In the middle of winter, the harbor, generally free of ice, was quiet. No tourists piled onto boats to be shuttled out to catch salmon or halibut. Commercial fishing boats rested in their slips. The fish packing plant went silent after the holiday season of sending gifts of frozen seafood all over the country. Most of the businesses on the Spit—bear viewing outfits, water taxis, the ice cream shop, espresso and trinket stands—closed, and many boarded up their windows with plywood to wait out the winter.
After the flush of summer, Homer’s population seemed to halve in the winter, but the dark months created pockets of vibrancy. Businesses strung lights along their roofs and around nearby trees. The community college in Homer showed foreign films for free on Friday evenings, and restaurants offered weeknight dinner specials that weren’t available during the summer months—half-priced burgers, fish and chips, clam chowder. The six-month-long winter passed through town in a succession of annual events and scheduled celebrations: the craft fair that coincided with the annual community production of The Nutcracker, the winter arts festival which was accompanied by a parade down the main thoroughfare through town, a dozen fundraisers for various causes, and skiing competitions for all ages.
Supermarkets around town maintained their earnest stocks of colorful produce even when the ground was frozen and the sun had slumped low in the sky. The same waxy apples were flown in from the other side of the globe, bananas were shipped north from the tropics, and heads of sensitive lettuce were brought up from California. All winter long, we emptied our freezer of salmon we’d caught the summer before. We grilled it, fried it, baked it, and put it into soups. We ate salmon for dinner, then brought leftovers to work for lunch. We ate the raspberries we’d made into jam and syrup late in the summer and used up the clams we’d canned as chowder. By late winter, the berries and clams were gone and we were sick of salmon.
Winter brought its own recreation. When the town’s largest lake, which was used during the summer months as the floatplane airport, was frozen fast, people raced beat-up cars across its surface. Scores of snowmachiners parked their trucks and trailers a dozen miles out the road that headed east from town and took off into the wide expanse of undeveloped backcountry. Ice rinks sprang up—a flooded blacktop next to the elementary school, a frozen pond next to the airport—and attracted skaters who gathered to twirl, do laps, and play hockey. As we skated across its surface, the pond let out haunting sounds like the calls of whales. Three sets of trails were groomed around Homer for cross-country skiers. Years before John and I moved there, a group of fishermen had put up a rope tow on Ohlson Mountain, a stout hill behind town, using a boat engine to drag skiers up the slope.
AS YOU TRAVEL north during an Alaskan winter, the sun slinks lower and lower toward the horizon until you reach the Arctic Circle at 66° latitude, which runs across the state about two-thirds of the way to its northern coast. There, the sun doesn’t rise at all on winter solstice. If you took a dogsled north from that dotted line on the map, you’d lose the sun for days, then weeks, then months. In Alaska and other northern regions, the wide arc the sun makes across the northern sky all summer long is pulled taut, until the sun merely scrapes low along the southern horizon. The moon usurps the sun’s summer path and dominates the winter sky. The winter constellations I’d learned the year before returned. Orion led the parade across winter’s night skies; W-shaped Cassiopeia, her husband Cepheus, the Great Square, and that small question mark–shaped group of seven stars called the Pleiades followed suit. Here, it was easy to see how the sky rotates around the North Star, which sits almost directly above the Earth’s axis: Over the course of one night, the Big Dipper dumped itself out. A clear moonless night revealed a sky infinitely perforated by stars and in the morning, Venus glowed so brightly it cast its own milky light on the surface of the bay.
But the dark sky had once again ratcheted around us. The darkness drove us home earlier on winter afternoons, and kept us in later in the mornings. Before moving to Alaska, I had been warned about the long, dark winters. John and I had looked up the statistics for Homer: The shortest day of the year—December 21, winter solstice—offered about six hours of light. The sun rose at 10:05 A.M. and set at 4:04 P.M. The darkness had seemed mysterious and exciting. But we hadn’t known that the quality of light also changed drastically with the seasons. Because the Northern Hemisphere leans away from the sun during the winter months, in midwinter the sun rises barely a hand’s width above the mountain range to the south. Shadows are long even at midday. In winter, sunlight passes through a band of light-scattering atmosphere thicker than at any other time of year, which makes the light gentle and hazy. Over the radio, experts urged listeners to go outside during the few lighted hours in order to get at least twenty minutes of sunlight into our retinas each day, which they said would help ward off depression from seasonal affective disorder. Shops around town sold lights that simulated the sun, some of which steadily brightened, like a plug-in dawn.
Although neither John nor I seemed to be suffering from lack of light, winter forced us to look at ourselves and at each other, and it wasn’t just because the view out our windows disappeared for so much of the day. For more hours than not, the panes framed reflections of ourselves. John pulled out his book on the stars, which suggested what it called a new way of seeing the constellations—new pictures to link stars, new ways to connect the dots. Given the same dozen points, you could draw so many different things. I began to think of all of the lives I could live: up north at the edge of the sea or someplace else; with or without John; as a teacher, student, or as someone else entirely. The points in my life could be reshuffled to create different, overlapping lives, in the same way stars are shared between constellations: The end of the Dipper’s handle becomes the nose of Ursus Major. Andromeda’s head is also one of the corners of the Great Square.
