Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [55]
This mixed life embodied so many paradoxes. To live off the land requires supplies brought in from someplace else. It requires machines that you have to keep feeding with gas and oil. It requires access by highway, plane, or boat. Remoteness is often at the cost of long phone calls to friends and family elsewhere. I traveled more miles by plane those first years in Alaska than I’d done in the whole of my life up to that point. When I went back to the East Coast to visit my family, I was always surprised at the newness of things: late model cars gleaming across freshly paved roads painted with crisp lines; neatly trimmed lawns buttoned up around houses like pressed shirts; people wearing fresh haircuts and new clothes. The glimmer attracted and repelled me. Sometimes I got sick of wearing old jeans and rubber boots. I would buy a strappy sun-dress at the mall and take it back to Alaska where I’d fold it and put it away in the bottom of my drawer. I wanted to be handy, and I wanted to be beautiful.
AS JOHN AND I walked along the beach, I thought about the future of the Old Believers. In a few years, a pair of teens would graduate from high school in this village, pulling other students behind them in the years after. Already a few young women from other Russian villages were attending the community college in town. More would soon follow. Would the village suddenly pick up and move to some untrammeled patch of land in Canada or Argentina or who knows where else in an effort to stay intact? Would they have to choose between maintaining their traditions and holding onto their geography?
Sometimes living here, I felt I had to choose between the wonders of nature and the wonders of human ingenuity. On the East Coast, every old city block was a reminder of human potential: prewar apartment buildings with intricate facades, highly engineered parks, old churches. Concerts, galleries, and museums exhibited extraordinary talent while here, most talent was homegrown. In Alaska, the beauty of the land and sea was unparalleled and the extent of undeveloped terrain was greater than anywhere else in the United States. But sometimes for me, this wasn’t enough. I wanted to lead both lives.
John seemed sure he wanted this life, wanted to buy, build, stay, while for me it was more complicated than that. The future came into focus in his mind with perfect over-the-shoulder light. For me, it was a fuzzy thing in the distance, as when I forgot my binoculars or rain blurred the view of the mountains across the bay. “Are you going to stay? Are you thinking about buying a place?” I was asked one day at the bookstore by a woman I barely knew. Her questions drilled too deep into me. People here talked about foundations, frames, and property lines. I couldn’t grasp this language of permanence. Even so, more than anything, I wanted to feel at home here—at home catching and putting up fish, running a skiff, knowing whom everyone was referring to when they mentioned names around town, knowing the bird calls when they sounded new once again in the spring. Yet sometimes the landscape here repulsed me. The stunted spruce seemed sickly and pathetic. The few deciduous trees were short and scrawny, the array of spring warblers dull. The bars too smoky, the Friday nights too quiet.
“You’re having a great experience,” friends back East would say. I wanted to explain that this was just life, that it wasn’t hard enough or extreme enough, that I hadn’t proved anything to myself about how I could live or whether I could take care of myself. That I hadn’t let go of my lust for fancy shoes, I had just lost the opportunity to wear them in this life dominated by gravel, snow, and mud.