Monthly Archives: December 2017

Solstice

1 Reply

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Happy Solstice little dog. Tomorrow we start the climb toward midsummer. Aki pauses in her investigation of a yellow spot on the snow and looks up at her human. Her kind never fears the dark. Our low-light winter days do not depress her. She just takes what nature offers. Does she ever worry, like I do, that one winter the earth may not tilt south after solstice?

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

It’s high noon. Sunlight bathes Mt. Juneau and the other south facing peaks that line Gastineau Channel. But sunshine will never touch the mountain meadow that Aki and I cross. Even the mountains’ time in the sun will be brief.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Without pesky sunshine, frost builds thick forests of feathers on the meadow grass. Cold firms up the boggy muskeg, opening up areas closed during thaws. Aki flies across the meadow, changing direction without concern about watercourses, ponds, or bogs. For a brief moment I am tempted to lead the poodle mix to the Southern end of the meadow where our combined weight might stop the earth’s tumble north. But only for a moment.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Aki the Scavanger

Leave a reply

2

The weather whipsaw continues to create uncertainty this winter. Yesterday we had cold, calm skies with sunshine. Last night it snowed. Now sleet falls on Aki and I as we climb up the Perseverance Trail. Soon it will rain. Then it will snow again. Tomorrow we are promised more sun.

3                  Aki, the master scrounger, is following a trail of treats dropped by other dog walkers. She manages to down the goodies before I can intervene. If I could, I would stop her scavenging ways. But the little dog should be fine. She, like most of her kind, has a cast-iron stomach.

1

Down River

Leave a reply

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The trail Aki and I take today starts at the end of Industrial Boulevard. To get here we had to drive past a small fish processing plant, metal fabricators, and boat yards. Most of these businesses have a view of mountains or the glacier from their parking lots. The place is a metaphor for modern Alaska. The only one better is our landfill, where smoke and methane gas curlicues up from the dump against a wall of mountains and a hanging glacier.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Aki doesn’t stop to discuss metaphors or take time to appreciate how the white masts of stored fishing boats in the foreground pop against their backdrop of blue glacial ice. She has to pee and poop. Last night’s cold, calm weather allowed frost to form on every twig, branch, and blade of grass. All sparkle in the morning light, making the little dog squint. I’d do the same if I weren’t wearing sunglasses. As a floatplane returning from a village mail run lands, the little dog and I walk along Mendenhall River. She finds plenty of sign to sniff. I look, without success, for wild animals or birds.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

No wind riffles its surface so only thin pans of ice disrupt the reflection of mountains and glacier in the river. No paddling goose or duck cuts a dark scar across the watery mirror. I spot an old fashion, humpbacked trailer on a frosted field of grass. Between it and the glacier a thin radio tower pokes up through an alder thicket. Both could have been here when dairymen grazed their cows on these flats. They form a metaphor for the quieter Alaska—before jet planes, Alaska statehood, or modern cruise ships.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The Love of Snow

3 Replies

2

Yesterday, while it rained on Downtown Juneau, it snowed on the Douglas Island ridge. Because she loves running through the stuff, I brought Aki to a meadow above the snow line. After doing her business, the little dog ran full out down the trail and then slid sideways, digging with her front paws. Since she never digs in dirt or beach sand, I have never understood why she does it in snow.

1

After burning off energy apparently stored up since our last snow visit, Aki follows me onto the partially frozen meadow. It must have been windy during the storm as the tree trunks are bare except for thin strips on the lee side of each tree.

3

When we are in the middle of the meadow, Aki charges away toward a thin copse of trees. She doesn’t bark or growl but her tail is up and wagging. I expect her to come back with a dog friend. But no one follows when she runs full out back to me. If she wasn’t chasing after friends, food or fiends, she must have been running for the fun.

4

Sheriff in Her Own Mind

1 Reply

2

On this soft winter day, Aki lead me on one of her favorite walks. She trotted down Gold and up Gastineau Avenue, checking for sign and marking her territory. In her mind, she owns Downtown Juneau. No one but me showed her deference. The raven that is always perched on the same cottonwood branch when we walk by ignored my little dog. I exchanged hellos with three homeless and holiday greetings with another. Only one noticed my dog and he giggled. The sheriff received no respect today.

1

Aki is Going to Ask Santa

Leave a reply

1.jpgThis afternoon Aki is going to have her picture taken with Santa. It’s for a fundraiser to feed homeless dogs. But first we will take a walk together on the glacial moraine. Rain pours down on us when we leave the car. While Aki does her business, I climb up a small rise and look out over Mendenhall Lake. Its waters are almost as gray as the sky. I can just make out the blue of the glacier across the lake. Small pans of ice line the shore. They provide the only evidence of winter’s November visit.

2.jpg                  Backtracking to the car, I lead Aki onto a new cross-country ski trail that snakes through a belt of thin spruce and hemlock trees. A month ago, a foot of snow covered the trail. Nordic skate skiers would have flown past us. Today it’s a bare as summer.

3

The rain forest has known grey and wet Christmases before. We might have to endure another one this year. Maybe Aki can ask Santa for a miracle snow storm next week.

