Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [89]
When we landed, the young guy hired for the summer to run the twenty-five-foot boat nosed it up onto the gravel beach and lowered a ladder off the bow into shallow water. I climbed out with two of the others. Those on board passed gear—packed in duffels, backpacks, canvas bags, and dry bags—from the deck to those of us standing in rubber boots in the ankle-deep sea at the bow. Then we unloaded three kayaks and carried them up the beach.
After the boat took off and the sound of its engine faded, we ferried the rest of the gear to the top of the beach. We pitched our tents in spruce needle–strewn depressions between the trees that grew just beyond the border of beach grass and lovage, a tall plant with white, umbrella-shaped flowers and edible leaves that tasted like parsley.
IN THE MONTHS after I left John, I grew more sweet peas than I’d ever imagined, rented four different houses, and forgot about the crab fisherman. I got drunk at bars late into the night, taking over the dance floor with a couple of girlfriends. I’d put on brand-new red lipstick I’d bought from an Anchorage department store makeup counter, where a woman with dark hair slicked back into a perfect ponytail, eyes lined coal-black, and a white lab coat over a streamlined black outfit convinced me she knew exactly what I needed. She pulled out a deep red; I trusted her entirely. Before heading to the bar, I’d grab the sheepskin coat I had found at a used clothing store; the coat was stained and worn, but its wide furry collar made me feel glamorous. On Saturdays, I spent hours thinning carrots or rigging up mini-greenhouses to warm the struggling zucchini plants in my garden. These contraptions of plastic sheeting and wood stakes encouraged the squashes to grow and then rot. I used a borrowed posthole digger to build a fence of spruce posts and gill net to keep moose out of the broccoli, kale, and beets. Most nights, I returned home alone, but occasionally I’d bring home a member of a band touring through from out of town.
That spring, I borrowed a kayak, tied it on the top of my car, and drove up the highway. I camped alone on the far side of a small lake where red-necked grebes were busy building floating nests and savannah sparrows called from the tops of chest-high spruce. In the morning, I hiked to the next lake over, stepping between brown bear tracks freshly laid in the muddy trail. Proud of my initiative to explore, yet terrified of the prospect of bears, as I walked I sang to myself, to the bears, to the kinglets that weren’t listening up in the trees. It was a thrill to learn I could heave the boat onto the top of my car and take it down alone. It was a thrill to learn that my own knots held.
Newly alone, necessity required me to adapt, and there were times when I felt like an amputee learning to do those mundane things that had been so easy before. I had to figure out how to get the hundred-pound rototiller I’d rented at the hardware store out of the back of my station wagon. The hardware guys had helped me get it in, but in my driveway, I was on my own trying to get it out. Suddenly simple machines rigged out of scraps of wood were invaluable. Each solution I engineered became a small victory. The diaphanous shower curtain I’d bought used at the Pick ’n’ Pay for ten cents billowed to the ceiling once I turned on the water. So I thought of an economical solution: I slid a row of pennies into the bottom seam to weight it down. The coins made a racket as they banged against the inside