For many the idea of living off the land is a romantic notion left to stories of olden days or wistful dreams at the office. But for Sara Loewen it becomes her way of life each summer as her family settles into their remote cabin on Uyak Bay for the height of salmon season. With this connection to thousands of years of fishing and gathering at its core, Gaining Daylight explores what it means to balance lives on two islands, living within both an ancient way of life and the modern world. Her personal essays integrate natural and island history with her experiences of fishing and family life, as well as the challenges of living at the northern edge of the Pacific.
Loewen’s writing is richly descriptive; readers can almost feel heat from wood stoves, smell smoking salmon, and spot the ways the ocean blues change with the season. With honesty and humor, Loewen easily draws readers into her world, sharing the rewards of subsistence living and the peace brought by miles of crisp solitude.
For many the idea of living off the land is a romantic notion left to stories of olden days or wistful dreams at the office. But for Sara Loewen it becomes her way of life each summer as her family settles into their remote cabin on Uyak Bay for the height of salmon season. With this connection to thousands of years of fishing and gathering at its core, Gaining Daylight explores what it means to balance lives on two islands, living within both an ancient way of life and the modern world. Her personal essays integrate natural and island history with her experiences of fishing and family life, as well as the challenges of living at the northern edge of the Pacific.
Loewen’s writing is richly descriptive; readers can almost feel heat from wood stoves, smell smoking salmon, and spot the ways the ocean blues change with the season. With honesty and humor, Loewen easily draws readers into her world, sharing the rewards of subsistence living and the peace brought by miles of crisp solitude.
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Overview
For many the idea of living off the land is a romantic notion left to stories of olden days or wistful dreams at the office. But for Sara Loewen it becomes her way of life each summer as her family settles into their remote cabin on Uyak Bay for the height of salmon season. With this connection to thousands of years of fishing and gathering at its core, Gaining Daylight explores what it means to balance lives on two islands, living within both an ancient way of life and the modern world. Her personal essays integrate natural and island history with her experiences of fishing and family life, as well as the challenges of living at the northern edge of the Pacific.
Loewen’s writing is richly descriptive; readers can almost feel heat from wood stoves, smell smoking salmon, and spot the ways the ocean blues change with the season. With honesty and humor, Loewen easily draws readers into her world, sharing the rewards of subsistence living and the peace brought by miles of crisp solitude.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781602231986 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alaska Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2013 |
| Series: | University of Alaska Press - The Alaska Literary Series |
| Pages: | 140 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.20(d) |
About the Author
Sara Loewen teaches writing at Kodiak College during the winter and spends the summer in Uyak Bay with her husband and two sons, where they fish commercially for salmon.
Read an Excerpt
Gaining Daylight
LIFE OF TWO ISLANDSBy Sara Loewen
UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 University of Alaska PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60223-198-6
Chapter One
giant wings
IT WAS EARLY JUNE and Uyak Bay churned as fin whales and humpbacks feasted, heaving and gaping, and we watched openmouthed from shore. These whales eat thousands of pounds of krill and fish a day. When a pair of humpbacks breached over and over down the length of the bay, it drew me outside to where Peter was working with a couple of crewmen. We all yanked on our raingear and ran to the skiff, and then floated, motor off, farther from the humpbacks than the regulations require, as much out of fear as respect. Watching the whales breach side by side made the open boat feel like a leaf on the water.
I braced myself against the side of our aluminum skiff, the bulk of my raincoat hiding six months of pregnancy. A surge of happiness surprised me. It was good to be on the water, to rush out into open space. Some days, overcast skies close over Amook Island like the lid of a box. I hadn't realized how lonesome the cabin had felt. I tried to think how many days it had been since I'd been off the beach. How many days since I'd felt happy.
A photograph of a breaching humpback isn't true. It is not loud like a bus plunging from a bridge. It's only the up, without the power of water to air, the startling grace, the enormity, the final slap. A photograph leaves out that deep secret beneath, water so dark and immense it can hide forty feet of whale, water that connects and carries these humpbacks from Kodiak Island in Alaska thousands of miles to the Hawaiian Islands or Mexico each year.
