Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [69]
Alaska produces almost nothing; the ships come up full and leave mostly empty, except during summer when they cart seafood away. Each day is a parade of stuff into the state: doughnuts, sneakers, car tires, lumber. As the snow melted away that spring, the question rung out: Where did it all end up? Landfills swelled, backyards filled, warehouses restocked, houses shot up on cleared slopes.
In early summer, it was hard not to detest the arrival of so much equipment: RVs the size of eighteen-wheelers towing shiny SUVs, trailers spilling out four-wheelers, trucks trailering thirty-foot fishing boats. Like seeds set to the breeze, tents were strewn across the Spit, sprouting fire pits, parked rental cars, driftwood and tarp structures that struggled against the wind. Each year, a few took root and stayed.
It was impossible to resist the urge to surround ourselves with what we knew, what we owned, what we bought and created. Recently, I’d complained to John about not having a spot for my books, the few knickknacks I’d brought with me or recently accumulated. When I’d moved to Alaska, I had abandoned my meager amount of furniture—scrounged from yard sales and friends—and instead brought only what I could carry in a backpack and two bags I’d loaded onto the ferry. With so few things of my own around, life felt transitory, like a rental. So, I started collecting: rocks shaped like squares, small gray beach pebbles smoothed by the sea, gull vertebrae scrubbed by surf, driftwood sculpted into pleasing forms. I covered the windowsills and wanted more space. I thought if I had my own spot for my own things, it might make my life here seem less provisional. Over the winter, John had encouraged me to build a small bookshelf using the landlord’s shop and scrap wood he’d salvaged. John showed me how to use a table saw, circular saw, jigsaw, and router. The shelf emerged as a stunted piece of furniture, made to fit below a window, and impractically short for anyplace else. I’d get rid of the shelf a few years later, another piece of junk that moved through my hands and then out of sight.
If you thought about it long enough, it could make you weep or feel sick to your stomach: We were ruining the very thing we’d all moved here for. We were bringing in so much stuff, our footprint was always spreading into places where no human development had existed before. We were clearing land for more refuse: for buildings that would rot away within a generation or two; for level land on which to park cars that would eventually break down and fall apart; to raise up storage units to hold things we rarely used. Developers felled trees, scraped the rolling landscape flat, subdivided, hauled in truckloads of gravel for an access road, and planted a sign: PANORAMIC VISTA: NATURE OUT YOUR FRONT DOOR.
As with life anywhere else, the rubble of our lives held our histories. You couldn’t give Dungeness crab or shrimp pots away anymore, so they piled in yards as evidence of busted fisheries, an ocean changing faster than people’s ability to forget. A mechanical clam digger with wheels more than six feet high sat rusting in the mudflats on the Spit for years. Originally a military vehicle used to haul equipment across snow, it had been outfitted to dig into sand for razor clams as part of a pilot commercial clamming project that went belly-up. When the city launched a beautification project that encouraged people to haul away junk, a local machinist who had snuck beers with friends behind the massive digger during high school dragged the thing eight miles out the road to his front