Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [54]
John trailed his binoculars after a black speck moving across the sky. “Falcon,” he pronounced. “Probably a peregrine.” He’d noticed the bird’s speed, pointed wings, and short tail. By the time I stood up and raised my binoculars to my eyes, it was gone. He wanted to see and name the birds to make sense out of where he was. He needed to know what was there to feel at ease in a place, and to feel as though he’d truly experienced his own life. Not looking and not knowing would be a missed opportunity, a life less full. But when we spotted a bird together, I’d often shout, “Don’t say! Don’t say!” ordering him not to identify it aloud. I wanted to name it for myself. I wanted to know whether I was making progress. Was I seeing the difference between a dunlin and dowitcher at a distance? Could I tell a mallard from a shoveler at a glance? I memorized names and field marks.
A shot sounded in the distance, then echoed. Far out on the flats, ducks rose into the air like fruit unfalling from a tree. I scanned around with my binoculars and made out a couple of duck hunters on a four-wheeler far out on the flats. A yellow dog bounded ahead of them. At the end of the day the hunters would head home with the supple, streamlined bodies of freshly shot ducks lashed to the back of their four-wheeler. The feathers would bare colors few people saw: the shimmering hues of blue, green, and purple that birds revealed only on close examination.
It was late afternoon and we hadn’t gotten to any landmarks. There was no sign announcing the head of the bay. Nothing that said this is how far you’ve come, how far you have left to go. I had hoped a trip to the head of the bay would reveal the answer to a question I couldn’t yet form.
We turned back under a canopy of cottonwoods. In late spring, the trees had shaken out their white cotton flakes. This hint of winter wasn’t subtle. Summer sped by and fall, we knew, would pass in a blink. Back on the beach, the tide had gone out, exposing a million tiny drainages that had carved shallow rivulets in the mud. Chunks of coal and knots of red kelp had been abandoned when the bay pulled back. Nearly half a dozen tidal wracks ran along the beach—empty mussel shells, seaweed that had dried into fists, vacant crabs, the donut-shaped skeletons of urchins—cleaned, spineless, and bleached white. We collected a few clumps of mussels that had washed up with the tide. Their byssal threads, strong hairlike strands that anchored them to rocks and each other, had trapped small stones and empty mussel shells. We ripped off the large mussels and threw everything else back onto the mudflats. This would be dinner.
Here it seemed we could do it all—collect mussels on the beach for dinner, rent a new release at the video store to watch afterward. Maybe it was perfect. Maybe it was jarring. Sometimes it seemed it couldn’t last. Sometimes I imagined life in the Bush, off the road system, surviving primarily off the land. I felt I needed to prove myself like that—to no one else but me.
“Alaska’s the only place where a man can be a man,” a rough-around-the-edges bachelor told me. He carried a sharp knife on his belt and lived without running water, with an outhouse and woodstove. Most days he split wood. For much of the year, he had to walk or ski three quarters of a mile to his house. He worked in town as an electrician only as much as he had to. Lately, the bachelor had taken to wintering in the tropics.
Women here were just as likely as men to seek a physical, demanding life. And they seemed, generally, more adept than men at straddling two worlds—at holding down regular, even professional, positions in town while tending the garden, putting up fish, keeping a modern homestead going. Perhaps they were better at knowing what they needed and seeking it out.