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By Root 224 0

here was similar to what I had come to learn back home, but the Delta had its own parameters. Tides weren’t nearly as extreme here as in Homer, but you had to keep track of them, because a slough that cut a deep channel into your study plot might be a narrow trickle to cross at low tide, but would be a very cold swim when the water level rose almost a dozen feet later in the day and you wanted to get back to camp. I learned that running boats was a different thing in this muddy landscape than back home, where in the bay you had to be alert for submerged rocks. There were no rocks here, but the gray water masked mudflats that could trap even the most experienced boater. So you drove the skiff along the side of the river with the steep cut bank where the water was deeper, rather than closer to gently sloping mudflats. John gave me a lesson on a camp skiff one evening on the river, but when I accidentally opened the throttle when I meant to slow down, I vowed not to drive the boats anymore, and instead to sit in the bow and look out at the open country moving by.

On the Delta, land was a tenuous seam binding sea and sky. A pile of dust scraped off inland mountains and splayed out by the rivers, the region was shifty and nothing was solid. Hundreds of rivers migrated across the tundra, carving new curves, shrugging off old ones, and dropping deep, slippery mud where they slowed. On an incoming tide, the Bering Sea fingered into tidal sloughs, overtaking the flat land with its fragrance, and carting off with earth when it left. Each summer, I learned, camp was moved back a dozen feet, as the river gnawed away at its bank.

As soon as the snow broke into patches in spring, the Delta was thick with birds. Within a week of arriving, I had become familiar with the nearly three dozen species that nested around camp as if they were neighbors. The diversity spanned dainty songbirds to long-legged shorebirds, more than a dozen species of ducks and geese, raptors, cranes, and unwieldy swans. John helped me see the differences between all of the shorebirds—some of which I recognized from the thick flocks that stopped over at our bay back home. And he helped me hear the varied music of these birds: Savannah sparrows called in trills, black-bellied plovers sang from the highlands upriver, and willow ptarmigans burst with throaty laughs. The tundra extended as far as we could see, and each step revealed a vast thickness of birds. As we walked across our research plots, we parted flocks of brant geese whose prim black and white plumage made them look like a crowd of white-collar commuters waiting for the morning train. Inadvertently, we flushed countless shorebirds from their expertly concealed nests and scared mother geese into hunkering low on their nests. And a dunlin, a robin-sized shorebird with a black patch on its belly, perched atop our tent in the evenings and sang into the night.

While birds dominated the soggy landscape, Arctic foxes slunk by from time to time sniffing out a meal, and mouse-sized voles streaked occasionally across the weatherport floor. But it seemed as if the birds, with their deliberately engineered nests, their careful tracks across the mud, were the only things that kept the Delta from washing completely away.

I HAD SPENT a few summers on a trail crew and I loved living and working outside once again. I got used to the rhythm of chores: making dinner for everyone after a day in the field if you were among the first ones back to camp; hauling wash water in buckets from a nearby lake, brackish because it got inundated a few times a year by extremely high tides and swimming with tiny gray invertebrates. We took turns washing dishes after dinner at a table at the edge of the river, looking north as the sky turned pink. At that time of evening, loons flew downriver out to sea to feed, quacking loudly over our heads. It was the only time we used warm water for washing—heated on the propane stove—and as I soaked my hands, the dishwater melted away the chapping from wind and sun and the crescent moons of dirt beneath