[Made-for-TV shelter on Fox Island]
—
To get hours during the early season here, I spent time completing random tasks—like planting flowers to spruce up the deck around the office. I hadn’t gotten my hands dirty planting things in a long while. Gardening smells so good! I’d forgotten the freshness. Leaves and soil, dry or wet. I replanted hanging baskets except the baskets were retired buoys. Somebody had cut them open to make a mouth. I filled each mouth with flowers.
I also harvested a full carpet of moss from the deck of an abandoned boat and spread the greenery in front of another boat full of buoys.
This is one of those places where people have lived long enough for stuff to accumulate. Folks are always visiting the “boneyard” (where lumber goes to be reborn) or trawling the wood shop for stuff to repurpose. Lumber is expensive in Alaksa.
My kitchen counter on my cabin porch is 90% an old counter somebody left in the woods after last season and 10% an old campsite marker with numbers facing out, a nod to its heritage. It seems the necessary materials for anything you could want to make are here if you find the right overlooked corner. It gives a sense of cyclic possibility. The only rule of thumb, I’m told, is that if it looks too nice to use, it is.
—
I took part in the filming of an Argentine in TV show. A whole heap of producers and two stars. The concept, one producer told me when I asked, is that the main guy flies around the world in his plane and invites one friend to join him on each new adventure. They do something that is “authentic” to each new travel destination.
My job was to get dropped off on an island and set up a camp they could return to after a day of fishing. The idea was that they’d cook their fish over an open fire that they would build themselves.
They filmed the stars walking off the boat and laughing five times. There was debate over whether my boss should actually make the fire for them off camera. “No, let him do it,” a producer said.
“Has he ever made a fire before?” I asked.
“No. And when he’s bad at things he acts like a child. It’ll be funny.”
It was a weird day. The contrast between hanging out alone on an island for four hours and being part of a boiling ant hive that is TV show production was sharp. Everyone was speaking fast Spanish into headsets and crouching behind bushes to keep out of the shot.
When they showed back up on the island, my face was covered in charcoal from deadlifting the remains of old fires. I needed to make the fire ring look more aesthetically pleasing. Make it seem natural.
We fake left the beach before we could really leave the beach.
—
On one of my training trips, we took out a family with some very cute kids. One sitting in the front of my kayak was around 5 or 6. She was determined to paddle well because she wanted to go fast. Occasionally she would take a break and let her hand trail in the water. Can you paddle faster? She asked me over and over again. She wanted to feel the speed through her fingers.
Later I tried to explain what pins and needles were because her brother’s foot had fallen asleep. “Sometimes,” she said, “My feet feel like they’re full of beans.”
When we went to land, I told her at the end that we finally got to paddle as fast as we could to get up on the beach. “What if we go to the top of the mountain?” She asked, clearly delighted by the prospect.
On the water taxi on the way back she was jumping around. To get her to sit down, I started showing her where we were on the map. Then we looked at pictures of marine animals. We saw this one and this one and this one she said. Yes, yes, no, I told her, I said, explaining sea lions versus seals.
I haven’t spent time with little kids in a long time. I didn’t realize I’d missed it. The strange ways their brains leap from subject to subject. How quickly they become excited or bone-crushingly tired. Unexpected descriptions and wants that seem to bubble up out of nowhere.
Before she left, her parents gave me a tip and she gave me a hug.
—
When I’m not on a trip, I eat breakfast on my cabin’s little porch. I have a camp chair and a foot rest.
One afternoon this week, I had my feet crossed in front of me while drinking tea. Little brown bird swooped down and landed on my purple croc. I held still for a heartbeat. She flew away.
—
[Ochre Stars under the tideline]
—
We put clients in tandem boats. Divorce boats, we call them. A sharp jab of a joke. The person in back steers using peddles to control a rudder; the person in front sets the paddling pace and looks out for rocks. Most of the time, in hetro couples, the dude wants to be in back. Unfortunately for some of them, people six-feet and up can only sit in front.
- One husband started by telling his wife she would be terrible at steering. No surprise, she was. Constantly overcorrecting hard and tracing sharp zig-zags in response to his critiques.
- One wife wanted to sit in back. So he can’t see when I don’t paddle, she said. Nobody laughed.
- One guy made a huge show of how OK he was with not steering. “Good job, Honey. Good job,” he said, whenever she went in the direction he pointed towards.
- A few couples are just fine. They’re not too focused on who’s doing what. An observation: these couples are often very excited about starfish.
—
The sea life center in town put on a free art workshop: How to Draw Feathers. We started with little exercises: counter drawings and value sketches. Then we launched into a longer study of the mallard tail feathers in front of us. Drawing, the instructor said, is all about paying attention. Our brain likes to fill in the blanks of what we’re seeing. When you really look closely, you see more. Drawing is a way to keep your mind engaged in the act of looking.
Writing, I think, is similar. It was amazing how quickly the two hours slipped by.
—
[An experiment in drawing iridescence]
—
Another trip, another family with kids. The youngest one was eight years old and had a broken foot. They’d signed up for a park trip, which is a long day. A mistake nobody caught until we were on the boat already because they showed up late. His older brothers took turns paddling with him, because he got tired and bored too quickly to pull his own weight. Then, in the last hours of the day, his eldest brother hit on a strategy to get him reinvested. “Let’s be pirates.” And the little guy started loudly humming the pirates of the Caribbean theme song as they raced across the water. “We have to beat the skeletons!” he said.
“To where?” I asked.
“The buried treasure,” he said as though it were obvious.
—
I’v been very sensitive to ocean imagery in poems lately. For instance:
“…the seaweed that holds itself up with air
bubbles, like we hold ourselves up with ideas.”
(from “Baltics” by Tomas Tranströmer)
And:
“…spray of that sea,
irised: otters in the tide lash, in the kelp-drench,
mammal warmth and the inhuman element. Ah, that is the secret.”
(from “Against Botticelli” by Robert Hass)
—
More often than not, when it’s not raining, the day ends around a fire. Somebody starts working the wet wood into a flame and then other people gather. A warm feeling.
At one fire, friends were just getting started preparing for bed when somebody looked at their phone. 11 pm and still light. “There are whales by the office,” she said. “Bubble-net feeding.”
A few days before someone had described the strategy to me: It’s learned collaborative hunting technique, where humpback whales circle prey and push out strings of bubbles in a spiral pattern. When several whales work together, they can corral their future food into a vertical column. Then they dip below and swim straight up with their mouths open.1 What’s extra cool is not all family groups of whales know how to do it. It’s cultural, gets passed down to members of particular communities.2
We ran to watch. Nothing visible but a strangely dense cloud of birds. The sky was softening into an evening light, the mountains gathering in their shadows. People spread out along the beach. We waited.
Suddenly, the birds moved as a group and a whale shot up, mouth open, sea water spilling out the edges. Like an overzealous toddler still working on how much food he can cram into one bite. It crashed back down. Quiet but not for long. The whales came up again, and again, and again, moving south through the bay. People followed along the shore. Some with cameras, some with phones.
Each time the whale surfaced, a corresponding feeling of delight surged in my chest and throat. Such consistent magic. The whales were still feeding when I turned to go to bed.
—
[Evening meal]
—
People talk about drifting off to sleep. These days, right before I lapse into unawareness, I sometimes feel the sway of deep water under me. It’s like being drunk when the world spins, but the feeling is quieter. I float out into the dark.