Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [67]
WHEN THE SNOW melted away, the world of human things rose up: hastily thrown-up cabins, trailers long forgotten, yard junk. The garden patch that had looked tidy for months under snow revealed the knotted mess of pea vines and bolted radish heads you hadn’t bothered to pull in the fall. It was time to work the beds and start seeds. Time to change out your car tires and pick up a winter’s worth of blown trash. It was time to weed through your closets and bring what you no longer used down to the Pick ’n’ Pay, where your neighbor could buy your old shirt back for a quarter. Spring begged for work—so much needed to be cleaned up, prepared. But that afternoon, I didn’t want to budge.
In the middle of spring chores, you realized the enormous amount of time spent acquiring stuff and then taking care of it. Some people joked about how many motors they had to keep running: two cars, an old plow truck, a boat, lawn mower, four-wheeler, and a generator just in case. This didn’t include the fridge, oil heater fan, and well pump. Just the sheer number of shoes needed to get by in winter was astounding: rubber boots for wet days, snow boots for cold ones, ski boots, ice skates, inside shoes for work, slippers for the cold floor at home. Life here required a new set of possessions I gradually acquired—things I would never use if I moved almost anywhere else: clam shovel, sturdy down parka, a collection of five-gallon plastic buckets, rebar cut into garden post–lengths, jars for pickling fish in, an assortment of fishing nets for various purposes, scrap wood, milk crates, and hardware salvaged from the dump. I accumulated and collected; sometimes it all seemed like too much junk.
But there was a culture of junk here, and a few locals were lauded and despised for their exceptional ability, or tendency, to accumulate it. Les Wilson owned one of the most beautiful parcels around: thirty-nine sunny acres of meadow, birch, and some live spruce. His property, about three miles out of town, was flat, perfect for farming, tending a nice grassy yard, or just lying down in the meadow when the fireweed was aflame and staring up at the sky. He’d bought the place a decade before for a price that would make local subdividers salivate, and then began covering it with junk. Now it was a compound of the neglected, a community of odds and ends. A muddy loop road across the property ringed his stockpiles of junk: propane tanks, old cars, trucks, camper vans, stacks of car door panels, beer cans, tires, steel beams, welder’s tanks, buoys, blue tarps. Les had hauled in a few dilapidated trailers salvaged from someplace else that he dropped in rows at the edge of the mud road and rented out for too much money. There were a couple of hand-built cabins occupied by men who helped Les continue carting stuff in. You could look at it as a sign of resourcefulness and industry. Someday he might be able to provide for someone in need—and that’s what kept him going. But you could also see it as a scab on the land, an insult, even a tragedy. The planes to and from Anchorage flew over the place half a dozen times a day. The view from above—of junk creeping into untouched meadow, pooling up around birch trees—was not pretty.
But salvage, Les said, was part of the Alaskan mentality. Living for years far from stores and supply shops, off the road system or during the days before a highway and town rose up around you, you learned to keep stuff, to scrimp, save, and be resourceful. “That’s not a junk car,” he philosophized, “that’s the parts for the car you’re driving.” Why get rid of something—even an eyesore—when someday you, or your neighbor, or a guy with some cash in his wallet, might want it? “I’m not in it to get rich,” Les declared. He realized that wasn’t likely going to happen, of course, but for him, piling up