Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [11]
Just as the maps went blank north of California before Alaska’s coast had been traced, my mental map petered out once I crossed the edge of the state. I’d seen pictures of its coastline, glaciers, and big mountains. But my image of this immense state was as incomplete as an unfinished dot-to-dot. I couldn’t know how it fit together—how expanses of tundra gathered like fabric around the foothills of mountains, how rivers cast off old oxbows and curves, how spruce forests scattered into treelessness, how glaciers receded, leaving giant mounds of old mountain parts aflame with stands of cottonwood and birch.
“I have lived in Alaska for a couple of years,” I wrote at the end of my fabricated visit. “I really like it here. Most of my friends are Eskimos and I have learned to speak Aleut. I am going to school here and I am not sure what will lie ahead of me in the secret and mystical land of Alaska.” I wonder whether anyone else in my class took their report as personally.
Two days after leaving Bellingham, Washington, the ship slipped into a narrow, liquid crease between velvety green hills. We were approaching Ketchikan, the first Alaskan port, where I would get off the ferry to switch ships for my final destination of Seward, another three days away. We were at the southern tip of the Alaska Panhandle, the strip of coastland and islands that stretches five hundred miles southeast from the state’s mainland. Southeast Alaska, flush with the kind of temperate rainforest I had become familiar with in Oregon, is dotted with communities accessible only by air or by sea. Low, wet clouds parted the day we arrived in Ketchikan. At the edge of the water, a clutter of tourist shops, wood houses on pilings, and defunct logging mills glistened under the sun. Thirteen feet of rain that washed in each year had scrubbed everything in this small town clean.
But Ketchikan was filthy with salmon. Pink salmon were running up the creek in the middle of town so thick the whole place reeked. At the mouth, fish stirred the surface of the water into a fierce froth. Two local men stood on the bridge which spanned the creek near its mouth as their children dropped fishing lines over the edge. The men joked about how bad the town would smell in a couple of weeks.
After checking in to a small hotel, I clambered down to the creek. Female salmon shimmied their tails over the creek bed to dig depressions called redds where they would lay eggs. Males surged upstream, vying for the chance to fertilize. Stepping from stone to stone, I saw fish in every stage of dying and decay. For miles upstream, the bodies littered eddies, rotted in rock crevices, and lay splayed and decomposing along the banks. All around me, gulls attacked the rancid flesh.
Later, I hiked up a squat mountain on the back side of town that was flush with rainforest. The spruce and hemlock trees, which I had become familiar with in Oregon, were wide and tall. Ferns leaned over the trail, and moss fleeced the trunks of trees and every surface otherwise left bare. Below me, sunlight silvered the sea between green islands. And inland, these dense woods, striped here and there by timber harvests, stretched to the horizon. For two days, enormous cruise ships, like supine skyscrapers, pulled in and out of port. They poured out passengers who swamped the local shops for a few hours and then sucked them back in and took off.
Ketchikan looked just like the town I’d imagined was my final destination, and the doubts I’d been having about my move were replaced by the near-electric feeling