In the coming months and years, the research would progress slowly. The transmitters revealed that the population of red-throated loons nesting on the Delta migrated down the West Coast of North America as far south as California. This information provided a critical clue, but it didn’t solve anything; it was a tiny prelude to the rest of a story whose end no one could predict.
A few weeks later, John and I headed home. On the flight out, as I looked from the floatplane for swan families on lakes, I realized that despite everything I couldn’t do and didn’t know, I felt adept as a witness to the Delta, which was in the midst of changes far beyond what the few research camps scattered across the region could measure. The calculations of cause were so complex. I dwelled in what I could see and record: a cache of ping-pong ball–like eggs under a piece of driftwood that was a short-eared owl’s nest; the white heads of emperor geese stained gold by iron in the mud; the way camp shrank from black dots on the horizon to nothing as I worked my way across the tundra. At home, I put the blue glass globe from the Japanese fishing net on the windowsill, where it gathered light. It was a token smuggled from another world, borrowed by me for a time. It was a reminder that a domain once claimed can be lost.
11
STAKING CLAIM
STEVEDORE: n. One who is employed in the loading or unloading of ships. v. To load or unload the cargo of a ship.
The property was perfect. It was six acres that abutted eighty acres of scattered spruce forest that were protected by law for moose habitat. A meadow ran across it, north to south, draped with grasses and thick with the fuchsia flowers of chest-high fireweed. At the far end of the meadow, the snow-capped peaks of the mountains across the bay rose up above the black tips of spruce. A stream slipped along the edge of the meadow. Running water on the property: This felt like a dream. There was nothing between the southern edge of the land and the bluff down to the beach except a mile and a half of spruce, the slice of Fritz Creek—as wide as a rural lane—and the kind of boggy habitat where we hoped wild cranberries grew. Standing on the property, you couldn’t hear the road. It was seven miles out of town to the east, in a microclimate that was generally warmer in the summer and colder in the winter than town. We liked that. It meant perfect gardening conditions—for the north, at least—and in winter, we’d get snow when town was getting rain. And the meadow collected sun for many hours during the summer days; we could tell this even at the end of August when we found the place and bought it.
The property had no water view. This was perfect too, we thought. It made the land much cheaper—less than some people paid for a new car. But just knowing that there were no houses, no roads, no telephone or electric lines between our place and the bay made us very happy.
We knew already which birds would pass through the place. In the fall, we would hear great horned owls and see hawk owls perched at the tops of our spruce. On winter days, we knew that chickadees would buzz through in small groups and dull red pine grosbeaks would gather in the trees. In the spring, we’d awaken to hermit thrushes and the three-note calls of golden-crowned sparrows and fall asleep to robins’ songs that would play long into the night. In the summer, kinglets would sing incessantly and cranes would fly overhead, sounding their rattle-like calls as they passed. We would hang a feeder from a tall birch with a perfectly placed bough and keep it filled all year long.
The land had beautiful trees. Birches lined the gravel driveway that curved a quarter-mile into the property. Their boughs spread like arms infinitely fingered. I loved the jagged edges and strong venation of birch leaves and the way that whole canopies lit yellow with the first deep frosts of fall. We had plenty of spruce, both live and those killed by bark beetles. There were enough dead spruce to bring down for ample supplies of firewood. Thick alders masked the view of neighbors, making the place feel private and wild. Nearby, along the creek, tall cottonwoods grew in pairs. In late summer, they would cast off minute seeds in downy nebulae that would zoom across our acres. And in the spring, scrubby willows would reach pawlike flowers over the banks of the creek.
The night after John and I signed on the property, we stayed up long past the sun had gone down talking incessantly about our plans. We would turn the unfinished, two-story structure that sat next to the driveway into a workshop, with a little apartment above it for visitors, or a renter, even. We would turn the earth over and grow a large garden. We would have chickens. We would ski from the property in the winter, and walk along the creek in the summer, and take cold dips in it. We would build a sauna and fill buckets with water from the creek to throw over our heads.
