The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [5]
Bulletins. Warnings. Advisories. The Weather Bureau was once a division of the Army Signal Corps and speaks the language of alarm. Famous for its mercilessly swift transfers, for personnel orders effective within forty-eight hours, the bureau gave Bigelow just that long to book his passage and pack what he owned—no time to worry about where he was going until he was standing on the deck of the Siren as it left Seattle, his sudden apprehension almost something he could see, a lead-blue haze hanging over him, burnt off in spots by the hilarity of other passengers, fortune seekers from San Francisco and Portland and even New York, Chinese packed into steerage like consignments of firecrackers, a flock of Tanaina women returning from a year’s employment in Vancouver.
Not exactly seasick, Bigelow stood on the Siren’s quarterdeck, looking backward at the wake, trying to imagine what he’d hurriedly read about Cook Inlet: one of the greatest tidal differentials in the world, chunks of ice as big as houses, as big as courthouses, ebbing and flowing as much as sixty miles in half a day. All the epic white buildings he’d seen: St. Louis’s Festival Hall and her Palace of Horticulture. Chicago’s Art Institute. Supreme courts and municipal courts. Legislatures. Opera houses. Departments of Commerce and Agriculture. The Weather Bureau and even the White House itself, dome cracking and colonnade collapsing. Having lost sight of land, Bigelow saw all of civilization’s big white edifices turning and jumbling on great curling spits of freezing foam.
The fantasy of a city boy, he shrugged it off and went below deck, sat on his narrow bunk, and stared at the wall. For another eight dollars he could have had a porthole, he could have had the sky.
Except that it isn’t a fantasy; it turns out to be true. In October, ice appears. With his binoculars, Bigelow watches the last ships of the season stalk and catch great slabs of it, haul them up in nets, pack them in sawdust, and return south to San Francisco’s restaurants and butchers, to the ice cream parlors on Clay Street.
And in October, Bigelow receives an unofficial letter from a friend in the bureau, who warns that the department’s new budget hasn’t been approved, with salaries for Bigelow’s rank stuck at the impossible $1,100 per year. How is he faring in Anchorage? the friend inquires. Does a town so new have a pool hall or a dance pavilion or moving-picture shows? Is there any opportunity for social gathering, female company?
Bigelow crumples the letter and shoves it into his pocket. $21.16 per week is not nearly enough. At least, it won’t be in December, when he has to spend that much on light and heat alone. He chews his lower lip, thinking. All right then, he’ll find extra work. He will when he needs to.
It may be that his pay is insufficient, but Bigelow has discovered something. In Alaska he is his own boss. For the first time in his life, he can order his days as he sees fit. He can build what he’s seen in those minutes before he falls asleep, drawn on the red insides of his eyelids. Equations that he knows by heart, sketches he’s copied onto scraps and into margins, analyses of friction impacted by velocity and altitude: a kite, a two-celled box kite that will soar above his station on the creek, whole miles higher than any kite has ever flown before. A way to understand not just the air, but the heavens.
Bigelow digs out his friend’s letter, smoothes it