Pastels over Sharp Waters
The island is my jailer, hemming me into just a few square miles. My friend’s old beater sounds like a go-kart on steroids. She always has to spur it to action by stabbing the battery terminals with a screwdriver, so we decided to leave it and the screwdriver in Kodiak and grab the rental instead. In the morning we drove out to Anton Bay, but the road turned to ice after we passed into the shade of a mountain. It was too much for the all-season tires (and my nerves) to handle as we slid across the road, so we turned around and went to Chigiak instead. Then, as we neared our new destination we discovered the road had been washed out by the bay, so we had to turn around yet again. After a morning of failures we went to Rendezvous for lunch to figure things out. At least this is a beautiful place to fail. Fog has settled into the valleys between golden peaks, lit up by the sun hanging low just over the winter horizon.
Eventually we settled on a southern bearing and set out for the beach at Pashagshak. As the tires sped over the island I realized that this is the most solid rental I’ve ever had (I’m not holding the all-season tires against it). Despite the 123k miles on the ‘03 Toyota Tundra with a camper on back, it has some serious response and handles itself as well as any new thing rolling off a dealer’s lot. It’s no wonder the Toyota War was a thing, where Hilux and Land Cruiser models had machine guns mounted on them and sent into action. The truck took us to some amazing places.
Amid the ever-changing biomes from one side of mountains to the next are spread a variety of island dwellers that I can’t say I’ve been around much, having lived a landman’s life. Maybe my favorite of the them are the sea squirrels that bob up and down upon tides as the ocean laps the island. One of them was clam-crazy and mowing down on what to have been an ocean’s worth of them. Apparently they love them as my companion tells me she was on her docked boat one quiet night and could hear the sound traveling over the water of one cracking open a clam shell and eating it.
My friend combed the beach for ocean artifacts while I gathered my camera gear in the Toyota under the pastel skies, listening to the rumble of waves outside. Even from a distance I could tell they had some muscle in them, and they looked ominous as they blocked out the setting sun in the background and replaced it’s light with a wall of water. Then a thought popped into my head.
How cold is the water, exactly?
It was cold. It was really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, cold!
I had exploded out of the truck cab like a house cat sitting by the window all day and someone had left the door open for a second too long. I darted over the sand and on to the mirror of thin water that had been left behind by the retreating tide as I charged forward. The waves I had seen from the passenger seat had grown into imposing predators when I approached them. They menaced at just beyond, and I faltered dove into a swell that reached my waist instead. The frigid water whirled around me, stabbing me a thousand times from a thousand angles in a moment. I thought I knew cold, but this Alaskan ocean was my teacher today. I lasted only a few seconds before retreating back to the heater vents of the 4x4. I’ll never forget that cold.