Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [2]
Like any seaside town, the community was continuously fortifying itself against the very thing everyone had moved here for. Years before, a sandy spit that stuck four and a half miles into the bay and marked the remains of a glacial moraine had been deemed reliable, and before long a boat harbor, hotel, souvenir shops, and fish packing plants crowded its tip. But the powerful 1964 earthquake dropped the Spit six feet into the sea, so the Army Corps of Engineers reinforced it with wood, steel, and rock. They came back again and again, each time bolstering up the sandy handle, though at high tides during storms, waves still washed over the road that ran the length of it. And to keep the sea from claiming real estate within city limits, the town built a seawall to anchor the eroding bluff. But during the first winter, waves harassed the seawall so fiercely it gave way.
The word “Alaska” was likely taken from the Alutiiq word Alaxsxaq, which refers to the thing the sea throws itself against. And, more than any other state, Alaska is defined by water. In Southeast Alaska, days and days of rain souse temperate rainforest, where spruce can grow to two hundred feet tall and as wide as cars at their bases. Southcentral Alaska, which was carved and recarved by icy glacial waves, is dominated by rushing salmon streams. Each summer, fishermen spill out of RVs in chest waders and line the edges of the region’s waterways like human riprap. Much of western Alaska is low-lying river delta that gets flushed by the sea. Extreme spring tides bring the Bering Sea dozens of miles inland, so you can be standing calf-deep on tundra with no land in sight 360 degrees around you and the sea creeping ominously up your boots. The topography of the Arctic is dictated by the habits of frozen water. A waterproof layer of permafrost below its surface traps rain and snowmelt so that the landscape is freckled with lakes, in some places creating terrain more aquatic than terrestrial. And each winter, ice drives wedges into the tundra that split the ground into polygons so regular it could be the surface of a soccer ball stretched flat. Even the interior of the state, hundreds of miles from the coast, is at the whims of giant rivers, namely the Yukon and Kuskokwim. Around the hem of the state, the sea has laced a coastline so frilled it would wrap nearly twice around the waist of the earth if unraveled. And the sea surrounds Alaska’s thousands of islands and claims them as its own. Here, the sea and its rivers serve as highways, supermarkets, landing strips, sewers, mail routes, and navigational markers. Water includes and excludes, carves the land, and ferries it away.
As if that weren’t enough, fish carry the ocean into the very middle of the state: Each year, millions of salmon swim more than a thousand miles up the Yukon, and countless more make their way up smaller rivers and streams all over the Alaskan coast. They work their way against whitewater and fling themselves up waterfalls. So singular is their purpose that they don’t eat during this time and instead digest their fat reserves while alive. The fish turn rainbow colors and white fungus spreads along their skin. The males sprout grotesque humps and their jaws contort fiercely in their fight to fertilize a female’s eggs, which she lays on the gravel bottom of a stream or lake. When this work is done, they slowly die. Creeks become scenes of death and decay, strewn with stinking fish carcasses. First, gulls come to peck out the eyeballs. Then bears creep in to scavenge. And everything else arrives too: flies, beetles, eagles. Years later, when those bodies have been replaced by countless others and that sea-fed flesh has long since soaked into the ground, pieces of those fish appear as chemical signatures in the leaves of Alaska’s trees. Here, the sea surges far inland to feed the terrestrial world.
MINE WAS A landlocked childhood. In the Maryland suburbs where I grew up, there was no evidence of the sea anywhere. The earth was clay, not sand. Heavy, gray-trunked