Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [10]
When we weren’t teaching school groups, John was teaching me. When we went for walks, he pointed out which skinny trees with the narrow leaves were Indian plum, one of the earliest to flower in spring. At night, we lay in my single bed in a trailer parked just out of reach of the surf, listening to the coastal downpours against the metal roof. We felt everything was conspiring in our love: the indulgently blooming azaleas, the gracefully sculpted offshore rocks, the way the sun dangled rainbows from the sky.
John had spent a few summers studying birds in Alaska, and when he told me he was ready to go back there, this time to stay, my eyes widened. “Yes,” I said. His desire to go to Alaska was an urgent craving; mine had been a long, slow ache. So we decided on a town at the edge of a bay that filled with birds each spring, where John had been offered a job teaching at a small elementary school. He drove up the highway to Alaska that summer in a packed Volvo station wagon. I stayed behind to finish my job and counted on him to meet me at the ferry dock two months later.
AS THE M/V Columbia squeezed through close passages, I could easily spot the brilliant white heads of bald eagles sitting sentry in spruce trees along the shore. Gray gull-like birds dipped into the sea off the bow. I puzzled over my bird guide, trying to identify them. Were they northern fulmars? Flesh-footed shearwaters? Mew gulls? John would have known.
For years I had wanted to go to Alaska and yet, as I stood at the deck rail, I forgot how I had made the decision to move. I felt as though I were carrying out a plan made long ago, perhaps by someone else. I realized that once the split second had passed in which I’d made the decision to go, the rest of my life had aligned politely behind it. By the time I’d boarded the ferry, I was miles beyond turning back.
Inside the ship, I studied maps on the walls, posters about Alaskan towns, pictures of Alaskan birds. I realized how little I actually knew about the state. While low clouds wrapped themselves around the ship’s windows, I imagined Homer, the town where I was going to live. I pictured a place dark with spruce, a coast of black rocks beaded with white barnacles, and scattered wooden houses that were neatly trimmed. I imagined that John and I might rent a cabin somewhere in the woods. We might live without running water, as we had heard was common among people living a little ways out of town. While in Oregon, I had subscribed to one of the community’s two local weekly newspapers and in the evenings, I sat at the dinner table reading the police blotter aloud:
AUGUST 9: A city worker at 9:42 A.M. reported graffiti painted on city property.
AUGUST 10: A man at 7:56 P.M. reported a black bear in the backyard of his Birch Way house.
AUGUST 12: A woman at 10:52 P.M. reported an extremely drunk man lying in the middle of Jackson Street. Police arranged for the man to go home in a taxi.
AUGUST 13: A woman at 2:49 P.M. reported a missing purse.
I assumed the matter-of-fact, Dick-and-Jane language of these compressed stories captured the town’s worst ills; it seemed quaint.
When I stood at the deck rails, I remembered how I’d stood there in my mind years before. Part of the assignment for my fifth grade report required that I imagine and write about a visit to my chosen state. Worried that I might not have enough material, I started the voyage at my Maryland home at the beginning of a tedious, six-day drive across