Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [30]
As the year passed, people moved in and out of town like a slow tide. In May, king salmon flushed into nearby streams and RVs followed nearly as thick. They parked in view spots, huddled close together as if for warmth. As the weather warmed, it became nearly impossible to make a left turn onto the main thoroughfare through town. You stopped at the blinking red light but never could go. The lines at the supermarket got longer, with retiree couples arriving in matching windbreakers. They looked clean, and if you hadn’t been washing much yourself, they smelled clean too. Fishermen in rubber boots who were stocking up for another hitch on the water brought full carts to the cashiers loaded with the necessities: soda, chips, preformed hamburger patties, and buns.
The hotels filled up, floatplanes moved in swarms, and even the occasional private jet touched down at the airport. The bed and breakfast fad had hit Homer. Sometimes it seemed as though half the town ran a little side business in an extra bedroom. There was even a B and B in a homely yellow house on the road out of town that had an awkward painting of a moose in bedroom slippers on its front side. It was called “The Cozy Moose.”
The distinction between insider and outsider played out all summer long. Visitors lingered around the public fish cleaning tables next to the harbor where locals cleaned dozens of salmon they’d netted in resident-only fisheries. “Vat kind of salmon?” a pair of spectacled Germans asked, standing out of reach of flying fish slime. “I’d be happy to take over for ya,” said a gray-haired tourist from out-of-state, “just for the practice.” Beneath the signs that reminded people it was illegal to sell or barter fish caught for personal use through resident fisheries, so as to not compete with commercial markets, what he meant was: I’ll do a little work for you if you slip me a fillet. A gray-haired, wide-beamed man named Chris stood at the fish cleaning tables with an array of sharp knives within reach and a cigarette drooping from his lip. He charged two dollars to fillet a fish and knew when all of the charter boats returned to the harbor. In two agile sweeps of the blade, he’d pull a clean fillet off a hundred and fifty-pound halibut. Then he’d cut out the cheeks, the succulent rounds of meat on the fish’s head, and toss the carcass over his shoulder into a fish dumpster, where fat gulls were waiting on the metal rim. Chris didn’t live in town in the winter, but he was a fixture in the summer, and despite his grimy rubber bibs and unkempt head of gray hair, he must have been making a killing.
In late summer, the town uncluttered gradually. As the raspberries became ripe on the stalk, the fishing quieted down. The RVs headed out of town before the cranes. By the time the heavy frosts came, the traffic had thinned and the floatplane lake had quieted.
As the seasons in Alaska went by, I kept in touch with friends in other parts of the country. Suddenly, even people I’d met elsewhere and had known barely more than a year felt like old friends. Once you move so far away from anything you’ve known, all things familiar become dear. By then, John and I knew some other young couples. At least one or two pairs of people like us—married or not, from someplace else—seemed to drift into town each year and set anchor, at least for a while. Even so, surrounded by strangers and a looming panorama of mountains, sea, and sky, I often felt out of my element. But I wanted my element to change. “I felt now a part of the land of Alaska,” is what I’d boldly written years before in my fifth-grade report. At eleven, I was unambiguous. Would these words turn out to be a prophecy?
TOM NEVER DID get that room added onto his place. But he stuck it out at the fish packing plant, returning every summer, and then later coming up for a month or so in the winter to work the Christmas rush. During the winter stints—when frozen fish was being sent all over the country but no fresh fish was coming in—the owner let him live in a small room above the