Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [51]
Beyond the cabin and a log bridge that spanned a small creek, the road turned away from the beach into the Russian village. From our vantage point on the beach, the village was a collection of drab-colored houses enclosed by a fence of metal posts and barbed wire. NO TRESPASSING signs had been tacked to the trunks of nearby trees. Cows grazing along the edge of the fence lifted their heads as we walked by, but no one else was around. About 250 people lived in the village, which was owned in collective by the community. The school building, too, belonged to the village and was leased to the district, which ran a small school where American teachers, assisted by Russian aides, taught classes of only Russian children. I had never been in the village—the signs were enough to keep me out—but a woman I knew who had taught there for sixteen years told me it was a beautiful place with neat gardens overflowing with vegetables, wood-sided houses, the school, and the church. Every morning, she parked her car at the top of the road and hiked in. For most of the school year, the mornings were dark and she used a headlamp to illuminate the way. At the end of the day, she hiked back out. Often, she had to attach cleats to her boots for traction on the steep road. She loved teaching there, she told us. She felt accepted and appreciated by the community. Russian kids typically didn’t attend school past their mid-teen years; none from the village had made it through high school. Boys took off to begin careers as commercial fishermen, while girls, once married, became responsible for a growing household. In her late-forties, my friend was already teaching the children of some of her first students.
Although many of the Old Believers had been born here, they spoke Russian at home and maintained a distinct separateness from town life. We never saw them at restaurants or community celebrations; they didn’t go to the movie theater or local bars. The children learned English in school, yet it might be years for them between trips into town. It was a village life, and the role of mayor passed among the men year to year. I wondered about the Russian women my own age: toting around huge families while wearing high-waisted dresses—maternity clothing year in and year out—they seemed ultrafeminine, yet must have been indomitably tough.
Aside from the old cabin, the village, and one house beyond the village with a fenced horse pasture, there was no other development around. There was no pavement, no streetlights, no stores or restaurants. The only way out was back up the dirt switchback.
We walked along the barbed wire toward the head of the bay. This was one of the most remote parts of the bay, but the beach here was ugly and felt industrial. There was no sand, just mudflats and above them, the land was chipped up coal and red baked shale—which looked like crumbled clay pots, ground finer under the tire tracks. The mudflats were littered with the dribbled castings of marine worms, and a jellyfish puddled on the mud, looking like a pool of oil. There was trash: large truck tires, a box that once held rifle cartridges, beer bottles, and fleshless scapula that likely were butchering waste from a moose carcass. Figure eights had been tracked into the mudflats by four-wheelers. Algae grew filmy in depressions that once held water, and driftwood stained orange by iron in the mud lay piled like a stack of defunct machine parts. Just over the fence, fifty-five-gallon drums lay half-buried in the mud, and a heap of rubble marked where a building had once stood—snarled metal sheets, torn yellow insulation, cut wires, two-by-fours stuck with nails—and