Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [78]
In comparison to the Delta, Homer was a cluttered mess. Back home, electric lines intersected rooftops, roads crisscrossed creeks, and street signs pointed all over town. Having come to love a place bound by coastline and bluff, where the sky was interrupted by mountains and ragged stands of spruce, I was surprised at how fiercely I was drawn to the Delta’s clean divisions between river, bank, sky. An ancient landscape, the Delta was formed by the sloughing away of old mountains, yet the land renewed itself continually, refreshed with every influx of tide, scraped clean by the constancy of rivers. There was nearly continuous cacophony—the metallic melodies of Lapland longspurs, the coughing of tundra swans as they flew overhead, the barking of geese, the wailing and wailing of loons. Yet I had never known such silence.
I was entranced by the emptiness, the lack of human-made boundaries. At once a big empty bed just made up with fresh sheets and a blank page, the Delta’s flawless plain calmed and invigorated me. In rubber raincoat and boots, I lay in an X on the tundra, the vectors of my limbs shooting out infinitely. This was what it feels like to be cocooned by open space.
Often in the middle of the day I took a lunch break on one of the large pieces of driftwood that had washed downriver and been dropped far inland by the spring and fall high tides. Stripped of bark and washed smooth by months or years of sea and weather, the wood provided a dry place to sit with my back to the wind and pull out lunch from my pack. These pieces of driftwood were the largest things on the tundra, and with no other objects competing on the horizon, they loomed in the distance. Many were marked by an axe’s notch, signaling that they had been claimed by Native villagers and would be collected in winter when the Delta was frozen, when ice bridged the rivers and the terrain was easily navigable by snowmachine. Traditionally, the Yup’ik had used driftwood posts to support their semiburied sod homes and had stretched skins across driftwood frames for boats. Modern villagers lived in stick frame or prefabricated houses and owned skiffs with outboard engines; but in this treeless, shifty landscape, wood was still essential for sauna fires and to make racks for drying fish.
For enough years to witness the great movements of rivers, Yup’ik people relied on the Delta’s resources, living off its fish and seals, berries and whales, the heat of sweatbaths and the spotless cold of winter. The Internet had come to Delta villages, and while digital delivery of the rest of the world was speeding up every year, subsistence was a way of life among most Yup’ik here, and schools taught classes in the Native language. In summer, cut banks near the villages were dotted with fish camps, where families combed salmon out of muddy rivers with wide gill nets and dried them on wooden racks. Fishermen pulled bottom-dwelling fish up with longlines and took freshwater fish with handheld nets. Yup’ik families fanned out into the tundra to harvest berries and gathered at the mouths of rivers to shoot seals. As the days shortened, hunters traveled upriver for moose and caribou and hooked fish through holes in the ice. After a winter of eating their stores of dried meat and fish, the villages celebrated spring as the start of the new season of fresh, wild food. The Yup’ik name for April means “bird place,” and the arrival of millions of birds meant an abundance of things to eat.
You could call this the most remote region in the country. We were five hundred miles off the road system, in a region uninhabited for many miles. I loved being so far from communication; we were far from phone lines and the reach of the Internet, and had only a VHF radio to talk to other research camps and passing pilots as well as a suitcase-sized