled across the bow, and John held the kayak steady as I stepped in. Then he lifted the stern and shoved me off. On the boat’s maiden voyage, I paddled close to shore, slicing the gleaming craft through murky water. Narrow in beam, the kayak held me closely at my hips and responded gracefully to my strokes. It fit me perfectly and felt like mine.
I hoped that having my own boat would fortify me against the fear I felt on the water. I was terrified of the sea at the same time I was drawn to it. Half an hour from land, I would freeze. Suddenly, the blue depth of the bay was an incessant and distracting mystery. How many fathoms of water lay below us? What was down there? The sun shafted into the ocean, but those pillars of light dissipated in the darkness.
SHOULD WE GO? I asked myself. My hands dug into the pockets of my raincoat where sand had collected in the seams. I was relieved we had decided to leave our own wooden boats at home and borrow a double kayak for the trip. We’d paddled it before and knew the heavy boat was more stable in the water, better for less-than-ideal paddling conditions. John would take the stern, controlling our direction, and from the bow, the bay would stretch unbroken in front of me. I felt safer having him close; it was easy to get out of earshot paddling separately. But having only one boat meant that if we tipped, we both went in.
I looked across the bay. Patches of snow near the peaks of the mountains glowed under the sun. The only way to get over my fear was to force myself into situations that scared me. But the small chop on the bay that evening was the roughest we’d ever considered paddling through.
I had realized there was nothing you could count on about the sea. Mornings, the bay was usually glassy, but not always. Evenings, the sea would usually lie down, but not
always. Such unpredictability meant that there were so many precautions to take and things to consider. Life was like that here. If you weren’t prepared for every possibility, you weren’t prepared. And this wasn’t just the case on the water. Hiking on the trails outside of town, you watched for bears and paid attention to the weather. When paddling, you zipped a cigarette lighter into your life vest pocket—and maybe an energy bar, too—in case you got stranded. You carried water, safety equipment, extra clothes. On the water, the sea conspired with the sky. The wind could pick up from any direction, and the bay’s temperature in the summer hovered around fifty degrees. You had to study the map, keep track of the weather, and listen to what people were saying. “It’s starting to pick up out there. Front coming in.” And then you had to decide whether to stay or to go.
It was common on these sunny summer days for the bay to froth with whitecaps and rise up in five- to eight-foot waves by the afternoon. And although the bay didn’t open directly onto the Gulf of Alaska, wind could sweep up it, teasing waves off its surface. The bay was only forty miles long, but southwesterlies had a hundred miles of uninterrupted sea—called fetch—to build before reaching the mouth. “Small craft advisories” went out over the radio when sustained winds above eighteen knots were predicted and the seas grew to four feet or more. People waited out these conditions before crossing the bay in small skiffs.
Tide, Feather, Snow Page 9