Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [15]
From any location in town, the compass directions are simple. North points toward the only way to get anyplace else: along the highway to Anchorage. To the south are the bay and the mountains across it. East means the rising sun and East End Road, which runs along the edge of the bay nearly to its head. And to the west spreads Cook Inlet, named after Captain James Cook, the British navigator who sent his ships up this long inlet in search of the fabled Northwest Passage.
Around us, the state sketched roughly the shape of an elephant’s head. The Alaska Peninsula extends to the west like a long ivory tusk reaching toward Russia. The panhandle of Southeast Alaska traces the elephant’s neck. The vast Interior is the animal’s broad face, and Southcentral Alaska is dominated by Cook Inlet, the elephant’s maw, which takes a two-hundred-mile-deep bite into the coast. At the back of the mouth sits Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city and home to nearly half the state’s population. East of the Inlet, Homer sits at the tip of the animal’s lower lip, and the Spit sticks out into the bay like a long, errant whisker.
We were at latitude 59, a line that, going east, traverses Canada farther north than any of the well-known cities; cuts through Hudson Bay; nips the southern tip of Greenland; flies over mainland Scotland’s head; jogs among Oslo, Stockholm, and St. Petersburg; and bisects Siberia into two long, narrow strips. We were 450 miles south of the Arctic Circle, the latitude at which the sun doesn’t set on summer solstice and doesn’t rise on winter solstice.
From our kitchen table, we looked out wide windows across the bay. I wasn’t used to having a mountain view while I did dishes, and I wasn’t used to being surrounded by wilderness. At night, a few lights blinked from the other side of the bay. Behind town, uninterrupted hills stretched to the horizon. In front of us, the bay opened to the Inlet and the Inlet opened to the wide open sea.
The town had a year-round population of about five thousand that doubled in the summer. People were employed in fishing and tourism jobs, but the bulk of year-round work was supplied by a hospital, a mental health center, and the public school system. It was just a matter of days before I got a job teaching at a small private school where the students’ ages ranged from six to sixteen. The town’s mix of politically conservative Christians, hippies, ex-hippies, dislocated intellectuals, and the down-and-out created a demand for a number of small, low-budget private schools. When I arrived, in October, the school year was already a month under way, and I was hired on the spot. Over the coming months, I’d see how children around town grew up with or without running water, spending summers in town or out at remote fish camps, with parents who worked nine-to-fives or cobbled together whatever they could. It was no big deal to have an outhouse or take showers at the Laundromat.
The school where I taught was in town, not far from the beach. Up the road, the community’s two main drags had a few banks, a post office, a living room–sized library, two hardware stores, a dozen churches (including Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness, and Salvation Army), a few coffee joints and twice as many bars, and a handful of other shops selling new and used trinkets and necessities. I taught whatever subjects were needed for whatever students showed up: Science to sixth graders; math to tenth graders; music to all ages. During recess, I walked the students down to the beach, where they huddled in clumps behind a plywood windbreak, played kickball on a patch of grass, or threw stones into the waves.
JOHN AND I were two of the many people who ranged into town and lingered to make a first pass at enduring the long winter. No one thought we’d stay;