Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [31]
What I would do, I didn’t know and couldn’t predict. Some days I wondered how many ties I would need to stay here. Visits with Tom were nice, but they reminded me that I’d broken so many other ties to come here. And my attraction to this odd friendship—and the work of maintaining it, which I kept to myself—reminded me how love had entangled my life with John’s in ways I’d never experienced before. It was at once comforting and alarming. Lately, however, I had begun to want a few more things for myself. I started taking an evening art class at the community college and playing pickup soccer a couple of nights a week. I kept my eyes out for potential friends. I needed to be connected here apart from John. I felt like the transplants that I put in my garden in the spring, the ones whose tightly bound roots I’d had to tear apart in order to help them grow new roots in the tilled bed. But you have to wait and see whether they take.
5
THE RIVER’S MOUTH
RUNNING LINE: n. A continuous line that runs between shore and a mooring buoy that allows a small craft to be moved between shore and deep water.
This is an announcement from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game,” said the man on the radio. By now, I recognized all of the station’s announcers, but his voice was unfamiliar. “The Kenai River personal use dip net fishery will be open to Alaska residents at 5 A.M. on July 10 until midnight on July 31, unless closed by emergency order.” Ninety miles up the highway, the Kenai twisted a wide, turquoise path from the mountains into Cook Inlet. Every summer, tourists and residents packed its banks to fish. Tourists were limited to hook and line, but over the next few weeks, hundreds of Alaskans would fish with dip nets in the glacier-fed river. These arm span–wide bags of nets were strung off solid frames with pole handles a dozen or more feet long. All over town people pulled nets out of wherever they’d been stored during the winter and spring, patched holes, strapped them to the roofs of their cars, and headed north. During these midsummer weeks, the all-around houseware, drugstore, and trinket shop prominently displayed dip nets for sale. People had been waiting all year for this.
John had set his mind on dipnetting months before. Nowhere else in the country could you fish like this. He’d heard that the red salmon you could catch up there were special; they had high oil content that made them fatty and delicious. Silver salmon—like the kind we’d caught the previous summer from the beach in front of our place—were nice, but people said that they didn’t keep as well in the freezer as the reds, and the silver’s pale flesh had a milder taste.
I was always eager for the next adventure John conjured up. I wanted to learn something new, experience something different, go to a place I’d never been before. But as John schemed, I floundered. Where could we find the equipment? What day should we go? How did it all work? We didn’t know much about how fishing was done up there, but we knew we needed nets and waterproof chest waders so that we could stand in the river holding the nets out as the fish ran upstream. But we couldn’t afford to buy the nets and waders new, and used gear was usually passed from friend to friend to friend.
John’s mind was set: We would go. He started looking for ways to borrow equipment or otherwise get it for free. He was good at this. A few days later, Cynthia, our friend who lived in the yurt, asked us if we wanted to go with her. She had borrowed two nets and two pairs of waders from her neighbors and would share them