Tide, Feather, Snow
by Miranda Weiss
Alaska is a
place where know-how is currency and a novice's mistakes can kill you.
An extreme landscape in both its beauty and challenges, the state is
nicknamed "The Last Frontier" with good reason: Here is a
paradoxical landscape where boundaries—between community and
isolation, bounty and deprivation, conservation and exploitation—are
constantly in flux.
But the
state has also always been a place for reinvention, a refuge as much for
those desperate to escape something as for those on a quest for
something else. In Tide, Feather, Snow, Miranda Weiss, a young
woman who grew up landlocked in well-kept East Coast suburbs, moves with
her boyfriend to Homer, Alaska, where the days are quartered by the most
extreme tides in the country, where the years are marked by seasons of
fish, and where locals carry around the knowledge of fish, tides, boats,
and weather as ballast. At first, she struggles to make a place for
herself in this unfamiliar country. But ultimately, Weiss learns the
skills to survive on her own, from setting a fishing net to befriending
the locals, from jarring rosehip butter to skinning a sea otter.
Weiss's
keenly observed prose introduces readers to the memorable people and
peculiar beauty of Alaska's vast landscape and takes us on her personal
journey of adventure, physical challenge, and culture clash. In the
tradition of John McPhee's Coming into the Country, this elegant
and affecting memoir is nature writing at its best.
Order at Hearthside
Books.
