Author: Naomi Klouda

Snow fell on Alaska, and we celebrated.
We swirled in a circle, tasting flakes of sky.
“Kelp brew for everyone, even the children!” Jenna Ben shouted.
How we celebrated! Three circles switched hands and partners aboard our oil platform’s broken asphalt.
Sky poured in billowy pieces, turning the tarmac white – the first time in my fifteen-year life. Snow in Alaska!
Jenna Ben’s sad walrus eyes, waist-length hair tied back and hanging in thin strands down her skinny back – she was our leader and my great-grandmother.
“Snow didn’t desert us! We are loved!” she proclaimed. “Each snowflake is stamped by the heavens…”
Frozen air, personified.
“This tells us we can return to land,” Jenna Ben said. “We’ll need the snow, we’ll live among her arms… We’ll watch the glaciers freeze again.”
Did I believe her?
Jenna Ben spoke like she knew.
But it could not freeze like long ago.
“Snow heralds the cold. Welcome it into your hearts!” she coaxed we shivering onlookers. “Embrace with your arms up, palms open!”
I raised my arms. I caught snow in my palms. I drank the kelp brew. I danced into the night as snow piled up. But I did not believe in the power of snow.
*
My people have lived on the abandoned oil rig Thalassic since the year 2103, twenty-two years ago. Ocean stole the land, even certain hills, and gave us abandoned oil platforms, “drilling rigs so plentiful dotting Cook Inlet that people took their pick which one they wanted,” Jenna Ben told us.
We look out on the skyline. We see rigs as far as the eye can see. Some are friendly and some are not. We stay to ourselves.
We partner with Kipnuk, the third platform closest to us. These giant rigs formerly siphoned the earth to suck every oil drop.
In the first years Post Climate, people picked from the plentiful rigs. Jenna Ben tells of a time when people deserted the warming, flooding Alaska in giant ships. Those left behind resorted to whatever craft, short of swimming. One rode to our rig on a floating rooftop: Elias Roof, we called him.
“What did we find on the rigs?” Jenna Ben asked. Couches, pool tables, chairs, beds. Canned goods. Foods, still stacked in freezers if run on solar panels. Heaped computers that could be turned back on.
“Those were the best years of our lives,” Jenna Ben told us at night. “Pick your oil rig! So many to choose from. Almost like the beginnings of Earth, when there were only two humans to be loved by God, Adam and Eve – we had our pick.”
“Thalassic picked us,” she said.
People gasped in fear when they heard the reference “on land.” The older ones cringed when the World Shifted in Flooding was mentioned. They remember the quakes.
“You born after the W.S.F. won’t know this,” Jenna Ben said, her voice lowering, “But in O.L. times we loved the trees, so many kinds of trees it broke your heart – We saw a hummingbird wavering in air in a single spot to eat from one flower. We saw velvet mountains and felt brown soil where rocks crunch as you walk. Oh, the boulders of the earth! People used to put rocks in their pockets. It’s a sin not to love the earth back when it loves you…”
I’d never seen soil you walk on. I knew nothing of hummingbirds.
A smart mouth in the back yelled, “We’ll never see dirt again.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Jenna Ben squinted at the crowd.
I felt ashamed to notice it was cousin Yusiik.
“You’ll see,” Jenna Ben said threateningly.
We needed to at least act like we believed.
*
People went out one day and came back with more stories.
“There’s a strip of land at the foot of where Tuxedni Glacier used to be,” said Tuqen, a middle-aged man. His one blue eye looked back, and his brown one looked forward. “Dwarf plants grow small as mosquitoes, birch trees big as rulers. There’s lichen on rocks where Tuxedni receded. And fireweed, lupin!”
As if saving the best for last, Tequn said, “We must move there.”
I didn’t want to hear.
It’s a rule to Not Be Afraid. Fear causes humans to kill things they might love.
Mother Thalassic was the only home I’d known. I was born on this rig to Sally. I remember her before the Starvation.
We buried Sally beneath the waves.
“From water, humans came, and to water we return,” Jenna Ben rained angry tears as she bid her granddaughter goodbye.
*
One day after the snows, we set off. Fifty of us. Plus, twenty or so from Kipnuk.
The people prepared boats in this way: Inflatable boats from sunken cruise ships, patched with jeans and old silk ties, and heated tar balls.
I scored a double kayak.
We loaded for a tentative journey.
“One must always be ready,” Jenna Ben told us.
We traveled for hours to get to land.
If gold color held wings and flew as grasslands, if velvet purple lupin didn’t ache so … Ah, these sights straight from myth.
We landed.
The land stayed beneath my feet. I felt dizzy. Brown particles of ground-up mountains formed soils.
Stones so plentiful! Soils and dirt, silky silt on fingers.
I saw the tiny birch.
People sobbed as if greeting their friends in the rocks and distant trees.
Soon, everyone tasted rocks. Just as we had tasted snow. Only this time, I suspected the Earth was tasting Me back.
“We’ll stay for a while,” Jenna Ben announced. “To be loved by the earth back is the best of all. Right?” She planted her feet on the ground.
“Put your hands together in the air!” She coaxed. “Clap so the Earth can hear you! Clap loudly and without reservation…”
I felt the earth listening.
I believed, at last. The Earth might love us, too.