Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [61]
Although the sea dampened the extremes of winter, the beach was magical during the frozen months. By morning, hoarfrost had wrapped each beach cobble individually, and as the day passed, sunlight melted the ice on the south faces of the stones until each dark cobble was merely capped with white. Then the tide came in and painted the beach black again. Ice crystals powdered seaweed on the beach and froze it into solid gnarls. Creeks that normally spilled across the beach froze into shelves of ice, and seeps along the bluff shellacked the dusty earth. During the coldest weather, high tides quietly deposited shoulder-high continents of sea ice at the top of the beach and slushy waves rolled in languidly.
In the middle of winter, the harbor, generally free of ice, was quiet. No tourists piled onto boats to be shuttled out to catch salmon or halibut. Commercial fishing boats rested in their slips. The fish packing plant went silent after the holiday season of sending gifts of frozen seafood all over the country. Most of the businesses on the Spit—bear viewing outfits, water taxis, the ice cream shop, espresso and trinket stands—closed, and many boarded up their windows with plywood to wait out the winter.
After the flush of summer, Homer’s population seemed to halve in the winter, but the dark months created pockets of vibrancy. Businesses strung lights along their roofs and around nearby trees. The community college in Homer showed foreign films for free on Friday evenings, and restaurants offered weeknight dinner specials that weren’t available during the summer months—half-priced burgers, fish and chips, clam chowder. The six-month-long winter passed through town in a succession of annual events and scheduled celebrations: the craft fair that coincided with the annual community production of The Nutcracker, the winter arts festival which was accompanied by a parade down the main thoroughfare through town, a dozen fundraisers for various causes, and skiing competitions for all ages.
Supermarkets around town maintained their earnest stocks of colorful produce even when the ground was frozen and the sun had slumped low in the sky. The same waxy apples were flown in from the other side of the globe, bananas were shipped north from the tropics, and heads of sensitive lettuce were brought up from California. All winter long, we emptied our freezer of salmon we’d caught the summer before. We grilled it, fried it, baked it, and put it into soups. We ate salmon for dinner, then brought leftovers to work for lunch. We ate the raspberries we’d made into jam and syrup late in the summer and used up the clams we’d canned as chowder. By late winter, the berries and clams were gone and we were sick of salmon.
Winter brought its own recreation. When the town’s largest lake, which was used during the summer months as the floatplane airport, was frozen fast, people raced beat-up cars across its surface. Scores of snowmachiners parked their trucks and trailers a dozen miles out the road that headed east from town and took off into the wide expanse of undeveloped backcountry. Ice rinks sprang up—a flooded blacktop next to the elementary school, a frozen pond next to the airport—and attracted skaters who gathered to twirl, do laps, and play hockey. As we skated across its surface, the pond let out haunting sounds like the calls of whales. Three sets of trails were groomed around Homer for cross-country skiers. Years before John and I moved there, a group of fishermen had put up a rope tow on Ohlson Mountain, a stout hill behind town, using a boat engine to drag skiers up the slope.
AS YOU TRAVEL north during an Alaskan winter, the sun slinks lower and lower toward the