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and weather made the difference, I guessed.
    It didn’t bother me too much, though. There was something about this village: the drawn shades, the rare walker striding past with collar up and face hidden, the casual service in the town’s only open eatery, that made me feel the very opposite of pandered to, and somehow better able to rest, turn inward, and feel hidden away myself. Here, on a gray day, overly chipper smiles would have been out of place.
    â€”Andromeda Romano-Lax, Walking Southeast Alaska
    There are more docks than boardwalks in this town, and more boats than houses. Amidst the working boats, a couple of sailboats hunker down under blue tarps. “Tourists,” the sheriff explains. He laughs, holding his cigarette between his forefinger and thumb.Lacking much business in the crime department, he has joined us on the bench. We look out together at the boats in the moorage and give the sun time to work its way into our shoulders. “Had one woman stand here on her boat and ask how many feet above sea level we were. Had another lady fly in over the glacier and ask what we did with all that Styrofoam. ‘We mine it,’ I told her, ‘and ship it south for picnic coolers.’” He laughs again and then it’s quiet on the dock except for the sound of waterfalls streaming down the mountains across the inlet.
    â€œI don’t know why they call it tourist season, if we’re not allowed to shoot ’em.” But he’s only joking, just running through his repertoire of dumb-tourist jokes, and here comes the next one: “Some guy asked me how much rain we forecast, and I said I expected it to fill the inlet about eight more feet by suppertime.” Then the law looks over at us, so obviously strangers, and remembers his manners. “Aw, a few tourists aren’t so bad. As long as they go home.”
    A boy runs past, carrying a fishing pole. A few others bunch on the boardwalk, jostling and wrestling without ever dismounting from their bikes. Their parents are out on the boardwalk too, gathered in small groups to talk and tease, enjoying the first clear evening in a long, long time. “I don’t think I’d like to live anywhere else but here,” a sixteen-year-old tells me. “Doesn’t seem all that nice in other places. Except maybe I’ll go to college, if there’s a college in a place like this.”
    What she doesn’t know is that she may live in the only place like this.
    This was a company town, built for packing salmon in 1930. For decades the people got by, prosperity ebbing and flowing with the schools of herring that brought in the Chinook. But last year, the long-line fisherman who doubles as town manager received a letter over his fax machine: Thefish plant will close on Friday. Word spread quickly the length of the boardwalk, past the wet-goods store, past the storefront “steambaths and showers,” past the bar-and-grill and the restaurant, past the fire station and the boatyard where crab traps pile up off-season, to the row of little company houses along the boardwalk, the school, the river, and the end of town.
    Some families moved away. Some fathers left to get jobs outside, leaving their families behind. Other parents divided their children among the neighbors and went off to find work. Somebody cobbled together financing to run the fish plant for a few months a year, other people set up their boats for halibut, off-loading their catch on fish-buying boats. The people who remain in this little town get by whatever way they can and wonder what will happen next. On the docks, we overhear the worried conversations, the patched-together plans. In the school, I listen to the children. They want to know about the Seattle Sonics, but I can’t help them. Their parents are holding on to a way of life as tightly as the town clings to the mountainside, but they know it’s going to take more than a life jacket to