The Seal Wife Read Free Page A

his position at forty feet above sea level, and housed it along with the wet and dry bulb atmospheric thermometers in the louvered shed he assembled upon arrival. His snow measurement apparatus—density tube and spring balance, as well as a Kadel snow stake—is poised for the first flake’s arrival.
    Each morning he goes to the telegraph office, walking on boards laid over the mud. There he cables his observations on the weather to Washington, D.C., where bureau clerks and cartographers plot temperatures and pressures, precipitation indexes and wind speeds, from all over the country onto composite maps that reveal the direction and severity of storms, the arrival of killing frosts, the patterns of drought. Because of the earth’s rotation, winter storms that paralyze the east originate in the west, and Bigelow’s eight A.M. report will provide the Weather Bureau its earliest warning of trouble to come, as much as another day, or night, for farmers to thresh and for ranchers to gather their livestock into barns, for Great Lakes passenger boats to quickly find a port, for orange growers in Okeechobee County, Florida, to light smudge pots among their trees.
    Bulletins. Warnings. Advisories. The Weather Bureau was once a division of the Army Signal Corps and speaks the language of alarm. Famous for its mercilessly swift transfers, for personnel orders effective within forty-eight hours, the bureau gave Bigelow just that long to book his passage and pack what he owned—no time to worry about where he was going until he was standing on the deck of the
Siren
as it left Seattle, his sudden apprehension almost something he could see, a lead-blue haze hanging over him, burnt off in spots by the hilarity of other passengers, fortune seekers from San Francisco and Portland and even New York, Chinese packed into steerage like consignments of firecrackers, a flock of Tanaina women returning from a year’s employment in Vancouver.
    Not exactly seasick, Bigelow stood on the
Siren
’s quarterdeck, looking backward at the wake, trying to imagine what he’d hurriedly read about Cook Inlet: one of the greatest tidal differentials in the world, chunks of ice as big as houses, as big as courthouses, ebbing and flowing as much as sixty miles in half a day. All the epic white buildings he’d seen: St. Louis’s Festival Hall and her Palace of Horticulture. Chicago’s Art Institute. Supreme courts and municipal courts. Legislatures. Opera houses. Departments of Commerce and Agriculture. The Weather Bureau and even the White House itself, dome cracking and colonnade collapsing. Having lost sight of land, Bigelow saw all of civilization’s big white edifices turning and jumbling on great curling spits of freezing foam.
    The fantasy of a city boy, he shrugged it off and went below deck, sat on his narrow bunk, and stared at the wall. For another eight dollars he could have had a porthole, he could have had the sky.
    Except that it isn’t a fantasy; it turns out to be true. In October, ice appears. With his binoculars, Bigelow watches the last ships of the season stalk and catch great slabs of it, haul them up in nets, pack them in sawdust, and return south to San Francisco’s restaurants and butchers, to the ice cream parlors on Clay Street.
    And in October, Bigelow receives an unofficial letter from a friend in the bureau, who warns that the department’s new budget hasn’t been approved, with salaries for Bigelow’s rank stuck at the impossible $1,100 per year. How is he faring in Anchorage? the friend inquires. Does a town so new have a pool hall or a dance pavilion or moving-picture shows? Is there any opportunity for social gathering, female company?
    Bigelow crumples the letter and shoves it into his pocket. $21.16 per week is not nearly enough. At least, it won’t be in December, when he has to spend that much on light and heat alone. He chews his lower lip, thinking. All right then, he’ll find extra work. He will when he needs