Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [82]
There was other work to be done. The property was littered with other remnants of the previous owners. Dozens of crab pots—with a diameter the size of eighteen-wheeler tires—were stacked along the driveway. An old truck—with four flat tires—had been pushed off the driveway and sat nosed up into a stand of spruce. Boat parts—an anchor, an engine, the mold of a hull—sat in thick grass. There were rusty drums and old boat batteries parked along the driveway, and wooden pallets that had been tossed haphazardly everywhere. A skeet shooter stood on a spruce pole platform in the grass, and we found clay pigeons scattered across the meadow. A chicken coop built with spruce siding and the frame of a greenhouse were falling apart on either side of the meadow. And there was so much other junk. But when I cupped my hands on either side of my face—to block out the decrepit trailer, the glassless greenhouse, the rotting chicken coop—what I saw was the long grassy meadow edged by spruce, the peaks of the mountains across the bay, and our own slice of sky.
SINCE MOVING TO Alaska, we had been surrounded by people who had bought land and built their own homes. There were Dave and Rebecca, whose property, farther out of town than ours, dipped to the southeast, granting them a view of the head of the bay and up a glacier-filled valley on the south shore. They had put up a small, two-story place and kept adding on as their family grew. They had a chicken coop—made out of an old wooden boat—and their toilet was a five-gallon bucket they emptied onto a compost pile in the yard. I couldn’t imagine what Rebecca’s parents thought when they came up to visit from their retirement home in Florida. Another friend, Sasha, had bought eight acres thirteen miles out of town that had a small cabin on it. When Collin came into her life, they got pigs and another dog, extended the garden, and started building a workshop. It seemed everyone was in some stage of buying land or building. And it seemed that this is what everyone did who stayed: They staked out their own piece of land, then made it theirs. They cleared and built, graded and maintained.
For a year, John had been suggesting that we buy a place. But I had resisted. I wasn’t ready for the responsibilities or the commitment. At the back of my mind, I always wondered if I’d return to the East. But I had been romanced: by the way pairs of ravens tangoed across the sky; by moose tracks left provocatively along streets in the middle of town; by the musk of the sea. And the month on the Delta left me swooning. This was a rich life. I loved the way hills unrolled endlessly behind town, and how, at the foot of them sat a strip of undeveloped beach. Undeveloped beach—where else could you find that? Here, streams ran unfettered to the sea. Migratory birds flew in and out unimpeded. Moose dropped calves around town. As each year passed, the seasons changed how I lived. I knew the species of trees and the low plants that grew in the taiga, in meadows, along the trails in the dense woods across the bay. I was beginning to be able to identify every bird I saw. I knew where to find clams and mussels, and was learning the names of the creeks that veined down the bluff behind town and made their way to the beach. I could gather up my courage to paddle across the bay; I could fill my boat with fish. I knew the names of many of the fjords and inlets created by the furrowed coastline on the south side of the bay: Tutka, China Poot, Peterson, Sadie. This, to me, was what home meant. And so, three years after moving here, I woke up one Saturday and told John it was time to look for a place.
Here, buying property wasn’t just about buying a place to live; it was often about buying a place to produce, to support yourself. We wanted to grow food, collect eggs from a coop full of hens. We wanted to heat our house for free and use water from