Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [83]
During the weeks after our purchase, we walked the property to find its corners, which were marked with pink plastic tape. We made plans about how to proceed. John had ideas about how everything should be done: how the trailer should be moved, a cabin built around the existing structure, the place cleaned up. On our days off, we left our rental place in the morning to drive out to the property and didn’t return until dinnertime. We hacked down outbuildings and threw the wood onto a swelling burn pile. John climbed onto the top of the shed and removed the aluminum roofing. We set it aside to use for the cabin. For days I moved junk from one end of the property to the other. There were buckets of damp nails, old tools unusable because of rust, tangles and tangles of line. With everything, we made the decision: keep it, burn it, or take it to the dump. We spent days dismantling, burning, setting aside, and cleaning up. Still, there was no end in sight.
During these weeks, we scanned maps, seeing how the outline of our property fit into the land around it: the winding course of the creek, the route we could take to walk to a nearby lake no roads led to, the land protected from development, future subdivisions, neighbors’ parcels. We were so proud of our rectangle and the way it shared a boundary with land that would forever be free from roads, houses, strip malls.
All around our property, signs of ownership had been stamped onto the land. Homesteaders and early settlers had left their names on nearby roads: Thurston, Waterman, Kilcher, Greer. And across the map of the entire state, names reflected other kinds of ownership. The Russian: Bobrof Island, Mount Sergief, Strogonof Point, and Pavlof Volcano. The Native: Aiautak Lagoon, Kinipaghalghat Mountains, Takrak River, Hochandochtla Peak, and Kalakaket Creek. The British: Cook Inlet, Prince of Wales Island, Prince William Sound, and Bristol Bay.
Naming was one of the many ways to try to own a place. For our six acres, you wrote out a check and signed your name on a stack of papers at an office on one side of town. When the papers were filed at an office on the other side of town, ownership was official. Natives had owned the region by living here, by eating of the place, by surviving. Russians had doled out charters to companies; these pieces of paper granted them rights to natural resources, which they often took by force. Homesteaders filed a claim, paid a fee, lived on their allotment for five years, built a home, and farmed the land. Then they could “prove up” and the land was theirs. Not far up the highway you could turn off it, drive another thirty-five miles, and hike on the beach to a promontory of land that looks across the water to Anchorage. Here, at Point Possession, in 1778, after failing to find the fabled Northwest Passage, Captain Cook sent one of his men ashore to bury a brandy bottle containing a parchment that claimed all of the surrounding lands for England. Today, this tip of land remains testament to how so many acts of ownership mean nothing.
ONE WEEKEND, AT the end of a day of work on the land, we stopped by the house of a couple I knew who lived on the road: Rick and Lauren. He was tall and soft-spoken, like John, but with a long ponytail of nearly black hair falling down his back. She was a bookworm from Montreal with a sharp wit that reminded me of people I knew back East. They weren’t back-to-the-landers. They were professionals who worked in town and were talking about leaving the state for graduate school. “You’ll need a French drain,” Lauren instructed. This was a fancy term for a ditch that would divert water away from the house. “It’ll keep your place from becoming a pile of mud in the spring.” She laughed. John and I looked at each other. “We know someone with a Bobcat,” Lauren said quickly. “I can give you his number.”
Other neighbors walked up the driveway one afternoon and introduced themselves as we were throwing junk onto the burn pile. They were a couple in their fifties, both tall, with