Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  Midway between the lulls of highs and lows, tides ripped around the tip of the Spit, around rock promontories, and out of narrow inlets, breaking glassy water into unpredictable shards. The day breeze could pick up at any moment. Even in isolated fjords, cold winds sweeping off the ice field could rake waves off otherwise protected waters. And when the tide was high, it was often hard to find a place to land boats.

  Cold water kills fast. In the bay, at its summer temperature, you could last for half an hour to an hour before complete exhaustion or unconsciousness. After one to three hours in this water, you would likely die. Bodies lose heat twenty-five times faster in cold water than in cold air. And as your temperature drops, your heart slows and your breathing becomes less frequent. Extreme cold makes people confused and irrational. Those suffering from severe hypothermia often reject help, insisting that they’re fine. Sometimes they feel an overwhelming desire to undress.

  All year long, people died in Alaska’s waterways—averaging nearly one per week. Some died from fishing accidents: a line knotting itself around the ankle of a young deckhand and carrying him down, or a fisherman crushed between boat and dock. Others drowned when their boats went down in rough seas. Although commercial and recreational fishing had gotten much safer than in past decades, pleasure boating killed nearly twenty people each year, which meant that water was twenty times more likely to kill you than a bear. Locals and tourists alike died in lakes, rivers, and off the coast. The sea was particularly cold, volatile, and ruthless.

  All around us was evidence of past disasters. Everyone knew of someone who had lost a loved one at sea. At a bar in town one night, a man told me, “Every year it used to be that some drunks would grab a rowboat at the tip of the Spit and try to get across the bay. It was an easy way to die.” Out near the end of the Spit, a bronze statue of a fisherman—rubber bibs and boots, a line in his hand—paid homage to those lost at sea, and each spring, at the start of the commercial fishing season, a crowd gathered around this Seafarer’s Memorial for the blessing of the fleet. A bridge up the highway was named after a man who drowned in the river below it during an annual canoeing competition twenty-five years ago. That year, the event was abolished.

  In Southcentral Alaska, where we lived, the sea could be especially ornery. The two-hundred-mile-long Cook Inlet into which our bay opened was pushed and pulled by the largest tides in the country: The difference between the heights of high and low tides could be as much as thirty feet. This meant that extreme tides barreled into narrow arms of the Inlet on a wave called the tidal bore. This wall of water could be as high as six feet and race fifteen miles per hour. Signs along the highway that edged the Inlet’s coast warned people not to wander into the mudflats that were exposed at low tide. You could get stuck as the tide rushed back in.

  During winter’s coldest weather, ice formed on the Inlet. There might be a greasy-looking layer of slush that undulated with the surface of the sea. Sometimes pancakes of ice floated on the Inlet’s surface and then collided and froze together in floes that could be a quarter-mile wide. These dynamic conditions and the presence of sandbars that shifted invisibly under the cloudy water made Cook Inlet’s shipways some of the most dangerous in the world. Law required that boat pilots knowledgeable in local conditions navigate container ships and tankers entering and leaving the Inlet. Helicopters brought pilots out to ships waiting near the mouth of the bay; tugboats ferried other pilots, who lived in Homer and other nearby towns, from the tip of the Spit to ships anchored in the bay. From shore, we’d watch the tugs approach, stop along the starboard or port side momentarily, and then return to the harbor. Soon after, the large ship would exit the bay.

  Even with these precautions, accidents still happened. Oil tankers had been ripped repeatedly from fueling docks by ice rushing out the Inlet on receding tides. Ice tore pilings out from under an oil dock and sealed a freighter’s water intake valve, causing it to lose power and drift. Some people thought that the conditions were ripe for the next devastating oil spill.

  It wasn’t just the sea that was volatile. At the base of the Spit, a blue sign with the white silhouette of a wave pointed east along a road that led out of town to higher elevation: the tsunami evacuation route. And every Thursday at noon, the tsunami siren wailed out its test. We knew it could happen. Here, along the Ring of Fire, where a string of volcanoes puffed away across Cook Inlet, and the oceanic plate was being forced beneath a restless and fragmented continental plate, almost anything could.