The weekend after buying the place, we set out to explore. From the end of the meadow, we walked south, toward the bay. Damp grasses licked our rubber boots until they shone. We examined the small stream for aquatic insects and found none, though I was certain we’d see them in the spring. We crossed Fritz Creek, which was one of the largest that ran off the bluff into the bay, on the back of a fallen cottonwood, and spotted a pair of harlequin ducks from the far bank. These shy birds were John’s darlings. The male had plumage as playfully colored as a court jester—bold white markings on a blue head, with red crown and flanks. This species of sea duck nests along remote freshwater creeks and rivers in the summer. We were thrilled. Maybe we’d have our own nesting pair nearby.
Farther along, at the edge of a pillowy upland area covered in crowberries, squat spruce, and a miniature form of birch, we came across a small clearing where the ground had been torn up. We found moose hairs, then part of a bloodied backbone. We circled the bear kill cautiously—irresistibly curious about the attack yet knowing that the bear could still be nearby. Then we saw the skull—cleaned of skin and blood: It belonged to one of this year’s calves. We loved knowing there were bears nearby and that they hunted not far from our new place, that we would be able to witness these other lives. All of this, too, seemed perfect.
But we couldn’t move in yet. There wasn’t a place to live, and the property needed work. A forty-foot-long dilapidated trailer house stretched across the end of the driveway. The previous owners had parked it there twenty years ago. Its aluminum siding—white with a pale blue trim—was falling down. Inside, it was a mess. It looked as though the previous owners had just up and left one afternoon and never returned. A coffee mug sat on the counter and cans of food crowded the cupboards. The bedroom was littered with clothes and children’s books with curled pages. The place was unlivable. The carpet had gone moldy and bad. The walls sagged. The countertop was peeling off. The place stank of the rot of man-made things. But John and I weren’t fazed. We would get rid of it. John assured me we could hire someone to haul it to the dump, where it could be gotten rid of for free. We would clean up the mess. We would take down a sloppy shed that had been added onto the trailer. John looked at a tiny one-room cabin that had been built behind the trailer—presumably as an extra bedroom—and knew immediately that we could convert it into a place where we could live. We would add on to it and make it ours.
There was other work to be done. The property was littered with other remnants of the previous owners. Dozens of crab pots—with a diameter the size of eighteen-wheeler tires—were stacked along the driveway. An old truck—with four flat tires—had been pushed off the driveway and sat nosed up into a stand of spruce. Boat parts—an anchor, an engine, the mold of a hull—sat in thick grass. There were rusty drums and old boat batteries parked along the driveway, and wooden pallets that had been tossed haphazardly everywhere. A skeet shooter stood on a spruce pole platform in the grass, and we found clay pigeons scattered across the meadow. A chicken coop built with spruce siding and the frame of a greenhouse were falling apart on either side of the meadow. And there was so much other junk. But when I cupped my hands on either side of my face—to block out the decrepit trailer, the glassless greenhouse, the rotting chicken coop—what I saw was the long grassy meadow edged by spruce, the peaks of the mountains across the bay, and our own slice of sky.
SINCE MOVING TO Alaska, we had been surrounded by people who had bought land and built their own homes. There were Dave and Rebecca, whose property, farther out of town than ours, dipped to the southeast, granting them a view of the head of the bay and up a glacier-filled valley on the south shore. They had put up a small, two-story place and kept adding on as their family grew. They had a chicken coop—made out of an old wooden boat—and their toilet was a five-gallon bucket they emptied onto a compost pile in the yard. I couldn’t imagine what Rebecca’s parents thought when they came up to visit from their retirement home in Florida. Another friend, Sasha, had bought eight acres thirteen miles out of town that had a small cabin on it. When Collin came into her life, they got pigs and another dog, extended the garden, and started building a workshop. It seemed everyone was in some stage of buying land or building. And it seemed that this is what everyone did who stayed: They staked out their own piece of land, then made it theirs. They cleared and built, graded and maintained.