* * *
We spend winters in the town of Kodiak but leave every May for the salmon season, moving to our cabin in Uyak Bay on the west side of the island. At the fishsite we fall into a division of labor that feels both natural and restricting. When fishing is heavy, Peter is on the water more than he is on land, picking nets and delivering salmon. He is always moving, his attention pulled away from us and toward the bay. I take care of our sons, Luke and Liam, who are two and four and who love to be outside helping, which is why my garden vegetables grow in unruly rows and there is a permanent trail of dirt from one cabin door to the other.
When I stood facing Peter on our wedding day I said yes to this way of life without knowing the many things I was saying yes to. It's true of any marriage, that you can't know what you will gain or give up or the ways it will change you, but months on a remote island and the intensity of a fishing season can add to the magnitude of the choice. The fact that isolation can dredge up a loneliness you didn't know you were carrying around should be less surprising, yet it always feels wrong amid the beauty of an Alaska summer. It's the same as recognizing restlessness in the midst of a happy marriage or family life, or sadness you expected love to shield you from.
* * *
You'd think that living around whales every summer might eliminate the novelty or dampen the wonder. But their size alone is astounding. Inside fins almost two stories long are the same bones as a human arm and hand. I've read that humpbacks may carry a thousand pounds of barnacles; their hearts are as heavy as three people. Yet they are the lithest of whales, moving through the water as gracefully as "a swallow on the wing," in the words of nineteenth-century whaleman and naturalist Charles Melville Scammon.
Watching the humpbacks, I wanted to shed my sadness. I wanted to leap. The whales lifted and fell. They slapped their fins—the "giant wings" of their scientific name, Megaptera novaeanglia. Why the spyhop, the enormous backstroke, the flinging rise to sky? It was comforting—the untidy questions left open, refusing answers.
* * *
Another June, a few years earlier, as I nursed my first baby at the cabin, I felt as content as I have ever felt at our fishsite, rocking Liam and watching the wind carry off the spouts of whales traveling out to Shelikof Strait. I can't help but attach tenderness to images of mother humpbacks lifting their newborns to the surface, though it might be anthropomorphism. A mother humpback usually won't let her calf travel more than a body length away. She'll sometimes rest with the baby on her belly, or will rise up playfully with her calf on her back, letting it slide down her sides.
"The mother whale seemed solicitous only about her calf. She would fondle it with her huge snout, and push it along before her. She would get between it and the boats, to keep it out of harm's way," wrote Charles Nordhoff in Whaling and Fishing in 1856. "She would take it down with her, knowing that on the bottom was the safest place. But here the little one could not obey her. It was forced to come up to breathe at least once every two minutes, and by this means, even had we not been able to tell by the strain of our lines, we knew at all times where the old whale [was]."
I heard about a young humpback tangled in the seine of a local fishing boat last summer. The men on the boat said it cried like a wailing child as they worked frantically to cut away the net. Then its mother surfaced next to the calf, and immediately it calmed and was quiet. She stayed right there until her calf was freed.
When I cried over the news story of a starving baby humpback trying to nurse on the smooth underside of yachts in Sydney Harbor, I blamed the compulsive empathy motherhood seems to trigger. After all, it is not the same. The nipples of a nursing whale are more like a fire hose blasting gallons of pink milk into the calf's stomach, a hundred pounds a day of milk as thick as toothpaste.
So why do I think of them in the blackness under our skiff those nights we head home late, the baby under my jacket, me wondering if I was thrown into that cold water, if our skiff flipped, could I keep his head above the waves? Could I lift him into the air? I think of them those nights my babies root and nudge in the darkness and I meet them with an awkward turn, the ache of fullness.
* * *
Just after our second son, Luke, was born, I followed the humpbacks to Hawaii, inadvertently, when we traveled to Kauai for a friend's wedding. I was nervous about flying with a baby just a few weeks old. By the time our plane landed in Honolulu, my fingers had cracked from all the hand sanitizer.
"So what adventures do you have planned?" someone asked at the rehearsal dinner. Not zip lines, rafting, helicopter tours, or surfing lessons. It's an adventure getting two small children out the door and loaded into a car. These days are cluttered with an uneasy vigilance. Are they safe? Are they close?
In Hawaii, walking the beach around sunrise, enjoying the ease of slipping outside without a jacket or socks, I would search for spouts on the water, knowing somewhere offshore the humpbacks were giving birth and singing their lowing songs. Male humpbacks spend half the year singing. They sing alone and while escorting females with calves, and though every herd sings the same song, they make changes collectively as the season progresses. Jacques Cousteau described hearing humpbacks at night, their songs echoing off underwater canyons: "It seemed almost that one was in a cathedral, and that the faithful were alternating the verses of a psalm."
