Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [60]
SOMETIMES THE FIRST snow flew long before Halloween. In other years, cold rain pierced us long into November. But when winter came in Alaska, it made the landscape bloom again. On clear, cold mornings, crystals blossomed on the surface of the snow, catching the sun like peach fuzz on young skin. Hoarfrost petaled the dead, saucer-sized umbels of pushki that still stood shoulder-high out of the snow, and ice sprouted like asters along hollow fireweed stalks. Icicles dropped glistening taproots from the edges of roofs, and on bare patches beneath spruce, ice crystals extended like vines. Snow made spruce trees look as if they had grown new white boughs on top of the old. Along the beach, frost spread like a gardener’s groundcover among the cobbles. Sometimes snowflakes dropped from the sky like cherry blossoms set to the wind and you could catch these flowers in your mouth. Other times, snow left a dust as fine as pollen.
As a kid, I had longed for snow, knowing that just the threat of it—an inch or two predicted for that afternoon—could cancel school. A dozen miles outside the nation’s capital, snow and ice meant that everyone was worried about getting sued. But I had noticed very little about the snow itself—all I cared about was whether it was sticky, which meant good snowball fight conditions. Here, snow reinvented the landscape. After months of fall darkness, when we lost more than a half hour of daylight in a single week, the first snowfall whitewashed everything. The snow damped noise, silencing the grumble of the trucks we heard all summer long. Gray clouds piled into the bay and dropped flakes so silently all you could hear was a gentle static that seemed like the absence of sound. Snow insulated houses, blocking drafts and layering heavily onto roofs where it trapped warmth. Around town, winter brought an incessant falling and melting of snow. Cottony clouds gripped the top of the bluff behind town, then let go, having powdered the brown hills as white as talc. Snow made everything shipshape. All of those messy in-between areas—vacant lots around town, yards filled with parts cars, horse trailers, rusting trucks, stacked fishing gear—looked neater after they were dressed in a starch-white snow.
The drastic changes each season wreaked on the landscape forced people to think about making drastic changes of their own. Some decided to take off in the winter for life in a hot climate. Others downsized, upgraded, cut their hair, got a divorce. Over the course of the year, the land around us morphed from bloom, to green, to brown, to white. Six feet of growth died back to nothing and then was replaced by head-high snow. The different selves emerged: the melancholy, the manic, the purposeful, the lazy.
Although the changes winter brought to coastal Alaska were extreme, the season here was much milder than in the Interior. The sea, which absorbs and releases the sun’s heat slowly, tempers the extremes of summer and winter. As the days shorten and the temperatures drop in the fall, the sea cools more slowly than the land, keeping coastal areas mild. By late winter, the temperature of the sea drops to its lowest point, and as the days lengthen and the sunlight increases in intensity, the cold ocean cools coastal regions. Although true celestial mid-summer and mid-winter occur on the solstices, the sea’s sluggish pace of storing and giving off heat helps cause the bulk of cold winter days to come after the shortest day of the year and summer’s warmth to run long after summer solstice. In Homer, winter temperatures rarely dropped below zero, but the tempering influence of the sea faded in the higher elevations even a couple of miles from town, where temperatures were often significantly colder and winter lasted a month longer. And just