They inhabited the fragments of myself: part armorless sea slug, part well-protected snail. Clawed and spined, and then sometimes boneless, without shells, just a naked piece of flesh. I felt intermittently thrashed and tough, exposed and as if I’d crawled under a very large rock. Then, some nights at the bar, like a fresh piece of detritus thrown by currents to the crabs.
I looked up to see my friends scattered across the acre of exposed rocks. Strong, independent people, I thought. But seeing this colorful and outlandish marine life alone made me intermittently sad.
WHEN THE TIDE started to turn, I saw it in the lowest pools first. Still kelp began to get restless; torn bits of seaweed started moving up the beach. The pools swelled, and bubbles floated across their surfaces. The bay was coming back to erase what I’d seen over the previous hours. It was taking the pools back, bringing the creatures home. The rising water pushed me back up the beach. But I stopped and looked out across the rocks and the bay. There I was at the edge of the sea. Not a boat person or a carpenter. Not born and raised here, nor even having lived here long. I was no commercial fisherman nor fisherman’s wife. The water began sneaking up my boots and would come up fast. I could stand there and pull the bay up around me like a skirt. I could stand there until it pressed against me, holding me tightly, coldly, indifferent. But I turned and walked up the beach.
As the bay came back in, it pushed countless jellyfish toward the shore. Some were clear with deep orange centers, while others just gave off a moon white glow. They trailed long ragged tentacles and could have been a fleet of spaceships making their way home. The tidepools filled then disappeared. The rocks were smothered. The seaweed lifted then drowned. It is always quicker leaving than entering another world.
That evening, as clouds hiked up the backs of the mountains toward the summits, on the camp stove I cooked a big pot of mussels I had yanked off nearby rocks. When they opened, they let out juice of the sea which became a rich broth at the bottom of the pot. We shared them all around, picking the bits of meat out of the shells with our fingers and dipping bread into the salty juice.
Joel built a fire on the beach and we sat around it long after dinner, sipping wine out of mugs and passing around a flask of whiskey. There were no stars and there wouldn’t be any for weeks. Then, you’d begin to be able to barely make them out with the corner of your eye. If you looked at them straight on, they’d disappear. We watched the sun sink in the north. A gold disc hung in the sky above the sun’s exit. It was after 11 P.M., but it was still light enough to read outside. A skiff moved by, breaking the sheet of water that had lain flat after dinner. Small breakers rolled into the beach and broke gently.
People trailed to their tents gradually. The fire faded and the light in the sky gave over a bit of its luster to dark. I brought my toothbrush down to the water’s edge where the tide was rising for the second time that day. Brushing my teeth outside had always been one of the joys of an outdoor life. I stepped into the edge of the bay as I brushed. Lights the size of mustard seeds flared up in the water around my boots. I splashed my feet gently, which made the phosphorescence alight like a meteor shower. The sea held stars, moons, and fiery rocks in its midst.
I listened to the sound of the sea card against the cobble beach. I loved that sound of the rocks rolling against each other, wearing each other down into their smooth, round forms. It was a sound, I thought, that could cure almost anything.
I lay down in my tent and listened as the evening chorus of birds simplified. Gradually, melodies were plucked out of the air. First the incessant kinglet broke, then the varied thrush stopped its whistle. I hadn’t heard the fox sparrow that had been assembling its complicated song down near the beach for a while. The nuthatch had long since quieted. It was like pulling the instruments out of an orchestra one by one. Finally, it was just a single hermit thrush off in the distance, with its melody sounding sometimes liquid, sometimes metallic, always complete.
EPILOGUE
This morning I woke up to a silent bay. Windlessness kept the water flat and well-behaved and the pink and blue sky didn’t budge. It is fall, and the alder leaves are closing in on themselves. Yards are being picked up, cars winterized. Singles are coupling up for the cold months. Each week, half an hour of light drains away. You can feel the earth’s tilt.
In the weeks during which I was finishing this book, the nation’s eye was on Alaska like never before. The questions swarmed: What is Alaska all about? Who are Alaskans, really? And what do they stand for?
The answers revealed a knot of contradictions. We represent the country’s oil-slicked future; we are anchored in a grimy but abbreviated past; we are the nation’s newborn northern heartland; we are exceptional in countless ways—flung far to the north, we are neighbors to foreign territories, and we are good shots and brave in the cold.
Many Alaskans were thrilled just to be put on the map. We weren’t that afterthought of a state floating out there in the Pacific, extending a finger to tickle Hawaii’s chin. We wanted to be just like everyone else and, at the same time, to be different, better, to be exceptional. We wanted it all.
People who are paying attention say that these desires—for money, oil, gold, and a life away from it all—are threatening Alaska as it has never been threatened before. Our hankerings make us restless—so we move often; our ambitions transform the land and sea. Today, Alaska is warming, melting, and shrinking.
