Category Archives: Aki

Hard Eyes

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There are some things a gray-haired person should not do on a spring morning. Reading Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees,” with its reminder that lost years will not come again, is one of them. While I read the poem gentle rain washed a winter’s accumulation of dust from Chicken Ridge and irrigated the budding lilacs.

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Out of on the moraine with the little dog, I did another unwise thing—locked eyes with a Steller jay. Rather than fly to high branch to scold us, the jay settled on a low spruce branch and turned sideways so its eye could bore in on my face. The hard, black marble of the eye reflected no kindness, just scrutiny. Feeling measured and found lacking, I let Aki lead me to the little cashew shaped lake where the glacier seems to rise about a strip of forest. Two mallards and a bufflehead family move slowly down lake from us. But one of the bufflehead young, still in tan and chestnut swung past us. Aki didn’t abuse this trust by charging into the lake. I locked eyes with the young duck and saw defiance, not fear, realized what a poor judge I am of the facial expressions of birds.

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Even the Devil’s Club Thinks It’s Spring

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A rock fall draws our attention. The little dog sniffs and stares. I follow her gaze and spot two mountain goats just above us on the flank of Mt. Juneau. I’d seen at least six other goats on this hike along Gold Creek. All were too far above us to be more than moving white dots. These two are close enough to watch, to appreciate a little of their personalities. The one following moved slowly, carefully lifting it’s front legs over deadfalls and rocks. It was hard to imagine this goat gracefully transiting a rock face like I’d seen them do often.

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Along the creek, it looks like early summer. Tiny yellow violets are flowering. Elderberry plants, willows, and balsam poplars show fresh green growth. The later smell like the balsam incense for which they are named. Even the conservative devil club plants are leafing out. Yet the goats climb away from all this lush new growth.

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Shaman Island

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Aki and return to the North Douglas trail head and, thankfully, find it empty of cars. Ten minutes into the beachside forest, I realize that my boots are the nosiest things in the woods. No airplane, boat, or car noise reaches us. We can hear a cranky set of Stellar jays and the long trill of a thrush. A goose calls out in panic and flies over our heads. The solitude is not appreciated by my little dog, who loves company of all kinds. She must settle for the smells of scent left by dogs who passed through here yesterday.

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With the uneasiness I always feel when walking over exposed tidelands, I lead Aki onto a flat, sandy plain dotted with shallow tide pools. She hangs back, like she knows in a few hours almost twenty feet of water will cover the ground where we walk. In minutes we are on the now-exposed causeway that offers a dry path to Shaman Island. A large murder of crows stirs on a rocky point at the end of the causeway and breaks into the trees in the interior of the island. Two bald eagles roost in trees on the edge of the island. Another eagle, bound from Admiralty Island, joins them.

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A small raft of harlequin ducks swims away as if to distract us from a small family of their kind that remain huddled against the point. Near the family an orange beaked oystercatcher whistles as if to attract our attention away from its nest. Aki and I wander around the tiny island and start back across the causeway. The crows abandon their island hideout and land in front of us on the trail. When we get within forty feet of them, they burst in the air in a big noisy show and circle back to join the harlequin family and the oystercatcher on the rocky point. A flock of gulls drops in to join them. All will be happy when the tide buries the causeway.

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Soft and Grey

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I should have known better than choose a North Douglas trail for today’s walk. On this Sunday afternoon with a lot of visitors in town for the folk festival, the attraction of a minus 3.5 foot tide has filled the trailhead parking areas to overflowing. Even the waters Fritz Cove are crowded with boats targeting feeder king salmon. Trying to ignore my whinny little dog, I head to a trail unaffected by tides.

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I expected to find the parking lot for this mountain meadow trail empty but every space but one is taken. Men with hunting dogs and shotguns wander toward the trees where grouse have been know to roost. It’s too late for the snow and too early for muskeg wildflowers but Aki has the dogs to distract her. I am drawn to small islands of beauty things like skunk cabbage and the bleached grain of standing-dead pines. The yellow skunk cabbage flowers provide the only vibrant color on the meadow until I spot the splash of red from the exposed breast of an American robin. Otherwise it is a soft, gray day that offers silence until the first hunter fires.

