Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [9]
I know that love had something to do with my pull toward Alaska. During college, I had never managed to find one of those normal boyfriends—a history major from a Boston suburb, perhaps, or a pre-med student who liked to jog. Instead, I fell for men in the woods—men who knew how to chop wood, pack horses, and hail bush pilots by radio. I fell for men who knew how to say nothing as the full moon rose over the piñons, knew how to recognize the butterscotch scent of Ponderosa pines, and how to enjoy a life of hard work.
I graduated with a biology degree, and as soon as I found a job teaching science to fifth-graders on the Oregon coast, I quickly packed my bags. Between the snarled pines along the shore and the waves tumbling up toward them, I met John. A teacher in this ecosystem for years, John was a lanky man with a close-cropped brown beard and head of short, nearly black hair that peaked at his forehead. He was often quiet around people our age, but teaching drew out of him a dramatic flair that mesmerized young students. From the beginning, I was impressed by his ability to name all of the creatures in nearby rocky tidepools: buffalo sculpin, sea cucumber, opalescent nudibranch. But it was because of birds that I fell in love with him. Everywhere we went, John knew all of the birds: western grebe, Townsend’s solitaire, ruddy turnstone. He kept binoculars slung around his neck at all times, and with one hand steadying them as he walked, it looked as if he was holding them against his heart. On our days off, John took me to a lush oasis in the middle of the Oregon desert that was filled with birds. We paddled a borrowed canoe to an island where hermit thrush sang from the high boughs of ancient trees. Together, we sought out yellow-headed blackbirds, lazuli buntings, and American avocets, which wade on skyblue legs.
This sudden awareness of birds was a revelation to me. I had never bothered to look at birds or to learn the names of plants and animals where I had grown up. Although I was a biology major, I had spent more time designing experiments in the greenhouse and lab than in paying attention to what was happening in the woods. I knew maples and oaks and could recognize the cooing of mourning doves, but not much more. Once you know a place’s natural history, I realized, instead of the landscape feeling smaller in its familiarity, it expands exponentially. John and I spotted falcons above an old landfill and bright yellow warblers in a power line right-of-way. We spied hawks in the suburbs and watched a black cyclone of tens of thousands of chimney swifts funnel into an old smokestack to nest. John was attuned to a frequency of sound I had never known before. When we rode bikes around town in the morning, he’d point out robins when he heard their call. When we watched movies together, he’d notice which bird vocalizations had been dubbed in without regard to natural history.
During those first weeks of training in Oregon, as I became an ardent student of this foreign landscape so that I could turn around and teach it, John took notes on me. He wrote that I had looked harder than the other teachers had at the chitons, barnacles, and