Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [91]
Cushioned by moss, I found it easy to forget how thin a skin of green there was between me and the rock which made up the south side of the bay. All of this life—the nuthatches, nagoon berries, devil’s club, and thrush—was a simple layer of life above the bedrock. It had accumulated slowly, first with wind and rain turning rock to dust; lichen turning the dust to soil, which provided a bed for things to grow and reproduce on. But now there were columbine and cloudberries, marten and Steller’s jays. There were watermelon berries and moose and voles. There was sorrel, and goose-tongue. This whole ecosystem was a fresh cast of the primordial dice. It amounted to a dense but narrow tangle of life above the bedrock and beneath the sky. It was amazing that we had gotten here at all. Maybe it was the sudden burst of vitamin D on patches of my skin that hadn’t seen the sun in a long time that made me feel a surge of strength and independence lying there naked by myself. But a short gust of wind set off goose bumps on my skin, reminding me that each feeling was hitched to its opposite, the way centripetal and centrifugal forces keep our universe from collapsing as well as from scattering apart: Strength came with vulnerability, independence with loneliness.
THE NEXT MORNING, we woke up after a night under spruce and sat on the beach with the day, just after 8 A.M., feeling well under way. Marla boiled a pot of water for tea, coffee, and hot oatmeal. She was efficient at the stove—at clearing away cobbles to make a level spot for it on the beach. At priming the pump and lighting it. Water came from a creek down a short trail that led away from our tents and the plywood outhouse a bit farther into the woods. The sky had been peeled of clouds, which had gathered the evening before, and it was already a brilliant blue. I wore all the layers I had brought and sat cross-legged at the top of the beach with both hands clutching a warm mug of tea. I spread cream cheese on a cold grocery store bagel and ate it quickly. The tide was on its way out. I’d checked the tables the night before. Low was a minus 4.7 at 9:58. My watch said 8:11. As the tide retreated and I drank my tea, the dropping bay left a wet edge on shore. There was still over an hour left until the tide sunk to its lowest and as I sat at the top of the gravel beach, rubber boots outstretched before me, the bay continued to drain.
When tea and coffee were done, we headed down the beach to where the damp margin was widening. I stepped across rocks studded thickly with barnacles, which crunched beneath my boots, and walked through shards of clamshells strewn between the rocks. Cockles gaped open, revealing a yellowish tongue of flesh inside their deeply grooved shells. They tasted like clams but were chewier; people put them in chowders. Clams shot streams of water from the sandy places between rocks. You could look across the beach and see dozens of them firing off like a timed performance. I wanted to get to the water’s edge, where I could see things revealed only at the year’s lowest tides. Then I would follow the water back up the beach as the tide changed. Farther down, boulders were embedded in the beach and covered by barnacles and popweed, seaweed with air bladders that looked like pea-sized bubbles within their fronds. There was more than a two-story drop in elevation from the top of the beach to where I squatted at the water’s edge. These were two worlds: one tied to land, the other a limb of the sea. Here, I was entering the sea.
Squatting down to my knees to get a closer look, I parted the blades of kelp at the bay’s retreating edge to find pools of water beneath the damp fronds. These kelp, exposed only during such extreme low tides, had blades nearly