Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [77]
Even though I had the familiar sense of life paring down to its most important components—eat, work, wash, sleep—there was much that surprised me about life on the Delta. The day the tree swallows showed up in camp, I was shocked by the covetousness that possessed me in the midst of this communal life where possessions—a good novel, sunscreen, a bottle of Glenlivet—were few and easily shared. I wanted to keep the birds around, to have them nest here and be our pets. These brilliant blue-green birds nest in tree cavities, and we watched the four birds flit around camp exploring every possible nesting site: the vacant circle in the battered weatherport door where a doorknob should have been, a hole in the metal cap on the top of a propane tank. We were surrounded by nesting birds, but that morning, nothing seemed more important than keeping the swallows at this stop on their migration farther north, where they would find trees. A couple of the other biotechs and I ran around camp looking for supplies to make a nesting box. We sloppily hammered together a few pieces of wood, knocked out a knot to create a perfect swallow-sized hole, and then attached the wooden box with duct tape to a metal pole pounded into the tundra. We waited. One swallow landed on the box and inspected it. I held my breath. Unsuitable. In a few minutes, they were gone.
I was surprised, too, by the feeling that, although we all meant well and cared about the birds, just by being out here we were doing harm. As we walked across our plots, we flushed all kinds of birds from their nests, and sometimes gulls would fly in to take advantage of the unprotected eggs for a meal. Foxes scampered across the tundra and we suspected that they might be following our scents from nest to nest so they, too, could find easy food.
I had tried to prepare myself to once more be on John’s turf. But the more I depended on him to be my teacher, the more I shied away from him in every other way. So after dinner, I went to the tent and wrote in my journal to be alone. I described the varieties of mud—the deep stuff that had swallowed one of the other women’s hip waders one afternoon, setting us off into fits of laughter, and the drier mud, broken into continent-shaped fragments, which made the ground look like a gathering of maps. I recorded the strict hierarchy of water: the river, which was our road and drain; the wash water lake we returned to daily; and the blue plastic barrels of drinking water that had been hauled to camp by snowmachine in early spring by a couple of men from Chevak. I recorded small things I saw around me: a cold addled egg kicked out of a white-fronted goose’s nest; a dead shorebird stiff on the tundra; and groups of male common eiders in handsome black-and-white plumage with green on the backs of their heads who had left their mates to care for the eggs and hatchlings for the rest of the summer. Getting these sights down on paper became my own project.
I QUICKLY BECAME sensitive to the Delta’s subtle beauty. Nothing was showy about its stark horizon nor the plants that hugged this windswept land. The gray rivers were slow and flat. There were no dangerous large mammals around. A layer of fine mud coated everything so that when the veterinarian arrived—stepping out of the plane in clean jeans and loafers—he sparkled, everything metallic and unmuddied on him flashing: his watch, his wedding ring, the frames of his glasses. There was, however, nothing subtle about the turn of this season. It was the fastest,