Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [5]
Although the sea is fiercely whimsical, it wastes nothing. Sunlight is trapped and never let go. Calcium, which comes first into the ocean from mountains, becomes shells and teeth and backbones and all of those things all over again. The sea’s frugality was contagious. Retired boats were dragged ashore and made into houses, bed and breakfasts, sweet pea planters. Old cabins were picked up and moved, reroofed, added onto. Oil drums became barrel stoves and barbecues. Old fishing nets were strung between spruce posts to keep moose out of vegetable patches. And rubber boots too worn to be waterproof were cut down into slippers, easy to put on and take off for the walk between back door and outhouse.
The town’s food web was as intricate and efficient as the sea’s. Money shuffled around the community continuously. Benefit parties were held in the biggest bar in town or in local schools for a boat man whose house burned down, for a woman with a gut disease, for the four widows and thirteen children left fatherless after a charter plane carrying fishermen home plunged into the sea. A few coins dropped into a jar at the drugstore helped a mother of four whose husband died of a heart attack while playing soccer with his son in the high school gym. Everyone was connected through a network of buying and selling, giving and needing, through things left at and rescued from the dump, items sold and requested over the radio, gear exchanged at ski swaps, odds and ends bargained for at yard sales. It wasn’t uncommon to see your old jacket or sweater on a friend who had bought it from the local consignment store and didn’t know it was yours. Sometimes “benefits” that accompanied a salary meant fish, bread, a skiff ride. Every skill was taken advantage of, and people in town were sometimes surprised to find themselves suddenly in the role of debate coach, salsa dancing instructor, or board president.
It was so obvious to eat directly from the sea that the grocery stores sold little seafood. Instead, people put up cases of salmon in glass jars, packed a freezer’s worth of fish, smoked long strips of red flesh to savor and give away all winter. Those with boats threw out lines for halibut, because they knew they’d tire of salmon by midwinter. Those without begged rides. Gardeners lugged mats of eelgrass from the beach to feed their soil. They composted fish heads and tails and fed the slurry to broccoli, pea plants, and greenhouse tomatoes.
The sea takes then gives back, it cuts and calms, it slaps and laughs and whispers. It constantly leaves small tokens at your feet—a dead seal, a still and eyeless thrush, a wrack of spotless mussel shells as blue as jewels. And suddenly, at slack tide, the wind quiets and the water stops its charging. For a moment, you can believe that everything is normal, that the sea is well-behaved and you are in control.
AT HIGH TIDE six hours after setting the net, John and I pulled a pale yellow canoe stored in the sloping garage next to our rental and dragged it to the edge of the bluff, leaving a stripe of flattened grass. A breeze was kicking up whitecaps on the bay. During the hours we’d been up at the house, the entire net had been submerged and the tide had arced the float line as it pressed into the bay. From the top of the bluff, we could see the silver side of a fish blinking in the net just below the surface. I grabbed John’s wiry arm and jumped up and down in my rubber boots on the grass. We cheered. The plastic mermaid, her head tethered to the net, swung her tail about wildly as if in celebration.