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By Root 253 0

our landlord demanded ten months’ rent up front. But people took us in nonetheless. We were invited to countless potluck dinners and to birthday parties of strangers. We befriended the lesbian couple who lived just down the beach. Their ten-year-old daughter, a girl with olive skin and alarmingly green eyes, would wander over for visits unannounced. She had grown up playing on the beach, and a massive fort of driftwood—in a continuous state of being dismantled and rebuilt—stood in front of their house. Like many local houses, theirs was surrounded by a clutter of outbuildings: an old homesteader’s cabin with walls papered with magazines from the 1950s; sheds slanting toward the ground; a large workshop which held lumber, empty canning jars, and out-of-season tires; and a lean-to for firewood. They often had a horse clipping the grass behind their place. He kept the scrabble of wild-growing raspberries at bay.

One evening, Kat, the mother of one of John’s students, took us out in her skiff. It was my first time on the bay, and it had been years since I’d been in a powerboat. As I leaned awkwardly against the gunwale, Kat stood solidly at the tiller with her long blond hair flowing behind her. We flew over the water toward a cluster of islands off the south shore as the evening sun slanted across the bay. We slowed at the edge of a small island topped with spruce. “Radiolarian chert!” Kat shouted over the sound of the outboard as she pointed to cliffs where red rock layers somersaulted over each other. Beneath us, the Earth’s crust dove, bent, and pushed its way back up. This twisted rock was the seafloor rising again. When Kat spotted a cloudy puff above the surface of the bay off in the distance, she opened up the throttle and we sped toward it. She cut the engine as two humpback whales surfaced next to the boat. They were so close we could hear the sounds of their damp exhalations, and I could imagine the wet rubber feel of their skin.

SMALL-TOWN LIFE STARTLED me. I had never known a life where you ran into acquaintances in line at the post office or while buying groceries. I had to keep my mind from drifting off because invariably I’d need to remember someone’s name and make small talk. I wasn’t used to buying coffee from friends or getting my car fixed by a neighbor.

The radio was the center of communication in town. The public station brought in news from the outside world in those soothing voices from four time zones away that many of us had come to know long before we came to Alaska. The radio announced important news around town too: lost dogs, missing cats, horses loose on the road. It announced events: bluegrass concerts, public meetings, and funerals. Rides were offered and requested to and from Anchorage, a 220-mile drive north up the highway (“will share the usuals”). And the radio was the way that people who lived in the Bush—off the road system, in remote places without telephone lines—sent and received messages. These bushlines were broadcast twice daily: “For Donny in Blue Fox Bay, Happy Birthday! We can’t wait to see you in June. Love from Rachel and Tim.” “For the Jenkins in Spruce Cove, your order’s in at the Wagon Wheel Nursery. Ready for pickup.”

John approached our new terrain as a naturalist. Gaining an understanding of this landscape seemed the best way to settle into it, so I followed suit. And as fall progressed, I began to see how much I’d have to learn. The names of things were critical: birds, mountain peaks, valleys, and streams. The timing of seasonal events was important too. To feel at home, I would have to sense the arrival and departure of cranes, the blooming of native plants, the fluctuations in fish. I began to learn how to look at the place. For identifying unknown birds, size and even particular coloration didn’t matter much, as both could fool you over distance. Instead, I had to pay attention to where I saw them and what they were doing. To understand the geography, I needed to see how the drainages of creeks bled into rivers and where the rivers spilled into the sea. For the