Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [17]
Yet the landscape itself was relatively simple. The number of native species in a place declines as you head toward the poles because the seasons for growth and reproduction shorten. There were only four kinds of trees: spruce, alder, cottonwood, and birch. Only a few species of birds stuck around through fall and winter, including magpies, chickadees, rock sandpipers, and eagles. And you could count the number of common mammals on one hand.
But there was still so much to see. During walks on the beach, I trained binoculars on rafts of ducks on the bay and tried to see if I could distinguish, at a distance, between ravens and crows. I admired the palette on the beach—the red-orange clay, the blue-black coal, the milk white quartz veins in gray stones, the cobalt of a castaway feather from a Steller’s jay, and the pine green of algae that washed ashore. With the deciduous trees undressed by fall, I could observe the particular treeness of the trees. The birches, now bare, revealed their wiry branches. Cottonwoods had rough, corky bark, and their uncloaked boughs terminated at tiny stumps. Spruce were steadfast, unchanged by the seasons except to offer pale new shoots at the ends of their limbs in the spring. Now leafless, alders reached out of the ground like grasping arms.
A walk around the boat harbor was an education in itself. White anemones blossomed on the undersides of floats. The pilings provided a lesson in striation: Kelp, mussels, barnacles, then thin green algae grew from below the waterline to where the wooden posts were simply damp. The seesawing ramp from the parking lot down to the harbor floats taught me about the tide: During extreme tides each month—at the new and full moons—the ramp would alternate over the course of the day between being very steep and nearly flat. I studied the docked boats. Like a naturalist, I wanted to know the right name for each kind of boat and how to identify them all. Knowing these things felt necessary to belonging here and also to surviving. I had heard stories: This was a place where a novice’s mistake could kill you.
The fall’s first snows on the peaks across the bay brought out the cracks and wrinkles in the rock. Rain at the lower elevations toppled the grasses and wild-flower stalks left standing at the end of summer. Sunlight lengthened until its angles were sly, and each day had five minutes less light than the last. At this latitude, there were still six hours of light to lose over the next three months as the northern hemisphere leaned away from the sun. The radio announced sunrise and sunset, the minutes and seconds of light lost from the day before, and the time of the next high tide. This is how we began to keep track of our lives.
AS THE DARK sky cinched down around town that first winter, my new world shrank. It was dark when I left the house in the morning to teach and dark when I returned. By dinnertime, the view from our place vanished and the windows turned to mirrors, reminding me that I had moved here knowing only John and that it would be a long, dark winter. The house clamped around us against the cold and we turned on all of the lamps. They feebly threw small patches of light out the windows and into the dark yard.
But after the first snowfall, light rose up from the ground. And snow made the endless roll of hills newly navigable. We put studded tires on the car and headed to the hills with skis in the back. Sometimes we skied to a vacant homestead cabin—a new green metal roof had been nailed on, but nothing else was square. Inside, the log walls—once chinked, no doubt, with moss—had been more recently filled with yellow spray-foam insulation. A barrel stove stood firmly on the floor and a pair of wooden skis had been tacked to the wall. The cabin hadn’t been heated for years and it smelled dank. We had heard about a couple who had lived there long before. They had fished and saved money while squatting in