Geography of Water by Mary Emerick

Author:Mary Emerick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781602232716
Publisher: University of Alaska Press

Never turn your back on the ocean.

Only harvest shellfish in months with an r.

Don’t run from a bear.

Never turn a boat broadside in a following sea.

Hold on to copperbush when climbing slippery slopes.

Follow the deer trails; they know the best way.

Never leave harbor on a Friday.

No bananas onboard a boat or hats on a bed.

Don’t whistle at sea; you will whistle up a storm.

When I was little I whispered those rules every night, over and over until I fell asleep. If I forgot one, I went back and started over. There had been a comfort in them, a promise that if I followed each one, life would be even and unchanging. This time the rules did not work. I got up, pulling on my mother’s fleece jacket from the closet.

The path down to the ocean was lit by a tentative moon, floating in and out of dark clouds. My father was sitting next to the dock, his back against it, a bottle between his knees. His chair sat on the dock and he had somehow gotten himself down to the beach, a ten-foot drop.

He had not seen me yet, and I suddenly remembered being seven years old and asking my mother questions she could not answer. Why the salmon came back to the same stream, when they had no map to follow. Out of the whole big ocean, why this one tiny stream, I asked. What was so special about this one, when there were thousands of others?

My mother was filleting fish and only half listening. Her knife cleanly separated delicate spine from meat, the filmy white bones from the pieces that were good. She threw what she did not want into the ocean for the sea lions to fight over.

My job was to pack the fish in the big white cooler with wheels so that we could move it over to the workbench next to the tall freezer in the shed. Then we would vacuum seal the fillets into bags and let them slowly freeze into rock-hard lumps. The fillets were slippery, the flesh cold rubber. They were hard to hold onto.

My mother set down her bloody gloves and looked at me. “The salmon have their own map,” she said.

My father heard us from where he sat, baiting up a halibut skate with some of the discards. The long hooks on the line were curved and sharp. When he was done he would row out into the bay and set the skate deep into the water, the line spooling out far, farther than I could see, a pale white line falling through to the place where the water turned black. He would attach an orange buoy to the top of the skate and row back to us.

“A map? Like ours?” I had thought of our charts, almost as wide as I was tall, sheets of blue and gold where the land was not important, just the sea. My father had shown me our own bay on the charts, moving

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