4

Ice Dragon

1 Reply

5

In her poem, “The Mendenhall Glacier” Ursula Le Guinn describes it as an ice dragon. Why didn’t I think about using that metaphor for the glacier? It’s seems so obvious this morning with fragments of clouds hanging above the ice like steam rising from a dragon’s nostrils. Le Guinn, who lives in Oregon, may have only seen the glacier once, and that as a cruise ship visitor. The little dog and I have seen it many times. Yet all I have been able to come up for a descriptor is “river of ice.” Well, she has published 50 books.

 

2

While I grumble to the little dog about metaphors, a bald eagle roosted in a nearby cottonwood tree lets go a ribbon of scat that arcs out of its rear and twists down to the ground like a dragon of poop. Aki looks at me like a dog tired of dragon metaphors. We push on toward Nugget Falls, now fully charged by recent storms.

2

Three mountain goats graze near the falls. Two, a female and kid, move very close to the water on a steep pitch of glaciated rock slick with mist. One slip would send them into the torrent. But they safely reach a patch of willows, which might be succulent with sap sent out during our false spring.

4

A woman with an 18-inch telephoto lens on her high-end camera appears behind me on the trail. When she points it at the two goats, the larger one stops to look at us. Its kid disappears into a hollow. I look down at Aki, tiny and quiet beside my right boot. She can’t be the reason for the goats’ defensive move. Between the goats and us the falls pounds into the lake. That fact alone should reassure the mother and child that we can’t harm them. Has the she goat learned to identify humans pointing rifle-like objects as threats?

3

Busy Time

1 Reply

3

This trail touches on two bays. The first one we reach today is empty of birds and seals. On the second one, a huge gathering of surf scooters have formed a quarter-mile long black crescent with their bodies. Here and there, one of their members bursts into a short flight, calling out a half-hearted version of their hysterical warning call. The rest are harvesting.

4

So precise is the interior line of the crescent that I wonder if it forms a psychological barrier for baitfish between the birds and the beach. Does the long line of feathered bodies and paddling feet scare fish toward the shore? I can’t imagine any other explanation for the scooters’ precise work. If a bait ball passes under the crescent, the scooters splash into the water after them.

1

The Scooters aren’t the only busy critters in the area. Perhaps panicked by the way the rain-swollen pond waters flooded over the top of their damns during last night’s storm, the big rodents piled sticks and branches on top of their main dam. But they couldn’t prevent water from escaping the smaller ones. Over these water now floods across the beach trail. Aki minces her way through the overflow. We both have wet feet after the passage.

2

Sheep Creek Delta

2 Replies

3

Happy Saint Lucy day little dog. Aki looks at with me like someone who had to watch a trusted friend eat warm saffron buns with his morning coffee while all she had to look forward to was a breakfast of dried kibble. Fortunately she forgot about my neglect by the time we climbed into the car for a drive out to the Sheep Creek delta.

2

Using our car’s magic blue tooth connector, we listen to music recorded on my phone. This morning that device doesn’t allow me to choose songs. Instead we have to settle for an eclectic mix tape as the phone shuttles through my music library. After The Pogues finish a song about brown eyes, Yo Yo Ma starts playing one of the more obscure Bach cello suites. We reach the trailhead before the phone can shuttle over to the Texas Tornados. As if she doesn’t care for Bach, Aki bursts out of the car and into a heavy rain when I opened the door.

1

It’s high tide so most of the delta is under water. What seems like every mallard in the greater Juneau area hugs the beach or sleeps on it. When I close the car door, one of the mallards makes a sarcastic chuckle. Crows have crowded onto the mid-channel navigation aid. More of their murder stand on a nearby gravel bar even though it is covered with a inch of water. When the tide turns in a few minutes and retreats from their gravel bar, the crows will fly to another one closer to the beach that was dry when theirs was wet.

5

We won’t see or hear an eagle during our beach walk. But on the drive home the car will pass under a trio of them jockeying for position over a beach with a brace of stubborn ravens. The center of their temporary universe is something dead. I look on the beach but see only rocks and rubble.

4

A Little Gift

Leave a reply

4

The little dog and I are pulling into the Fish Creek trailhead parking lot. And as if nature thought we deserved an early Solstice gift, it is not raining. Aki, you just never know what climate change will bring us. The pastel pinks of sunrise color mist rising off the pond. As if to gild the scene, a heron flaps through the mist to land on a pond-side spruce.

5The weather guys forecast heavy rain for tomorrow, which makes this break in the storms that must sweeter. But it is not all beer and skittles for the little dog. A shotgun booms across Gastineau Channel making Aki cringe and look back to make sure I know what I am doing. The gunshot drives a gang of Canada geese into a noisy flight. I wonder if they are giving warning or hurling curses down upon the hunter.

2

It’s a day for finding bones. I almost step on a slim seal bone and later spot the large leg bone of a moose. Eagle feathers littler the beach grass. All these things were deposited here by a powerful flood tide.

1

It is also a day for crows. The Juneau murder must have roosted in the small forest that at the end of the Fish Creek spit. They spill out over the water of Fritz Cove, their black bodies looking like music notes inked onto the mottled sky.

3