Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [95]
People trailed to their tents gradually. The fire faded and the light in the sky gave over a bit of its luster to dark. I brought my toothbrush down to the water’s edge where the tide was rising for the second time that day. Brushing my teeth outside had always been one of the joys of an outdoor life. I stepped into the edge of the bay as I brushed. Lights the size of mustard seeds flared up in the water around my boots. I splashed my feet gently, which made the phosphorescence alight like a meteor shower. The sea held stars, moons, and fiery rocks in its midst.
I listened to the sound of the sea card against the cobble beach. I loved that sound of the rocks rolling against each other, wearing each other down into their smooth, round forms. It was a sound, I thought, that could cure almost anything.
I lay down in my tent and listened as the evening chorus of birds simplified. Gradually, melodies were plucked out of the air. First the incessant kinglet broke, then the varied thrush stopped its whistle. I hadn’t heard the fox sparrow that had been assembling its complicated song down near the beach for a while. The nuthatch had long since quieted. It was like pulling the instruments out of an orchestra one by one. Finally, it was just a single hermit thrush off in the distance, with its melody sounding sometimes liquid, sometimes metallic, always complete.
EPILOGUE
This morning I woke up to a silent bay. Windlessness kept the water flat and well-behaved and the pink and blue sky didn’t budge. It is fall, and the alder leaves are closing in on themselves. Yards are being picked up, cars winterized. Singles are coupling up for the cold months. Each week, half an hour of light drains away. You can feel the earth’s tilt.
In the weeks during which I was finishing this book, the nation’s eye was on Alaska like never before. The questions swarmed: What is Alaska all about? Who are Alaskans, really? And what do they stand for?
The answers revealed a knot of contradictions. We represent the country’s oil-slicked future; we are anchored in a grimy but abbreviated past; we are the nation’s newborn northern heartland; we are exceptional in countless ways—flung far to the north, we are neighbors to foreign territories, and we are good shots and brave in the cold.
Many Alaskans were thrilled just to be put on the map. We weren’t that afterthought of a state floating out there in the Pacific, extending a finger to tickle Hawaii’s chin. We wanted to be just like everyone else and, at the same time, to be different, better, to be exceptional. We wanted it all.
People who are paying attention say that these desires—for money, oil, gold, and a life away from it all—are threatening Alaska as it has never been threatened before. Our hankerings make us restless—so we move often; our ambitions transform the land and sea. Today, Alaska is warming, melting, and shrinking.
But no natural system is static. The seasons change, the ocean cycles, the earth shakes from time to time, swinging the ceiling lamp like a pendulum over your head. What we don’t know is, how quickly will the land and sea outside our windows become unrecognizable? Which of the riches we’ve come to depend on here—a freezer full of fish, ample berries, nearly endless beds of mussels and clams, silence—will be the first to go?
To live in this place is, in part, to destroy it; that is the paradox—and the responsibility—we live with every day.
I imagine myself in the future, gray-haired, with the backs of my hands like old maps, telling newcomers the same kinds of stories that were told to me when I first moved here. But in my version, the species are different. “We used to head across the bay during minus tides and get as many mussels and clams as we wanted,” I might say. “On a lucky dipnetting day, you could catch all the salmon you needed for winter in a single tide.” I can’t keep that image out of my brain, but I don’t want to tell those stories like that. I don’t ever want to tell stories about what’s gone.
What is singular about Alaska