Winter shrugged, and dropped a swirling cloak of snow all through the week. The wind blew 50, then 75 mph. Last night the gauge hit 90 mph. The empty Sealand vans at the dock, where all the islands goods make shore, took flight, tumbling into the ocean. Our house, on the edge of the ocean cliff, threatens the same some nights. No matter our own cloaks and scarves, there are some winds we cannot wrap against. Nothing is strong enough to clothe our nakedness before such forces.
It’s the season, too, where we wake to dark, pry our lids open reluctantly, only rising because the clock and our schedules force us to it. Our bodies know better. We try to fool them with full spectrum lighting, with a shot of rays in the tanning bed once a week, all this simply a hint of what we know shines elsewhere in other corners of the world. It doesn’t really work. I cannot fully shake off the somnolence of the dark but the effort gives me hope and helps me spend my six and a half hours of daily light carefully, gratefully. I remember why I live here at such times. I remember when my neighbor plows my driveway, secretly, in the night. When another neighbor drives his Bobcat up a high hill to clear our long driveway after another snow. When my truck lands sideways across the road, helpless to climb the hill to my house, and three men appear within minutes to push me out of the berm.
Often the planes cannot fly, the mail does not come, trips are ruined, the entire town runs out of wrapping paper or milk and eggs. Last week, in the dead of winter, two hunters were charged by a Kodiak bear---a bear that should have been hibernating. The certainty we expect as Americans is less certain here---and for all its frustrations, this is why we live here. We cannot be sure of many things, but we can be sure that someone will help us out of the ditch, someone will give a ride to those who have no car, someone will organize a fund-raiser for the woman with cancer, for the man who was crushed by a boat. We stand in line at the stores, talking to whoever is behind us, not because we know them, but because we live on Kodiak Island together, and that is enough for one hundred conversations.
Adam Nicolson, in his book Sea Room writes about the Hebrides: “Islands feed an appetite for the absolute. They are removed from the human world, from its business and noise. Whatever the reality, a kind of silence seems to hang about them. it is not silence, because the sea beats on the shores and the birds scream and flutter above you. But it is a virtual silence, an absence of communication which reduces the islander to a naked condition in front of the universe. It is not padded by the conversation of others. Do you want the padding or do you feel shut in and de-natured by it? Do you love the nakedness or do you shiver in the wind? Do you feel deprived by your island condition or somehow enabled and enriched by it?
I know the answer. I shiver in the skin of my own insufficiency before these winds. In the dark, in the island distance, I encounter my own aloneness again and again. I do feel deprived—but I also feel enriched: I am awakened to the aloneness of others. We listen to each other because of it; we seek shelter in each others’ homes, we converse with our ears. We learn how to speak the singular language of Island.
