Miranda Weiss. Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. 288 pages.
This memoir is an exploration of how one woman abandoned the known for the unknown–in this case, south central Alaska. Weiss, who was born and raised in flat suburban Maryland, shucked off most of her preconceptions when she moved to Homer, Alaska, with her boyfriend. Once there, she found both sublime beauty and deep frustration.
Weiss is extremely adept at describing the physical landscape–how the bay changes twice daily with the tides, the look of the area buried in snow, the accumulations of junk that are ubiquitous in Homer. She’s less skilled here in communicating how people interact–there isn’t much dialogue with her boyfriend or the other people she’s obviously close to, which limits the reader’s ability to see them as distinct characters. As a result, the centers on Weiss’s personal journey.
The reader gets a vivid portrait of Homer, Alaska, in all of its natural beauty and ugliness. It’s a land that’s both wide open and claustrophobic. Life “off the grid” can be liberating but also limiting.
Some highlights include Weiss’s descriptions of the seasonal changes, particular fall to winter and winter to spring. Covered in snow, the landscape looks immaculate, but spring–though it is a reflowering–is also a loss of innocence, with melting snow revealing rubbish everywhere.
There’s some, but not too much outside research in this book–we get the basics of Alaskan history, but no extended treatises on the subject. This seems to be in keeping with the current trend in creative non-fiction. For example, towards the end of the book, Weiss is on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, where she says that “sought some insight into” the indigenous Yup’ik men assisting the expedition who live in (relatively) nearby Chevak. But she says, “they said little, just chuckling with each other softly as they worked.”(209) Where a John McPhee would have dug up a surveyors report from the first Russian expedition to encounter the Yup’ik or a more recent sociological survey of the village, Weiss adds nothing more. That’s not entirely a bad thing, since blocks of exposition might drag down the narrative, but it might have built the sense of scale.
In short, this is the story of one woman’s life in Alaska. It’s not comprehensive–nor does it claim to be–but it’s filled with fascinating, well-illustrated images and insights.