I couldn’t help it. I began to slip into these other lives, as you might for a moment stop seeing the ladle and see only the bear. I imagined curling up on the couch with the friendly plow guy when he came into the house to use the phone when John was gone. The plow guy had gotten his truck stuck in the ditch along the driveway. Why hadn’t I told him that there was a ditch there, now hidden under the snow? Didn’t I know that was my job? My stupidity made me cringe, but the plow guy, in work pants wet up to the thigh from wading into the snow, was gentle and unfazed. I considered taking off to learn tango in Argentina, where it was summer. I would throw on a flimsy dress and slide into a pair of heels. Or I would leave and go back to school. Perhaps being a student would cure me of the incessant feeling that I was an apprentice of my own life. Sometimes all I wanted was to escape the way I felt when John looked at me: as his perpetual student, the girl in overalls and rubber boots ready to accompany him on his next adventure. But it didn’t take long for the familiar pictures to resurface, the Dipper to return, Orion’s shield to weld together its line of stars.
LESS THAN A mile from the house, our skis slipped quickly into the icy dips in the snow beneath spruce trees. We crossed undeveloped parcels owned by people who lived out of state. We’d never seen anyone here, though our neighbors told us that in the spring, they picked morels in these fields. We had the expanse of snow and scattered spruce woods to ourselves. Winter could be like this: moments of intense intimacy with others—shared dinners in small spaces with friends and cheap wine, bodies packed into someone’s sauna, crowds gathered at the few restaurants open in town—and then whole days when John and I would see no one else. But in the quiet of winter, snow revealed the industry of hundreds of silent societies. Highways of vole tracks careened between clumps of elderberry, and moose crashed across the hills, leaving beheaded willows in their wakes. The telltale prints of snowshoe hares—with their huge hind paws landing ahead of their diminutive forelegs—traversed the snow, followed by lynx tracks as large as saucers. Coyotes left curious, winding trails, and squirrels dropped nervous, claw-scratched tracks. And even the wings of an owl swooping down
to pluck off a meal left a gentle swipe.
The bears had gone into hibernation; the shorebirds and warblers had gone south, but life was everywhere. Hummingbird-sized golden-crowned kinglets, olive green birds with a brilliant streak of yellow across the tops of their heads, dashed between spruce branches all winter long. We were amazed that they could survive the cold months in the north. They nested around town in the summer, and in the spring, we heard their earnest, energetic calls, like a car engine turning over again and again but never starting. Ravens traversed the white winter sky, chortling to each other on the wing. A crow-sized hawk owl perched regularly at the top of a spruce tree near the fast-food joint. Magpies, whose black and white plumage reflected winter’s simple palette, flapped around town. Snow buntings examined grasses on the berm at the top of the beach, and huge flocks of redpolls—small brown songbirds with bright spots of red on the tops of their heads—chutted by overhead, then congregated momentarily in stands of alders.
In the winter, the bay, which remained open in all but the most protected areas, provided a haven for tanker ships as well as seabirds. Ducks rafted up in great numbers. From the beach we could see the white flanks of scaup gathered by the hundreds, the black profiles of clumped scoters, pairs of goldeneyes, single grebes, and drab loons diving in the shallows near the edge of the surf. Otters gathered in the bay as well, and seals periscoped their heads through the cold surface of the sea just off the beach in town.
For those species that didn’t migrate, winter up north required innovation. The hares replaced their dingy brown summer coats with fur of unblemished white composed of hollow hairs that insulated the animals from the winter chill. Moose grew thick coats that would peel away messily in the spring. In the fall, spruce grouse gathered on gravel roads to fill their gizzards with grit to help them digest their winter diet of stiff spruce needles. The frogs we heard calling in the spring hibernated in burrows of dead leaves and grasses, sleeping beneath thick layers of snow.
Winter meant a peculiar mixture of quietness and life, of darkness and earnest vibrancy, of accessibility and danger. For John and me, winter proved to be an equalizing season. For eight months, I could forget about my fear of the water. Winter was a terrain I felt comfortable in. We stored our boats and explored the land instead of the sea. I was more adept as a skier than John, and I wasn’t afraid of the cold. I learned quickly how to dress for a ski trip: Wear far less than what seemed rationally appropriate. In cold temperatures, sweat can be dangerous. Once wet, your body can lose heat rapidly. I wasn’t afraid of getting lost, either; beyond the familiar scattering of houses, the land creased into shallow valleys holding creeks that all ran, faster or slower, toward the same narrow river, and soon after to the sea. There were no tiderips to plan around, no clues in the surface of the sea to pick up on. By midwinter, the topography behind our place was etched in my brain: Twitter Creek ran by Lookout Mountain; Beaver Creek Flats would take you to the North Fork of the Anchor; Crossman Ridge humped up between our place and Ohlson Mountain.
As friends and family back East repeatedly asked me how I was handling the long winter, I realized I had become sensitive to the subtleties of the season: the acute angle of light, the way fresh animal tracks in the snow dulled during the days after they were laid, the red hue cast by thick stands of leafless alders. Summer was why people came here, but winter was why many of us stayed.
