We were heading to the glacier moraine but on this rare sunny day I couldn’t drive past the light washed wetlands. Neither Aki nor I have been to this section by the airport for a couple of years. Frost flowers sparkle on dead fireweed stalks and willow gall roses. Aki sniffs at one spot, dashes to another, and sniffs again. People rarely walk their dogs here so I can’t figure out what she is investigating.

To get to the high tide line, we have to walk along the Egan Expressway for thirty minutes. Cars rush by at 55 miles per hour. Aki ignores them. I go extensional: pretend that the highway a fast mountain river that brings life to a desert instead of shoppers home from Fred Meyers.

Leaving the “river” we walk over tussocks of grass bent low by snow to where the high tide replaced snow cover with a thin, flexible sheet of salt water ice. Portions of the ice sheet broke off when the tide ebbed and now lay on the banks of small, deep channels, draped like Greek gowns. When we return to the snow covered area, Aki restarts her investigation. We find a set of fresh tracks that must have been made by a large, running cat, say a Lynx. There are four tracks together as if made by the cat when it brought all four paws together just before springing forward. Maybe three feet away, we find a similar set of four, but also a “v” shaped groove that suggests that the animal dragged its right rear paw.   While I was trying to focus my camera on some ice bling, did a cool cat leap across our tracks?

Relatively warm fog obscures everything but this mountain meadow and nearby trees. I know it’s warm. The sound of free flowing groundwater and snow texture on the trail testifies that it is well above freezing. But even my heavy winter gloves can’t warm my hands after I expose them when taking photographs. The moist fog is almost as efficient at removing body heat as cold water. The snow provides good purchase for Aki’s paws. She exploits it by dashing back and forth, sometimes stopping suddenly so she can enjoy the resulting slide.

By eliminating their visible competition, the fog provides a nice stage for the twisted meadow pines. Recently fallen snow dapples the meadow with a pinto pattern and partially fills twin wounds made by the wheels of an all terrain vehicle. The muskeg plants will eventually heal the scar but it will take many years. I’m wondering why the ATV guy drove in a cloud of noise and hydrocarbons to cut a path across a meadow that could be walked in twenty minutes. Was he or she a thoughtless yob or just someone who needed to leave proof of a sad life on earth.

This afternoon, as the rain stopped, Aki and I meandered around the University’s Auk Lake campus. It is quiet. All the action takes place in the library. We carry out the usual division of labor. Aki pees, and sniffs messages left by other dogs or greets the odd student on a study break. I take pictures, mostly of the eyes carved in totem poles.

 When the marine layer breaks open to reveal the blue sky that I had lost hope of seeing again, we head down to the lake and find thin sheens of petroleum mimicking the northern lights. This faux aurora borealis doesn’t dance like the sky bound one until Aki walks onto a floating dock and sets off surface ripples with every step. I snap away at the lake reflections of black spruce, blue sky, and magenta and green oil sheen. Each reflection would be beautiful in cloud whites, blues and blacks but is made more stunning by the shimmering pollutants. I’ve been here before: admiring California sunsets enhanced by smog, Canadian sunrises with deep reds popping against black forest fire smoke. Each time I wonder how corruption can produce fallouts of such beauty.

In heavy rain, Aki and hide out on a trail through the old growth that leads to a beach diminished by high tide. A thick, low cloud layer almost eliminates the view of Lynn Canal. It is a good day to study small wonders, like tree lichen, so I watch stands of old man’s beard swing like lazy ghosts from bare blue berry brush. I happen on columns of frilly angel wings that climb the trunk of a dying hemlock tree and named then “angels of death.” (It is not an uplifting day). Then I realize that last week I had found one of the winged lichen, moist and flattened in a clump of seaweed. I took it for some tide pool creature but with the help of a passing hiker worked out that it was once attached to a tree. What is it about making connections, even unintended, that can brighten a gray day of rain?