For a year, John had been suggesting that we buy a place. But I had resisted. I wasn’t ready for the responsibilities or the commitment. At the back of my mind, I always wondered if I’d return to the East. But I had been romanced: by the way pairs of ravens tangoed across the sky; by moose tracks left provocatively along streets in the middle of town; by the musk of the sea. And the month on the Delta left me swooning. This was a rich life. I loved the way hills unrolled endlessly behind town, and how, at the foot of them sat a strip of undeveloped beach. Undeveloped beach—where else could you find that? Here, streams ran unfettered to the sea. Migratory birds flew in and out unimpeded. Moose dropped calves around town. As each year passed, the seasons changed how I lived. I knew the species of trees and the low plants that grew in the taiga, in meadows, along the trails in the dense woods across the bay. I was beginning to be able to identify every bird I saw. I knew where to find clams and mussels, and was learning the names of the creeks that veined down the bluff behind town and made their way to the beach. I could gather up my courage to paddle across the bay; I could fill my boat with fish. I knew the names of many of the fjords and inlets created by the furrowed coastline on the south side of the bay: Tutka, China Poot, Peterson, Sadie. This, to me, was what home meant. And so, three years after moving here, I woke up one Saturday and told John it was time to look for a place.
Here, buying property wasn’t just about buying a place to live; it was often about buying a place to produce, to support yourself. We wanted to grow food, collect eggs from a coop full of hens. We wanted to heat our house for free and use water from the creek to douse veggies in the garden.
During the weeks after our purchase, we walked the property to find its corners, which were marked with pink plastic tape. We made plans about how to proceed. John had ideas about how everything should be done: how the trailer should be moved, a cabin built around the existing structure, the place cleaned up. On our days off, we left our rental place in the morning to drive out to the property and didn’t return until dinnertime. We hacked down outbuildings and threw the wood onto a swelling burn pile. John climbed onto the top of the shed and removed the aluminum roofing. We set it aside to use for the cabin. For days I moved junk from one end of the property to the other. There were buckets of damp nails, old tools unusable because of rust, tangles and tangles of line. With everything, we made the decision: keep it, burn it, or take it to the dump. We spent days dismantling, burning, setting aside, and cleaning up. Still, there was no end in sight.
During these weeks, we scanned maps, seeing how the outline of our property fit into the land around it: the winding course of the creek, the route we could take to walk to a nearby lake no roads led to, the land protected from development, future subdivisions, neighbors’ parcels. We were so proud of our rectangle and the way it shared a boundary with land that would forever be free from roads, houses, strip malls.
All around our property, signs of ownership had been stamped onto the land. Homesteaders and early settlers had left their names on nearby roads: Thurston, Waterman, Kilcher, Greer. And across the map of the entire state, names reflected other kinds of ownership. The Russian: Bobrof Island, Mount Sergief, Strogonof Point, and Pavlof Volcano. The Native: Aiautak Lagoon, Kinipaghalghat Mountains, Takrak River, Hochandochtla Peak, and Kalakaket Creek. The British: Cook Inlet, Prince of Wales Island, Prince William Sound, and Bristol Bay.
Naming was one of the many ways to try to own a place. For our six acres, you wrote out a check and signed your name on a stack of papers at an office on one side of town. When the papers were filed at an office on the other side of town, ownership was official. Natives had owned the region by living here, by eating of the place, by surviving. Russians had doled out charters to companies; these pieces of paper granted them rights to natural resources, which they often took by force. Homesteaders filed a claim, paid a fee, lived on their allotment for five years, built a home, and farmed the land. Then they could “prove up” and the land was theirs. Not far up the highway you could turn off it, drive another thirty-five miles, and hike on the beach to a promontory of land that looks across the water to Anchorage. Here, at Point Possession, in 1778, after failing to find the fabled Northwest Passage, Captain Cook sent one of his men ashore to bury a brandy bottle containing a parchment that claimed all of the surrounding lands for England. Today, this tip of land remains testament to how so many acts of ownership mean nothing.