  The Earth. The sea. The very things we depended on could slap us and take us down. It was unnerving. What made this area geologically rich also made it volatile. What made the sea beautiful and productive also made it deadly.

  “YES. LET’S GO,” I said to John. Those words set us both into wordless action. We heaved the double kayak off the roof of the car and carried it in two goes to the water’s edge. We unpacked the gear from the back of the car and toted it down to the boat. Sleeping bags and pads, tent, stove, food, warm clothes—everything had been packed in waterproof bags. We lowered them, piece by piece, into the kayak’s bow and stern. John had already put on his life vest and spray skirt, which kept water from getting into the cockpit, by the time I reached for my purple vest. I pressed my hand against a zipped pocket on the vest: The lighter was there. John was looking out on the water. He was always like that—looking, observing, noting every bird, watching the movement of the tide, and scanning for skiffs he recognized. The wind had picked up slightly. After I pulled on my spray skirt, we dragged the bow of the boat into the water and I waded in. John sat on the stern to balance it while I lowered myself into the forward cockpit. Small waves lapped the sides of the boat. John lifted the stern and carried the boat further into the water. Then he stepped in and shoved us off.

  After we snapped the elastic-edged spray skirts around the rims of the cockpits, we set out from the tip of the Spit. John was a stronger paddler than I; but from the stern, he matched my pace. Wind blew gently from the southwest, into the mouth of the bay. I focused on paddling. Right, left. Right, left. It wouldn’t take that long, I reminded myself. In a little over an hour, we’d be at the south shore.

  As we paddled from the tip of the Spit, a few charter boats crossed in front of us on their way back to the harbor. Passengers standing at the sterns in baseball caps and windbreakers stared and waved at us while two-foot-high wakes fanned out from the backs of their boats. John angled our bow into the wakes and when one hit, we rose up and over it, then we prepared for the next.

  Once through the traffic, I was relieved. The first hurdle jumped over. Now, to keep going. To cover distance. But also, to look around. The far side of the bay fell into view like layers of a stage set. Offshore rocks: the first painted flat. Then the coastline. Further back, a blue haze washed over each peak with successively more strokes. Then the final blue backdrop of sky. We paddled through a line of driftwood and debris gathered together by the currents. A snarl of bull kelp, its stems knotted by the constant motion of the water, passed off our starboard side. A glaucous-winged gull stood atop a piece of driftwood that bobbed up and down with the surf. We paddled toward a flotilla of half a dozen dainty red-necked phalaropes, the only shorebird that swam in the bay. They spun around themselves in the water like windup bath toys in an effort to suction food from below. In an instant, the birds lifted from the water and flew off in unison. A sea otter popped its head up to catch a glance at us, then lost interest and swam off. Out on the bay, you could see these things: the curiosity of otters, the leisure of gulls. You could witness how birds lived, how the bay slowly gyred, and how the sea was a seamstress and kelp its thread.

  Paddling a kayak was the best way to see these things. Unlike being a passenger on a motorized skiff, kayaking was nearly silent, and there was nothing between you and the sea but half a foot of hull. We didn’t leak engine oil in watery rainbows behind us, and we could easily pull up onto the narrowest of beaches.

  For years, John ha
d explored the watery edges of lakes and rivers, the coasts of bays and rims of islands. I was learning to do the same. The margin where the sea met the shore was much more interesting than the flat plane of water, and it told you so much about a place. The shore revealed whether the tide was rising or falling and whether the next high tide would be higher or lower than the last. The shore was both a gateway to the land and a piece of the sea floor exposed for view. It displayed the refuse chucked out by the sea: the conical shells of limpets, the snail shells of periwinkles, driftwood licked clean by the surf. We lifted rocks to find crabs, marine worms, eel-like gobi fish, and hopping amphipods. We picked up spiny purple urchins and tossed stranded jellyfish back into the water. We weeded through tidal wracks and studied stones.

  And the edges were never the same. An average of twenty feet of water washed into the bay twice daily with the tide, so a cove could be a wide expanse of water at one point in the day and then a narrow channel girded by mussel flats and tidepools six hours later. The water could rush out like a river, and later sit flat and calm.

