Equinox Balance

Spring evening in Uganik.

Spring equinox caught me off guard this year, coming early as it did, but once reminded that the moment of equal day and night was indeed upon us, I could think of nothing else but balance.

Of course sunlight is a joy, the days suddenly stretching longer than the nights. Though it may still be cold, the light in and of itself lets our souls feel spring. I’m particularly glad that now the sun is strong enough for us to do laundry without firing up the generator. Our solar panels run the washing machine and our free southwest wind and a clothesline dry them. Finally the balance of renewable power we’ve harnessed has tipped from marginal to abundant.

This time of year I marvel, too, at the sweet float of ski upon afternoon corn snow. Simultaneously I appreciate the snow’s melting, baring more earth and vegetation for the deer with each passing hour. After a long, deep winter, snow is enjoyable again, its presence balanced out with the anticipation of its absence soon to come.

Appropriately for spring, it just so happened that on equinox itself we pried one of our skiffs from its winter slumber in the snowy grasses and launched it into the waiting ocean. Though we do this at least 4 times annually, the moment that the heavy, seemingly immovable aluminum mass metamorphoses into a buoyant vessel balancing easily, naturally, on the water never ceases to amaze me. The laws of physics that make our livelihood possible still make the circuits in my brain dance wildly if I think about them deeply enough! Last spring we made a video of launching a skiff – if you haven’t seen it, you can watch it here.

All this balance, however, doesn’t equal perfection. There will be rainy days with limited solar power coming in, sloppy wetness and mud from melting snow making snowshoeing, or skiing a thing of the past, and of course our wonderfully floating skiffs are bound to cause us certain amounts of stress. In fact, they already do. Upon launching the skiff the other day, we were thrilled that the outboard started right up after a long hibernation. But reverse was a whole different story. It’s reverse is dead from years of abuse fishing and simply wouldn’t shift to anything other than forward or neutral. Hmmmm….

This is frustrating, yes, but I quickly shift my own mental gears to think of all the good things. This break down isn’t happening on May 31, the day before salmon starts. In fact, we have a new outboard ready and waiting – Tollef just needs time (which he has) to get it installed. He has the appropriate aluminum and welder on hand to be able to modify the transom as needed to accept the new outboard, and it’s all going to be even better than the old setup with five inches more freeboard being added in the stern. This may not sound like a lot but every inch really counts when the skiff is squatted down with 4,000 pounds of salmon in rough weather. Really, this problem couldn’t have come at a better time. By the following day we had another skiff ready that we launched, so we weren’t stranded.

And there’s even a speck of joy hidden in this frustration, which comes in the form of a memory of the story of my dad’s first journey to Alaska from the east coast in 1966, when he and a friend, both in their 20’s, navigated the gravel AlCan highway in a little Volkswagon Kharmann Ghia with no reverse all the way from Massachusetts. Little did dad know how true that metaphor would be. For him, there was no going back from Alaska. Out of money and unable (or unwilling) to reverse course, he found work in a Kodiak salmon cannery, which soon led to a job fishing, which in turn led to his falling in love with the island and bringing his own love here to settle. Kodiak became their permanent home and, in time, mine, for which I am so grateful. Sometimes, it turns out, reverse is over-rated.

I know it’s a tense time for the world. Not to minimize any of that concern, but instead to try to maintain sanity, I find it personally soothing to hold on to this image of balance not as the ultimate in perfection, but as a constant ebb and flow, as a mindset of flexibility and appreciation. May we all find our own pockets of balance in these stressful times. Happy Spring!

-Adelia