I would have liked to see our humpback whales again. But the boys were too little for catamarans and the baby too new to leave all day with a babysitter. They are still small enough that I can't imagine ever sending them off and letting them go. They fill my view. The only whales I saw in Hawaii were in a fountain at our Honolulu hotel—a sculpture of a mother humpback nosing her baby skyward.
When I next see humpback whales, they'll be in our cold waters. I'll follow two boys and two wagging brown tails down the beach. We are all visitors here, carrying within us our needs and songs, sharing the bay and these fleeting days of summer. Though the whales have been traveling since we finished the season, every year we watch them as if time hasn't passed, as if all is unchanged and stationary, the way you can't see your children growing while you are with them. From sea to sky, humpbacks breach again and again in Uyak Bay, and I watch, hoping to lift my own days to a place of contentment.
Chapter Two
december
REMEMBER DECEMBER? RememberDecemberrememberdecember. My best friend was named for the month in which she was born. I loved the rhyme of her name and the way her hair, black as winter solstice, hung straight to the back of her knees. Braided, it swung out below her coat like a tail or thick rope, strong enough, I imagined, to hold an anchor. Sometimes I called her "Cem," which sounded intimate, the way using a family version of a name suggests closeness.
The village we lived in was a nickname place. The nicknames weren't just to distinguish boys from their fathers. Girls had them too. Lolly, Puddins, Sister, Choo-Choo, Dynx, Blondie, Fisherman. Nicknames set a child apart and also connected him or her to the place. In Old Harbor, grownups used the nicknames more than given names; the whole village did, so that those names sounded like belonging. I wanted a nickname. But they were for the children of Old Harbor and I was a teacher's kid, transplanted and temporary.
The nicknames were not the same as names that kids made up, say, for my older brother, whom they called "Mr. Rogers" to tease him for his whiteness. In Old Harbor, you might also be teased for dark features that looked too Native; it was mixed up that way. In 1784, this area on the southeast side of Kodiak housed the first permanent Russian fur trading settlement. Over the next century, the descendants of Russian men and Alutiiq women created a privileged Creole class within the Russian colony. Though that status diminished with the sale of Alaska in 1867, it may still have been preferable during American acculturation policies of the early 1900s. Later there were marriages between local girls and Scandinavian fishermen. Two hundred years of mixed heritage complicated the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act for people on Kodiak when it came time to identify Alutiiq lineage to qualify for benefits. ANCSA helped revitalize Alutiiq culture through Native corporation funding for arts and language programs, but that shift wasn't visible in the 1980s when we lived in Old Harbor. December was Alutiiq, but it wasn't something I was aware of as a difference between us.
We agreed that everything should be the same between best friends, and so we dressed in matching colors and drew similar characters with the big eyes of Garfield comics and copied each other's handwriting until it was equally bubbly with circles above the i's. Same dolls, same favorite everything, same Halloween costumes, same dance moves choreographed to cassettes we played over and over, so that I still know all the lines from Madonna's first two albums and a surprising number of eighties hits for a girl raised without MTV—or television for that matter. From five to ten, those years of fierce imagination and play, I thought of December as my sister, even though I already had one. December is next to me in every birthday photo, every holiday recital. I was as sure of our sameness as I was that my baby dolls had feelings.
I willed my thin brown hair to grow, though it never reached much below my shoulders. When December got glasses, I was determined to get some too, so we would match in spite of my blue eyes. I prized having headgear because December had headgear. I actually chose to wear my headgear to school in third grade, until the recess when Alec Inga's hand tangled up with my face during a game of tag and tore out the whole apparatus. Old Harbor was a village without a doctor, much less a dentist or orthodontist. My dad—shop teacher and all-around handyman—found some pliers and pushed the metal brackets back onto my molars "for the time being."
Instead of nicknames, I settled for my parents' expressions like "skin and bones" or "slow as molasses." Praise or exasperation, it didn't really matter. I liked any label that seemed to distinguish me. Being the middle child and wanting attention made me do odd things, like pretending not to hear the beeps of a hearing test, or hooking my toes inside my snow boots so it took forever for my teachers to wrestle them off. I was proud of broken arms and the way I could fit a pinky between my crooked bite. The second time I broke my arm, we had to wait two days for the weather to lift before I could see a doctor for an X-ray and a cast. I relished those hours on the couch and the care with which Mom wrapped my arm in a splint made out of rolled magazines, and later, flying into town with Dad all to myself.