But no natural system is static. The seasons change, the ocean cycles, the earth shakes from time to time, swinging the ceiling lamp like a pendulum over your head. What we don’t know is, how quickly will the land and sea outside our windows become unrecognizable? Which of the riches we’ve come to depend on here—a freezer full of fish, ample berries, nearly endless beds of mussels and clams, silence—will be the first to go?
To live in this place is, in part, to destroy it; that is the paradox—and the responsibility—we live with every day.
I imagine myself in the future, gray-haired, with the backs of my hands like old maps, telling newcomers the same kinds of stories that were told to me when I first moved here. But in my version, the species are different. “We used to head across the bay during minus tides and get as many mussels and clams as we wanted,” I might say. “On a lucky dipnetting day, you could catch all the salmon you needed for winter in a single tide.” I can’t keep that image out of my brain, but I don’t want to tell those stories like that. I don’t ever want to tell stories about what’s gone.
What is singular about Alaska is that here, we have opportunities that have been lost in most of the rest of the country and much of the world. We have rivers and streams that wind through their natural courses; we have salmon that run up those rivers in their mysterious ways. We have wolves and belugas, walrus and cranes. We have energetic tides, kinetic winds, and the heat of the earth bubbling up within sight. We have water, ice, snow.
Nearly ten years have passed since I moved up to Alaska in the fall just after the cranes left. Since then, I left the state for a time, returned, fell in love, and got married. This year, I missed the cranes’ departure—a loss that feels like having to return a library book before you’ve read the last chapter. But in the next couple of weeks, I hope to catch the swans as they fly by—this year’s cygnets as large as their parents but the color of grayed laundry. I watch for them through our living room windows.
A band of clouds is moving down the bay now, and by this afternoon, the tide will switch. I can already see a breeze beginning to rifle through the alders. Constant change is our stasis, the open sea our backyard.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted countless times over for help and support along my way. I want to first thank my parents, Michael and Susan Weiss. It’s because there’s always been such a wonderful place to come back to that I’ve been able to explore.
Thanks to my agent, Kris Dahl, for getting behind this book and to Gillian Blake for her excitement and smart editing.
; Thanks to my workshop compatriots at the creative writing program at Columbia University who gutted and filleted my work. Thanks to Richard Locke for his wise editing in the early phases of this project and for helping me see how all of the pieces fit together. I have learned much from other teachers along the way, including Darcy Frey, Lis Harris, Stephen O’Connor, Eva Saulitis, Michael Scammell, Leslie Sharpe, Mark Slouka, and Alan Ziegler.
Two friends I don’t ever want to do without—Jessica Stiles and Rose Newnham—provided well-balanced meals of love, feedback, hot mud, and bacchanalia that continue to nourish me.
I can’t adequately thank my professor and friend Patty O’Toole—a true Justice of the Peace, Our Lady of Nonfiction, for her cheerleading, friendship, and timely words of wisdom that are always beyond what I feel like I deserve. Sara Marcus has been my most important ally from the time this book began to take shape. A committed reader, she delivered pep talks just when I needed them, and without her big brain, this book would have suffered.
Thanks to Tracy Arensberg, who taught me to see birds, and to Starr Saphir, who hears all the warblers in Central Park. She helped me find the wilderness I needed.
Thanks to my colleagues at the Pratt Museum, a small museum with big ideas about the deep connections between people and place.
And I owe thanks to many people who shared their knowledge and experiences, including: Ed Berg, Joel Cooper, Holly Cusack-McVeigh, Tom Doolittle, Lois Epstein, Dave Erikson, Carmen Field, Steve Fishback, Jeff Fox, Steve Gibson, Brian Hirsch, Janet Klein, Ray Kranich, Sue Mauger, Ken Maynard, Thomas McDonough, Dennis McMillan, Ken Moore, Chris Oldham, Rob Rosenfeld, Mara Schwartz, Doug Schwiesow, Rick Sinnott, Larry Smith, Tom Smith, Michele Stenger, Charlie Trowbridge, Betsy Webb, and Steve Zimmerman. Errors are my own.
Deep thanks to the waters and landscapes that have inspired my writing and to the people who work hard to create and maintain beauty in the world around us, as well as birds, fish, predators, clean water, and wilderness. Some of the entities they work through are Cook Inletkeeper, Alaska Marine Conservation Council, Kachemak Heritage Land Trust, Kachemak Bay Conservation Society, and Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies.
Finally, thanks to my husband, Bob Shavelson, for his love, generosity, and potent backrubs. We’re at the beginning; I’m excited for more.
About the Author
Raised in Maryland, MIRANDA WEISS now lives in Homer, Alaska. She received her MFA from Columbia University.
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Credits
Jacket design by Amanda Kain
Jacket photograph © Scott Dickerson
Copyright
TIDE, FEATHER, SNOW. Copyright © 2009 by Miranda Weiss. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition April 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-186964-8
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