  When we paddled in the shallows, I could see the bottom. Most of the south shore of the bay had a ragged, rocky coast, and the sea came in clear and free of sediment to the land, rather than cloudy as it did on our side of the bay, which was edged by silty mudflats. Ribbonlike fronds of kelp parted to reveal clams, mussels, and hubcap-sized sea stars of all colors. Moon jellies, a species of jellyfish, pulsed their creamy white tentacles through the bay. Flounders lifted off the bottom and swam away as we approached.

  Already that summer, we had fished and collected mussels from our kayaks. A few weeks before, we had paddled across the bay with long-handled landing nets lashed to the deck of the double kayak. We waded into a rushing creek at the head of a narrow inlet that fingered off the bay and caught a dozen red salmon, surging upstream. Then we cleaned them, lowered them whole into the hatches, and paddled back, exhausted.

  There was so much about the region’s natural history that I didn’t know and couldn’t see. I wanted to be able to distinguish between a marbled and a Kittlitz’s murrelet, dainty birds that floated on the sea on summer days and flew back to their inland nests in the evenings. I wanted to know the difference between pelagic and red-faced cormorants; both species of these large, black seabirds had the same profile and held their wings open like damp raincoats while they perched on rocks to dry off. But I had begun to notice the differences between the types of seaweed that collected at the water’s edge: which ones were lacy, and which were smooth; which had small, turgid air bladders to keep them afloat and which washed in as flaccid as steamed spinach; which were red, mustard, or green; which felt like waterlogged leather between your fingers and which were as delicate as silk. I was learning things about the water—how a retreating tide left a wet lip on the beach; how glacial streams ran milky into the bay. The previous spring I had taken field trips with my students and had seen some of the bay’s microscopic universe: copepods, which looked like helmeted aliens; crab larvae that were large-eyed and leggy; and the larvae of barnacles, which looked like miniature Frisbees with feathery wings.

  I had to learn the sea itself, how to navigate it, what to look out for. I was surrounded by capable people and inspired by tough and skillful women. There were women who ran skiffs and who led paddling trips. Others who fished commercially far out in western Alaska while raising children. Some gave birth in remote fish camps, picking nets until labor had undeniably set in. One woman paddled with her husband out of the bay and around the tip of the peninsula on which we lived into the unprotected waters of the Gulf of Alaska. Waves battered this far coastline, and there were stretches of land where rocky cliffs rose straight out of the water, leaving few opportunities to pull ashore.

  THE DOUBLE KAYAK was lazy in the water, only inching forward, it seemed, with each stroke. Though more stable, this heavy shell of dinged-up fiberglass was neither agile nor graceful. It was a butter knife compared to the sleek blade of my wooden kayak. Paddling my own boat felt perfect. It was like being on the water in an extension of myself. I would sit with my legs outstretched, the tips of my boots nearly touching the underside of the deck. In my own kayak, if I bent my knees up, I could feel the hull close around me. This tightness made for better maneuverability. The boat would slice neatly through the water and, though it had no rudder, I could turn it easily. With each stroke of my paddle, the nose of my kayak would respond—turning port when I paddled on the right, starboard when I paddled on the left. Gentle rocking of my hips would tip the boat on its keel. The wooden deck would gleam under the sun.

  In the double, John leaned on his paddle—dragging it in the water or sweeping the blade around—to turn us. The bow would swing either way, depending on what he did in the stern. My only job was to help keep us going forward, to keep paddling and not stop.

  As I turned my head around to see how far we had come, I was glad to have John behind me. “Not too much farther now,” he smiled. We were getting to the halfway mark, the no-turning-back point where, even on the calmest of days, the shore seemed much too far away. Behind us, the charter boats had shrunk in the distance and were indistinguishable from each other. Business continued at the tip of the Spit; I felt worlds away. We had told Cynthia we were paddling across for the night, but no one knew we were out there at that moment. No one was watching out for us. No one would know for a long time if anything happened to us.

