Monthly Archives: August 2016

Wind Blown Strangers

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“We usually don’t see waves,” I shout over the onshore wind and wave crashes. The couple are petting Aki so I don’t know if they heard me. It is hard to tell where they are from. He wears a ball cap made from high-tec fabric and they both have good quality raincoats. His is a British Commonwealth accent, not Canadian but not London Brit. Neither seems afraid even through they will be alone on the North Douglas trail when Aki and I turn into the woods—alone with the wind and the rain clouds it is blowing towards them. Halfway back to the car, I am tempted to turn back and find the couple and give them enough information to stay out of trouble. But they managed to find the Outer Point Trail on their own. Hopefully, even with the trail system’s lack of directions signs, they will find their way home.

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Frisbee—Aki’s Mobile Device

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Aki may not suffer distractions from a mobile device like many of the humans we pass on trails. By plugging their ears with buds, they take hearing out of their toolbox for experiencing nature. They might even miss the shadow of a bald eagle flying over the smart phone they clutch in a hand. Today I learned that her Frisbee has a similar impact on Aki.

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We are walking along the edge of Mendenhall River where it enters Fritz Cove. The incoming tide has flooded much of the beach. As usual, a half-a-dozen bald eagles are roosting in riverside spruce. Each watches us pass, perhaps eying Aki as a possible meal. Normally, the little dog hugs the forest edge when eagles take up stations in the tall spruce. Today, as if advertizing poodle meat, while chasing down her Frisbee, she dashes out to the water’s edge and springs like Tigger in the windblown grass.

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Gallons of Blues

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This morning I ate pancakes made with the blue berries picked near sea level on July 2nd. To get our winter supply, since then we have had to move higher and higher into the mountains to find ripe berries. This is all for the good as far as Aki is concerned. Berry picking is a family affair.

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Aki joins her other human and I halfway up a ski run where blue berries hang heavy and ripe. Her humans take turns throwing her Frisbee while we pick a gallon and a half of blues. Some berries drop when we touch them and I wonder, for the thousandths’ time, why birds are not hammering them. Wouldn’t birds do a great job delivering blue berry seeds in their scat? They would drop them here unlike the bears, who eat so many berries at a time that thousands of berry seeds are concentrated in each bear scat.

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Winners and Losers

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Carless for the past few days, Aki and I have been limited to trails that begin and end at our front door. Our walks on them reminded me that even in our benign little town, there are winners and losers. The winners whistled or even smiled at my little dog as we walk past them in the rain. One young African-American man called out a hello followed by, “Stay white.” While pondering this possible mixed message, I passed the rubble of a homeless camp and the avaricious jewel merchants of Lower Franklin Street.

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Today, again having wheels, we head out to the North Douglas Island trail that leads to a beach view of Shaman Island. At the end of a warm, wet summer, the fungus are winners here. So are the tall displays of devil’s club that thrive in forest opened by wind-felled spruce and hemlock trees.

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I not sure whether the two kingfishers we spot consider themselves winners or losers. The hunker on rocks just offshore apparently waiting for a fingering to expose itself. A clump of gulls huddle along the mouth of Peterson Creek. Otherwise the little bay is empty. No eagles or ravens complain. No rafts of scoters or ducks bob in the mild surface.

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Fog and Fall

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Fog. It covers Mts. Juneau and Roberts. The temperature difference between Gold Creek and the air above it produces more fog that rises in ragged strips like souls floating to Nirvana. The fog allows me to focus on the cottonwoods that are already dropping their yellowing leaves. Leaves of maples and thimbleberries join the cottonwood rubble on the flume trail. Aki doesn’t recognize the significance of the leaves that she sniffs for dog sign. But I know they always start to drop before the fall monsoons.

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Hey, It’s Summer

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Standing in full sun on the side of a Douglas Island mountain, I realize how cleverly we rain forest dwellers can honor days of gray. During the recent wet spell, I took comfort in a day’s lack of gale force winds or, when that didn’t apply, that the rain was warm, not the chilly cold of November. Yesterday, it was enough that the pavement was dry when I woke up. Today, we have sun, warmth, and little wind. In other words, it’s summer.

