Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [22]
In the spring, winter’s carbonated sky went flat as the darkness leaked out of the night, making stars lose their luster. The sun crept out of the southern sky, arcing widely toward the north. We had been gaining five minutes of light each day and by late May, there were sixteen hours of daylight. There was a mania to this time; the days were getting so long that it seemed we had two days inside each one. After John and I came home from work, the sun shone for hours and we wanted only to be outdoors. Nights never fully darkened and sleeping felt irrelevant. That spring, as red tulips we hadn’t planted petticoated the house, ferns pushed their curled fiddleheads through last year’s dead growth. We picked them and panfried them in butter. Horsetails shot up in diminutive forests along the roadsides. Fields of chocolate lilies bloomed in cocoa-colored flowers, which drooped earthward and smelled of rot.
By this point, I had learned that there were two ways you could live here: the particular way of life this place afforded or the way you could live anywhere else. Even twenty miles out of town, some people lived with wall-to-wall carpeting, satellite dishes, and office jobs. For John and me, it seemed important to live in the unique way we could here. So we experimented with self-sufficiency. In the fall, we had made jars of rosehip butter, a sweet paste the color of rust, from the fruit on bushes that grew around the house. I couldn’t decide if I liked it, but I ate it anyway, spread onto whole wheat toast sliced from loaves I’d baked myself. This meal was sturdy and practical; at least, I thought, the vitamin C-laden hips would ward off scurvy. In the spring, we made a dark green concoction like pesto from the young shoots of stinging nettle that multiplied in a wet spot in the yard. We canned jars of clam chowder using clams we dug from the mudflats in front of our house, and we ate whatever wild thing we could: urchin roe, mussels that washed onto the beach in clumps, fireweed shoots, wild mushrooms. We planned a garden and started seeds next to the window.
For a week in May, sandpipers arrived by the tens of thousands; the bay was their stopover point to their nesting grounds in the north. Gulls and terns took over the taiga near the airport. This hummocky area of stunted spruce provided ample nest sites. Red-necked grebes built floating nests on the floatplane lake and put up with the engine noise. The cranes returned in a dramatic V, and for a day or so, this was all everyone talked about. A flock of feral pigeons loitered at the harbor looking urban and out of place. Salmon threw themselves up local streams. The spectacle of summer, I realized, had begun.
At this time of year, the chorus of birds was continuous. Although robins are known as morning birds, here they sang until well after midnight, and didn’t get up at dawn. John identified the melodies that began hours before we woke: the three-note calls of golden-crowned sparrows, the delicate fluting of hermit thrush, the incessant solos of kinglets. In the evenings, orange-flecked varied thrush sounded their referee whistle calls from the tops of spruce, and snipe, stocky birds with long bills, showed off in the sky: They circled and dove and let out a ghostly, ascending sound created by air rushing through their tail feathers. As John and I tended our garden starts, nothing seemed more important than growing food and learning the birds who made those calls.
4
PEOPLE’S LIVES
TENDER: n. A vessel attendant on other vessels, especially one that ferries supplies between ship and shore.
Tom Watkins’s cabin sat so far over the edge of the bluff it looked like it could tumble down to the beach any day. It was a tiny structure—fifteen by fifteen at best, with a low loft up steep, ladderlike stairs. A few skinny alders seemed to be the only things that kept his bit of flat earth cut out of the edge of the bluff from sliding into