Living along a fjord that cuts through steep sided mountains has pluses and minuses. I feel the negatives most on January days when the sun barely manages to crest the Douglas Island ridge. Plato’s’ analogy of the cave rings true on those days. But today, Aki and I experience the benefits of fjord land.

After a three-mile drive from salt water, the little dog and I are crossing a mountain meadow still blessed with snow patches. It’s in the mid-50’s so I can get by with just a sweatshirt. Aki wears nothing. We visit this meadow each year just before true spring. The air is sweet and clean, as if expired by a land thankful to be free of most of its snowy burden. Thrush and robins sing, Stellar’s Jays scold. The little dog rolls in every snow patch we find and then runs it’s length, savoring the way it gives beneath her tiny feet.

Just minutes into this walk along the Auk Rec Trail, Aki and I find one of the year’s first salmonberry blossom. While listening to small waves braking on the beach, I think about a Haida woman I knew in Ketchikan. She taught traditional weaving classes to keep those traditional alive. One night she burst into a carving class I was attending while holding a magenta colored salmonberry blossom. “I wanted to share this first sign of spring,” she said before returning to her class upstairs.

Salmonberry blossoms provide more than beauty in the rain forest. Most will died to give wave to sweet, plump, multi-segmented fruit—The first berries to ripen each year. I always look forward to their harvest even though I buy domestic berries and fruits from the store. Imagine what the taste of their sweetness would mean to someone that had made it through the winter on preserved fish and oil, deer meat, and what the tide exposes.

Just back from California and reunited with Aki, I lead the little dog down the rain forest trail. It’s early morning but we have missed the blink of sun that often comes at the start of a cloudy day. No one else has walked the trail yet so we have good bird watching. The persistent trills of thrush bird song dominate the other forest sounds and the tall, yellow skunk cabbage flowers grab the eye.

It’s early spring in the rain forest so the alders are just leafing out and tiny pink and white lantern flowers hang from trailside berry brush. Yesterday, spring was ending in California where her green hills were turning golden brown. There, harbor seals were pupping. Here that’s a month off.

When we reach the water, scooters, harlequin and golden eye ducks hug the beach. Just offshore the eyes, nose, and forehead of a harbor seal appear above the water. Judging the seal the lesser threat, the birds move away from the beach.

None of the instruments of Juneau’s industrial tourism invades the calm morning. Soon the dam and princess boats will tie up at the new downtown panamax docks. The first of a million tourists will negotiate gangplanks and line up for whale watching and helicopter tours. Then, the now peaceful Lynn Canal waters will be noisy with tourist boats, the skies with helicopters. Ah little dog, let’s linger in the calm a little longer.