Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [66]
Everything else was on the move too. Moose roved into town from the hills, where deep snow made passage difficult for these long-legged animals. They moved between the edges of parking lots and vacant parcels, browsing on willows and the tips of spruce. Sea ducks that had wintered on open water returned and flecked the bay in black. Warblers dashed in and then proceeded to sing for hours from the boughs of birches, cottonwoods, and alders that would soon leaf out. In a matter of days, moths crowded the air and, at night, headlights waded into their midst. Nighttime itself was going someplace else.
It was late April, and the snow was rotten and patchy, strewn with debris and pulpy in places. The skiing was no good. There hadn’t been fresh snow in weeks. The tops of willows poked through. I wanted spring to get on with itself. I folded myself onto the couch with a book while John set off to work on a project, digging out our wooden kayaks we’d stored in the fall so that we could get on the water before the snow was completely gone, which might not be until June.
Months earlier, to protect our boats from winter weather, we had slid them side by side in the crawl space beneath the floor of an unfinished building our landlord had started the year before. The plywood surface extended twenty by twenty feet and would, the landlord planned, support a building that was part of a business scheme he talked about from time to time. He would turn the house into a retreat center and build outbuildings where dozens of people could sleep. Already there was a similar structure on the property as well as an outhouse and part of a ropes course. The landlord had stashed his own fleet of a half-dozen brightly-colored plastic kayaks—also part of the business plan—in this spot as well, to protect them from the feet of snow that would fall over the course of the winter.
That afternoon, the boats had been far from my mind. I didn’t want to think about making the crossing to the other side of the bay. I didn’t want to think about having to read the water, navigate the tide rips. A winter of skiing the hills behind our place had ruined me—the predictable swells of land, the gentle current of one drainage running into another; slack was when you stood still on your skis and took a break. It was a form of subtle protest, my reading on the couch. I didn’t want to help. I wanted to linger in the terrestrial world for as long as I could, but John was determined to get up and go.
Sometimes I found John’s endless energy exhausting. In his eyes, there was always another project to do. And the moment he’d arrived in Alaska, his dream came into focus: to explore the state’s wildest places by its waterways. Reluctantly, I agreed that this seemed the best way to approach it. John ordered the kit for my boat soon after. But building the boat wasn’t the only thing there was to do; we would also have to refinish the wood every year or two; maintain paddles, life vests, and safety equipment; acquire maps and charts; and constantly glean advice from people with more experience.
Two pages from the end of the chapter I was reading, John burst back through the front door. “Something’s wrong with the boats!” He was out of breath from sprinting back to the house. “I need a light for a better look.” He ran to the closet to get a headlamp, leaving torn waffle-shaped pieces of snow fallen from the tread of his boots melting on the wood floor. I jumped off the couch, grabbed a jacket, yanked on my rubber boots, and followed him out the front door to the side of the house where the platform was encircled by spruce. More than half a dozen feet of snow had fallen that winter, piling up heavily on every flat surface.
When we got to the clearing, I could see that drifts had piled up higher than the level of the building’s floor, and John had taken a shovel to the solid, six-foot bank to create a space through which