But lately, you couldn’t count on winter. Friends who had lived in Alaska for years lamented the recent whimsy of winter. You couldn’t depend on there being good snow anymore, they complained. That winter, Iditarod dog mushers were forced to cross fifty miles of bare ground—their sleds bounced over tussocks and brush in an area usually blanketed by snow. The previous winter, racers worried that the unusually warm winter temperatures—in the upper thirties—would overheat and dehydrate their dogs. Frequent news reports suggested that the typical deep freeze of Alaska’s winters was no longer a sure thing. On Alaska’s Arctic oil fields, winter freeze-up allowed massive machinery to travel off the network of gravel roads that linked the scattered drill pads and processing facilities. But this season of ice roads was getting shorter, threatening the slow-growing tundra beneath the heavy equipment. Each winter, the tiny, half-Native Interior village of Nenana held a competition in which people all over the world guessed when the village’s river would break up. The jackpot of about $300,000 was shared by those who guessed the right date, hour, and minute. The river was now breaking up, on average, five and a half days earlier than it had in 1917, when the contest was initiated by railroad workers itching for spring. Late winters and early springs made travel more difficult and even deadly in the Bush: Snowmachines and trucks sometimes crashed through thin ice in places where villagers had once been able to rely upon safe passage. Warming temperatures were unraveling winter’s fabric.
ON OUR SKIS, we continued downstream beyond where the creek joined another. There was no one around but the old zipperlike tracks of snowmachines fading in the creek bottom. From time to time they’d highmark their machines, driving up steep sides of the drainage in dare-devil loops. In the backcountry, these routes could kill snowmachiners because they triggered avalanches. Up ahead, a series of beaver dams hemmed ice-covered pools. The pools drained into a reservoir that held the town’s drinking water.
I stopped on my skis when I spotted a caddisfly crawling across the snow. These half inch-long insects wear wings tented above their brown bodies. The sight of this fragile creature crawling across the wide expanse of snow was a reminder that spring, eventually, would come. As larvae, caddisflies live in cold and swift-running creeks, wearing elaborate homes they’ve pieced together out of twigs and pebbles. They spin nets to catch food, and when they’re fully grown, the larvae close themselves in their houses and begin the first stages of metamorphosis. In early spring, the insects crawl out of the water, and step out of their old skins wearing new wings. Then they mate, lay eggs, and die. Would this one, emerging so early, find a mate?
I called to John and he skied over to where I watched the insect moving slowly across the snow. We both loved to find wild things where you wouldn’t expect them, and to notice what could easily be overlooked. In front of us, ice lidded a shallow pond. We took off our skis at the edge and then inched our boots onto its startlingly clear surface. The ice was as transparent as glass. We lay flat on our bellies and looked through the hard surface. The ice was a window into another world, showing the pond’s winter life. Brown grasses danced in the invisible current, which carried silver air bubbles along the underside of the ice ceiling. Larval caddisflies stepped gingerly along submerged leaves and black beetles zipped about in the frigid water wearing pockets of air like glimmering skirts. A white worm wiggled through the water among the stumps of last year’s horsetails.
The ice was part window, part mirror. The surface reflected my face, which was framed by the white of the sky and the black, sawlike tops of spruce behind my head. My hair brushed the ice; I touched my lips to its cold surface and then my tongue. The taste was metallic and clean.
Every time I thought about the other lives I could live, I remembered this: What existed between John and me was a penchant for hidden worlds, for moments of extraordinary beauty. For seeing the way mist hung in the valley below our place, the way a moose would steam on a cold fall morning, the way a full winter moon rose swollen over the mountains. Every time I thought about the other places I could be, I thought about the endless snow-covered hills we seemed to own on weekend days in late winter, the evidence of lynx. Still, I wondered whether life would always feel so tentative and uncertain. Whether I would always imagine living other lives. But winter was my territory, and in it, I was the woman who could put skis on in the morning and leave the house not knowing where she’d end up.
9
SPRING
CAT’S PAW: n. A puff of wind; a light breeze affecting a small area, as one that causes patches of ripples on the surface of a water area.
At this time of year, it became clear that every object held heat among its swimming atoms: Deep moats formed around the bases of spruce trees where the dark trunks, having absorbed the sun’s gentle warmth, melted the snow away. A single piece of gravel pushed off the road by the plow months before would melt the snow around it as a drop of soap scatters an oily film. Gardeners threw ash atop their snow-covered beds, and these sooty patches, taking in more heat than the reflective ground around them, would be denuded first.
Land was on the move. You could stand in the middle of a snow-coated meadow and hear the crackling of melting ice and the slurring of water first seeping then running downgrade to find more of itself. Having been locked up for months, water was eager to pool, to mingle. It ran in every ditch, in every drainage, and gathered itself in every hollow. It needed to move, to transgress boundaries and flood fences. A certain kind of school was letting out for the rush of melt, then of summer. Finally rivers and streams were able to hear the sounds of their own voices again and remember what it felt like to fall downstream, to enter the sea. It was a phase change: solid to liquid; nothing was spared.
Tide, Feather, Snow Page 14