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Muddy Dog of Spring

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As if forced away by music, the clouds always abandon Juneau on the Saturday of folk festival week. This surprised the weatherman, who had predicted a continuation of the wet weather that plagued Southeast Alaska for a week. Aki doesn’t know that a bath awaits her when we return home from this trip to the wetlands. In minutes she manages to coat her fur with estuary mud then prances around like a perfumed starlet. With the tide out, the birds are out feeding on the mudflats. Two eagles do fly over, chasing each other toward the glacier. They disappear, leaving the skies empty except a song sparrow that settles onto a drift wood root wad and sings of spring.

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Alien Fruit

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Thanks to a book I am reading, Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy, I am a little obsessed with our local mountain goats. (Oreamnos americanus). Meloy’s book is about desert bighorn sheep but her descriptions of them in Eating Stone makes me think about the Juneau goats. There should be a clutch of them grazing on the rock slopes near the glacier so Aki and I heading toward Nugget Falls to spy on them. I stop often to photograph the myriad of icebergs that now litter to surface of Mendenhall Lake. You’d expect them to make the best models but I found them outclassed by willow catkins. Even though rain-soaked and already going to seed, they look like complex alien fruit.

3The goats are a no show but on our return to the car we run into a beautiful toddler enjoying her rubber boots, yellow slicker, and red umbrella. She entertains herself with a little umbrella dance until Aki barks. Then she stands at attention next her family’s yellow retriever and laughs at my little poodle-mix.

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Clouds

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This morning, while cleaning up a garden plot, I felt like I was being watched. I was, by a cloud of at least twenty eagles and an escort of ravens. In seconds the cloud dispersed as eagles spread out over Downtown Juneau. Before they totally disappeared, one dived on another in an attempt to mate. Then they were gone.

3This afternoon, Aki and I don’t find any eagles along the shore of Mendenhall Lake. There’s just a huddle of mallards shouldering off the rain on a rocky point. My little dog ignores them but they stir and look our way until we break back into the woods.

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Okay, It’s Spring

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Aki is uneasy this morning. She throws on her brakes just before stepping onto the old Basin Road trestle bridge. Another dog passes us on to way to Perseverance Trail and my little dog trots after her. Aki halts after we cross the bridge. Hoping that she will change her mind again, I ignore her and search the slopes of Mt. Juneau for mountain goats. If there, they should be easy to spot in the strong sunlight illuminating the mountainside. I can’t find them. The snow that fell on the ridges last night must have driven them down toward the creek. Maybe they found some fresh greens in a place hidden from our view.

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The little dog starts up the road after a few minutes but shows little interest in my plan to climb to the Perseverance overlook. She must smell scents left by a passing bear. In a normally year, I’d attribute her shyness to something else but since I can spot other signs of spring, it would not be surprising to find a bear emerging from winter hibernation. Already the alder limbs are bent down with blossoms and fuzzy catkins decorate the willows.

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Dances

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This morning a family of mountain goats feed near the shoulder of Mt. Juneau. Aki tugs at her leash as I try to watch then through my telephoto lens. From other trips, I know that the goats start each day down the mountain in areas where fresh greens already think it is spring. The noise of people and dogs on the trail seem to drive them to the higher elevations. So I shouldn’t be surprised to find a clump of snow-white fur on the trail near a large patch of emerging ferns. It could be from a dog except it isn’t greasy like a northern bred’s at the end of winter. It doesn’t have that stale, doggy smell. It smells heather-like, maybe like a just-broken willow twig.

1On our return trip down Basin Road we pass under two eagles in loose formation. I wonder if they are the pair that I watched mate yesterday from our upstairs’ window. Unlike the loose, play-like flight of today, they flew like predator and prey. One pursued the other who repeatedly escaped pursuit with abrupt turns. Finally they hooked up—literally. With talons locked, they formed a spinning sphere that that tumbled toward the state capitol building. In seconds they broke apart and climbed back into the sky. Seconds later they resumed the hunt.

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Obsessed

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Aki and I are both obsessed today. She is all about her orange Frisbee, which she wouldn’t drop from her mouth if I waived meat under her nose. In spite of all the blue-sky-beauty of the glacier and its mountains, I’m fixated on a nuclear family of Mt. Goats that look down on us from a mountain ridge. I fiddle with camera setting to get a decent photo of the trio. Each effort fails. Before spotting the goats, I found lots of small beauty, all involving a reflection in open lake water. In my favorite, a sliver of water between shore and ice is sky blue marred by white clouds. Aki walked by the abstract beauty, concentrating only on her beloved Frisbee.

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