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Aki has four humans to herd up the trail. When we break into pairs and space ourselves out on the trail, the little dog runs back and forth between her groupings like a border collie herding sheep. Maybe, given the la-la feeling produced by the weather, we need herding.

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The Ditch

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Today Aki and I check out improvements on the Treadwell Ditch Trail, which follows the wood lined ditch that once carried water ten miles from Fish Creek to the mill works at the Treadwell mine site. Chinese immigrants dug the ditch over 100 years ago, cutting down huge, old growth spruce trees and busting a path through their roots. We don’t hear grunts or Chinese curses today, just the crunch of my boots on gravel and, when Aki spots another dog on the trail, her excited barks.

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Metaphors Bore Aki

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Aki is bored. She sniffs half-heartedly at trailside growth and generally dawdles. The mountain meadow and surrounding hills offer many metaphoric images. But metaphors bore Aki. Looking up from the little dog toward Sheep Mountain as it emerges from cloud cover, I notice how an exposed ridge looks like the shoulder of a woman exposed briefly while she pulls down her top. I look away, as embarrassed, as I would be if we stumbled on a woman changing clothes near a mountain stream. Aki is not surprised.

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Carrying Wind

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Are crows the masters of wind and memory? While eagles roost in wind shadows and gulls hunker in the protection of tall grass, crows play in the gusts above the Fish Creek wetlands. Aki shelters beneath dancing fireweed stalks. I watch the crows surrender to updrafts and then furl their wings into dives that end just above the spruce tips of a small wooded peninsula.

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Two female deer ease out of the woods and mince down to a beach covered with severed rockweed. Wind that carries fireweed down over my shoulder to them makes our presence known. But rather than breaking back into the woods, they slowly move along the beach until they are past.

 

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After the deer have passed, Aki and I round the wooded peninsula. The little dog lets me lead on the tall trail grass first so I can knock all last night’s rain off the bending leaves and create a newly dried path for her passage. On the peninsula tip we surprise an immature bald eagle perched on a beach. Even the wind gusting around the point can’t hide out approach. With a surprising lack of grace, the eagle ends its short flight with a plunge into the creek. After flapping around like a drunk just fallen into a swimming pool, the eagle breaststrokes over to the little island it was shooting for when it hit the water. Was the eagle victimized by a sudden burst of wind?

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Aki and I must lean into the wind on the way back to the car, wind that plays with the wheat-yellow grass and reddening fireweed stalks and lifts crows. It carries the voices of the king salmon snaggers on Fish Creek Pond, fireweed down, and memories. The down always reminds me of my child on an Alaskan beach to August, skipping rocks as fireweed down flies:

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From eagle feathers and fish bones

memories float up off this beach

like fireweed down in August.

 

Eagle flies from a spruce bough

circles then drops to the sea.

She submerges talons that pull

a herring dinner skyward.

 

My toddler daughter watches

as others clap amazement.

 

I want to dive into the memory

surface just after the capture

ask if my baby feels pity

or admiration, my child

of forest and beach

who falls asleep to the music

of wind and tides.

 

Promises

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Aki ignores the kingfisher that seems to me to be hunkering down on a small glacier erratic. It’s a fool’s errand to attribute emotions to a bird but expressive kingfishers invite the attention. This one on its small bolder might have been stunned into stillness from a just injected meal. It could be waiting, with patience, for its feathers to dry from a recent downpour that soaked the forest and created rivulets that eroded parts of the forest trail we took to reach this beach. It might just be sulking as another kingfisher, on his one own glacial erratic a hundred meters down the beach, savors a recently caught herring.

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When a shaft of sunlight illuminates white gulls that wander a patch of orange-brown rockweed just delivered by last night’s storm surge, I think of the rainbow. It formed over Admiralty Island during the downpour we drove through to reach the trailhead. Aki, didn’t God seal his promise to Noah of no more catastrophic floods with a rainbow.

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I can accept the promise of no more civilization ending floods but know rainbows never promise the end of rain. Even as we leave the beach from the old growth, drops dimple the water around a curious seal.

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Where beavers recently flooded part of the forest, I see another possible portent: three woodpeckers hammering the same section of an old spruce tree. Two are sapsuckers. The other hunts insects. Why do they crowd together in a rain forest full of targets? The dog has no answers and the birds—they never talk to me.