TENAKEE SPRINGS — "Ooooohk, I hope there are crabs," Justin said, staring out our front window at the high tide. A sapling Sitka spruce and an elderly cottonwood framed the ocean at the edge of our yard. At low tide, sand flats spread out just below our woodpile. But at high tide, the sea filled our little cove in a large C shape, covering the beach's blemishes like fresh paint. Almost a half-mile out and 20 feet down sat the crab pots we'd set out that morning. Our buoys were orange spots on the ocean's sheen.
"I try not to hope," I said. "That way I don't get disappointed."
We were new here. About two weeks ago, we had moved into this leaky, uninsulated, off-the-grid old homestead, surrounded by Tongass National Forest on three sides and the Pacific Ocean on the fourth. Tenakee Springs, population 100, was a 35-minute walk or 10-minute skiff ride to our west.
Our main sign of other humans was the boat traffic that motored by. Songbirds, eagles and squirrels took turns hollering outside our window, and we expected to see bear sign as soon as salmon began their death march up the nearby Indian River.
Justin and I met in Fairbanks, where I was a graduate student and he was returning from two years hunting and trapping near a remote village in Alaska's Interior. We spent the first two years of our relationship — while I finished school — researching just the right rural town to settle in. We decided on Southeast Alaska, and lucked upon caretaking this cabin outside Tenakee Springs. Between roof patching and wood chopping, we were trying to figure out how to feed ourselves.
Neither of us, however, knew the first thing about fishing. I'd grown up a city girl in nearby Juneau, using the rainforest and ocean for quick recreational trips. Justin, though accustomed to subsistence living, had never lived near the ocean. When we arrived in Tenakee, we'd tried casting from the dock for Dolly Varden until someone mentioned that the Dollys had come and gone. We'd been given old crab pots, and spent an afternoon with coat hangers and two sets of pliers, trying to jury-rig them to Fish and Game regulations. We'd been lent a skiff, the engine of which promptly broke. Left landlocked, we stared out our window as 20-foot high tides swept towards the house and minus-4 lows undressed the beach.
There was crab out there — not to mention salmon, halibut, shrimp and cod. Without a boat, none of them was reachable.
Waiting for low tide
"We used to walk out and drop the pots at low tide," the owner of our cabin mentioned when he visited about a month after we arrived.
This was our ticket: Perhaps we didn't need a boat after all. We scrutinized our tidebook and waited for the month's lowest tide.
Past owners of this homestead have cursed the flat beach that sprawls out from the cabin. A month ago, if someone had praised a steep beach, I would have shrugged, unsure of the advantages. For many out here, however, where a boat is one's vehicle and a beach is one's driveway, the vertical tide gains and losses each day translate into horizontal distances. On ideal shorelines, low and high tide mean the difference of a 100-foot walk. On our beach, low tide is almost a half-mile away.
On the morning before the lowest tide, we wheel-barrowed crab pots down the beach.
Past the upper-tide zone, where a green layer of sea asparagus and tidal grasses are splashed with salt water on the highest tides.
Past the orange spread of the mid-tide zone, where bladderwrack, a seaweed with two finger-like, mucus-inflated prongs that covers the rocks.
Past the dark blue of barnacles and muscles that crunched uncomfortably underfoot.
We baited our pot, made sure our orange buoys were secured, and dropped the pots just underwater. The octagonal black metal cages crunched as they hit bottom. Then we walked up the beach to home. We would be back to check the pots in 24 hours, when the tide was low again. Now we just had to wait.
Justin waited like a schoolboy, looking out the window, checking as our buoys bobbed merrily. I, on the other hand, was sure this idea would fail, leaving us frustrated and foodless. Better to ignore the crab pots until it was time to trek back down the beach.
'Can't eat a view'
The following morning was gray except for a godlike beam of light shining through to illuminate the water. These are my favorite Southeast Alaska days. Rain drips from the air, not quite falling, but always a potential. Color is dramatized by the grey backdrop, and the mountains across the inlet looked like ripped paper along their timberline edges, layered with lighter and lighter gradations of blue as they receded.
Justin followed me out of bed uncharacteristically early, an hour before the tide unwrapped our pots. His hip boots were on, his bucket was in hand.
"I'll meet you down there," he said. He'd been nursing a sore ankle for days, and I watched him gimp down the beach with our two huskies prancing alongside. In some ways, I was the one who had convinced him to try living on the ocean, where he had to start over. In Interior Alaska, he'd become an established woodsman. He knew snowmachines and dogs, moose hunting and river boats. Now he needed a whole new set of skills.
And he wasn't convinced this place was worth it. "Can't eat a view," he'd said once.
I hurried to put on my boots and tripped after him. The first pot was empty. No undersized crab to throw back, no sea stars stealing our bait.
"Huh," Justin said, wading into the seaweed beds. Around us, sea stars popped in bright orange, spreading out 15 legs. They seemed exotic compared to their five-pointed cousins who resided farther up the beach. Clams spit and bubbled under the sand. Thick ribbons of Dulse seaweed swayed just under the surface, a shroud for miniature rockfish and herring that flitted in and out of the fronds. I was glad the pursuit of crab had gotten us to the low tide line, even if our efforts were fruitless.
"There are definitely crab here," Justin mused. "Wonder why they didn't go for the pot."
Crabs are speedy creatures, scuttling sideways and burrowing into the sand at any sign of danger. They love the protection of sea grasses and kelp.
Then Justin stomped. "Whoa!" he said, eyes wide. "I … got one?"
Justin had eaten crab for the first time about two months earlier. He'd never handled a live crab. I, on the other hand, remember quite clearly a painful moment crushed between Dungeness pincers. The trick to saving one's fingers is to snatch the crab by the back of its body. But Dungeness typically face their enemies, pincers at the ready.
Justin gingerly reached his gloved hand into the water, his face contorted into a half-grimace, half-hopeful smile.
"How, yipes, ah! He's …" Justin hollered. Then he held his trophy out of the water: a large Dungeness crab, rich dark purple shell and legs. Pincers strained for Justin's hand. At the leg joints, his shell opened and closed like armor.
I fumbled with the Fish and Game regulations and a tape measure. He measured more than 7 inches, with the obelisk shape on his stomach that marked him as male. Legal! We dropped him in the bucket.
Justin waded deeper, a hunter on the trail, a child at Christmas. Soon he held up a second crab. Then a third. Each time he stomped quickly, reached his hand gingerly into the water and pulled. The ocean seemed to crawl with crab, each male almost 8 inches across the back.
The bucket of crab in my hand grew heavier. We would spend the next day shucking crab, feasting on crab, freezing crab and giving crab to new friends.
The black cage sat like an octagonal rock at the water's edge. We peered inside. Two large males stared back at us, their pincers blinking open and shut.
Megan Bush lives in Tenakee Springs with her partner and two dogs. She is currently finishing her first book, a memoir about her family's experience with schizophrenia.