Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [58]
Winter’s coldest weather seemed irrational. When it came, dry slush—like some sort of lunar dust—formed on the beach at the edge of the surf. On cold, clear nights under a gibbous moon, ice crystals sparkled fantastically across the surface of the snow, as though it were illuminated from within. Cloudless nights often draped otherworldly colors across the sky—neon green, fuchsia, ghostly white—as though the aurora borealis were dropping silk handkerchiefs to Earth. Sometimes the northern lights just glowed on the horizon like a second moon readying to rise. Cold fronts occasionally slid into town and didn’t budge, depositing a gray ice fog that trapped wood smoke and car exhaust until the air around town smelled like the end of a tailpipe. In the hills behind town, frigid air sank into the creek drainages, lacquering willows with ice. In bitter weather, supple fabric became stiff and noisy, and even the snow squeaked. Our eyelashes and hair grayed when moisture from our exhalations froze onto the strands. Car doors iced shut, engines grumbled to a start more grumpily than normal—or didn’t start at all—and ice spread along the insides of windshields. The coldest days were too cold for snow and brought a dry air devoid of smells that scraped my throat.
The darkness and the cold, the raging wind and persevering snowstorms, and the incessant, frigid crash of the sea would seem to shut Alaskans in their homes during the long winter. But the time of snow and ice is the time when much of Alaska is its most open. Winter makes the landscape—otherwise soggy, lake-speckled, and river-sliced in so much of the state—far more traversable than during the thawed months. Snow makes the endless rolling land quietly navigable for miles by smoothing rumpled ground, masking tangled shrubs, and bridging creeks. Along Alaska’s northern coast, shore ice makes travel between villages more direct as sinuous bays and inlets could be bypassed. Frozen rivers in the north become state-maintained highways that link remote villages. Fuel trucks, family station wagons, and state trooper vehicles travel the curving river highways that are marked with stakes and reflective tape and kept open from the incessantly drifting snow by plow trucks. A fleet of taxis—Chevy Suburbans, mostly—carry villagers into town for supplies, or ferry them to and from their ice fishing spots on the river.
But this mobility often invited disaster. Each winter triggered a relay of deaths. As soon as the old man who sped away from his village into the white expanse on his snowmachine was pronounced gone, a boat would capsize in winter waters. A truck driver was killed when an avalanche spilled him across the highway and into the ocean, and a helicopter dove into cold, gray water. A recluse died of hypothermia when the power company shut off his electricity, and an old woman, suffering from dementia, wandered out of her home to freeze to death alone.
Even small things could spell death in winter: car keys dropped—and lost—in the snow on a frigid night, a stalled-out snowmachine far from help, a minor miscalculation on an icy highway. A single page of the Anchorage Daily News reported two days’ toll of winter deaths: A boy died when he sledded into a stationary truck; a couple was killed when a young man lost control of his speeding truck on an icy highway; an avalanche tumbled an experienced skier down a mountain and buried him under five feet of snow while his friend watched; and a young man was killed when a downdraft smashed the single-engine plane his father was piloting into a remote, snow-covered valley. The radio, too, droned with disaster all winter long. We kept the statewide news on while we cooked dinner. That winter, there was nearly one death a week from snowmachine accidents alone. Winter united this broad