acres of wildflowers<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n a freshwater spring<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n cranberries growing on the roof of a driftwood shack<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Tramping the beaches in icy rain, cold drizzle, fog, and wind that never tired<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The rest of the world remembered as a snarl of people & complications <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n in which a million necessary possessions were entangled<\/em>*<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lines are unexpected poetry in a seal hunter\u2019s stories of Tugidak, a treeless, low-lying island in the Trinities, as otherworldly as the thin places of folklore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From above, Tugidak looks like a worn old afghan, like pancake batter drizzled on a flat griddle. Its tundra porous with marshes and lakes and ponds summer bright with yellow lilies, and creeks and streams channeling between. At its northeastern end the island curls into a lagoon\u2014the mouth-shaped, moon-shaped source of Tugidak\u2019s name. A nursery for Dungeness crab, feeding place of herring, rest stop for thousands of migratory geese and brant. A site most dismal and exposed<\/em>, explorers noted, if they saw it at all. Its offshore waters strong and freakish, extremely dangerous, foul and broken, <\/em>though Alutiiq paddlers often hunted seals and sea otters here. It used to be that tens of thousands of harbor seals hauled out on Tugidak, more than anywhere in the world. When John Garber went prospecting for gold in the 1980s, his wife Midge went along for the week and just stayed, right through the winter, in an old seal hunting cabin. They would stay for decades. There was something there that she had been looking for all of her life. I don\u2019t know what it was. It\u2019s still a mystery,<\/em> he said. <\/em>They weren\u2019t young. Tugidak offered a sort of second life. They built cabins from milled driftwood, all cedar-scented, and a bath house and greenhouse. In the cabin where visiting children slept, Midge filled shelves with hard candies in mason jars with beachcombed toy frogs glued to the lids, and kept a Christmas tree decorated year-round. Someone said, It was like they lived with a different sense of time<\/em>. As if time, in such places, is no heavier than the island\u2019s steady unfettering winds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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