Cardinal Points

It was evening when it floated into the bay. My husband Pete tied up the skiff and came up to the cabin for binoculars. There’s something disconcerting about extremely large, unrecognizable objects on the ocean. It looked like a giant floating bonbon. Sunlight bounced off the round shape rising eight feet above the waterline, and Pete wondered if it was a water tank lost overboard. We took the skiff out to see it, motoring slowly, cautiously. After thirty-three summers here, Pete has seen countless things floating in Uyak Bay. He recently turned the skiff for a closer look at bears on the beach and glancing down, saw a shark swimming alongside the boat. “What are the odds,” he asked, “of seeing two of the world’s greatest predators at exactly the same time?” Once, he passed an enormous tree floating perfectly upside down with its wide trunk and full set of branches just under the waves.

A whale. Freshly dead, a bloated humpback rocked in the current. The smell was like durian fruit, or cantaloupe left too long on a countertop. The rocking movement unnerved me. I kept scanning the ocean around us, for what? An angry mama? Orcas? He was floating on his back, white fins extended. It’s hard to make sense of an upside-down whale. What had glinted like smooth obsidian from a distance was actually ridged and textured with barnacles and tubercles. He was softer than I expected. Another wave set him rocking and I jerked my hand back.

All summer we travel around Uyak Bay to check the nets, deliver our fish, pick up mail, or visit other sites. Yet by the end of the season, it feels as though we travel only two directions, away from the island and back. Lodges in the bay advertise this wilderness with words like pristine and breathtaking. Equally true are words like confining or unsettling. At high tide, the ocean seals off our beach at both ends. After a few days on Amook Island, I am eager to leave the beach but my relief as our skiff picks up speed never lasts very long. Deep water scares me.

Ever since a friend mentioned that when someone drowns in cold water they sink to the bottom and stay there, I can’t stop picturing people standing on the ocean floor, lined up like pale marble statues in a museum corridor.

Like the boy and his grandfather who went for a skiff ride in our bay and disappeared, although the empty skiff was found floating. As Dave searched for his son and his father, he mistook his own calls echoing off the cliffs, hearing “Dad!” as the cry of his only child.

Or the missing parents of the drowned baby found on a beach, still buckled into the carseat. They were Russian Old Believers skiffing to Kodiak for groceries. I see the mother’s scarf and long silky skirt swirling in the current.

Or the newlyweds who swam for shore when their skiff filled with water as they picked a setnet just 150 fathoms from the beach. A third crewman clung to the net and was rescued. I imagine them hand in hand, having forgiven the other for kicking toward shore, for following.

It’s an impossible scene. But so is the idea of a seventy-foot whale passing unseen under our skiff. Or the millions of salmon, invisible until they thrash in our nets. Hundreds of feet beneath Uyak Bay are shipwrecks and sharks, old engines and crab pots. I am blind to all we pass over.

Each time we drive out the road in Kodiak we pass Woman’s Bay and the abandoned fishing boat, the Saint Patrick. Twelve crewmen, afraid of being trapped inside when the boat flipped and went under, tried to swim for land when the Saint Patrick foundered in a storm near Afognak Island. Only two made it. The boat never sank. It seems wrong that it is still visible in the bay. It should be buried and hidden, the same way I push these stories under and try to...