Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [8]
I dashed around the ship those first few minutes aboard. A forward viewing area at the bow had movie theater–style fold-down seats. A large deck opened at the stern. A dining room, cafeteria, and lounge sat amid-ships. Scores of cabins with small, rounded doors were scattered around the ship, and cars, trucks, and RVs were strapped down on the lower deck. It was the tail end of the tourist season and although the ferry—the largest of Alaska’s fleet of eleven—had been built to carry five hundred passengers, the ship was fairly empty.
I planted myself at the bow to watch the ship untether itself from land. Deckhands detached ropes as fat around as my thigh from the dock and wound them up onboard. The anchor chain with links the size of loaves of bread was reeled into the hull. We were off. On my first trip to Alaska, I was going there to stay indefinitely.
I had wanted to move north slowly in order to watch the landscape metamorphose and to feel the true distance that separated the life I was leaving from the one I was going toward. As the ferry chugged through British Columbia’s Inside Passage, the landscape regressed: Buildings were plucked off shorelines, roads erased from treed slopes, boats disappeared from the water. Green islands emerged from the sea like knees and rounded hills of spruce and hemlock became stout mountains along the shore. It looked as though a monstrous needle had been stitched through the very fabric of the land and smocked it along the coast. The ferry moved through narrow passes where seals bobbed their bulbous gray heads off the ship’s gunwales, and one morning I awoke at 5 A.M. to see the fin of an orca knife the black surface of the sea. The region wasn’t entirely devoid of human artifacts. Navigational markers alerted captains from atop hills, and great swaths of forests had been clear-cut, leaving them looking naked and shaved.
Somewhere in those narrow passages the ship crossed the invisible boundary between British Columbia and Alaska. Minutes of latitude ticked by. Each hour pressed new sights against my eyes: wood cabins graying near the sea’s edge, grasses combed right up to the shore, a hundred kinds of green. I was enchanted.
My romance with the largest state had begun years before, in the fifth grade, with an assignment to write a report on the state of my choice. I chose Alaska because I knew it still held undeveloped territory and pictures of it evoked wondrous things I’d never seen with my own eyes: brown bears as large as station wagons, glaciers like icy interstates through mountain ranges, peaks so sharp they looked like saw blades against the sky.
I turned in a 43-page assemblage of cursive paragraphs on lined notebook paper, magic marker drawings, magazine cutouts pasted on blank pages, and photocopied geography handouts I’d carefully filled in with erasable pen. The next week, the class held a banquet in which each student brought a dish from his or her state. My best friend studied Idaho and toted in a pan of scalloped potatoes. I brought the only dish my mother and I could think of, Baked Alaska, which involved carving a cavity in a store-bought angel food cake, packing it with ice cream, slathering meringue over the entire thing, and baking it quickly at a high temperature. One thing on the outside, something very different within: Alaska was lodged permanently in my mind.
The summer I was fifteen, I went backpacking for two weeks in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. Tall rhododendrons reached pink blossoms skyward at the tops of twisted trunks, and creeks ran cold and clear, unlike the one that puttered warmly behind our house. At night, I lay under a clear sky and saw more stars than I’d ever imagined and spotted satellites zipping across the Milky Way. And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about Alaska. The mountains of the East were humped with age and the forests, crisscrossed by logging roads, seemed tame.
Eager to go north, I applied for jobs in national parks in Alaska. They were all taken. So I settled on stints of trail