"Sara Peacock Cosmic Klutz," chanted Jack Christiansen when I came back with my arm in a sling. I didn't mind, it was sort of poetic, but I knew it wasn't a real nickname. Everyone called Jack "Yakoo."
* * *
Remember? How I never said no to you, December, even when you stepped in a puddle or dog poop and insisted that I step in it too because that's what best friends do. It might have surprised our teachers to know how you bossed me. You, who were so shy you wouldn't even speak in public. On school trips out of the village, I spoke for you in restaurants and stores.
"She needs to get over her shyness," teachers scolded. But I knew what you wanted by the way you moved your eyebrows. You were a whisper and I was your voice.
I have a memory without sound. The pastor stood in a chest freezer full of water; your parents must have hauled it into the middle of the kitchen the night before. I watched as if underwater, the whole baptism on mute. You stood facing me, with your bottom lip pushed out to the side, the way you always held it when you were mad or scared. I practiced that look a lot in the mirror. The pastor pushed you back and under the water and then jerked you upright. You came up streaming, wide-eyed and stiff as shale, your face and dripping dress the same shade of gray. Was it you or me who gasped?
* * *
On a Saturday morning—any Saturday, every Saturday—I waited in the doorway of December's house, frowning a little at my sneakers, which were hand-me-downs from my brother and too pointy in the toes to pass for girls' shoes. I crossed my arms, and then uncrossed them because it made my bony wrists poke out of the lavender sleeves of my coat.
"Can December play?" I leaned against the bags of dog food we often robbed for our "restaurant"—mixing cup after cup with water and feeding it to Puppers and Sukey until their stomachs bulged. December's mom nodded from the kitchen table, her hands busy with cigarette and coffee cup. I heard a story that once, late at night, she fell out of the skiff and her husband found her and fished her out by the orange glow of the cigarette still clenched between her teeth.
"Where you girls headed?" she asked.
"Playground," we said, but it didn't really matter. We might change our minds and ride over to one of the lots stacked with crab pots that we used as mazes and jungle gyms or wander to the beach to catch handfuls of jellyfish or climb the mountains behind school. It's hard for me to explain that freedom to people who didn't grow up there, even to my husband—how we weren't afraid of anything, how being so free made the whole outdoors ours. It's why I tell anyone who asks that it was the perfect place to be a kid. Maybe it's why I've never felt as sure of a place again. Old Harbor belonged to me, and then, in every place since, I've wondered, Is this place home? But it wasn't Old Harbor as much as childhood that made such ownership possible. And surely that feeling would have changed if we'd stayed. As a teenager I might have felt trapped or bored or uncomfortable in my white skin. And now, knowing how many schoolmates died early from accidents or alcohol, it's hard to reconcile such happiness with the luck of leaving in time. My best childhood stories start and end in Old Harbor. Sometimes we make a place, or a person, perfect by leaving.
* * *
To gain momentum on our bikes, we stood over the banana seats and pedaled straight-legged. We lived downtown, where the oldest houses were—rows of prefab housing hastily built after the 1964 tsunami destroyed all but two buildings in the village. When the houses were new, they looked so much the same that people occasionally wandered into the wrong one. Uptown was less than a mile away, yet we rarely rode our bikes all the way there, past the gravel runway and boat harbor, over the culvert where you could fish for silvers in the fall and ice skate in winter.
My eyes watered in the sharp breeze. The air tasted like woodstove smoke and smoked salmon. It made my stomach growl. I tried to spin gravel into the air but wasn't strong enough.
"If this bike was a BMX, I'd be a lot faster," I said, which reminded me again of finishing last in the Field Day bike race and how December didn't wait for me.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gaining Daylight by Sara Loewen Copyright © 2013 by University of Alaska Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Giant Wings
December
Woman Overboard
To Know a Place
Capacious
Unsinkable
The Wait
Hunger & Thirst
Homing
A Lake By Any Other Name
Elementary Love
Pacific Sandwiches
Winter in June
Hometown Ode
Sea Chains Broken
Fifteen Times over the Bridge
Red Caviar
The Simple Life
The Outlaws of Amook Island
Cardinal Points
Acknowledgments
Sources
Notes & Photo Credits