Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [21]
The circular house sat on a snow-covered field that sloped down into a creek drainage. The place was surrounded by untrammeled, unbroken snow. Cynthia and the kids had built a wall of snow next to their house and illuminated it with candles. And they had pushed their boots through the snow in the yard, drawing swirling patterns in its surface. For these artists, snow was a canvas, the night sky a backdrop, and light was paint. At midnight, Taro struck a metal oil drum he’d hung from spruce posts as a gong, and the sound pulsed through the dry air into the valley below us. This, I thought, was an exquisitely beautiful life.
New Year’s ushered in the bulk of winter. The lip of the bay iced and cracked. Hoarfrost crept down the beach. Plows drove through town, pushing snow into chest-high ridges in the middle of the road. Later, after the roads had been cleared enough that cars could pass, a huge truck came to vacuum up the snow. A vacant lot on the edge of town became a mountain of dirty, discarded snow that would last long into spring. On cold mornings, with temperatures in the teens or below, John would go out in the dark to the sloping garage next to the house and plug in the car’s engine block heater. After tea and breakfast, the car would be warmed up enough so that it didn’t cough so darkly when it started.
It snowed for months, and the flakes endlessly erased themselves on the liquid surface of the bay. In February, avalanches up the highway closed the road to Anchorage for a week. This was the only road to anywhere, and cargo came into town by truck. Milk disappeared from grocery stores, then bread. Finally, a plane came to restock the store shelves. For days, people were stranded in town, in Anchorage, and at all points in between.
As the months went by, I learned signs. A snow sky was obvious: It was heavy and silent, a down comforter quietly shaking out its feathers. Dry days were colder, I learned. And on the coldest days, snow didn’t even bother to fall. I learned that Jupiter and Saturn traveled across the night sky paired. I could train a scope on Jupiter, the brighter point, and see four of its moons. I thought about Galileo, who had watched them four hundred years before. Windy days, I found, were the crows’ favorites. This was when they played. They hovered and danced, collected and dispersed. I learned how winter was measured: by whether the floatplane lake in town froze solid enough for stock car racing; by how many days of good, clean ice there were on the lake behind the airport for skating; by how often the power went out and for how long; by the number of feet of snow that accumulated in the hills.
In late winter, as patches of tired grass began to show through the snow, moose roved into our yard. A yearling decided he liked a spot next to the house where two exterior walls sheltered a triangle of grass. After spending the night there, the animal left behind a scattering of long white guard hairs on the flattened grass. Owls visited the yard too. A great gray owl perched at the top of a cottonwood, and magpies flew in to harass it. We watched the neighbors’ cat steal up a birch tree toward a perched bald eagle. As the cat got closer, the bird eyed it indifferently. The standoff ended when the eagle upped and flew away. Coyotes slinked