Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [1]
New to the town of Homer and eager to fit in and stake out our own territory, we quickly realized that Kachemak Bay, on which we now lived, was already a crowded place. Even with its convoluted coastline and dozen islands, every bit of nature’s real estate had been claimed. All five species of Pacific salmon populated the bay, fattening off its rich waters and swarming local streams. Humpbacks, orcas, and fin whales regularly plowed the water, sending the sound of their exhalations over the surface of the bay. Forests of ribbonlike kelp grew thickly from the seafloor, feeding urchin and harboring sea otters, who napped while wrapped in the green fronds. Long strands of kelp washed ashore and quickly became whips and jump ropes for children playing on the beach, or were sliced and pickled in jars. When the bay withdrew at low tide in the spring, shorebirds up from California and Mexico on their way to nesting grounds farther north crammed the flats, needling their bills into the mud for pink, thumbnail-sized macoma clams. Above, marsh hawks patrolled for the stragglers and the weak. Hundreds of snow geese owned the head of the bay each spring, and the rocky shore on the south side of the bay, which was dimpled and nicked endlessly, was as populated and compartmentalized as the oldest city block. Sea lions claimed Sixty Foot Rock as their haul-out spot and occasionally lorded over the harbor, eyeing passersby with dogs. In summer, a clump of nearly naked rocks became a boisterous colony of nesting gulls, kittiwakes, puffins, murres, and cormorants. The chatter clattered loudly above the sound of the surf, and the ammonia smell of guano could burn your nose from more than a quarter mile away.
The town we had moved to called itself the “halibut fishing capital of the world,” and all summer long, charter boats ferried tourists to the mouth of the bay so they could drop lines to the bottom of the sea in search of these flat bottom fish. From time to time, a hook brought up a monstrously large halibut, which might bring its captor the annual derby loot, a prize large enough to buy a new luxury car unfit for local roads. These barn-door halibut are taller than a man, weigh more than three hundred pounds, and have to be shot dead before they are hauled onboard lest the flex of their tails swipe someone off the deck.
The commercial fishing fleet streamed out of the harbor starting in the spring. Seiners nosed into narrow fjords on the south side of the bay when salmon ran thick and followed fish up the inlet to net the oily-fleshed red salmon that pulsed by the millions into glacial rivers that emptied there. Crabbing boats docked until fall, when their harvesting frenzy would begin in the icy Bering Sea. Long-liners, gillnetters, and tenders brought fish-filled hulls back to the harbor to be unloaded by cranes. A long pipe that pumped waste from fish processing and packing plants back into the bay attracted a storm of gulls at its mouth. The commercial vessels, which docked closest to the entrance of the harbor, were being pushed aside by an expanding army of charter boats and water taxis, pleasure skiffs, and private yachts.
THE CENTER OF town squatted between the end of the highway and the beginning of the shore, and I quickly realized the sea was the backdrop for everything that happened here—a witness to weddings and deaths, to visiting dignitaries as well as to small, daily indignities. It hosted a beach barbecue for a visiting Kennedy and embraced a truck, stolen from a gay high school teacher, that had been charred and abandoned at the edge of the surf. Every house in town faced the bay or wished it did. And in places where there were no views of the sea, they had been painted on earnestly in colorful murals—inside the bank, on the side of the middle school, on a concrete wall next to the Christian bookstore, on the exterior of a