Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [74]
A WEEK LATER, a couple of hours past midnight, the sound of outboards drifted into my sleep like a mosquito in the ear. I awoke as John was leaving our tent. The rest of the crew arrived after a cold, six-hour trip on the river in two small skiffs and two wide aluminum boats. Five biologists, including the project director, were aboard the skiffs, which were heavy-laden with gear. The larger boats were run by four stocky Native herring fishermen who had broad, brown faces. They were hired to haul gear that couldn’t fit in the small camp skiffs. These men lived in Chevak, a village of eight hundred people who spoke a unique dialect and called themselves Cup’ik. The skiffs we used all summer long were stored there between field seasons. Wearing every layer they had brought, topped off by sturdy rubber rain gear, the five biologists moved stiffly as we all gathered on the cut bank in the dusky light of the middle of the night to unload the boats. The Cup’ik men wore jeans, sweatshirts, light windbreakers, and baseball caps. The tide was out, and without much talk, we lugged dozens of heavy plastic totes from the boats onto the bank, now about ten feet above the river’s surface. Four guys steadied themselves to heave the generator. With the engines cut, the night was quiet—even the birds were silent—but the banging of gear against the boats’ hulls sounded like the striking of drums. The light was like that moment of dusk when trees rise as paper cuts against the sky. Here, that quality of light lingered.
I was curious about the new biotechs—these people I’d be living so closely with over the next few weeks. But more than that, I sought some kind of insight into the men from Chevak, into how they lived, how they looked at the Delta. They said little, just chuckling with each other softly as they worked. John brought a pot of tea out of the gear tent once the unpacking was done. We stood on the bank of the river, in that extended twilight and silently drank tea, holding the mugs with both hands so as not to lose any warmth. One of the Cup’ik guys, who I realized on closer glance was perhaps only fourteen, quietly broke the silence by telling us he had just written a school report on a tundra plant called Labrador tea. “It’s got a lot of antioxidants,” he said, that health magazine term knocking around strangely in his mouth. Soon afterward, the Native men got back in their boats and took off as the sky was beginning to get light.
Over the next few days, camp blossomed from a basic shelter to a comfortable outpost. The project leader, Joel, was in his late thirties and bumbled around camp in the same pair of stained red sweatpants every day. He was quiet but enjoyed the opportunity to laugh, and was an easygoing boss. Field crews changed from season to season, and the rest of our nine-person crew was a motley assortment of college and graduate students in biology on their summer break, and a volunteer in his sixties who was less interested in work than in adding rare Eurasian bird species to his life list.
We put up a weatherport, an uninsulated platform tent tall enough to stand up in, which served as kitchen, living room, and office. We furnished it with an oil heater, a two-burner propane stove, folding chairs, shelves, and a kitchen table. One of the biotechs stapled a flowery plastic tablecloth to the table’s ragged surface; spices, marinades, dry goods, canned food, and chocolate bars emerged from plastic totes.
Mornings at field camp normally passed leisurely. We packed into the weatherport, where the oil heater created the only warm, dry, and windless space for miles around. Unless someone decided to make