Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [14]
I smiled back and waved. “Awww,” said the nurse who stood next to me at the rail. There was the man who was the convergence of the life I had left behind and the new one I would create. I felt a split second of disappointment. The end of anticipation is always a letdown; the beginning is already over. Those floating moments on the ferry were done, but I knew John would have another adventure planned, and then another. I threw my backpack on my back, picked up a bag with each hand, and walked through the gate.
3
LANDING
SHOAL: n. An offshore hazard to navigation on which there is a depth of 16 fathoms or less, composed of unconsolidated material.
I arrived in Alaska just after the sandhill cranes left. These tall, dun-colored birds with red crowns fly north from California every spring to nest on grassy fields and tundra all over the state. Everyone knew as soon as they were gone. I didn’t yet know that they took summer with them and left a particular silence that I wouldn’t recognize for another year.
Homer, the fishing town and vacation spot where we’d moved, is in Southcentral Alaska, on the coast of the forty-mile-long Kachemak Bay. Across the bay, the Kenai Mountains rose four thousand feet out of the sea. I arrived in October. The peaks had just gotten a new sifting of snow.
During those first days, as I hadn’t yet found work, when John left in the morning for his job teaching at the small elementary school, I put on rubber boots and climbed down the edge of the bluff with the help of a rope that the owners of the house we’d rented had tied to a tree and thrown over the slope. I walked up the beach to where the scattering of houses at the top of the bluff thinned to none and there was no one around.
Alone in new terrain, I did little else than explore the beach. The name Kachemak likely meant “high-water cliff” in one of the region’s Native languages, and the bluffs themselves were the layered remnants of rivers. I examined seeps that leaked out of the bottom of the bluff and layers of coal that angled across the bluff’s sandstone face. It was believed that the seams of coal occasionally caught fire, perhaps by spontaneous combustion. The smoldering coal would bake the shale around it. At the bottom of the bluff, I stopped at a spot where gray stones held fossilized impressions of vanished plants. If I looked closely, I could find images of leaves and branches on some of their surfaces.
Every morning, the beach donned a new garb. Twice daily, low tides pulled the bay out of its basin. The silty water withdrew from shore and left a half mile of mudflats exposed in front of the house. On a flood tide, the water spilled across the flats quickly, until it lapped nearly at the foot of the bluff. Some days, the tidal wrack was a skein of eelgrass; on others it was a braid of yellowed reeds and empty mussel shells. Sometimes spruce chips spilled from barges loading up for Japan, and this flotsam edged the shore. At high tides sea otters floated close to shore, and when the bay flushed out, harbor seals hauled out on a glacial erratic dropped long ago by melting ice. At the month’s highest tides, the bay gnawed the bluff and carried chunks of it away.
The tides brought a new timepiece into our lives. Governed mainly by the gravitational tug of the moon on the Earth’s seas, the tides lagged behind about an hour each day because the moon lagged too as it circled the Earth over the course of about a month. And so much else was new: moose tracks on the sand at the top of the beach, the varied shapes of tankers that pressed into the bay, an undeveloped shore. I had expected country that was dark with trees, where the canopies knitted together over the roads. But Homer sat on a relatively flat grassy belt of land with only scattered stands of spruce. The highway came down from the north and dead-ended in Homer, which