Alaska

by Cora Enterline

Can you feel it, that biting cold of the morning, every bit of you damp and wanting? Sleep still over you like a heavy, wet blanket, frost eating gently away at the porthole window? Early morning, so early the sun hasn’t yet risen, and the fog is still heavy over the foredeck. You awake, sore, half-dead, to the smell of bitter, black coffee. You lick daftly at the grounds on your lip and try to decipher a message in the remains at the bottom. Anything to wake up. Anything to stay warm. Slide back into your boots, pull the mildewed rubber gloves to your elbows.

Can you smell the whales passing? Whale breath, your captain tells you, is like a drug. Keeps him coming back every year. All you smell is the bottom of the ocean, the decades-old stench of unwashed mouth, the putrid ghosts of a trillion krill. The whales arc weightlessly through the bay, fins pointed and sleek. They move through water in a way you could only dream of. The whole boat smells like whales, really, each corner of the shared bunkroom below deck caked in salt and grime and mold. Your hands will never be clean, you sometimes think, scrubbing the stench of fish guts from under your nails.

Can you see it, though? The great frontier, Alaska, mountains as purple and glowing as every postcard you’ve ever bought? Snow falls on the horizon. Can you see the two eagles, powerful and delicate as they swoop, together then apart, as one and then two beings, and pick—gracefully and violently—the heavy salmon from the water? Can you see the breath of the moose across the valley, the ruffling hair of the black bears, their paws still wet with summer blackberry?

How cold can summer be, you ask. How dark, how hard. You set the nets out into open ocean, your arms heavy with sea water and the nets like ropes of steel. Some days, you reel in and with them come nothing but jellyfish, a wave of jellyfish, a monsoon. Jellyfish raining down on you like biblical hail. And can you still feel their sting around your neck? The ones that pour into your bib, that lodge their gooey, stinging bodies into the knees of your dry pants?

Do you remember the dreams? The nightmares? The way a phantom mast sounds when it breaks in two, the echoing screams of a man overboard in the night? Do you trust that bodies are meant to float, do you think you would last long on the surface? Think about the cool black water, stilled at low tide, eerie and quiet while you stumbled back to the boat, drunk on local beer, itching jellyfish venom from your beard. What do you dream of when you’re dead tired? What do you fear on the open ocean?

And what does it sound like, six men yelling over the crash of waves? Can you hear your own heart over how strongly you can feel it? Over the unforgiving drill of rain into your back as you hunch over the sprawl of dying fish at your feet? Their moist bodies slapping as they undulate their way out of life. The men are yelling at you, you know this. They are yelling instructions. But the fish, they have so many eyes, which gaze at you, wet and wanting, their gills stretching desperately under the summer rainstorm. The captain wants you back under cover. The other men yell your name. There’s no time once a storm hits the sea. No minute to spare thinking of the fish, who are dying more quickly. You have preparations to make. The storm is coming. The men are only getting louder. And you? Are you scared?

What do you feel when you shoot your first gun? What does it sound like up close? Can you still recall the way the cool metal fit into your hands, do you sometimes lie awake at night and point an imagined arm at your ceiling? The bullet disappears into the water like it was nothing. The smoking gunpowder clouds your vision. The shot echoes across the low valley, green and yellow in the afternoon sun. You can hear rustling. The animals know what you have done. They know they might be next. You have never felt power like this.

One morning you break the hot body of a fresh crab in two and a savory yellow liquid pours into your hands. The sweet pink meat melts like butter between your fingers. You have seen many crabs like this one, scuttling across the deck, claws waving freely as you tossed them back to the sea. But this is the first you have opened, in such a delicate ritual, hands raised to your face almost in prayer, the succulent juices dripping along your chin and down your neck. You could sit at this table as at an altar. You could make a bloodier sacrifice than this.

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