Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [13]
In this close world, I made friends easily. A short, muscular blond guy about my age who had claimed a reclining deck chair near mine confided in me that his handgun was stashed in his truck (which was belowdecks) and that he would never be so stupid as to travel without one. I met a high school teacher from Los Angeles who had decided one day to escape his life and head north. Another man had left behind a girlfriend and young baby in hopes of finding work. He said that he would send for them. I met a nurse moving alone to a remote Native village, and a man from Long Island who had just been hired to be the director of a prestigious science center in Alaska. His girlfriend had come along for the trip, but wasn’t going to stay. I couldn’t help wondering whether one of them would change their mind.
We traded cameras and took pictures of each other at the bow with the coastline spread grandly behind us. We gathered at the gunwales when someone spotted a pair of whales. We swapped magazines and books. We were all in suspension—awaiting a new job, a remade life, an adventure, newfound solitude. There was no other choice but to take people as they were, which meant without an identity tied to job or geography, and with little baggage. We were in it together, bearing the two-story-high swells, the smell of vomit, the limitations of comfort. We became tribes, banding and disbanding easily—over dinner or a Scrabble board, at the deck rails, with a pack of cards. We were in the midst of in-betweenness, neither in our old life nor in the new, standing on our own clean slates. Off the stern, the sea flattened the ship’s wake and erased our tracks.
Soon after the cargo door was repaired and we were again on our way, the ship slipped into Prince William Sound between glassy waters and a low ceiling of clouds. I parked myself at the deck rails and watched black and white Dall’s porpoises play in the bow’s wake. They dashed in and out of the emerald water that raced against the hull. Dark mountains rose like sleeping giants at the water’s edge and two long islands—Hinchinbrook and Montague—closed behind us. In front of us, the sea was pulled taut. Wooded islands foregrounded the mainland darkly. Waterfalls flung thick, white cords down black slopes, and everywhere the undulations of the coastline produced an endless string of bays, inlets, and coves.
Ten years had passed since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which had leaked at least eleven million gallons of crude oil into the Sound. Tides had washed the crude out of the protected Sound and swept it westward, greasing 1,300 miles of coastline—enough to blacken the beaches from Boston to Cape Hatteras. I was fourteen years old at the time, and the news stories of the spill had left indelible images in my head of birds blackened with oil, workers in rubber suits and masks trying to rinse beaches with heavy hoses, and one dead sea otter after another. But now, viewed from the ferry, the region looked pristine. I didn’t know that you could dig into nearby beaches and still find oil blackening the sand. Nor that the spill had spelled both bust and boom for many Alaskans.
We stopped at Cordova, a fishing town of about 2,500 people, squeezed between mountains and the Sound. Low wet clouds had settled comfortably in town, and from the bow I couldn’t see past the docks where locals lingered in rubber boots. After a few passengers and a truck or two left the ship, we were off once again.
Eleven hours later, the ship muscled into a narrow bay under a fat moon that spilled a path across the black sea like a film of milk. At the head of the bay sat the town of Seward, a community of about four thousand people who lived mainly off of fish and tourists. In the moonlight, I could see buildings cluttering a narrow shelf of land between steep slopes and the sea. My eyes scanned