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Somewhere among all of our dreams and disappointments, we have to piece together a compromise. Nothing is clear-cut—not how we live, not our desires, not one love affair from its predecessor, not the differences between the life we lead and another we could make for ourselves somewhere else. If you really looked at anything—the Russian village, life in Native villages, the lives adopted here by those of us who had come from far away—you would see a confounding amalgam. But compromise wasn’t yet part of my language. Wanting so many different things left me with a quiet, constant ache.

AFTER TURNING BACK, we spotted two Russian girls, about nine years old, on the beach up ahead. They were dragging pieces of driftwood twice their height up the beach as the wind tousled their long, white dresses. Their braids swung across their backs as they lunged with the wood, trying to balance the tops of the trunks against each other, making a tepee. “Hurry up!” one of the girls called to the other. “Get that one under!” The English surprised me. The other girl responded in Russian as they fitted the ends against each other. Then the construction began as they balanced more sections of driftwood, closing the walls of the wood tent. They laughed as they worked, and then stopped to watch us as we walked by. We waved and they waved back.

In a few weeks, rain would extinguish the colorful burn of fall. Birch and cottonwood canopies would fizzle out like embers. After the season of bounty, life would pare way down. The grasses would die back; the trees would undress. The bay would scour the beach clean and snow would simplify everything: hummocks flattened to a white plane, gnarled mountain slopes made smooth. The landscape would become a husk of its former self as the night sky hunched up behind the daytime dome. But the tide would always bring gifts. We would eat well.

8

WINTER

NILAS: n. A thin elastic crust of ice, easily bending on waves and swell and under pressure, thrusting in a pattern of interlocking fingers.

My second winter was different. Friends and family back East kept asking me when I was coming home. Home? When would they realize that my real life had begun and that I was home?…Wasn’t I?

On a Sunday morning in early March, when the sky was white and changeless, the light dull and without angle, John and I put on our skis, which we stored tips-up in the waist-high mound of snow outside the front door, and headed downhill into a shallow creek drainage. The previous fall, we had moved into a house in the hills behind town at the end of a one-mile gravel road walled by spruce. We watched the snow pile up outside our windows and ice send lace up the glass, until we could no longer remember what the yard looked like when not covered by four feet of clean cotton batting.

On weekend days, we’d pack water, cookies, and a thermos of hot soup and ski until dark. We could ski for miles out the front door of the house, dipping into valleys and skiing along the humped backs of hills. We skirted clumps of alder, fallen spruce, and willow thickets that stuck through the snow. We passed abandoned homesteaders’ cabins and carefully furnished summer cabins surrounded by snow untouched by truck, plow, or shovel; we could press our noses up to the windows knowing that the owners weren’t likely to return until June.

The few inches of new snow that had fallen the night before sat atop an icy crust that held our weight in the coldness of the morning. I pushed off ahead of John, past the browned elderberry shrub which splayed up through the snow like the bottom of an old broom. I moved with a skater’s stride, trying to build momentum to carry me down the hill. I glided my right ski out and then the left. I pushed the ground behind me with my poles, feeling them pierce the hard crust beneath the powder.

The sky’s white ceiling felt close and heavy above us as we skied along the edge of the driveway. It wouldn’t snow or rain all day. We kept our skis just at the edge of the road; it was a steep drop down to the track. A plow no longer