ONE WEEKEND, AT the end of a day of work on the land, we stopped by the house of a couple I knew who lived on the road: Rick and Lauren. He was tall and soft-spoken, like John, but with a long ponytail of nearly black hair falling down his back. She was a bookworm from Montreal with a sharp wit that reminded me of people I knew back East. They weren’t back-to-the-landers. They were professionals who worked in town and were talking about leaving the state for graduate school. “You’ll need a French drain,” Lauren instructed. This was a fancy term for a ditch that would divert water away from the house. “It’ll keep your place from becoming a pile of mud in the spring.” She laughed. John and I looked at each other. “We know someone with a Bobcat,” Lauren said quickly. “I can give you his number.”
Other neighbors walked up the driveway one afternoon and introduced themselves as we were throwing junk onto the burn pile. They were a couple in their fifties, both tall, with short, graying hair. “Why don’t you come over for dinner tonight?” they asked. So we did. When it got too dark to work, we drove up the road a couple of miles to pick up a bottle of wine, then came back, parked at the property, and walked over. They were drunk by the time we got there. Over pan-fried T-bones and more wine, they slurred about how badly they wanted to leave the state. Their grown daughter back East, the long winters, the too-small town. They had nailed a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign onto the trunk of a birch at the end of their driveway, which was the last place on the road. They hoped they weren’t asking too much.
Weeks later, when John was at the property alone, a pair of Mormon missionaries hiked up the driveway in their blacks and whites. You could spot the traveling Mormons from a mile away: They were the only men in town who wore suits. And their hair was neatly trimmed, their faces clean-shaven, and their shoes made for pavement. “I wanted to offer them tea,” John reported to me later. “But I didn’t have a stove or a pot. So instead, I asked them to leave.”
We were in the middle of sorting through old fishing gear piled beneath the two-story shed one afternoon when we heard a high-pitched shriek coming from someplace beyond the bottom of the driveway. It continued, like the sound of a pained question, the tone rising at the end. It was somehow familiar, but I couldn’t place it. John didn’t know either. We walked to the road where a man with a skinny, gray braid hanging down his neck and a cigarette between his fingers stood looking up into a tall spruce. He lived up the road. “Bear cubs,” he said. “Must have lost their mama. Just called Fish and Game. They’re sending someone out.” As we stood there, the sound continued and a scene flashed
through my head of a long-past summer in the Rockies that I’d spent clearing trails, when I’d seen some small dark animal up a tree, a dark shape with spines. “Sounds kind of like a porcupine,” I mumbled. “Naw. Just some lost bear cubs crying for their mama,” the man said.
A mint green Fish and Game truck came down the road and stopped near us, the engine idling. The driver rolled down the window. “Hey Bill,” he said to the man with the braid. “Howdy,” he said to us. He listened for a minute to the shrieks. “What you got there is a porcupine. And we’ll just leave him be,” the Fish and Game man said before turning his truck around and taking off. For a moment, I felt the small victory of having had the answer to that high-pitched question. I so badly wanted to have that answer, to have any answers.
As fall ticked by and winter’s dark sky began to hang lower and closer, the days we spent working on the property felt long and damp. The leaves dropped and the grasses died back, shoving into the fore all the work we hadn’t done: the broken wood pallets we hadn’t burned, the deflated buoys we hadn’t taken to the dump, the defunct truck we hadn’t towed away. But our dreams kept the despair at bay: We talked about the seeds we would plant in the spring, the ski routes we wanted to explore from the place that winter, the colors we would paint the walls and plywood floor of the cabin.
Every weekend, we worked all day then fell into bed exhausted, the smell of the burnpile lingering in our hair and in the heap of clothes we’d stripped off in the corner of the room. Pretty soon we realized the two-story building would have to be torn down—the stairs swayed beneath our feet and the pressboard floor had rotten out. We realized the previous owner never would come pick up the crab pots, car batteries, and fifty-five-gallon drums as he’d promised. We realized we would spend years pulling nails out of the soles of our shoes.
Tide, Feather, Snow Page 18