Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [71]
As soon as the burnpile cooled, John shaved his beard clean and began building a new kayak. I had never seen his bare face before, his thin upper lip or the expanse of skin between his nose and mouth. He looked like someone I didn’t know. It was like erasing a memory and suddenly creating a new one. In six weeks, the new boat was done and John carried it outside into the yard, where the grass was now almost completely green. He lowered himself into the cockpit, rocking the boat on its keel and feeling it hold him at the hips. John wanted nothing but to get it in the water and go. And soon he would. But later that afternoon, with the boat still under the sun on the grass, a bull moose lumbered into the yard to gnaw on an elderberry shrub steps away from John’s new boat. We watched nervously from the window, afraid to startle the animal lest it put a hoof through the deck. The moose lost interest and moved on.
There are seasons in life when things seem to disappear. That was one of those seasons. The boats gone, the snow, John’s beard, a black cat with a white bib we’d adopted from the pound in the fall who didn’t come home one day. Picked off by a hawk or coyote, we assumed. The landscape naked of snow was bony and sullen, sallow and emptied out. Beneath our feet, the earth was waterlogged and cold; it waited.
In a few weeks, John would find the single picture he’d taken of me in my boat on its maiden voyage. You couldn’t tell it was me, the image was so small. But you could see the slick gleam of the boat on the surface of the bay, a slice reflecting the sun. He put it in a frame and set it on the windowsill. Now I could brag about the accomplishment of building it, but didn’t have to face the responsibility of owning it, or the obligation to explore by sea. I felt an indefinable sense of relief—one that I could never share with John. I hated that sense of relief, but knew it was true. A tie to this place, to this man, had come undone.
10
THE DELTA
NEAP TIDE: n. A weak tide that occurs near the quarter moon phase when the gravitational force of the sun and moon are perpendicular to each other with respect to the Earth.
It was early June, the week before John and I would be going to far western Alaska, where he had secured summer jobs for us, working as field assistants on a bird research project. There were a few days’ worth of work in Anchorage, sorting through and packing up equipment and buying gear, before we would fly out to the research camp. We drove north up the highway. Dirty piles of snow lingered near the road where small avalanches had bulldozed down and come to a halt. Rushing snowmelt whitened every drainage, but everything else was green.
We’d been hired by a biologist John had worked for during two summers while in college. We stayed in a back room at the biologist’s house and spent our time driving from one side of Anchorage to the other, buying stuff John knew we needed for the field: hip waders, work pants, books and magazines. John and I considered the state’s largest city not a destination but a place where we found ourselves out of necessity, usually on the way to somewhere else. Aside from visiting nearly every rubber boot outlet in Anchorage, we stuck tightly to our usual spots: the Asian market where we could find the curries and Thai spices not sold in Homer, a couple of giant thrift stores, a mediocre bagel joint, and the huge new and used book store.
Three days later, we boarded the flight from Anchorage to Bethel, which took a little over an hour. Heading west, the jet rose over the sharp peaks of the Alaska Range and the blue glaciers in between. Beyond the range’s western