Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [42]
It was common on these sunny summer days for the bay to froth with whitecaps and rise up in five- to eight-foot waves by the afternoon. And although the bay didn’t open directly onto the Gulf of Alaska, wind could sweep up it, teasing waves off its surface. The bay was only forty miles long, but southwesterlies had a hundred miles of uninterrupted sea—called fetch—to build before reaching the mouth. “Small craft advisories” went out over the radio when sustained winds above eighteen knots were predicted and the seas grew to four feet or more. People waited out these conditions before crossing the bay in small skiffs.
Midway between the lulls of highs and lows, tides ripped around the tip of the Spit, around rock promontories, and out of narrow inlets, breaking glassy water into unpredictable shards. The day breeze could pick up at any moment. Even in isolated fjords, cold winds sweeping off the ice field could rake waves off otherwise protected waters. And when the tide was high, it was often hard to find a place to land boats.
Cold water kills fast. In the bay, at its summer temperature, you could last for half an hour to an hour before complete exhaustion or unconsciousness. After one to three hours in this water, you would likely die. Bodies lose heat twenty-five times faster in cold water than in cold air. And as your temperature drops, your heart slows and your breathing becomes less frequent. Extreme cold makes people confused and irrational. Those suffering from severe hypothermia often reject help, insisting that they’re fine. Sometimes they feel an overwhelming desire to undress.
All year long, people died in Alaska’s waterways—averaging nearly one per week. Some died from fishing accidents: a line knotting itself around the ankle of a young deckhand and carrying him down, or a fisherman crushed between boat and dock. Others drowned when their boats went down in rough seas. Although commercial and recreational fishing had gotten much safer than in past decades, pleasure boating killed nearly twenty people each year, which meant that water was twenty times more likely to kill you than a bear. Locals and tourists alike died in lakes, rivers, and off the coast. The sea was particularly cold, volatile, and ruthless.
All around us was evidence of past disasters. Everyone knew of someone who had lost a loved one at sea. At a bar in town one night, a man told me, “Every year it used to be that some drunks would grab a rowboat at the tip of the Spit and try to get across the bay. It was an easy way to die.” Out near the end of the Spit, a bronze statue of a fisherman—rubber bibs and boots, a line in his hand—paid homage to those lost at sea, and each spring, at the start of the commercial fishing season, a crowd gathered around this Seafarer’s Memorial for the blessing of the fleet. A bridge up the highway was named after a man who drowned in the river below it during an annual canoeing competition twenty-five years ago. That year, the event was abolished.
In Southcentral Alaska, where we lived, the sea could be especially ornery. The two-hundred-mile-long Cook Inlet into which our bay opened was pushed and pulled by the largest tides in the country: The difference between the heights of high and low tides could be as much as thirty feet. This meant that extreme