Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [46]
Still, disasters were always happening. The following spring, a deep-sea trawler went down in cold, rough conditions in the Bering Sea, drowning all fifteen men on board. It was the most deadly fishing accident in the country over the past half-century, and it made everyone shudder. Rescuers found only one body.
Two summers later, a young couple went kayaking on a mild January day from the south shore, where they were caretaking a lodge. Both in their mid-twenties, he was writing a novel and she was teaching herself to paint. Though the day they went out was warm and mild for January, the conditions got rough. Their double kayak flipped and they swam to a rocky island. They fumbled up a gravel beach on numb hands and feet, so exhausted and cold that they couldn’t think straight and passed out. They woke, climbed a cliff, fell back, and passed out again. He tried to start a fire but failed. When he woke this time, she was gone. Her body had been taken by the tide. He managed to clamber into a cabin on the island and keep himself alive for three days until a passing boat saw him waving from the shore.
“MURRES!” JOHN CALLED, as a couple of black and white birds sped by overhead with their wings beating furiously. I tried to notice other things besides the chop on the water and the breeze teasing the right side of my face and neck. Ahead, scores of black-legged kittiwakes, dainty gull-like birds, had collected on the surface of the water, likely over a ball of needle fish. Far out the mouth of the bay, the familiar red and green hull of a tanker was moving toward us. It would pick up a pilot before heading up the Inlet to a fertilizer plant.
Just past the halfway point, the wind got stronger, and the water began to roll beneath us. The boat rose on two-foot high lumps of sea that were pressing in from the southwest. With each forward motion of our paddles, the rollers spun us nearly a quarter turn on our keel. The waves didn’t break, but white water began to lace their tips. Up and down, up and down. I was terrified. In the trough of a wave, the sea curved up around us. At the top, we lost control and could not move ahead or turn.
“John, it’s getting worse.”
“Wind’s picked up,” he observed. “But we should be fine.”
“Let’s paddle hard!” I shouted, knowing nothing else to do or say. Water slipped erratically around my paddle. The rocky islands, where we could rest on the leeward sides, weren’t getting closer fast enough. Forward paddle, spin back. Forward paddle, spin back. I could feel the stress in my wrists as I clenched the paddle tightly and used all of my strength to move ahead. Sweat formed in the small of my back, sticking my shirt to my skin, and dampness collected on my forehead beneath the band of my cap.
Far off our bow, boats plied the bay, and I could see the noses of small skiffs dipping into the water as rolling waves passed beneath them. Seeing how the water was playing with these larger boats made me even more nervous. What else were we but a piece of refuse the sea could toss around as it pleased? The sounds of wind and sea and the whine of far-off boat engines made me feel invisible. All I wanted was to catch a whiff of guano from the seabirds that nested on the rocks. The last time we’d paddled across, we could smell the rank, ammonia odor from a quarter-mile away; it was a sign that we were close to the other side. But the wind was at our backs, and we still had more than a mile to go.
I paddled harder. My muscles clenched with nervousness and exertion. What if we lost control and took a wave