Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [44]
Once through the traffic, I was relieved. The first hurdle jumped over. Now, to keep going. To cover distance. But also, to look around. The far side of the bay fell into view like layers of a stage set. Offshore rocks: the first painted flat. Then the coastline. Further back, a blue haze washed over each peak with successively more strokes. Then the final blue backdrop of sky. We paddled through a line of driftwood and debris gathered together by the currents. A snarl of bull kelp, its stems knotted by the constant motion of the water, passed off our starboard side. A glaucous-winged gull stood atop a piece of driftwood that bobbed up and down with the surf. We paddled toward a flotilla of half a dozen dainty red-necked phalaropes, the only shorebird that swam in the bay. They spun around themselves in the water like windup bath toys in an effort to suction food from below. In an instant, the birds lifted from the water and flew off in unison. A sea otter popped its head up to catch a glance at us, then lost interest and swam off. Out on the bay, you could see these things: the curiosity of otters, the leisure of gulls. You could witness how birds lived, how the bay slowly gyred, and how the sea was a seamstress and kelp its thread.
Paddling a kayak was the best way to see these things. Unlike being a passenger on a motorized skiff, kayaking was nearly silent, and there was nothing between you and the sea but half a foot of hull. We didn’t leak engine oil in watery rainbows behind us, and we could easily pull up onto the narrowest of beaches.
For years, John had explored the watery edges of lakes and rivers, the coasts of bays and rims of islands. I was learning to do the same. The margin where the sea met the shore was much more interesting than the flat plane of water, and it told you so much about a place. The shore revealed whether the tide was rising or falling and whether the next high tide would be higher or lower than the last. The shore was both a gateway to the land and a piece of the sea floor exposed for view. It displayed the refuse chucked out by the sea: the conical shells of limpets, the snail shells of periwinkles, driftwood licked clean by the surf. We lifted rocks to find crabs, marine worms, eel-like gobi fish, and hopping amphipods. We picked up spiny purple urchins and tossed stranded jellyfish back into the water. We weeded through tidal wracks and studied stones.
And the edges were never the same. An average of twenty feet of water washed into the bay twice daily with the tide, so a cove could be a wide expanse of water at one point in the day and then a narrow channel girded by mussel flats and tidepools six hours later. The water could rush out like a river, and later sit flat and calm.
When we paddled in the shallows, I could see the bottom. Most of the south shore of the bay had a ragged, rocky coast, and the sea came in clear and free of sediment to the land, rather than cloudy as it did on our side of the bay, which was edged by silty mudflats. Ribbonlike fronds of kelp parted to reveal clams, mussels, and hubcap-sized sea stars of all colors. Moon jellies, a species of jellyfish, pulsed their creamy white tentacles through the bay. Flounders lifted off the bottom and swam away as we approached.
Already that summer, we had fished and collected mussels from our kayaks. A few weeks before, we had paddled across the bay with long-handled landing nets lashed to the deck of the double kayak. We waded into a rushing creek at the head of a narrow inlet that fingered off the bay and caught a dozen red salmon, surging upstream. Then we cleaned them, lowered them whole into the hatches, and paddled back, exhausted.
There was so much about the region’s natural history that I didn’t know and couldn’t see. I wanted