Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [63]
LESS THAN A mile from the house, our skis slipped quickly into the icy dips in the snow beneath spruce trees. We crossed undeveloped parcels owned by people who lived out of state. We’d never seen anyone here, though our neighbors told us that in the spring, they picked morels in these fields. We had the expanse of snow and scattered spruce woods to ourselves. Winter could be like this: moments of intense intimacy with others—shared dinners in small spaces with friends and cheap wine, bodies packed into someone’s sauna, crowds gathered at the few restaurants open in town—and then whole days when John and I would see no one else. But in the quiet of winter, snow revealed the industry of hundreds of silent societies. Highways of vole tracks careened between clumps of elderberry, and moose crashed across the hills, leaving beheaded willows in their wakes. The telltale prints of snowshoe hares—with their huge hind paws landing ahead of their diminutive forelegs—traversed the snow, followed by lynx tracks as large as saucers. Coyotes left curious, winding trails, and squirrels dropped nervous, claw-scratched tracks. And even the wings of an owl swooping down to pluck off a meal left a gentle swipe.
The bears had gone into hibernation; the shorebirds and warblers had gone south, but life was everywhere. Hummingbird-sized golden-crowned kinglets, olive green birds with a brilliant streak of yellow across the tops of their heads, dashed between spruce branches all winter long. We were amazed that they could survive the cold months in the north. They nested around town in the summer, and in the spring, we heard their earnest, energetic calls, like a car engine turning over again and again but never starting. Ravens traversed the white winter sky, chortling to each other on the wing. A crow-sized hawk owl perched regularly at the top of a spruce tree near the fast-food joint. Magpies, whose black and white plumage reflected winter’s simple palette, flapped around town. Snow buntings examined grasses on the berm at the top of the beach, and huge flocks of redpolls—small brown songbirds with bright spots of red on the tops of their heads—chutted by overhead, then congregated momentarily in stands of alders.
In the winter, the bay, which remained open in all but the most protected areas, provided a haven for tanker ships as well as seabirds. Ducks rafted up in great numbers. From the beach we could see the white flanks of scaup gathered by the hundreds, the black profiles of clumped scoters, pairs of goldeneyes, single grebes, and drab loons diving in the shallows near the edge of the surf. Otters gathered in the bay as well, and seals periscoped their heads through the cold surface of the sea just off the beach in town.
For those species that didn’t migrate, winter up north required innovation. The hares replaced their dingy brown summer coats with fur of unblemished white composed of hollow hairs that insulated the animals from the winter chill. Moose grew thick coats that would peel away messily in the spring. In the fall, spruce grouse gathered on gravel roads to fill their gizzards with grit to help them digest their winter diet of stiff spruce needles. The frogs we heard calling in the spring hibernated in burrows of dead leaves and grasses, sleeping beneath thick layers of snow.
Winter meant a peculiar mixture of quietness and life, of darkness and earnest vibrancy, of accessibility and danger. For John and me, winter proved to be an equalizing season. For eight months, I could forget about my fear of the water. Winter was a terrain I felt comfortable