Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [90]
There were many things to figure out: how to move a free couch into the house that wouldn’t fit through the front door, how to get help from strong men without leading them on; and how to live separately from—but in such close proximity to—a man I had loved and left only a handful of months before. I saw John’s car around town more than I saw him. I fought the urge to spend time with him, although a few times, when we did see each other among friends, we orbited around each other awkwardly.
Those months, as I bounced between trying to be the alluring bar girl, the proficient gardener, the solo explorer, and the resourceful rental house fixer-upper, I felt kaleidoscopic, but not in a dazzling and beautiful way. I felt fragmented into parts, the constant shifts revealed pieces of myself that hadn’t been seen—even by me—in a long time. Weekend days opened empty with just my own whims to follow. I wanted most of all to feel independent, but so much autonomy left me dizzy. On the most beautiful days, the sunny and still ones when the perfectly blue sky seemed to be saying there was no reason to be anything but perfectly content, I felt the worst. I wanted someone to whisk me off on an adventure of their devising. No one showed up. So I worked to make headway in the garden. The twenty by twenty–foot patch became my distraction, my refuge. My moods changed like weather, my barometer dependent on so many small things. The garden thrived, but I was lonely. I constantly asked myself: Should I stay?
ON THE SOUTH side of the bay, we were a loose group of friends who seemed to be linked by a penchant for being on the outer side of doors. A few years before, Dale and Sharon had invited John and me to join them on a full-moon skate on a frozen lake where the night was silent except for the groaning of the ice and the scrape of our blades, which wrote a language on the surface of the lake that seemed to be the only thing worth saying. That night cemented a sporadic friendship. Later, we had gone on a too-long spring ski deep in the hills behind town where we crossed and recrossed a river on ice that was dangerously thin. We ran out of snow a half-mile from where we’d parked the car the day before and had to carry our skis the rest of the way, postholing in patches of rotten snow up to our thighs. Along the way, we did not see anyone else, but we saw a dozen moose grouped up along the river, strangely social in a way we’d never known about before. When we finally reached the car, we were exhausted to the point of tears, linked by extreme hunger, crankiness, and eagerness to do it all over again the next spring.
They were all good people, but no one wanted to perch themselves at the bar with me, scanning the room for eyes that were also on the roam. They’d outgrown nights at the bar, they told me. I was a few years too late. I either went alone or stayed home. Loneliness flushed in and out of me.
AFTER PITCHING OUR tents, we took off on our own. Dale and Sharon took the kayaks out; Joel, Marla, and Sue went to scope out a hiking trail up the ridge. I clambered over fallen spruce to a spot at the top of a rocky bluff where the sun fell on a soft patch of yellow-green moss. From here I could see the mouth of the bay, how the inlet on which we camped split into two narrow fjords separated by the green backbone of a mountain ridge, scoured long ago by glacial ice hundreds of feet thick. Three islands anchored themselves near the mouth of this inlet and a rock the shape of an elephant’s head reared up out of the water. Although a breeze was raking the water into whitecaps, I was sheltered from the wind. The sun lay across my lap, my chest and face. And so I began to take off my clothes, layer by layer. First the rubber boots and wool socks. Then my fleece coat. Undressing here felt like a supreme luxury; there