KODIAK -- In Kodiak snowstorms usually make winter's arrival hard to ignore. It's a subtler shift from spring to summer. Except for this year, when May blazed in with several weeks of sunshine.
Within days there was green everywhere. It started along the edge of the road, budded on alders and salmonberry bushes that were soon waving starry pink blossoms, and crept up the mountains toward shrinking patches of snow. Even the birds passing through to breeding grounds on the mainland seemed to extend their stay, puttering like vacationers around the beaches at Women's Bay.
On our second sunny day, I counted 16 cars waiting at the drive-through car wash. After a week of sunshine, we were a different town. We soon felt entitled to this perfect weather for the annual community clean up, the start of the Kodiak King Salmon Derby and the entire summer. We skipped socks for flip-flops and displayed pale legs and arms. Teenagers watched softball games on couches they had shoved into pickup beds. Our 2-year-old, Liam, learned to say "bumblebee," "motorcycle" and "I help grandpa garden."
In Kodiak sunshine causes memory loss. It only took a few weeks of blue sky to forget last May, when 14 inches of rain made it the wettest May on record. We forgot that the total precipitation last year was 87 inches. And we forgot that it almost always rains during the Crab Festival held over Memorial Day weekend.
But after watching kids scoop soggy candy from puddles during the parade and sealing Liam under the backpack rain shield to walk downtown for a Bruin Burger eaten with numb hands, we remembered.
As I wrestled wet helium balloons against the wind for our son's birthday party, I wondered why on Earth I had envisioned an outdoor party with children playing on a dry, green lawn.
There was a cruise ship in over the weekend. Usually I feel sorry for tourists who visit Kodiak during a storm. You see people you don't recognize in matching ponchos flapping in sideways rain and it feels a little like the island is letting them down. These people came all this way to see the Emerald Isle and never even got a glimpse of crisp blue ocean or the mountains under the fog.
Yet this weekend I was almost proud of our terrible weather. The river was too high for the traditional rubber duck race, but the rain didn't deter the runners who raced up Pillar Mountain or the cyclists who rode 41 miles from Pasagshak to Kodiak.
I admired the resilience of our town as I watched families lined up at food booths, visiting with friends and eating ice-cream bars in the rain. Kids in rubber boots splashed their way between carnival rides.
The Crab Festival started in 1958, just as Kodiak was becoming the King Crab Capital of the World. In the '60s and '70s, when the king crab population exploded around the island, fishermen caught millions of pounds until the numbers dwindled and the fishery was shut down completely in 1982. The only crab available at the festival now comes from fishing grounds further west.
The popular survival suit race started in response to the high numbers of Kodiak fishermen lost at sea during those early decades of crab fishing, before the fishing vessel safety act that mandated survival suits and safety equipment onboard vessels.
Several community members created the race to encourage fishermen to get familiar with putting on survival suits and wearing them in the water. The teams of four represent a typical fishing boat crew.
My sister was in the survival suit race this year. We watched her team run down the boat ramp, squirm into survival suits, paddle across the harbor and flop into a life raft tied to the dock.
There's always a big crowd cheering for suits zipped in spite of Gumby-hands, the big orange belly flops into the water and the group effort of hauling the final teammate into the raft. It's fun to watch.
But, as with other weekend events like the Fisherman's Memorial and the Coast Guard Search and Rescue demonstrations, it also reminds one of the losses inherent in a fishing town.
Years ago there were seal-skinning contests and crab races. Now there are frog races and a Fisherman's Poetry reading. People like to talk about how the festival has changed over the years and how much bigger it used to be, the same way they speculate on whether this fishing town has a future. The Crab Festival may have started as a tribute to the boom of the king crab fishery, but it's become a tradition celebrating the diversity that carries the town through good and lean years.
Over the weekend it was easy to celebrate that diversity, whether you listened to the Kodiak Island Drummers or balalaika players, visited the multi-cultural celebration at the high school, or just filled up on seafood, El Salvadorian tamales and Filipino-style pork on a stick from the booths at the midway.
The Crab Festival honors those things that keep us all here, and keep us safe, that sustain us and challenge us and create community.
On Monday night when the Crab Festival was over, workers loaded carnival rides onto the ferry. The booths were boarded up and hauled away. The rain quit, the sky cleared, and the next morning started with sunshine.
Sara Loewen lives on Kodiak Island, where she's now at her family's fish camp and reports "lots of whales."
SARA LOEWEN
AROUND ALASKA