Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [48]
Most people thought of fall as the end of the season; for me, it was a beginning. Since moving to Alaska in the fall two years before, that season had felt like the beginning of it all, of my life here, of the cycle of a year. Fall reminded me why I’d come here—to see what it was to live at the edge of wilderness. I had wanted to see how the life I imagined I might live here would simplify my needs. But instead of paring down my desires, being here expanded them. I needed a freezer full of wild salmon and berries. I needed undeveloped coastline. I needed silence and untracked snow. I needed the abrupt swings between seasons to wake me up. I needed to see owls. Having been raised to think I could do anything, be anybody, I never thought about compromise. There was danger in that.
FALL DIDN’T PASS here lazily as it did where I grew up. There were no weeks of falling leaves, no weekends spent raking them into jumping-into piles. There was no dank earth smell out the back door or strings of evenings when crows would gather in one of the few remaining stands of tulip poplars and shout at rush hour traffic. Here fall was a moment. John and I were eager to experience it before winter settled in. On a Sunday in mid-September, we got in the car and headed east from our house. We were driving “out east,” as people called it, which meant taking the road that ran eastward from the blinking red light along the north shore of the bay toward its head. This wasn’t to be confused with “back East,” which referred to the East Coast. We passed grassy fields interspersed with houses and clumps of alders and spruce. We passed an old bus with a stovepipe stuck out of the roof. I had heard that one of my students lived in there. We passed a low building just off the road that was a bar and package store, a church housed in a double-wide trailer, and another church that was a two-story geodesic dome made out of plywood painted yellow. We passed a greenhouse that had been fashioned out of two-by-fours and plastic sheeting. The couple who lived in the house next to it—a plywood, box-shaped structure—were growing English cucumbers to sell in town. The greenhouse had collapsed during the winter under snow, and the owners had rigged it up again in the spring.
We were driving along the bench, which was stippled by a wide range of types of houses—from half-million-dollar second homes with bright blue or green metal roofs and large windows facing the bay to unfinished places with tar paper flapping in the wind, surrounded by generations of old cars and trucks. Local economics were changing as retirees moved in, bringing money they’d made someplace else and leaving behind children who were having kids of their own. This influx of cash changed things: Subdivisions were being stamped out of patches of alder, and tidy houses were thrown up—built on spec—that looked out of place in their neatness and completeness.
Eight miles out of town, the Fritz Creek General Store, a low log structure, offered a two-pump gas station, post office, liquor store, movie rental, fresh bread, pizza, and espresso. In the summer, you could pick a few dusty raspberries at the edge of the gravel parking lot, and in the winter, find underemployed locals socializing inside. Across the street sat the most expensive restaurant around Homer, which served seafood and steaks. During the summer, tourists flocked to the place, which had been written up in all of the guide books.
Past the general