Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [84]
Weeks later, when John was at the property alone, a pair of Mormon missionaries hiked up the driveway in their blacks and whites. You could spot the traveling Mormons from a mile away: They were the only men in town who wore suits. And their hair was neatly trimmed, their faces clean-shaven, and their shoes made for pavement. “I wanted to offer them tea,” John reported to me later. “But I didn’t have a stove or a pot. So instead, I asked them to leave.”
We were in the middle of sorting through old fishing gear piled beneath the two-story shed one afternoon when we heard a high-pitched shriek coming from someplace beyond the bottom of the driveway. It continued, like the sound of a pained question, the tone rising at the end. It was somehow familiar, but I couldn’t place it. John didn’t know either. We walked to the road where a man with a skinny, gray braid hanging down his neck and a cigarette between his fingers stood looking up into a tall spruce. He lived up the road. “Bear cubs,” he said. “Must have lost their mama. Just called Fish and Game. They’re sending someone out.” As we stood there, the sound continued and a scene flashed through my head of a long-past summer in the Rockies that I’d spent clearing trails, when I’d seen some small dark animal up a tree, a dark shape with spines. “Sounds kind of like a porcupine,” I mumbled. “Naw. Just some lost bear cubs crying for their mama,” the man said.
A mint green Fish and Game truck came down the road and stopped near us, the engine idling. The driver rolled down the window. “Hey Bill,” he said to the man with the braid. “Howdy,” he said to us. He listened for a minute to the shrieks. “What you got there is a porcupine. And we’ll just leave him be,” the Fish and Game man said before turning his truck around and taking off. For a moment, I felt the small victory of having had the answer to that high-pitched question. I so badly wanted to have that answer, to have any answers.
As fall ticked by and winter’s dark sky began to hang lower and closer, the days we spent working on the property felt long and damp. The leaves dropped and the grasses died back, shoving into the fore all the work we hadn’t done: the broken wood pallets we hadn’t burned, the deflated buoys we hadn’t taken to the dump, the defunct truck we hadn’t towed away. But our dreams kept the despair at bay: We talked about the seeds we would plant in the spring, the ski routes we wanted to explore from the place that winter, the colors we would paint the walls and plywood floor of the cabin.
Every weekend, we worked all day then fell into bed exhausted, the smell of the burnpile lingering in our hair and in the heap of clothes we’d stripped off in the corner of the room. Pretty soon we realized the two-story building would have to be torn down—the stairs swayed beneath our feet and the pressboard floor had rotten out. We realized the previous owner never would come pick up the crab pots, car batteries, and fifty-five-gallon drums as he’d promised. We realized we would spend years pulling nails out of the soles of our shoes.
But John worked on, decisive and undeterred. Part of me wanted to torch everything, the other part wanted to examine it all as if sorting through an ancient midden. What clues did this junk provide? What could we save to use again? My uncertainty bred deliberation; the deliberation bred inefficiency. While I debated what was useful and what was junk, John dismantled