  EARLIER THAT SUMMER, John had gone out paddling alone. He left in the morning with water and lunch and a plan to paddle across the bay and a few miles up it to a cluster of houses, lodges, and oyster farms called Halibut Cove. He said he’d be gone all day, but by nine that night he hadn’t returned. It was still light out, but I was worried. I walked out to the edge of the bluff and scanned the bay through binoculars. What if he’d gotten stranded? What if he’d capsized? I called Cynthia. “The same thing happened with Taro years ago,” she told me. “I called the harbormaster. He said that almost everyone comes back by ten, because that’s when the wind dies down. He said that if Taro wasn’t home by then, to call back.” Cynthia’s husband had returned as predicted, and it was nearly ten when, using binoculars, I spotted the profile of John and his boat nearing the tip of the Spit.

  Still, disasters were always happening. The following spring, a deep-sea trawler went down in cold, rough conditions in the Bering Sea, drowning all fifteen men on board. It was the most deadly fishing accident in the country over the past half-century, and it made everyone shudder. Rescuers found only one body.

  Two summers later, a young couple went kayaking on a mild January day from the south shore, where they were caretaking a lodge. Both in their mid-twenties, he was writing a novel and she was teaching herself to paint. Though the day they went out was warm and mild for January, the conditions got rough. Their double kayak flipped and they swam to a rocky island. They fumbled up a gravel beach on numb hands and feet, so exhausted and cold that they couldn’t think straight and passed out. They woke, climbed a cliff, fell back, and passed out again. He tried to start a fire but failed. When he woke this time, she was gone. Her body had been taken by the tide. He managed to clamber into a cabin on the island and keep himself alive for three days until a passing boat saw him waving from the shore.

  “MURRES!” JOHN CALLED, as a couple of black and white birds sped by overhead with their wings beating furiously. I tried to notice other things besides the chop on the water and the breeze teasing the right side of my face and neck. Ahead, scores of black-legged kittiwakes, dainty gull-like birds, had collected on the surface of the water, likely over a ball of needle fish. Far out the mouth of the bay, the familiar red and green hull of a tanker was moving toward us. It would pick up a pilot before heading up the Inlet to a fertilizer plant.

  Just past the halfway point, the wind got stronger, and the water began to roll beneath us. The boat rose on two-foot high lumps of sea that were pressing in from the southwest. With each forward motion of our paddles
, the rollers spun us nearly a quarter turn on our keel. The waves didn’t break, but white water began to lace their tips. Up and down, up and down. I was terrified. In the trough of a wave, the sea curved up around us. At the top, we lost control and could not move ahead or turn.

  “John, it’s getting worse.”

  “Wind’s picked up,” he observed. “But we should be fine.”

  “Let’s paddle hard!” I shouted, knowing nothing else to do or say. Water slipped erratically around my paddle. The rocky islands, where we could rest on the leeward sides, weren’t getting closer fast enough. Forward paddle, spin back. Forward paddle, spin back. I could feel the stress in my wrists as I clenched the paddle tightly and used all of my strength to move ahead. Sweat formed in the small of my back, sticking my shirt to my skin, and dampness collected on my forehead beneath the band of my cap.

  Far off our bow, boats plied the bay, and I could see the noses of small skiffs dipping into the water as rolling waves passed beneath them. Seeing how the water was playing with these larger boats made me even more nervous. What else were we but a piece of refuse the sea could toss around as it pleased? The sounds of wind and sea and the whine of far-off boat engines made me feel invisible. All I wanted was to catch a whiff of guano from the seabirds that nested on the rocks. The last time we’d paddled across, we could smell the rank, ammonia odor from a quarter-mile away; it was a sign that we were close to the other side. But the wind was at our backs, and we still had more than a mile to go.

  I paddled harder. My muscles clenched with nervousness and exertion. What if we lost control and took a wave broadside? What if we got so tired we couldn’t continue? Behind us, a skiff engine crescendoed, and a gray-haired man at the wheel slowed near us. “You okay?” he called out to us. It was unusual for paddlers to be on the water in such choppy conditions and even more unusual for kayakers and skiffs to make contact in the middle of the bay.