KODIAK -- After the salmon season ends, we like to stay a month or so out at the cabin in Uyak Bay. There is still work to do, but there is also a quiet that settles around the bay. It is more than the fact that the radios go silent once most of the setnet families have stored their nets and boats and left for other homes. In the fall the light is soft and everything else is crisp -- the breeze and night skies and the sharp smell of herbs when I empty pots into the garden.
In October we watched the changes in wildlife that signal the impending winter. We spent a day watching a pod of orcas as they circled the bay and saw humpback whales breaching just a few hundred yards from the cabin. When my husband, Peter, would point out the arrival of murres or ducks migrating overhead, our son, Liam, would respond by pointing and mimicking his favorite bird this summer, "chickadee!"
This year, our last visitors of the season were friends from Anchorage with their new baby. We're lucky to have family and friends who don't mind the work of getting out to Amook Island for a visit. Seeing their appreciation of the site always renews my feeling of gratitude for the beauty around us.
Company is also a good excuse to pull out the kayaks and take long walks. We went kayaking on one of those mornings when the bay wakes up a lake, before the afternoon brings waves and a breeze. On water that calm, you can hear the breath of fin whales and the splash of kittiwakes diving. Mostly we floated without paddling and watched harbor porpoises and seals surface around us.
One night, before the moon was up, we took advantage of the early darkness. We drifted in the skiff and watched the bioluminescence glimmer in the black water. There is something magical about creatures generating their own light. With the delight of kids chasing fireflies, we splashed the water to watch the sparks and then marveled at the way the skiff's wake glowed on the way home.
As we closed up the cabin, we had visits from several bears foraging on the beach. They left their tracks along the tide line flecked gold with the last cottonwood leaves. When Peter drained the waterline he found their wide prints in the trampled mud and water shooting up from bear bites in the pipe.
Last winter, our setnetter friends in neighboring Uganik Bay had a bear in their cabin. It climbed through a window and left through the wall. When we leave, we board up the doors and windows and hope we won't return to a mess and chewed-up couches and mattresses. We also clean out the pantry, which makes for interesting meals. For several days, we cooked giant omelets to use up the eggs and garden onions.
I have heard subsistence described as "always getting ready," and it rings true with every seasonal transition in Alaska. I think of winterizing as always trying to guess what nature might destroy while we're away. Something will inevitably freeze or break, but we try to take things down that an earthquake might shake from the walls and store the solar panels and anything else the wind might take.
I shouldn't admit it, but I find it almost as satisfying to put the garden beds to rest as it is to plant the first seeds in May. When I rake compost and seaweed over the cabbage leaves and broccoli stems, I imagine the soil resting under a layer of snow, and it feels like making peace with the end of another season at the site.
Now we've moved to the town of Kodiak. It's back to marking time with days of the week and dates on the calendar, back to telephones ringing, seat belts and grocery stores. In the winter, it's the small things that I'll miss from our season at the fish site, like having time to write a real letter and starting the day with a slow walk in a quiet place.
Kodiak-based Sara Loewen, formerly a teacher and now a student in the Master of Fine Arts program at UAA, fishes in Uyak Bay with her husband, Peter, and year-old son.
SARA LOEWEN
AROUND ALASKA